Hundreds of people – including government officials and traditional leaders – have been coming to see how the walls are built in the round architectural shape popular in northern Nigeria.

The bottles, packed with sand, are placed on their side, one on top of the other and bound together with mud.

Meet the Roberts electric car. Built in 1896, it gets a solid 40 miles to the charge — exactly the mileage Chevrolet advertises for the Volt — the much-touted $31,645 electric car General Motors CEO Dan Akerson called “not a step forward, but a leap forward.”

I wonder what Al Gore would think about this.

The chief of the world’s leading physics lab at CERN in Geneva has prohibited scientists from drawing conclusions from a major experiment. The CLOUD (“Cosmics Leaving Outdoor Droplets”) experiment examines the role that energetic particles from deep space play in cloud formation. CLOUD uses CERN’s proton synchrotron to examine nucleation.

CERN Director General Rolf-Dieter Heuer told Welt Online that the scientists should refrain from drawing conclusions from the latest experiment. “I have asked the colleagues to present the results clearly, but not to interpret them,” reports veteran science editor Nigel Calder on his blog. Why?

Because, Heuer says, “That would go immediately into the highly political arena of the climate change debate. One has to make clear that cosmic radiation is only one of many parameters.”

The unusual “gagging order” could have been issued because the results of CLOUD are really, really boring, muses Calder. Or, it could be that the experiment invites a politically unacceptable hypothesis on climate.

I’ve been seeing a number of web sites that seem to make it clear that plastic bags are actually greener than paper bags. But I’m wondering if there is an advantage to plastic that no one has mentioned, carbon sequestration.

Critics say that one of the disadvantages of plastic bags is that they will last “1000 years”. Plastic bags that biodegrade faster however end up releasing carbon dioxide back into the environment contributing to global warming. It seems to me that if they buried plastic bags in places where they won’t degrade they could take carbon permanently out of the environment. 2 birds – 1 stone.

What am I missing?

Click pic to embiggen

As you can see by the straight line of this graph, the average temperatures around the globe never change year after year until very recently.

Oh wait… That’s the flat center line and the estimated future rise at the end.

Found by Mr. Kevin

Interesting problems if the blocking sunlight idea isn’t done just right. And even if they do…

The unknown risks of “geoengineering” — in this case, tweaking Earth’s climate by dimming the skies — left many uneasy.

“If we could experiment with the atmosphere and literally play God, it’s very tempting to a scientist,” said Kenyan earth scientist Richard Odingo. “But I worry.”

Arrayed against that worry is the worry that global warming — in 20 years? 50 years? — may abruptly upend the world we know, by melting much of Greenland into the sea, by shifting India’s life-giving monsoon, by killing off marine life. If climate engineering research isn’t done now, climatologists say, the world will face grim choices in an emergency.
[...]
Engineers from the University of Bristol, England, plan to test the feasibility of feeding sulfates into the atmosphere via a kilometers-long (miles-long) hose attached to a tethered balloon.

Shepherd and others stressed that any sun-blocking “SRM” technique — for solar radiation management — would have to be accompanied by sharp reductions in carbon dioxide emissions on the ground and some form of carbon dioxide removal, preferably via a chemical-mechanical process not yet perfected, to suck the gas out of the air and neutralize it.