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Cassini team members created the six-image set using data collected over 13 years by the Saturn-orbiting probe's Visual and Infrared Mapping Spectrometer (VIMS). As its name suggests, VIMS deals in long-wavelength infrared light, allowing the instrument to see through the thick Titanic haze that obscures visible-light views of the moon's frigid surface. But the new mosaics are pretty much seamless — a breakthrough made possible by a reanalysis of the VIMS data and laborious hand processing of the resulting mosaics, mission team members said. "With the seams now gone, this new collection of images is by far the best representation...

A team of scientists at Harvard University and a company called Carbon Engineering announced this week that they’ve figured out a low-cost, industrial-scale method of pulling carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere. Needless to say, it sounds like an exciting technology, which would, as The Atlantic’s Robinson Meyer notes, “transform how humanity thinks about the problem of climate change.”To be fair, though, plenty of humans have argued that innovation, rather than widespread state-compelled behavior modification or top-down economic regimes like the ones the Left has proposed over the years, would eventually deal with climate change. This conviction was based...

Climate change is over. [snip] Judged by deeds rather than words, most national governments are backing away from forced-marched decarbonization. ...President Trump’s ostentatious withdrawal from the Paris Agreement merely ratified a trend long becoming evident. [snip] Climate alarm is like a car alarm—a blaring noise people are tuning out. This outcome was predictable. Political scientist Anthony Downs described the downward trajectory of many political movements in an article for the Public Interest, “Up and Down With Ecology: The ‘Issue-Attention Cycle,’ ” published in 1972, long before the climate-change campaign began. ...Mr. Downs discerned a five-stage cycle through which political issues...

Researchers have been able to confine light down to a space one atom, the smallest possible. This will pave the way to ultra-small optical switches, detectors and sensors. Light can function as an ultra-fast communication channel, for example between different sections of a computer chip, but it can also be used for ultra-sensitive sensors or on-chip nanoscale lasers. There is currently much research into how to further shrink devices that control and guide light. New techniques searching for ways to confine light into extremely tiny spaces, much smaller than current ones, have been on the rise. Researchers had previously found...

Global tourism accounts for 8% of total worldwide greenhouse gas emissions, four times more than previously believed, new research says. Some gases, including carbon dioxide and methane, trap heat in the atmosphere, producing a "greenhouse effect," and so make the planet warmer. The amount of greenhouse gases released by a particular activity is referred to as its "carbon footprint." The increasing carbon footprint of global tourism between 2009 and 2013 represents a 3% annual growth in emissions, according to University of Sydney researchers. Their paper was published Monday in the journal Nature Climate Change.

A coalition of conservative and free market think tanks are heaping praise on an anti-carbon tax resolution that was recently introduced in the lower chamber of Congress. Americans for Tax Reform, along with more than 20 like-minded organizations, issued a joint statement Thursday in support of a House resolution that explicitly condemns a tax on carbon dioxide pollution. Majority Whip Steve Scalise and West Virginia Rep. David McKinley introduced the nonbinding resolution. The one page resolution states that “a carbon tax would be detrimental to American families and businesses, and is not in the best interest of the United States.”...

Updates on the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, diamonds inside a planet, the Environmental Defense Fund is up to no good (again), and cleaning up Caves...

The cold blast hitting the U.S. is exposing the absurdity of left-wing energy policies in New England. Natural gas prices are skyrocketing in the region as the gas demand for both heating and electricity exceeds supply. ISO New England issued a “cold weather watch” for January 5 to alert the wholesale power market to a surge in demand for the weekend, as temperatures are expected to plummet. The grid operator believes it has enough power, but the demand could exceed supply. Don’t blame the weather for soaring energy prices and possible electricity shortages; blame the left-wing politicians and radical environmentalists...

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While CO2 concentrations are now higher than they have been in at least 800,000 years, the gas still only accounts for a tiny 0.04% of our atmosphere. However, extracting carbon dioxide from well mixed air is not just technically difficult, it's expensive as well. A half-hour outside Zurich stands one of the frontline attempts to develop a commercial approach to sucking down CO2. On the roof of a large recycling centre at Hinwil stand 18 metal fans, stacked on top of each, each about the size of a large domestic washing machine. These fans suck in the surrounding air and...

BRUSSELS Gov. Jerry Brown, arriving in Brussels after collegial events in Germany, sparred publicly with British politicians when confronted over his climate change record at the European Parliament on Wednesday. Steven Woolfe, a British politician on the parliament, was first to pierce the pleasantries, accusing Brown of supporting state intervention “at a huge scale” and spending and increasing taxes “like it’s going out of fashion.” Brown’s climate change policy, he argued isolates the state from much of the U.S. Woolfe dismissed California’s cap-and-trade carbon market a “tax-and-spend” policy. And he teased the governor as potentially being interested in joining the...

