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Category: climatology – Page 154

Humanity has sought to make the Earth’s oceans potable for thousands of years. The Norse tale of Utgarda-Loki tells of Odin being tricked into drinking from a horn connected to the sea, while Exodus 15:22–26 of the Bible likely describes Moses desalinating the water of Marah:

When they came to Marah, they could not drink the water of Marah because it was bitter; therefore it was named Marah. And the people grumbled against Moses, saying, “What shall we drink?” And he cried to the Lord, and the Lord showed him a log, and he threw it into the water, and the water became sweet.

Even the Greek philosopher Aristotle once observed that “salt water, when it turns into vapor, becomes sweet and the vapor does not form salt water again when it condenses.” Yet, despite the continued accelerating pace of technological advancement since we switched from BC to AD, turning salt water into fresh has remained more expensive than transforming it into wine. But as climate change continues to ravage the world’s watersheds, we may soon have little choice other than to turn to the sea’s bounty of H2O to keep our growing global population from getting parched.

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Should definitely be worked on. Eventually the same stuff could be used to reverse engineer/terraform Venus.

When politicians talk about the Paris Climate Agreement, it’s usually framed in terms of restrictions on emissions for states and businesses. But the Paris Agreement wasn’t just an agreement to regulate — it was also an agreement to innovate. That’s because most experts agree that the world won’t be able to keep global temperature rise below 2 degrees Celsius, unless there’s a way to physically remove CO2 from the atmosphere.

A Swiss startup called Climeworks has made that their goal, developing the most advanced carbon-capture technology to date. VICE News went to Switzerland to see how the technology works and hear how the business plans to tackle climate change. Problem is, what Climeworks is doing isn’t cheap.

This segment originally aired Oct. 16, 2017, on VICE News Tonight on HBO.

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China is leading the world in solar power installations by a long run. ASECEA is predicting that 50GW of solar power is well within reach of being installed this year. In June and July of 2017, China installed 25GW of solar power – and they’ll push the globe past 100GW total for the year.

At China’s ‘State of the Union address’ equivalent, just yesterday, president Xi Jinping said, “Any harm we inflict on nature will eventually return to haunt us… this is a reality we have to face.”

“Taking a driving seat in international cooperation to respond to climate change, China has become an important participant, contributor, and torchbearer in the global endeavor for ecological civilization,” said President Xi Jinping, and that China must “develop a new model of modernization with humans developing in harmony with nature.”

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“Scientists and philosophers… had always assumed that the world worked by physical laws, and if you could measure initial conditions accurately enough, those laws would let you predict the future indefinitely. As James Gleick described it in his book Chaos: Making a New Science, this view was very wrong.”

“There was always one small compromise, so small that working scientists usually forgot it was there, lurking in a corner of their philosophies like an unpaid bill. Measurements could never be perfect,” he wrote. “Scientists marching under Newton’s banner actually waved another flag that said something like this: Given an approximate knowledge of a system’s initial conditions and an understanding of natural law, one can calculate the approximate behaviour of the system. This assumption lay at the philosophical heart of science.”

“Today we know how wrong this assumption was. The Three Body Problem is now recognized as a classic example of a chaotic system. Like the butterfly that causes a hurricane by flapping its wings, it is exquisitely sensitive to initial conditions. The tiniest tweak can have massive consequences down the line.”

Like the endlessly repeating patterns of chaos theory, the new solutions discovered by the Chinese researchers make for elaborate and weirdly beautiful images when they are plotted in two dimensions. They are unlikely to have ever existed in reality, however. Because of how solar systems form, planets, moons and stars tend to settle into regular orbits on a single plane.

The Chinese researchers credit their discoveries to advancements in computer science and their novel technique called clean numerical simulation, which is a strategy for modelling chaotic systems, in which solutions are reached indirectly by continuous refinement, rather than directly by brute calculation.

“In this paper, we numerically obtain 695 families of Newtonian periodic planar collisionless orbits of three-body system with equal mass and zero angular momentum in case of initial conditions with isosceles collinear configuration, including the well-known figure-eight family found by Moore in 1993, the 11 families found by Šuvakov and Dmitrašinović in 2013, and more than 600 new families that have never been reported, to the best of our knowledge,” reads the report by XiaoMing Li and ShiJun Liao.

Continue reading “How Chinese scientists used a supercomputer to solve the ancient puzzle called the Three Body Problem” | >

There’s a colorless, odorless, and largely benign gas that humanity just can’t get enough of. We produce 40 trillion kg of carbon dioxide each year, and we’re on track to cross a crucial emissions threshold that will cause global temperature rise to pass the dangerous 2°C limit set by the Paris climate agreement.

But, in hushed tones, climate scientists are already talking about a technology that could pull us back from the brink. It’s called direct-air capture, and it consists of machines that work like a tree does, sucking carbon dioxide (CO2) out from the air, but on steroids—capturing thousands of times more carbon in the same amount of time, and, hopefully, ensuring we don’t suffer climate catastrophe.

There are at least two reasons that, to date, conversations about direct air capture have been muted. First, climate scientists have hoped global carbon emissions would come under control, and we wouldn’t need direct air capture. But most experts believe that ship has sailed. That brings up the second issue: to date, all estimates suggest direct air capture would be exorbitantly expensive to deploy.

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This Northern Hemisphere summer, researchers spent two months collecting samples from a submerged landmass known as Zealandia.

As a result, we could gain new insight into everything from ancient life forms to climate change.

Tens of millions of years ago, a landmass that’s being referred to as Zealandia was largely submerged beneath the Pacific Ocean. This summer, a team of scientists set out on an underwater expedition using an advanced research vessel, and the results might yield brand-new insight into Earth’s prehistory.

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Microsoft, Facebook, and the telecoms infrastructure company Telxius have announced the completion of the highest capacity subsea cable to ever cross the Atlantic Ocean. The cable is capable of transmitting 160 terabits of data per second, the equivalent of streaming 71 million HD videos at the same time, and 16 million times faster than an average home internet connection, Microsoft claims. The cable will be operational by early 2018.

Called Marea, which is Spanish for “tide,” the 4,000 mile long subsea cable lies 17,000 feet below the ocean surface and extends between Virginia Beach, Virginia and the city of Bilbao in Spain. Marea also stretches a route south of most existing transatlantic cables. Because of this, Microsoft says the cable will provide resiliency for those living in the US and Europe by safeguarding against natural disasters or other major events that might cause disruptions to connections like those seen during Hurricane Sandy. More importantly to Microsoft and Facebook: both companies have large data center operations in Virginia.

“Marea comes at a critical time,” said Brad Smith, president of Microsoft. “Submarine cables in the Atlantic already carry 55 percent more data than trans-Pacific routes and 40 percent more data than between the US and Latin America. There is no question that the demand for data flows across the Atlantic will continue to increase.” For most of the route, the cable — made up of eight pairs of fiber optic cables enclosed by copper — lays on the ocean floor. Some parts are buried to protect from shipping traffic, usually in areas closer to the shore.

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The jagged geological ridges, found at the highest elevations located close to Pluto’s equator, soar hundreds of feet into the sky and are as high as some of the tallest skyscrapers on Earth.

According to an article in the latest issue of planetary science journal, Icarus, the colossal “ice-scrapers” observed on Pluto’s surface are vestiges from the last Ice Age that occurred on the dwarf planet millions of years ago.

Scientists believe that the “ice blades” are the result of solid methane evaporation that formed the towers of ice on the mountain peaks along Chile’s Chajnantor plain.

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