Engineered solar panels harvest energy at night

Climate News Links on April 27, 2022

Stanford University engineers have added thermoelectric generation to solar panels enabling them to harvest heat energy radiating to space

Soon, solar panels could work at night. Photo: Nuno Marques via Unsplash / from the article

by Sarah Roach, 7/4/2022 in Protocol

Stanford engineers make solar panels work at night: Meet the thermoelectric generator, what could be solar panels’ newest friend.

The Stanford team used a device known as a thermoelectric generator. As the name hints, the device generates electricity from difference in temperature between the ambient air and solar cells. The device basically harvests energy that passes between solar panels back into space at night, a process known as radiative cooling. (That process isn’t limited to solar panels, either.)

It has a particularly strong effect on clear nights, which is when the researchers found they were able to generate the most power. The new system can offer a “continuous renewable power source” throughout both the day and nighttime and could cost less to maintain over the long run compared to battery storage, according to the new paper published in Applied Physics Letters.

Read the complete article….

Featured image: A thermoelectric circuit composed of materials of different Seebeck coefficient (p-doped and n-doped semiconductors), configured as a thermoelectric generator. / Ken Brazier – self-made, based on w:Image:ThermoelectricPowerGen.jpg by CM Cullen (which is GFDL 1.2 and CC-by 2.5 licensed) via Wikimedia

Views expressed in this post are those of its author(s), not necessarily all Vote Climate One members.

Leaders Debate: Live view was owned by Sky News

William P. Hall on April 24, 2022

If you compare what Scotty and Albo think about climate change, you won’t find it here. Unlike Q&A, Sky didn’t find an audience concerned about the future

IN FULL: Sky News-The Courier Mail People’s Forum: Scott Morrison vs Anthony Albanese: “REAL NEWS, HONEST VIEWS”

Editors commentary

After not finding any freely available live broadcast of the Leaders Debate from the Gabba Stadium in Brisbane, someone sent me a link to the YouTube version, linked here. Comparing the questions and responses here to what transpired on ABC’s Q&A session in Gladstone is like comparing two completely different planets.

Based on questions Sky News read out, their audience was primarily interested in personal things like taxes, jobs, immigration, cost of living, pensions, health services, etc. Energy policy was mentioned perhaps twice, net-zero (with no explanation) was mentioned about once; and I don’t think issues like climate change, climate emergency, etc. were mentioned at all by questioners or the ‘leaders’. Interestingly, in over half an hour of searching with Google (which I am fairly good at using) I couldn’t find any news outlet or other organ who has published a complete transcript of the debate.

Contrast this with ABC’s live broadcast of Q&A from Gladstone, Qld:

Q&A Live from Gladstone

Note that the Youtube video from Q&A includes a complete and searchable transcript of the video, making it easy to analyze the discussion. In any event there were a good 18 minutes of discussion relating to the climate emergency and its effects on Australia.

In any event, my own thoughts on the Leaders Debate, is that if this the best on offer by the dominant parties, if you are concerned about our future in a catastrophically changing climate, bring on the independents. Labor may be better than the COALition, but if they have no intention to shut down coal mining or gas production, the difference is minor where climate action is concerned.

Featured Image: Grab from the Featured Video.

Views expressed in this post are those of its author(s), not necessarily all Vote Climate One members.

True grimness of IPCC’s report still misunderstood

Climate News Links on April 18, 2022

Most media concluded that emissions could go on rising until 2025 and the world could still stay under 1.5C. A potentially lethal error.

photo by Mario Tama / from the article

by Matt McGrath, 16/03/2022 in BBC News

Climate change: Key UN finding widely misinterpreted: A key finding in the latest IPCC climate report has been widely misinterpreted, according to scientists involved in the study:

A major challenge in communicating complex messages about climate change is that the more simplified media reports of these events often have more influence than the science itself.

This worries observers who argue that giving countries the impression that emissions can continue to grow until 2025 would be a disaster for the world.

“We definitely don’t have the luxury of letting emissions grow for yet another three years,” said Kaisa Kosonen from Greenpeace.

“We have eight years to nearly halve global emissions. That’s an enormous task, but still doable, as the IPCC has just reminded us – but if people now start chasing emissions peak by 2025 as some kind of benchmark, we don’t have a chance.”

Read the complete article….

