Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
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Category: climatology

The world wants to “transition” away from fossil fuels toward green energy, but the difficult reality is this: Dirty fuels are not going away — or even declining — anytime soon.

The total amount of renewable energy that’s available is growing. That’s good news for a world threatened by potentially devastating climate change.

But the increase in renewable energy is still lower than the increase in global energy demand overall. A “transition” from fossil fuels may come someday, but for now, renewable energy isn’t even keeping pace with rising energy demand — so fossil fuel demand is still growing.

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Evolutionary genomics approach identifies genes that enable plants to live in the Atacama Desert, offering clues for engineering more resilient crops to face climate change.

An international team of researchers has identified genes associated with plant survival in one of the harshest environments on Earth: the Atacama Desert in Chile. Their findings, published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), may help scientists breed resilient crops that can thrive in increasingly drier climates.

“In an era of accelerated climate change, it is critical to uncover the genetic basis to improve crop production and resilience under dry and nutrient-poor conditions,” said Gloria Coruzzi, Carroll & Milton Petrie Professor in the New York University (NYU) Department of Biology and Center for Genomics and Systems Biology, who co-led the study with Rodrigo Gutiérrez.

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There’s no question about it: climate technology is in again.

Over the past several quarters, entrepreneurial activity and investment interest in climate tech have skyrocketed. New funds devoted specifically to climate have launched at an astonishing rate in 2021: from blue-chip venture capital firms like Union Square Ventures, from large private equity players like TPG and General Atlantic, from a whole new breed of climate-specific VCs like Lowercarbon Capital. Scarcely a day goes by now without a climate tech startup announcing a major new funding round. A whopping $49 billion of venture capital funding will pour into climate tech in 2021.

BlackRock CEO Larry Fink aptly captured the current ebullience when he declared last week that “the next 1,000 unicorns” will be in climate tech.

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Across all sectors, organizations are grappling with rapid transformation. On top of that, there are enormous global shifts and challenges to contend with, such as climate change, and shifting political and economic power. To put it bluntly, our world is changing fast. And organizations must learn to adapt accordingly.

These eight major trends provide a snapshot of how business operations are evolving to suit our rapidly changing world.

Full Story:

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A “perfect storm” of several crises, such as climate change and the Covid-19 pandemic, mean many nations are “knocking on famine’s door,” Beasley said.

A small group of ultra-wealthy individuals could help solve world hunger with just a fraction of their net worth, says the director of the United Nations’ World Food Programme.

Billionaires need to “step up now, on a one-time basis”, said David Beasley in an interview on CNN’s Connect the World with Becky Anderson that aired Tuesday — citing specifically the world’s two richest men, Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk.

“$6 billion to help 42 million people that are literally going to die if we don’t reach them. It’s not complicated,” he added.

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Like weather forecasting, disease forecasting needs to be statistical.

While we cannot predict in advance exactly how many hurricanes will occur this year or how bad they will be, we know with great confidence that climate change is a risk factor increasing the frequency and severity of hurricanes. Our knowledge of this and all the other risk factors for hurricanes allows us to make a statistical prediction for the coming season.

Similarly, we have known for decades that ther… See more.

I’ve written before about the need for infectious disease intelligence and whether or not we can insure against damages from future outbreaks. Both ideas assume that epidemics can, to some extent, be predicted. But can they?

The lack of control and idiosyncrasies of the current Covid-19 pandemic (like multiple “waves” of transmission), might cause some to wonder if predicting epidemics is a lost cause. A comparison of the performance of 27 individual models made by many of the best academic scientists showed high high variability in forecast skill across time, geospatial units, and forecast horizons. Only just more than half of the models evaluated showed better accuracy than simply assuming the number of cases per week will stay the same for the next 4 weeks.

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