Climatology – Lifeboat News: The Blog

Aug 1
2018

Miracle in Midtown: Tiny House May Be Answer to a Global Crisis

As heat and humidity soared and New Yorkers slowed their famously fast strides to cope, a small miracle happened in Midtown: A single-family house was assembled in three days.

The tiny 22-square-meter (237-square-foot) prototype, on display on United Nations Plaza, is designed for a family of four. It’s self-sustaining, producing drinkable water from the air, energy from the sun and food from a vertical vegetable garden embedded in the exterior walls. And at an expected price of about $35,000, it may provide an affordable answer to a global housing shortage.

“In this climate, this home would produce enough food for a family of four for about 260 days” out of a year, said Anna Dyson, a professor of architecture and forestry and environmental studies at Yale University. “In better climates — in Africa, for example — it could actually produce a surplus of food.”

Aug 1
2018

Heatwave deaths will rise steadily by 2080 as globe warms up

If people cannot adapt to future climate temperatures, deaths caused by severe heatwaves will increase dramatically in tropical and subtropical regions, followed closely by Australia, Europe and the United States, a global new Monash-led study shows.

Published today in PLOS Medicine, it is the first global study to predict future heatwave-related deaths and aims to help decision makers in planning adaptation and mitigation strategies for climate change.

Researchers developed a model to estimate the number of deaths related to heatwaves in 412 communities across 20 countries for the period of 2031 to 2080.

Jul 31
2018

Neil deGrasse Tyson scolds cherry picking climate science

Astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson says lawmakers and the media cherry pick scientific papers to reinforce political ideals on climate change and says it’s irresponsible to create public policy while ignoring the scientific community’s consensus.

Jul 27
2018

Cost of flood losses in Maritimes could increase

The financial costs of flooding in Canada’s maritime region could spike by 300 per cent by the end of the century if steps are not taken to address the impacts of climate change.

A study done by researchers at the University of Waterloo looked at the Halifax, Nova Scotia area, a region hard hit by recent riverine flooding. The team, made up economists, geographers and political scientists, merged data on flood probability, climate change and financial payout information from the insurance/re-insurance market and used the information to develop a forecast.

“Until recently there hasn’t been a lot of work exploring what increased flooding will cost, and who will get stuck with the bill,” says Andrea Minano, coordinator of the Canadian Coastal Resilience Forum (CCRF) and a researcher at Waterloo’s Faculty of Environment. “The increases in flood losses put into question the long term insurability in the Halifax area, and highlight a broader problem facing many other areas in Canada if no actions are taken to mitigate and adapt to climate change.”

Jul 27
2018

Deglacial changes in western Atlantic Ocean circulation

A new study carried out by an international team of researchers, using the chemistry of ocean sediments has highlighted a widespread picture of Atlantic circulation changes associated with rapid climate change in the past.

The new integrated dataset, published today in the journal Nature Communications, provides new insights into the interactions of melting ice, ocean circulation and climate change, with potential implications for future long-term changes in the Earth systems with global climate change.

Dr. Hong Chin Ng from the University of Bristol’s School of Earth Sciences, is the study’s lead author.

Jul 26
2018

Should We Build A Fast Nuclear Test Reactor Or Continue To Be Beholden To Russia?

In the end, however, if the critics quoted in the Science article don’t care about global warming, fine – many people don’t. If they think renewables alone can do it, fine – some people do. I’m sure they’re well-intentioned. However, every leading climate scientist from Jim Hansen on down knows that we will not achieve any of our climate goals without a dramatic increase in both nuclear and renewables.

Since fast-reactors, like those that will be tested in the VITR, can get ten times the power out of the same fuel, can burn spent fuel and even depleted uranium like our old Iraqi tank armor, when we get to fast reactors as a significant portion of our energy we will have several thousand years of low-carbon power on hand.

That’s more energy than exists in all the coal, oil and natural gas in the ground right now.

Jul 26
2018

Tesla, others help Puerto Ricans go solar amid power turmoil

Ten months after Hurricane Maria, Adjuntas still loses power any time a heavy rain or wind pounds the rickety power lines feeding this town high in the central mountains of Puerto Rico.

That leaves its 20,000 people once again in the dark, without light, fresh water or air conditioning—except for a handful of homes and businesses glowing in the night thanks to solar energy.

The people of Adjuntas call those places “cucubanos,” an indigenous Puerto Rican firefly. They’re part of a small but growing movement to provide the U.S. territory with sustainable, renewable energy independent of the decrepit power grid.

Jul 24
2018

Artificial intelligence saves water for water users associations

Agriculture uses 70 percent of the water in the world, and this appears to be an upward trend regarding water needs. As the demand in other industry sectors is also increasing, and the effects of climate change exacerbate water shortages, water saving measures have become an unavoidable challenge for maintaining the sector and preserving life.

Agronomy researcher Rafael González has developed a model to predict in advance the water that users will need each day. This tool came about from a drive to ally with water resource sustainability.

The model applies artificial intelligence techniques including fuzzy logic, a system used to explain the behavior of decision making. It also mixes variables that are easier to measure, like agroclimatic ones or the size of the plot of land to be watered, with other more complicated variables, like traditional methods in the area and holidays during watering season.

Jul 22
2018

An Introduction to the Future with Oxford VSI

“The Future: A Very Short Introduction” (OUP, 2017) by Dr. Jennifer M Gidley.

Oxford University Press has just released a wonderful little animation video centring on my book “The Future: A Very Short Introduction” published in 2017. In an entertaining way it shows how the concept of the future or futures is central to so many other concepts — many of which are the subject of other OUP Very Short Introductions. The VSI Series now has well over 500 titles, with ‘The Future’ being number 516.

To watch the video click here.

You can read a full sample chapter of the Introduction. The abstracts can be read for all of the other chapters at the links below.

Contents

List of Illustrations

Introduction

1 Three Thousand Years of Futures

2 The Future Multiplied

3 The Evolving Scholarship of Futures Studies

4 Crystal Balls, Flying Cars and Robots

5 Technotopian or Human-Centred Futures?

6 Grand Global Futures Challenges

Conclusion

References

Human influence detected in changing seasons

For the first time, scientists from Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) and five other organizations have shown that human influences significantly impact the size of the seasonal cycle of temperature in the lowest layer of the atmosphere.

To demonstrate this, they applied a so-called “fingerprint” technique. Fingerprinting seeks to separate human and natural influences on climate. It relies on patterns of climate change—typically patterns that are averaged over years or decades. But in the new research appearing in the July 20 edition of the journal Science, the team studied seasonal behavior, and found that human-caused warming has significantly affected the seasonal temperature cycle.

The researchers focused on the troposphere, which extends from the surface to roughly 16 kilometers in the atmosphere at the tropics and 13 kilometers at the poles. They considered changes over time in the size of the seasonal cycle of tropospheric temperature at different locations on the Earth’s surface. This pattern provides information on temperature contrasts between the warmest and coldest months of the year.