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Category: climatology

A simple cooling system driven by the capture of passive solar energy could provide low-cost food refrigeration and living space cooling for impoverished communities with no access to the electricity grid. The system, which has no electrical components, exploits the powerful cooling effect that occurs when certain salts are dissolved in water. After each cooling cycle, the system uses solar energy to evaporate the water and regenerate the salt, ready for reuse.

“Hot regions have high levels of solar energy, so it would be very attractive to use that solar energy for cooling,” says Wenbin Wang, a postdoc in Peng Wang’s lab. In many parts of the world, there is a greater need for cooling because of climate change, but not every community can access electricity for air conditioning and refrigeration. “We conceptualized an off-grid solar-energy conversion and storage design for green and inexpensive cooling,” Professor Wang says.

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Professor Hasselmann developed a method for satellite ocean wave measurements.

This year’s Nobel Prize in Physics laureate Klaus Hasselmann helped to shape a ground-breaking Earth-observation mission that paved the way for the modern study of our planet’s environment.

The German oceanographer and climate modeler was awarded the coveted prize for his contribution to the physical modeling of Earth’s climate that has enabled scientists to quantify the climate’s natural variability and better predict climate change. Hasselman won half of the 2021 Nobel Prize for Physics last week, with the other half shared by scientists Syukuro Manabe and Giorgio Parisi for their own research on disorder and fluctuations in physical systems.

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Sixty-three percent. That’s the proportion of mammal species that vanished from Africa and the Arabian Peninsula around 30 million years ago, after Earth’s climate shifted from swampy to icy. But we are only finding out about it now. — HeritageDaily — Archaeology News.

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Vertical Farming has come a long way since the original series was posted 3 years ago, and there have been many developments that are shaping the future of the industry. Whether it’s large scale plant factories, community urban farms, or even new types of farm, the size of vending machines, and even vertical farms at home, the way we grow is changing.

But it’s not just the way we grow, what we grow is also changing. Vertical Farms are adding new crop types like tomatoes, cucumbers, strawberries and many other types of fruits and vegetables, and this change has happened sooner than the original series projected.

But to really have a significant impact on the global challenges of climate change, food security and water security, we will have to grow energy intensive crops like wheat and rice in vertical farms.

Are we on track to meet this challenge, or is vertical farming struggling to improve its energy efficiency? Is vertical farming closer to changing the world?

Previous video in series: The Future Of Vertical Farming.
https://youtu.be/ESuzrY2abAw.

Is Solar Power The Future Of Energy?

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Advanced Nuclear Power Advocacy For Humanity — Eric G. Meyer, Founder & Director, Generation Atomic

Eric G. Meyer is the Founder and Director of Generation Atomic (https://generationatomic.org/), a nuclear advocacy non-profit which he founded after hearing about the promise of advanced nuclear reactors, and he decided to devote his life to saving and expanding the use of atomic energy.

Eric worked as an organizer on several political, union, and issue campaigns while in graduate school for applied public policy, taking time off to attend the climate talks in Paris and sing opera about atomic energy.

Eric began his full time nuclear work in May of 2016 with Environmental Progress by organizing marches, rallies, and trainings in California, New York, and Illinois, before leaving to found Generation Atomic in late 2016.

In only a short period of time, Generation Atomic has made significant progress in the world of nuclear advocacy. Over the last year they’ve held several advocacy trainings at conferences, Marched for Science, talked to over tens of thousands voters, and carried the banner for nuclear energy at the climate talks in Morocco, Germany, and Poland.

Eric attended University of Minnesota-Duluth where he obtained a Master’s Degree in Advocacy and Political Leadership, with Concentrations in Public Sector and Non-profits, and a Bachelor of Arts in Music Performance.

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Editor’s note, 6/28/21, 3:35 PM: The article was updated to clarify that Natrium features a sodium‐cooled fast reactor and not a type of molten salt reactor, as previously reported.

A nuclear power startup founded by Bill Gates has announced plans to build a new kind of nuclear reactor at a retiring coal plant in Wyoming.

This reactor will be the first real-world demonstration of the startup’s technology, which could help power the world — without warming the climate.

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But the global effort to fight climate change is also causing problems. Europe’s wind farms haven’t seen a good breeze in months, and droughts in China and South America have dried up power generation from hydro dams. Meanwhile, surging prices for carbon pollution credits in Europe have made fossil alternatives even more expensive, and Chinese grid operators have come under mounting political pressure to help the country meet its carbon emissions targets by burning less coal.

The energy crisis could imperil political support for climate policies, just as the COP26 climate summit approaches in Glasgow in November. But there are steps governments can take to prevent energy market turmoil leading to sky-high electric bills and breakdowns in the global supply chain.

“What we’re seeing is an unfortunate set of circumstances during a period of transition where we haven’t fully moved from one system to another,” says James Henderson, director of the Energy Transition Research Initiative at Oxford University. “During that period, market risks are enhanced. It’s impossible to envision a world where there won’t be more volatility.”

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Disaster sciences, digital twins & artificial intelligence — craig fugate, chief emergency management officer, one concern.

Mr. Craig Fugate is the former Director of the Florida Division of Emergency Management, and former administrator of the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA — an agency of the United States Department of Homeland Security, whose primary purpose is to coordinate the response to disasters that have occurred in the United States and that overwhelm the resources of local and state authorities.)

Mr. Fugate is currently the Chief Emergency Management Officer of One Concern, (a Resilience-as-a-Service solutions company that brings disaster science together with machine learning for better decision making).

Mr. Fugate is also senior advisor at BlueDot Strategies, where he assists a range of clients with emergency management implementation strategies and crisis communications.

Mr. Fugate serves on the Board of Directors of PG&E Corp., one of the largest electric and natural gas utilities in the U.S., and on the staff at Indian River State College, serving as a strategic consultant in emergency management.

Mr. Fugate has decades of experience at the local, state, and federal levels in disaster preparedness and management. He has also overseen preparation and response efforts for disasters such as wildfires and hurricanes, health crises, and national security threats.

As Florida Director for the Emergency Management Division, Mr. Fugate oversaw the “Big 4 of ‘2004″ (Hurricanes Charley, Frances, Ivan, and Jeanne) and as the Administrator for the Federal Emergency Management Agency, he organized recovery efforts for a record of eighty-seven disasters in 2011.

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From ecosystem development to talent, much effort is still required for practical implementation of edge AI.

By Pushkar Apte and Tom Salmon

Rapid advances in artificial intelligence (AI) have made this technology important for many industries, including finance, energy, healthcare, and microelectronics. AI is driving a multi-trillion-dollar global market while helping to solve some tough societal problems such as tracking the current pandemic and predicting the severity of climate-driven events like hurricanes and wildfires.

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