Cutting out the chemicals: Nature Newsozone experts are exploring ways to curb powerful greenhouse gases of their own making under the Montreal Protocol,
arguing that direct regulation would be faster and cheaper than using carbon markets under a global climate treaty.
The Montreal Protocol set a strong precedent for such an approach, having almost eliminated production of the once-ubiquitous chlorofluorocarbons (CFCS) that eat away at stratospheric ozone.
now, chemical manufacturers have moved on to a third-generation replacement, hydrofluorocarbons (HFCS; see graphic. HFCS are cheap
but are also powerful greenhouse gases. Although in this respect many are less potent than their predecessors,
As greenhouse gases, they are covered under the Kyoto Protocol, but many believe that they could be eliminated much faster
a network of experts worldwide and a 20-year track record of handling these types of chemicals.
We created these chemicals and we can get rid of them, says Durwood Zaelke, president of the Institute for Governance & Sustainable Development, an advocacy group in WASHINGTON DC.
We have the chemicals. We have the wherewithal within the treaty. It's just an administrative issue.
Emissions of some ozone-depleting chemicals will continue for some time and even in 2100 long-lived CFCS will remain the dominant ozone destroyers.
But schedules are in place to phase out most of the remaining chemicals of concern. The ozone story is winding to a close,
when analysing chemicals. And Fahey says Montreal's experts have performed well on that account. He co-authored a 2007 paper estimating that
explicitly citing the potential to further reduce greenhouse-gas emissions. The US Environmental protection agency says that the resulting greenhouse-gas reductions could equate to around 2. 6 billion tonnes of CO2,
akin to taking more than 68 million vehicles off the road for 30 years, depending on which chemicals fill the void.
This is largely why the Montreal parties decided to weigh in on HFCS now. Although they represent less than 1%of the greenhouse-gas forcing,
HFC emissions are rising by about 15%per year, largely as demand for air conditioning and refrigerators grows in countries such as China.
HFCS could also be dealt with in a global carbon market; the problem is that, because many are thousands of times more potent than CO2,
In a particularly controversial example, industrialized countries have been offsetting their emissions by paying companies in the developing world to incinerate the chemical HFC-23,
which is 11,700 times more potent than CO2 as a greenhouse gas (M. Wara Nature 445,595-596;
The chemical giant Dupont, based in Wilmington, Delaware, is concerned more about industrial HFC refrigerants than incidental HFC by-products, for
when HFCS are wrapped into the carbon market. He illustrates with the following scenario: a US$25-per-tonne price on carbon equates to $150 for the cost of the HFCS that go into an average home air conditioner,
which translates into a $450 to $600 price bump for consumers. By contrast, the Lieberman-Warner climate legislation introduced in the US Senate last year proposed a stricter phase-down for HFCS than for other greenhouse gases,
but under separate regulations. Compliance would cost just $2 to $3 per unit, Dupont estimates, meaning only a $4 to $6 bump in consumer prices.
better industrial processes and, ultimately, the development of new, more climate-friendly chemicals, says Mcfarland.
by applying either the treaty itself or its framework to other powerful greenhouse gases such as perfluorocarbons (PFCS) and sulphur hexafluoride (SF6), both
Emissions of both gases are limited to relatively small and specialized industrial sectors which lend themselves to the kinds of rapid technical assessment
He worries that the carbon market will be too slow to spur the kind of technological transformations that will be necessary to avoid the worst that global warming has to offer.
Chemicals in early refrigerants contributed to the hole in Earth's ozone layer-->Â See also Correspondence'Time running out to deal with banks of greenhouse gases
Zinc-finger nucleases have recently been used to create human immune cells that are resistant to HIV (see'Designer protein tackles HIV'.
The US Environmental protection agency (EPA) has agreed to set new rules governing emissions of mercury and other toxic chemicals from power plants by November 2011,
& the Press News maker Large Hadron Collider Physicists last week injected particles into the accelerator for the first time
In another, climate policies result in a world full of forest plantations that are created solely to store the greatest possible amount of carbon, with no regard for preserving biodiversity.
Or what if the very possibility of using geoengineering to mitigate climate change gives political leaders cover to say that greenhouse gases aren't a problem?
The term geoengineering covers everything from mundane methods for increasing carbon storage in plants soils
Keith is developing a method to use aircraft to release fine sulphur particles that will stay aloft for years in the stratosphere.
to hunt for the elusive Higgs particle at the collider's current collision energies. The plan is likely to be agreed by CERN's management and council in January.
-gas emissions 墉 largely approving commitments made in last year's Copenhagen Accord. See page 875 for more.
