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The Headlines:

Oil spill impacts fuel consumers
Greenland rises as ice melts
Feeling warm? You’re not the only one!
Pollution-eating plant walls
Cow manure could help more than just farmers

The Details:

Oil spill impacts fuel consumers

Starting off with some good news: A poll by an environmental polling organization called the Shelton Group found that 20.1 percent of Americans say they will “reduce their gas consumption in response” to the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. So one in five Americans plan to drive a little bit less.

“For years our research has shown America is a see-it-to-believe-it nation. Before we make changes, we need to see things with our own eyes or have a personal connection to something, said Suzanne Shelton, president of Shelton Group. “If Americans start seeing a lot of oil-covered pelicans or dying dolphins, these numbers will likely go even higher.” We hope it doesn’t take that happening to convince Americans.

This information corresponds to a slightly optimistic trend reported by CBS News: Americans’ support for drilling has dropped from 62 percent in 2008 to 46 percent as of last week.

Greenland rises as ice melts

You’d think that ice melting would cause a landmass to lose surface area. Not so with Greenland.

Greenland is mostly covered in glaciers and ice, and thanks to climate change, a lot of that ice is melting. The melting ice is sliding into the ocean, taking some of the weight off of Greenland. Without as much ice weighing it down, Greenland is literally rising.

Greenland’s rocky areas are shooting up almost an inch per year in some spots. If the trend continues unabated, that number could go up to as much as two inches per year by 2025.

Feeling warm? You’re not the only one!

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, or NOAA, recently looked at the Earth’s tempurature trends for January through April. What they found was proof positive of global warming.

To quote NOAA: “The combined global land and ocean surface temperature was the warmest on record for both April and for the period from January-April.”

The monthly analysis comes from NOAA’s National Climatic Data Center, which is based on records going back to 1880. The combined global land and ocean average surface temperature was the warmest on record for January-April at 56.0°F , which is 1.24°F above the average temperature for the 20th century.

Pollution-eating plant walls

Vertical farming and gardens seem to be the trendy new innovation all the green geeks are experimenting with. But this one caught our eye. The company is called Ceracasa, and they make ceramic tiles.

But their newest tile system is a double-whammy. They’re calling it Lifewall, and in a similar fashion to a ChiaPet, the tile grows drip-irrigated plant life on it. A secondary tile called Bionictile absorbs pollution from the air and converts it into fertilizer for the Lifewall plants.

The one meter square tiles are meant to be arranged in various patterns by designers to create a flora wall. The nitrogen oxide that pollutes the air is transformed into nitrate fertilizer, and the air quality around the garden walls significantly improves. Just another way environmentally conscious people are working to clean up the planet.

Cow manure could help more than just farmers

Hewlett Packard recently came up with an ingenius idea that could benefit computer companies as well as farmers. The arrangement would also use renewable energy of the stinky kind.

A lot of farmers have heard about biogas plants where manure is processed and the methane produced is used in place of natural gas or diesel, but the cost of equipment is often too expensive for them to finance by themselves. But tech companies like HP, Google, Microsoft, etc. need the power and the land that these farmers could potentially give.

Farmers need to get rid of their cow poo, and tech companies need space and power for data centers. An average cow produces enough manure to power a 100-watt light bulb and 10,000 cows could potentially power a 1-MW data center.

Another plus is that computers create a lot of heat, and biogas systems need heat to work, so a truly symbiotic relationship could come of this unlikely partnership.