We have to cut down the amount of carbon being released into the atmosphere. The interdisciplinary team looked at a range of possible approaches to dissipating greenhouse gases and reducing warming.
We found that climate engineering doesn't offer a perfect option said Daniela Cusack the study's lead author and an assistant professor of geography in UCLA's College of Letters and Science.
Working under the auspices of the National Science Foundation the team spent two years evaluating more than 100 studies that addressed the various implications of climate engineering and their anticipated effects on greenhouse gases.
reducing emissions sequestering carbon through biological means on land and in the ocean storing carbon dioxide in a liquefied form in underground geological formations and wells increasing Earth's cloud cover and solar reflection.
and low-carbon fuels would. Technology that is already available could reduce the amount of carbon being added to the atmosphere by some 7 gigatons per year the team found.
We have the technology and we know how to do it Cusack said. It's just that there doesn't seem to be political support for reducing emissions.
Of the five options the group evaluated sequestering carbon through biological means --or converting atmospheric carbon into solid sources of carbon like plants--holds the most promise.
One source curbing the destruction of forests and promoting growth of new forests could tie up as much as 1. 3 gigatons of carbon in plant material annually the team calculated.
Deforestation now is responsible for adding 1 gigaton of carbon each year to the atmosphere. Improving soil management is another biological means of carbon sequestration that holds considerable promise
because soils can trap plant materials that have converted already atmospheric carbon dioxide into a solid form as well as any carbon dioxide that the solids give off as they decompose.
Since the dawn of agriculture tilling land has led to the loss of about half (55 to 78 gigatons) of the carbon ever sequestered in soil the team reports.
But such simple steps as leaving slash--the plant waste left over after crop production--on fields after harvests so it could be incorporated into the soil could reintroduce between 0. 4 and 1. 1 gigatons of carbon annually to soil the study says.
The approach would also improve soil's ability to retain nutrients and water making it beneficial for additional reasons.
So the approach can work to keep carbon that has become bound up in plant life from decaying
but scientists are only now starting to appreciate its potential for tying up greenhouse gases Cusack said.
which sequesters carbon. The approach ranked as the study's least viable strategy in part
because less than a quarter of the algae could be expected to eventually sink to the bottom of the ocean which would be the only way that carbon would be sequestered for a long period of time.
The study's second most promising climate engineering strategy after carbon sequestration was carbon capture and storage particularly when the technique is used near where fuels are being refined.
CCS turns carbon dioxide into a liquid form of carbon which oil and coal extraction companies then pump into underground geological formations and wells and cap;
millions of tons of carbon are already being stored this way each year. And the approach has the potential to store more than 1 gigaton permanently each year
--and up to 546 gigatons of carbon over time--the study says. However a liquid carbon leak could be fatal to humans
and other animals and the risk--while minimal--may stand in the way of public acceptance.
Among the technologies evaluated in situ are floor type in cattle housing use of additives in slurry storage manure turning flexible lagoons for collective slurry storage biowashers for gases at the outlet of air ducts of the sheds
but it poses numerous environmental problems like the emissions of polluting gases (ammonia nitrous oxide and methane) into the atmosphere and the polluting of soil and water by nitrates.
Research suggests cooling action will clean airever-rising greenhouse gas emissions and the potential need to deploy untested and expensive climate engineering technologies are just two of the many bits of bad news in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's new report on Mitigation
One of the main causes of greenhouse gas emissions is coal power Hertwich says. Coal-fired power plants produce a lot of pollution so any measures that will reduce our combustion of coal will also help us to fight air pollution.
what humankind is doing to the climate by burning fossil fuels and releasing greenhouse gases to the atmosphere.
nevertheless quick to point out that the past decade has seen an unprecedented rate of increase in greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere as a result of a global rise in emissions.
what we call the carbon budget he says. The world's scientists have calculated a carbon budget for the planet which tells us how much CO2 we can put into the atmosphere before we reach concentrations above which we will unacceptably warm the planet.
If we continue to emit greenhouse gases at current rates we risk overshooting the carbon budget with dire consequences.
We understand now if we do not want to overshoot we need to bring emissions down to basically zero over the next 50-60 years he said.
