MARK KINVER, Environment Reporter - BBC News (UK)
Stephan: Here is some classic good news-bad news. The U.S. did something smart and forward thinking -- created tax policies to encourage solar -- but has now allowed them to expire, thanks to old energy deploying its lobbyists and whipping both the Obama Administration and the Congress back into place.
Of particular note in this report is the data showing that solar is now a larger energy contributor than nuclear.
Click through to see a chart comparing the various national investments.
Thanks to Jeff Vander Clute.
The US has regained top spot from China as the biggest investor in clean energy in 2011, according to global rankings.
The table, published in a report by the Pew Charitable Trusts, showed that US invested more than $48bn (£30bn) in the sector, up from $34bn in 2010.
China slipped to second place, the authors reported, with investment only increasing by $0.5bn to $45.5bn.
Globally, overall financial backing in clean energy technologies hit a record $263bn, up 6.5% from 2010 levels.
The report, Who is Winning the Clean Energy Race, showed that G20 nations accounted for 95% of the investment in the sector (which does not include nuclear power).
The data, compiled by Bloomberg New Energy Finance, ranked the UK as seventh in the world, with $9.4bn of investment in 2011.
Over the course of the year, an additional 83.5 gigawatts (GW) was added to the world’s clean energy generation capacity, including almost 30GW of solar and 43GW of wind.
‘The sector continues to expand and is outpacing growth in the overall (global) economy. The sector reached its trillionth dollar of investment last year,’ observed Phyllis Cuttino, director of Pew’s Clean Energy Program.
‘We now have 565GW of installed (generation) capacity around the world. That outstrips nuclear installed […]
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Thursday, April 12th, 2012
Stephan: Another dimension of the impact of Climate Change is beginning to emerge. I don't expect it to have any greater effect on the Theocratic Rightists than anything else in science, but I want my readers to know what is coming.
Global warming may initially make the grass greener, but not for long, according to new research results.
The findings, published this week in the journal Nature Climate Change, show that plants may thrive in the early stages of a warming environment but then begin to deteriorate quickly.
‘We were really surprised by the pattern, where the initial boost in growth just went away,’ said scientist Zhuoting Wu of Northern Arizona University (NAU), a lead author of the study. ‘As ecosystems adjusted, the responses changed.’
Ecologists subjected four grassland ecosystems to simulated climate change during a decade-long study.
Plants grew more the first year in the global warming treatment, but this effect progressively diminished over the next nine years and finally disappeared.
The research shows the long-term effects of global warming on plant growth, on the plant species that make up a community, and on changes in how plants use or retain essential resources like nitrogen.
‘The plants and animals around us repeatedly serve up surprises,’ said Saran Twombly, program director in the National Science Foundation (NSF)’s Division of Environmental Biology, which funded the research.
‘These results show that we miss these surprises because we don’t study natural communities over the right time scales. For plant communities in […]
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Thursday, April 12th, 2012
JIM HEIRBAUT, - Science (AAAS)
Stephan: This may seem rather esoteric, but the implications are enormous, and this represents a first step in a trend that holds the potential to transform our communications.
For more than a decade, physicists have been developing quantum mechanical methods to pass secret messages without fear that they could be intercepted. But they still haven’t created a true quantum network-the fully quantum-mechanical analog to an ordinary telecommunications network in which an uncrackable connection can be forged between any two stations or ‘nodes’ in a network. Now, a team of researchers in Germany has built the first true quantum link using two widely separate atoms. A complete network could be constructed by combining many such links, the researchers say.
‘These results are a remarkable achievement’, says Andrew Shields, applied physicist and assistant managing director at Toshiba Research Europe Ltd. in Cambridge, U.K., who was not involved in the work. ‘In the past we have built networks that can communicate quantum information, but convert it into classical form at the network switching points. [The researchers] report preliminary experiments towards forming a network in which the information remains in quantum form.’
Quantum communications schemes generally take advantage of the fact that, according to quantum theory, it’s impossible to measure the condition or ‘state’ of a quantum particle without disturbing the particle. For example, suppose Alice wants to send Bob a secret message. She […]
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Thursday, April 12th, 2012
MACKENZIE WEINGER, - Politico
Stephan: What used to be considered tinfoil-on-the-head fringe weirdness has now become mainstream. Thanks to the Theocratic Rightists another red state has passed into law a bill essentially designed to give official sanction to stupidity. It's not the first time. The Scopes Trial in July 1925 was based in Tennessee.
The more things change the more they remain the same.
The controversial legislation – known as the ‘Monkey Bill
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Thursday, April 12th, 2012
B. ROSE HUBER, - University of Pittsburgh
Stephan: If you think that the poisons spewed out by Monsanto and the other death corporations just affect bees, please read this report. Tons of these toxins are being spread across the world, particularly in the U.S. What goes around, comes around. Millions will suffer so a few can get even richer. If you use lawn and garden products like Round-up... well, just read this report.
PITTSBURGH — The world’s most popular weed killer, Roundup®, can cause amphibians to change shape, according to research published today in Ecological Applications.
Rick Relyea, University of Pittsburgh professor of biological sciences in the Kenneth P. Dietrich School of Arts and Sciences and director of Pitt’s Pymatuning Laboratory of Ecology, demonstrated that sublethal and environmentally relevant concentrations of Roundup® caused two species of amphibians to alter their morphology. According to Relyea, this is the first study to show that a pesticide can induce morphological changes in a vertebrate animal.
Relyea set up large outdoor water tanks that contained many of the components of natural wetlands. Some tanks contained caged predators, which emit chemicals that naturally induce changes in tadpole morphology (such as larger tails to better escape predators). After adding tadpoles to each tank, he exposed them to a range of Roundup® concentrations. After 3 weeks, the tadpoles were removed from the tanks.
‘It was not surprising to see that the smell of predators in the water induced larger tadpole tails,
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