Heat pumps save energy for heating and cooling

Climate News Links on April 10, 2022

Heat pumps use physical laws of thermodynamics to move large amounts of thermal energy for heating and cooling with little energy expenditure.

Image: Polytechnic University of Valencia / from the article

by Emiliano Bellini, 08/04/2020 in PV Magazine

Residential heat pump produces water up to 75 C: Scientists in Spain have developed a new heat pump that can produce 6.49 kWh of heat for each kilowatt-hour of power it consumes. The device could generate hot water at a temperature of up to 75 C.

Researchers from the Polytechnic University of Valencia in Spain and heating specialist Saunier Duval, a unit of Germany-based Vaillant Group, have developed a new residential heat pump based on natural refrigerants.

The device uses propane as a refrigerant, which allows for high energy efficiency, while keeping carbon dioxide emissions to almost zero.

“Our heat pump can heat homes completely environmentally friendly, without emitting carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. In addition, its high-efficiency energy allows it to be classified as renewable energy, by pumping energy from the environment”, said researcher José Gonzalvez.

Read the complete article….

Featured image: Diagram of a phase change heat pump. Legend: 1. Condenser coil (hot side heat exchanger, gas cools and liquifies); 2 Metering Device (liquid expands and cools), 3. Evaporator coil (cold side heat exchanger, liquid vaporizes and heats up), 4. Compressor (gas is compressed and heats up). Red = Gas at high pressure and very high temperature, Pink = Liquid at high pressure and high temperature, Blue = Liquid at low pressure and very low temperature, Light Blue = Gas at low pressure and low temperature. Note: the arrows in the diagram are meant to indicate the flow of air and coolant; they do not correspond to heat flow, which in the system depicted is (generally) from right to left. / Author: Ilmari Karonen, own work / Licensing: Public Domain.

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As bad as it is, IPCC Report likely understates reality

Climate News Links on April 10, 2022

Saudi Arabia, India, China, (Australia) and a few other countries have sought to make changes that would weaken the final warnings.

Students protest in Toulouse, France, on 25 March, about government inaction on climate change. Photograph: Alain Pitton/NurPhoto/REX/Shutterstock / from the article.

by Fiona Harvey, 02/24/2022 in The Guardian

Dire warning on climate change ‘is being ignored’ amid war and economic turmoil: The third segment of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report is being overshadowed, just like the previous one

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Saudi Arabia, India, China and a few other countries have sought to make changes that would weaken the final warnings, the Observer understands. Some governments are anxious to avoid policy advice such as cutting subsidies to fossil fuels, even though these are widely espoused by leading authorities.This process of refinement – which has also been a complaint in the previous chapters of the IPCC assessment – is defended by some, as producing a document that all governments must “own”, as they have all had input. But many scientists are growing increasingly f

rustrated, as it produces a conservative and sometimes watered down document that many feel does not reflect the urgency and shocking nature of the threat.

Read the complete article….

Featured image: An earlier report streamed to a press conference at the Swiss Academy of Sciences in Bern last August. Photograph: Alessandro Della Valle/EPA / from the article.

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IPCC: Summary of importance of 3 part AR6 Report

Climate News Links on April 10, 2022

Following up on my comprehensive post, The Guardian succinctly explains why the 3 parts of the complete AR6 need to be considered by everyone.

The latest report said that temperatures could rise by as much as 3C, a catastrophic level. Photograph: Mario Hoppmann/AFP/Getty Images / From the article

by Fiona Harvey, 05/04/2022 in the Guardian

Why are the three IPCC working group reports significant? Explainer: The IPCC has now published all parts of its landmark review of climate science.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), made up of the world’s leading climate scientists, has now published all three sections of its landmark comprehensive review of climate science.

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Yet the picture could already be even worse than the IPCC has presented. The IPCC data took in research papers published from 2014 up to last year, but since then the world has experienced even more extreme weather. The IPCC reports are regarded as cautious and conservative by many scientists, and the summary for policymakers that sets out the key messages of each working group are subject to inputs from governments that some regard as watering down.

Read the complete article….

Featured Image: IPCC Sixth Assessment Report (AR6) – complete. From the IPCC Web site.