If humankind does not control the growth in greenhouse gas emissions in the next decade it increases the likelihood that we will need negative-emissions technologies such as bioenergy with CO2 capture
Dong and his team will build miniature greenhouses that precisely control light intensity humidity temperature carbon dioxide chemicals and even pathogens.
and sequester carbon dioxide a greenhouse gas. The project is part of the Gates Foundation's Reinvent the Toilet Challenge an effort to develop a next-generation toilet that can be used to disinfect liquid and solid waste
Linden is working closely with project co-investigators Professor R. Scott Summers of environmental engineering and Professor Alan Weimer chemical and biological engineering and a team of postdoctoral fellows professionals
The interdisciplinary project requires chemical engineers for heat transfer and solar energy work environmental engineers for waste treatment
and paper production-a process that involves harsh chemicals and expensive treatments. The research provides a new approach integrating knowledge of genes proteins plant chemical compounds
and engineering modeling to understand how plants make products and structures needed for growth and development.
This work in the new area of plant systems biology integrating biology chemistry and engineering sets a new standard for understanding any complex biological feature in the future.
which was discovered as part of this work including quantitation of all 21 enzymes carried out by chemist David Muddiman.
The ORNL technology offers a new pathway to biomass-derived renewable fuels that can lower greenhouse gas emissions and decrease U s. reliance on foreign sources of oil.
and CEO who will take this novel catalyst from the lab to the marketplace. We see this technology as a significant step in moving the United states toward energy independence.
and Associate Laboratory Director Martin Keller uses an inexpensive zeolite catalyst to transform ethanol into hydrocarbon blend-stock.
The ORNL team's lab-scale tests also indicate the catalyst can operate at relatively low temperatures
and widely license breakthrough technologies that substantially expand the use of sustainable transportation fuels that reduce greenhouse gas emissions
and keep the corn cubs for food we have come a long way says Per Morgen professor at the Institute of Physics Chemistry and Pharmacy University of Southern Denmark.
and this is the important compound in the production of the new acid. The scientists paired silicate particles with chlorosulfonic acid and this made the acid molecules attach themselves to the silicate compounds.
The result was an entirely new molecule--the acid RHSO3H --which can replace the enzymes in the work of breaking down cellulose to sugar explains Per Morgen.
He is particularly proud that all levels in this new way of producing bioethanol are environmentally friendly and accessible for all The catalyst acid is made â#rom readily available plant left overs
and it can be reused many times. The recipe cannot be patented and the bioethanol is produced from cellulosic plants that cannot otherwise be used for anything else.
The research offers new perspective on evolutionary biology microbiology and the production of natural gas and may shed light on climate change agriculture and human health.
Methane is the main component of natural gas and a potent greenhouse gas. This innovative work demonstrates the importance of a new global regulatory system in methanogens said William Whitman a professor of microbiology at the University of Georgia who is familiar with the study
Methanogens play a key role in carbon cycling. When plants die some of their biomass is trapped in areas that are devoid of oxygen such as the bottom of lakes.
The same process allows natural gas production from agricultural residues a renewable resource. Methanogens also play an important role in agriculture
They found that the protein thioredoxin which plays a major role in contemporary photosynthesis could repair many of the organism's proteins damaged by oxygen.
or triple the price of other protein sources and rightfully so might hold beef to an even higher standard of excellence said Dan Thomson Kansas State university veterinarian professor and director of the Beef cattle Institute.
Beef is one of the purest most wholesome and most humanely raised forms of protein that we produce worldwide Thomson said.
With the carbon matching system in place in this neighborhood, traffic patterns can be broken down, and other sources of carbon can be traced.
According to Bartlett, this system helped IBM identify carbon in unexpected places like in methane leaks from utilities.
When you can have this type of project in the neighborhood, he said, you can then redesign a green corridor there.
as we develop more low carbon energy sources, building owners will be able to go to what he calls the energy cafe
giving them an opportunity to cut costs and reduce their carbon footprint. IBM has been working with New york city
The goal, with the help of IBM's carbon intelligence software is to reduce New york city's greenhouse gas emissions by 30 percent by 2017.
What will it take to see these predictions happen? All of these predictions are based not on wild fantasy,
Fifty percent of investment today worldwide in equipment and chemicals is in municipal infrastructure. This is the slowest moving, least innovative market for a lot of industries.
