Global Warming 2020

Global Warming News : abc NEWS : Gore Warns Major Investors at UN Forum That ‘Subprime Carbon Assets’ Will Prove Costly

By JOHN HEILPRIN Associated Press Writer : UNITED NATIONS Feb 14, 2008

Al Gore advised Wall Street leaders and institutional investors Thursday to ditch businesses too reliant on carbon-intensive energy or prepare for huge losses down the road.

“You need to really scrub your investment portfolios, because I guarantee you as my longtime good redneck friends in Tennessee say, I guarandamntee you that if you really take a fine-tooth comb and go through your portfolios, many of you are going to find them chock-full of subprime carbon assets,” the former vice president said.

Carbon dioxide from burning fossil fuels is the leading component of “greenhouse gases,” which scientists say are playing a key role in warming the globe.

Gore’s remarks before a high-profile business crowd that collectively controls some $20 trillion in capital were intended to unleash a financial ripple effect that could force the world to start putting a price on carbon emissions.

Gore, who shared the Nobel Peace Prize for his efforts to warn about climate change, compared the financial risks facing investors in carbon-using industries with the meltdown in the market for subprime mortgages given to people with blemished credit records or low incomes.

“Similarly, the assumption that you can safely invest in assets that come from business models that assume carbon is free is an assumption that is about to go splat,” he said. “You have lots of assets, many of you do, in your portfolios right now that truly do deserve that epithet ’subprime.’”

The U.N. played host to nearly 500 prominent financial leaders and institutional investors who came searching for insights on shifting business currents as the world shifts to cleaner energy sources and fuels.

Fifty U.S. and European institutional investors managing $1.75 trillion in assets agreed to invest $10 billion more in energy efficiency and “clean energy” technologies over the next two years and to aim for a 20 percent reduction in energy from core real estate investment holdings over three years. California State Treasurer Bill Lockyer said his state’s leading pension funds would invest more than $800 million in environmental technology with similar aims.

Source: http://abcnews.go.com/International/wireStory?id=4293939

Global Warming News : Oceans Could Slurp Up Carbon Dioxide To Fight Global Warming

Illustration depicts how the oceans could be used as a giant carbon dioxide collector to fight global warming. (Credit: Courtesy of Kurt House, Harvard University) 

Researchers in Massachusetts and Pennsylvania are proposing a new method for reducing global warming that involves building a series of water treatment plants that enhance the ability of the ocean to absorb carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.

About 100 such plants — which essentially use the ocean as “a giant carbon dioxide collector” — could cause a 15 percent reduction in emissions over many years, they say. About 700 plants could offset all CO₂ emissions. 

Scientists believe that excessive build-up of carbon dioxide in the air contributes to global warming. In addition to cutting down on carbon dioxide emissions by reducing the use of fossil fuels, researchers have focused on new technologies that remove the gas directly from the atmosphere.

In the new study, Kurt Zenz House and colleagues propose building hundreds of special water treatment facilities worldwide that would remove hydrochloric acid from the ocean by electrolysis and neutralize the acid through reactions with silicate minerals or rocks.

The reaction increases the alkalinity of the ocean and its ability to absorb carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. The process is similar to the natural weathering reactions that occur among silicate rocks but works at a much faster rate, the researchers say.

The journal article, “Electrochemical Acceleration of Chemical Weathering as an Energetically Feasible Approach to Mitigating Anthropogenic Climate Change,” is scheduled to appear in the Dec. 15 issue of ACS’ Environmental Science & Technology.

Adapted from materials provided by American Chemical Society, via EurekAlert!, a service of AAAS.

Source: http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2007/11/071119112231.htm

Global Warming News : New Materials Can Selectively Capture Carbon Dioxide, Chemists Report

ZIF. ZIFs are porous and chemically robust structures, with large surface areas, that can be used to capture carbon dioxide. (Credit: Image courtesy of University of California – Los Angeles) 

ScienceDaily (Feb. 17, 2008) — UCLA chemists report a major advance in reducing heat-trapping carbon dioxide emissions in the Feb. 15 issue of the journal Science.

The scientists have demonstrated that they can successfully isolate and capture carbon dioxide, which contributes to global warming, rising sea levels and the increased acidity of oceans. Their findings could lead to power plants efficiently capturing carbon dioxide without using toxic materials.

“The technical challenge of selectively removing carbon dioxide has been overcome,” said Omar M. Yaghi, UCLA’s Christopher S. Foote Professor of Chemistry and co-author of the Science paper. “Now we have structures that can be tailored precisely to capture carbon dioxide and store it like a reservoir, as we have demonstrated. No carbon dioxide escapes. Nothing escapes — unless you want it to do so. We believe this to be a turning point in capturing carbon dioxide before it reaches the atmosphere.”