Hall (pictured) has made it clear that he will take a hard line against attempts to regulate greenhouse gases.
Nobel chemist dies John Fenn (pictured who shared the 2002 Nobel prize in Chemistry, died on 10 december aged 93.
In the late 1980s, he developed electrospray ionization, a way to gently separate clumped proteins into a fine spray of individual molecules.
This method, when combined with mass spectrometry, gave scientists a tool to quickly identify proteins via their mass
and helped to launch the field of proteomics. In 2005, Fenn lost a legal battle over the patent rights to Yale university in New haven, Connecticut,
where he developed the technique. He had moved to Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond in 1994.
were developed by start-up firm Ion Torrent in Guilford, Connecticut, which was bought by Life Technologies in August.
Bisphenol A ban The European commission has agreed to ban the common chemical bisphenol A from baby bottles across the European union by mid-2011.
foreign genes can be fired into plant cells on metal particles shot from a'gene gun'.
and particle bombardment is less predictable, often yielding multiple, fragmented insertions of the new gene.
but it is most effective with very fine particles of gold  and Madre de dios tends to yield larger, coarser grains.
What is your position on cap-and-trade, carbon taxes, and other policies proposed to address global climate change
China long ago passed America as the leading emitter of greenhouse gases. Developed world emissions have leveled off
So I oppose steps like a carbon tax or a cap-and-trade system that would handicap the American economy
reduce greenhouse gas emissions, and produce the economically-attractive technologies that developing nations must have access to
and natural gas by 2035. Since taking office, electricity production from wind and solar sources has doubled already more than in the United states. We are boosting our use of cleaner fuels,
America has regained its position as the world s leading producer of natural gas. My administration is promoting the safe,
responsible development of America s near 100-year supply of natural gas that will help support more than 600,000 jobs.
but instead to facilitate responsible use of all energy sources from oil and coal and natural gas, to nuclear and hydropower and biofuels, to wind and Solar energy development, economic growth,
One of those animals, a cow, secretes milk that lacks an allergy-inducing protein because researchers accurately blocked its production using the technique of RNA interference1.
In 2006, scientists at Agresearch in Hamilton, New zealand began to experiment with molecules that interfere with the MESSENGER RNA go-between that enables translation of a gene into protein.
says Stefan Wagner, a molecular biologist at Agresearch. That's why it has taken so long to succeed in making an allergen-free cow,
RNAI cannot eliminate the protein completely because some MESSENGER RNA slips past the blockade, but each TALEN targets a specific DNA sequence in the genome and cuts it.
and leaves no mark in the genome, says Bruce Whitelaw, a molecular biologist at the Roslin Institute near Edinburgh in the United kingdom,
Without these receptor proteins to remove cholesterol-containing LDLS from the blood, LDLS build up and lead to atherosclerosis.
by using specialist enzymes to break down the long-chain cellulose molecules and Brazil doesn t want to be left behind.
-and-trade system to limit greenhouse-gas emissions remains one of the key failures of Obama s first term.
But scientists and environmentalists are pushing for an expanded effort to nurture low-carbon technologies.
Since then, her agency has developed the first US greenhouse-gas standards for vehicles, tightened air-quality standards and proposed emissions limits for power plants.
Christine Gregoire, Bob Perciasepe A former governor of Washington, Gregoire signed a 2010 law setting up greenhouse-gas reporting requirements
if unexpected, reduction in US greenhouse-gas emissions during his first term. The decline is in part a result of the economic slowdown and a shift in electricity production from coal to natural gas,
which has become cheap and plentiful in recent years. But policies have helped. These include federal greenhouse-gas standards for vehicles
As a next step, Obama s administration is expected to impose two greenhouse-gas regulations targeted at power plants
encouraging the shift towards natural gas. Other rules could target the oil and gas industry by limiting emissions from refineries and drilling sites.
But these piecemeal regulatory efforts will not be sufficient to reduce emissions by 83%by mid-century a target promised by Obama at the Copenhagen talks.
and development that could drive down the cost of large-scale, low-carbon energy, and ultimately make a carbon tax or a cap-and-trade agreement politically palatable.
The President s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology has recommended increasing spending on energy research and development from around US$4 billion per year to $16 billion,
But even Monsanto, the agricultural biotechnology giant in St louis, Missouri, was surprised by the furore that followed
In 1999, Monsanto s chief executive pledged not to commercialize terminator seeds. The concept, if not the technology, is now gaining traction again.