New york and Pennsylvania are sitting on an enormous reserve of natural gas, the Marcellus Shale. You're looking for real urgency and drive.
as part of the food company's overriding agenda to develop an integrated crop management system that will help the company reduce the carbon emissions
The company hopes the plant will help reduce its carbon footprint and boost its use of renewable energy;
if Crane's stationary has reduced a carbon footprint? DC: Will it tip them over the edge
A distillation will get out the chemicals that carry that odor or flavor and take that to make flavorings or fragrances.
They were extracting the chemicals for food additives from it. The remainder they were simply giving away to whoever would take it.
the development of nitrogen-based fertilizer at the close of the 19th century by chemists Carl Bosch and Fritz Haber.
he said of pollution and greenhouse gases from burning fossil fuels. It may not be quite as visible or an assault on our senses as horse manure
Seize'em and freeze'em Preserving samples in liquid nitrogen. Credit: USDA) Mulligan's column reminded me of a variation on this cloning idea years from almost 20 years ago.
You need to do a bit of chemistry to get the sugar out. Mother Nature has five types of sugars--we can use two types,
six-carbon and five-carbon sugars found in nature. Smartplanet: Cobalt has seen investment from Vantagepoint, Pinnacle, LSP and Harris & Harris, among others.
That's really the challenge with all these fuel and chemical technologies, they have to cross the Valley of Death.
The first thing we want to do is sell butanol into the chemical market. That's a $7 billion dollar market.
when you sell into the chemical market, and we should have completed our facility by the end of 2011.
From a volume perspective, the fuels market is much better than the chemicals market. The chemicals market is pretty exciting--the revenues are the same.
Trillion-plus-dollar markets. The real key to winning is to get out there and build a lot of these things
A zero-fat soybean oil called Plenish under its Pioneer brand in 2012. We have a unique capability to have both science in advanced materials as well as biotechnology,
energy security, rural community growth, fewer greenhouse gas emissions, food constraints, green jobs. Binetti outlined the advantages of cellulosic ethanol:
60 percent reduction in greenhouse gases. Grown on marginal land. Good income for farmers. Then he outlined the advantages of biobutanol:
I was first a chemical engineer for Nalco Chemical. I grew up in the industrial boat.
We have a lot of technologies around desalination that reduce the cost, take the energy cost out--about 50 percent of the cost of running a desal plant is energy
take natural gas. In New york and Pennsylvania, we're sitting on one of the greatest shale gas reserves in the world.
and frees the gas bubbles up. What comes up is really nasty wastewater combined with gas.
They separate the gas, and the wastewater is really nasty stuff. The way to get rid of it is put it in a really giant evaporation pond,
or put it in a disposal well--states like Texas and Louisiana do this --and remove it from the cycle completely.
Today, we want the natural gas because it meets the needs of global climate change, but it taints our water supply.
coal, nuclear, gas. A big power plant uses a boatload of water. The primary use is to cool those processes--the big hyperbolic cooling towers.
they are digging several feet underground to find clay with a similar chemical make-up to the clay used in the time period
while chemical baths are used to age bronzes. Â Shapes are replicated near perfectly with the help of 3d scanning technologies.
 Some use radiocarbon, thermoluminescence and other techniques to accurately date the antiques. Others concentrate on identifying signs of artificial aging.
so he can use the portable spectrometer to test for chemicals used to simulate aging.
and measuring various carbon and gas emissions. Those sensors have typically been used for finding gas leaks
or for measuring how changes in weather patterns. Now, Picarro is working with agriculture and food products companies to apply the sensors to measuring the isotopes in foods.
The intention: help food companies spot check and confirm the origins of the ingredients more cost-effectively.
Iain Green, vice president of business development for Picarro, said every food gives off a unique isotope signature.
PG&E first utility to embrace new gas leak detection technology From predicting weather to tracking greenhouse emissions
And we have created some new compounds that will be in the geologic record for a long time to come, the most ubiquitous
Nitrogen is the most important element in most of the proteins that make up our bodies.
if Fritz Haber and Carl Bosch hadn invented a chemical way of ripping inert nitrogen from the atmosphere
We are putting carbon that was locked away during the Cretaceous period 300 million years ago, back into the atmosphere as CO2.
Where we mimic the cooling effect of a massive volcanic eruption by putting a lot of sulfur dioxide particles into the atmosphere to block sunlight.
The problem is that the instant those particles go away you get a redoubled warming and it has all kinds of unintended consequences.
Like stopping leaks from natural gas pipelines. Not only does this make economic sense this makes climate sense.
