September 14, 2009 - The argument over Cape Cod windmills has not been limited to public places like Nantucket Sound and Cape Cod towns, it is also taking place in private backyards. Wendie and Francis Howland of Bourne wanted a windmill behind their house to minimize their carbon footprint and save on energy costs. The town's planning board denied a permit and the couple ultimately took the case to the Massachusetts to Superior Court where they lost. Here's the full story from Amy Goodnough at NYTimes.com.

While reducing emissions of CO2 and other heat trapping gasses remains plan A for fighting global warming, ideas for plan B, geo-engineering, continue to evolve. Proposed geo-engineering solutions have included seeding the ocean with iron powder to create nation-sized algae blooms that would suck up CO2 and rocketing mirrors into space to deflect the sun. Expensive, hard to reverse and prone to dire unintended consequences, most geo-engineering ideas have been gathering dust. However, with a recent endorsement by the Royal Society in Britain there is one idea that is gaining steam. The idea is to have remote controlled "cloud ships" turn sea water into clouds while sailing the oceans of the world. The clouds would deflect sunshine and could lower the global thermostat from 1 to 2 degrees. They would cost $9 billion to test and launch within 25 years, compared to the $250 billion that the world’s leading nations are considering spending each year to cut CO2 emissions, and the $395 trillion it would cost to launch mirrors into space. At present, British and American teams are seeking funding to launch sea trials. The US team has been boosted by a donation of several hundred thousand dollars by The Carnegie Institute, while the British team, led by John Latham, an atmospheric physicist at the University of Manchester, and Stephen Salter, an engineer at the University of Edinburgh, is working with a Finnish shipping company, Meriaura. Here's the full story from Telegraph.co.uk.

Regarding unintended consequences there's a recent report in the journal Science on how geo-engineering could increase droughts. Gabriele Hegerl of the Grant Institute at University of Edinburgh and Susan Solomon of National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) at Boulder, Colorado, write that "if geo-engineering studies focus too heavily on warming, critical risks associated with such possible "cures" will not be evaluated appropriately". They cite the powerful effects on rainfall of volcanic eruptions which also prevent solar radiation reaching the Earth's surface, albeit by throwing up dust rather than reflecting the radiation back into space. For example in 1991, the eruption of Mount Pinatubo not only reduced global temperatures but also led to increases in drought. Here's the story from the BBC.

August 2, 2009 - Convention wisdom has been that Global Warming will make the lives of people living in and around the Sahara desert even harder. Climate change will cause less rainfall so crops will fail and people will go thirsty... right? Well, maybe not. Emerging evidence is painting a very different scenario, one in which rising temperatures could benefit millions of Africans in the driest parts of the continent. Scientists are now seeing signals that the Sahara desert and surrounding regions are greening due to increasing rainfall. If sustained, these rains could revitalize drought-ravaged regions, reclaiming them for farming communities. This desert-shrinking trend is supported by climate models, which predict a return to conditions that turned the Sahara into a lush savanna some 12,000 years ago. Here's the full story by James Owen for National Geographic News.

July 23, 2009 - It's well known that wind farms are harmful to birds. They hurt bats too. Bats use sonar to navigate and hunt. Many have been killed by wind turbines which their sonar doesn't seem to recognize as a danger. Surprisingly, radar signals could help keep bats away from wind turbines, scientists have now discovered. Here's the full story from Charles Q Choi at LiveScience.com.