Political Ecology

Newly built (greenfield) power plant offer the advantage of optimised integration measures to reduce the efficiency penalty associated with the application of a post-combustion CO2 capture process by wet chemical absorption. Especially, the integration of waste heat from the desorber overhead condenser of the CO2 capture unit (CCU) and from the CO2 compressor into the [...]

“We have made a theoretical modelling of two different scenarios that might trigger climate change. We wanted to investigate if it could be determined whether there was an external factor which caused the climate change or whether the shift was due to an accumulation of small, chaotic fluctuations”, explains Peter Ditlevsen, a climate researcher at [...]

Carter explained that the substance became known as “dry water” because it consists of 95 percent water and yet is a dry powder. Each powder particle contains a water droplet surrounded by modified silica, the stuff that makes up ordinary beach sand. The silica coating prevents the water droplets from combining and turning back into [...]

I’ve been seeing a good deal of defeatist thinking lately along the lines of this article: http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/08/100824092408.htm.  This line of thought posits that the amount of warming already in the pipeline is unavoidable….so therefore we might as well give up trying and just deal with the consequences. This is a very dangerous and fallacious line [...]

Trend analysis of the multi-data set series (including an annually varying estimate of error) reveals that May and June SCE (Snow Cover Extent) have decreased 14% and 46%, respectively, over the pan-Arctic region over the 1967–2008 period in response to earlier snow melt. These results are confirmed with in situ data from Canada, Alaska and [...]

Various studies have documented the effects of modern-day irrigation on regional and global climate, but none, to date, have considered the time-varying impact of steadily increasing irrigation rates on climate during the 20th century. We investigate the impacts of observed irrigation changes over this century with two ensemble simulations using an atmosphere general circulation model. [...]

Radiocarbon in the atmosphere is regulated largely by ocean circulation, which controls the sequestration of carbon dioxide (CO2) in the deep sea through atmosphere–ocean carbon exchange. During the last glaciation, lower atmospheric CO2 levels were accompanied by increased atmospheric radiocarbon concentrations that have been attributed to greater storage of CO2 in a poorly ventilated abyssal [...]