Lifeboat Foundation

How can afforestation/reforestation (AR) help reduce climate change and help achieve the goal of the Paris Agreement calling for a maximum 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels? This is what a recent study published in Nature Communications hopes to address as a team of researchers from Germany investigated how AR could contribute to meeting this goal. This study holds the potential to help researchers, climate scientists, legislators, and the public better understand the steps that can be taken to mitigate the effects of climate change, for both the short and long term.

In simple terms, afforestation/reforestation (AR) is planting trees in areas that have experienced deforestation (tree removal) or areas where trees never existed. For the study, the researchers used Integrated Assessment Models (IAMs) to simulate how AR could contribute to the Paris Agreement goals by conducting more than 1,200 scenarios. In the end, the researchers found that AR contributions to climate change makes its biggest impact in 2052, along with decreasing average global temperatures by 0.2 degrees Celsius by the end of the century. Finally, AR could also reduce the amount of time before average global temperatures exceed 1.5 degrees Celsius by 13 years.

“These results show that global AR can in fact make an important contribution to mitigating climate change, when applied at the large sale,” said Dr. Yiannis Moustakis, who is a postdoctoral researcher at Ludwig Maximilians Universität München and lead author of the study. “But it is not a panacea and must be viewed in a more comprehensive framework that takes socioeconomic trade-offs equally into account. Planting a forest could create jobs, revenue, and promote ecosystem services, but it could also deprive people’s livelihood, exacerbate poverty, financially or physically displace people, and disturb local food networks.”

“The isotope values of these carbonates point toward extreme amounts of evaporation, suggesting that these carbonates likely formed in a climate that could only support transient liquid water,” said Dr. David Burtt.

Was the planet Mars ever habitable and what conditions led to it becoming the uninhabitable world we see today? This is what a recent study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences hopes to address as a team of researchers from the United States and Canada investigated how carbonate minerals found within Gale Crater on Mars could help paint a clearer picture of past conditions on the Red Planet and whether it was habitable. This study holds the potential to help scientists better understand the formation and evolution of Mars and whether it once had the necessary conditions to support life as we know it.

Studying carbonate minerals is important due to their ability to tell scientists how a climate formed and evolved over time, with these carbonate minerals containing large amounts of carbon and oxygen isotopes, specifically Carbon-13 and Oxygen-18, which the study notes is the highest amount of these isotopes identified on the Red Planet. Carbon-13 and Oxygen-18 are known as environmental isotopes, which are used to better understand the interactions between a planet’s ocean and atmosphere and how life could exist. While Earth is the only known planet to support life, studying these isotopes on Mars could help scientists better understand if life could have formed on Mars long ago.

Continue reading “The Habitable Mars? Examining Isotopes in Gale Crater” »

“Satellite navigation (GPS) degraded or inoperable for hours,” the SWPC warned.” Radio – HF (high frequency) radio propagation sporadic or blacked out.”

This severe geomagnetic storm is forecast at the same time Hurricane Milton is forecast to strike Florida. While the SWPC did not note if satellite issues could hinder hurricane monitoring, radio blackouts are expected.

An innovative way is being created by scientists which will help them in “growing” ice and doing the impossible job of “refreezing” the Arctic Sea as initial tests prove promising.

Scientists are aiming at pumping seawater over the frozen Arctic Ocean. They have carried out trials in the Canadian Arctic which have seen sea ice getting thickened successfully.

According to a report published in New Scientist, if no action is taken right now, the accelerating climate change will make the Arctic “ice-free in the summer in the 2030s” which will be disastrous for the planet.

https://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/images/153422/sprites-camera-action.

An astronaut on the International Space Station captured a red sprite over North America, a rare atmospheric phenomenon associated with powerful lightning.

Continue reading “Astronauts Reveal Dazzling Red Sprites: Stunning Phenomena Captured From Space Station [Video]” »

Satellites are broadcasting emergency alerts on all networks.

While machine learning methods can be used for accurate flow prediction in complex environments, such as for urban structures³⁰ or turbulent fields³¹, generalizing these approaches to domains of arbitrary size and complexity remains a challenging problem. One reason is that flows near and around obstacles depend on factors associated with the fluid (i.e., Reynolds number) or domain (i.e., boundary conditions), and fixing either of these conditions puts bounds on the validity of the estimated fields. Thus, if we seek broad applicability, then we should seek the fewest set of model restrictions that together provide the most accurate flow predictions. To this end, our approach has been to deconstruct certain types of domains into individual obstacles that each maintain some level of geometrical similarity, so that a single neural network model can be used to predict flows near all structural boundaries of the domain. Flows between these structural surfaces, at a scale on the order of the obstacle diameter, are predicted using a second neural network model in series with the first. Together, this serial-modeling approach allows for rapid prediction of flows in domains that can be represented by a disjoint set of structural elements. This type of domain is common, for example, in urban and periurban areas, wherein buildings conform to a common structural motif that affects ground-level velocity fields.

Another relevant length scale is the grid size used to digitize individual domains for read-in by the model. Thus, we investigated how flow patterns can be affected when this input resolution is varied. Although our choice of grid size is somewhat arbitrary, it is dense enough to capture variation in the relevant velocity fields near individual obstacles, but not so dense that producing a large enough cohort of CFD-generated training datasets becomes computationally intractable.

Our approach can also be trained to predict flows with a variable inlet velocity, which, in the case of urban wind flow prediction, permits model parameterization in terms of current meteorological conditions. In the specific case of aerial dispersion of chemicals throughout an urban environment, our predicted flows are considered as the advective field of a drift-diffusion model of molecular dispersion. This advection field plays a central role because concentration fluctuations decorrelate in relationship with the velocity fluctuations of the advection field, and spatial heterogeneity in the flow patterns is determined by the sequence of obstacles in the flow path.

How will climate change alter winter weather in the future? This is what a recent study published in npj Climate and Atmospheric Science hopes to address as a team of researchers investigated the long-term effects of climate change on winter weather precipitation, or wetness. This study has the potential to help researchers, climate scientists, policymakers, and the public understand the long-term consequences of global climate change and the steps that can be taken to mitigate it.

For the study, the researchers used computer models to compare precipitation levels between 1985 and 2014 and compared these to model-predicted data spanning from 2070 to 2099 across seven subregions across the United States. In the end, the researchers estimate an increase between 2 to 5 percent of precipitation for every degree increase before the end of the century, noting this increase will hit the Northwest and Northeast regions of the United States the hardest.

“We found that, unlike summer and other seasons where projected changes in precipitation is highly uncertain, there will be a robust future intensification of winter precipitation,” said Dr. Akintomide Akinsanola, who is an assistant professor in the Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences at the University of Illinois Chicago and lead author of the study. “It will accelerate well past what we have seen in historic data.”

“This research underscores that successful water investments hinge not just on addressing immediate water needs, but also on strengthening the governmental and societal frameworks that facilitate private sector engagement,” said Dr. Pamela Green.

What steps can be taken to address global water shortages and security? This is what a recent study published in Global Environmental Change hopes to address as an international team of researchers investigated the readiness levels of economies around the world and if private investments could help alleviate the concerns regarding water security and safety worldwide. This study holds the potential to help researchers, climate scientists, and the public understand the severity of global water security and what steps can be taken to mitigate those risks and concerns.

For the study, the researchers conducted a statistical analysis comparing at-risk regions across the globe to available fiscal resources that can be used to address and alleviate risks and concerns to water scarcity.

Continue reading “Addressing Water Insecurity: A Call for Innovative Economic Strategies” »