The South Korean Minister has confirmed his participation in the upcoming Summit, and will be a keynote speaker in the Energy Ministers’ panel on January 18th.

Yong-Chil Chung, Ambassador of the Republic of Korea said:

“Korea is emerging as a leader of green growth. We are very happy to participate in the World Future Energy Summit and hope that this event will open the door to substantial green initiatives and projects.”

The World Future Energy Summit, now in its third year, is witnessing unprecedented Korean participation with many of Korea’s leading companies including DAE Shin Demister, Jusung Engineering Co. Ltd, Doosan Heavy Industries & Construction, Hyundai-Kai Company, Korea Institute of Energy, Technology Evaluation and Planning (KETEP), and Posco Power among others.

The South Korean government is committed to securing new sources of energy, and recently announced that they will be spending 50 trillion won ($38bn) over the next four years in a “Green New Deal”. The project which is endorsed by the Ministry of Strategy and Finance includes recycling, carbon reduction, energy conservation, flood prevention, river management and maintaining forest resources. This ambitious initiative is intended to spur economic growth and create more than 956,000 jobs.

South Korea is also planning to increase the proportion of power generation sourced from renewable energy from 1.0% presently to 1.7% by 2011. This target will be achieved through a five-fold increase in green energy investments by the country’s nine state-owned energy companies.

The World Future Energy Summit Energy Ministers’ panel discussion will be attended by Ministers coming from developing and developed countries, to discuss the challenge of balancing energy demand and sustaining economic development versus meeting environmental realities.

Source

For the uninitiated, Geo-engineering is easiest explained as the plan B in the fight against climate change, in case our politicians and world leaders fail. And as the Kyoto agreement is due 2012, with both Bali and Copenhagen settled disappointments, it is perhaps time for drastic action.

Scientists all over the world are already on it.

10. Ocean Iron Fertilization

“Give me half a tanker of iron, and I’ll give you an ice age” ~John Martin, discoverer of the Ocean Iron Fertilization Idea.

Introduce iron into the ocean’s upper layer and increase the amount of phytoplankton (plant plankton) in the ocean. This in turn will increase the amount of food for ocean life, strengthen the ecosystem and most importantly, take in CO2 and release oxygen. The problem however, is not just the process but the scale on which it has to be done to make an impact.

9. Cloud Reflectivity Enhancement

Making clouds whiter. How? Apparently the “viable plan” by Stephen Salter of the University of Edinburgh is to have 1500 special ships known as Flettner ships to spray ocean water into the atmosphere. The ocean spray would work within a concept known as the Twomey Effect. The biggest problem is the lack on ocean nuclei needed due to pollution.

Problem: 1500 honkin’ ships shooting water into the air.

8. Scatterers – Stratospheric Sulfate Aerosols

Release microparticles into the atmosphere at the rate of 1 million metric tons a year through the use of jumbo jets and military artillery. The idea is to reflect some of the sunlight entering our atmosphere, thus reducing warming effects and helping us keep nice and cool. Read more at Wikipedia.

Read the rest of the article here

A composite of archival Hubble data taken with the Wide Field Planetary Camera 2 and the Advanced Camera for Surveys. Like a whirl of shiny flakes sparkling in a snow globe, Hubble caught this glimpse of stars in the globular cluster M13. The cluster is home to over 100,000 stars, packed closely together in a ball approximately 150 light-years across, and is located at a distance of 25,000 light-years. Picture: AFP / NASA / ESA

Click here to see a high-res version of the Hubble snow globe I wonder what the sky would look like from a world in the center of that cluster? Would some of the stars look like bright marbles in the sky?

If you really want to see some interesting things from the HST, have a look at this gallery:

Hubble Space Telescope Advent Calendar 2009

Like the photo above, it gives some perspective about our place and scale in the universe.

The UN climate summit reached a weak outline of a global agreement last night in Copenhagen, falling far short of what Britain and many poor countries were seeking and leaving months of tough negotiations to come.

After eight draft texts and all-day talks between 115 world leaders, it was left to Barack Obama and Wen Jiabao, the Chinese premier, to broker a political agreement. The so-called Copenhagen accord “recognises” the scientific case for keeping temperature rises to no more than 2C but did not contain commitments to emissions reductions to achieve that goal.

American officials spun the deal as a “meaningful agreement”, but even Obama said: “This progress is not enough.”

“We have come a long way, but we have much further to go,” he added.

The deal was brokered between China, South Africa, India, Brazil and the US, but late last night it was still unclear whether it would be adopted by all 192 countries in the full plenary session.

The agreement aims to provide $30bn in funding for poor countries to adapt to climate change from next year to 2012, and $100bn a year after 2020.

But it disappointed African and other vulnerable countries who had been holding out for far deeper emission cuts to hold the global temperature rise to 1.5C this century. As widely expected, all references to 1.5C in previous drafts were removed at the last minute, but more surprisingly, the earlier 2050 goal of reducing global CO₂ emissions by 80% was also dropped.

The agreement also set up a forestry deal which is hoped would significantly reduce deforestation in return for cash. It lacked the kind of independent verification of emission reductions by developing countries that the US and others demanded.

Obama hinted that China was to blame for the lack of a substantial deal. In a press conference he condemned the insistence of some countries to look backwards to previous environmental agreements. He said developing countries should be “getting out of that mindset, and moving towards the position where everybody recognises that we all need to move together”.

Read entire story at the Guardian here