REMKO DE WAAL / Getty Images On Saturday a team led by 24-year-old Boyan Slat will haul a 600-meter boom system from San Francisco out to the Great Pacific Garbage Patch to clean up marine plastic.
“Hopefully in the next few months, we will be able to prove that it works by taking the first plastic out of the ocean to land.
But marine debris floating in the gyres is just a small fraction of the plastic waste entering the ocean every year.
“After 50 years of trash going out onto the ocean, only 1 percent of one year?” UniversalImagesGroup / Getty Images He says the vast majority of plastic is likely collecting in coastal areas.
Slat hopes to upcycle the collected debris into products that could help fund the next cleanup.
In the long term, the goal is to reduce plastic use (and eliminate single-use plastics such as coffee stirrers), to stop trash from leaking into natural environments and to reinvent plastics to be degradable or recyclable, with cost-competitive products held to high performance standards.
It’s a process that some campaigners have criticized for adding to air pollution and perpetuating an energy system built on fossil fuels, but advocates say it’s a good solution for destroying existing plastic waste with nowhere to go.
Reducing plastic use as much as possible, building up strong waste management, redesigning materials to be easily reused and recycled and never leaving anything at the beach or in any other natural environments are all part of the puzzle.
“There’s a whole suite of things that we need to do, all the way from the consumer level up through the plastics supply chain and the major corporations and consumer goods companies, all the way to local governments and municipalities up to national, international development funding and the U.N.,” says Ocean Conservancy’s Woglom.
All content is editorially independent, with no influence or input from the foundations.

Kasdorf, a poet and English professor at Pennsylvania State University, asked her server what was going on.
Determined to keep an open mind, she began seeking out stories from people affected by fracking.
Her conversation at a roadside restaurant inspired the opening poem, “Fry Brothers Turkey Ranch with Urbanspoon and Yelp Reviews.” Here’s a snippet: The young waitress says last winter they didn’t have to lay Anyone off.
Pennsylvania sits atop one of the world’s largest natural gas fields, the Marcellus Shale, and as of May 2017 was host to 10,097 active fracking wells, according to the state Department of Environmental Protection.
If fracking means you can keep your farm, am I going to stand in judgment about that?
In Shale Play, Kasdorf draws from court transcripts, letters, and legal documents.
She lives just 10 miles from the house where she grew up, south of the Marcellus Shale.
But in April, a Pennsylvania appeals court issued a landmark ruling that redefined some fracking as trespassing.
“These companies have no concern for the people and places they are using,” Kasdorf says.
“We must protect our own people and places from the violence of this kind of exploitation and destruction.

From the perspective of critics, there are many reasons to be concerned about the rise of artificial intelligence.
Now Prince Charles, the 69-year-old heir to the British throne, has revealed another reason to fear AI.
In an interview with GQ Magazine, Charles said he’s deeply dismayed by the way artificial intelligence is beginning to change the way people interact with machines.
“The thing I find hardest now is to cope with this extraordinary trend that somehow we must become part human, part machine, which I totally and utterly object to,” the Prince of Wales told the magazine.
Long considered an environmentalist, Charles has been promoting organic farming since the 1980s and has made a point of “urging action on global warming” since at least 1990, according to Time.
Charles said he has “always believed that living on a finite planet means we have to recognize that this puts certain constraints and limits on our human ambition in order to maintain the viability of the planet.” “That is why it matters so much that the way we operate has to be in tune with the way nature and the universe works and not the way we think it ought to work, which is what we have been doing,” he added.
Among his many warnings about the rise of artificial intelligence, Musk — who appeared in a documentary this year about the danger of AI — has said that autonomous machines are more dangerous to the world than North Korea and could unleash “weapons of terror.” Musk has also compared the adoption of AI to “summoning the devil.” But Kevin Kelly, the executive editor of Wired magazine, has offered a decidedly optimistic view of technology’s evolution, signaling that the debate over AI is robust within the tech world.
“I think that we, ourselves, are technology,” Kelly told a reporter at the World Government Summit in Dubai earlier this year, appearing to imply that technology is an extension of biological evolution and central to what makes humans unique among animals.
We have invented our humanity.” “If we took all technology from our lives away, everything — fire, knives — humans would only last six months,” Kelly added.