The carbon dioxide is captured using a new class of materials designed by Yaghi and his group called zeolitic imidazolate frameworks, or ZIFs. These are porous and chemically robust structures, with large surface areas, that can be heated to high temperatures without decomposition and boiled in water or organic solvents for a week and still remain stable.

Rahul Banerjee, a UCLA postdoctoral research scholar in chemistry and Anh Phan, a UCLA graduate student in chemistry, both of whom work in Yaghi’s laboratory, synthesized 25 ZIF crystal structures and demonstrated that three of them have high selectivity for capturing carbon dioxide (ZIF-68, ZIF-69, ZIF-70).

“The selectivity of ZIFs to carbon dioxide is unparalleled by any other material,” said Yaghi, who directs of UCLA’s Center for Reticular Chemistry and is a member of the California NanoSystems Institute at UCLA. “Rahul and Anh were so successful at making new ZIFs that, for the purposes of reporting the results, I had to ask them to stop.”

The inside of a ZIF can store gas molecules. Flaps that behave like the chemical equivalent of a revolving door allow certain molecules — in this case, carbon dioxide — to pass through and enter the reservoir while blocking larger molecules or molecules of different shapes.

“We can screen and select the one type of molecule we want to capture,” Phan said. “The beauty of the chemistry is that we have the freedom to choose what kind of door we want and to control what goes through the door.”

“The capture of carbon dioxide creates cleaner energy,” Yaghi said. “ZIFs in a smokestack would trap carbon dioxide in the pores prior to its delivery to its geologic storage space.”

In ZIFs 68, 69 and 70, Banerjee and Phan emptied the pores, creating an open framework. They then subjected the material to streams of gases — carbon dioxide and carbon monoxide, for example, and another stream of carbon dioxide and nitrogen — and were able to capture only the carbon dioxide. They are testing other ZIFs for various applications.

Carbon dioxide is killing corral reefs and marine life, damage that will be irreversible, at least for many centuries, Yaghi noted.

Currently, the process of capturing carbon dioxide emissions from power plants involves the use of toxic materials and requires 20 to 30 percent of the plant’s energy output, Yaghi said. By contrast, ZIFs can pluck carbon dioxide from other gases that are emitted and can store five times more carbon dioxide than the porous carbon materials that represent the current state-of-art.

“For each liter of ZIF, you can hold 83 liters of carbon dioxide,” Banerjee said.

The word zif, Yaghi noted, is used in the Bible to describe a region of splendor. It also means comeliness and brightness. This name is fitting for this new class of materials, he said, because its members are many and of quite beautiful constructions.

On a fundamental level, the invention of ZIFs has also addressed two major challenges in zeolite science. Zeolites are stable, porous minerals made of aluminum, silicon and oxygen that are employed in petroleum refining and are used in detergents and other products. Yaghi’s group has succeeded in replacing what would have been aluminum or silicon with metal ions like zinc and cobalt, and the bridging oxygen with imidazolate to yield ZIF materials, whose structures can now be designed in functionality and metrics.

Banerjee and Anh automated the process of synthesis. Instead of mixing the chemicals one reaction at a time and achieving perhaps several reactions per day, they were able to perform 200 reactions in less than an hour. The pair ran 9,600 microreactions and from those reactions uncovered 25 new structures.

“We keep producing new crystals of ZIFs every day,” Banerjee said. “These reactions produce crystals that look as beautiful as diamonds.”

Co-authors are Bo Wang, a UCLA graduate student in chemistry in Yaghi’s laboratory; Carolyn Knobler and Hiroyasu Furukawa of the Center for Reticular Chemistry at the UCLA’s California NanoSystems Institute; and Michael O’Keeffe of Arizona State University’s department of chemistry and biochemistry.

In the early 1990s, Yaghi invented another class of materials called metal-organic frameworks (MOFs), which have been described as crystal sponges and which also have implications for cleaner energy. Yaghi can change the components of MOFs nearly at will. Like ZIFs, MOFs have pores — openings on the nanoscale in which Yaghi and his colleagues can store gases that are usually difficult to store and transport.

Yaghi’s laboratory has made several hundred MOFs, with a variety of properties and structures. Molecules can pass in and out of them unobstructed.

BASF, a global chemical company based in Germany, funded the synthesis of the materials, and the U.S. Department of Energy funded the absorption and separation studies of carbon dioxide.

Adapted from materials provided by University of California – Los Angeles.

Source: http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/02/080214144344.htm