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Implications for Australia in latest IPCC report

Climate News Links on April 10, 2022

The IPCC has warned that if we don’t stop and reverse global warming now it will soon be too late to avoid climate catastrophe and suffering.


The IPCC makes it clear that promotion of coal and gas – a favourite pastime of Australian politicians – is making it harder to keep global heating to 1.5C. Photograph: Saeed Khan/AFP/Getty Images / from the article

By Adam Morton and Graham Readfearn, 09/04/2022 in The Guardian

Latest IPCC report offers key lessons for Australia but is anyone listening? The climate authority has warned it is now or never to cut emissions but will MPs on the campaign trail heed its warning?

Perhaps the message was too familiar. With the unofficial election campaign under way, and the prime minister mired in escalating allegations of bullying and duplicity, a major report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change – the world’s most respected climate science body – quickly disappeared from the Australian news cycle this week.

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Headlines told part of the story: it was “now or never” if the world was to limit global heating to 1.5C above pre-industrial levels. The report suggests that threshold is already practically out of reach without using technology to suck carbon dioxide from the sky. Keeping heating below 2C, which would trigger damage several magnitudes worse than 1.5C, will require an “abrupt acceleration” of effort after 2030.

Read the complete article….

Featured Image: Scenarios in a mathematical model by en:Adam Frank et al., 2018, which describes climate change due to GHG emissions by an advanced energy-intensive civilization.[1] From left to right, top to bottom: Die-off: The world population reaches a peak and subsequently declines slowly until an equilibrium is attained. Population can decline by up to 90% after peaking; according to Frank, such a civilization “might well just descend into chaos.” Sustainability: Both the world population and average surface temperature rise and then level off. This scenario shows that civilizations can be stable in the long term. Collapse without resource change: A civilization makes no attempt to switch to less GHG-intensive energy and collapses due to runaway climate change, possibly going extinct. Collapse with resource change: A civilization transitions to less GHG-neutral energy, but collapses anyway due to triggering a tipping point in the climate system. / 3-01-2021 by LaundryPizza03 – Own work; adapted from a figure in Billings, 2018. / via Wikimedia Commons.

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Given his history is anything he says believable?

Climate News Links on April 6, 2022

Scotty from Marketing and Capt. Humbug are good names for a PM who is clueless how to discuss the physical realities of the world we live in.

Featured image. Aside from his failure to know a fact when he trips on it, there are some other things he doesn’t do well either….

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Video report: Arctic warming and scientific conservatism

Climate News Links on April 3, 2022

A personal story on Arctic climate change filled with facts together with discussion of how ‘conservative science’ nobbles urgency of action.

What Arctic climate tells us – It’s worse than we are told: Why science communication is conservative.

by Jason Box, 08/01/2022 on YouTube

Greenland ice melt – why climate communication is conservative – personal story

Featured image: 2100 years of summer Arctic air temperatures under different IPCC climate models. / From the video.

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History: First real evidence for abrupt climate change

Climate News Links on April 3, 2022

1969 Greenland ice cores provide convincingly accurately timed evidence for abrupt major changes in Earth temperatures and global warming.

Wally Broecker, shown here in 1997, proposed that the shutdown of a major ocean circulation pattern could lead to abrupt climate change. Jean-Louis Atlan/Paris Match via Getty Images / from the Article

by Alexandra Witze, 29/03/2022 in Science News

Wally Broecker divined how the climate could suddenly shift: The shutdown of an ocean conveyor belt could cause abrupt climate change

It was the mid-1980s, at a meeting in Switzerland, when Wally Broecker’s ears perked up. Scientist Hans Oeschger was describing an ice core drilled at a military radar station in southern Greenland. Layer by layer, the 2-kilometer-long core revealed what the climate there was like thousands of years ago. Climate shifts, inferred from the amounts of carbon dioxide and of a form of oxygen in the core, played out surprisingly quickly — within just a few decades. It seemed almost too fast to be true.

Read the complete article….

Editor’s note: See Broecker’s 1975 paper, Are We on the Brink of a Pronounced Global Warming? in Science, that gave us early warning 47 years ago on what might be happening. How different our future might have been if humanity took that warning seriously.

