SteamyTea

Ground temperature lags air temperature, as does ocean temperature (which is why it was only 13°C yesterday). Like using the thermal inertia in a house to stabilise ambient temperature, it is only 'right' under very specific circumstances i.e. right ∆T, right, solar gains, right temperature variation. As @JohnMo says, probably not worth the effort, or expense. If pipes in the ground really did make a difference, they would have been used for centuries.

How big a mixer you after? They are pretty cheap new.

Worth looking into the minimum load that triggers the battery/inverter. This is often 200W, which will not run small loads like lighting and laptops. Mt view is that batteries are still too expensive, much better to store excess energy in DHW. It is kW, which is power (actually kWp where the subscription is peak) kWh is energy i.e. the size of the batteries, or how much energy the PV system generates over a set period of time i.e. 4000 kWh.year-1.

Easy, when 'valuing natural resources' we do it all the time. So as an example, and appropriate down here, you ask how much people are willing to pay to have access to a beach, and how much they would take in compensation to not have access. The National Trust, though their car park policy has excluded a lot of beaches to a lot of people.

Have you thought of asking why people don't build their own home? (not done the survey)

How good are you at fixing things?

The companies usually morph and phoenix, so a small tax is reasonable. Concrete is stupidly cheap, and a fantastic material. Compared to many building materials not too bad environmentally either.

GRP it.

That seems reasonable to me as it almost costs the people that caused the problem, and it may reduce concrete usage via less waste.

How does that work?

A house yes, but many things have quite strict rules about ownership and usage. Class A drugs for one. Firearms are another. So you going to be voting for the most liberal party, you can buy my vote if you like, oh hang on, that is illegal.

Owned and being sold by a housing association. But the point is, why are seriously substandard houses allowed to be sold, as houses, rather than a condition that they must be demolished and rebuilt.

It is an old council house, so we have already payed for it, many times over.

Maybe that was the blocks made from power stations. The point is, some buildings should really be condemned and knocked down.

They have arsenic in them I believe.

This place is for sale at £120k https://www.rightmove.co.uk/properties/148261388#/? It is cheap, even for down here because it has mundic blocks in it. That got me thinking. Why are we allowed to sell poisonous housing to live in, I am not allowed to sell poisonous food. Even old cars need to reach a minimum safety standard before they are allowed to be used.

Pick out all the dark ones, then use them as letters to spell out what you are thinking. "Shit a brick" comes to mind.

A fluid that has to be pumped and stored usually. Have read that to capture CO2 from a coal plant takes 30% more energy, natural gas 25%. Not sure how accurate those numbers are and it was a decade or more ago I saw it. There is this article that claims that it is at parity. https://www.rechargenews.com/energy-transition/the-amount-of-energy-required-by-direct-air-carbon-capture-proves-it-is-an-exercise-in-futility/2-1-1067588

