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Branson Offers $25 Million Prize to ‘Defeat Global Warming’
ENS
Former Vice President Al Gore and Virgin Group Chairman Sir Richard Branson today announced the Virgin Earth Challenge, a $25 million global science and technology prize to encourage a technology that will remove at least one billion tons of carbon dioxide equivalent from the atmosphere per year.
The Virgin Earth Challenge will award $25 million to the individual or group who demonstrate a commercially viable design which will result in the net removal of anthropogenic, atmospheric greenhouse gases each year for at least 10 years without countervailing harmful effects.
This removal must have long term effects and contribute materially to the stability of the Earth’s climate. ..
The timing of the announcement of the Virgin Earth Challenge follows the announcement last week by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change that temperatures on Earth could increase by as much as 6.4 degrees C by the end of this century. If this were to occur, said Sir Richard, it would result in “most of life on our planet being exterminated.”
(9 Feb 2007)
Site for the Prize at Virgin Earth.
Reader Carl Etnier sent through the following thoughts and called for more detailed analysis..
Here’s the basic rub that I’d like someone more qualified than I to address: CO2 gas is given off as a product of converting fossil fuels into heat energy. Don’t basic entropic principles mean that converting CO2 gas back into a solid or liquid takes _more_ energy than was released in the initial burning? If so, what methods could possibly make sense to use, instead of using the energy that would drive them to substitute for current use of fossil fuels?
Since CO2 is throughout the atmosphere, and humans are more concentrated, one obvious starting point is to use direct or indirect solar energy in areas where humans would not be harvesting it. But I am sceptical this would make sense with anything mechanical, chemical, or electrical. Wind turbines could be set up in Patagonia (which I assume has very windy sites) to make electricity to run a CO2-solidification gizmo. But what if the same energy and capital were expended to build wind turbines nearer population centres where electricity is generated from fossil fuels–how much potential CO2 would that measure remove? Or what if the Patagonian wind turbines produce H2 gas, piped or shipped to elsewhere in Chile or Argentina for use in transportation or heating–how many “negatons” of CO2 would that produce?
Similar thought experiments could be run for PV panels in the Sahara. And nuclear power plants, whatever their carbon footprint, hardly meet the “without adverse effects” criterion.
So maybe biological processes are the ones (by default) most likely to remove CO2 without adverse effects. If so, where is the carbon likely to go? Advocates of keyline farming say that if the US adopted their farming practices, it alone could reduce atmospheric CO2 to pre-industrial levels. Something that sounds too good to be true is likely also to _be_ to good to be true, but I’m open to understanding more what the potential is for increasing organic matter in soil. Are there other biological sinks for carbon that could be harnessed through benign technology?
All this is great speculation, fine for shooting the breeze in a bar; real answers need numbers based on data.
Measuring the Uncertainty of Climate Change
Kevin Bullis, MIT Technology Review
Better models are rapidly defining the uncertainties ahead, says leading climate scientist Ronald Prinn.
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…Ronald Prinn, professor of atmospheric chemistry at MIT and one of the lead authors of the [IPCC] report, says that estimating and understanding these uncertainties is key to evaluating climate data and to deciding on a course of action. Prinn, a leading climate scientist and the director of a worldwide project that carefully monitors the amounts of dozens of greenhouse gases, recently sat down with Technology Review to explain why climate-change science is uncertain, how technology is reducing that uncertainty, and what challenges remain.
(14 Feb 2007)
Population growth plays a key role
John Seager, Baltimore Sun
Global warming is “unequivocal,” according to the recently released report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. The most likely culprits are people – all of us. Yet there never has been much public discussion about the role of human population growth in global warming.
According to professor Timothy Dyson of the London School of Economics, a 40 percent cut by 2050 in per capita carbon emissions in the developed world could be canceled by global population growth.
It’s time to open a “second front” in the battle against global warming by stressing the need for population stabilization – sooner rather than later. ..
What can we do? We know that family planning works everywhere. When women and couples are free to make informed choices and have access to family planning resources, they choose to have smaller families. Thirty years ago, for example, Mexican women had almost seven children each. Today, thanks to education and the availability of family planning, they have an average of 2.4 children.
Globally, at least 350 million couples lack family planning services. In the U.S., one-third of all births are unplanned. If we could cut in half the number of unwanted births in America alone, we’d have about 5 million fewer births over 20 years. ..
John Seager is national president of Population Connection (formerly Zero Population Growth).
(13 Feb 2007)
Study Questions Prospects for Much Lower Emissions
Matthew L. Wald, NY Times
As Democratic leaders in Congress prepare to put climate change legislation on the agenda, some in the utility industry are arguing that it will take decades of investments and innovation to get substantial reductions in their emissions of greenhouse gases.
Electric power companies, which emit about one-third of America’s global warming gases, could reduce their emissions to below the levels of 1990, but that would take about 20 years, no matter how much the utilities spend, according to a new industry study.
The report, prepared by the Electric Power Research Institute, a nonprofit consortium, is portrayed as highly optimistic by its authors, who will present the findings on Thursday at an energy conference in Houston.
(15 Feb 2007)
