Clouds of smoke and ash from wildfires that ravaged Australia in 2019 and 2020 triggered widespread algal blooms in the Southern Ocean thousands of miles downwind to the east, a new Duke University-led study by an international team of scientists finds.
The peer-reviewed study, published September 15 in Nature, is the first to conclusively link a large-scale response in marine life to fertilization by pyrogenic—or fire-made—iron aerosols from a wildfire.
It shows that tiny aerosol particles of iron in the windborne smoke and ash fertilized the water as they fell into it, providing nutrients to fuel blooms at a scale unprecedented in that region.
The discovery raises intriguing new questions about the role wildfires may play in spurring the growth of microscopic marine algae known as phytoplankton, which absorb large quantities of climate-warming carbon dioxide from Earth's atmosphere through photosynthesis and are the foundation of the oceanic food web.
(Futurity) A new transparency-friendly solar cell design could marry high efficiencies with 30-year estimated lifetimes, researchers report.
It may pave the way for windows that also provide solar power.
“Solar energy is about the cheapest form of energy that mankind has ever produced since the industrial revolution,” says Stephen Forrest, a professor of electrical engineering at the University of Michigan, who led the research. “With these devices used on windows, your building becomes a power plant.”
While silicon remains king for solar panel efficiency, it isn’t transparent. For window-friendly solar panels, researchers have been exploring organic—or carbon-based—materials. The challenge for Forrest’s team was how to prevent very efficient organic light-converting materials from degrading quickly during use.
The strength and the weakness of these materials lie in the molecules that transfer the photogenerated electrons to the electrodes, the entrance points to the circuit that either uses or stores the solar power. These materials are known generally as “non-fullerene acceptors” to set them apart from the more robust but less efficient “fullerene acceptors” made of nanoscale carbon mesh. Solar cells made with non-fullerene acceptors that incorporate sulfur can achieve silicon-rivaling efficiencies of 18%, but they do not last as long.
Natural-Gas Prices Surge, and Winter Is Still Months Away
Low inventories around the world have made the heating fuel more expensive than it has been in years
By Ryan Dezember
Natural-gas prices have surged, prompting worries about winter shortages and forecasts for the most expensive fuel since frackers flooded the market more than a decade ago.
U.S. natural-gas futures ended Friday at $5.105 per million British thermal units. They were about half that six months ago and have leapt 17% this month.
It feels like we have suddenly been hit by this. The price for electric energy has soared in Europe. As it looks now, we are going to pay about $570 more for electricity per year. Fortunately we don't use gas for heating, but wood.
Maybe we need more nuclear energy.
Large-scale solar hydrogen production through water splitting using a powder photocatalyst is considered one of the most promising methods of producing sustainable fuels in the future. In 2018, this research group demonstrated that water-splitting photocatalytic panel reactor can be scaled up to 1 meter squared in size without compromising the solar water splitting activity of the photocatalyst. However, large-scale separation and collection of solar hydrogen beyond the laboratory scale had never been realized. It was necessary to review the design of the photocatalytic panel reactor and develop a system to safely separate the gas mixture of hydrogen and oxygen in an outdoor environment.
The joint research project involving NEDO, ARPChem, The University of Tokyo, Fujifilm, TOTO, Mitsubishi Chemical, Meiji University and Shinshu University (who was responsible for the photocatalytic water-splitting technology) demonstrated that in a large-scale outdoor area of 100m2 it is possible to split water using a powder photocatalyst and solar rays to retrieve solar hydrogen from the generated hydrogen-oxygen gas. More rigorous safety tests are still needed, but if a properly designed system is used, the highly explosive hydrogen-oxygen gas can be safely handled for long periods. Therefore, a system for producing a large amount of solar hydrogen at low costs through the improvement of the visible light responsive photocatalyst, the photocatalyst panel, and the gas separation module is within reach.
Policy experts warn new proposals to plug abandoned oil and gas wells amount to huge subsidy for the fossil fuel industry
Oil and gas companies have a century-old bad habit of drilling wells and ditching them. And while Congress finally has a plan to plug some abandoned wells, new proposals effectively pass the fossil fuel industry’s cleanup costs on to taxpayers and may even enable more drilling.
Concerned parties seem to agree on the scale of the crisis: millions of wells sit untended across the US, leaking toxins that pose public health problems along with the potent greenhouse gas methane, which contributes to the climate emergency.
But powerful special interests have carved out a presence in federal well-plugging efforts – one of the most bipartisan corners of Joe Biden’s $1tn infrastructure bill, which is due for a vote later this month. Instead of requiring fossil fuel companies to cover the actual cost of drilling and cleanup, policy experts say the proposal is an additional multibillion-dollar subsidy for the industry most responsible for driving the climate crisis.
“People on the surface think that this is a good environmental thing … but the devil is in the details,” said Megan Milliken Biven, a consultant and former program analyst with the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management. “This is a bill for the bosses.”
A study by the ICTA-UAB analyzes different proposals for the implementation of telework based on mobility and air quality data obtained in Barcelona during the lockdown.
