Lethal Heating: 08/12/20

12/08/2020

(AU) 'Two Global Health Emergencies': Doctors Group Backs Green Stimulus

Sydney Morning Herald - Nick O'Malley

Peak medical groups representing about 75 per cent of Australia’s 90,000 doctors have written to the prime minister to ask him to make a response to climate change central to the government’s post-coronavirus economic stimulus plans.

The groups, which include bodies such as the Australian Medical Association and the College of Intensive Care Medicine of Australia and New Zealand, have called on the government to redirect funds from fossil fuel subsidies in stimulus efforts to renewable energy projects and infrastructure to promote walking, cycling and public transport.

The letter comes after a similar appeal sent on Monday by finance and industry heavyweights, including the big four banks and major corporations, also urging the government to make “sustainable investments” in areas such as health, education, clean energy and urban infrastructure as it helps rebuild the economy.

Bushfire smoke last summer led to 3000 hospitalisations for heart and lung problems, the doctors told Mr Morrison. Credit: Wolter Peeters

On the advice of the National COVID-19 Coordination Commission, the government has been advocating for a gas-led recovery on the grounds that cheaper energy would help stimulate manufacturing in Australia.

But speaking in support of the doctors’ letter, Dr Kate Charlesworth, a public health physician and PhD who is a member of the Climate Council, said that including fossil fuels in a recovery package was like “including support for the tobacco industry in an anti-smoking campaign”.

She said the government had a unique opportunity to make investments that not only created jobs during the economic recovery, but greener, healthier and cooler cities.

The letter thanks the prime minister for his leadership of the national cabinet in crafting the early response to the crisis based on scientific advice.

'Every year this silent killer is linked to the premature deaths of 3000 Australians.'

“We now join international health voices in urging our political leaders to put health at the centre of economic recovery plans,” it says.

“The world is in the middle of two global health emergencies: the viral pandemic and climate change. As we continue efforts to limit the spread of the COVID-19 virus, we must ensure that we also have a whole-of-government approach towards addressing climate change, which also has potentially catastrophic health impacts.

“Carbon pollution and associated global warming will have profound consequences on the fundamentals of human health: clean air, water, access to food and a safe climate.”

The letter says that global warming is already exposing Australia to more frequent and severe bushfires, extreme heat events, droughts and storms, while fossil fuels were both exacerbating health problems and costing the public purse.

“The 2019-20 ‘Black Summer’ bushfires claimed 33 lives, while associated smoke engulfed our cities for weeks, causing respiratory, cardiovascular and ocular complications,” the doctors write.

“The smoke resulted in over 1300 presentations to emergency departments with asthma, more than 3000 hospitalisations for heart and lung problems and 417 excess deaths. The mental health impacts of the bushfires are likely to be present for decades.

"The fossil fuel combustion that drives global warming is also a major contributor to air pollution —every year this silent killer is linked to the premature deaths of 3000 Australians.”

According to the doctors, the annual cost to Australia from air pollution mortality alone is estimated to be between $11.1 and $24.3 billion.

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Sunlight Could Solve Drinking Water's Biggest Problem In 30 Minutes

Inverse - Sarah Wells

This sustainable technique can create nearly 40 gallons of clean drinking water per cycle.

Image: GETTY

Clean drinking water is one of life's essentials. However, safe drinking water isn't a reality for over 2 billion people across the world. These individuals are at risk of contracting potentially fatal waterborne illnesses like typhoid and polio.

This at-risk population is expected to grow over the next five-years as the climate crisis creates more and more water-stressed areas, according to the World Health Organization (WHO.)

Scientists have been working to solve this problem for decades, and while some solutions have found success in effectively cleaning water, those energy-heavy solutions can be hard to implement in communities without a stable electric grid.

Now, a team of scientists from Australia and China has proposed a sustainable solution that relies on sunlight to jump-start the filtration process instead of heat or electricity.

Using a super porous material to suck up salt from brackish, salty water, researchers were able to sustainably create nearly 40 gallons of clean drinking water per single kilogram of a metal material. Better yet, this drinking water was even cleaner than WHO's official guidelines.

This finding was published Monday in the journal Nature Sustainability.

