Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
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Category: climatology

https://youtube.com/watch?v=LEx6K4P4GJc

Most of us probably don’t think too much about the foodstuffs we buy in the supermarket. But behind the scenes, today’s food production system relies on a centralized, industrial-scale supply chain that’s still dependent upon soil-based agriculture for the majority of our food crops.

In many instances, that means that food has to travel long distances from farm to table, meaning that food has lost much of its freshness and nutritional value by the time it reaches your table. There’s also a growing awareness that this model isn’t sustainable: the pressures of increasing urbanization and loss of arable land, rising populations and the increased frequency of extreme weather events like droughts and floods — brought on by climate change — means that slowly but surely, we are going to have to change the way we grow our food.

There are some indications of this shift: the appearance of urban rooftop farms, an explosion of interest in automated hydroponic systems. The problem with all these systems is that their platforms are proprietary, and the lack of a common platform between them means these won’t necessarily scale up.

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The inner edge of the habitable zone is the dividing line between peaches and cream and all out hell. Venus has likely seen both. The study of exo-solar systems like Wolf 1061 is key to understanding our own Venus.

New observations of the nearby star Wolf 1061, some 14 light years distant in Ophiuchus — already known to harbor three super-earths — should help planetary scientists better understand what went wrong with our own Venus.

Turns out hellishly-hot Venus-like worlds are quite common and early in the history of any given planetary system, such close-in terrestrial mass planets might even sport liquid water. But as their host stars evolve, the perilous inner edge of these extrasolar planetary systems’ habitable zones move decidedly outward.

As a star’s luminosity grows over time, such tenuous habitable zones can cause what might have been a promising climate to turn into a runaway greenhouse of the sort we see on Venus. With no liquid water at its surface, Venus is the very definition of inhospitable. That’s in contrast to a habitable clime where given the right atmospheric pressure and temperatures terrestrial mass planets can host temperate liquid water on their surfaces.

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Yes, you read that right. The Global Challenges Foundation, founded by the Swedish billionaire László Szombatfalvy, has launched an international competition in order to find a better system for world governance. As Szombatfalvy writes in a letter published on the Foundation’s website:

The greatest threats we face today transcend national boundaries; they therefore need to be addressed jointly by all countries based on an increased realization of our mutual dependence. […] Our current international system – including but not limited to the United Nations — was set up in another era following the Second World War. It is no longer fit for purpose to deal with 21st century risks that can affect people anywhere in the world. We urgently need fresh new thinking in order to address the scale and gravity of today’s global challenges, which have outgrown the present system’s ability to handle them.

The Global Challenges Prize 2017: A New Shape is calling on individuals, groups of individuals, universities, companies or associations from anywhere in the world to submit proposals outlining an alternative world governance model – either by revising the present UN system, or by proposing completely new forms of governance. The new model should be able to effectively address some of the most pressing global problems (like climate change, population growth, extreme poverty) by making it possible for nations to make collectively binding, long-term decisions that take into account the interests of all those affected, including future generations.

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Concerned that scientific views are not being properly represented in Washington, a new nonprofit group wants to get more scientists elected. 314 Action, named after the first three digits of pi, wants scientists to embrace the political process, running for all levels of government. The group’s aim is to get as many scientists elected as possible in the 2018 elections.

314 Action sees particular urgency for its work due to the rise of anti-science rhetoric on the Hill, especially from the right. The current Republican standard bearer President Trump has questioned the idea that climate change is caused by humans and seemingly encouraged debunked anti-vaccination opinions. With the appointments Trump made so far, it’s hard to believe his administration will advance scientific causes.

The 314 Action group describes its members as people who come from the STEM community whose goals are to increase communication between STEM community and elected officials, to actually elect STEM-trained candidates to public office, to increase presence of STEM ideas through the media, and to prevent the U.S. from falling further and further behind the rest of the world in math and science education.

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If a trip to Venice is your ideal holiday, then you’re going to love the future.

new-york-2140-2

Most of us, however, will be quite sobered by Kim Stanley Robinson’s upcoming novel, New York 2140, a near-future projection of a world reshaped by climate change. Sea level has risen by 50 feet, flooding the Big Apple and countless coastal cities around the planet. Thousands of species have gone extinct.

The same economic and political forces driving the world ever closer to that reality are still in charge, setting life on a perpetual spin cycle of boom and bust, with the rich always getting richer.

