Breaking Waves: Ocean News

Freighters emit more greenhouse gases than jets, but a tech startup believes a simple and effective technique can help the industry change course An industrial park alongside the River Lea in the London suburb of Chingford might not be the most obvious place for a quiet revolution to be taking place. But there, a team of entrepreneurs is tinkering with a modest looking steel container that could hold a solution to one of the world’s dirtiest industries. Inside it are thousands of cherry-sized pellets made from quicklime. At one end, a diesel generator pipes fumes through the lime, which soaks up the carbon, triggering a chemical reaction that transforms it into limestone. Continue reading...

Company’s Starbase launch site in Texas near the Mexican border has seen test failures resulting in large explosions Mexico’s president, Claudia Sheinbaum, has threatened legal action over falling debris and contamination from billionaire Elon Musk’s SpaceX rocket launches across the border in the United States. Mexico’s government was studying which international laws were being violated in order to file “the necessary lawsuits” because “there is indeed contamination”, Sheinbaum told her morning news conference on Wednesday. Continue reading...

A conference in Cambridge this week will explore a raft of geoengineering ideas to cool the region down – and attempt to address the fears of those who argue the risks outweigh the benefits When the glaciologist John Moore began studying the Arctic in the 1980s there was an abundance of suitable sites for him to carry out his climate research. The region’s relentless warming means many of those no longer exist. With the Arctic heating up four times faster than the global average, they have simply melted away. Forty years on, Moore’s research network, the University of the Arctic, has identified 61 potential interventions to slow, stop and reverse the effects of the changing climate in the region. These concepts are constantly being updated and some will be assessed at a conference in Cambridge this week, where scientists and engineers will meet to consider if radical, technological solutions can buy time and stem the loss of polar ice caps. Continue reading...

People are disgusted by the idea of eating bugs despite their lighter planetary cost compared to traditional livestock Recent efforts to encourage people to eat insects are doomed to fail because of widespread public disgust at the idea, making it unlikely insects will help people switch from the environmentally ruinous habit of meat consumption, a new study has found. Farming and eating insects has been touted in recent years as a greener alternative to eating traditional meat due to the heavy environmental toll of raising livestock, which is a leading driver of deforestation, responsible for more than half of global water pollution, and may cause more than a third of all greenhouse gases that can be allowed if the world is to avoid disastrous climate change, the new research finds. Continue reading...