A new design of wind turbine has broken the world record for the most amount of power generated in a 24-hour period.
Siemens Gamesa said its 14-222 DD offshore prototype generated 359 megawatt-hours in just one day – enough to power 18,000 households or a Tesla Model 3 for more than a million miles.
The renewable energy breakthrough was achieved using a set of “revolutionary” blades that are cast in a single piece of recyclable resin.
…The German oceanographer and climatologist Stefan Rahmstorf writes: “We have enough ice on Earth to raise sea levels by 65 metres – about the height of a 20-storey building – and, at the end of the last ice age, sea levels rose by 120 metres as a result of about 5C of warming.” Taken together, these figures give us a perspective on the powers we are dealing with. Sea-level rise will not remain a question of centimetres for very long.
..Saving the world is voluntary. You could certainly argue against that statement from a moral point of view, but the fact remains: there are no laws or restrictions in place that will force anyone to take the necessary steps towards safeguarding our future living conditions on planet Earth. This is troublesome from many perspectives, not least because – as much as I hate to admit it – Beyoncé was wrong. It is not girls who run the world. It is run by politicians, corporations and financial interests – mainly represented by white, privileged, middle-aged, straight cis men. And it turns out most of them are terribly ill suited for the job. This may not come as a big surprise. After all, the purpose of a company is not to save the world – it is to make a profit. Or, rather, it is to make as much profit as it possibly can in order to keep shareholders and market interests happy….
A drought in China is threatening food production, prompting the government to order local authorities to take all available measures to ensure crops survive the hottest summer on record.
On Tuesday, four government departments issued an urgent joint emergency notice, warning that the autumn harvest was under “severe threat”. It urged local authorities to ensure “every unit of water … be used carefully”, and called for methods included staggered irrigation, the diversion of new water sources, and cloud seeding.
A record-breaking heatwave combined with a months-long drought during the usual flood season has wreaked havoc across China’s usually water-rich south. It has dried up parts of the Yangtze River and dozens of tributaries, drastically affecting hydropower capacity and causing rolling blackouts and power rationing as demand for electricity spikes. There is now concern about future food supply.
great upheaval is coming. Climate-driven movement of people is adding to a massive migration already under way to the world’s cities. The number of migrants has doubled globally over the past decade, and the issue of what to do about rapidly increasing populations of displaced people will only become greater and more urgent. To survive climate breakdown will require a planned and deliberate migration of a kind humanity has never before undertaken.
The world already sees twice as many days where temperatures exceed 50C than 30 years ago – this level of heat is deadly for humans, and also hugely problematic for buildings, roads and power stations. It makes an area unliveable. This explosive planetary drama demands a dynamic human response. We need to help people to move from danger and poverty to safety and comfort – to build a more resilient global society for everyone’s benefit.
Large populations will need to migrate, and not simply to the nearest city, but also across continents. Those living in regions with more tolerable conditions, especially nations in northern latitudes, will need to accommodate millions of migrants while themselves adapting to the demands of the climate crisis. We will need to create entirely new cities near the planet’s cooler poles, in land that is rapidly becoming ice-free. Parts of Siberia, for example, are already experiencing temperatures of 30C for months at a time.
Compared to 2001, fires are now causing 3 million more hectares (7.4 million acres) of tree cover loss per year, amounting to an area larger than Belgium. In 2021, fires were responsible for more than one-third of all tree cover loss for the year, making it one of the worst years on record.
Russia, Canada, the U.S., Brazil and Australia had the highest tree cover loss due to fire over the past 20 years.
The GFW analysis of fire data from the Global Land Analysis & Discovery (GLAD) lab at the University of Maryland was released Aug. 17 and built upon a study on forest loss due to fire from 2001 through 2019 published earlier this year. These analyses provide the most up-to-date and highest-resolution look at global stand-replacing fires.
Known as “extreme event attribution”, the field has gained momentum, not only in the science world, but also in the media and public imagination. These studies have the power to link the seemingly abstract concept of climate change with personal and tangible experiences of the weather.
Scientists have published more than 400 peer-reviewed studies looking at weather extremes around the world, from wildfires in the US and heatwaves in India and Pakistan to typhoons in Asia and record-breaking rainfall in the UK. The result is mounting evidence that human activity is raising the risk of some types of extreme weather, especially those linked to heat.
Humans are filling the world with trash, but not all of our waste is visible to the human eye.
While plastic litter on the beach is easy to spot, microplastics and ‘forever chemicals’ have leached far and wide without our barely noticing.Both forms of pollution are now so ubiquitous in the environment, they are falling with the rain. But while the potential threat of microplastics is a regular point of discussion, some researchers argue the spread of other persistent synthetic compounds is comparatively overlooked.
A team of scientists in Europe are now worried we have crossed a critical line. They argue the presence of forever chemicals in our hydrosphere at values that exceed key guidelines means we have entered an unsafe operating space from which there is practically no return.
The warning comes on the heels of another cautionary paper, which argues the world has breached the safe planetary limit for synthetic chemicals.
Germany saw the addition of 615 MW of new PV capacity in June, according to the latest figures from the Federal Network Agency – the Bundesnetzagentur.
This compares to 548 MW in May this year and 428.5 MW in June 2021. The newly installed solar power generation capacity for the first six months of this year was 3.8 GW. In the same period a year earlier, 2.75 GW of solar capacity was added.
Of the monthly new additions, 364.5 MW was represented by PV installations with a capacity lower than 300 kW, built under the country’s feed-in tariff scheme, while the remaining capacity comes from PV systems selected in auctions for PV systems exceeding 750 kW in size.
