Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
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Category: climatology – Page 61

Nuclear arsenals remain large enough to fundamentally shift the Earth system in the blink of an eye.

The U.S. and Russia have recently agreed to hold talks on the New START Treaty, and the only accord left regulating the two largest nuclear arsenals in the world. While this is undoubtedly good news, we must not allow it to lull us into complacency. Global events this year, most notably in Ukraine, have raised fears of a nuclear conflict to levels not seen since the cold war. More than 10,000 nuclear warheads remain in the world, and the Kremlin’s language regarding weapons of mass destruction has become increasingly threatening in 2022.

Global famine and climate breakdown

In 1982, a group of scientists, including Carl Sagan, began to raise the alarm about a climate apocalypse that could follow a nuclear war. Using simple computer simulations and historic volcanic eruptions as natural analogs, they showed how smoke that lofted into the stratosphere from urban firestorms could block the sun for years.

Continue reading “Even a small nuclear war could cause global famine — here’s what the data shows” | >

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” | >