Lifeboat Foundation

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.

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.

Continue reading “Artificial intelligence saves water for water users associations” »

“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.

Continue reading “An Introduction to the Future with Oxford VSI” »

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.

Australia announced plans Friday to explore concepts such as firing salt into clouds and covering swathes of water with a thin layer of film in a bid to save the embattled Great Barrier Reef.

The UNESCO World Heritage-listed reef, about the size of Japan or Italy, is reeling from two straight years of bleaching as sea temperatures rise because of climate change.

Experts have warned that the 2,300-kilometre (1,400-mile) long area could have suffered irreparable damage.

Continue reading “Cloud brightening, ‘sun shields’ to save Barrier Reef” »

An international team of scientists has shown how much sea level would rise if Larsen C and George VI, two Antarctic ice shelves at risk of collapse, were to break up. While Larsen C has received much attention due to the break-away of a trillion-tonne iceberg from it last summer, its collapse would contribute only a few millimetres to sea-level rise. The break-up of the smaller George VI Ice Shelf would have a much larger impact. The research is published today in the European Geosciences Union journal The Cryosphere.

Recent, rapid warming in the Antarctic Peninsula is a threat to ice shelves in the region, with Larsen C and George VI considered to have the highest risk of collapse. Because these large ice platforms hold back inland glaciers, the ice carried by these glaciers can flow faster into the sea when the ice shelves collapse, which contributes to sea-level rise. The new study shows that a collapse of Larsen C would result in inland ice discharging about 4 mm to sea level, while the response of glaciers to George VI collapse could contribute over five times more to global sea levels, around 22 mm.

“These numbers, while not enormous in themselves, are only one part of a larger sea-level budget including loss from other glaciers around the world and from the Greenland, East and West Antarctic ice sheets. Taken together with these other sources, the impacts could be significant to island nations and coastal populations,” explains study-author Nicholas Barrand, a glaciologist at the University of Birmingham in the UK. He adds: “The Antarctic Peninsula may be seen as a bellwether for changes in the much larger East and West Antarctic ice sheets as climate warming extends south.”

Continue reading “New study puts a figure on sea-level rise following Antarctic ice shelves’ collapse” »

Watersheds channel water from streams to oceans, and more than $450 billion in food, manufactured goods and other economic factors depend on them, according to the Environmental Protection Agency. Watersheds also are crucial to the health of surrounding ecosystems and communities. Now, researchers from the University of Missouri have found that climatic changes and urban development, when working in tandem, could have profound effects on watersheds by midcentury.

“In some cases, the effects of urban development and climatic changes on hydrologic conditions can be intensified when both stressors are considered,” said Michael Sunde, a researcher in MU’s School of Natural Resources. “In spring, for example, we found that both factors could increase runoff, which, in turn, can send more pollutants into streams, increase erosion and cause more serious flooding.”

Sunde (pronounced “Soond”) and his colleagues used several models, including land cover change, hydrologic and climate model projections to identify potential changes in a Missouri watershed for the mid-21st century. Individually, increased urbanization and climate change were shown to have different impacts on the watershed. Researchers found that urban development is likely to increase runoff and limit the amount of water absorbed into the ground as groundwater. Evaporation of water from soil and other surfaces and consumptive water use by plants is also expected to decrease due to urbanization. Conversely, projected temperature increases and changing precipitation patterns would cause decreases to runoff and increased evaporation and plant transpiration. However, climate impacts were shown to vary widely, depending on the season and direction of precipitation changes projected by climate models.

Continue reading “Urbanization and changes to climate could pack a one-two punch for watersheds in the future, study finds” »

Blockchain developers won’t be at peace until every single thing in the world is on blockchain. Or, so it seems.

Web developer Rui Gomes has created Lighting Spin — a web app that lets you play roulette over Bitcoin Lightning Network.

The app lets you wager anywhere between 1,000 Satoshi (approximately 6¢) to 100,000 Satoshi (approximately $6) per round. All you need to play the game is load your balance using a wallet service with support for the Lightning Network – like Eclair, for instance.

When my colleague Professor Tom Gill at University of Texas at El Paso alerted me to a recent study noting that cargo ships may be creating more lightning, my first reaction was that I wasn’t surprised at all. Though this may be a surprising finding to many scientists and the public, I have been conducting research for over two decades on how cities affect rainfall, storms, and lightning. As I read the paper, it was apparent to me that some of the same physical processes were at play with the cargo ship — lightning relationships. So how does a cargo ship create lightning?