Category Archives: Climate Change

Climate Change, Government, Science, Technology, United States

Nuclear fusion: A breakthrough that will lead to clean energy?

NUCLEAR FUSION

A REVOLUTIONARY scientific breakthrough is thought to have brought humanity a step closer towards limitless clean energy from nuclear fusion.

Since the 1950s, scientists and researchers have been working tirelessly towards the “holy grail” of creating more energy from nuclear fusion than they put in.

Now US government scientists in California have reportedly done it, by aiming the world’s largest laser at a nuclear target the size of a peppercorn.

The result, from a nuclear reaction reaching three million degrees Celsius, is apparently 2.5 megajoules of energy, from 2.1 megajoules of laser energy.

Nuclear fusion is preferable to nuclear fission, which is currently used to power the planet alongside fossil fuels and renewable power.

That is because nuclear fission splits heavy atoms like uranium or plutonium, to create energy, producing potentially dangerous radioactive waste that must be stored.

Nuclear fusion creates energy by bringing atoms together, instead of splitting them, and has no waste products, making it clean energy.

Unlike coal, the supply is limitless, usually requiring just two materials called deuterium and tritium, which are slightly different versions of hydrogen and found in sea water and mineral springs.

A small cup of this fuel could one day be used to power a house for hundreds of years.

The breakthrough at the federal Lawrence Livermore Laboratory in California was achieved using a laser pulse amplified a quadrillion (a million billion) times and split into 192 different pulses.

These enter a hohlraum – a gold container – and hit a tiny capsule of deuterium and tritium, creating shockwaves which produce vast amounts of  energy, in a process called inertial confinement fusion.

Significant engineering challenges remain, including how to cut the cost of nuclear fusion, harness the energy produced, run it through a turbine and get it into the National Grid.

Most experts believe this won’t be possible until 2045, but some say it could be done in a decade and is likely to be achieved using a different type of nuclear fusion called magnetic fusion.

But whether it is using magnets or lasers, the experts agree it is the main hope for escaping the climate crisis.

Sir Robin Grimes, professor of material physics at Imperial College London, said: “This is a key step towards commercial fusion – the technology which will ensure our survival on Earth, providing enough energy, with a low impact on the environment, to hugely reduce our contribution to climate change.”

Jeremy Chittenden, professor of plasma physics at Imperial, said: “If what has been reported is true and more energy has been released than was used to produce the plasma, that is a true breakthrough moment.”

Nuclear fusion, if it can be scaled up and made to run more continuously, could in future be almost zero-carbon.

However, some experts point out that the amount of energy used for the entire system containing the laser means, technically, scientists are unlikely to have yet produced more energy from nuclear fusion than was put into it.

The US energy secretary, Jennifer Granholm, made the announcement of a “major scientific breakthrough”.

– Diagrammatic representation of how nuclear fusion works. Source: BBC

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Britain, Climate Change, Environment, Government, Politics, Society

The urgency of the IPCC climate report

CLIMATE

AGAINST a backdrop of orange skies, as vast wildfires sweep through Greece and California, the sixth report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) was published. In western Germany, thousands of homes remain without running water or other vital utilities following the devastating floods of July. In the Siberian city of Yakutsk, deemed the coldest winter city on earth, residents were warned last month to stay indoors as forest fires filled the air with acrid and toxic smoke, following extraordinary heat waves that began in the spring.

The IPCC’s report which took eight years to compile, and which was authored by the world’s leading climate scientists and approved by 195 national governments, confirmed the meaning of the evidence before our eyes: the cumulative impact of human activity since the Industrial Revolution is “unequivocally” causing rapid and potentially catastrophic changes to the climate. The predictions that environmental scientists foresaw with such alarm when the IPCC produced its first report three decades ago has arrived.

Without an accelerated reduction in greenhouse gases during the next decade, the ambition of the 2015 Paris climate agreement to limit global heating to 1.5C will not be met. The price of failure will be a world vulnerable to irreversible and exponential effects of global heating: there will be worse floods more often, more frequent heatwaves, devastating and repeated droughts, and an increase in mortality through disease.