Editor’s note: Based on my rigorous evaluation of the IPCC’s scientific methodology and writing processes, even the corrected understanding of the IPCC report STILL UNDERSTATES the likelihood of the risk from, and the magnitude of consequences of failures or even delays in stopping the progress of global warming. In reality, the report says it is already too late to avoid global average temperatures rising more than 1.5 °C. By reaching net zero in 2030 AND extracting and sequestering most of the excess CO₂ already in the atmosphere we might be able to bring temperatures back down to 1.5 °C or less. Continuing with business as usual keeps us on the road to runaway warming to Earth’s Hothouse Hell and social collapse leading towards global mass extinction of humans and most other large and complex organisms on the planet.

Featured Image: A dried out reservoir in Chile where drought has forced the government to take emergency measures. / Getty Images / from the article.

Views expressed in this post are those of its author(s), not necessarily all Vote Climate One members.

Global warming report for March 2022 shows rise

Climate News Links on April 17, 2022

James Hansen’s March 2022 global average temperature still trending up (close to all-time record for the month) when temps normally drop

By Hansen et al., 15/04/2022 from Climate Science, Awareness and Solutions, Columbia Univ,

March Temperature Update & Butterfly Report

March was notably warm (Fig. 1), more than 1.3°C warmer than the average March in 1880-1920, despite continued La Nina cooling of the Pacific. Because of the present planetary energy imbalance – discussed in prior posts – we expect 2022 to be substantially warmer than 2021. [my emphasis] The imbalance is due to surging growth rates of GHGs (greenhouse gases), solar irradiance rising from its recent minimum, and perhaps the aerosol forcing becoming less negative, although the latter remains speculative given the absence of measurements of the global aerosol forcing.

The imbalance – excess energy coming in – is not enough to push the 2022 annual temperature above the 2020 record, but it will soon do that. Meanwhile, models forecasting the tropics favor continuation of the La Nina this summer, which favors strong tropical storms.

Read the complete article….

Editors note: Hansen’s Climate Science, Awareness and Solutions Lab in the Earth Institute at Columbia University is an excellent source of graphics summarizing the current state of global warming and the climate emergency

Featured Image: Fig. 1.  Monthly global surface temperature anomaly (°C) relative to 1880-1920 mean. / From the article.

Views expressed in this post are those of its author(s), not necessarily all Vote Climate One members.

Tells the truth about electing honest government

Climate News Links on April 16, 2022

Excuse the profanity, but Juice Media perfectly describes how Vote Climate One is trying to use preferential voting to get honest government.

Featured Image: Preferential voting in the House of Representatives. / Parliamentary Education Office licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.

Views expressed in this post are those of its author(s), not necessarily all Vote Climate One members.

Michael Mann on South African flooding catastrophe

Climate News Links on April 16, 2022

In a warming world La Niña enables air over the ocean to carry more water vapor. When pushed into hills ashore, the vapor turns into floods.

Michael Mann discusses the deadly South African floods, the role that climate crisis is playing with these extreme events, and what we need to do about it, with BBC World News “The Context” (Apr 14, 2022

Featured Image: Area of extreme flooding, Durban, South Africa on the same latitude as the NSW northern coast area (e.g., Coffs Harbor) demonstrating the apparently global extent of NB4 rainfalls along this band of the world. (The Guardian also reports on these floods) / From Google Earth Pro, by William Hall. Public domain.

Views expressed in this post are those of its author(s), not necessarily all Vote Climate One members.

Famine is a likely result if global warming not stopped

Climate News Links on April 16, 2022

Genetically restricted cultivars of major food crops likely to be early casualties of extreme temps and weather as world continues warming

Top: Cavendish banana plants infected with Panama 4 in the Philippines where the fungus has destroyed tens of thousands of acres of plantations. Below: on the left is the Cavendish plant root infected with the pathogen Panama 4, on the right is a healthy root. Photographs: Fernando Garcia-Bastidas / from the article

by Nina Lakhani, et al., 14/04/2022 in The Guardian

Our food system isn’t ready for the climate crisis: The world’s farms produce only a handful of varieties of bananas, avocados, coffee and other foods – leaving them more vulnerable to the climate breakdown

The climate breakdown is already threatening many of our favorite foods. In Asia, rice fields are being flooded with saltwater; cyclones have wiped out vanilla crops in Madagascar; in Central America higher temperatures ripen coffee too quickly; drought in sub–Saharan Africa is withering chickpea crops; and rising ocean acidity is killing oysters and scallops in American waters.

All our food systems – agriculture, forestry, fisheries and aquaculture – are buckling under the stress of rising temperatures, wildfires, droughts, and floods. 