Only about half of the sunlight makes it to the surface, so we’re down to 0.14 W/m2 change from peak to trough, less than a twentieth of a percent.
They’re right … … but they’re also wrong.
To start with, here’s the breakdown of the strength of the solar radiation by wavelength.
Wavelengths shorter than that are ultraviolet (UV).
And way over on the left, at 10 – 24 nm wavelength between the vertical red lines, is the tiny amount of extreme ultraviolet (EUV).
Even though it varies on a percentage basis more than the TSI, the EUV represents such a small part of the sun’s energy that it cannot be even seen at this scale.
The second problem is that the variation in EUV is much, much smaller in absolute terms than the variation in TSI.
As you can see, the variations in the EUV are very small compared to the variations in the visible spectrum.
In fact, the only reason that the percentage variations in EUV are greater than the percentage variations in TSI is that changes in EUV start from almost zero … so even a tiny absolute change in EUV is a large percentage change in EUV.
DATA: I’ve used the solar data recommended here for use in the CMIP6.

The European Offshore Wind Deployment Centre, with the world’s largest turbine capacity, is inaugurated in the presence of Vattenfall`s CEO Magnus Hall and Nicola Sturgeon, First Minister of Scotland.
The European Offshore Wind Deployment Centre, is at the heart of Vattenfall’s drive for low cost offshore wind power.
The EOWDC, in Scotland’s North-east will produce enough electricity to meet the power demand of about 80,000 British households (312 GWh) every year.
Magnus Hall, CEO of Vattenfall, said: “Vattenfall is in Britain to grow.
As we forge new partnerships in heat, e-mobility, retail, power distribution and wind over the next ten years we will be at the forefront of the UK’s decarbonisation of energy.” Future wind power technology will be tested at the EOWDC in Aberdeen Bay, which is one of the first testing facilities of its kind.
The eleven wind turbines, two 8.8 MW and nine 8.4 MW, have the largest turbine capacity in commercial operation in the world.
One single rotor lap from the record 8.8 MW turbine provides a British household with electricity for a full day.
Instead of using traditional monopiles (hollow steel tubes), a new technique has been used at Aberdeen Bay; so-called suction buckets.
The method is suitable for seabed with shallow rock strata, is virtually silent which minimizes the disturbance of wildlife at sea.
* How the marine life is affected by wind farms For studies of marine wildlife around wind farms, Vattenfalll and the EU have invested EUR 3 million to study the effect of offshore wind farms on dolphins, salmon, sea trout and sea birds.

This peppermint foot scrub is made specifically for feet.
Exfoliating sugar and dried herbs will scrub away rough skin, coconut oil will soften cracks, and soothing peppermint essential oil has a cooling effect.
First, they are simple to make, and you can usually find the ingredients you need around the house.
This makes them a fabulous way to get started if you want to learn how to make your own all-natural skincare products.
I make them for myself, friends, and family, and post the recipes for everyone else!
This recipe is perfect for feet.
Makes 400g sugar scrub Ingredients 250 g of sugar 125 g virgin coconut oil, softened 1 mint tea bag 10 drops peppermint essential oil Spirulina powder (optional) Make it!
In a bowl, cream together the sugar and the coconut oil.
To give a minty green color to the scrub, add in some spirulina powder as a natural colorant.
Stir the ingredients together and scoop into a lidded jar.

