Sunday, May 20, 2007

More Great News From the World of Science!
California re-froze! A section of Antarctica the size of California did, anyway. Of course, this means that first it melted - "the most significant thawing in thirty years" - but hey, who cares? It froze again!

In other news, you may have heard that one of our technological hopes for combating industrial CO2 emissions is something called "carbon sequestration." Here, carbon would be captured - sent down into the depths of the Earth, perhaps - instead of released into the atmosphere. We don't know quite how to do that efficiently on a large scale yet, but it's a plan. Until then, the best repositories for carbon capture we have are natural means of sequestration: forests and oceans, which soak up carbon themselves. Problem is, the oceans are getting full.
The phenomenon wasn't expected to be apparent for decades, Le Quere said in a telephone interview from the University of East Anglia in Britain.

"We thought we would be able to detect these only the second half of this century, say 2050 or so," she said. But data from 1981 through 2004 show the sink is already full of carbon dioxide. "So I find this really quite alarming."
But not to worry. Some guy went to Antarctica and he says it's still pretty cold and we should stop all the kvetching.

No comments: