Olympic cauldron designer hatches London garden bridge scheme - Images. Thomas Heatherwick's vision of a garden bridge across the Thames (Image: Heatherwick Studio) Image Gallery (4 images) London could be the venue for a "garden bridge" in the mode of New York's High Line, if designer Thomas Heatherwick (he of 2012 Olympic cauldron fame) has his way.
If £60 million (US$94 million) in private funding can be secured, it's thought the bridge could open as early as 2016. The original idea for a green bridge, several years old according to the Evening Standard, appears to have come from actor and campaigner Joanna Lumley. "It's quite strange to talk of something that doesn't exist yet [we can definitely relate – Ed], but the Garden Bridge is already vivid in the plans and the imagination," she said. And that's almost as much as we know about the bridge itself at this point. Heatherwick Studio is now working with Arup to develop the proposal ahead of a formal planning application in early 2014. Sources: Heatherwick Studio, Evening Standard.
Energy prices will play an important role in determining global land use in the twenty first century - Abstract - Environmental Research Letters. Global land use research to date has focused on quantifying uncertainty effects of three major drivers affecting competition for land: the uncertainty in energy and climate policies affecting competition between food and biofuels, the uncertainty of climate impacts on agriculture and forestry, and the uncertainty in the underlying technological progress driving efficiency of food, bioenergy and timber production.
The market uncertainty in fossil fuel prices has received relatively less attention in the global land use literature. Petroleum and natural gas prices affect both the competitiveness of biofuels and the cost of nitrogen fertilizers. High prices put significant pressure on global land supply and greenhouse gas emissions from terrestrial systems, while low prices can moderate demands for cropland. Linking traits between plants and invertebrate herbivores to track functional effects of land-use changes - Moretti - 2013 - Journal of Vegetation Science. Study outlines overlooked impacts of mountaintop removal - News. CHARLESTON, W.Va. -- Mountaintop removal is having frequently overlooked impacts on forests, biodiversity, climate and public health, and an updated federal review is needed to more fully examine those issues, according to a new study by government and university scientists.
The study warns that mountaintop removal is not only causing significant changes in the Appalachian topography, but also could be worsening the impacts of global warming. Authors of the study, published in the peer-reviewed journal BioScience, say that legal and regulatory focus on water quality impacts has led to less research on how mountaintop removal affects forests, soils, biodiversity and the mountains themselves. "Evaluation of terrestrial impacts is needed to complement the growing literature on aquatic impacts in order for an environmental assessment of the practice to be comprehensive," states the paper, written by scientists from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, the U.S.
Economists find evidence for famous hypothesis of ‘comparative advantage’ David Ricardo’s concept of “comparative advantage” is one of the most famous and venerable ideas in economics.
Dating to 1817, Ricardo’s proposal is that countries will specialize in making the goods they can produce most efficiently — their areas of comparative advantage — and trade for goods they make less well, rather than making all kinds of products for themselves. As a thought example, Ricardo proposed, consider cloth and wine production in England and Portugal. If English manufacturers are relatively better at making cloth than wine, and Portugal can produce wine more cheaply than England can, the two countries will specialize: England will concentrate on making cloth, Portugal will focus on making wine, and they will trade for the products they do not produce domestically.
Neat as this explanation may seem, it is by definition hard to prove. Harnessing heat from city roads. Sun-warmed asphalt could heat water for local use or energy generation.
The black asphalt roads of urban centres are notorious for soaking up the sun, often helping make cities uncomfortably hot during the summer. Special piping technology from the Worcester Polytechnic Institute in Massachusetts, however, is offering a way to trap this heat and use it elsewhere, potentially transforming urban streets into giant solar collectors. The idea is simple: the sun-warmed asphalt can be used to heat up water, which is pumped through tubes embedded a few centimetres below the road surface.
Using Different Colored Streets To Keep Our Cities Cool. If you were going to design a cheap way to trap a lot of heat in cities, a standard asphalt pavement would be a pretty good choice.
The mixture of black rocks and gooey black stuff holding it together is an excellent invention if you want to absorb as much sunlight as possible, and re-radiate that energy as heat. Except, most cities don’t want to absorb as much sunlight as possible. They want to cool down, not get steadily hotter. To show that there are alternatives to hot asphalt, Lawrence Berkeley Lab, in California, currently has a showcase of "cool pavements" that are designed to reflect between 30% to 50% of the energy, compared to about 5% for conventional surfaces. On some days, according to Benjamin Mandel, a researcher with the Heat Island Group, the new coatings are 40 degrees Fahrenheit cooler than traditional counterparts.