Will sucking carbon from air ever really help tackle climate change? The direct air capture industry got a boost last week with the opening of Mammoth, the largest plant yet for sucking carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere, but questions remain about whether the technology can scale up By Madeleine Cuff 15 May 2024 The Mammoth direct air capture plant in Iceland is the largest in the world Climeworks Humanity has spent the past few centuries releasing ever greater amounts of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere – a state of affairs that must be reversed if we are to get to grips with climate change. Removing such CO2 in a process called direct air capture (DAC) has been on the cards for some time, but finally, after years of research and small-scale pilot projects, giant carbon-sucking facilities are becoming a reality. The question is, will the industry grow large enough, fast enough? DAC got a big boost last week when Swiss company Climeworks switched on a new plant called Mammoth. This can extract up to 36,000 tonnes of CO2 a year from the atmosphere – living up to its name, at least when compared with its predecessor Orca, which boasted a maximum capture capacity of just 4000 tonnes per year. The new plant instantly quadrupled global capacity for DAC and is a sign of a step change under way in the industry. Mammoth will only hold the title of world’s largest DAC plant until next year, when the Stratos plant, built by a subsidiary of energy firm Occidental Petroleum using technology from Canadian DAC company Carbon Engineering, comes online. It will be able to extract half a million tonnes of CO2 a year. Steve Smith at the University of Oxford says Mammoth and Stratos are the start of a rapid expansion in global direct air carbon capture and storage (DACCS) capacity. “A dozen or so more DACCS projects are planned to go live in the next couple of years, by various companies,” he says. “If these all materialise, DACCS capacity could be nudging 800,000 tonnes per year.” Overall, ambitions are high – both Occidental and Climeworks plan to be operating multiple plants with capture capacities of 1 million tonnes apiece by 2035. This rapid expansion is being driven by two factors. The first is corporate interest in carbon removals, with the likes of Microsoft, Stripe and Coca-Cola buying DAC credits to help offset their own emissions. With the reputation of many traditional carbon offset schemes in tatters, DAC is seen by some large firms as one of the last respectable removal options. Government policy has also been instrumental, particularly in the US. President Joe Biden’s administration is spending $3.5 billion to support four DAC “hubs” in the US, including Stratos, as part of measures passed in the Inflation Reduction Act to drive carbon removal efforts across the country. US federal tax credits also provide support of up to $180 per tonne of CO2 trapped and permanently stored via DAC, the first major policy of its kind anywhere in the world. But voluntary carbon credits and generous government subsidies will only take the industry so far. Pathways to limit warming to 2°C will require billions of tonnes of carbon to be removed from the atmosphere by mid-century. For DAC to make a meaningful contribution to that, “some form of regulation by governments” will be necessary to drive the growth of this sector, says Smith. For example, in February European Union officials outlined plans to create “a European single market for industrial carbon management” by 2050, to ensure all residual emissions from sectors such as livestock farming are balanced with equivalent removals. But the plans are still in their infancy and are yet to be approved by member states. Another major hurdle is cost. For the DAC industry, the race is on to cut removal costs before government subsidies and corporate budgets run dry. Operators are hoping that by scaling up the size of facilities, the sky-high price of sucking carbon out of the air will come down rapidly, from around $600-$1000 per tonne today to $100-$200 per tonne within the next few decades. That price point would make DAC capable of delivering globally significant levels of carbon removal, most experts agree, but few are sure such a dramatic price drop is possible. “The science was done 50 years ago. This has always been about the ability to do things at industrial scale, cheaply,” says David Keith at the University of Chicago. “The challenge is whether you can do it at an interesting cost, and I don’t think we know the answer to that yet.” There are also reputational challenges to consider. Big oil companies including Occidental, ExxonMobil and Shell are all eyeing DAC as a way to justify squeezing more oil from reservoirs, reducing the net carbon footprint of their fossil fuels business on an ongoing basis. Rather than extending the lifespan of the fossil fuel industry, Smith stresses the focus should be on cutting global emissions and developing DAC as a way of tackling any residual, hard-to-abate emissions. He describes DAC as the “carbon equivalent of litter-picking: hard work, expensive, not the first-best way to deal with the problem, but necessary