The thing about human-induced warming is that it has a rather pronounced effect at night when the planet is trying to shed the heat built up over the day and no longer can as effectively.
I am not a botanist, but I wonder if desert plants are adapted to take advantage of the cool desert nights to recover from the intense daytime heat? If so, I could see where they would be in trouble now.
Honestly, I wouldn’t mind if they made a version that just stays in one age indefinitely and lets you explore it in an open world sort of way?
Like take Minecraft. I played that for years without even knowing there is an end game, and it came as something of a shock when someone told me. You can finish Minecraft?!?
But then I was like meh, leave me alone. I’m trying to build Noah’s Ark with a functioning village on top and a crystal waterfall down to the animal sanctuary below. And I still haven’t completed the Mars colony. Wonder how the pandas are doing over there?
Storm surges can be insane. I’ve never been in a hurricane, but have witnessed the aftermath. My parents had some property in coastal Mexico that got hit. When we got there to assess damages, the town’s main street was essentially a giant sand dune over 2 storeys tall. The surge had basically lifted the entire beach and dumped it 2 blocks in. The town square was likewise covered in sand with all sorts of debris sticking out of it. And by debris, I mean stuff as large as a fridge.
(Regarding the property, we kind of lucked out. About a year before it hit, a hotel went up between the house and the beach, which blocked the view but had a major silver lining in terms of protecting all the houses behind it from the worst of the storm. And then speaking to the hotel owner, he said he’d spent a small fortune to build a giant concrete foundation that stretched almost a city block’s length under the beach. People thought he was insane to do that, but it was literally the only waterfront building still standing, so he clearly knew what he was doing.)
How can they do this? It’s a confirmed natural wonder in Civ6.
A good place to start might be to look at the huge number of ethnic dishes built around beans. People around the world have been inventive in this regard for centuries.
For the North American diet, it would help if fast food offered more bean options. There’s Taco Bell and the like, I guess. And hummus and falafel are working their way into places that sell wraps. But while burger joints are increasingly offering veggie burgers that are presumably using some kind of bean or pea-based protein, I wonder why they don’t try offering a chili? We have a chilli festival where I live and it’s hugely popular with around half the recipes being bean-based.
Many renewables are stuck in the “interconnection queue,” a long line of projects waiting to get connected to the grid. According to Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, more than 1,500 gigawatts of power, mostly renewables, are waiting for approval to connect. (That’s more than one-third of all the power produced in the United States.)
That is really unfortunate. I’m in Canada, but it wouldn’t surprise me if we are in the same boat. Where I live, there is a lot of wind and solar going in, but my understanding is that this is in part because it’s one of the rare areas with an under-capacity grid that is not too far from several major urban centres.
And you can see how important the grid layout is in that solar farms are popping up mostly along large transmission corridors, presumably to allow for easier connection. This is less evident with wind, since geography plays a bigger role in where you want to put a wind farm for optimal results.
It makes me speculate that renewables like wind and hydroelectric (including pumped hydro storage) which are less negotiable in terms of location compared to solar are more likely to be waiting a long time on this interconnection queue? I don’t know if that is actually the case though.
I did bike commute to a degree with a normal bike but I do so far more often now with the ebike. What’s interesting to me is that my fitbit says I’m actually getting more exercise per week now since I ride more consistently, even if the intensity is not as great as it once was.
With the regular bike, I could get so wiped after one day that I’d be too tired/sore to ride the next. And there were other factors that would affect whether I would ride. Is there a stiff headwind today? Is it a heat wave or is the air quality low? Might I have to make a side-trip in the middle of my work day that will wear me out even more?
The ebike changed all that. It also changed the route I take to work. Now I ride through a ravine park I used to avoid because of all the climbing it would entail once I need to leave it. So it’s a much more pleasant experience being far from traffic, which encourages me all the more. Honestly, I had no idea how transformative getting an ebike would be?
I seem to recall reading somewhere that these have better cold weather performance than lithium-ion? As a Canadian, I made a mental note this.
I’d be curious to know whether urban air quality in general is improving also?
I had an induction hot plate before I had an induction stove.
It’s the gateway drug, isn’t it…
Dang, I’d never heard of induction stoves but now I’m thinking about getting an induction hot plate for the kitchen.
Here’s the thing though. I arrived at the conclusion that buying both a car and an ebike is cheaper than buying a car alone, provided the bike replaces the car for the bulk of your trips. You save enormous amounts in fuel and maintenance. The amount of electricity you consume is a rounding error on your monthly bill while you need to budget for fuel when driving, and automobile maintenance costs are easily 10x higher than for a bike. And last but not least, you can go for a long time without replacing your car since you put so little mileage on it, and when you do go looking for a replacement, you can lower the bar in looking for a bargain. Since it’s something you will only drive sporadically, it doesn’t have to be great.
More than 95% of the two-wheelers are located in China, according to the IEA.
Wow! What is the situation over there? Is it that fewer people can afford a car and opt for ebikes, that the infrastructure is more bike-oriented, or are there some other factors at play?
Was curious what their test rig looks like and found some pics here.
1st reaction: lmao
2nd reaction: hey wait, this is pure genius!
I’ve always wondered to what extent the horizontal drilling revolution could help with geothermal? It certainly did wonders for fossil fuel extraction, but perhaps this is the silver lining?
Sounds like they had an a-ha moment.
So, a few thoughts on this. If you consider the minimum on any of these graphs as a kind of base load capacity, you would need to build enough solar and wind to cover what’s demanded by the population. The fluctuating part above that line is excess which maybe might find some sort of opportunistic use but will more likely be discarded. I guess the industry term for this is curtailment.
The more you invest in storage, the less you will need to curtail. But given that even with a month worth of storage (which is a colossal amount if you crunch the numbers), there will be some curtailment, my takeaway from this is that there is room for synthetic fuel production like green hydrogen that would kick in once you’ve saturated all your batteries, pumped hydro, etc. I’d been wondering about this. There is energy loss (relative to say batteries) in making fuel out of electricity, but the energy in this case is essentially free, so why not give it a go? And we are really good at stockpiling fuels. The amount of energy stored that way around the world is orders of magnitude beyond everything else combined.
Here’s what it looks like after 7 (top) and 30 (bottom) days of averaging to give an idea of how much more reliability you can buy with a week or month of grid storage.
Of course, there is also variability on the demand side you need to match. Hmm…
One problem I have with this idea is that the cooling profile from releasing sulphates into the atmosphere looks very different from the greenhouse gas warming profile. For example, the latter has a more pronounced effect at higher latitudes, since GHG are insulators. The arctic is getting hit harder than the tropics. The former, I would expect, would affect the places in the world that get the most sun, since it is effectively a solar filter. So, the lower latitudes, in other words.
If we have a baseline scenario A of what would have happened without the GHGs and B with what is currently happening, this would make for a scenario C that is neither of the others. I would submit that C would likely be as far from A as B is. Yes, you might get global warming under control in an accountant-looking-at-only-the-bottom-line sort of way, but this would still represent a massive climate change into uncharted territory. Would scenario C still be preferable to B is the question I guess?