Two of England’s under-pressure water companies have pledged to cut bills for millions of customers and revealed new plans to tackle leaks.
Severn Trent and United Utilities said they would cut customer’s average bills by 5% and 10.5% respectively from 2020.
The UK’s biggest water company, Thames Water, has asked the water regulator to keep bills flat.
As part of Ofwat’s 2019 price review, water companies have been required to outline a detailed business plan, detailing how they will charge customers between 2020 and 2025.
In February, the environment minister, Michael Gove, warned water companies over their “concerning” behaviour.
It said new pipelines would deliver a 13% efficiency in spending.
Thames Water, which supplies more than 15 million people across the south-east, said it will spend £11.7bn on upgrades, including £2.1bn to reduce leaks.
Thames Water to pay back £65m to customers as part of leakage penalty Read more Anglian Water said its bills would rise by less than 1%.
The huge profits, and big salaries paid to water company bosses, have been repeatedly attacked by politicians and others.
“All companies have had an opportunity to develop high-quality plans, but where plans aren’t sufficiently ambitious or stretching, we’ll step in to protect customers and the environment.” Ofwat will publish an initial assessment of each water company’s business plan in January and its final determination in December 2019.

Mongolia’s Prime Minister, Ukhnaagiin Khürelsükh reportedly commissioned a 15-MW solar power plant, the country’s second operational photovoltaic (PV) facility and also the largest to date.
The plant is situated in the Economic Development Zone of Zamyn-Üüd, in Dornogovi province in southeastern Mongolia.
The Dornogovi plant is 50% larger than the country’s other solar facility, which is a 10-MW project in the northern Mongolian city of Darkhan.
The plant came online in January 2018 and was built with PV components that are resistant to the extreme weather conditions prevalent in the country.
The plant is expected to generate around 32 million kWh per year.
Meanwhile, according to the Chinese news agency, Xinhua another 20-MW solar park is being developed in Dornogovi, which was set for completion by the year-end.
Towards its endeavour of reducing its reliance on old coal-fired power stations, Mongolia is using solar.
And, the country implemented a feed-in-tariff (FIT) scheme over the past year, which resulted in the allocation of around 200-MW of solar and 450-MW of wind power capacity.
However, according to the World Bank, these arrangements were made without proper consideration of the ability of the power grid to absorb variable power.
In conclusion, the World Bank reiterated that the licensed developers have run into difficulties in establishing their plants, which has left most licenses in limbo.

Just: Will you vote?
Which is to say, environmentalists who vote.
“All the messaging we test is simply focused on one thing: What will increase the likelihood of voting?” EVP founder Nathaniel Stinnett says.
And they’ll push for laws and policies that reflect your beliefs.
“Climate change is not a small issue — it’s an existential crisis,” Stinnett says.
It targeted voters on behalf of the AFL-CIO, and later consulted for other politically progressive organizations, including the 2012 Barack Obama presidential campaign (more on that shortly.)
There are predictable and consistent reasons that people vote, Rogers and other social scientists found: We don’t want to disappoint our peers, family, and friends.
Recent elections suggest the first step of the EVP approach is working.
“If we want to make better decisions or do things in our society’s self-interest, we need to be tricked into doing them,” he says.
Like the voters they target, they have made pledges to themselves.

She lost everything except computers and some important files she’d stored high off the ground.
Then this past July 4th, 8 inches of rain fell on Houston, swamping streets, stranding unlucky motorists, and nixing the city’s Fourth of July party.
Of course, there was Harvey.
So many people, like the majority of the business owners and workers in this Meyerland strip mall, are staying put.
According to one survey along Armand Bayou, southeast of the city, the maps failed to predict 75 percent of flood claims from five recent floods.
“We will still have problems.” Reconciled to a future of floods, business owners in this little strip mall are coming up with their own ways to manage the risk.
“There are people who aren’t back in their homes yet.” When it poured this year on July 4, DeOssio feared the worst, he says: “I started to really think, are we going to have a relapse?” Even if nothing disastrous happens, sales drop off as the rains keep customers at home.
He watches the water levels at the edge of the strip mall, where two roads meet at a low point, as an indicator of how bad it will be in the neighborhood.
As was the case with Darlene Wilkens, Ousley-Nevarez also found her fridge lying sideways in water once Harvey passed.
“We knew were going to flood,” she says of that storm.