Implementing teleworking two, three or four days a week would reduce the levels of nitrogen dioxide (NO2), the main pollutant related to traffic emissions, respectively by 4%, 8% and 10%. This is the main conclusion of a study carried out by the Institute of Environmental Science and Technology of the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (ICTA-UAB). The study analyzes the data obtained from an air quality model, together with the measurements of the XVPCA stations (Xarxa de Vigilància i Previsió de la Contaminació Atmosfèrica) registered in the Metropolitan Area of Barcelona (AMB), during the period of mandatory mobility restrictions during to the COVID-19 lockdown.
Mobility restrictions due to the pandemic have forced many people to work from home, thus increasing teleworking and improving air quality in cities. Starting with this exceptional situation, the researchers of the URBAG project at the ICTA-UAB have carried out a large-scale pilot study that allows reflecting upon the lessons learned during lockdown in terms of air pollution declines.
Taking into account the fact that 85% of the labor force of the AMB is dedicated to the service sector, and approximately 40% of all personal vehicle transit is work-related, researchers defined three different socio-labor scenarios based on a week of two, three or four days teleworking, and studied the changes in pollution with an air quality model for each.
(Reuters via The Asahi Shimbun) SHANGHAI/SINGAPORE--China’s pledge to stop building coal-fired power plants overseas could cull $50 billion of investment as it slashes future carbon emissions, analysts said, although Beijing’s own domestic coal program is still propping up the dirty fossil fuel.
Chinese President Xi Jinping said in a pre-recorded address at the United Nations General Assembly on Tuesday that China would help developing countries build green energy production and halt construction of coal power plants abroad.
China has been under international pressure to announce an end to overseas coal financing as part of its updated package of national climate pledges to be submitted to the United Nations.
Beijing is the largest source of financing for coal power plants globally, and Xi’s announcement will have a far-reaching impact on coal power expansion plans in countries like Bangladesh, Indonesia, Vietnam and South Africa.
The announcement could affect 44 coal plants earmarked for Chinese state financing, totaling $50 billion, according to Global Energy Monitor (GEM), a U.S. think tank. That has the potential to reduce future carbon dioxide emissions by 200 million tons a year, GEM told Reuters.
Researchers have developed and demonstrated a new system that can detect defects in silicon solar panels in full and partial sunlight under any weather conditions. Because current defect detection methods cannot be used in daylight conditions, the new system could make it much easier to keep solar panels working optimally.
Silicon solar panels, which make up around 90 percent of the world's solar panels, often have defects that occur during their manufacturing, handling or installation. These defects can greatly lower the efficiency of the solar panels, so it is important that they be detected quickly and easily.
In the Optica Publishing Group journal Applied Optics, researchers from Nanjing University of Science and Technology in China describe how a unique combination of new hardware and software allows defects in solar panels to be clearly imaged and analyzed even in bright light.
"Today's defect detection systems can only be used to find defects at night or on solar panel modules that have been removed and moved inside or into a shaded environment," said Yunsheng Qian, who led the research team. "We hope that this system can be used to help inspectors at photovoltaic power stations locate defects and identify them more quickly, so that these systems can produce electricity at their maximum levels."
Ivory-billed woodpecker officially declared extinct, along with 22 other species
Source: Washington Post
The “Lord God Bird” is dead. The ivory-billed woodpecker, a ghostly bird whose long-rumored survival in the bottomland swamps of the South has haunted seekers for generations, will be officially declared extinct by U.S. officials after years of futile efforts to save it. It earned is nickname because it was so big and so beautiful those blessed to spot it blurted out the Lord’s name. Even the scientist who wrote the obit cried.
“This is not an easy thing,” said Amy Trahan, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service biologist who reviewed the evidence and wrote the report concluding the ivory bill “no longer exists.” “Nobody wants to be a part of that,” she added, choking up in a Zoom interview. “Just having to write those words was quite difficult. It took me awhile.” The Fish and Wildlife Service proposal Wednesday to take 23 animals and plants off the endangered species list — because none can be found in the wild — exposes what scientists say is an accelerating rate of extinction worldwide.
A million plants and animals are in danger of disappearing, many within decades. The newly extinct species are the casualties of climate change and habitat destruction, dying out sooner than any new protections can save them. The species pushed over the brink include 10 types of birds and bats found only on Pacific islands, as well as eight types of freshwater mussels that once inhabited riverbeds from Illinois to Georgia. The best available science suggests these creatures are no longer swimming, scampering or soaring on this planet, obliterating the need for any federal protection.
With a range that once spanned from the coastal plains of North Carolina to the bayous of East Texas, the ivory-billed woodpecker’s numbers suffered their most precipitous drop during the 1800s. Marksmen gunned them down for private collectors and hat makers, while loggers felled the old-growth stands where the birds roosted and foraged for grub. “The fact that this bird is so critically endangered has been true since the 1890s, and it’s fundamentally a consequence of the fact that we cut down every last trace of the virgin forest of the southeastern U.S.,” said John W. Fitzpatrick, director emeritus of the Cornell Lab of Ornithology. “We took all that away.”
Tesla CEO Elon Musk on Tuesday said he's a proponent of nuclear power and was "surprised by some of the public sentiment against nuclear."
