Posts From Jessica Goldberg
So How Goes that AI Spring?
While AI hasn’t reached its full potential or its eventual impact yet, AI is making good progress in many directions simultaneously.
Let’s examine some of the progress to date.
While I’m sure that AI is adding value, I’m also sure there is more progress that is not visible yet as it is in the labs or being pioneered in several scientific avenues.
Let’s look at the value add of AI to date.
Work resources are only as useful as the knowledge they are provided to make decisions and take action.
AI is playing a substantial role in assisting and can accelerate learning to suggest where to direct current and future actions.
Problem Recognition: AI can sense various signals at the edge, or not, and recognize patterns.
Also, AI can find new and emerging scenarios and bring them to the attention of the right resources for decisions and possible actions.
By leveraging natural language, humans can kick off actions that are either pre-packaged and sequenced or parallel and emergent.
Sophisticated AI Agents or Bots will bid on tasks that are necessary to complete organizational outcomes within governance constraints.
EU Needs 25% Nuclear Power To Meet Paris Climate Goals — Report
The European Union will need to continue having a nuclear energy share of at least one-quarter until 2050 to meet the emissions reduction targets it has set for that year, according to a new report from Deloitte.
The EU has set targets of reducing emissions by 40% compared to 1990 levels, and by up to 95% by 2050 – or net zero.
An essential part of that plan will be phasing out the burning of coal, the highest-emitting fossil fuel which is still used heavily in countries such as Poland and Germany.
Countries such as France which have heavy use of nuclear power are getting a head start in the emissions reduction race, in which each EU member state will have to meet with their own adapted targets.
With a share of 40%, nuclear provides the largest contribution to France’s energy mix.
Nuclear power is not a fossil fuel and therefor emits very little in the way of carbon emissions.
However safety concerns have resulted in its steady phase-out in Europe, first in the United Kingdom and now in Germany.
Chancellor Angela Merkel announced a decision to phase out nuclear power in her country following the 2011 Fukushima nuclear disaster in Japan.
But this has resulted in an increased use of coal and a resultant rise in Germany’s emissions, despite its heavy use of renewable energy.
“Not only will this enable the EU to achieve its carbon-free targets, whilst at the same time ensuring it has access to the energy it needs when it needs it, it will also provide a significant contribution in terms of economic growth and job creation.” The report’s authors assumed a high installed nuclear capacity of 150 gigawatts, based on the outcomes of a previous study by FTI-CL Energy Consulting, which assumed a continued share of at least one-quarter.
NPR: 8 Ways To Indoctrinate School Children With Warmunist Propaganda
Lab activities can be one of the most effective ways to show children how global warming works on an accessible scale.
“We’ve ignored climate change for a long time and now it’s getting to be, like, a real problem, so we’ve gotta do something.” Many teachers we talked with mentioned NASA as a resource for labs and activities.
Some are drawn from this book: A People’s Curriculum For The Earth: Teaching Climate Change And The Environmental Crisis.
NPR = Nitwit Pinko Radio Nothing on that list of 8 idiotic “ways to teach climate change” is even remotely related to climate science… And citing Howard Zinn as a resource?
65% replied that it wasn’t related to the subject(s) they taught and 17% said the didn’t know enough about climate change to teach it… My hunch is that >97% of teachers, including the 45% who “teach” about it, are insufficiently familiar with the science to teach it.
Who needs science teachers when you have a “self-proclaimed ‘science guru’ for seventh-graders”?
And if it’s true that plastic is not degradable, well, the planet will simply incorporate plastic into a new paradigm: the earth plus plastic.
Plastic came out of the earth.
The earth probably sees plastic as just another one of its children.
Climate change?
Rapid melting of the world’s largest ice shelf linked to solar heat in the ocean
Their results, reported in the journal Nature Geoscience, show that the ice is melting much more rapidly than previously thought due to inflowing warm water. “The stability of ice shelves is generally thought to be related to their exposure to warm deep ocean water, but we’ve found that solar heated surface water also plays a crucial role in melting ice shelves,” said first author Dr Craig Stewart from the National Institute of Water and Atmospheric Research (NIWA) in New Zealand, who conducted the work while a PhD student at the University of Cambridge. “Previous studies have shown that when ice shelves collapse, the feeding glaciers can speed up by a factor or two or three,” said co-author Dr Poul Christoffersen from Cambridge’s Scott Polar Research Institute.
