- Industry: Broadcasting & receiving
- Number of terms: 5074
- Number of blossaries: 1
- Company Profile:
The largest broadcasting organisation in the world.
Renewable energy comes from natural sources that can be replenished and not permanently depleted - such as biomass, hydro-power, geothermal heat, solar power, wind power, and wave and tidal power - and most of which do not produce CO2emissions. They are unlike fossil fuels, which took millennia to form and cannot be replenished.
Industry:Natural environment
Biomass is renewable organic matter that can be used as fuel. It is living or recently dead material - wood and other plant matter, or even animal waste. Fuel derived from biomass is known as biofuel. It does not include fossil fuels, which have formed - and stored their carbon - over millions of years. Because the CO2 released when biomass is burned is balanced by the CO2 absorbed during its production - and because new plant matter is re-growing and absorbing more CO2 all the time - it's regarded as carbon neutral.
Industry:Natural environment
Silicon is a chemical element known as a 'metalloid' (because it has intermediate properties between a metal and a non-metal). It is used as a semiconductor, for example in microchips in computers, and to make photovoltaic cells for solar panels.
Industry:Natural environment
Turbulence describes irregular eddies of air within the general air current. It can be caused when wind flows over obstacles such as trees or buildings and gets 'churned up', so it no longer has a smooth flow. Wind turbines do not handle turbulence well and power production can be dramatically decreased.
Industry:Natural environment
Water pressure is the force that pushes water through pipes and determines the rate of flow from your taps. Water companies are required to provide water at a pressure that will reach the upper floors of houses, but where this is a problem, pressure can be improved using pumps. However, devices such as power showers, which use a pump to boost flow for a more powerful shower spray, also greatly increase the volume of water used and the energy required to heat it.
Industry:Natural environment
A watt is a unit of power. Power is the rate at which energy is used, and a watt is equal to a rate of one joule of energy per second. Watts are commonly used when referring to the energy consumption of relatively small things like lightbulbs, while kilowatts (a thousand watts) are used for larger machines. Megawatts (a million watts) are used to measure the electricity generation of power stations. See also kilowatt-hours.
Industry:Natural environment
The state of the atmosphere with regard to temperature, cloudiness, rainfall, wind and other meteorological conditions. It is not the same as climate which is the average weather over a much longer period.
Industry:Natural environment
Climate change is the variation in the average global or regional climate as measured by yardsticks such as average temperature and rainfall. This variation is caused by both natural processes and human activity. Weather is what happens over days or even hours, whereas climate is the average weather measured over a longer period. Increasingly when people refer to climate change, however, they specifically mean the phenomenon of global warming.
Industry:Natural environment
Broadly speaking, any ex-Soviet bloc state. At the time the Kyoto Protocol was adopted in 1997, these countries were on the path from a Communist planned economy to a market economy. Many of them would now be categorised as market economies. Countries in transition to a market economy are grouped with industrialised countries in Annex I of the Kyoto Protocol, so they have emission reduction commitments to meet in the 2008-2012 period. In some cases their industrial base collapsed to such a degree in the early 1990s that they will have no difficulty meeting these commitments.
Industry:Natural environment
Dangerous climate change is a term introduced by the 1992 UN Framework Convention on Climate Change - the treaty that led to the Kyoto protocol. In general terms, it refers to climate change of sufficient severity that it will have a major effect on societies, economies and the wider environment. The definition of what that level is varies, but Defra, for example, defines it as a rise in average global surface temperatures of 1-3 ºC (taking pre-industrial revolution average surface temperatures as the base).
Industry:Natural environment
