The grey, sulphur-laden skies overlying parts of Asia have a bright side — they reflect sunlight back into space, moderating temperatures on the ground. Scientists are now exploring how and where pollution from power plants could offset, for a time, the greenhouse warming of the carbon dioxide they emit.

A new modelling study doubles as a thought experiment in how pollution controls and global warming could interact in China and India, which are projected to account for 80% of new coal-fired power in the coming years. If new power plants were to operate without controlling pollution such as sulphur dioxide (SO₂) and nitrogen oxides (NO_X), the study finds, the resulting haze would reflect enough sunlight to overpower the warming effect of CO₂ and exert local cooling.

But this effect would not be felt uniformly across the globe and would last only a few decades. In the long run, CO₂ would always prevail, and the world could experience a rapid warming effect if the skies were cleaned up decades down the road.

“The paper highlights the fundamental inequity and iniquity of anthropogenic climate change: ‘enjoy now and make others pay later’,” says Meinrat Andreae, an aerosol expert at the Max Planck Institute for Chemistry in Mainz, Germany, who was not involved in the work. In fact, he says, dirty coal plants could be seen as “a very primitive form of geoengineering”.

The study, which is under review at Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics, builds on a well-established idea. Global temperatures were relatively stable in the decades leading up to the 1970s, even as fossil-fuel consumption shot up. Then industrialized countries began curbing SO₂ and NO_X to reduce acid rain and protect public health — and temperatures increased rapidly. The latest work, led by Drew Shindell at NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York, looks at how the climate effects of air pollutants and greenhouse gases could play out over time and geography.

The study analysed a suite of scenarios for the years 2000 to 2080, mixing annual rates of power-plant growth from 5% to 10% with various controls on SO₂ and NO_X pollution. SO₂ is a precursor to sulphate aerosols and dominates the cooling effect, which varies depending on when plants adopt pollution controls. The sooner controls are put in place, the sooner the warming potential of CO₂kicks in.

In one scenario assuming rapid growth in coal power with pollution controls phased in between 2040 and 2060, the effect of aerosols from the plants outweighs the effect of their CO₂until the year 2046, when the CO₂ effect catches up and then overtakes aerosols. But the effect isn’t uniform: the SO₂emissions produce a net cooling across much of the Northern Hemisphere. The Southern Hemisphere and the Arctic see fewer aerosols and, because CO₂ has global effects, they exhibit net warming.

How quickly China and India will move to clean up their coal emissions is unclear. In the past few years China has been aggressively installing SO₂ scrubbers on many of its power plants in an attempt to improve air quality and protect public health. But some experts have questioned whether those scrubbers are being used properly — or even turned on.

http://www.nature.com/news/2010/100217/full/463860b.html?s=news_rss

Even though I seldom click G.cn and often complained Google auto-forward me to G.cn, I’d like to take the last chance to say “Thanks谷歌”。

We do not believe the brightness  just because the darkness is all we can see.

Google’s Philosophy:

Ten things we know to be true

“The perfect search engine,” says co-founder Larry Page, “would understand exactly what you mean and give back exactly what you want.” When Google began, you would have been pleasantly surprised to enter a search query and immediately find the right answer. Google became successful precisely because we were better and faster at finding the right answer than other search engines at the time.

But technology has come a long way since then, and the face of the web has changed. Recognizing that search is a problem that will never be solved, we continue to push the limits of existing technology to provide a fast, accurate and easy-to-use service that anyone seeking information can access, whether they’re at a desk in Boston or on a phone in Bangkok. We’ve also taken the lessons we’ve learned from search to tackle even more challenges.

As we keep looking towards the future, these core principles guide our actions.

1. Focus on the user and all else will follow.

Since the beginning, we’ve focused on providing the best user experience possible. Whether we’re designing a new Internet browser or a new tweak to the look of the homepage, we take great care to ensure that they will ultimately serve you, rather than our own internal goal or bottom line. Our homepage interface is clear and simple, and pages load instantly. Placement in search results is never sold to anyone, and advertising is not only clearly marked as such, it offers relevant content and is not distracting. And when we build new tools and applications, we believe they should work so well you don’t have to consider how they might have been designed differently.