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In Brief The company that is tasked with running China’s power grid just proposed a $50 trillion global electricity network to help us tackle pollution and climate change.

It seems that China likes building big things. Take the Great Wall of China. The country has been constructing bigger (and sometimes better) things than the rest of the world for centuries.

Now, the Chinese are at it again, but this time it’s on a global scale. China wants to build a $50+ trillion power grid. For the entire world. And they want to have it in operation by 2050. Talk about ambitious.

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Hmmm; there is another use for this type of satellite just can’t openly state.

SHANGHAI—China launched a satellite to monitor its greenhouse gas emissions early on Thursday, the latest step in efforts to cut its carbon footprint, the official Xinhua news agency said.

The launch follows the United States joining China in formally ratifying the Paris agreement to curb climate-warming emissions. It also comes as large sections of northern China have been shrouded in near-record levels of air pollution for most of the past week, disrupting flights, closing factories and schools, and forcing authorities to issue red alerts.

China launched the satellite via a Long March-2D rocket from Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center in the northwestern Gobi Desert, Xinhua said.

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Researchers used nitrogen-doped graphene quantum dots to convert carbon dioxide into liquid hydrocarbons like ethylene and ethanol for use as fuel.

The wonder material known as graphene may have a new trick up its sleeve: converting carbon dioxide into liquid fuels. A team of researchers at Rich University in Texas used nitrogen-doped graphene quantum dots (NGQDs) as a catalyst in electrochemical reactions that create ethylene and ethanol, and the stability and efficiency of the material is close to common electrocatalysts such as copper.

In the fight to slow climate change, reducing the amount of carbon dioxide that enters the atmosphere is crucial, and plenty of research is looking into how we can capture carbon at the source, using clay, engineered bacteria, metal-organic frameworks, or materials like the “Memzyme” and sequester it into rock and concrete. Other studies are focusing on converting the captured carbon into liquid hydrocarbons, which can be used as fuel.

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A synthetic metabolic pathway developed by Tobias Erb and his colleagues at the Max Planck Institute for Terrestrial Microbiology in Marburg converts CO2 from the atmosphere into organic matter more efficiently than plants are able to through photosynthesis. We asked the researcher what significance this process could have for climate protection, discussed the hurdles the research team had to overcome to achieve their goal, and looked at the new perspectives that synthetic biology opens up.

Does the synthetic metabolic pathway that fixes CO2 now represent an effective means of curbing climate change?

Firstly, we are aiming to understand the fundamental biological and chemical principles of how CO2 in gaseous form can be converted into organic molecules. Our primary motivation is not stopping . We are seeking to develop atmospheric CO2 as a source of carbon for the future using biological methods. Producing a CO2-neutral process or even one that removes CO2 from the atmosphere and has a positive impact on the climate would be a fantastic secondary effect.

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In future, greenhouse gas carbon dioxide could be removed from the atmosphere by deploying a new biological method. A team headed by Tobias Erb, Leader of a Research Group at the Max Planck Institute for Terrestrial Microbiology in Marburg, has developed a synthetic but completely biological metabolic pathway based on the model of photosynthesis that fixes carbon dioxide from the atmosphere 20% more efficiently that plants can photosynthetically. The researchers initially planned the new system, which they presented in the magazine Science this week, on the drawing board and then turned it into reality in the laboratory.

Climate change is one of the most pressing challenges of our time. The concentration of (CO2) in the atmosphere owing to human activities has continually risen since the start of the Industrial Revolution. All scientific evidence indicates that this increase is exacerbating the greenhouse effect and changing the climate. The consequences are already clearly evident. To overcome the environmental as well as the social challenge of climate change, “we must find new ways of sustainably removing excessive CO2 from the atmosphere and turning it into something useful,” underlined Erb, who leads a Junior Research Group at the Max Planck Institute in Marburg.

Theoretically, the problem could be tackled through greater productivity in agriculture and forestry. This is because plants fix carbon dioxide from the atmosphere through photosynthesis. They produce sugar for food from the CO2 via a gradual process known as the Calvin cycle. Each individual biochemical step towards producing the sugar is initiated or accelerated by its own enzyme. The various biocatalysts are precisely aligned with one another to ensure they can work together. However, there is a problem. The CO2-fixing enzyme in the Calvin cycle in plants, which is known by experts as RuBisCo, is relatively slow. It also frequently makes mistakes. RuBisCo captures an oxygen molecule instead of CO2 in one in five reactions.

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