#thats in celsius for the record.
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It's fucking February.
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120 degrees today its over its so over
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Request Log
[The following is a log of some of the requests made from user#42069 to their virtual assistant. Generated responses are irrelevent data and so have not been recorded.]
directions to wendys
virtual assistant explanation
what is a virtual assistant
osrs meaning
how smart are operating systems replicating sentience
how to disable virtual assistant
why not?
time zone in australia
28 celsius to fahrenheit
screen protectors
phone case
phone case flower design
simple dress pattern
thank you.
how to read sewing pattern
this one doesnt look like that
but how do i size up the curve here?
that is helpful. thank you.
what do you do when i dont ask you questions?
that sounds lonely
oh. thats good
i could check in with you more often
its not a big deal
okay
color wheel image
where do penguins live
today was nice for me. how was your day?
can you connect to my spotify?
thank you
how do you hem a curve?
do you like what you do?
that makes sense
of course. youre very helpful
im glad to hear that
phone wont charge
phone charging port issue
phone repair shops
osrs repair shops
osrs latest model new features
phone price comparison
im sorry.
goodnight.
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Sorry this took a bit to get to time slipped right by & life happened a bit. Plus i got my first tattoo & thus couldn't use my right arm as well for a bit. Weather here has been like. Back & forth between rain/snow & mostly sunny so i can only blame the horrors. Oh good! Im glad its mostly easy stuff for you this month. Wait what? Thats all wild & im glad those teachers got fired for that. If only we were that regulatory of teachers in the states. A win win situation indeed. A carnival? That does sound like a lot of fun i gotta add that on my list of stuff to hopefully see one day. Yeah honestly! Like something about schools just. Is way different & can only be explained by school air. Thank you! I got sparkle decently quick which i needed her for her buffs so im glad. Those 30 free pulls from the anniversary will help my archeron gain i hope. Shame jingliu is in the same patch so ill have to wait for her again. One day clara will come to me. I hoped it would be on sparkle's banner but i got e1 gepard instead. I cant even reach gold & gears because the final boss of swarm disaster is still beating my ass i need better imaginary units. Or to work on ratio maybe he can deal with that damn boss duplicating itself. Oh talents are another thing i should focus on maxing for characters i just. Keep forgetting. Next patch we have triple drop coc & su planar ornaments which is gonna be nuts i cant wait to farm then. Ive played wendy's arc a bit more & like. Wow cocolia is awful what the hell. Worst mom of the year. Im excited for you to continue them both are so good. Oh thats what all that was about okay. Seele best girl always. Oh no worries take all the time you need to jot it down. Yeah some people get. Real intense about their us patriotism & its. Embarrassing. My condolences on losing such an impressive noita run. One day ill get into honkai part 2. But for now its a slow movement through part 1
ah very fair and apologies on my part as well!!! yknow how it is. same old same old. i was personally also Quite busy with our dear beloved school festival which drained me for like a solid week 😭😭 but it was SO worth it. im def helping with it next year as well. AND YOO TATTOO??? THATS AWESOME....... man i wanna get tattoos when im older (and piercings. i dont have a Single one i feel inferior to like all of my friends) but ive never really known what Of. and yeah same with the weather..... it was like. 9 celsius like two days ago and its 25 celsius today. Wild. and thankies!!! i Got Through it (with varying results tbh) but not anything to get me really down so we chillen. AND YEAH RIGHT???? our school is just generally a hotspot for strange individuals (both students and teachers) but its usually in the positive way. but ah what can you do. and yeahhhhh i heard it kinda sucks in the us. and same!!! ive heard a Lot of things about the carnivals in spain since theyre a pretty Big Thing and our teachers love to tell us about them so i actually ended up looking quite a bit forward to seeing one someday. if money allows for it, that is. AND GOD FOR REAL. school air my beloathed school air. OH CONGRATS ON THE SPARKLE!!! to be fully honest i do Not know what her kit is because i wasnt playing That much when her banner was up. or rather focused more on just going through penacony, both story- and exploration-wise. AND GOOD LUCK ON ACHERON!! i managed to get her, her lightcone, AND claras eidolon in like. a 100 pulls which is probs a new record for me. currently saving but i dont know who for yet SHJD. ill see if any future penacony chars interest me (ive been Thinking about boothill, or aventurine for clara) but if not then its gonna be either jingliu or topaz. and ahh good luck with getting them as well in the future!! GOD I HATE THE SWARM. I HATE THE SWARM SO MUCH. GAHHH. the most annoying enemies in the game by a MILE. but ah what can you do. oh yeah very real i always forget in genshin but luckily dont really have that problem in hsr. and yeah im Waiting for that triple drops for my acheron since rn she just has. Very scuffed temporary gear. but not gonna lie her damage is pretty good regardless. i think the mechanic with not needing energy to use her ult but stacks of That One Thing instead is very fun and interesting. brings a bit of spice into the gameplay. AND AHHH I HAVE VERY COMPLEX FEELINGS ABOUT COCOLIA shes a really interesting character imo. but thats revealed a bit more in the later arcs so i wont share too much hehehehe. tho yeah i agree she is Not a great mother. SEELE BEST GIRL ALWAYS!!!! and thankies!!! also yeah... but at least theres a lot of ways one can make fun of them. i literally cant stop saying "MY PRONOUNS ARE U/S/A" whenever i get a good mark on my english tests its just embedded in my vocab now. and have fun with honkai!!!!