This week, the US Supreme court hears arguments that pit Monsanto against 75-year-old Indiana soya-bean farmer Vernon Hugh Bowman
who used the progeny of Monsanto seeds to sow his land for eight seasons. The company says that by not buying seeds for each generation,
"If I were at Monsanto and I learned that patents are not available to protect my soybeans,
Bowman was a regular customer for Monsanto s herbicide-resistant soya beans for his main crop,
but bypassed the company by purchasing seed for a late-season crop from a grain elevator known to contain Monsanto s transgenic seed.
Monsanto sued him. As the case climbed through the court system, it grew from a simple contract violation to a challenge of the idea that companies can use patents to limit the offspring of naturally self-replicating technologies.
The lower courts sided with Monsanto, and many were surprised when the Supreme court took up the appeal.
Another approach is to place the transgene under the control of a switch that must be activated by a proprietary chemical.
That would give companies control over the engineered trait by forcing buyers to return each year to purchase the chemical.
That is the strategy of Ginkgo Bioworks, a four-year-old synthetic biology company in Boston, Massachusetts, that develops made-to-order microbes to churn out marketable chemicals.
a genetic tweak that makes production of the desired chemical dependent on a proprietary additive, supplied by Ginkgo, in its fermentation medium.
and food safety groups are concerned about contamination of food crops with products from a new generation of crops engineered to produce chemicals or pharmaceuticals.
Patents owned by Monsanto required the insertion of three different genes into the plant genome.
Monsanto says it is currently not researching the techniques, and other companies are hoping that they will not have to."
While working at the Pasteur institute in Paris, he identified regulatory proteins that bind to DNA,
Jacob explained how feedback from the cell s environment changes the activity of the regulatory proteins.
thus lowering greenhouse-gas emissions. Energy spending Investment in renewable energy technologies still falls short of the level needed to clean up the global energy system
Thomson Reuters Point Carbonprices for allowances to emit a tonne of carbon dioxide on Europe s carbon-trading market are likely to remain low until 2020,
This means that the market is unlikely to spur investment in low-carbon energy, one of the scheme s key goals when it was launched in 2005.
according to Carbon Tracker, even though burning them would cause a catastrophic rise in global temperatures. 24-25 april On World Malaria Day (25 april),
it altered the plant s gene expression by changing the pattern of chemical groups added to its DNA rather than changing the DNA sequence itself.
Agricultural giants Monsanto, based in St  Louis, Missouri, and Syngenta, headquartered in Basel, Switzerland, are vying to license the technology."
Farmers dig into soil qualityefforts to bring chemical fertilizers to Sub-saharan africa are met often with concerns over harmful environmental and economic side effects.
Rapid soil-fertility assessment, a new spectroscopy technique used to analyse samples and produce site-specific soil maps for farmers,
Widespread use of chemical fertilizer has increased greatly food sufficiency in many countries, for example in China and India,
but the ecological and health effects of fertilizer chemicals raise serious concerns. China in particular, is facing a major pollution problem from overuse of nitrogen fertilizer,
Field trials to assess the ecological efficiency of organic and chemical fertilizers in different geographic and climatic settings are under way in Ethiopia, Kenya, Malawi, Uganda and Tanzania.
To help, researchers at CIAT developed the spectroscopy technique, which uses mid-infrared light, to precisely determine the mineral properties, nutrient content and organic chemistry of sub-Saharan soils.
Although still in its infancy, the technology could one day be used to evaluate and map the yield potential of soils across the region information that would then be relayed to farmers."
Advances in soil spectroscopy are"very promising, he adds, and spectral ana  lysis is on the agenda of a special FAO workshop on soil monitoring in Rome this December.
"Its use produces greenhouse gases and it ruins soil fertility rather than improving it. He points out that many smallholders in Sub-saharan africa can scarcely afford to buy mineral fertilizers anyway.
Most agricultural scientists acknowledge that applying only chemical fertilizers is not the solution to Africa s yield problem.
Chemical treatment could cut cost of biofuela mild chemical treatment that completely dissolves wood, dried grasses and other indigestible plant matter could greatly improve the efficiency of converting waste biomass to fuel.
chemists from the University of Wisconsin-Madison have invented now a process that they say easily extracts sugars from lignin and cellulose fibres."
Other academic and industrial scientists say that the chemical treatment is promising, but that it is too early to tell
mild chemicals known as ionic liquids can do the trick, as can harsh acids. But ionic liquids are generally expensive to make,
Chemist James Dumesic, who is also part of the Wisconsin-Madison team, has worked with the liquid for years as a potential fuel in its own right,
Also they periodically hand the vehicle back to the carbon based life form. I don't disagree with the approach I'm just saying that many things are yet to be proven.
