News from planet Earth:
Brazil’s coffee under threat from climate change? Nooooo: rising temperatures are reducing the amount of land in Brazil suitable for growing coffee beans, according to USAToday. Concerning for those of us for whom coffee is an integral part of our day-to-day existence.
Too much space junk in your trunk. The other week, Crikey explained what’s going on with all the junk flying around in space. Space geeks at a a meeting of the United Nations Committee on the Peaceful Uses of Outer Space in Vienna this week have been pondering the issue too, attempting to come up with a way to have a bit of a tidy up there.
Some suggestions include “attaching balloons to pieces of debris to increase their atmospheric drag and bring them back to Earth faster” and “attaching a 10-mile (16-kilometer) electrodynamic tether to debris that would generate a current, which then could be controlled from the ground enabling technicians to bring it down.” Mmm, good luck with that.
Cracking up. A study has found that cracks in the Earth are emitting large amounts of gas, potentially contributing to glboal warming, writes MSNBC.
Taken as a whole, emissions from fractures in the uppermost meter of the planet’s crust may make a significant contribution to greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. But Weisbrod stressed it’s too early to make such a conclusion; the team only studied one crack in detail out of millions.
“This has the potential to be important globally,” Yakir said. “The biosphere soaks up 30 percent of the carbon, and soil respiration is a very large part of that. If cracks remove CO2 from soils much faster than usual, it’s important. But this study is only a first step.”