It’s beautiful!” Despite spending a year helping to restore staghorn coral in the Florida Keys, this was the first time my snorkeling partner, Christina, from Coral Restoration Foundation had seen a huge staghorn colony in the wild.
We were snorkeling at Pulaski Shoal, one of the largest known thickets of staghorn remaining in Dry Tortugas National Park.
She was joining me on a week-long expedition focused primarily on transferring staghorn corals grown in The Nature Conservancy’s nursery to the reef.
The effort quickly expanded to include partners all along the reef, from Fort Lauderdale through the Dry Tortugas.
Genetically-distinct colonies are placed at each site to increase the likelihood of cross-fertilization and successful recruitment of larvae within and between restoration sites.
We outplant about 1,000 corals each year to sites within park boundaries.
Given the distance and the day-long transit just to get there, once there, we have to make do with what we’ve brought.
We had an ambitious schedule to outplant to a new site, spend some time cleaning the nursery and preparing it for another year of grow-out, collecting new stock, and setting up a test outplant site where the public has access and can view our work.
As the staghorn restoration program moves forward, the Conservancy and our partners are working diligently to explore other avenues of restoration and answer important questions to increase our effectiveness and efficiency at restoring ecosystems and their functions.
Bonefish Grill has committed $175,000 to help fund the Conservancy’s coral nurseries and coral restoration efforts in Florida and the Caribbean.

Seattle’s orcas are dying.
First was Tahlequah’s calf.
Then came news Thursday that another young orca, Scarlet, appeared to be dying.
Grieving orca mother carries dead calf for days as killer whales fight for survival Read more “This is what they have told the world – it is human actions that are responsible for the dead and stillborn calves, the sick and starving adults and the declining condition of the environment in which they live,” Solien said before calling for a moment of silence for Tahlequah and her calf.
Three years have passed since an orca calf born in the region survived.
In the past 20 years, 40 orcas have been born into the group while 72 have died.
I don’t believe we have another chance Phil Anderson The work of saving the orca in Washington has fallen to the Puget Sound Partnership, a taskforce of leaders from state agencies, interest groups and tribal governments.
“My first great grandchild was born this year,” Sanchez said.
Dams, pollution and fishing have depressed Pacific north-west stocks of Chinook, which often appear in supermarkets as king salmon.
Phil Anderson, a fisheries negotiator with the Pacific Salmon Council, said a proposed treaty with Canada will reduce the salmon catch if both governments approve it.

“All that is the ‘new normal’ that we will have to face.” Why on earth is the word normal being thrown around to describe such extraordinary times?
The new normal is a catchy phrase, and one you’ve probably heard before — if not from Brown, then perhaps from the New York Times.
“It sounds like we left the old normal, the old conditions, and arrived at a new normal, a new stasis,” Crystal Kolden, a fire scientist at the University of Idaho, tells me.
When people invoke the “new normal,” Stamper says they’re not referring to an unchanging, static condition, but rather “a measure of uncertainty and worsening danger.” In other words, the cliche conveys exactly the message that climate scientists want to convey.
“I hear what the climate scientists are saying — you don’t want to say bad hurricanes are the new normal, and we should just get used to them,” Stamper says.
“Delaware can’t afford a future where climate change and sea level rise are the new normal.” There are valid fears about complacency in the face of radical climate change — that we’ll forget the way that things used to be, become blind to the environmental destruction happening around us, and fail to act to save what’s left.
It’s a concern with climate change, too, he says.
“We’re in the middle of a shift that can destroy what we hold dear, and to call this normal is absurd.” Stamper has some advice for scientists, like Pauly, who hate the phrase.
“Do they think normal is a static point?
Because linguistically, we can show that what people call ‘normal’ changes constantly.” In fact, reporters are already approaching the phrase this way in climate reporting, which suggests that we might be able to have the phrase and use it too, exactly in the manner scientists would want — even if they still hate the term.

