Saturday, June 13, 2009

Feedbacks and Interactions between Global Change...

Feedbacks and Interactions between Global Change, Atmospheric Chemistry, and the Biosphere.

A very thought provoking review paper from the Max Planck Institute for Chemistry (Otto Hahn Institute) Biogeochemistry Department, Germany. The research in by Professor Andreae's et al and is closely tied to the International Biosphere/Geosphere Program, and involves a high amount of international collaboration.
http://www.mpch-mainz.mpg.de/~biogeo/feedbacks.htm

And check out the amazingly detailed diagram: CONCEPTUAL MODEL of Earth System process operating on timescales of decades to centuries. You may discover a lot of existing and potential feedbacks. (negative or positive...)

Here is a simplified, nicely colored overview of that diagram via NASA (1988)

Earth Systems Science: an Overview

Saturday, June 6, 2009

CarbonTwollar redirect to ecoTwollar

The CarbonTwollar experiment has spun a new incarnation.

It has been reshaped as ecoTwollar to reflect better its capacity. It can now accommodate various eco-streams, depending on what resource your eco-Act you think saves -- [carbon,kwh,water,etc,...]

It is NOT and offset, you don't need to estimate the exact amount saved in any of those. The idea is that you let you peer estimate the innovation content instead, and award #ecoTwollars accordingly.

And it works like this:

First, You do something innovative and simple, like you used a solar charger to your batteries, instead of plugging the charger into the mains. You take a picture of the charged betteries before and after and put it online with a link.

Next, you tweet about it @ecoTwollar or anyone else on your network who cares to follow you being so entirely brave. Give it a descriptive #hash in the end, such as in our example would be #solarCharge. One of us will look at the picture and decide it is clever enough. If it is, you will be given #ecoTwollar and asked to delete your Tweet. The information content of it is important, so put it up again with a #ecoSold hash. This way others will learn from your idea, but you will need to do another eco-Act to get paid in #ecoTwollar again. And so on.

If your act does not merit the pay in #ecoTwollar, don't dispair. One of two things will happen. You will get a friendly suggestion from me or someone else how to improve it next time. And so you decide to improve and get #ecoTwollar then. But you might get lucky in the future, if you keep the tweet up as it is, and someone may decide at a later date to give you #ecoTwollars. It is less likely though, since the strength of Twitter is real time reaction.

Oh...and one last thing: Please encourage others to do the same, and if you like what they do, give ecoTwollar, if not give a friendly advice.
That's all really...

Your starting account is 100 ecoTwollars: http://wikiwikimoney.com/ecoTwollar
The ecoTwollar tweet home: https://twitter.com/ecoTwollar

Have fun ecoTollaring away.

Warmly,