Global Warming Issues

July 25 — Beijing’s air pollution index rose steadily this week at the same time that the city has tried to cut traffic volume in half. Readings Thursday and Friday were over 100 and considered unhealthy for children, seniors and those with allergies or asthma.

The climb from a reading of 55 on Sunday to 110 on Friday — despite six days of forcing Beijing motorists to drive on alternate days — underscored the formidable challenge authorities face in trying to clear the air before athletes begin competing in the Aug. 8-24 Olympic Games.

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WHAT IS IT? The Heartland Corridor project involves improvements in railways between the Virginia coast and Columbus, Ohio, so that trains can carry more goods. Twenty-eight tunnels will be raised so that trains can carry double-stacked containers. The public-private partnership also will include construction of three intermodal facilities for easier transfer of containers between rail, roadways, rivers and airways. One is planned for nearby Prichard, while two others are planned for Roanoke, Va., and Columbus.

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What began as a Hanukkah gift for 13-year-old Advanced Math and Science Academy student Alex Gribov turned into an award-winning science project.

Gribov and his friend and fellow student Adi Panchamoorthy were one of three teams to win a CleanTech award during June’s Massachusetts State Science and Engineering Fair.

“My mom had gotten me a little kit with a solar cell,” said Gribov, who lives with his family in Newton but attends AMSA in Marlborough. “Me and Adi had been interested in it before.”

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Back in 2005, Depp bought the the 35-acre island (which he affectionately calls “F*ck Off Island”) in the Bahamas for around $3m after being inspired by what friend Marlon Brando had done with his own Tahitian paradise. In an interview with the Guardian, the actor recalled his conversation with the late Brando.

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Aberdeen-based subsea installation company, Subocean Limited, has been awarded a fast track contract with EON UK on the Scottish Robin Rigg wind-farm development in the Solway Firth, bolstering the company’s strategy of generating £50 million in sales from the renewable energy sector in the next two years.

The contract, which is believed to be worth approximately £7 million, is to install 64 power cables between the wind turbine generators and one export cable from the wind farm to shore on the Robin Rigg Offshore wind farms, 13.5 kilometres off the coast of Cumbria and 9 kilometres off the coast of Dumfries and Galloway.

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Costs to get crops in the ground will jump by about a third in 2009, fueled by fertilizer prices expected to surge 82 percent for corn and 117 percent for soybeans, said Gary Schnitkey, an agricultural economist who conducts the annual survey of input costs.

Fertilizer – the biggest non-land expense for corn and soybean farmers – is tethered to the same cost spiral that has driven steep gasoline and heating price increases over the last few years, said Schnitkey, a professor of agriculture and consumer economics.

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A sheen of oil coated the Mississippi River for nearly 100 miles from the center of this city to the Gulf of Mexico on Thursday following the worst oil spill here in nearly a decade. The fuel-laden barge that collided with a heavy tanker on Wednesday was still leaking.

The thick industrial fuel pouring from the barge could be smelled for miles in city neighborhoods up and down the river, even as hundreds of cleanup workers struggled to contain the hundreds of thousands of gallons. Some environmentalists worried about reports of fish and bird kills in sensitive marsh areas downstream, though officials said they had so far heard of only a handful of oil-covered birds. Booms to protect areas richest in wildlife, at the river’s mouth, were being deployed, officials said.

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The research has implications for all countries with livestock as it is the first attempt to outline a procedure for quantifying the national amount of renewable energy that herds of cattle and other livestock can generate and the concomitant GHG emission reductions.

Livestock manure, left to decompose naturally, emits two particularly potent GHGs — nitrous oxide and methane. According to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, nitrous oxide warms the atmosphere 310 times more than carbon dioxide, methane does so 21 times more.

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Combining existing data with new analysis, the eight studies project the long term economic impact of climate change on Colorado, Georgia, Kansas, Illinois, Michigan, Nevada, New Jersey and Ohio. Studies on additional states are in the works.

“We don’t have a crystal ball and can’t predict specific bottom lines, but the trend is very clear for these eight states and the nation as a whole: climate change will cost billions in the long run and the bottom line will be red,” says Matthias Ruth, who coordinated the research and directs the Center for Integrative Environmental Research at the University of Maryland. “Inaction or delayed action will make the ink run redder.”

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The traditional idea of monsoon formation was developed in 1686 by English astronomer and mathematician Edmond Halley, namesake of Halley’s Comet. In Halley’s model, monsoons are viewed as giant sea-breeze circulations, driven by the differences in heat capacities between land and ocean surfaces that, upon heating by sunlight, lead to temperature differences between warmer land and cooler ocean surfaces–for example, between the Indian subcontinent and the oceans surrounding it.

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