Nuclear power?

Hey guys, an article just published in Nature talks about the future of nuclear power:

Nuclear power: Chernobyl and the future: when the price is right

Once touted as too cheap to meter, nuclear power has become too costly to build. But the economics may be shifting, finds Jim Giles.

There are a couple of other articles on nuclear power in there as well.

It's the end of the world as we know it.....

Hey guys, to compliment the natural disaster reading for this week we thought you might spend a few minutes poking around the World Bank's Natural Disaster Hazard and Risk Management Site.

Also, for those of you wanting to know about the odds that we are going to get smacked by an asteroid in the near future, there is an article in Science that you might want to read. And, did you know that there is actually a chance that some of the particle physics experiments we do could cause the Earth to instantly vanish? Seriously. To learn more about that risk, check out this article in Nature on "strangelets."

(If you aren't at WFU you'll have to go through the library's web site to the Science and Nature issues that are linked.)

Carbon Markets

Hey guys, some of you were wondering about carbon markets and whether they existed, how they worked, etc. Here is a site--Point Carbon--that is "the leading provider of independent analysis, forecasting, market intelligence and news for the power, gas and carbon emissions markets." As you can see, it is quite a developed enterprise. You can buy your own ton of carbon emissions on the EUA market for $34.69.

Buzz about Global Warming

Hey guys, I don't know if you've noticed, but there has been a lot of attention focused on global warming over the last few weeks, including ads from the Ad Council (The organization that helped bring you "This is your brain, this is your brain on drugs" and "Friends don't let friends drive drunk") and Environmental Defense. (Editorial comment: the train one is better than the tic-toc one). There were also articles on ABC, in Forbes, Time, Newsweek, and even our own Winston-Salem Journal. About as timely a discussion as we could have!

Information sources

Hey guys, I've been reading some drafts of papers and one potential problem that I see is that people are relying on web-based resources very heavily, but those web-based sources are often fairly fringe. A cool website name does not necessarily mean that it has good information. For this paper, as we posted earlier on the blog under "climate resources", it is important to look at some primary sources of information on climate impacts, and ones that reflect some degree of consensus. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change is the world's center for information on climate change. If I were writing this paper, I would definitely think about citing some information from that. There is a IPCC Summary for Policy Makers that might be a particularly good resource. And it is written for busy, time-starved political decision makers.

Hi Folks, Here's another approach to solving the climate problem. The link is to an overview. The site has links to the actual articles in scientific journals. Enjoy! JC

http://www.princeton.edu/~cmi/resources/stabwedge.htm