The Nichioh Maru is the first Japanese cargo ship to be outfitted with solar panels. The ship's deck is covered by 281 panels for powering the LED lights through the hold and crew quarters, eliminating the need for a diesel-fueled generator. The ship began its first voyage on January 27 and will begin carrying as many as 1,380 cars along the Japanese coast to Oppama Wharf, Kobe and Kyushu.

This isn't Nissan's first foray into energy-efficient car carriers. It also uses The City of St. Petersburg ship to transport its LEAF vehicles around Europe. That cargo ship is designed to reduce fuel use by 800 tons and cut CO2 emissions by 2,500 tons per year compared to carriers of its size.

David Lobell looked at nine years-worth of images captured by the MODIS Earth-observation satellite to analyze the growing season of wheat in the Ganges plain of India.  What he found was that in the years with higher average temperatures, the wheat fields turned brown earlier meaning that they were no longer growing.

Previous studies have predicted that wheat yields would fall by about 30 percent by 2050 in places like India, but Lobell thinks that realistic yield losses could be about 50 percent greater than existing models show.  That's a scary figure since other studies have shown a need for wheat yields to increase by 50 percent in order to feed a growing global population.

One solution is breeding for wheat plants that have bigger roots and are less stressed by dryer and warmer conditions.  Another option is to breed for plants that are slower growing and can be planted earlier in the season.  That way the wheat could be harvested before the high spring temperatures while retaining its hardiness.  Scientists are already working on these solutions, but either approach will need to have a breakthrough soon to keep up with growing demand and warming temperatures.

via New Scientist

An updated video compiled by NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies illustrates this warming trend in colorful detail. Red in the video represents temperatures higher than the average during the 1950 - 1981 baseline period while blue represents temperatures lower than that average.

While 2011 was the ninth warmest year, 2010 was the warmest year on record. The difference in average temperature between 2010 and 2011 was 0.22 degrees F (0.12 C). Temperatures may fluctuate slightly from year to year, but, as this analysis shows, the overall trend of rapid warming continues.

The reports called the "Mapping and Assessment of the United States Ocean Wave Energy Resource( PDF)" and "Assessment of Energy Production Potential from Tidal Streams in the United States (PDF)," calculated the maximum kinetic energy in waves and tides that could be used for energy production. Our country currently uses about 4,000 TWh of electricity per year and the studies show that waves and tidal currents could potentially generate up to 1,420 TWh of electricity per year, but not all of that energy could realistically be developed.

The DOE plans to release additional resource assessments for ocean current, ocean thermal gradients, and new hydropower resources later in the year so that we'll have a full picture of the water power potential in the U.S.

The findings have been incorporated into NREL's searchable U.S. Renewable Energy Atlas.