November 14, 2011

Good Morning,

An exciting and progressive agreement has been made official between Canada and the U.S. to assess the energy output of commercial buildings in both countries. Check out the last article for all the details on this initiative.

Until Next Time,
Erin

Questions? Comments? Email me at: mailto:gizmo@gophercentral.com
Email your comments

P.S. Are you on Facebook? If you are, check out the Deal of the Day fan page. You get exclusive offers and a new deal every day. It is easy to become a fan, just click here and hit the like button...

PulseTV on Facebook
------------------------------------------------------------

Ancient climate event puzzle studied

HOUSTON - The answer to a 56-million-year-old climate change puzzle and extinction event may lie deep under the ocean floor, U.S. researchers say. A long-controversial scenario has suggested the release of massive amounts of carbon from methane hydrate frozen under the seafloor 56 million years ago caused the greatest change in global climate since a dinosaur-killing asteroid presumably hit Earth 9 million years earlier. Earth's temperature rose by as much as 10 degrees Fahrenheit, affecting the planet for up to 150,000 years until excess carbon in the oceans and atmosphere was reabsorbed into sediment. Many species went extinct during this so-called Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum. Now researchers at Rice University in Houston say their calculations show the controversial scenario is quite possible. Their numbers show the amount of frozen methane hydrate buried in undersea sediments was sufficient to create the warming event. "I've always thought of [the hydrate layer] as being like a capacitor in a circuit," Rice earth science Professor Gerald Dickens said. "It charges slowly and can release fast -- and warming is the trigger. It's possible that's happening right now." That makes it important to understand what occurred 56 million years ago, he said. "The amount of carbon released then is on the magnitude of what humans will add to the cycle by the end of, say, 2500. Compared to the geological timescale, that's almost instant."


Annual greenhouse gas index shows rise

BOULDER, Colo. - An annual greenhouse gas index has confirmed the upward trend in climate-changing gases since the 1880s and the Industrial Revolution, U.S. researchers say. Begun by the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration in 2004, the index reached 1.29 in 2010, meaning the combined heating effect of long-lived greenhouse gases added to the atmosphere by human activities has increased by 29 percent since 1990, the 1.0 "index" year used as a baseline for comparison, a NOAA release said. This figure is a slight increase from the 2009 index of 1.27. "The increasing amounts of long-lived greenhouse gases in our atmosphere indicate that climate change is an issue society will be dealing with for a long time," Jim Butler of NOAA's Earth System Research Laboratory in Boulder, Colo., said. "Climate warming has the potential to affect most aspects of society, including water supplies, agriculture, ecosystems and economies. NOAA will continue to monitor these gases into the future to further understand the impacts on our planet." NOAA prepares the Annual Greenhouse Gas Index each year from atmospheric data collected through an international cooperative air sampling network of more than 100 sites around the world.


New 'blackest' material for space uses

GREENBELT, Md. - NASA says a new material that absorbs 99 percent of all wavelengths of light promises to open new frontiers in U.S. space technology. The nanotech-based coating, a thin layer of multi-walled carbon nanotubes positioned vertically on various substrate materials much like a shag rug, absorbs more than 99 percent of ultraviolet, visible, infrared, and far-infrared light, a NASA release said. "The reflectance tests showed that our team had extended by 50 times the range of the material's absorption capabilities. Though other researchers are reporting near-perfect absorption levels mainly in the ultraviolet and visible, our material is darn near perfect across multiple wavelength bands, from the ultraviolet to the far infrared," John Hagopian of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., said. "No one else has achieved this milestone yet." Such a coating would be especially useful for a variety of spaceflight applications where observing in multiple wavelength bands is important to scientific discovery, the researchers said. One such application is stray-light suppression, preventing background light from reflecting off surfaces and interfering with the light that scientists actually want to measure. If used in detectors and other instrument components, the coating would allow scientists to gather hard-to-obtain measurements of objects so distant in the universe that astronomers no longer can see them in visible light, researchers said. "This is a very promising material," Goddard scientist Ed Wollack said. "It's robust, lightweight and extremely black. It is better than black paint by a long shot."


U.S., Canada join on green building use

WASHINGTON - The United States and Canada have signed an agreement to measure and assess the energy performance of commercial buildings in both countries, officials said. The agreement between the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and Natural Resources Canada will harmonize the approach of the two countries by enhancing EPA's existing Energy Star Portfolio Manager software tool to track and rate the energy performance of Canadian commercial buildings in addition to buildings in the United States, and EPA release said Wednesday. "We are glad that Canada selected EPA's Portfolio Manager tool to support their national energy management program for existing commercial and institutional buildings, and we look forward to the benefits this new partnership will create for the health of our families, for our economy, and for our environment." EPA Administrator Lisa P. Jackson said in the release. With a database of more than 250,000 commercial and institutional building spaces in the United States, the Portfolio Manager tool would give both governments measurable information on energy savings and greenhouse gas emissions reductions from commercial buildings, the EPA said. Under the agreement, enhancements will be made to Portfolio Manager, including the development of a Canadian-based energy performance scale and the addition of Canadian reference data such as weather, energy and emissions factors and metric units. The tool will also be available in both official languages of English and French.

------------------------------------------------------------
You can discuss this issue or any other topic in the new Gizmorama forum. Check it out here... Gizmo Forums