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Wining about Global Warming

grapes.jpgLast week, 350 wine makers and scientists from around the globe discussed how global warming is effecting their wines and how they can adjust their productions to emit less emissions themselves. Carbon sequestration was a hot topic, whereby carbon dioxide (CO2, a major contributor to global warming) is captured and stored underground, instead of letting it escape up into the atmosphere.

One admirable entrepreneur explained how he’s trying sequestering the CO2 himself:

Spanish producer Miguel Torres told delegates he was pioneering “carbon capture and storage,” whereby harmful CO2 emissions are trapped and stored underground.

At the foot of the Cordilleras of the Andes in Chile, Torres has already set up the first recovery process for the CO2 produced by fermenting grapes, he said.

“We are trying to convert CO2 into something solid, which will remain in the ground, instead of being emitted into the air,” he said.

If the Chile project — which Torres admits is still a small pilot experiment — is successful, he intends to implement a much bigger programme in Spain, with co-financing from the regional government of Catalonia.

Harvest season is already ten days earlier in most wine regions, and scientists reported that global warming would likely lead to “harder” and less aromatic wines. In Spain, some vines have been moved to higher and cooler areas or further inland. But some countries, like New Zealand or the UK, could start producing a wider variety of wines than their cooler climes allowed before.

AFP.com
New York Times

3 comments
  1. Bobby B.

    Okay, let me get this straight. CO2 is currently the biggest, baddest boogie man on mother earth. And now the greens want to bury the boogie man below the surface. Was it not the green crowd that went nuts when they discovered that spent nuclear waste was being buried underground? They made claims that it would poison the ground water, create new fault lines in the crust, or possibly (via magic chemistry) turn back into unspent nuclear fuel and go BOOM! Where is their collective fear regarding burying CO2? Where are the grandiose claims of the damage that could result when sequestered CO2 leeches into the drinking water or the well gets overpressured? How does one sequester a gas in porous rock?

  2. Maria Surma Manka

    Bobby B – Greens are hardly united around the idea of carbon capture and sequestration. (See Treehugger: http://www.treehugger.com/files/2006/07/carbon_sequestration.php and the Union of Concerned Scientists: http://www.ucsusa.org/global_warming/solutions/geologic-carbon-sequestering.html)

    Here are some sites with more information on the technology/possibilities and research being done on it: http://www.netl.doe.gov/technologies/carbon_seq/index.html
    http://www.epa.gov/sequestration/faq.html

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