in our imperfect world”. Some people doubt DAC will ever make a meaningful contribution to global pollution drawdown. Howard Herzog at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Energy Initiative believes the technology is “overhyped”, citing uncertainty over its future costs and high energy demand. Even Keith, who founded the DAC business Carbon Engineering, says that other methods of carbon removal, such as boosting the carbon storage capacity of soils or ocean waters, hold at least as much promise. “Direct air capture is one of many different carbon removal pathways,” he says. “I don’t see it as being unique.” To rescue biodiversity, we need a better way to measure it There are all kinds of different ways to measure biodiversity. But if we are to arrest its alarming decline, biologists must agree on a method that best captures how it changes over time By Graham Lawton 20 May 2024 Biodiversity contains several dimensions Hans-Joachim Schneider/Alamy At first blush, the idea of biodiversity seems simple enough. It is essentially the variety of all life on Earth. But making sense of biodiversity in a way that can help us halt or even reverse its decline is anything but straightforward. “People often use the word biodiversity just to mean any characteristic of life out there that we might care to protect,” says Mark Vellend, a biologist at the University of Sherbrooke in Quebec, Canada. “That’s not a definition I find useful in science because if it’s everything, it’s nothing.” For biodiversity to be a valuable concept, he says, it needs to be a measure of biological variety. That way, we can not only assess where we are and where we are headed, but also how best to conserve the biodiversity we have left. The problem is that variety itself comes in many forms, especially in biology. “You can’t just come up with a single number for biodiversity in the same way as you can for carbon,” says Andy Hector at the University of Oxford. “It’s way, way more complicated.” We already have ways to measure biodiversity. That’s how we know it is in steep decline. They boil down to what biologists think of as dimensions of biodiversity. One of the most basic is species richness, which is simply the number of species in a given place at a given time. This has been used extensively and can sometimes be a useful proxy for other dimensions of biodiversity, says Hector. Measuring biodiversity One of those is the relative abundance of the different species. Two ecosystems can be equally rich in species, but not in diversity. “The way I like to explain it is if you walk through a forest or swim through a coral reef and you see two organisms in sequence, what are the odds that they’re going to be different things?” says Vellend. “You could have a thousand types of things in there, but if 99 per cent of them are of one type, then the odds are, when you see two in a row, it’s going to be the same thing.” A third dimension is how different the species are from one another in some important aspect. “Functional diversity”, for example, looks at the range of different roles that species play in an ecosystem, such as in photosynthesis, nutrient recycling, predation or pollination. But there is also a fourth dimension, which tracks how the other three change over time. Every measure of biodiversity worth its salt captures one or more of these aspects, weighted according to what data is available and the project’s goals. “It all depends what you want,” says Hector. “Are you trying to conserve biodiversity for biodiversity’s sake or is it more human-centric?” Why bioabundance is just as important as biodiversity The abundance of wild birds, fish, amphibians, reptiles and insects has drastically declined over the past 50 years, but the scale and seriousness of this loss is often lost when we focus on the number of species in an area And here’s where things get knotty, because there are myriad ways of measuring each dimension. That means the whole thing risks becoming frighteningly fractal and indeed fractious. When discussions started on how to define the 2020 global biodiversity targets, there were nearly 100 suggestions on the table, according to Henrique Pereira at the University of Halle-Wittenberg in Germany. In 2013, researchers led by Pereira began trying to standardise the way biodiversity is measured. They distilled biodiversity to six key dimensions: genetic composition, species distribution and abundance, species traits, community composition, ecosystem functioning and ecosystem structure. These capture the essence of biodiversity and how it is changing in a format that biologists can measure and share, says Pereira. Not everyone is on board. But there is at least a growing realisation that the time for such quibbling has long passed. There isn’t, and probably never will be, a comprehensive measure of biodiversity, says Hector. And ultimately, “we don’t have the luxury of waiting until all life is documented”, he says. Could we live in tree cities grown from giant sequoia in the future? This week our new Future Chronicles column, which explores an imagined history of inventions of the future, visits carbon negative cities: forest homes grown