The world's first satellite capable of detecting industrial sources of carbon emissions from space has just reached orbit — and it promises to be a game-changer.
Scrubbing carbon dioxide from the air is imperative if humanity is to limit global warming, experts say, and a California startup says it can do just that, using limestone as a carbon-sucking sponge.The UN Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which steers the COP meetings, considers the deployment of carbon capture and storage systems to be unavoidable if we are to limit global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels.
It was, to put it mildly, a bad day on Earth when an asteroid smacked Mexico's Yucatan Peninsula 66 million years ago, causing a global calamity that erased three-quarters of the world's species and ended the age of dinosaurs. Researchers on Monday revealed the potent role that dust from pulverized rock ejected into the atmosphere from the impact site may have played in driving extinctions, choking the atmosphere and blocking plants from harnessing sunlight for life-sustaining energy in a process called photosynthesis. The total amount of dust, they calculated, was about 2,000 gigatonnes - exceeding 11 times the weight of Mt. Everest.
Around 11 miles above Earth’s surface, leftover bits from rockets and spacecraft are lingering in our planet’s atmosphere that could potentially have a lasting effect on the climate.