"I'm not saying we should go build a whole bunch of nuclear plants, but I don't think we should shut down ones that are operating safely," Musk said at the Code Conference in Los Angeles.
Musk pointed to Germany's push to decommission its nuclear power plants, which he said forced the country to rely more heavily on coal-fired power plants. Research published last year concluded that Germany's nuclear energy was being replaced primarily by sources such as coal plants and estimated that the increased pollution most likely led to 1,100 deaths a year.
"I don't think that was the right decision," Musk said of Germany's approach.
Musk's comments came in response to a question about rising energy demands that might come with a shift to electric vehicles. Despite his support for nuclear power, Musk said meeting this increased demand would depend on "large sustainable power-generation developments, primarily wind and solar."
And remember my friend, future events such as these will affect you in the future
New work from the Kiel Evolution Center suggests that somatic gene variations play a larger role in evolutionary adaptation mechanisms than previously thought.
The variability of genetic information within a species is a central basis for the expression of different individual characteristics of its individual organisms. It determines the phenotype, for example, how the external shape or resistance to disease develops individually. At the same time, the genetic variability within a population allows evolutionary adaptation of a species, for example in changing environments. During sexual reproduction, most genetic variability emerges through new composition of genetic information, a process called recombination. Here, the genes of the female and male individuals are divided and recombined in the resulting offspring. This mechanism ensures an almost infinite number of combination possibilities in the offspring.
(Counterpunch) The view that climate protection requires expanding nuclear power has a basic flaw in its prevailing framing: it rarely if ever relates climate-effectiveness to cost or to speed—even though stopping climate change requires scaling the fastest and cheapest solutions. By focusing on carbon but only peripherally mentioning cost and speed, and by not relating these three variables, this approach misframes what climate solutions must do.
The climate argument for using nuclear power assumes that since nuclear power generation directly releases no CO2, it can be an effective climate solution. It can’t, because new (or even existing) nuclear generation costs more per kWh than carbon-free competitors—efficient use and renewable power—and thus displaces less carbon per dollar (or, by separate analysis, per year): less not by a small margin but by about an order of magnitude (factor of roughly ten). As I noted in an unpublished 17 Aug letter to The New York Times:
…[The Times’s 14 August] editorial twice extols “wind, solar and nuclear power” as if all three had equal climate benefits. They don’t. New electricity costs 3–8 (says merchant bank Lazard) or 5–13 (says Bloomberg New Energy Finance) times less from unsubsidized wind and solar than from nuclear power. Renewables thus displace 3–13 times more fossil-fueled generation per dollar than nuclear, and far sooner. Efficiency is even cheaper, beating most existing reactors’ operating costs. Competing or comparing all options…saves more carbon.
Thus nuclear power not only isn’t a silver bullet, but, by using it, we shoot ourselves in the foot, thereby shrinking and slowing climate protection compared with choosing the fastest, cheapest tools. It is essential to look at nuclear power’s climate performance compared to its or its competitors’ cost and speed. That comparison is at the core of answering the question about whether to include nuclear power in climate mitigation.
The enormous surge of face-mask use since the beginning of the global lockdown in March 2020 has saved countless human lives, a crucial component to limiting the transmission of the novel coronavirus. But with 129 billion masks being consumed globally every month, disposal has become a major issue with implications on human, animal and ecological health.
The problem becomes more acute as, according to a recent study by Concordia researchers, a single mask left exposed under natural conditions can release more than 1.5 million microplastics into the aqueous environment. In a new paper, Ph.D. student Zheng Wang and Chunjiang An, an assistant professor in the Department of Building, Civil and Environmental Engineering, investigate how disposable masks break down in a shoreline environment and the environmental implications that poses. They examine changes in chemical composition and strength degradation of the three different mask layers caused by UV exposure and sand abrasion.
Shorelines, they write, are not only the main receptors of discarded masks; their unique environment also leads to further breakdown of masks into plastic particles.
The study was published in the Journal of Hazardous Materials.
More than three years after revealing plans to build a monster offshore wind turbine called the Haliade-X, GE Renewable Energy has announced that the prototype of the latest and most powerful member of the family has started operating at 14 MW in Rotterdam, the Netherlands.
The first version in the Haliade-X platform became the first offshore wind turbine to operate at 12 megawatts (MW) in November 2019. The uprated Haliade-X 13 model launched in 2020 and received its type certification in January of this year, and now GE Renewable Energy has become the first in the industry to run a turbine at 14 MW.
Essentially an enhanced version of the other turbines in the platform, each of the Haliade-X 14's blades measures 107 m (351 ft) long, it stands 260 m (853 ft) high and the company reckons that the turbine has the potential to produce up to 74 GWh of energy each year.
The flagship of the Haliade-X platform will make its commercial debut at the Dogger Bank C offshore wind farm some 130 km (80 miles) off the North East coast of England, where 87 turbines will be installed. Each of the three phases of the project is expected to have a generation capacity of 1.2 GW, with all three reported capable of powering some six million homes when the "world's biggest offshore wind farm" is up and running in 2026.