2. It’s best to do one thing really, really well.

We do search. With one of the world’s largest research groups focused exclusively on solving search problems, we know what we do well, and how we could do it better. Through continued iteration on difficult problems, we’ve been able to solve complex issues and provide continuous improvements to a service that already makes finding information a fast and seamless experience for millions of people. Our dedication to improving search helps us apply what we’ve learned to new products, like Gmail and Google Maps. Our hope is to bring the power of search to previously unexplored areas, and to help people access and use even more of the ever-expanding information in their lives.

3. Fast is better than slow.

We know your time is valuable, so when you’re seeking an answer on the web you want it right away – and we aim to please. We may be the only people in the world who can say our goal is to have people leave our homepage as quickly as possible. By shaving excess bits and bytes from our pages and increasing the efficiency of our serving environment, we’ve broken our own speed records many times over, so that the average response time on a search result is a fraction of a second. We keep speed in mind with each new product we release, whether it’s a mobile application or Google Chrome, a browser designed to be fast enough for the modern web. And we continue to work on making it all go even faster.

4. Democracy on the web works.

Google search works because it relies on the millions of individuals posting links on websites to help determine which other sites offer content of value. We assess the importance of every web page using more than 200 signals and a variety of techniques, including our patented PageRank™ algorithm, which analyzes which sites have been “voted” to be the best sources of information by other pages across the web. As the web gets bigger, this approach actually improves, as each new site is another point of information and another vote to be counted. In the same vein, we are active in open source software development, where innovation takes place through the collective effort of many programmers.

5. You don’t need to be at your desk to need an answer.

The world is increasingly mobile: people want access to information wherever they are, whenever they need it. We’re pioneering new technologies and offering new solutions for mobile services that help people all over the globe to do any number of tasks on their phone, from checking email and calendar events to watching videos, not to mention the several different ways to access Google search on a phone. In addition, we’re hoping to fuel greater innovation for mobile users everywhere with Android, a free, open source mobile platform. Android brings the openness that shaped the Internet to the mobile world. Not only does Android benefit consumers, who have more choice and innovative new mobile experiences, but it opens up revenue opportunities for carriers, manufacturers and developers.

6. You can make money without doing evil.

Google is a business. The revenue we generate is derived from offering search technology to companies and from the sale of advertising displayed on our site and on other sites across the web. Hundreds of thousands of advertisers worldwide use AdWords to promote their products; hundreds of thousands of publishers take advantage of our AdSense program to deliver ads relevant to their site content. To ensure that we’re ultimately serving all our users (whether they are advertisers or not), we have a set of guiding principles for our advertising programs and practices:

• We don’t allow ads to be displayed on our results pages unless they are relevant where they are shown. And we firmly believe that ads can provide useful information if, and only if, they are relevant to what you wish to find – so it’s possible that certain searches won’t lead to any ads at all.
• We believe that advertising can be effective without being flashy. We don’t accept pop-up advertising, which interferes with your ability to see the content you’ve requested. We’ve found that text ads that are relevant to the person reading them draw much higher clickthrough rates than ads appearing randomly. Any advertiser, whether small or large, can take advantage of this highly targeted medium.
• Advertising on Google is always clearly identified as a “Sponsored Link,” so it does not compromise the integrity of our search results. We never manipulate rankings to put our partners higher in our search results and no one can buy better PageRank. Our users trust our objectivity and no short-term gain could ever justify breaching that trust.

7. There’s always more information out there.

Once we’d indexed more of the HTML pages on the Internet than any other search service, our engineers turned their attention to information that was not as readily accessible. Sometimes it was just a matter of integrating new databases into search, such as adding a phone number and address lookup and a business directory. Other efforts required a bit more creativity, like adding the ability to search news archives, patents, academic journals, billions of images and millions of books. And our researchers continue looking into ways to bring all the world’s information to people seeking answers.

8. The need for information crosses all borders.

Our company was founded in California, but our mission is to facilitate access to information for the entire world, and in every language. To that end, we have offices in dozens of countries, maintain more than 150 Internet domains, and serve more than half of our results to people living outside the United States. We offer Google’s search interface in more than 110 languages, offer people the ability to restrict results to content written in their own language, and aim to provide the rest of our applications and products in as many languages as possible. Using our translation tools, people can discover content written on the other side of the world in languages they don’t speak. With these tools and the help of volunteer translators, we have been able to greatly improve both the variety and quality of services we can offer in even the most far-flung corners of the globe.