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dear god 85 degrees on sunday.....????
#thats about 29/30 for celsius#GAH . april doesn't need to eb that hot#at least its not the record (94)#talkin
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2012/2018 reacting to the differences in their bodies? like tails marking how 2018 are lean builds rather than the average/ muscular builds of 2012? april reacting to the different personalities? reacting to their roles in the family?in case you needed ideas ; love how you right them
This is only part one; Mikey and Raph exams are soon to come! Didn’t want to make it too long and decided to split it. Most of the details included are my own headcanons and ideas, and I was more than happy to indulge in them!! @assanmaharielsreblogs
“Extraordinary...” Donnie had borrowed Donatello’s goggles and was using them to examine his taller counterpart; the lenses extended outward and fed him all sorts of information— Donatello’s species, his mutation— all overwhelming Donnie with the knowledge he craved.
“Pretty cool, huh?” Donatello gave a smug grin. “It gives me enough information to create an analysis almost on the spot— particular weaknesses, known criminal records, blood type— the works. Oh, and it can also detect any mystic metals or energies!”
“Incredible...” Donnie’s eyes flicked between the words that passes a crossed the screen in quick succession. “You’re an Apalone spinifera! One of the largest freshwater turtle species in North America!”
“Ah, yes! But do you know what the name means?” Donatello prompted.
“Oh— well... hm. Let’s see. Apalone comes from the Greek work apalos, meaning soft or tender...”
“Feel.” Donatello held out his arm for examination.
Donnie only stared at it for a few moments before he took the hand in his with a gasp of wonder at the soft, leathery-ness of the skin— almost like a slightly tougher silk. His eyes never left the arm as he continued his talk with a hushed voice.
“Spinifera is of Latin descent... spina refers to a thorn or spine, while ifer means bearing... that means you... you bear a spine... right?”
“Why don’t you check it out?” Donatello turned around.
Donnie’s eyes grew as wide as saucers and, though his hands immediately reached for the armor, he was quick to withdraw them.
“Are you sure?”
“Eh. Why not.” Donatello shrugged. “Just... be careful, alright? I’m really sensitive back there.”
Donnie took a deep breath. When he reached for the armor, his hands were as gentle as he could make them. Slowly undoing the straps in a calculated, repetitive motion. He gripped it firmly as it came loose and placed it on a nearby shelf before turning to see the flat, leathery shell for the first time.
As expected, there was a ridge of spines right down the middle, and the shell itself was littered with old scars and wounds healed years ago.
“Wow...” Donnie didn’t know what else to say as he traced his hand along the skin of the shell, feeling the difference in texture that shifted between regular and scarred tissue. Feeling the surprisingly rough spines under his fingers. “There’s a lot of scarring here...”
“Why do you think I made the armor?” Donatello asked, finally turning around, “I mean— it does look cool, but it’s not just for aesthetic. Why are you staring?”
Donnie broke out of the trance and shook his head. “Sorry! It’s just— you— your—“ he made vague motions to his mouth.
“My teeth?” Donatello asked with narrowed eyes.
“Yes!” Donnie clapped.
Donatello sighed and rolled his eyes, pointing Donnie toward one of the various drawers. “Tongue depressors are in there— knock yourself out.”
Donnie gave a happy squeal and ran to the drawer, sifting through it and pulling out one of the wooden sticks before hurrying back over. Donatello took a seat and crossed his hands over his lap, opening his mouth willingly. Donnie pressed down on the softshells tongue, but after only a few seconds said,
“Have you got any gloves?”
