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Category: climatology – Page 57

Could video streaming be as bad for the climate as driving a car? Calculating Internet’s hidden carbon footprint.

We are used to thinking that going digital means going green. While that is true for some activities — for example, making a video call to the other side of the ocean is better than flying there — the situation is subtler in many other cases. For example, driving a small car to the movie theatre with a friend may have lower carbon emissions than streaming the same movie alone at home.

How do we reach this conclusion? Surprisingly, making these estimates is fairly complicated.

ATHVisions/iStock.

Continue reading “Video streaming as polluting as driving? See the new calculations” | >

The science of meteorology has taken tremendous strides in the past two decades thanks to a confluence of several inputs: improved computing power; better modeling of data; more observational data points ranging from the device in your hand to the satellites orbiting earth; and advanced data science applications. As recently as two decades ago, providing an accurate forecast three to four days out was considered innovative. Today a five-day forecast is accurate about 80 percent of the time. Most weather experts are predicting even more extended accuracy by 2030 with the application of artificial intelligence for numerical weather prediction output. But beyond improving accuracy, here are a few other forecasting trends to watch in 2023.

Hyper-relevant Forecasting

Just like other sets of analytics have become more tailored, or localized to the user, weather intelligence is bringing forecast relevancy to an individual organization or entity. A business can determine which risks are most significant to their operations, such as wind gusts, lightning, heavy rains, and ice accretion, and then be alerted when those risk thresholds are met. While there’s growing use among utilities, municipalities and other infrastructure decision makers, hyper-relevant forecasting is growing in other sectors. For example, by combining weather data with purchasing trends and consumer demand data, one grocery chain learned that even a small change in temperature can result in a significant shift in what people buy. The store improved its revenues by modeling this impact and managing inventory accordingly. Even sports teams are applying hyper-relevant forecasting for everything from daily stadium operations to food and beverage decisions and strategic game plays.

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Environmentalists are up in arms.

The U.K. has approved its first coal mine in 30 years, despite climate concerns. The British government approved the move on Wednesday, Dec. 7, 2022, just one year after it hosted the major climate summit, COP26, reported the BBC

The mine, near Whitehaven in Cumbria, will take two years to build and is set to produce around 2.8 tonnes of coking coal per year, according to the Washington Post.

Environmentalists have voiced their concerns, saying the new mine will stoke global emissions and spread a negative message around the world about Britain’s climate image.

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Government support is needed, however, to help consumers overcome heat pumps’ higher upfront costs relative to alternatives. The costs of purchasing and installing a heat pump can be up to four times as much as those for a gas boiler. Financial incentives for heat pumps are now available in 30 countries.

In the IEA’s most optimistic scenario – in which all governments achieve their energy and climate pledges in full – heat pumps become the main way of decarbonising space and water heating worldwide. The agency estimates that heat pumps have the potential to reduce global carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions by at least 500 million tonnes in 2030 – equal to the annual CO2 emissions of all cars in Europe today. Leading manufacturers report promising signs of momentum and policy support and have announced plans to invest more than US$4 billion in expanding heat pump production and related efforts, mostly in Europe.

Opportunities also exist for heat pumps to provide low-temperature heat in industrial sectors, especially in the paper, food, and chemicals industries. In Europe alone, 15 gigawatts of heat pumps could be installed across 3,000 facilities in these three sectors, which have been hit hard by recent rises in natural gas prices.

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The new concepts are part of the company’s initiative to get the aviation industry to net-zero by 2050.

Brazilian aerospace company Embraer announced new aircraft concepts this week to reduce carbon emissions. The new concepts would also help the aviation industry meet its net-zero climate goals by 2050, a company report explains.

The news comes a year after the company detailed the study of four new aircraft concepts powered by new technologies and renewable energies amid the backdrop of the COP26 climate conference in Glasgow, Scotland, which addressed what governments can do to avert the worst effects of climate change.

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Saturn’s moon Titan is one of the weirdest and most intriguing worlds in our solar system. It is the only place we know of in the universe for sure beyond Earth that has rivers, lakes and larger bodies of liquid, but on Titan these features are filled with flammable hydrocarbons like methane and ethane.

Studying Titan in depth has been difficult due to a thick atmosphere of clouds and haze, but NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) is giving scientists their first detailed glimpse of those clouds, and by extension, the weather patterns at work on this unique world.

“We had waited for years to use Webb’s infrared vision to study Titan’s atmosphere,” said JWST Principal Investigator Conor Nixon. “Detecting clouds is exciting because it validates long-held predictions from computer models about Titan’s climate, that clouds would form readily in the mid-northern hemisphere during its late summertime when the surface is warmed by the Sun.”

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Cooling accounts for about 15 percent of global energy consumption. Conventional clear windows allow the sun to heat up interior spaces, which energy-guzzling air-conditioners must then cool down. But what if a window could help cool the room, use no energy and preserve the view?

Tengfei Luo, the Dorini Family Professor of Energy Studies at the University of Notre Dame, and postdoctoral associate Seongmin Kim have devised a transparent coating for windows that does just that.

The coating, or transparent radiative cooler (TRC), allows to come in and keeps other heat-producing light out. The researchers estimate that this invention can reduce electric cooling costs by one-third in hot climates compared to conventional glass windows.

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NASA’s Discover supercomputer simulated the extreme conditions of the distant cosmos.

A team of scientists from NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center used the U.S. space agency’s Center for Climate Simulation (NCCS) Discover supercomputer to run 100 simulations of jets emerging from supermassive black holes.

The scientists set out to better understand these jets — massive beams of energetic particles shooting out into the cosmos — as they play a crucial role in the evolution of the universe.

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Cooling accounts for about 15 percent of global energy consumption. Conventional clear windows allow the sun to heat up interior spaces, which energy-guzzling air-conditioners must then cool down. But what if a window could help cool the room, use no energy and preserve the view?

Tengfei Luo, the Dorini Family Professor of Energy Studies at the University of Notre Dame, and postdoctoral associate Seongmin Kim have devised a transparent coating for windows that does just that (ACS Energy Letters, “High-Performance Transparent Radiative Cooler Designed by Quantum Computing”).

The coating, or transparent radiative cooler (TRC), allows visible light to come in and keeps other heat-producing light out. The researchers estimate that this invention can reduce electric cooling costs by one-third in hot climates compared to conventional glass windows.

Read more | >