Climate Change Scepticism Is 'Political Suicide', David Attenborough Argues

UK Telegraph -  Hannah Furness

It would be 'political suicide' for party leaders to say they do no believe in climate change, Sir David Attenborough argues

Great Barrier Reef with David Attenborough Photo: BBC

It would be "political suicide" for a British political leader to admit they do not believe in global warming, Sir David Attenborough has argued.
Sir David, the broadcaster and environmental campaigner, said climate change is now widely accepted by the public, with Britain already "come round" to the idea.
He has previously spoken out extensively about the issues of climate change, conservation and population growth, last year attending a global summit in Paris.
In an interview with the Sunday Times magazine this weekend, Sir David said much progress had already been made in bringing public opinion round to confronting the problems.

David Attenborough Photo: Toby Coulson

"When I look back to some of the programmes I've made, I ended up saying, 'Look, we're wrecking the world'," he said.
"Now people believe it and understand it. The Americans have come round and this country has come round, and it didn't start that way.
"But in this country, at least, it would now be political suicide for a party leader to say, 'I don't believe in global warming.'

Sir David Attenborough filming his Great Barrier Reef series

"People say to me, 'Why do people still say it's not happening?'
"And I say, hasn't it occurred to you that it's rather nicer to say that it's not happening? You don't have to worry or spend money and your business isn't going to be in peril."
In an interview with the Telegraph in December, Sir David confessed he had experienced a feeling of "embarrassment" about being held up as a voice of authority, saying: "The awful thing is that people think you know far more than you do.

Sir David Attenborough with a replica of the titanosaur's femur Photo: BBC

"For example, I often get asked if I've actually seen climate change and I have to say, look, I could find you examples of dramatic climate change, and I could find the converse, but it's very dangerous to just pick one particular circumstance.
"You have to take the bigger view; you have to respect the findings of people who spend their lives surveying this sort of thing, and make a responsible, scientific summary of where we are."
Sir David's career will be celebrated by the BBC later this year in honour of his 90th birthday.
His latest show, Attenborough and the Giant Dinosaur, will see him explore a record-breaking skeleton in Patagonia.

This Technology May Be The Future Of Solar Energy

Washington Post - Chelsea Harvey

Solar panels sit in an array at the Southwick Estate Solar Farm, operated by Primrose Solar Ltd., near Fareham, U.K., on Friday, Oct. 2, 2015. The plant, situated in 200 acres (81 hectares) of farmland, consists of 175,000 monocrystalline PV modules and has a capacity of 48 megawatts. Photographer: Simon Dawson/Bloomberg

In the solar energy sphere, scientists and economists alike will note that coming up with cheaper, most efficient solar cells is key to the industry’s growth. And now, many experts are arguing that an emerging type of technology, known as the “perovskite” solar cell, is the face of the future.
Solar cells, the devices that convert solar energy into electricity, only come in so many forms at the moment. Most of the ones in commercial use are made of silicon. But while these silicon cells dominate the market, they’re far from perfect — on average, they’re only able to achieve 16 to 20 percent efficiency when it comes to converting solar energy, said Michael McGehee, a professor of materials science and engineering at Stanford University. And they can be expensive both to produce and to install.
As a result, researchers around the world have dedicated themselves to coming up with cheaper and more efficient solar cells. A great deal of this research is conducted by private companies and is involved with improving the existing silicon cell technology. But some researchers are focused on developing other up-and-coming types of solar cells using different materials and production techniques.
One of these emerging products is the perovskite solar cell, a cheaper product with the potential to be just as efficient — if not more-so — than traditional silicon cells, according to recent research. The word “perovskite” refers to the type of material the cell is made out of. A perovskite material has a special type of crystal structure — calcium titanium oxide is one example, but other materials can have similar structures and be referred to as perovskites.
Around 2009, researchers started trying to make solar cells using perovskite materials, said Nitin Padture, director of the Institute for Molecular and Nanoscale Innovation and professor materials science at Brown University. And while the first of these experiments only achieved an efficiency of less than 5 percent, scientists have since improved them drastically. Now, they’re recognized by some experts as one of the most promising innovations in solar research.