9. You can be serious without a suit.

Our founders built Google around the idea that work should be challenging, and the challenge should be fun. We believe that great, creative things are more likely to happen with the right company culture – and that doesn’t just mean lava lamps and rubber balls. There is an emphasis on team achievements and pride in individual accomplishments that contribute to our overall success. We put great stock in our employees – energetic, passionate people from diverse backgrounds with creative approaches to work, play and life. Our atmosphere may be casual, but as new ideas emerge in a café line, at a team meeting or at the gym, they are traded, tested and put into practice with dizzying speed – and they may be the launch pad for a new project destined for worldwide use.

10. Great just isn’t good enough.

We see being great at something as a starting point, not an endpoint. We set ourselves goals we know we can’t reach yet, because we know that by stretching to meet them we can get further than we expected. Through innovation and iteration, we aim to take things that work well and improve upon them in unexpected ways. For example, when one of our engineers saw that search worked well for properly spelled words, he wondered about how it handled typos. That led him to create an intuitive and more helpful spell checker.

Even if you don’t know exactly what you’re looking for, finding an answer on the web is our problem, not yours. We try to anticipate needs not yet articulated by our global audience, and meet them with products and services that set new standards. When we launched Gmail, it had more storage space than any email service available. In retrospect offering that seems obvious – but that’s because now we have new standards for email storage. Those are the kinds of changes we seek to make, and we’re always looking for new places where we can make a difference. Ultimately, our constant dissatisfaction with the way things are becomes the driving force behind everything we do.

http://www.google.com/corporate/tenthings.html

Building on the successful model of the Clinton Global Initiative, which brings together world leaders to take action on global challenges, President Clinton launched the Clinton Global Initiative University (CGI U) in 2007 to engage the next generation of leaders on college campuses around the world.

Each year, CGI U hosts a meeting for students, national youth organizations, and university officials to discuss solutions to pressing global issues. The third annual CGI U Meeting will be held at the University of Miami from April 16-18, 2010. At this meeting, nearly 1,500 attendees will come together to make a difference in CGI U’s five focus areas: Education, Environment & Climate Change, Peace, Poverty Alleviation, and Public Health.

CGI U is more than just an event. It is a growing community of young leaders who don’t just discuss the world’s challenges — they take real, concrete steps toward solving them. Throughout the year, and as a prerequisite of attending the CGI U meeting, students, youth directors, and university officials develop their own Commitments to Action: a specific plan of action that addresses a pressing challenge on their campus, in their community, or in a different part of the world.Commitments range from installing energy-efficient light bulbs to establishing campus bike share programs, from distributing life-saving water filtration kits to designing medical backpacks for nomadic doctors in Africa. Since the inaugural meeting, nearly 2,000 commitments have been made.

To learn more about CGI U, visit http://cgiu.clintonglobalinitiative.org/Page.aspx?pid=1871

What is Social Enterpise?

The field of Social Enterpise is about understanding how social and environmental problems can be solved through a business approach. In other words, it is about creating businesses whose product, service or business model has a powerful positive effect on our world.

There are a lot of different ways to solve a problem. Sometimes, it is best to form a charity organization. Other times, it is best to gather the power of the community. In others, the best solution is for the government to intervene.

However, sometimes the most effective solution to a problem is to create a business. Take the example of TOM’s Shoes. This is from the TOM’s Shoes website:

“In 2006 an American traveler, Blake Mycoskie, befriended children in Argentina and found they had no shoes to protect their feet. Wanting to help, he created TOMS Shoes, a company that would match every pair of shoes purchased with a pair of new shoes given to a child in need. One for One. Blake returned to Argentina with a group of family, friends and staff later that year with 10,000 pairs of shoes made possible by caring TOMS customers.

Since our beginning, TOMS has given over 150,000* pairs of shoes to children in need through the One for One model. Because of your support, TOMS plans to give over 300,000 pairs of shoes to children in need around the world in 2009.”

TOM’s could have started as a simple charity, getting money from donors and using that money to buy shoes. But, by using a business model instead of a charity, TOM’s was able to give away many more shoes, and the model is self-sustaining.

The best way to understand social enterprise is to learn about examples of specific businesses. Visit the “Examples” link to the left to hear about other exemplary social enterprises.