"Sunlight is the most abundant and renewable source of energy on Earth."

The study's lead author Huanting Wang, a professor of chemical engineering at Monash University in Australia, says that his team's approach makes use of the planet's most abundant resource: sunlight. Their solar-powered method desalinates brackish, or stagnate, water more sustainable than previous methods.

"[T]hermal desalination processes by evaporation are energy-intensive, and other technologies, such as reverse osmosis, has a number of drawbacks, including high energy consumption and chemical usage in membrane cleaning and dechlorination," Wang says. "Sunlight is the most abundant and renewable source of energy on Earth."

Wang and his colleagues explain in the study that a sustainable energy source, like sunlight, would be especially useful for communities that may not have access to a reliable electric grid necessary for other methods of desalination.

Using darkness as well as visible light, researchers can coax this special material into absorbing salt from water at incredibly fast speeds. Nature Sustainability

How does it work — While sunlight is an important part of this process, another key player is the material the researchers chose to use. This material is a type of metal compound that is composed of metal ions configured into a crystalline pattern — not unlike the salt it aims to absorb.

Because of its unique crystalline structure, this compound is incredibly porous, with so many nooks and crevices within it that its overall surface area is actually the largest per unit measure of any known material.

So large in fact, that scientists estimate the entire area of a football field could fit within a single teaspoon of this material. A characteristic that makes it really effective at sucking up salt from water.

The researchers further enhanced the absorption of this material by adding another material to its pores, called PSP-MIL-53. This material is characterized by having "breathing effects," and is able to promote efficient absorption.

After testing this material on both natural saltwater and synthetic saltwater, they found that the compound was able to absorb enough water in 30 minutes to create nearly 40 gallons of fresh drinking water per single kilogram of the material.

When analyzing the resultant water, the researchers measured its total dissolved solids (TDS) to be less than 500 parts per million — a standard even above that recommended by WHO, which categorizes clean drinking water as having TDS no greater than 600 parts per million.

The initial absorption is done in the dark but a four-minute exposure to sunlight causes the material to release its collected salt and begin the absorption process again for many more cycles.

"This study has successfully demonstrated that the photoresponsive [metal compounds] are a promising, energy-efficient, and sustainable adsorbent for desalination," said Wang. "Our work provides an exciting new route for the design of functional materials for using solar energy to reduce the energy demand and improve the sustainability of water desalination."

What's next — In addition to helping provide a sustainable solution to creating clean drinking water for communities with poor energy infrastructure, the researchers also say that this approach could be repurposed in the future for the absorption of other compounds and minerals, creating a sustainable solution for mineral mining as well. What has to happen next is determining how to get this tech out of the lab, and into the field.

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This Worst-Case Climate Scenario Might Be The Most Realistic

Popular Science - Ula Chrobak

Climate scientists are still debating what's the most likely outcome, though none of them are looking good.

A worst-case climate scenario will mean many more severe storms in our future. Artur Aldyrkhanov/Unsplash

With news every day of environmental protections being stripped away, hotter summers, more powerful storms, and biodiversity in crisis, it’s perhaps easy to assume we’re on a dangerous path for climate change. However, among climate scientists, there’s a surprising amount of debate around the so-called “worst-case” scenario and whether it’s fair to say we’re going down that route.

The technical term for this worst-case scenario is Representative Concentration Pathway (RCP) 8.5. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change first used the RCPs in preparing their Fifth Assessment Report, published in 2014.

There are four main RCPs: 2.6, 4.5, 6.0, 8.5. The numbers represent different values for radiative forcing, a measure of how much of the sun’s energy the atmosphere traps. Starting with 2005, the RCPs project the trajectory of greenhouses gas into 2100. Each projection has different assumptions about future human population, economic activity, and fossil fuel use.

All except RCP 8.5 include climate change mitigation. For that reason, it’s sometimes also called a “business-as-usual” scenario—inA which we continue to pump carbon dioxide into the atmosphere with abandon, including by increasing coal use by about 500 percent by 2100.

On Monday, Christopher Schwalm and colleagues at the Woods Hole Research Center published a report in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences that argues we are indeed in line with RCP 8.5′s trajectory. But other scientists argue that RCP 8.5 doesn’t provide an accurate picture of what’s happening now, and is especially unlikely as a future scenario moving into 2100.

