Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
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Category: climatology

About 40 percent of all the energy consumed by buildings worldwide is used for space heating and cooling. With the warming climate as well as growing populations and rising standards of living—especially in hot, humid regions of the developing world—the level of cooling and dehumidification needed to ensure comfort and protect human health is predicted to rise precipitously, pushing up global energy demand.

Much discussion is now focusing on replacing the greenhouse gases frequently used as refrigerants in today’s air conditioners. But another pressing concern is that most existing systems are extremely -inefficient.

“The main reason they’re inefficient is that they have two tasks to perform,” says Leslie Norford, the George Macomber (1948) Professor in Construction Management in the Department of Architecture. “They need to lower temperature and remove moisture, and doing both those things together takes a lot of extra energy.”

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I’m not that interested in this on the movie end, because i think most movies already suck, and couldnt really get any worse.

AUDREY HEPBURN DIED in 1993, but in 2013 she nevertheless starred in an advertisement for Galaxy, a type of chocolate bar. She was shown riding a bus along the Amalfi coast before catching the eye of a passing hunk in a convertible. In 2016 Peter Cushing, who died in 1994, reprised his role as the villainous Grand Moff Tarkin in the Star Wars film “Rogue One”. Such resurrections are not new, but they are still uncommon enough to count as news. Yet advances in special effects—and, increasingly, in artificial intelligence (AI)—are making it ever easier to manufacture convincing forgeries of human beings.

In recent months this has led to concern that propagandists will use the technology to generate videos in which political figures appear to say compromising things. A video created by BuzzFeed, a news website, in April shows Barack Obama apparently saying “We’re entering an era in which our enemies can make it look like anyone is saying anything at any point in time,” for example. In May a Belgian political party produced a fake video of Donald Trump saying implausible things about Belgium’s climate policy. In both cases the video looks slightly off, and the voice is provided by an impersonator. But the technology is improving fast, prompting a dozen AI researchers to place bets on whether a fake video will disrupt America’s midterm elections later this year. (Tim Hwang, a Harvard academic, is overseeing the wager.)

Whatever happens in the arena of fake news, the same techniques are sure to revolutionise fiction of a different kind, in the form of film and television. In future, actors need not be creatures of flesh and blood, but could, like so many other things in an increasingly digitised world, exist as nothing more than long strings of 1s and 0s. Such digital actors would sit quietly in digital storage systems until their services were needed—there would be no need for luxury trailers, chefs and make-up people.

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Article (2017) about oxygen depletion. “There has been a clear decline in the volume of oxygen in Earth’s atmosphere over the past 20 years. Although the magnitude of this decrease appears small compared to the amount of oxygen in the atmosphere, it is difficult to predict how this process may evolve, due to the brevity of the collected records. A recently proposed model predicts a non-linear decay, which would result in an increasingly rapid fall-off in atmospheric oxygen concentration, with potentially devastating consequences for human health. We discuss the impact that global deoxygenation, over hundreds of generations, might have on human physiology. Exploring the changes between different native high-altitude populations provides a paradigm of how humans might tolerate worsening hypoxia over time. Using this model of atmospheric change, we predict that humans may continue to survive in an unprotected atmosphere for ~3600 years. Accordingly, without dramatic changes to the way in which we interact with our planet, humans may lose their dominance on Earth during the next few millennia.”

There has been a clear decline in the volume of oxygen in Earth’s atmosphere over the past 20 years. Although the magnitude of this decrease appears small compared to the amount of oxygen in the atmosphere, it is difficult to predict how this process may evolve, due to the brevity of the collected records. A recently proposed model predicts a non-linear decay, which would result in an increasingly rapid fall-off in atmospheric oxygen concentration, with potentially devastating consequences for human health. We discuss the impact that global deoxygenation, over hundreds of generations, might have on human physiology. Exploring the changes between different native high-altitude populations provides a paradigm of how humans might tolerate worsening hypoxia over time. Using this model of atmospheric change, we predict that humans may continue to survive in an unprotected atmosphere for ~3600 years. Accordingly, without dramatic changes to the way in which we interact with our planet, humans may lose their dominance on Earth during the next few millennia.

Keywords: Oxygen, Hypoxia, Acclimatization, Physiological adaptation.

