Tag: science

Negative emissions

Negative emissions of greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide (CO2) are high on the wish list of many. In short it is about taking greenhouse gases out of the atmosphere and getting rid of them, most often by burying them in the ground. The benefit would be the possibility to keep emitting climate hurting gases in …

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Biofuel

Ombeni Urio is a biofuel entrepreneur in Arusha, Tanzania. He runs a company which installs biogas systems. The systems consist of tanks into which animal or human waste is flushed, which then produces natural gas as it decomposes. The gas is then piped off and used for cooking fuel, and the residue waste becomes fertilizer for crops. Photo: Russell Watkins/Department for International Development (CC BY 2.0)

Biofuel is fuel made from organic material, normally plants in some form. Common biofuels are wood, ethanol and biogas. As the carbon in biofuels are part of the natural carbon cycle, the carbon dioxide emitted when biofuels are used doesn’t increase the greenhouse effect and global warming. Biofuels can however be problematic if farmland or …

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Fossil fuel

How can we move away from fossil fuels to avoid catastrophic climate change? Source: The Current Sea

Examples of fossil fuels are petrol, diesel, oil and coal. They are called fossil fuels as they were created over hundreds of thousands of year from old organic material. Dead parts of plants and small animals at the bottom of the sea and in the ground were slowly turned into the fuels that we are …

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Global warming

A scientific study of tweets showed differences between global warming and climate change. Twitter mosaic by Joe Lazarus (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)

Global warming is usually the same thing as climate change, see this word for a longer explanation. The one difference we want to highlight is that the two terms are used by different people. People who refuse the scientific evidence about climate change (“climate skeptics/deniers”) more often use the term global warming than others. People …

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Climate change

Climate change can lead to stronger winds, rising seas and flooding. Here huge waves crashing over the front at Port William, Great Britain 2014. Photo: David Baird (CC BY-SA 2.0)

There is natural climate change and then there is man-made climate change – and the latter is where the world’s scientists have measured dramatic changes over the last decades. The world is on average around 1°C warmer now than before the industrialization. When fossil fuels are burnt and the concentration of greenhouse gases in the …

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Greenhouse gases

Night-Shining Clouds might be getting brighter due to higher levels of greenhouse gases. Source: NASA and Jan Erik Paulsen

Greenhouse gases exist in the earth’s atmosphere and help making the earth habitable to humans, by keeping some of the heat from the sun trapped at the earths surface. This is called the greenhouse effect. When more greenhouse gasses are added to the atmosphere, the greenhouse effect increases. This leads to global warming and climate …

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