What conservation books are most inspiring?
As CEO of The Nature Conservancy, Mark Tercek knows the power of great conservation books.
As the book reviewer for Cool Green Science, I’m always looking for great conservation reads.
Lanham describes himself as a “rare bird, an oddity”: an African-American ornithologist who loves birding, hunting and exploring the land.
His memoir explores the influences that led him to his land ethic and his career in science.
Mark and I are both David Quammen fans, and it appears a lot of Twitter users are, too.
I frequently turn to The Well-read Naturalist for my reading recommendations, so I’m not surprised that his choice was one of my favorites.
It turns out, there’s a scientific basis for nature’s healing powers, as top journalist Florence Williams reveals in The Nature Fix.
Desert Solitaire and other works by Edward Abbey frequently appear on lists like this.
Read this book and discover Abbey for yourself.

Only about half of the sunlight makes it to the surface, so we’re down to 0.14 W/m2 change from peak to trough, less than a twentieth of a percent.
They’re right … … but they’re also wrong.
To start with, here’s the breakdown of the strength of the solar radiation by wavelength.
Wavelengths shorter than that are ultraviolet (UV).
And way over on the left, at 10 – 24 nm wavelength between the vertical red lines, is the tiny amount of extreme ultraviolet (EUV).
Even though it varies on a percentage basis more than the TSI, the EUV represents such a small part of the sun’s energy that it cannot be even seen at this scale.
The second problem is that the variation in EUV is much, much smaller in absolute terms than the variation in TSI.
As you can see, the variations in the EUV are very small compared to the variations in the visible spectrum.
In fact, the only reason that the percentage variations in EUV are greater than the percentage variations in TSI is that changes in EUV start from almost zero … so even a tiny absolute change in EUV is a large percentage change in EUV.
DATA: I’ve used the solar data recommended here for use in the CMIP6.

Coming despite severe warnings over lost jobs and investment from no-deal Brexit, his technology company is spending about £200m to expand the testing facility on a former second world war airfield at Hullavington, near Malmesbury in the west of England.
Electric cars exceed 1m in Europe as sales soar by more than 40% Read more The investment comes a year after Dyson announced plans to create an electric vehicle to propel his high-tech household goods company to become a rival to Tesla, the carmaker started by the US billionaire Elon Musk.
Dyson’s expansion plans for the research and development site, which is already home to about 400 workers, include planning applications for more than 10 miles of vehicle-testing tracks with high speed sections, hills and off-road routes to put its new electric cars through their paces.
Although only recruiting about 300 more automotive workers at present, planning details show the 45,000-square-metre site will ultimately have space for more than 2,000 people.
Dyson has yet to make a decision on whether it will mass-produce its electric vehicles in Britain once testing is complete.
The company employs more than 12,000 people around the world with about 4,800 in the UK, centred around Malmesbury.
Alongside its vacuum cleaners, hand dryers and car development, the company is working on battery technologies, high-speed electric motors, vision systems, machine learning and artificial intelligence.
Despite difficult trading conditions facing many firms after the Brexit vote amid heightened political uncertainty, Dyson has not changed his view that leaving the EU would be best for the country.
“Brexit can supercharge British technology and refocus minds on global trade if only we grab the opportunity with both hands – the government must embrace it and support British businesses,” he told the Guardian.
Economic growth has slowed since the referendum, while households are more than £900 worse off, according to the governor of the Bank of England.

