Is solar geoengineering an alternative solution to the climate crisis?
Solar geoengineering is a branch of geoengineering that focuses on reflecting sunlight back into outer space to reduce global warming. There are several solar geoengineering techniques being researched; the most feasible one consists of spraying reflective aerosols in the stratosphere.
Scientists also consider brightening marine clouds to make them more reflective.
Recently, the White House’s Office of Science and Technology Policy launched a five-year research plan to investigate methods for reflecting solar radiation back to outer space in an attempt to reduce the effects of global warming.
A type 1 civilization on the Kardashev scale manages to take advantage of 100% of the energy produced by its planet, control the climate, move continents and even change its planet’s rotation. In this sense, how long does the human race lack to become a type 1 civilization? Are we close to achieving it, or are we still far away? Ready, let’s start! “Introduction“ The level of technological development of any civilization can be measured mainly by the amount of energy they need. But, it also encompasses the management of that energy and how they use it to develop and grow on their home planet. Following Kardashev’s definition, a Type I civilization is capable of storing and using all the energy available on its planet; this includes all known electricity generation methods, as well as those that depend on the elements available on the planet, nuclear fusion and fission, geothermal energy, as well as that which they can collect from their star without leaving the planet. The human race has not yet reached this level of development, but will we ever reach it? And if so, when will we achieve it? Previously we already made a series of 3 videos in which we address the three types of civilizations that exist according to the Kardashev scale. “Enter here images of the series on the scale of Kardashev.“ But today, we will focus on analyzing why the human race has not yet managed to become a type 1 civilization and how far we need to become one. The Great Filter.
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“If I’m a farmer in Australia, and I want to know what the drought situation is going to look like over the next 20 to 30 years and decide what sorts of crops I might want to grow or how I might want to change irrigation technologies that I use for my farm, I want to be able to ask questions like that to this digital twin and get answers,” Kashinath said.
FourCastNet, an open-source project, is the first product of the broader Earth-2 initiative available to researchers. And while there’s no specific date for when the team will launch Earth-2 publicly, Kashinath said it will similarly be open for use by the research community.
Hopefully, as tools like Earth-2 emerge, we can better plan for and adapt to our rapidly changing climate.
When a volcanic eruption occurs in an inhabited area, rapid and accurate lava flow forecasts can save lives and reduce infrastructure and property losses. To ensure that current lava forecasting models can provide outputs fast enough to be useful in practice, they unfortunately must incorporate physical simplifications that limit their accuracy.
To aid evacuation plans, forecast models must predict a lavaflow’s speed, direction, and extent. These attributes are intimately connected to how the lava solidifies as it cools. Yet to achieve real-time speed, most current models assume that a flow has a uniform temperature. This is a major simplification that directly influences modeled rates of cooling; generally, lava flows are much cooler at their boundaries, where they are in contact with air or the ground, than they are internally.
Aiming to strike a better compromise between speed and realism, David Hyman and a team developed a 2D, physics-based lava flow model called Lava2d. They extended the traditional, vertically averaged treatment of a lava packet by considering it as three distinct regions: the portion near the lava-air boundary, the portion near the lava-ground boundary, and the fluidlike central core. The top and bottom regions of a modeled flow cool based on the physics of heat transfer to the air and ground, while the temperature in the center remains uniform, as in prior approaches. This setup enables the model to account for a temperature gradient without requiring a computationally expensive 3D approach.
“When I looked at the data, I was kind of surprised to see that it had a massive effect,” says Hunting. It was already known that individual bees carry a small charge, but a voltage of this magnitude had never been documented in swarming honeybees before.
The team deployed additional electric field monitors in combination with video cameras to measure the electric field and swarm density, and waited for the bees at nearby hives to naturally swarm. The researchers recorded three swarms passing the monitors for around 3 minutes at a time. They found that the bee swarms created an electric charge ranging from 100 to 1,000 volts per metre. By analysing the proximity of bees to each other in the swarms, the team found that the denser the swarm, the stronger the electric field was.
Hunting compared the bees’ highest charge to previous data on meteorological events like fair-weather storm clouds, thunderstorms and electrified dust storms, and found dense bees swarms outcharged them all. Their charge density was around eight times as great as a thunderstorm cloud and six times as great as an electrified dust storm.
Researchers created an artificial intelligence process that determines when and where wildfires will occur.
Wildfires have caused extreme fire damages across the globe, along with many deaths. It is significant to know when wildfires are spreading, and where, to prevent loss of life. Realizing this important information in advance is key. Forecasting wildfire danger can be a difficult task because of the complexity involving climate system, interactions with vegetation and socio-economic components.
Currently, available information for widespread fires only provides limited data and information.
The collapse of Arecibo’s radio telescope was a devastating blow to the radio astronomy community. Issues began in 2017 for the nearly 55-year-old telescope when Hurricane Maria tore through Puerto Rico, shearing off one of the 29-meter (96-foot) antennas that was suspended above the telescope’s 305-meter (1,000-foot) dish, with falling debris puncturing the dish in several places.
Since then, many have called for the telescope to be rebuilt or for building an even better replacement telescope at the site. Instead, the NSF wants Arecibo to serve as a hub for STEM education and outreach.
It enables us to make extraordinary leaps of imagination.
We all have to make hard decisions from time to time. The hardest of my life was whether or not to change research fields after my Ph.D., from fundamental physics to climate physics. I had job offers that could have taken me in either direction — one to join Stephen Hawking’s Relativity and Gravitation Group at Cambridge University, another to join the Met Office as a scientific civil servant.
I wrote down the pros and cons of both options as one is supposed to do, but then couldn’t make up my mind at all. Like Buridan’s donkey, I was unable to move to either the bale of hay or the pail of water.