The promise of perovskites
The major appeal of perovskite solar cells is that they’re cheap — “much cheaper than something like silicon,” Padture explained. High-quality silicon crystals must be made at high temperatures using very precise processes, he said. Perovskite cells, on the other hand, can be made at nearly room temperature using simpler methods, so production is not so costly.
Of course, lower costs don’t mean much if the cells can’t compete with the efficiency of traditional silicon cells. But in the lab, at least, scientists have succeeded in producing perovskite solar cells with efficiency levels comparable to those of commercially used silicon cells — upwards of 20 percent.
Perovskite solar cells are in no way ready for commercial use yet — Padture predicts that point is still at least 5 to 10 years away — but the early promise has led researchers to explore a number of different applications for the cells. On the one hand, if their costs and efficiency levels become competitive enough, they could be used alone in solar arrays in the same way that silicon solar cells are widely used today. However, some researchers believe the real future of solar energy lies in a new experimental technique that layers perovskite solar cells on top of silicon cells in order to maximize their total efficiency.
The reason this technique seems promising is because silicon cells capture sunlight at slightly different wavelengths than perovskite materials, said McGehee, the Stanford researcher. So if you put them together, they’re able to take advantage of a bigger segment of the spectrum than either would alone.
From a business perspective, this strategy makes sense as well, McGehee added. “I think this is one of the more compelling [pathways] because it’s not going head to head with silicon, it’s partnering with silicon,” he said.
There are so many companies and so much money and research invested in silicon solar cells already that it might be hard for perovskite solar cells to break into the market alone, even if they become truly competitive, he noted. The tandem cells are a way to boost the efficiency of solar panels and help grow the solar industry in a way that benefits everyone and minimizes competition between the different types of materials.
“If silicon gets better over the next 5 to 10 years, that’s not a problem for us — if silicon gets cheaper, that means our tandems will be cheaper, and if silicon gets more efficient, that’s great — it means our tandems will be more efficient,” McGehee said. “It’s a strategic business view. I think perovskites have a better chance of success partnered with silicon in a tandem than going alone.”
But there are other promising applications as well, Padture pointed out. Unlike silicon cells, perovskite solar cells can be transparent or even made into different colors. This means they can be placed in spots that wouldn’t be appropriate for opaque silicon panels, such as windows.
So when you consider these types of applications, perovskite cells “don’t need to compete with silicon,” Padture said. “They have a niche — something unique.”

Room for improvement
Perovskites still have a long way to go before they’ll be fit for the market. For one thing, the competitive efficiency levels that have been produced in the lab wouldn’t necessarily stand up under practical conditions. That’s because most perovskite solar cells that have been produced in the lab are very small, Padture noted — less than a centimeter square. In contrast, many commercially used solar panels are a foot square or even larger.
Unfortunately, there are some challenges to producing larger perovskite solar cells with competitive efficiency levels, according to Padture. Perovskite cells are typically made by combining different chemical solutions to produce a very thin layer, called “film” — the part of the solar cell that converts sunlight into electricity.
But while the low-temperature processes used in perovskite solar cells produce high-quality films in small quantities, “the quality of the films is not very reproducible over large areas,” Padture said. When researchers try to produce larger cells, the film often comes out with defects or holes.
However, there’s been clear progress in this area. Padture and colleagues recently published research describing how they’d been able to improve efficiency in larger solar cells by using different solvents or by dissolving a certain type of gas into the film, which helps to remove defects and can later be removed.
But there are other hurdles as well. Perovskite solar cells aren’t as physically stable as silicon solar cells. “When you expose these cells to humid air, they basically degrade in a couple of days or weeks,” Padture said. In addition, perovskite solar cells typically contain a form of lead that can leach into the environment — so in order for the cells to be viable, they need to be sealed inside a kind of polymer case that protects them from exposure to air and water.
This is a field that McGehee’s lab is currently working on — and while their most recent results are not yet published, McGehee noted that “we’ve made really really nice progress at Stanford in just the last couple of months.”

The future of the industry
There are already a few companies investing in perovskite research, including Oxford PV, which was founded to commercialize technology produced by the University of Oxford. Just last week, co-founder Henry Snaith, a physics professor at Oxford, and a group of his colleagues published research in the journal Science describing a method of improving the efficiency of tandem cells involving perovskite solar cells.
Although Padture and McGehee both agree that the technology is at least five years away from commercialization, Padture said he hopes the federal government will invest more resources into its study, as research into the improvement of silicon solar cells is already well-covered by private companies.
“It doesn’t make sense for the government to invest in something like [silicon] because the companies have a motivation to reduce the cost and improve efficiency and improve durability and reliability because they’re already making money off them,” Padture said. “These still experimental [techniques] — this is where I think the government should be investing.”
In combination with other actions, such as improved systems for solar subsidies and the initiation of a carbon tax, research into emerging solar technologies can help continue to make the solar industry competitive — and, naturally, benefit the environment, according to Padture.
“I firmly believe that research into emerging materials, emerging technologies, is where the future is,” Padture said.

