Global Warming Issues

The rising production of television sets may worsen global warming because a greenhouse gas used for the purpose is more harmful than coal, warns a leading environmental scientist.

Dr. Michael Prather, director of the environment institute at the University of California, says that the annual production of nitrogen trifluoride has increased to about 4000 tonnes on the back of television’s rising popularity.

He points out that this gas is 17,000 times more potent than carbon dioxide, and that people hardly know how much of it is being released into the atmosphere by the industry.

Highlighting the fact that this gas can remain in the atmosphere for 550 years, Dr. Prather has revealed that its production is “exploding” and may double by next year.

Dr. Prather has also revealed that unlike carbon dioxide, sulphur hexafluoride (SF6), and perfluorocarbons (PFCs), the production of this gas is not restricted by the Kyoto Protocol or similar agreements.

Along with his colleague Juno Hsu, Dr. Prather has calculated that this year’s production of the gas would have been equivalent to 67 million tonnes of carbon dioxide.

The researchers say that nitrogen trifluoride might have “a potential greenhouse impact larger than that of the industrialised nations’ emissions of PFCs or SF6, or even of the world’s largest coal-fired power plants,” theage.com.au reports.

On day 25 the Environment Committee of Congress unanimously approved a proposition that CiU urges the Government to replace within three years 350 million incandescent bulbs for compact fluorescent, which will decrease by 3% electricity consumption.

Similar measures were advanced by Cuba (2005) Venezuela (2006) and Australia (2007).

The PP says that the cost for each family would be about 250 € for about 25 lamps per household, this figure is exaggerated in both figures. In my house the points of light are 11 and the price of a compact fluorescent 12 or 15W replacing an incandescent 60 or 75W ranges from 3 to 9 € and the shelf life is at least eight times greater, for 1000h 8000h for incandescent and fluorescent so the price would be similar.

The economic savings of each lamp is easy to calculate replaced by example for a fluorescent 15W with a price of 0.10 € kWh and 8000 hours of life would be: (75-15) x0, 1 × 8000/1000 = 48 €

The energy saved would be in the same case (75-15) x8000/1000 = 480kWh that produced in a coal-fired power plant would be approximately half a tonne of CO2 avoided chandelier replaced by what they translated into cost per tCO2 would only cost 2 € 12 lamps +24 € electricity consumed-96 = -60 saved € € / tCO2. Really cheap gift should immediately.

What I regret is that this measure has not been as simple start-up and before you term replacement is so long, will almost coincide with the date you probably do not have sea ice in the North Pole in summer 2012-13 .

Measures as simple as these also send signals to people about the importance of the problem by helping to change their habits unless enervoros. Emissions per inhabitant per year in Spain are around 10t CO2.

However, the researchers caution that because earthquakes can sometimes occur in clusters, people should still be wary of another possible large-scale earthquake.

The magnitude 7.9 quake struck Sichuan province on May 12 at around noontime, which may have increased the human death toll because many people were at school, and the school buildings turned out to be especially vulnerable to collapse because of poor construction. More than 69,000 people have been confirmed dead so far, and more than 374,000 injured, with fears of further casualties because several lakes created by rockfall dams may give way and cause sudden flooding.

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One of the most vivid symbols of global warming is the torrents of melt water that drain from the lakes that form each summer on Greenland’s ice sheet.

Recent studies have shown that this water, which flows deep into the ice through natural drainpipes called moulins, allows the ice to slide faster over bedrock toward the ocean. And the faster the ice flows, the faster sea levels rise. But a Dutch study using 17 years of satellite measurements in western Greenland suggests that the movement associated with the meltwater is not as rapid as had been feared. The acceleration appears to be a transient summer phenomenon, the researchers said, with the yearly movement actually dropping slightly in some places.

“The positive-feedback mechanism between melt rate and ice velocity,” says the report, published Friday in the journal Science, “appears to be a seasonal process that may have only a limited effect on the response of the ice sheet to climate warming over the next decades.”

Greenland is still losing more ice through melting than it gains through snowfall, other measurements show.

The study was led by Roderik S. W. van de Wal of the Institute for Marine and Atmospheric Research of the University of Utrecht. He said the overall slowdown might be because of changing plumbing deep inside the ice. The study builds on earlier work also showing a limited overall change in ice flow from the surface melting.

The authors and independent experts familiar with the research stressed that the findings did not preclude the possibility that more widespread surface melting could eventually destabilize big areas of Greenland, the world’s second largest ice storehouse. Richard B. Alley, a glaciologist at Pennsylvania State University, said that big lakes were likely to form as areas of melting spread inland, and that this could unlock new ice regions to start sliding more.

But Dr. Alley and other experts said the new study showed that it was unlikely that Greenland’s ice had already become destabilized in ways that could cause a surge in sea levels.