from giant sequoia, genetically engineered for rapid growth. Rowan Hooper is our guide By Rowan Hooper 22 May 2024 Oregon sequoia forest, USA E.BISSIRIEIX/Shutterstock In the second half of the 21st century, the first living city was established in urban forest around Portland, Oregon. Sequoia City comprised a grove of 40 trees, including a hospital tree, schools, farms and recreation facilities (zip lines, slides and altitude swings). As they grew, residential trees eventually each housed dozens of families, living in custom-grown rooms made of living plant tissue. Children raised in Sequoia City saw no distinction between humans and other lifeforms. To them, ecology – the study of life in relation to its environment – was something they understood in their bones. That they were connected to nature went without saying; their intimacy was innate. Sequoia City was a demonstration settlement, established to provide the proven mental health benefits of living in nature, to support the storage of carbon in living trees and soils and to tackle the extinction crisis. It was inspired by ecologists who had discovered other species that had domesticated plants to live in. Philidris ants in Fiji sow seeds of Squamellaria on the branches of large trees. The ants tend the seedlings, which, as they grow, form large, hollow structures called domatia. The ants are saved the effort of building a nest and move into the domatia. The Squamellaria produce fruit too, which the ants eat. Descendant ants plant more seeds taken from their crop and the symbiotic cycle carries on. The planners behind Sequoia City saw what the ants were doing and thought it looked like a good idea. Inspiration also came from living tree cities in science fiction, such as Cixin Liu’s Remembrance of Earth’s Past trilogy. Giant sequoia are some of the largest organisms to have existed on our planet. They can live for up to 3000 years and grow up to 90 metres tall. In the early 21st century, their numbers fell in their native range in the Sierra Nevada mountains of California due to the climate crisis, but they continued to grow well in wetter, more northerly regions such as northern Europe and the Pacific Northwest. Oregon was chosen as the first location for a living city. There were a few problems to overcome in developing the residential trees. The biggest was the slow growth of sequoias. Although faster-growing than the likes of oak, sequoia still take at least 100 years before they are big enough to live in. However, the genome sequence of giant sequoia was well known, and our understanding of the genetics of plant growth was sophisticated enough even back in the 2020s to locate genes related to fast growth. With careful gene editing, it was possible to create sequoia that develop ultra rapidly. The key DNA sequences came from eucalyptus, one of the fastest growing trees, and bamboo, which, despite being a grass not a tree, supplied some important traits that enabled the development of a suitable species of sequoia. The resulting trees formed their own version of domatia, encouraged by inserting guiding bars into the plant tissue. Different sized rooms could easily be grown, and windows installed. Bathrooms and toilet facilities were fully plumbed. Sewage was processed by specialised microbes and recycled into soil at the base of the tree and in the numerous gardens high in the tree itself. Epiphytes – plants growing on other plants – are diverse and important parts of the forest ecosystem. In Sequoia City, garden zones and farm zones grew a range of squashes, cereals and beans, which the residents both consume and trade. Small cherry and apple trees themselves grew in orchard zones supported by the giant sequoia. Water farms on the trees deployed bromeliads, ferns and mosses to trap moisture from the air and send it down pipes to storage domatia. Electricity was supplied by wind and solar installations on individual domatia and on specialised power trees. The success of Sequoia City spawned a series of copies around the world that used gene-edited species native to their region: Oak City and BeechTown in the UK, Bamboo MegaCity in southern China and Gum Towns, made of eucalyptus, in Tasmania and New South Wales in Australia. The domestication of the baobab and its subsequent gene-editing for accommodation led to spectacular Baobab towns in Ghana, Kenya and Sudan. By the end of the 21st century, satellite surveys of tree cover confirmed a significant fraction of previously deforested land had been regreened, and estimates suggested that the tree cities had contributed to a large reduction in atmospheric carbon dioxide. Studies reported that species diversity and population sizes had returned to levels not seen since the 19th century. Tree children, immersed in the arboreal high life, traditionally got their first pair of wings – modified hang gliders – at age 10. Invention Living-tree homes Time stamp 2070 Tagline The ultimate in eco-living Future Chronicles explores an imagined history of inventions and developments yet to come. Rowan Hooper is the podcast editor at New Scientist and author of How to Spend a Trillion Dollars: The 10 global problems we can actually fix.