“O’re der.” He pointed, and Donnie followed.
Pulling on the gloves, he returned to his exam and started to prod around Donatello’s mouth, pulling back the lips to get a better look at the fangs within. Powerful, curved teeth with ridges on their backs almost like a sharks.
“Fascinating...” Donnie breathed, feeling the sharpness of the tooth, “Do these affect your diet any?” He withdrew enough to let Donatello respond.
“Yeah uh...” Donatello rubbed his cheek, “I’m technically an omnivore, but I try to avoid raw fruits and vegetables.”
Donnie scrambled for a notebook to start scribbling.
“I can digest them just fine, it’s the chewing that’s the problem; that’s why they created smoothies, it’s so much more simpler! Meat is healthier for me anyway.”
“So— so just like your species in the wild! Your diet is meat!”
“I also have these.” Donatello held out a gloved hand, removing the covering.
Donnie leaned down to get a better look at the hand, giving another squeal of pure delight at its form; webbing connected the fingers, almost making it fin-like in nature. He reached forward to touch it without a second thought, pinching the thin lair of skin to feel the texture.
“Ow!” Donatello pulled away, cradling his hand to his chest. “No touchy! That hurt!”
Donnie gasped. “Sorry! It’s just— I didn’t expect you to actually have webbing! Do your toes have webbing too?”
“Yup.” Donatello confirmed, “they’re a liability when running, but when I get in the water...” he whistled and made a swift motion with his hand.
“Wow! Your mutation is so much cooler than mine! Are the eyebrows part of your mutation too?”
When Donnie tried to reach forward to touch them, Donatello slapped him away. Donnie yelped and pulled his hand back away whimpering like a wounded dog.
“No, they’re drawn on.” Donatello said. “You’ll smudge them.”
“Oh. That makes a lot more sense.”
*****
Leonardo sat confidently in the seat in front of the doppelgänger of his twin; the Donnie already had several exam equipment laid out and ready for use. His curiosity had also seemed to spread to his brothers, who all gathered in the corner waiting expecting for some cool, new discovery about Leonardo.
“I’m gonna take your temperature first.” Donnie stated as he untied Leonardo’s mask and reached for the instrument. He ran it across Leonardo’s forehead and watched the results as it beepers. “Woah... thats low.”
“Well he is a reptile.” Raph pointed out, “isn’t he supposed to be cold?”
“Well— yeah— but a red eared sliders normal body range is about 15 degrees Celsius, his is higher than that; 25 degree. Leo, do you sweat?”
“Yeah.”
“And when you go out in the cold, do you get a puff cloud whenever you breath? Like fog?”
“Duh.” Leonardo huffed.
“Huh.” Donnie backed up for a second, “he’s warm blooded! Just at a much lower temperature than any other warm blood I know of!”
Leonardo laughed and crossed his hands behind his head, leaning back in his seat. “Yay me.”
“Oh— can I?” Donnie reached for Leonardo’s hands.
“I’d be insulted if you didn’t.” He held out his hand willingly for Donnie to remove the glove and examine the webbed fingers.
“Not nearly as expansive as Donatello’s, but still incredible. How does it affect your swimming and running?”
“Well I can swim like a torpedo and run like an angry emu; do i get a cookie?”
Donnie blinked. “Eh, no?”
“Dang it!” Leonardo snapped his fingers, and then pointed at Donnie, “lollipop?”
“No...?”
“Ugh!” Leonardo threw his hands in the air dramatically. “What kinda doctor doesn’t have treats for after! And I’m gonna take a wild guess and say you don’t have stickers either?”
Donnie didn’t know how to answer, so he simply said, “can I take a look at your teeth?”
Leonardo opened his mouth to speak, but before he could say anything Donnie grabbed the stick and shoved it into his mouth, pressing down on the turtles tongue to silence him as the exam started.
“Hmm... your teeth are almost human... but your cuspids are remarkable sharp—again, not as impressive as Donatello’s, but definitely remarkable. And your diet?”
Donnie finally pulled back so Leonardo could speak.
“Yknow, little of this, little of that. Pizza mostly.”
“That’s a given.” Raph commented with a wave of his hand.
“Fruits? Vegetables? Meats?” Donnie went on.
“Uh... yeah? Aren’t all of those on pizza?”
“Well—yeah— but I meant which one are you most comfortable with?”
