ANU PhD Student Inez Harker-Schuch Launches Game To Tackle Climate Change

Fairfax - Rod Taylor

On Christmas Eve 1974, Australia experienced one of its worst-ever natural disasters when Cyclone Tracy obliterated Darwin.
Inez Harker-Schuch was only three, but she vividly remembers her terror as the world disintegrated around her.

ANU PhD student Inez Harker-Schuch has created a game to help children understand climate change. Photo: Rod Taylor

Sheets of corrugated-iron were flying through the air, and trees were impossibly contorted. "It was as if the world had gone mad with fury", she recalls, "it was the shriek of the wind, the violence and the destruction."
The experience changed her perception of Christmas forever.
"The idea that a cyclone could come on Christmas Eve at midnight to destroy a city was just beyond what anybody could imagine – no-one expected it."

Inez's family were huddled in their house until it started to break-up around them. At the peak of the cyclone, the windows imploded showering them with glass, and they were forced them to flee into their Volkswagen beetle parked under their house.
They watched in disbelief as the neighbour's roof lifted from the house, then blew away. She recalls the flashes of lightning as he sprinted across his yard to join them in the car.
Peak winds on the day can only be estimated because the wind-gauge was destroyed, but it's believed it reached over 240 kmh.
Inez is visibly affected as she tells her story which she still finds traumatic. Everything they owned disappeared: furniture, toys, photographs, mementos - all gone. After the cyclone, they spent the next four years in Darwin living in a cramped caravan parked on a concrete slab, trying to rebuild.
Instead of retreating from the past, it has given Inez ambition to help solve the problem of climate change. I asked her if climate change might be a larger, slow motion version of the same thing, like a scaled-up cyclone?
"I think it's much worse", she says. "It's global – and we know we're walking into this. We also know we can do something about it."
After studying earth sciences in Austria and Denmark, she began teaching environmental science in schools. It was then that she realised conventional teaching methods weren't enough because they were often too static and abstract. She began building on an online 3D computer game called CO2peration that would bring climate science to life.
Players become a photon and go on an adventure through the solar system, learning how climate works. "They uncover the secrets of our little blue, shimmering planet", she says.
"Along the way, there's fun stuff, like shooting space debris from the exosphere, or building your own space probe. Climate is a fascinating thing. We've made it fun."
They tested a prototype of the game on nearly 800 Canberra students, and the reaction was overwhelmingly positive. A teacher said the game had managed to engage one of her students who, suffering from ADHD, often struggles to concentrate for longer than a few minutes.
"I've never seen her concentrate on something for so long – but she's been at it for 10 minutes and she hasn't looked up once," the teacher said.
Inez says, "I was pleasantly surprised because the game was only a rough draft. It was a poignant moment. No-one has done this before."
Inez is now working to complete the game as part of her PhD at the ANU. To fund the project she's launched a Kickstarter campaign.
As well as the satisfaction of seeing the game played in schools, she also recalls the first pledge to the campaign. "It was a complete stranger. Someone thought this idea worth giving their money to. Having that person pledge said that people care. And that is what is going to make a difference: people caring".

Links

• Inez Harker-Schuch
• CO2peration—3D climate science game
• Changing the Game on Climate Change

Oceans Could Offer A Wind-Powered World

Climate News Network - Tim Radford

Deep-water turbines could make a wind-powered world possible, scientists say, generating all the energy human civilisation uses today.

North Atlantic storms could help make a wind-powered world a reality. Image: By Ronnie Robertson via Wikimedia Commons

Two Californian scientists have worked out how to achieve a wind-powered world that provides the entire planet with wind energy without spoiling the view with turbines on every hilltop.

The answer: take wind farming onto the high seas. The force of the winds sweeping across the open ocean would be enough to generate 18 billion kilowatts – which is about the global annual energy demand right now.

The scientists report in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences that although the best that wind farms on land can deliver is electricity at the rate of 1.5 watts per square metre, the mid-latitudes of the North Atlantic could do much better: up to 6 watts per square metre.

In a calculation that is overtly hypothetical, they evaluate winds as so much kinetic energy to be exploited. Ocean wind speeds are at least 70% higher than wind speeds over land. Surface winds in the North Atlantic can reach 11 metres per second and 13.5 metres a second in the Southern Hemisphere, and these would be enough in theory to take generating rates up to 20 or even 80 watts per square metre.

Renewable world

Research at this level does not answer the world’s energy problems: instead it sets out, once again, the viable possibility of a world driven by renewable energy, rather than the fossil fuels that drive ever-higher greenhouse gas levels in the atmosphere, and potentially catastrophic global warming and climate change.

And it is one step onwards from a cascade of such thinking over the past few years. In 2013, scientists at the University of Delaware worked out that wind, solar and renewable sources could deliver almost all the energy needs of the United States.

Other groups – including one at Stanford University in the US – have not just backed up this reasoning but extended it, with a roadmap for at least 139 of the 197 nations that in December 2015 resolved to take steps to contain global warming to no more than 2°C by 2100.

“While no commercial-scale deep water wind farms yet exist, our results suggest that such technologies, if they become technically and economically feasible, could potentially provide civilisation-scale power”

But the laws of thermodynamics present practical problems. One of these is that, because energy is always conserved, a wind farm inevitably “saps” the energy of the wind that slams into the turbines, leaving a weaker wind for the next turbine in its path.

So although, in theory, winds could deliver at the rate of 60 to 80 watts per square metre, this “turbine drag” would slow the winds at every stage.

Even so, engineers could look forward to a harvest of 3 to 5 watts per square metre, which is much higher than the best available on land.

Someone had to do the sums. “Are the winds so fast just because there is nothing out there to slow them down? Will sticking giant wind farms out there just slow down the winds so much that it is no better than over land?”, said Ken Caldeira, senior scientist at the global ecology department at the Carnegie Institution for Science at Stanford.

Problems to solve

“The real question is can the atmosphere over the ocean move more energy downward than the atmosphere over land is able to?”

In principle, their answer is: yes, it can. Open ocean wind farms spread across 3 million square kilometres of ocean could in theory harness so much more of the atmosphere’s energy and generate all the power the world needs right now.

That still leaves all the other problems unsolved: the challenge of engineering turbines fit for the open ocean and of catering for seasonal variations in wind energy; of collecting the generated current and delivering it to the world’s cities, and the even bigger problem of the national and global politics involved.  But sophisticated modelling says there is nothing on Earth to prevent it being done.
“While no commercial-scale deep water wind farms yet exist, our results suggest that such technologies, if they become technically and economically feasible, could potentially provide civilisation-scale power,” the scientists write.

Links

• Huge energy potential in open ocean wind farms in the North Atlantic
• Geophysical potential for wind energy over the open oceans
• Climate change threatens empires
• Rising seas may bring more superstorms
• Shock decline in flying insects