The science is irrefutable. Less certain is the political will to act upon it. The burden of responsibility upon this generation of world leaders as humanity finds itself at a fork in the road is immense. The decisions and actions taken or foregone during the next 10 years will define the parameters of what is possible for future generations. A step-change is required, but across the world green rhetoric continues to translate into policymaking at a pace which is fatally slow. China has committed to the target of net zero emissions by 2050, but it continues to build coal-fired power stations both at home and abroad. Along with the top carbon-emitters such as Russia and India, it refused to endorse the 1.5C goal at an April summit convened by the American president, Joe Biden. As Mr Biden’s special envoy for climate, John Kerry, has said, if countries such as these cannot be persuaded to enact faster reductions over the next decade, the target looks unachievable.

Whilst this treacherous turning point in history must be dealt with, Britain finds itself both uniquely placed and unprepared to host the crucial Cop26 climate summit in Glasgow. The government’s climate minister and Cop26 president, Alok Sharma, has tried to use the IPCC report as a means of concentrating minds. Speaking in the last few days, he said that the world was almost “out of time” in dealing with the effects of global heating. Yet, ahead of arguably the most important summit held on British soil since the second world war, delay and equivocation have become the government’s trademark response to the greatest challenge of our times. The publication of a net zero strategy, which had been due in the spring, has been delayed until the autumn amid fears over the possible cost. Some backbenchers have also begun to lobby for a slower transition, based on the false presumption that poorer families will disproportionately bear the burden of change.

It is imperative that a fair transition to net zero is set. With the right forms of intervention and subsidies, it is eminently achievable. The experience of the Covid-19 pandemic has taught us that the most daunting challenges can be met by political leaders who recognise that exceptional times require exceptional measures. Thus far, though, there is little sign that Boris Johnson’s government is willing to treat the climate crisis in the same way. The stark conclusions of the IPCC study, and Britain’s vital convening role at Cop26, make that position untenable. The science is unequivocal. The verdict is clear. There is no more room for political manoeuvring, delay or prevarication in dealing with an emergency which is this generation’s responsibility to address.

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Climate Change, Environment, Global warming, Science, Society

Dimming the Sun: A project funded by Bill Gates

CLIMATE WARMING

BILL GATES, the philanthropist and founder of Microsoft, wants to spray millions of tonnes of dust into the stratosphere to stop global warming. Protagonists of his theory suggest that dimming the Sun could save the Earth.

The plan sounds like science fiction – but could become fact within a decade; every day more than 800 giant aircraft would lift millions of tonnes of chalk to a height of 12 miles above the Earth’s surface and then sprinkle the lot high around the stratosphere.

The hypothesis assumes that the airborne dust would create a gigantic sunshade, reflecting some of the Sun’s rays and heat back into space, dimming those that get through and so protecting the Earth from the worsening ravages of climate warming.

This is not the crackpot plan of a garden-shed inventor. The project is being funded by billionaire Mr Gates and pioneered by scientists at Harvard University.

Indeed, the plans are so well advanced that the initial “sky-clouding” experiments were meant to have begun several months ago.

The initial $3million test, known as Stratospheric Controlled Perturbation Experiment (SCoPEx) would use a high-altitude scientific balloon to raise around 2kg of calcium carbonate dust – the size of a bag of flour – into the atmosphere 12 miles above the desert of New Mexico.

It is calculated that this would seed a tube-shaped area of sky half a mile long and 100 yards in diameter. For the ensuing 24 hours, the balloon would be steered by propellers back through this artificial cloud, its onboard sensors monitoring both the dust’s sun-reflecting abilities and its effects on the thin surrounding air.

SCoPEx is, however, on hold, amid fears that it could trigger a disastrous series of chain reactions, creating climate havoc in the form of serious droughts and hurricanes, and bring death to millions of people around the world.

One of the Harvard team’s directors, Lizzie Burns, admits: “Our idea is terrifying… But so is climate change.” An advisory panel of independent experts is to assess all the possible risks associated with it.

One may wonder where the idea for such a mind-boggling scheme came from.

The inspiration was in part spawned by a natural disaster. When the volcano Mount Pinatubo in the Philippines exploded in 1991, it killed more than 700 people and left more than 200,000 displaced and homeless.