Data from the instruments deployed on the mooring showed that solar heated surface water flows into the cavity under the ice shelf near Ross Island, causing melt rates to nearly triple during the summer months.
This area, known as the Ross Sea Polynya, absorbs solar heat quickly in summer and this solar heat source is clearly influencing melting in the ice shelf cavity. “Climate change is likely to result in less sea ice, and higher surface ocean temperatures in the Ross Sea, suggesting that melt rates in this region will increase in the future,” said Stewart.
Rapid melting identified by the study happens beneath a thin and structurally important part of the ice shelf, where the ice pushes against Ross Island. “The observations we made at the front of the ice shelf have direct implications for many large glaciers that flow into the ice shelf, some as far as 900 km away,” said Christoffersen.
The point of vulnerability lies in the fact that that solar heated surface water flows into the cavity near a stabilising pinning point, which could be undermined if basal melting intensifies further.
The researchers point out that melting measured by the study does not imply that the ice shelf is currently unstable.
UK Labour Party Ratchets Up Climate Fight As Green New Deal Goes Global
The United Kingdom’s Labour Party is ramping up its climate proposals, making the crisis a central issue amid a wave of protests and new signs that the ruling Conservative Party is failing to cut emissions fast enough.
The opposition party, led by socialist firebrand Jeremy Corbyn, plans to force a vote this week on whether to declare climate change a national emergency.
And now its parliamentarians are promising a Green New Deal modeled on the movement quickly gaining steam among left-wing Democrats in the United States.
“‘Green New Deal’ is a phrase that has resonance,” Barry Gardiner, the U.K.’s shadow secretary of state for international climate change, told HuffPost.
On Sunday, the ruling Spanish Socialist Workers’ Party eked out a narrow parliamentary victory running on “El Green New Deal de España.” Jagmeet Singh, the leader of Canada’s New Democratic Party, said last week he’s proposing “a Canadian version of the Green New Deal” just months before the country’s next federal election.
Yanis Varoufakis, the former Greek finance minister, called for “nations to unite around an International Green New Deal” in an op-ed last week.
Scottish First Minister Nicola Sturgeon said over the weekend that climate activists “are right,” and backed calls to declare a climate emergency.
Some utilities are attempting to steel themselves against plans to bring them under public control, and Labour officials are considering creative ways to avoid 12-figure national expenditures.
“This has changed the whole atmosphere in the country,” Gardiner said.
Gardiner said the party plans to make a bid to host the U.N.’s 26th Conference of the Parties next year.
Introducing ‘Shift Happens,’ a newsletter all about solutions
Remember that time in the 1980s when we almost took serious action on climate change?
We were never really that close to acting, although we certainly missed an opportunity to get the ball rolling.
That’s why I’ve started a new program within Grist called, simply, Fix.
Let’s not lose Earth this time.
The city passed a law this month that requires buildings like the Empire State Building and Trump Tower to slash their greenhouse gas emissions by 40 percent.
“We act like we’re aliens here, or like we’ve been given everything to dominate by God.” 4.
Your Sunday plans When life gives you lemons, make lemonade.
And when life gives you stinging nettles, well, make yourself some pesto!
In Washington state, where I live, the stuff is everywhere this time of year, and it hurts like hell when it rakes across your shins.
Ingredients: 3 cups fresh nettle leaves (careful!)
‘Moved and Inspired’: Meet the 2019 Goldman Environmental Prize Winners
Six grassroots environmental activists will receive the prestigious Goldman Environmental Prize today.
To date, 194 winners from 89 different nations have received this award.
This year’s winners include an environmental and human rights lawyer who stopped the destruction of Liberia’s tropical forests, a conservationist who helped create a large protected area in Mongolia and a biologist from North Macedonia who fought against hydropower plants planned inside a critical habitat of the rare Balkan lynx.
