Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
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Category: climatology – Page 59

As the world rushes toward “the greatest disconnect between supply and demand in the history of commodities,” Snow Lake Lithium CEO Philip Gross talks us through his company’s plans to open the world’s first all-electric lithium mine in Canada.

Now that we’re starting to see the chaotic and destructive early effects of climate change begin to wreak havoc the world over, the world seems to have finally reached a consensus that we need to decarbonize as rapidly as possible. Which is great – better late than never. But a huge percentage of the push toward net zero carbon by 2050 is going to rely on batteries, and the simple fact is this: there’s not going to be enough lithium.

There’s plenty in the ground, but as we wrote a couple of months ago, there’s nowhere near enough coming out of it, and while everyone seems to be expecting electric vehicles to continue taking over the auto market, the numbers look dire. By 2030, if all existing mines keep producing and everything that’s under construction comes to fruition, there’ll still be barely enough metal to satisfy half of demand. This will be a lithium resource squeeze of epic proportions.

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It will be used to power oil and gas production.

Hywind Tampen, the world’s largest floating wind farm, located off the coast of Norway, has become operational, a company press release said. Of the 11 turbines involved in the project, the first turbine began power production on November 13, with another six scheduled to go online this year.

With the impending doom of climate change and the recent upshoot of fuel prices, countries around the world are looking to switch aggressively to renewable energy. While those in the tropics are looking at solar power, others that can access winds over the seas are looking to build offshore wind farms.

Although increasing the size of wind turbines is a straightforward way to increase the energy output of these facilities, it also comes with increased costs for constructing these structures. Floating wind farms are being looked at as a possible solution to this problem, and Hywind Tampen is the first real-world test of this kind.

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There might be room for everyone, or not. At first glance, the connections between the world’s growing population and climate change seem obvious. The more people we have on this planet, the larger their collective impact on the climate.

The global population is projected to reach 8 billion on 15 November 2022, and India is projected to surpass China as the world’s most populous country in 2023, according to World Population Prospects 2022, released today on World Population Day.

“This year’s World Population Day falls during a milestone year, when we anticipate the birth of the Earth’s eight billionth inhabitant. This is an occasion to celebrate our diversity, recognize our common humanity, and marvel at advancements in health that have extended lifespans and dramatically reduced maternal and child mortality rates,” said UN Secretary-General António Guterres. “At the same time, it is a reminder of our shared responsibility to care for our planet and a moment to reflect on where we still fall short of our commitments to one another,” he added.

The global population is growing at its slowest rate since 1950, having fallen under 1 per cent in 2020. The latest projections by the United Nations suggest that the world’s population could grow to around 8.5 billion in 2030 and 9.7 billion in 2050. It is projected to reach a peak of around 10.4 billion people during the 2080s and to remain at that level until 2100.

Continue reading “World population to reach 8 billion on 15 November 2022” | >

There might be room for everyone, or not.

At first glance, the connections between the world’s growing population and climate change seem obvious. The more people we have on this planet, the larger their collective impact on the climate.

Looking back to the Stone Age.

Continue reading “Earth’s population will reach 8 billion next week — here’s what that means for our planet” | >

Microbial life may have resided within the first four kilometers of Mars’s porous crust.

Four billion years ago, the solar system was still young. Almost fully formed, its planets were starting to experience asteroid strikes a little less frequently. Our own planet could have become habitable as long as 3.9 billion years ago, but its primitive biosphere was much different than it is today. Life had not yet invented photosynthesis, which some 500 million years later would become its main source of energy. The primordial microbes — the common ancestors to all current life forms on Earth — in our planet’s oceans, therefore, had to survive on another source of energy.

Some of the oldest life forms in our biosphere were microorganisms known as “hydrogenotrophic methanogens” that particularly benefited from the atmospheric composition of the time. Feeding on the CO2 (carbon dioxide) and H2 (dihydrogen) that abounded in the atmosphere (with H2 representing between 0.01 and 0.1% of the atmospheric composition, compared to the current approximate of 0.00005%), they harnessed enough energy to colonize the surface of our planet’s oceans.

In return, they released into the atmosphere large amounts of CH4 (a.k.a., methane, from which they get their name), a potent greenhouse gas that accumulated and heated up the climate. Since our sun at the time was not as bright as it is today, it may not have been able to maintain temperate conditions on the planet’s surface without the intervention of other aspects. As such, thanks to these methanogens, the very emergence of life on Earth may itself have helped ensure our planet’s habitability, setting the right conditions for the evolution and complexification of the terrestrial biosphere for the billions of years that followed.

Continue reading “Mars shows how even the simplest life forms can destroy their own planet” | >

Aspiring bakers are frequently called upon to adapt award-winning recipes based on differing kitchen setups. Someone might use an eggbeater instead of a stand mixer to make prize-winning chocolate chip cookies, for instance.

Being able to reproduce a recipe in different situations and with varying setups is critical for both talented chefs and , the latter of whom are faced with a similar problem of adapting and reproducing their own “recipes” when trying to validate and work with new AI models. These models have applications in ranging from climate analysis to brain research.

“When we talk about data, we have a practical understanding of the digital assets we deal with,” said Eliu Huerta, scientist and lead for Translational AI at the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Argonne National Laboratory. “With an AI model, it’s a little less clear; are we talking about data structured in a smart way, or is it computing, or software, or a mix?”

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Early on Thursday morning, Hurricane Nicole made landfall near Vero Beach on Florida’s eastern coast. Because Nicole had a very large eye, nearly 60 miles in diameter, its strongest winds were located well to the north of this landfalling position.

As a result of this, Kennedy Space Center took some of the most intense wind gusts from Nicole late on Wednesday night and Thursday morning. While such winds from a Category 1 hurricane are unlikely to damage facilities, they are of concern because the space agency left its Artemis I mission—consisting of the Space Launch System rocket and Orion spacecraft—exposed on a pad at Launch Complex-39B. The pad is a stone’s throw from the Atlantic Ocean.

How intense were the winds? The National Weather Service hosts data from NASA sensors attached to this launch pad’s three lighting towers on a public website. It can be a little difficult to interpret the readings because there are sensors at altitudes varying from 132 feet to 457 feet. Most of the publicly available data appears to come from an altitude of about 230 feet, however, which would represent the area of the Space Launch System rocket where the core stage is attached to the upper stage. The entire stack reaches a height of about 370 feet above the ground.

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