Category: climatology – Page 64
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.
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.
Orbon Alija/iStock.
However, a closer look with a longer time horizon reveals relationships between population size and climate change that can help us better understand both humanity’s predicament as the global population nears 8 billion people – a milestone the United Nations expects the world to hit on about Nov. 15, 2022.
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.
While this is the likeliest explanation for the early development of habitability on Earth, what was it like for the other planets of the solar system, such as our neighbor, the red planet? As we continue to explore Mars, it is becoming ever clearer that similar environmental conditions were developing on its surface at the same time as those that enabled methanogens to flourish in the oceans back on Earth.
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 computational scientists, 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 scientific fields 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?”
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.
For the past two centuries, humans have relied on fossil fuels for concentrated energy; hundreds of millions of years of photosynthesis packed into a convenient, energy-dense substance. But that supply is finite, and fossil fuel consumption has tremendous negative impact on Earth’s climate.
“The biggest challenge many people don’t realize is that even nature has no solution for the amount of energy we use,” said University of Chicago chemist Wenbin Lin. Not even photosynthesis is that good, he said: “We will have to do better than nature, and that’s scary.”
One possible option scientists are exploring is “artificial photosynthesis”—reworking a plant’s system to make our own kinds of fuels. However, the chemical equipment in a single leaf is incredibly complex, and not so easy to turn to our own purposes.
Climate change delegates traveling aboard private jets known to release more carbon dioxide emissions have added to the controversy surrounding the United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP27) in Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt.
Hundreds of environmental activists stopped private jets from taking off from Amsterdam’s Schiphol Airport the day before the conference started last week.
“We face two global crises in housing and climate change.”
Southern California met its first-in-the-world 3D-printed zero net home thanks to Mighty Buildings. As part of a 40-unit community in Desert Hot Springs, these 3D-printed houses also draw attention to environmental and economic strategies.
“We are excited to be the first company in the world to complete what we believe to be the sustainable housing standard of the future,” said Mighty Buildings CEO Slava Solonitsyn, as per Dezeen.
Mighty Buildings.
As mentioned in the Dezeen, the 1,171 square foot (159 square meters) house was finished by the Oakland-based technology corporation in September 2022. The Quatro, a two-bedroom, two-bathroom home built by Ehrlich Yanai Rhee Chaney Architects (EYRC), is said to use a flexible, panelized kit of parts from Mighty Buildings to produce as much energy as it uses.