 

BUT it also gave scientists the chance to monitor the consequences of a vast chemical cloud in the stratosphere.

The volcano disgorged 20 million tonnes of sulphur dioxide high above the planet, where it formed droplets of sulphuric acid that floated around the globe for more than a year. These droplets acted like tiny mirrors to reflect sunlight.

As a result, global temperatures were reduced by 0.5c for around a year and a half.

This gave impetus to the idea of a dream “fix” of global warming – and has been the subject of at least 100 academic papers.

Creating what would amount to a gigantic sunshade for the Earth would likely come at a high price, posing even greater risks than climate change itself.

One fear is that spreading dust into the stratosphere may damage the ozone layer that protects us from hazardous ultraviolet radiation which can damage human DNA.

Climatologists are also concerned that such tinkering could unintentionally disrupt the circulation of ocean currents that regulate our weather.

This itself could unleash a global outbreak of extreme climatic events that might devastate farmland, wipe out entire species and foster disease epidemics.

The potential for disaster does not even end there. Trying to dim the Sun’s rays would likely create climate winners and losers.

Scientists may be able to set the perfect climatic conditions for farmers in America’s vast Midwest, but at the same time this setting might wreak drought havoc across Africa.

For it is not possible to change the temperature in one part of the world and not disturb the rest. Everything in the world’s climate is interconnected.

Furthermore, any change in global average temperature would in turn change the way in which heat is distributed around the globe, with some places warming more than others.

This, in turn, would affect rain levels. Heat drives the water cycle – in which water evaporates, forms clouds and drops as rain. Any heat alteration would cause an accompanying shift in rainfall patterns. But how and where exactly?

Thee is no way of predicting how the world’s long-term weather may respond to having a gigantic chemical sunshade plonked on top of it.

As one of the world’s leading climate experts Janos Pasztor – who advised at the UN’s Paris climate agreement and now works for New York’s highly respected Carnegie Climate Governance Initiative – has warned: “If you make use of this technology and do it badly or ungoverned, then you can have different kinds of global risks created that can have equal, if not even bigger, challenges to global society than climate change.”

The technology may even spark terrible wars. For tinkering with our climate could send sky-high the potential for international suspicion and armed conflict.

Say, for example, the Chinese government – which already has been experimenting with climate-altering technology – used its burgeoning space-age scientific know-how to try to dust the stratosphere to protect its own agricultural yields.

Then two years later the monsoons fail in neighbouring Asian giant India, causing widespread starvation and disease. Even if the Chinese move had not actually caused the monsoons to fail, billions would blame them.

There is a further peril. The technology involved is seductively cheap, perhaps less than $10billion a year. This means that an individual nation could use it for their own ends – perhaps as a weapon of war or blackmail.

What’s to stop a nation such as Russia interfering with our weather in the same way it has interfered with democratic elections and social media opinions?

 

NEVERTHELESS, Harvard scientists maintain that they can manage their brainchild safely.

For example, one of the SCoPEx team’s leaders, David Keith, a professor of applied physics, recently reported that by evenly seeding the entire global atmosphere with low levels of reflective dust, there should be a far lower risk of unexpected problems than is feared.

Professor Keith has also suggested that the world’s richer nations should club together to create a pooled global insurance fund to compensate poorer countries for any damage unintentionally caused by their sunshield experimentation.

Critics point out that the promise of a stratospheric sunshade could encourage politicians and industrialists to decide that there is no need to do the hard, unpopular and expensive work of reducing greenhouse gas emissions.

Mike Hulme, a Cambridge University professor of human geography and former scientist on the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, says we could end up instead relying massively on technology to compensate for climate problems that our industries are causing.

He calls this spiralling problem “temperature debt”, because it is like amassing credit-card debts that can never be paid off. “It is a massive gamble,” Professor Hulme warns. “Far better not to build up this debt in the first place.”

Even greater questions arise. How do you switch such a global cooling system off? And what unforeseen consequences would arise if you suddenly did so.

This dream “fix” seems to have plenty of potential to become a global nightmare and outright catastrophe.

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