Green Options

Climate science is a little bit like me and books: I can never get enough of them, and appreciate lots and lots of them. For climate science though, it’s a case of getting more and more data, from as many possible sources as humanly possible.

And now, thanks to Virgin Galactic, the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) will be getting a bit more data to continue their never ending quest to understand planet Earth.

Depending on whom you ask, emissions from air travel make up 2-6 percent of the planet’s total CO2 emissions (as a whole, the transportation sector makes up about a quarter of those emissions). But airlines in particular have been getting a bad rap among some in the environmental community because of it, and a recent conference of European airline industries debated how to brighten their image.

One British strategic communications firm argued that the airline

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Associated PressSir Richard Branson, head of Virgin Group, has offered $25 million for the first person or group who can come up with a technology to remove one billion tons of green house gases from the atmosphere per year for ten years.

Branson told reporters at a news conference that he created the Virgin Earth Challenge because, "The Earth cannot wait 60 years. We need everybody capable of discovering an answer

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