Around half the world could lose easily accessible groundwater by 2050 In coming decades, major groundwater sources may become economically unfeasible — this could raise food prices and shift diets, among other impacts By James Dinneen 15 May 2024 Reaching peak groundwater pumping could impact agriculture across the globe Peter Bennett / Alamy Groundwater extraction is set to peak globally within the next three decades as unsustainable pumping depletes accessible stores. This could reshape the food and water systems that serve at least half the world’s population. Between 1960 and 2010, global groundwater extraction increased by more than 50 per cent, largely to irrigate crops. Today, one-fifth of all food is produced using groundwater. Much of this water is extracted from aquifers faster than they naturally refill, driving declining water levels. This causes the land to sink, contaminates the remaining water and harms ecosystems fed by the aquifers. It also increases the cost of extraction — wells must be drilled ever deeper and water pumps require more energy. Previous studies projected this groundwater extraction would rise indefinitely, but they “did not have the human feedback in there”, says Hassan Niazi at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory in Washington state. Niazi and his colleagues projected how decreasing water levels and rising pumping costs could affect extraction in the world’s major water basins this century. They used a model that incorporates the intricate relationships between groundwater extraction, economic development, energy systems and climate change. The researchers modelled 900 different scenarios to capture a range of possible futures. On average across scenarios, they found the volume of groundwater extraction peaked around 2050 at 625 cubic kilometres of water — about twice as much as today. By century’s end, extraction declined to near present-day level. The peak’s timing and magnitude varied across scenarios, but nearly all forecasted a peak before 2100. Some regions may face even quicker declines. In most scenarios, extraction peaked before 2030 in 10 per cent of studied water basins, including in large areas of India, Pakistan and China. Extraction in some basins appears to have already peaked. The researchers found declining extraction volumes in Missouri and California since 2010 and 2015, respectively. “What is driving that peak really differs region to region,” says Niazi. In California, for example, increasing pumping costs appears to be the main cause. In South-East Asia, shifts in precipitation and hotter temperatures due to climate change play a larger role, he says. The researchers were clear that it is impossible to drain all the planet’s groundwater – they project people will pump less than 1 per cent of the water present in the top 2 kilometres of Earth’s crust over the next century. But supplies that are economically or physically feasible to extract could run short, impacting agricultural and water systems. Food prices could rise, for instance. That may spur more agriculture on rain-fed lands or compel drier countries to import water-intensive crops. Regions that haven’t pumped much groundwater might start pumping more. “Those changes aren’t going to be easy,” says Peter Gleick at the Pacific Institute, a non-profit research organisation in California. “You can’t just move that agricultural production to somewhere else” in most cases, he says. Alongside factors like climate change and a growing population, the impact on food availability could be “very alarming”, says Matti Kummu at Aalto University in Finland. Food producers should switch to less water-intensive crops and use groundwater more efficiently as soon as possible, he says. Sunlight-trapping device can generate temperatures over 1000°C A solar energy absorber that uses quartz to trap heat reached 1050°C in tests and could offer a way to decarbonise the production of steel and cement By Chen Ly 15 May 2024 The heat-trapping device reached 1050°C in experiments mark bulmer/Alamy Engineers have developed a device that can generate temperatures of over 1000°C (1832°F) by efficiently capturing energy from the sun. It could one day be used as a green alternative to burning fossil fuels in the production of materials such as steel, glass and cement. Manufacturing these materials involves heating raw materials to above 1000°C by burning fossil fuels, which is extremely energy intensive. “About half of the energy we use is not actually turned into electricity,” says Emiliano Casati at ETH Zurich in Switzerland. “It’s used to produce many of the materials that we need in our daily lives and our industries.” Solar furnaces, which use an array of moveable mirrors to focus sunlight onto a receiver that reaches high temperatures, could be used at manufacturing sites as an alternative to burning fossil fuels. However, they are currently quite inefficient at converting solar energy to temperatures higher than 1000°C, says Casati. To improve the efficiency of such devices, Casati and his colleagues have designed a heat-trapping solar receiver with a 300 millimetre layer of quartz around it. Quartz is a semi-transparent material that allows light energy to pass through it but blocks thermal energy. This means that as the silicon heats up from the concentrated sunlight, the quartz prevents thermal energy leaking back out, trapping the heat and reducing energy loss in the system. The team tested the modified solar receiver in a facility that simulates sunlight using LEDs. Their initial experiments found that the silicon absorber easily reached 1050°C. According to heat transfer models, the silicon shield could enable receivers to get to temperatures of up to 1200°C while keeping 70 per cent of the energy input in the system. Without the silicon shield, the energy efficiency drops to just 40 per cent for the same temperature. While this is just a proof-of-concept device, Casati hopes that it will one day be widely used as a green way of producing the high temperatures needed in manufacturing. “We really need to tackle the challenge of decarbonising these industries, and this could be one of the solutions,” he says. Journal reference: Device DOI: 10.1016/j.device.2024.100399 Heatwaves seem to be driving severe asthma flare-ups in children Children are