The winners also include an indigenous leader from Chile who led a movement against two hydroelectric projects on a sacred river, a marine conservationist who campaigned to protect the Cook Islands’ marine biodiversity, and an activist from the U.S. who rallied residents to stop the construction of a massive oil export terminal that could have threatened the health and safety of the local community. “I am so moved and inspired by these six environmental trailblazers,” Susie Gelman, president of the Goldman Environmental Foundation, said in a statement. “Each of them has selflessly stood up to stop injustice, become a leader when leadership was critical, and vanquished powerful adversaries who would desecrate our planet.
These are six ordinary, yet extraordinary, human beings who remind us that we all have a role in protecting the Earth.”
The winners will be honored at the San Francisco Opera House in California, U.S., on April 29.
Former U.S. vice president and environmental activist Al Gore will present the keynote address.
Here are the winners of the 2019 Goldman Environmental Prize:
The Cooling Rains
Figure 1 shows a Pacific-centered and an Atlantic-centered view of the average rainfall from the end of 1997 to the start of 2015 as measured by the TRMM satellite.
The ITCZ is where the two great global hemispheres of the atmospheric circulation meet near the Equator.
In the Pacific and Atlantic on average the ITCZ is just above the Equator and in the Indian Ocean, it’s just below the Equator.
It gives us a way to calculate how much this cools the surface.
And in the same way that our bodies are cooled by evaporation, the surface of the planet is also cooled by evaporation.
Now, we note above that on average, the increase is 1.33 millimeters of water per year.
So over the period of this record, we have increased evaporative cooling of 0.10 W/m2 per year, and we have increased radiative warming from GHGs of 0.06 W/m2 per year.
Which means that over that period and that area at least, the calculated increase in warming radiation from GHGs was more than counterbalanced by the observed increase in surface cooling from increased evaporation.
• Rain re-evaporating as it falls to cool the atmosphere • Cold wind entrained by the rain blowing outwards at surface level to cool surrounding areas • Dry descending air between rain cells and thunderstorms allowing increased longwave radiation to space.
Calculation of energy required to evaporate 1.33 liters of water.
A weekend in Mexico? Why the rise of long-haul short trips is so disastrous
As someone who once took a work-related day trip to San Francisco it is a little hypocritical of me to criticise others for taking long-haul flights for vanishingly brief holidays.
But for all sorts of reasons it really is a terrible idea.
Environmentally, the trend is a disaster, whatever the airlines say about greener aircraft and the rise of biofuels making flying less destructive.
“We need to encourage slow travel and local travel rather than jetting halfway across the world for three days.
That’s just not eco-friendly.” Wilson-Powell says flying is a touchstone in the war raging over climate change.
“One of the most impactful things you can do if you want to live a more sustainable life is not fly,” she says.
“Flying across the world for two or three days at a time doesn’t fit in to that.” She suggests that if you are flying long haul you should try to carbon offset – Emma Thompson’s get-out for her recent flight from Los Angeles was to join the Extinction Rebellion protest in London.
There is also the question of what weekend breakers get from taking a bite-sized chunk of a complex culture, and what they are putting in to the place they visit.
“We encourage travellers to spend their money with people who really deserve it,” says Wilson-Powell.
There are hotspots around the world that people want to get their photos taken in.” These are less bite-sized holidays than Instagram holidays.
Why your brain doesn’t register the words ‘climate change’
brainwaves Which phrase does a better job of grabbing people’s attention: “global warming” or “climate change”?
If you want to get people to care, try “climate crisis,” suggests new research from an advertising consulting agency in New York.
SPARK Neuro measures brain activity and sweaty palms to gauge people’s emotional reactions and attention to stimuli.
And now SPARK Neuro is turning its attention to climate change.
“Global warming” and “climate change” performed the worst of all in terms of emotional engagement and audience attention.
He pointed to the “estate tax,” which normal people didn’t care much about until Republicans started rebranding it as the “death tax” in the 1990s.
If a term doesn’t evoke a strong emotional response in the first place, it’s even more likely to wear out quickly, Gerrol said.
People who care about our warming planet are starting to realize the power of words.
The company’s work has been called a “lie detector on steroids.” For the messaging experiment, participants were first shown neutral stimuli to establish a baseline.
That kind of response leads people to pay more attention and encourages a sense of urgency, Gerrol said.
