Climate Climate & Energy

What Pricey Glory

Carbon sequestration a pricey but feasible way to curb global warming Carbon sequestration — capturing and storing carbon dioxide emissions — isn’t a cheap or easy solution to global warming, but it’s doable. A new report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change finds that with major investments, up to 40 percent of CO2 emissions […]

Arctic You Glad We Didn’t Say Banana

Arctic ice cap is melting fast, say scientists The Arctic ice cap has shriveled to its smallest size in a century; at this rate of shrinkage, the summer cap may vanish by 2060. Researchers who compiled the data say the process appears to have become self-sustaining: As ice melts, there’s more water, which absorbs more […]

Apollo Alliance now shooting for the statehouse instead of the moon

By now the mission of the two-year-old D.C.-based Apollo Alliance — to mobilize a grand-scale federal commitment to energy independence, with the triple-whammy promise of creating good jobs with new technology, bolstering national security with energy independence, and saving the planet from carbon emissions — has become something of a cliché. Apollo: No longer shooting […]

Sacrificial Sham

Bush asks Americans to avoid unnecessary car trips and save energy President Bush yesterday called on Americans to drive less and conserve gas. “We can all pitch in,” he said. Of course, “all” is relative: Though the president directed federal agencies to reduce energy use, Republican congressional leaders were meeting even as he spoke to […]

London Brawling

Leading U.K. scientist excoriates U.S. on climate-disruption obstruction As superstorm Hurricane Rita bears down on Texas and Louisiana, Sir John Lawton, chairman of the U.K.’s Royal Commission on Environmental Pollution, told the Independent that neoconservatives in the U.S. ought to reconsider their obstructionist stance on climate change. “If this makes the climate loonies in the […]

Swedes aim to phase out fossil fuels by 2020

To counteract today's totally bummer crop of news, a cheery development from my peeps, the Swedes:

Prime Minister Goran Persson announced this week that Sweden will try to end its dependency on fossil fuels in 15 years by, among other things, ramping up use of wind power, boosting research into renewable-energy technologies, and providing incentives for renewable power and clean cars. Swede dreams are made of this ...

Quick on the Thaw

Melting Arctic sea ice may have hit point of no return, scientists fear Experts on the climate of the Arctic have been busy this summer altering their dire predictions for a globally warmed future — to make them even direr. According to scientists at the National Snow and Ice Data Center at the University of […]

Hurricane You Hear Me Now?

Warming oceans linked to increase in powerful hurricanes and storms Severe hurricanes and cyclones have become more common worldwide as ocean temperatures have increased, according to a study published today in the journal Science. Georgia Tech climatologist Judith Curry and colleagues studied satellite data from the past 35 years as well as computer models before […]

Dead radioactive birds piling up at British nuclear plant

One more reason to oppose nuclear: the radioactive birds.  

Make that the dead, frozen, expanding pile of radioactive birds.

At a nuclear plant in Britain, concerned about birds potentially spreading radiation from the site, managers hired snipers -- yes, snipers -- to assassinate birds that land in the area, mostly pigeons and seagulls. Which they've been doing for a while now.

Well, problem solved then, right? Not exactly.

Now, instead of live radioactive birds that could fly away and contaminate things, there are dead radioactive birds, deemed low-level radioactive waste, that aren't going anywhere. Hundreds of them, actually, the managers guess. But unlike other, conventional forms of radwaste, the birds rot -- enough to be deemed "putrescent" -- so they must be kept out of the normal nuke waste dump.

Which means that now the Brit nuke plant has the same problem as avid hunters trying to cut down on their meat consumption -- freezers and freezers full of their kill, with more arriving all the time. And until a special nuclear-bird landfill can be built where they'll be dumped, the nuke plant's freezers will keep overflowing with the hot cold birds.

Freezer-burned nuclear gull, anyone? Yum.

Continental Wreck-Fest

Europeans adapting to the realities of a disrupted climate While Americans quibble ignorantly over whether climate change is really happening, Europeans are already adapting to it. Swedish foresters are being told to plant trees that will thrive in warmer temperatures. Planners of a new subway system in Copenhagen, Denmark, raised all structures to accommodate an […]