Links

• Scientists say human greenhouse gas emissions have canceled the next ice age
• Why clean energy is now expanding even when fossil fuels are cheap
• The surprising way that huge icebergs slow down climate change

Paris Climate Deal Offers Flame Of Hope, Says UN Official

The Guardian - Suzanne Goldenberg*

Christiana Figueres says countries cleared multiple hurdles to reach accord, showing that ‘if we want to do something we can’

Christiana Figueres (centre) at the Paris climate change summit in December. Photograph: Francois Mori/AP

The Paris climate agreement kindled “a huge flame of hope”, establishing a new model of 21st-century diplomacy, the woman behind the deal has declared.
In her first public reflections on the climate accord signed in December, Christiana Figueres, the UN climate change official, said that after two decades of meandering negotiations, countries had at last discovered their “higher purpose” and risen to the challenge of dealing with global warming.
The Paris agreement, in which 195 countries committed to limiting the temperature increase to well below 2C, set a new standard for dealing with complex global problems, she said.
“Climate change is a very, very good example of how we are moving to a completely new social contract from the last century,” Figueres told the Guardian at a conference hosted by the International Renewable Energy Agency (Irena) in Abu Dhabi. “The social contract that is going to underpin the 21st century has at least five very, very different ways of dealing with challenges and very different ways of delivering solutions.
“To have Paris is a huge flame of hope. We can really take some confidence from there that if we decide we want to do something, then we can,” said Figueres, who will step down this summer after guiding the negotiations for six years. “We are not bound by situations we are confronted with. We can rise above them. It’s fantastic.”
A number of key players in the Paris climate deal attended the annual Irena conference at the weekend.
More than 80 countries committed in their climate plans in Paris to expand their use of solar and wind power as a way of reducing greenhouse gas emissions. These countries are now looking for financing and technological assistance to make the switch to cleaner energy sources.
Figueres said countries had overcome multiple faultlines to arrive at a deal in Paris – the divide between rich and poor countries, between the public and private sector, between different regions.
Unlike other negotiations, the Paris climate talks involved governments, business leaders and campaign groups. A number of foreign policy experts have held up Paris as a new model for diplomacy, and commentators have praised the French hosts for skilfully guiding the talks to a successful resolution. “It is the way that we are going to operate increasingly in the 21st century,” Figueres said.
The agreement abandoned the idea of a traditional international treaty with clear rules and fixed obligations, in recognition that the US would never sign on to an agreement that needed approval from a Republican-controlled Senate.
Instead, the agreement relied on countries to come forward with plans for cutting greenhouse gas emissions and then to review those plans at regular intervals to make even deeper cuts.
Anne-Marie Slaughter, a former US Department of State official and president of the New America Foundation, wrote of the deal in December: “By the standards of a traditional treaty, it falls woefully short. Yet its deficits in this regard are its greatest strengths as a model for effective global governance in the 21st century. The Paris agreement is a sprawling, rolling, overlapping set of national commitments brought about by a broad conglomeration of parties and stakeholders. It is not law. It is a bold move toward public problem-solving on a global scale. And it is the only approach that could work.”
But there have also been a number of high-profile critics of the Paris agreement. James Hansen, the climate scientist, dismissed the agreement as a fraud. Bernie Sanders, the Democratic presidential contender, said the deal went nowhere near far enough.
Figueres said the 31-page agreement had exceeded her expectations. “The surprise for me was actually the clarity of the text and the way in which governments worked with each other to get to common ideas,” she said. “In previous negotiations, people have got so caught up with the wording itself – this comma, that comma, that verb – that they tripped over themselves and were not able to reach for the stars. In this case they first reached for the stars and then thought: how do we express that?”
She said Paris was the first time in six such climate meetings that she never had a moment when she feared it would all end in a collapse.
“At every other one there was at least one moment in which I thought we are going to lose this whole thing,” she said. “This was the first time in which it was so evident that there was overwhelming, not just political will, but political determination to actually come to an agreement.”
And not just an agreement for the sake of it, she said. “The overriding current was getting to an agreement that they could all be proud of. It wasn’t just for a photo.”

*Suzanne Goldenberg’s trip to the conference in Abu Dhabi was funded by Irena, the International Renewable Energy Agency.

Links

• Rapid switch to renewable energy can put Paris climate goals within reach
• World leaders hail Paris climate deal as 'major leap for mankind'
• Paris climate talks: Bishop hails 'historic' day as nearly 200 countries sign deal
• Paris climate talks: governments adopt historic deal – as it happened