Climate Change

“Essentially it looks like they left a pretty big mess behind,” San Jose State Assistant Professor Dustin Mulvaney told CBS 5. Mulvaney has written a white paper on solar industry waste for the Silicon Valley Toxics Coalition. Looking at CBS 5’s video, Mulvaney said it’s hard to tell how much hazardous waste is at the Milpitas facility. But he said one thing is for sure.

While this year's early warm weather has made for something of a ramp windfall, it also suggests future problems, said Frank Lowenstein, a climate scientist with the Nature Conservancy and an avid harvester of wild ramps. Since they're hearty, drought- and cold-resistant, and spend most of their year in the ground, a dry year will not hurt them, Lowenstein explained. "That’s their historical strategy: Get some leaves up and get their sunshine now." But a permanent change to weather patterns could spell disaster.

We are pleased to let you know about a new report, Monitoring Climate Effects in Temperate Marine Ecosystems: A Test Case Using California’s MPAs, which outlines a new and innovative framework for measuring climate change effects and informing adaptive MPA management.

“When you are integrating renewables, until now, when people asked the question, ‘Can we have 100 percent renewables?' usually that was taken to mean, ‘Is there enough resource to fill all 8,760 hours of the year? And, if not, how much storage do we need?’” explained von Meier, the Co-Director of Electric Grid Research at UC Berkeley’s California Institute for Energy and Environment. “That level of analysis is no longer where the most difficult problems are.”

To do REDD right and make it easier for local communities, we need to be legit. You can plant a tree or prevent the cutting of a forest and claim less greenhouse gases are reaching the atmosphere. Your claim would be basically true, but to be REDD certified, you have to meet three key stipulations.

“Our climate is changing and so it is more important than ever that cities work together around this common cause,” said Dr. Nancy Steele, executive director of Council for Watershed Health (CWH), an agency that works closely with water conservation, ecology and watershed protection programs covering over 1500 square miles in Southern California (U.S.) . “By coming together, conference participants will share resources and knowledge across regional and national boundaries to build effective solutions.

Scientists say China must act now. The world has just two or three decades to avoid irreversible climate change, says Kelly Sims Gallagher, an energy professor at Tufts University in Medford, Massachusetts, and author of two books on pollution. “If the Chinese don’t dramatically reduce carbon emissions from coal, there’s no way we can make a dent in climate change globally in the time period that matters,” Gallagher says. Read the full story

But away from transmission lines, DC is also gaining ground as an alternative in the developing world, according to Karina Garbesi, a professor and visiting researcher at LBNL. Getting power to remote areas from an AC grid is very costly and doesn't make much sense, since some of these regions can construct wind turbines and solar farms.

"Our findings add to the list of naturally occurring chemical compounds that could serve as biofuels, which means more flexibility and options for the biofuels industry," says Harry Beller, a JBEI microbiologist who led this study. "We're especially encouraged by our finding that it is possible to increase the methyl ketone titer production of E. coli more than 4,000-fold with a relatively small number of genetic modifications." Read the full story