Reading is vitamins for the brain!!!I'm in the same boat as you GGENUA!
As for the free carbon acidifying the ocean why would that be worrying? The acidity is neutralized by the dissolution of Calcium
and coral is beneficial to other species (note that the era where cartiledge fish like sharks developed was a high free carbon era
Likewise when that carbon is needed that calcium will be freed up once again. The fact that so much of the world is covered with (A) limestone
With data from the robotic vehicles Palau can add downed aircraft to an inventory of the country's rich underwater sites something previously unattainable for an office that can barely afford to buy gas for a boat.
Chemicals! Technology! Big ag! The uncertainty of modern development! Like it or not most of what we eat in the U s. has been touched
and biotech worlds Shetterly wrote in her piece though her piece does little to explain why beyond the notion that powerful agricultural corporations like Monsanto are preventing research into unknown allergens that might arise from genetic engineering.
Monsanto is a multi-billion dollar corporation. It's massive. They have the pockets to spread their garbage
They just passed a silent bill that states companies like Monsanto cannot be sued or stopped if the genetically modified food causes harmful side effects.
As the Washington Times points out the provision s success is viewed by many as a victory by companies like Syngenta Corp Cargill Monsanto
Read more here-rt. com/usa/monsanto-congress-silently-slips-830/Popsci do you're homework.
Sincerely-Joe www. joesid. comnotice-This slate writer was found to have been a Monsanto consultant and writer.
but careless actions with them and legal barriers like the ones put in place by Monsanto are dangerous practices.
namely the bullying of small farmers by large agro companies like monsanto. The cross-pollination bit is the perhaps the most disturbing thing but
The protein is very selective generally not harming insects in other orders (such as beetles flies bees and wasps.
or animal that has been modified genetically through the addition of a small amount of genetic material from other organisms through molecular techniques.
Why would the government pass a bill to protect Monsanto if they caused harmful effects?
and Chemical Toxicology found that rats fed on a diet of 33 per cent NK603 corn
and digestive problems. www. english. rfi. fr/americas/20120920-monsanto-gm-maize-may-face-europe-ban-after-french-study-links-cancersincerely-Joewww. joesid. compoor rats...
and Empmortakaten. www. businessinsider. com/monsantos-roundup-and-resistant-corn-found-to-be-toxic-2012-9sincerely-Joewww. joesid. comtangsten thank you for the link.
The study cited in the article was a 2-year toxicology study of rats fed Monsanto's Roundup-resistant NK103 maize (corn) and the herbicide Roundup.
www. businessinsider. com/monsantos-roundup-and-resistant-corn-found-to-be-toxic-2012-9it says:
Also to address your misconception about chemical weapons in Iraq. They WERE there at one time. Saddam Hussein used them during the 1980's against Iranian and Kurdish civilians.
That presented the possibility that those chemical and biological weapons could end up in the hands of terrorists;
After proposing the use of rats in long-term experiments it exposed that Monsanto and every other case study did not do a long-term study.
and market authorizations for the thousands of chemicals and GM foods that were authorized on the basis of these studies should be revoked.
in order to avoid being sued by corporations like Monsanto in case of accidental seed distribution. They made the law
because about 11 farmers a year get sued for this reason in the United states. There's no need to point at one case since Monsanto won every case.
Monsanto simply outspends the defendants dedicating $10 million a year and 75 staffers for the sole purpose of investigating
Farmers who have sued Monsanto back have been defeated soundly. More sources on this documentation: http://thinkprogress. org/health/2012/11/21/1224761/farmers-insurance-sued-by-corporations/Monsanto claims not to sue farmers who have been cross pollinated by their neighbor's crops
but every year they sue and are paid when that trace amount becomes questionable. They claim they don't
Monsanto website states this: Can a farmer be sued when a small amount of GM crop seed blows into a neighbor s fields?
It has never been nor will it be Monsanto policy to exercise its patent rights where trace amounts of our patented traits are present in farmers fields as a result of inadvertent means.
Instead the burden of proof is on Monsanto to investigate the legitimacy of these claims and to resolve the issue as quickly
Sincerely-Joewww. joesid. comeven with Monsanto's disturbing sphere of influence both inside and outside government it is still surprising to see such disbelief that GMO's negatively impact health.
What a credit to Monsanto's propaganda. Thank you Tangsten for exposing the raving origins of
A study was published recently examining adverse effects of Bacillus thuringensis (aka the Bt toxin) that Monsanto builds into their corn and soy.
and he's kind of an expert. http://wwwi-sis. org. uk/Bt-toxin. phpit is no coincidence that Monsanto has invested so much money in our politicians and against measures such as California's Prop 37.