Human dominion over planet Earth is driving profound changes that may culminate in extinction. Loss of natural vegetation and the burning of fossil fuels are altering our atmosphere at an alarming rate [1]. Two interconnected themes have received the most attention: the accelerated rise in atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration and the escalation of global temperatures. These changes are accompanied by natural phenomena with potentially catastrophic consequences, such as increasingly unpredictable climate subsystems and rising sea levels from polar ice cap recession [2–4]. If such environmental hazards were not a sufficient threat to the survival of Earth’s 7 billion plus human inhabitants, there is yet another concerning change already underway, global deoxygenation.

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Old, but excellent post:

[Image: “Disckonsia Costata” by Verisimilius is licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0]

Several times in evolutionary history, the arrival of an innovative new evolutionary strategy has lead to a mass extinction followed by a restructuring of biota and new dominant life forms. This may pose an unlikely but possible global catastrophic risk in the future, in which spontaneous evolutionary strategies (like new biochemical pathways or feeding strategies) become wildly successful, and lead to extreme climate change and die-offs. This is also known as a ‘biotic replacement’ hypothesis of extinction events.

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Ocasio-Cortez’s 100%-renewable plan puts her in agreement with a coalition of US mayors who have committed to the goal of complete decarbonization within their own cities. But Ocasio-Cortez, who has an economics degree, also couples that plank with an economic plan she is calling the Green New Deal.

In a major upset on Tuesday night, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a 28-year-old Latina democratic socialist from the Bronx, beat out the longtime US representative Joe Crowley in the New York primaries. In the overwhelmingly Democratic district, she is practically certain to win a seat in Congress during the general election in November.

Ocasio-Cortez’s climate-change platform would become the most progressive of that of any sitting Congressperson in the Democratic party—and her primary victory catapults that platform into the mainstream.

“We need more environmental hardliners in Congress,” she told In These Times magazine earlier this week. “We need a Marshall Plan for renewable energy in the United States. The idea that the Democratic Party needs to be moderate is what’s holding us back on this.”

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The Chandra X-Ray Observatory is a NASA telescope that looks at black holes, quasars, supernovas, and the like – all sources of high energy in the universe. It shows a side of the cosmos that is invisible to the human eye.

After more than a decade in service, the observatory has helped scientists glimpse the universe in action. It has watched galaxies collide, observed a black hole with cosmic hurricane winds, and glimpsed a supernova turning itself inside out after an explosion.

The telescope – billed as one of NASA’s Great Observatories along with the Hubble Space Telescope, Spitzer Space Telescope and the Compton Gamma Ray Observatory – has been a public relations tool for the agency, as well. Its pictures are frequently used by NASA in press releases.

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Here’s how to watch the announcement live.

NASA’s Curiosity Rover has found some new and exciting information about Mars, and the space agency is announcing that discovery to the world on Thursday.

The Curiosity Rover launched from Earth in November 2011 and landed on Martian soil on August 6, 2012. It has since been cruising around the red planet’s surface, functioning as a 9-foot-wide roving science machine.

Curiosity has a few key tasks on Mars: it’s meant to study the Martian climate, check for signs of life, search for ice and water, and serve as a kind of planetary scout to see if Mars could ever sustain human life. The laboratory-on-wheels can also take an excellent selfie.

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Tesla is apparently significantly ramping up its effort to help rebuild the power grid in Puerto Rico after it was destroyed by hurricanes last year.

After having completed hundreds of energy storage project on the islands in the last few months, Tesla CEO Elon Musk now says that they have ‘about 11,000’ energy storage projects underway in Puerto Rico, which means something big is in the work.

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Scientists at the University of Alberta have applied a machine learning technique using artificial intelligence to perfect and automate atomic-scale manufacturing, something which has never been done before. The vastly greener, faster, smaller technology enabled by this development greatly reduces impact on the climate while still satisfying the insatiable demands of the information age.

“Most of us thought we’d never be able to automate atomic writing and editing, but stubborn persistence has paid off, and now Research Associate Moe Rashidi has done it,” said Robert Wolkow, professor of physics at the University of Alberta, who along with his Research Associate has just published a paper announcing their findings.

“Until now, we printed with about as efficiently as medieval monks produced books,” explained Wolkow. “For a long while, we have had the equivalent of a pen for writing with atoms, but we had to write manually. So we couldn’t mass produce atom-scale devices, and we couldn’t commercialize anything. Now that has all changed, much like the disruption following the arrival of the printing press for those medieval monks. Machine learning has automated the atom fabrication process, and an atom-scale manufacturing revolution is sure to follow.”

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