A new United Nations report says the Trudeau government is so far behind meeting the greenhouse gas reduction targets it agreed to in the Paris climate accord, it will likely have to buy billions of dollars worth of carbon offsets to meet its international commitments. The problem, as even the report concedes, is that global carbon offset markets are riddled with fraud, meaning that buying them may not actually lower emissions. The UN’s Emissions Gap Report 2017, identifies Canada as one of several countries, “likely to require further action and/or to have to purchase offsets in order to meet their...

A huge well of molten carbon that would spell disaster for the planet if released has been found under the US. Scientists using the world's largest array of seismic sensors have mapped a deep-Earth area, covering 700,000 sq miles (1.8 million sq km). This is around the size of Mexico, and researchers say it has the potential to cause untold environmental damage. The discovery could change our understanding of how much carbon the Earth contains, suggesting it is much more than we previously believed. It would be impossible to drill far enough down to physically 'see' the Earth's mantle,...

Researchers say they were able to produce 'diamond rain' using fancy plastic and high-powered lasers to recreate the intense conditions of the planets .... Consider this your daily reminder that the solar system is even more awesomely bonkers than you realized: On Uranus and Neptune, scientists forecast rain storms of solid diamonds. The gems form in the hydrocarbon-rich oceans of slush that swath the gas giants’ solid cores. Scientists have long speculated that the extreme pressures in this region might split those molecules into atoms of hydrogen and carbon, the latter of which then crystallize to form diamonds. These diamonds...

With a sweeping overhaul of the tax code on the horizon, two Senate Democrats believe this is the moment to broach the third rail of climate change policy: a carbon tax. The plan by the senators, Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island and Brian Schatz of Hawaii, to level a $49 per metric ton fee on greenhouse gas emissions is widely acknowledged as a long shot. But the lawmakers, along with climate activists and a cadre of conservative supporters, insist the tax reform is a way to create bipartisan support. The senators propose to use a portion of the estimated $2.1...

BOULDER, Colo. - - Behind a locked door on the ground floor of a new University of Colorado science center here, a laboratory outfitted with specially reinforced concrete floors sits dark and empty, like a dining room set for a guest who never arrived. In this case, the no-show is a $2 million, 12-ton machine that is vital to addressing global warming. The machine, a high-precision accelerator mass spectrometer, uses nuclear physics to detect the presence of a rare, heavy isotope of carbon. It enables scientists to distinguish fossil fuel emissions from all other sources of carbon dioxide in the...

Credit: Timothy Strobel ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Scientists have found a way to make carbon both very hard and very stretchy by heating it under high pressure. This "compressed glassy carbon", developed by researchers in China and the US, is also lightweight and could potentially be made in very large quantities. This means it might be a good fit for several sorts of applications, from bulletproof vests to new kinds of electronic devices. Carbon is a special element because of the way its atoms can form different types of bonds with each other and so form different structures. For example, carbon atoms joined...

WASHINGTON - Exxon Mobil Corp. and other large oil companies are backing a carbon tax proposal put forward earlier this year by a group of former Republican leaders including James A. Baker III, the former secretary of state and a Houston attorney. The Climate Leadership Coalition, a group that includes Baker, former Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson, and former Secretary of State George Shultz, announced a list of "founding members" Tuesday that includes Exxon Mobil, BP, Shell, Total, General Motors and Johnson & Johnson. "We support @TheCLCouncil as a founding member and are working to support its policy development process," Exxon...

In a decision that evokes former President Obama’s environmental agenda, the Colorado Public Utilities Commission (PUC) on March 23, 2017, expanded its authority in a way that’s likely to drive up electricity rates. Every four years, Xcel Energy undergoes a resource planning process that outlines their ability to meet ratepayers’ electricity demand. They present portfolios containing cost analyses regarding the utility’s generation, and the Commission selects the “lowest cost resources available to provide the company with enough capacity and energy to in turn be able to provide customers with reliable electricity.” However, in the 2016 Energy Resource Plan, the Public...

President Donald Trump said the United States "will continue to be the cleanest and most environmentally friendly country on Earth" as he announced a U.S. pullout from an international accord designed to curb climate change. But facts muddy that claim. Data show that the U.S. is among the dirtiest countries when it comes to heat-trapping carbon pollution. One nation that has cleaner air in nearly every way is Sweden.