Why else would Monsanto help raise $45 million to prevent a bill requiring them and other companies to label GMO's on their products?
1. A 2008 long-term study commissioned by the Austrian Agency for Health and Food safety looked at how Monsanto s genetically modified corn currently eaten
ÃÃÚÂ Ã 2. A comparative analysis published in the International Journal of Biological sciences examined the health effects of three different varieties of Monsanto-developed GMO corn on mice.
and other blood-making organsã¢Â#Âll of which are signs of severe toxicity. 3. This past year Food Chemical Toxicology published the results of a two-year study conducted by scientists at the University of Caen
Monsanto s GMO corn is engineered to be immune to glyphosate-based weed-killers such as Monsanto s trademarked Roundupãherbicide used on crops and fields nationwide.
and are forcing farmers to dump even more varieties of toxic chemical herbicides and pesticides on our foods in order to stay ahead of nature s race.
GMO corn contains an extremely high level of formaldehyde a chemical linked to adverse health effects and various forms of cancer.
and luxury to not eat the chemicals and GMO foods-but if you have to choose inbetween GMO food
and filled it with collagen. He then glued a thin black silicon sheet onto blank paper and fed it into the printer.
The paper spooled out with TB clearly delineated in off-white proteins By 2000 Boland and his team had reconfigured a Hewlett-packard Deskjet 550c to print with E coli bacteria.
or collagen the scaffolds provide a temporary matrix for cells to cling to until they're robust enough to stand alone.
A molecule on one cell causes a receptor protein on the cell membrane to change shape tugging on the cytoskeleton of a second cell.
Instead of printing a test tube out of plastic to do chemistry in let's print our test tube out of tissue.
In April Olguin's team released Project Cyborg a Web-based platform geared toward nanoscale molecular modeling and simulations for cellular biology.
People normally do a reaction purify the chemicals take the drug add it to cells look at the response formulate maybe do animals
and then go to humans says Lee Cronin a University of Glasgow chemist and nanoscientist developing a 3-D printer to manufacture medicine using chemical inks.
Instead of printing a test tube out of plastic to do chemistry in let's say we now print our test tube out of tissue
and we do chemistry in the tissue and look at the response in real time. That's where things get really interesting.
If bioprinted assays provide pharmaceutical researchers with better quicker data the entire drug-discovery process will accelerate.
The absence is the fat. It's a leanness. But the bite feels like a conventional hamburger.
The technology to grow fat cells is still lacking--Schonfeld characterized the texture as like an animal protein cake--but that is the next step for the team.
--But this lab-grown protein I can most certainly jibe with this. It's about time methinks.
In the right hands of a food processing major it would perhaps contest any naturally-sourced protein in both nutritional values and taste.
it's out there combating climate change a few carbon emissions at a time. When beavers build a dam impeding the natural flow of water the river begins to overflow more often creating a sediment-rich wetland area known as a beaver meadow.
A new study from Colorado State university geology professor Ellen Wohl finds that these beaver meadows store carbon temporarily sequestering greenhouse gases from the atmosphere.
With reductions in the beaver population we're missing out on a whole lot of potential carbon storage.
Wohl found that the abandoned beaver dams she studied made up around 8 percent of the carbon storage in the landscape
Squirreling away our carbon log by log. The study appears in Geophysical Research Letters. Science via Phys. org Considering we're at a critical carbon deficit right now it's about time to start wiping these pudgy menaces out for good!
I'm a little skeptical about this study. I have a hard time believing that cutting down trees
and burying them in water will have a net negative impact on the level of carbon in the area.
You're reducing a carbon sync AND anaerobic decomposition as you would get with buried plant matter would produce methane which is a much more potent greenhouse gas than CO2.
I suppose the new plant growth in the area previously covered by the river could offset that
but I'd bet there is a net increase of atmospheric carbon. Cute Beaver and interesting article too.
Critical carbon deficit? WTF are you talking about?@@Frosttty for most of the history of the world we have had significantly more atmospheric carbon than we do now.
Most of it has already been buried. Atmospheric carbon has been falling since the late Jurassic when it was about 2500 ppm vs today's 400 ppm.
Considering the climate stabilizing properties of greenhouse gasses and the importance of CO2 to life On earth we need to do everything we can to prevent carbon sequestration
if we desire a healthy planet. As a retired Department of Environmental Quality Employee and an owner of timber land this is a stupid article on environmentalism gone crazy in past history.
Reading some of these comments it's clear that it's not enough that beavers sequester carbon raise the water table augment the density
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