Lifeboat Foundation

So people can change the weather, and science-based weather modification techniques are now employed in over 50 countries according to the World Meteorological Organization. But for every science-based weather-altering technique, there are dozens of pseudoscientific urban legends.

In Cuba, it is believed that a shotgun can stop twisters. Aim at the funnel cloud, pull the trigger, and stop the tornado or waterspout before it touches down. In Puerto Rico, people have suggested installing giant fans in the El Yunque rainforest on the east side of the island to blow hurricanes away. Others have suggested putting fans in Africa to increase the amount of Saharan dust that already enters the Atlantic early in hurricane season, which can dampen fledgling tropical storms. The proposal to tow icebergs from the Arctic down to the tropical ocean to cool it down is equally impractical. No flotilla could bring enough rapidly melting icebergs to cool the vast tropical Atlantic Ocean for the six months of hurricane season.

Given all these fantastical ideas perhaps it should come as no surprise that besides altering the weather, conspiracy theorists also claim HAARP can trigger earthquakes, and, as the Georgia men believed, remotely control minds. The line between harmless urban legend and dangerous conspiracy theory is thin.

Noctilucent clouds were once thought to be a fairly modern phenomenon. A team of researchers recently calculated that Earth and the entire solar system may well have passed through two dense interstellar clouds, causing global noctilucent clouds that may have driven an ice age.

The event is thought to have happened 7 million years ago and would have compressed the heliosphere, exposing Earth to the interstellar medium.

Interstellar clouds are vast regions of gas and dust between the stars within galaxies. They are mostly made up of hydrogen along with a little helium and trace elements of heavier elements.

“The grid needs new electricity sources to support AI technologies that are powering major scientific advances, improving services for businesses and customers, and driving national competitiveness and economic growth,” Google Senior Director for Energy and Climate Michael Terrell, said in a statement.

“This agreement helps accelerate a new technology to meet energy needs cleanly and reliably, and unlock the full potential of AI for everyone,” Terrell added.

Rising emissions and climate change boost demand for renewable energy.

Researchers have developed a method to produce hydrogen gas from water using only solar power and agricultural waste like manure or husks.

Colonized artificial reef structures could absorb the power of storms.

SpaceX undertook a planetary defense mission on behalf of the European Space Agency (ESA) on Monday, aiming to provide scientists with tools to prevent future catastrophic cosmic impacts.

The ESA’s Hera planetary defense mission builds on NASA’s 2022 Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) mission and will analyze its effects, allowing scientists and engineers to gain a more comprehensive understanding for use in real-world emergencies.

No new launch date has yet been set for the delayed mission.

New Stanford-led research unveils a hidden factor that could change our understanding of how oceans mitigate climate change. The study, published Oct. 11 in Science, reveals never-before seen mucus “parachutes” produced by microscopic marine organisms that significantly slow their sinking, putting the brakes on a process crucial for removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.

How can afforestation/reforestation (AR) help reduce climate change and help achieve the goal of the Paris Agreement calling for a maximum 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels? This is what a recent study published in Nature Communications hopes to address as a team of researchers from Germany investigated how AR could contribute to meeting this goal. This study holds the potential to help researchers, climate scientists, legislators, and the public better understand the steps that can be taken to mitigate the effects of climate change, for both the short and long term.

In simple terms, afforestation/reforestation (AR) is planting trees in areas that have experienced deforestation (tree removal) or areas where trees never existed. For the study, the researchers used Integrated Assessment Models (IAMs) to simulate how AR could contribute to the Paris Agreement goals by conducting more than 1,200 scenarios. In the end, the researchers found that AR contributions to climate change makes its biggest impact in 2052, along with decreasing average global temperatures by 0.2 degrees Celsius by the end of the century. Finally, AR could also reduce the amount of time before average global temperatures exceed 1.5 degrees Celsius by 13 years.

“These results show that global AR can in fact make an important contribution to mitigating climate change, when applied at the large sale,” said Dr. Yiannis Moustakis, who is a postdoctoral researcher at Ludwig Maximilians Universität München and lead author of the study. “But it is not a panacea and must be viewed in a more comprehensive framework that takes socioeconomic trade-offs equally into account. Planting a forest could create jobs, revenue, and promote ecosystem services, but it could also deprive people’s livelihood, exacerbate poverty, financially or physically displace people, and disturb local food networks.”