more likely to be hospitalised for asthma complications during a heatwave, a problem that is expected to get worse with climate change By Sonali Roy 19 May 2024 Hot temperatures can lead to ozone pollution, which irritates the airways of people with asthma Lopolo/Shutterstock Hot weather appears to be triggering more frequent hospital visits for children with asthma. Symptoms of the lung condition, such as breathlessness and wheezing, are more commonly associated with cold weather. To better understand the impact of hot temperatures, Morgan Ye at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF), and her colleagues studied electronic health data from UCSF Benioff Children’s Hospitals. The data included records on asthma hospitalisations and the patients’ addresses. The researchers used information from PRISM Climate Group at Oregon State University to obtain temperature records at the patients’ homes every day from June to September between 2017 and 2020. The researchers defined heatwaves in 18 different ways. By looking at the range of temperatures that occurred over these periods, they considered it a heatwave if it fell in the top 1 per cent of these temperatures, or the top 2.5 per cent, or the top 5 per cent, and so on. Presenting their results at the American Thoracic Society conference in San Diego, California, this week, the researchers found that across all of the heatwave definitions, these temperatures were associated with 19 per cent higher odds, on average, of a child with asthma being admitted to hospital, compared with when there wasn’t a heatwave. While further research is required, hot weather can contribute to smog and ozone pollution, which may inflame or irritate the airways, says Ye. “As we continue to see global temperatures rise due to human-generated climate change, we can expect a rise in health-related issues as we observe longer, more frequent and severe heatwaves,” she says. Children are particularly vulnerable to extreme heat, says Stephanie Holm at the UCSF’s Western States Pediatric Environmental Health Specialty Unit. Speaking of the researchers’ approach to defining heatwaves, she says: “The fact that their results were robust to different definitions of extreme heat is powerful.” Solar-powered floating islands could help to regrow coral reefs A trio of hexagonal islands could generate solar electricity to power a process that accelerates coral growth, with space for a research lab and a garden By Madeleine Cuff 21 May 2024 Corals growing on a Biorock reef restoration structure in Indonesia MATTHEW OLDFIELD/SCIENCE PHOTO LIBRARY A cluster of floating, solar-powered islands could be used to support coral reef restoration efforts in coastal waters, a team of researchers has proposed. It is possible to accelerate the recovery of damaged corals, or the growth of new coral colonies, by pumping an electrical current through seawater. This prompts minerals dissolved in the seawater to crystallise on structures, forming limestone rock that is the perfect habitat for young corals. The approach, known as the Biorock process, has been used on hundreds of coral reefs around the world. But deployment has been limited to reefs close to shore because of the difficulty of running electricity cables out into the deeper ocean. Lê Thanh Tài at Ho Chi Minh City University of Technology, Vietnam, and his colleagues have designed a system of three interconnected floating islands they say could be used to power the Biorock process at sea, with no need for terrestrial power supplies. Each island has a distinct function: one would feature a solar array to power the coral restoration efforts; the second would act as a research hub for teams monitoring the reef; and the third would act as a “botanical garden”, with a roof to collect rainwater as a water supply. The islands would be hexagon-shaped, with each side measuring 30 metres, and have a stainless steel frame and a composite outer surface. The team’s analysis, which hasn’t yet been peer reviewed, suggests the islands could float and provide adequate water and electricity without relying on mainland supplies. Each system would cost around $2 million to build, Lê estimates. “Our study has demonstrated the feasibility of our artificial islands,” he says. “This highlights the potential for these islands to serve as viable platforms for coral reef restoration efforts.” The islands would sit in sheltered coastal bays where they are protected from storms. They would transmit electricity to structures on the seabed where the coral would grow. “There are four anchors per island to prevent the whole system from drifting away without being under control and from being toppled over by large waves,” says Lê, although he says an extreme event such as a tsunami would be likely to cause severe damage. Alastair Bonnett at Newcastle University, UK, says the design looks sound and has a novel application. “Most artificial islands – and there are a lot in the tropics – are a real engine for destroying coral,” he says. “To see a scheme that is about growing coral is great.” But floating islands usually only have a lifespan of 50 to 100 years. “If you are having schemes that need replacing every 50 years, that becomes an environmental issue itself,” says Bonnett. Reference: Research Square DOI: 10.21203/rs.3.rs-4299233

You talk such bollocks sometimes. The USA is a huge country, has very different climate zones, and properties prices are not so dissimilar to ours. $400k against £300k (you can look up the figures on the FRED and ONS). Median wages in the USA are $365/week, England £672/week. So against what you want to believe, property in the USA is more expensive, depending where you are, the weather may be more extreme, but not many people live in those extreme areas, most live in places with known climate extremes, just like we do.

It increases the amount of time that the rest of systems have to react to. Why it is called inertia. Mainly the noise and physical size. Also, the mass and speed the flywheel has to spin at. Here is a bit about the KERS device that Williams developed. https://www.racecar-engineering.com/articles/f1/williams-f1-kers-explained/

There is one need Edinburgh https://www.science.org/content/article/gravity-based-batteries-try-beat-their-chemical-cousins-winches-weights-and-mine-shafts