Leland_McInnes at en.wikipedia – (red) GRIP data: http://www.glaciology.gfy.ku.dk/data/grip-ss09sea-cl-50yr.stp (blue) NGRIP data:http://www.glaciology.gfy.ku.dk/data/NGRIP_d18O_50yrs.txt / License: CC BY-SA 3.0

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Rising crescendos: clusters of climate catastrophes

Climate News Links on April 3, 2022

In a warming climate extreme weather events may encourage other extreme events to closely follow, e.g., fires followed by floods & landslides

Debris from a mudslide covers a home on January 10, 2018 in Montecito, California. Credit: Justin Sullivan/Getty Images / from the article.

by Andrea Thompson, on 01/04/2022 in Scientific American

Double Disaster: Wildfires Followed by Extreme Rainfall Are More Likely with Climate Change: These events can cause devastating landslides and flash floods

At 3:30 A.M. on January 9, 2018, half an inch of rain poured down on the charred slopes of the Santa Ynez Mountains in coastal southern California. The flames of the Thomas Fire—at the time the largest wildfire in state history—had swept through the previous month, leaving the soil and vegetation scorched and unable to soak up the onslaught of water. The destabilized ground gave way in a devastating landslide. Boulders crashed into houses in the town of Montecito, Calif., and a highway was buried under several feet of mud. The disaster killed 23 people and caused an estimate of around $200 million in damage.

Read the complete article….

See the scientific report that is the source of this article: Touma et al., 01/04/2022, Climate change increases risk of extreme rainfall following wildfire in the western United States in Science Advances

Featured Image: This image from a rescue helicopter records the burn scar from the Thomas Fire, as well as the path of a deadly mudslide in Montecito, Calif., in January 2018. Credit: California National Guard, CC BY 2.0 / from No Relief from Rain: Climate Change Fuels Compound Disasters: Climate change is increasing the risk of fire-rain events, raising mudslide concerns in fire-prone communities. by Leah Campbell, 12/12/2021 in EOS.

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CO₂: If you can measure it, you can control it

Climate News Links on April 2, 2022

A new satellite system and atmospheric modelling can separate changes in anthropogenic CO₂ emissions from natural environmental variability.

Credit: Pixabay/CC0 Public Domain via the Article

by Jessica Merzdorf Evans, 01/04/2022 in Phys.org

First-of-its-kind detection of reduced human carbon dioxide emissions

For the first time, researchers have spotted short-term, regional fluctuations in atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2) around the globe due to emissions from human activities.

Using a combination of NASA satellites and atmospheric modeling, the scientists performed a first-of-its-kind detection of human CO2 emissions changes. The new study uses data from NASA’s Orbiting Carbon Observatory-2 (OCO-2) to measure drops in CO2 emissions during the COVID-19 pandemic from space. With daily and monthly data products now available to the public, this opens new possibilities for tracking the collective effects of human activities on CO2 concentrations in near real-time.

Read the complete article….

Read the source report: Brad Weir et al, Regional impacts of COVID-19 on carbon dioxide detected worldwide from space, Science Advances (2021)

Featured image: Atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations at Mauna Loa, Hawaii since 1958. Source Delorme – Data from Dr. Pieter Tans, NOAA/ESRL and Dr. Ralph Keeling, Scripps Institution of Oceanography via Wikipedia (which see for more details) / License: licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International.

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Great govt. planning! Boost fossils not renewables

Climate News Links on April 1, 2022

COALition continues funding fossil fuel patrons while neglecting/cutting 21st Century green/ renewable growth industry sector. Who benefits?

Renewable energy generates 1.6 times the electricity used by Australian households, with 2021 the fifth year in a row of record new capacity. Photograph: SolStock/Getty Images / from the article

Australia’s renewables boom fading as investors lose confidence, energy council says: Clean Energy Council says Morrison government’s lack of ‘meaningful policies’ and leadership on climate could mark start of downturn

Australia’s boom in rooftop solar and large-scale renewables is fading as investors lose confidence, with the lack of coordination by the Morrison government partly to blame, according to the Clean Energy Council.

The warning comes as the industry marked its latest record year for household solar, wind and solar farms, and big batteries. Renewable energy’s share of the electricity supply reached 32.5%, doubling since 2017, the council said in its annual report.

Read the complete article….

Featured Image: Logo Renewable Energy by Melanie Maecker-Tursun V2 green. Melanie Maecker-Tursun Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0

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