Tag Archive for 'Global Warming'

2007 was Earth’s 2nd warmest year

Published
by
Tom Raftery
on 18/1/2008
in climate change
. 8 Comments

According to NASA, 2007 was tied with 1998 as the second-warmest year in a century.

global climate change

According to the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS), the eight warmest years in the GISS record have all occurred since 1998, and the 14 warmest years in the record have all occurred since 1990.

The article goes on to say:

The greatest warming in 2007 occurred in the Arctic, and neighboring high latitude regions. Global warming has a larger affect in polar areas, as the loss of snow and ice leads to more open water, which absorbs more sunlight and warmth. Snow and ice reflect sunlight; when they disappear, so too does their ability to deflect warming rays. The large Arctic warm anomaly of 2007 is consistent with observations of record low geographic extent of Arctic sea ice in September 2007.

“As we predicted last year, 2007 was warmer than 2006, continuing the strong warming trend of the past 30 years that has been confidently attributed to the effect of increasing human-made greenhouse gases,” said James Hansen, director of NASA GIS

The data in the graph above are pretty conclusive. The planet’s climate is changing. Now what are we going to do about it?

New battery technology imminent?

Published
by
Tom Raftery
on 5/9/2007
in Global Warming, Technology, carbon neutrality and climate change
. 0 Comments

I was reading a report on Ars Technica today about an emerging battery technology which could totally change how we use batteries today.

The breakthrough comes from using capacitors as batteries. Up until now this has not been feasible because there hasn’t been a strong enough insulator to make this approach compelling. However, EEstor, the company who have made the breakthrough have applied for a patent for a highly insulated capacitor.

In their patent application, it suggests that:

the charge storage is much higher than anything achieved in an academic lab: 52 kilowatt-hours in a 2,000 cubic inch capacitor array. A rough conversion calculation suggests that this is over 10 times the power density of standard lead-acid batteries.

The Ars Technica article goes on to note that:

the Associated Press is reporting that the ZENN Motor Company, which makes compact electric cars, plans to start using the capacitors before the year is out. The company has invested in EEStar in return for production goals being met and so is in a position to know how realistic its claims are

If this has any basis in fact, it could have incredible consequences for the reduction of carbon emissions from transport and from the environment in general with the reduction in the use of the particularly nasty chemicals which currently go to make up batteries.

Climate change

Published
by
Tom Raftery
on 11/7/2007
in Global Warming and climate change
. 18 Comments

They had snow the other day in Buenos Aires.

Texas has had one of the wettest June’s on record with Marble Falls getting 18″ of rain overnight!

Australia is suffering from a drought for the last five years which is threatening to destroy 40% of its agricultural output.

The UK has had one of the wettest June’s on record with some people in Hull still unable to return to their homes.

And despite the weather here in Ireland of late, it seems that according to the Met Office, temperatures in Ireland have been gradually climbing for the last 27 years!

Climate Change

And some people still deny that climate change is occurring? Incredible.

Using I.T. to add green power to the network

Published
by
Tom Raftery
on 20/6/2007
in Global Warming, carbon neutrality, cix and climate change
. 6 Comments

The problem with wind power is that its production is variable and difficult to predict. From the perspective of a power supply company, such a supplier is unreliable and likely to de-stabilise the power network.

For instance, at 2am in Ireland, when the demand for electricity is near its lowest, if a 40mph wind is blowing across the country, wind can be supplying up to 30% of the demand. However, if the wind picks up to 50mph, the wind farms shut down to protect their mechanisms and suddenly you lose 30% of your supply! The electricity supply companies have to scramble to bring power stations online to meet the sudden fall off.

In CIX, we have come up with a strategy for Data Centre’s to act as a flywheel for electricity supply companies. This will allow the supply companies to greatly increase the amount of green energy they buy. And if the Data Centre’s are burning biodiesel then you are in a win-win situation .

It seems we are not alone in our thinking - Google, no-less, has come up with a similar strategy using cars! Yes cars. You’d think that with all their data centres they’d use them in the way we propose but they have decided to go the ‘vehicle to grid’ route for now.

Google’s strategy is modify hybrid cars so that they can consume power from the grid. These new ‘plug-in hybrids’ achieve 70-100mpg.

These plug-in hybrids take power from the grid overnight at times of low demand, say. Then the batteries in these cars, which store electricity, can ’sell’ electricity back to the grid at times of high demand.

Check out the Google video on this to see what I mean:

A cute idea but one which would have to achieve massive scale before making a difference, I suspect.

Tax on company cars causes increased carbon emissions!

Published
by
Tom Raftery
on 7/6/2007
in Global Warming, carbon neutrality and climate change
. 7 Comments

I was speaking to a sales rep yesterday who was driving a company car. He told me about the Irish government’s scheme to tax people for receipt of company cars. It is called Benefit in Kind (BiK).

Basically, if your employer gives you a company car, you are liable to pay 30% of the original market value of the car in tax (the original market value includes the amount the government already collects in VRT!).

However, if you do more than 15,000 per annum, the amount of BiK you have to pay drops. The more mileage you do, the less BiK you have to pay (up to a ceiling at 30,000 miles).

Sounds fair, you might say. These people are using the cars the company gave them.

Possibly, until you realise that what this law does is incentivise company car owners to use their cars more to drive to meetings (for example) where they might otherwise have taken a more carbon friendly alternative (telecon anyone?). The rep I was talking to said he will preferentially drive anywhere to get his mileage up!

If you want to tax company cars, why not do it on the basis of their carbon footprint (or engine size if that rating isn’t easy to come by). Something like €500 for cars 1.6L and less; €2,500 for 1.6L to 2L; €6,000 for 2L to 3L and €12,000 for 3L and above index linked.

Yahoo! also going for carbon neutrality!

Published
by
Tom Raftery
on 18/4/2007
in Global Warming, cix and climate change
. 3 Comments

I see Yahoo! has announced that it is going to follow our lead in CIX *cough* and aim for carbon neutrality!

In the announcement David Filo, co-founder of Yahoo! said:

we’re going to invest in greenhouse gas reduction projects around the world to neutralize Yahoo!’s impact on the environment. While doing our homework on this, we measured our carbon footprint and discovered that Yahoo! going carbon neutral is equivalent to shutting off the electricity in all San Francisco homes for a month. Or, pulling nearly 25,000 cars off the road for a year.

While buying carbon credits isn’t the ideal way to go carbon neutral (I can think of a couple of better ways - David, come along to my talk at Barcamp Dublin on Saturday if you want to know more!), it is certainly a step in the right direction and puts a financial imperative on the company to “clean up its act”, from a carbon point of view, at least!

Kudos to Yahoo! for taking this stance and hopefully we’ll see more companies going down this route sooner than later (though I don’t see Halliburton coming on board any time soon).

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