But Merkel said such calls, most recently from the European Commission’s climate chief Miguel Arias Canete, for swifter cuts to harmful carbon dioxide emissions would be counterproductive, adding that setting new goals made little sense when European countries were already struggling to meet their cuts targets.
Full story h/t to Charles the Mod Guest essay by Eric Worrall Greens have reacted with fury at Trump Secretary of Interior Ryan Zinke‘s suggestion that opposition to sensible forestry management is exacerbating fire risks.
Wildfires seem unstoppable, but they can be prevented.
Ryan Zinke, Opinion contributor Published 6:00 a.m.
ET Aug. 8, 2018 Actively managing our forests benefits the… By Javier A most remarkable climate phenomenon is taking place under our very noses without anybody paying attention to it.
As nearly everybody knows, the planet is warming.
Therefore, periods of… From the “worse than we thought” department comes this new climate model, but at least they acknowledge the pause.
Researchers have developed a mathematical model to predict how average global surface air temperatures will vary over the next few years.
Climate Change Impacts ‘No Longer Subtle,’ Scientist Says … Here & Now’s Jeremy Hobson talks with Michael Mann (@MichaelEMann), distinguished professor of atmospheric science and director of the Earth System Science Center at Penn State… Guest commentary by David Middleton Big Oil’s carbon capture tax credit betrayal BY JOHN NOEL, OPINION CONTRIBUTOR — 07/30/18 09:30 AM EDT THE VIEWS EXPRESSED BY CONTRIBUTORS ARE THEIR OWN AND NOT THE VIEW OF THE HILL Instead of finding ways to responsibly reduce production, the fossil fuel industry has decided carbon capture is the… Guest essay by Eric Worrall Our favourite identity thief Peter Gleick, who stole documents from Heartland while serving as chairman of the AGU ethics committee, has written a deliciously confused piece in which he urges people not to give up, despite the inevitability of serious climate change.
The researchers, from the University of Cambridge and the Medical Research Council Laboratory of Molecular Biology (MRC LMB),… Guest bewilderment by David Middleton Interior Secretary Ken “Boot” Salazar in 2010… Tough-Talking Admin Officials Keep ‘Boot on Neck’ of BP By MIKE SORAGHAN of Greenwire Published: May 3, 2010 BP used to stand for “British Petroleum.” Now the company wants people to think “Beyond Petroleum.” But in the eyes of the Obama administration it’s… How the Southern Ocean may explain Holocene warming The oceans are the planet’s most important depository for atmospheric carbon dioxide on time scales of decades to millenia.

Last October, then-EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt announced that the agency would repeal the Obama administration’s Clean Power Plan.
The rule’s costs in worsening public health far exceed its monetary benefits.
Dirty Power Plan’s climate impact is small Many news stories about the Dirty Power Plan exaggerated its climate impact due to confusion about various points of comparison.
For example, the Clean Power Plan aimed to reduce carbon pollution from US electricity generation 32% below 2005 levels by 2030.
The Dirty Power Plan will encourage coal plants to operate more efficiently, which the EPA estimates will reduce emissions about 1% more than simply repealing the Clean Power Plan.
That happened without the Clean Power Plan ever going into effect – we basically didn’t need it, because coal was replaced anyway just for being too expensive.
1/ August 21, 2018 The EPA’s new analysis found that under the Clean Power Plan, carbon pollution from US electricity generation would have fallen 29% below 2005 levels by 2030, and under the Dirty Power Plan, it would fall 26% below 2005 levels by 2030.
Both appear to be extremely conservative estimates – remember, US power sector carbon pollution already fell 25% below 2005 levels by 2016 – but the point is that the climate difference between the plans is relatively small.
The EPA estimates that US coal production will be just 8% higher in 2030 under the Dirty Power Plan than it would have been under the Clean Power Plan.
The silver lining is that Trump can’t save the dying dirty coal industry, and his EPA’s pollution plans will be reversed by the next administration in 2021.

A thoughtful story in Bloomberg BusinessWeek this week discussed the impact for Japan’s economy of the “gradual demise of the

President Trump gave a great deal of publicity this week to what had been a little known hypothesis about the