When Henry found his prize-winning research for assessing crack damage to nuclear reactor vessels, potentially saving thousands of lives and money, was taken over by his University, his inventive mind looked around for the next project, and latched onto using new state of the art low carbon technology to convert an old silk mill into sustainable luxury apartments.

Next thing was to gain credibility for his designs, so after a lengthy and gruelling application process, his project was entered for the Low Carbon Building grant programme, up against over 100 seriously tough applicants. Henry sailed through into the final 16 along side other major corporations such as Oxford Brookes.

At Dandridge’s Mill, he is converting an old silk mill, adapting centuries-old technology, and using an Archimedean Hydro screw to generate power from the flowing mill race. The screw will generate 4KW of electricity which will be distributed to the apartments. This is all neatly designed to be backed up in the summer months, when flows are lower, by a solar PV array installed on the roof.

Lurking under the mill stream’s water surface, collector loops for a Water source Heat-pump are laid low on the river bed so they can’t be seen, but are designed to provide 100% of the underfloor heating, on-demand hot water, and “another little carbon free bonus”, according to Henry, “In summer time the system will provide under-floor cooling to lower the temperature to around 17° taking the edge off hotter days.”

Step inside each of the converted luxury apartments, and a sophisticated lighting system starts up. Henry is using light bulbs that will last 30 years before they need changing and consume a mere 7W in comparison to your every day power hungry 50W halogen. “The lighting is seriously clever stuff” tackling advanced lighting technology that has been ignored so far Henry has again been praised for “pursuing where others have given up” to really benefit from the low energy, high power LED technology available today.

Doing nothing by halves, he looked over the specs for energy saving in new buildings, and decided what they asked for was too low, so has gone for 25% above the regulations on insulation. Rainwater (of course) is channelled into the river to be turned into electricity, and the system he has put in will allow every householder to key into a home page of their own home, neatly displaying their individual energy consumption for all utilities against what has been produced by the renewable sources. “The savings will happen in front of their eyes, people need to see and feel how effective these technologies can be if we are ever going to get away from this oil crisis”

With his mobile phone playing “we’re off to see the Wizard, the wonderful wizard of Oz” – Henry firmly believes in harnessing wonders and liberating energy.

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To anticipate emissions from the burning of fuel and to estimate how it will impact the climate can be done if we know how and when global oil production will peak. But scientists and analysts have debated over this problem in the past years and have been unable to come up with a precise answer. But Pushker Kharecha and James Hansen of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York have considered a wide range of fossil fuel consumption scenarios. Published Aug. 5 in the American Geophysical Union’s Global Biogeochemical Cycles, their research showed that the increasing percentage of carbon dioxide can be kept under a safety line as long as emmissions from coal are evenly dispersed globally.

“This is the first paper in the scientific literature that explicitly melds the two vital issues of global peak oil production and human-induced climate change,” Kharecha said. “We’re illustrating the types of action needed to get to target carbon dioxide levels.”

But why is it bad to have to much carbon dioxide in the Earth’s atmosphere ? It’s bad because carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas. Greenhouse gases effectively absorb thermal infrared radiation, emitted by the Earth’s surface, by the atmosphere itself due to the same gases, and by clouds. Atmospheric radiation is emitted to all sides, including downward to the Earth’s surface. Thus greenhouse gases trap heat within the surface-troposphere system. It is believed that global warming will become dangerous if the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere exceeds a concentration of approximately 450 parts per million. That’s a 61 percent increase from the pre-industrial era but just 17 percent more than the actual level of 385 parts per million.

An important source of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere are the volcanoes. However, emissions of CO₂ by human activities (mostly deforestation and the burning of fossil fuel) are currently more than 130 times greater than the quantity emitted by volcanoes, amounting to about 27 billion tonnes per year.

Kharecha and Hansen came up with 5 different carbon dioxide scenarios, each scenario reflecting different estimates for the global production peak of fossil fuels, the timing of which depends on reserve size, recoverability and technology.

The first scenario estimated carbon dioxide levels if emissions from fossil fuels are unconstrained and follow along “business as usual,” growing by two percent annually until half of each reservoir has been recovered, after which emissions begin to decline by two percent annually. The remaining forth considered the previous mentioned dispersing of coal, reduction of coal consumption and/or improvements in coal burning technologies.

The unconstrained “business as usual” scenario resulted in a level of atmospheric carbon dioxide that more than doubled the pre-industrial level and from about 2035 onward levels exceed the 450 parts per million threshold of this study. Even when low-end estimates of reserves were assumed, the threshold was exceeded from about 2050 onwards. However, the other four scenarios resulted in carbon dioxide levels that peaked in various years but all fell below the prescribed cap of 450 parts per million by about 2080 at the latest, with levels in two of the scenarios always staying below the threshold.

“Because coal is much more plentiful than oil and gas, reducing coal emissions is absolutely essential to avoid ‘dangerous’ climate change brought about by atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration exceeding 450 parts per million,” Kharecha said. “The most important mitigation strategy we recommend – a phase-out of carbon dioxide emissions from coal within the next few decades – is feasible using current or near-term technologies.”

There are two main ways in which warming glaciers raise sea level: they add more water as they melt and they also add water when ice breaks off from glacial flows. The incidence of this latter phenomenon has soared in recent years .  Some glaciers draining on the southern Greenland Ice Sheet have been doing so much to the mystification of glaciologists. Unable to model such accelerated ice losses, members of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change declined to include them in their widely cited projection of up to 60 centimeters of sea level rise by 2100.

The new, higher sea level rise “is a useful number,” says glaciologist Richard Alley of Pennsylvania State University in State College. “It’s a reality check.” Geoscientist Michael Oppenheimer of Princeton University agrees. “Where these guys end up is plausible.” Even 1 meter of sea level rise “is a big deal,” he notes, as it would threaten people in many parts of the world.

Phoenix probe, Nasa’s spacecraft, sent its first pictures from Mars. It landed in the northern polar region of Mars, and began three months of examining a site where that may have frozen water. The first images from the Mars Pheonix Probe showed the space probe in good condition after its 10-month journey.

“Over the next few days, we’ll be getting the whole scene filled in,” said the Phoenix mission’s chief scientist, Peter Smith. “We’ve only looked at one little sliver of the Martian surface, but it’s exactly what we wanted, and we couldn’t be more excited.”

The successful landing of Phoenix is a relief for NASA as only five of 11 previsious U.S attempts to land spacecraft on Mars have succeeded. According to NASA, the spacecraft approached Mars at a speed of about 20,000 kilometres an hour and made a difficult descent, decribed as “seven minutes of terror”. When it entered the atmosphere, it used superheated friction with the atmosphere, a strong parachute and a set of retrorockets to make its three-legged standstill touchdown on the surface, NASA said.

The mission of the probe is to study the planet’s frozen water for evidence of carbon-containing chemicals and to digg into the ice-rich soil with the lander’s robotic arm. It will also monitor the planet’s arctic-region weather from the surface for the first time using the Canadian-built Meteorological Station, or Met, which can monitor changes in water abundance, dust, temperature and other variables.

More images at European Space Agency.