Even in the best-case scenario, global heating is expected to make the earth less suitable for the crops that provide most of our calories. If no action is taken to curtail the climate crisis, crop losses will be devastating. 

Read the complete article….

Featured Image: A corn crop blighted with Southern corn leaf blight and stalk rot (Bipolaris maydis), by J.C. Wells, North Carolina State University, Bugwood.org / Creative Commons License   licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 License. / via Forestry Images

Views expressed in this post are those of its author(s), not necessarily all Vote Climate One members.

For IPCC views, read Tech Sum not Policy Sum

Climate News Links on April 13, 2022

IPCC Reports are highly political processes. The Summary for Policy Makers reflects govt. views. The scientists write the Technical Summary.

Getty image / From the article

by Amy Westervelt – 12/04/2022 in Drilled

The Technical Summary kinda slaps (IPCC Mitigation Report, Part 2): Forget the Summary for Policymakers, the Technical Summary Is Where It’s At

If I could give other journalists covering this report just one piece of advice, it would be this. The Summary for Policymakers (SPM) goes through a tedious approval process during which representatives from 195 governments (some of them very dependent on our continued dependence on fossil fuels, cough cough the U.S. and Saudi Arabia, I’m looking at you). The Technical Summary, on the other hand, comes straight from the authors and is generally released at the same time as the SPM. As Max Boykoff, a contributing author to Ch 13 (on policy) put it: “The technical summary is the one that’s prepared by authors of the report. So it does go through a review process by governments and experts, but ultimately the authors have a say there.” Whereas with the SPM, while authors can reject input that would make the summary inaccurate, that seems to be the most they can do to maintain the integrity of that document; preventing it from becoming a mealy-mouthed political document on the other hand, not so much.

Read the complete article….

Featured image: IPCC’s review process for formal reports. / Original source: IPCC’s Preparing Reports. Via Hall (02/2022) Some fundamental issues relating to the science underlying climate policy: The IPCC and COP26 couldn’t help but get it wrong.

Views expressed in this post are those of its author(s), not necessarily all Vote Climate One members.

Bad outlook for our next El Niño fire season

Climate News Links on April 12, 2022

Global Ecology and Biogeography journal article forecasts that extreme/widespread fire events under 2 °C will likely exceed anything yet seen

Representative day-of-burning maps for two fires that occurred in 2020, Cameron Peak and Holiday Farm. / From the article

by Coop et al., 19/03/2022 in Global Ecology and Biogeography

Extreme fire spread events and area burned under recent and future climate in the western USA

Results: Extreme single-day fire spread events >1,100 ha (the top 16%, >1 SD) accounted for 70% of the cumulative area burned over the period of analysis. The variation in annual area burned was closely tied to the number and mean size of spread events and distributional skewness towards more large events. For example, we identified 441 extreme events in 2020 that together burned 2.2 million ha across our study area, in contrast to an average of 168 per year that burned 0.5 million ha annually between 2002 and 2019. Fire season climate variables were correlated with the annual number of extreme events and area burned. Our models predicted that the annual number of extreme fire spread events more than double under a 2°C warming scenario, with an attendant doubling in the area burned.

Conclusions: Exceptional fire seasons like 2020 will become more likely, and wildfire activity under future extremes is predicted to exceed anything yet witnessed. Safeguarding human communities and supporting resilient ecosystems will require new lines of scientific inquiry, new land management approaches and accelerated climate mitigation efforts.

Read the complete article….

Featured Image: Hypothetical distribution of daily fire spread events during normal and extreme fire years. Increases in the annual area burned could potentially be accounted for by more fire spread events (number), larger event size (mean) and/or more large events (right skewness) / From the article

Views expressed in this post are those of its author(s), not necessarily all Vote Climate One members.

Not much ice left – warm blue arctic ocean due soon

Climate News Links on April 12, 2022

Blue oceans absorb more heat than ice caps. Loss of thick ice at winter’s end makes blue ocean likely soon. Expect more extreme weather!

Loss of thicker March sea ice from 1979 to 2022… Zack Labe, 12/04/2022

Featured Image: Arctic Sea Ice Thickness By Year. / Data: PIOMASS v2.1 (Zhang & Rothrock 2003) from 1979-2022 (averaged with ≥0.15 thickness) / Source: http://psc.apl.uw.edu/research/projects/arctic-sea-ice-volume-anomaly/ / Graphic: Zachary Labe (@ZLabe)

Views expressed in this post are those of its author(s), not necessarily all Vote Climate One members.