Schwalm found that, since the RCPs were developed, we’ve been closest to that worst-case pathway. For the past 15 years, our greenhouse gas emissions have tracked most closely with those projected under RCP 8.5.

“It was designed to track the high end of what might be plausible,” says Schwalm. But it appears to match what’s happened since then and into the near future. “It is a very good characterization of where we are going to be if current trends are simply extrapolated out forward in time … And it tracks historical emissions within 1 percent.”

Schwalm and his team also considered where we might be heading. Putting together historical emissions, energy-related emissions forecasts created by the International Energy Agency, and policy commitments by countries, they projected where we might end up in 2030 and 2050. That pathway, it seems, is somewhere between the emissions of RCP 4.5 and 8.5.

The authors argue that if you consider some of the factors the RCPs don’t include—including complex feedback loops like permafrost degradation that will probably result in greater emissions—it’s best to plan for an RCP 8.5 world.

Schalm thinks that, considering how close we are to matching the RCP 8.5 path now and into the next couple decades, it’s worth using it as a tool in planning. If you’re building a dam today that needs to sustain the impacts of a warmer climate, it may be wise to consider what an RCP 8.5 world will do to the intensity of storms in 2050 just in case.

“The overall terms of the debate, in terms of trying to understand what a useful scenario is, really have to be much more focused on the near term as opposed to the end of the century,” says Schwalm. “That is much more important, both from a policy standpoint and just from a standpoint of human relatability, than some technical discussion about the level of coal use that may or may not happen 80 years from now.”

Not all climate scientists agree with Schwalm. Some, including Zeke Hausfather, director of climate and energy at the Breakthrough Institute, have issues with describing RCP 8.5 as similar to our current track because its underlying assumptions about energy use don’t match reality.

For example, it projected that the world will use five times as much coal as it did in 2005, due to a growing population and weak market for alternative energy. As Hausfather explains, global coal use peaked in 2013 and the especially-dirty fossil fuel seems to be slowly losing steam. Although our emissions on the surface are similar to the 8.5 track right now, we’ve already started moving away from it’s assumptions on fossil fuels.

Hausfather says that framing this climate scenario as the one we’re on track for is misleading. He says that RCP 8.5 way underestimates emissions that rise from changing land uses (think, a forest being chopped down for use in agriculture), and conversely overestimates energy emissions.

Therefore, while total emissions so far match the worst-case projection, it’s not because we’ve been burning fossil fuels at quite the rate projected by RCP 8.5. As Hausfather put it, “It’s the right answer for the wrong reason.”

The RCPs were formulated in 2005, and a lot has changed in energy and policy since then. Experts have estimated that, based on the policy commitments countries have made since then, we’re most likely on track to warm the planet by 3°C at the end of century. RCP 8.5, however, puts us at around 5°C.

This is important because numerous studies use the 8.5 trajectory to predict the resulting impacts of a world warmed under that scenario. Hausfather thinks researchers should use less-extreme climate scenarios than RCP 8.5 to provide a clearer picture of what we’re potentially in store for.

Where the two scientists agree is that we should not just throw away this worst-case pathway. As Hausfather explains, there are certainly scenarios in which we could reach an RCP 8.5 level of warming by 2100, or at least close to it. And it’s probably best not to ignore a worst-case scenario with something as profoundly impactful as climate change.

Adding another dimension to the RCP projections could help. As part of its next assessment, the IPCC has developed Shared Socioeconomic Pathways, or SSPs, which interact with the RCP scenarios to influence the pathways of our emissions.

For example, in a world of “resurgent nationalism,” as one SSP describes, countries may fail to cooperate on climate agreements, and spiral toward a future of 4°C warming in 2100. Considering these SSPs, which also include information about land use change, will help scientists make better predictions.

Even as climate scientists improve these projections, though their main message hasn’t shifted much over the decades. “The overall narrative that was articulated some 30, 40 years ago, is really the exact same one that we have today, which is we have to wean ourselves off of fossil fuels,” says Schwalm. “And the sooner we do that, the better.”

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