中文版：
010年4月，ECSEL 2010将支持中国学生前往美国参与一个为期一周的项目，其初衷是协助有理想的社会创业者们实现能创造社会改变的商业创意。这个项目分为两部分：

首先，我们将在加州旧金山附近的太平洋大学全球社会创业中心（GCSE）参加一个2天的定制工作坊。该工作坊让学生有机会接触在美国，中国和世界各地产生过积极的社会环境影响的前沿企业和机构领导者。学生将从他们的经历中学习并讨论社会环境问题怎样可以在中国有效地应对。学生们将前往旧金山访问一些在清洁能源，发展问题等领域有影响力的机构和组织。

之后，我们将前往佛罗里达州迈阿密参加2010克林顿全球倡议大学会议(CGI-U)。由克林顿总统在任期结束后亲自创建的基金会发起了这个会议，汇集1500名来自美国及世界各地的学生探讨世界面临的重大挑战以及每个人可以如何创造改变。学生们将与来自美国及世界各地的优秀学生以及商界、政坛和社会领域的卓越人物进行交流。

Go to this website and find more http://ecsel2010.com/about

I love this but I think the terms need to be switched. True happiness is what is made in the mind. Synthetic happiness is what is found externally. The mind produces a sustainable happiness when it accepts the situation as it currently is. When this process doesn’t work right it searches externally for a substitute. Isn’t that external substitute the synthetic happiness?

Another one is:”10 ways the world could end”, I think it would be unnecessary to watch “2012″

The joint press release detailed the outcomes of the talks as following:

(1) Copenhagen Should Not Be a Wasted Opportunity. Dedicated to working together against climate change, the two parties believe that “an agreed outcome at Copenhagen should, based on the principle of common but differentiated responsibilities and respective capabilities, include emission reduction targets of developed countries and nationally appropriate mitigation actions of developing countries.”

(2)  Scaling Renewable Energy is a Priority. The newly-adopted “U.S.-China Energy Effiiciency Action Plan” will help the two countries “work together to achieve cost-effective energy efficiency improvements in industry, buildings and consumer products through technical cooperation, demonstration and policy exchanges…the two Presidents underscored the enormous opportunities to create jobs and enhance economic growth through energy savings.” In addition, the countries launched the U.S. China Renewable Energy Partnership, with the goal of achieving rapid and wide-scale deployment of renewable energy technologies and a modern electric power grid through design and policy cooperation.

(3)  Creation of a U.S.-China Clean Energy Research Center. Coming in at a cost of $150 million over five years, the two countries will evenly split the cost and construct one Center in each country. With the hopes of encouraging joint research and development on clean energy technologies, the Center’s priority areas of focus will be energy efficiency in buildings, clean coal, and clean (electric and other fuel) vehicles.

(a) Energy Efficiency. With the speed in which Chinese cities are growing, and that fact that U.S. buildings account for 40% of energy use, it is imperative that building construction and remodeling in both countries be done with energy efficiency as a top priority.

(b) Clean Coal. The U.S. and China have a heavy interest in improving coal efficiency as both nations rely on coal as the biggest source for electric base-load power. The two countries “agreed to promote cooperation on large-scale carbon capture and sequestration (CCS) demonstration projects and to begin work immediately on the development, deployment, diffusion, and transfer of CCS technology. The two sides welcomed recent agreements between Chinese and U.S. companies, universities, and research institutions to cooperate on CCS and more efficient coal technologies.

(c)  Launch of a U.S.-China Electric Vehicles Initiative. And with a rising car culture in China and a need to revamp automobile infrastructure in the U.S., both countries have a concrete interest in developing a clean vehicle industry. With the goal of bringing millions of electric vehicles to both countries, the program calls for “joint demonstration projects in more than a dozen cities, along with work to develop common technical standards to facilitate rapid scale-up of the industry.”

Getsolar.com

Few days ago, the local office newspaper reported “Chiense gross domestic product (GDP) may be able to climb 8-9% next year”, that probably a indicator of next financial crisis in Asia in the wake of liguidity injection by the world’s central banks. In the past year, China’s government created $1.3 trillion credit boom, directly helping growth accelerate while at the same time Shanghai Composite Index of stocks climb rapidly, nearly doubled than the lowest point in last year.

Mr. Fan thinks China must continue its stimulus measures to sustain growth in coming year even as he rejected the prospect of double-dip slowdown in the expansion. The US may see a renewed slump.

China should maintain a “moderately loose” monetary policy in 2010 as currently government stimulus effect and private investment are still weak.