No one wants to lose their natural gas, it a product. And methane is worse than CO2 on the list of greenhouse gasses.
And they are doing natural gas research. And better biofuels research, like re-engineering plants, so they do a better job of turning sunlight into fuels than current plants do.
The Texas Transportation Institute has found that in the United states alone 2. 3 billion gallons of gas is wasted each year in traffic jams.
like gas-powered engines, the trick is to produce force on turbines, but to do so without creating emissions.
In quantum mechanics, a particle, such as an electron circling the nucleus of an atom, does not have an actual location or physical state.
All that can be said of it is a set of equations that describe its probability of being given in a place with a given energy
Two particles whose vibrations are the same in all dimensions are said to occupy the same quantum state.
Ashton Bradley and his colleagues at the Australian Research Council quantum-optics lab have shown that it possible to teleport an atom.
To demonstrate, Australian researchers made a Bose-Einstein condensate (BEC) of rubidium atoms. A BEC is a substance that occurs
it can instantly freeze certain particles it comes in contact with. The researchers then aimed a beam of rubidium atoms at the condensate.
Instantly chilled, the atoms in the beam also dropped to their lowest state, getting rid of the extra energy by giving off a burst of light.
Astonishingly, that light contains all the quantum information needed to reconstitute the atom. Aim it at another BEC,
and whatever atom it strikes takes on the quantum state of the original atom. In effect, an atom at the transmitting end has disappeared
and been reconstituted at the receiving end. There is still an atom at each end but the quantum oeidentity has moved from one to the other.
It is a long way from teleporting a few individual atoms to sending people from the Enterprise to a planet surface.
But, while it may take decades to transmit something as complicated as a virus or a single molecule of DNA,
it should be possible eventually theoretically to send a human being from one place to another through a matter transmitter.
The Issue: Energy The Future: World energy demand will increase dramatically. Experts predict that energy demand will rise by 60%between 2002 and 2030
but experts say it likely would not be a simple compound of chemicals. A pill-sized food replacement system would have to be extremely complex because of the sheer difficulty of the task it was being asked to perform
more complex than any simple chemical reaction could be. The most viable solution, according to many futurists, would be a nanorobot food replacement system.
and senior research fellow at the Institute for Molecular Manufacturing, has described several potential food replacement technologies that are somewhat pill-like.
however, is that instead of containing drug compounds, the capsules would contain thousands of microscopic robots called nanorobots.
Freitas points out that the isotope gadolinium-148 could provide much of the fuel the body needs.
But a person can t just eat a radioactive chemical and hope to be healthy,
Freitas says the person might still have to take some vitamin or protein supplements but because gadolinium has a half life of 75 years,
the person might be able to go for a century or longer without a square meal.
The nutribots would take the fat, excess iron, and anything else that the eater in question did absorbed not want into his or her body and hold onto it.
and the excess fat, normally out of the body in the restroom. A nanobot Dr. Freitas calls a oelipovore would act like a microscopic cosmetic surgeon, sucking fat cells out of your body and giving off heat,
The simple activated carbon filtration system aims to tackle the Millennium Development Goal of reducing the proportion of the world people without sustainable access to safe drinking water.
Small proteins, antibodies, and viruses were amenable to the technology and within reach of a startup.
and land contributes to about one-fifth of global annual greenhouse gas emissions, according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
The Guardian Larry Elliott argues that as demand for protein-heavy diets in developing nations increases,
As agricultural science gained prominence, consumption of animal proteins, cereal and calories per capita also skyrocketed.
Chemical inputs mechanized farming methods, and the start of the animal agriculture business all saw dramatic increase in yields,
The success of the first tested genetically engineered cotton in 1990 led biotech company Monsanto to introduce herbicide-immune soybeans aka, oeround-Up Ready in 1995,
and vitamins has made biotechnology a global giant in the world of food production
Mixed-use 2. 0: The office building of the futuresocial forces and advances in communications technology are driving changes in how and where people work.
or any other starting point other than what is required to achieve carbon neutrality. Cities should provide incentives to developers who meet these performance goals.
computers, sporting goods, cosmetics, etc. â chemical production: industrial compounds, high-value compounds, plastics, chemical synthesis, etc. â human health:
medical drugs and devices, over-the-counter medicine, clinical therapies, etc. This field has taken on a life of its own due to economic incentives:
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