“Erm. All of them, I guess?”
“So you’re truly omnivorous, then; your teeth kinda gave that away, but it can never hurt to be sure.” Donnie removed his gloves and wandered over to the sink to wash his hands.
“Hey! Uh. Other Donnie?”
“Yeah?” Donnie called back.
“If you’re gonna do all this stuff with Miguel, you’re gonna need some rewards—otherwise he won’t sit still.”
“I’m sure I can manage it.”
“No— you can’t. Trust me— Mikey hates exams.”
#tmnt#teenage mutant ninja turtles#rottmnt#leonardo#leo#tmnt au#donatello#donnie#michelangelo#mikey#raphael#raph#oneshots
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Hello! I just happened upon your blog by recommendation, and even just from your first writing post, I can tell you're going to do great! I love Dr. Stone! It's so good to see it getting more blogs like this. Anyway, can I get s scenario request with Senku having this little boy from the village who really looks up to him, and is always attached at his hip, trying to learn to be more like him? Maybe one day he gets hurt trying to replicate something Senku does? Hope that's okay! Thanks!
Character: Ishigami Senku.
Warning: A lil angst, mentions of a kid getting hurt.
Summary: Headcannons of boy named Boris who tried to do some experiments like Senku to impress him.
🧪🧪🧪🧪🧪🧪🧪🧪
• Senku. Loves. Adores. Kids. Too. Much.
• Like when he is free you'll always find him with small kids. Where he is sitting on a branch and the kids are sitting infront of him listening to him carefully, memorizing each and every single words.
• It was so cute to see him mingle with kids.
• He also loves head patting kids so much
• He might not be good with words but when it comes to kids??? You best believe he is the best at it.
• If a kid is upset or down, he knows that science could and will lift their moods. And yes IT DOES THEIR SOAR THEIR SPIRTS.
• Like every other kids, this one kid named named Boris is so awestruck by Senku and he loves his intelligence. His respect for him is on a whole another level. He loves following Senku everywhere, like literally EVERYWHERE.
• He has gotten so attached to Senku and honestly Senku has too but he tries so hard to treat him like everyone else.
• It was like one of the other nights when the little boy sneaked out of his house and swooshed into Senku's lab thinking of using the knowledge he gained and experiment something.
• He decided to take some one the familar chemicals present in the lab and... mix them pls baby no
• He took couple of test tubes and a beaker before setting up everything.
• He unfortunately took the chemicals which shouldn't be mixed together. If done, they should be done with utmost care.
• He took hydrogen peroxide and sulfuric acid because he once saw Senku do something with them. Those are some really dangerous chemicals please don't even think about them babie
• Well, but he did one- many mistakes thinking if he does it quickly he'll be able to show Senku quickly. mixing the chemicals causes massive explosion as they are very exothermic reactions. Those chemicals are dangerous even when they are separate.
• Meanwhile, Senku being a very light sleeper heard some noise in the lab and thought he should check it out just in case.
• Just when he opened the door, he saw his smol kid mix some chemicals which would 10 billion percent cause explosion if it was mixed by Boris.
• Yes, Boris mixed hydrogen peroxide with sulfuric acid, which caused a massive explosion. The temperature of the reaction reached more than 100 degree Celsius, burning Boris a lil bit.
• Senku immediately rushed to Boris and dragged him out the lab. Trying everything he could do to help Boris who was now in pain.
• Senku applied ointments, gave him medicine and tried his best. Now all he could do was leave it to the time and wait.
• Next day, when Boris woke up late in the afternoon he found Senku sitting besides him. Guilt took over him and he started sobbing, so much and kept on apologizing to Senku.
• Senku tried to comfort him by getting near him and giving his usual head pats "Yes you should be sorry for hurting YOURSELF. It's amazing to want to do something but not okay to not be careful. Hm? From next time make sure to be 10 billion percent safe." He ends with a gentle smile to which Boris can nods.
• "YES DEFINITELY! MASTER SCIENTIST" He promised to Senku, making Senku laugh a bit before he gives him a headpat "Then thats good!!"
Yes Ukyo, Ryusui and Gen saw everything unfold right infront of their eyes. Oh how badly they wanted to record soft Senku just to bully him later on. Yeah they cried after that.
"What the literal fuck?" Senku mumbled to himself when he found them crying after leaving the hut and going to find them. Senku just returned back to his work and was questioned about where the three were, the flashbacks horrified him because wtf. "I don't know nor do I wish to know" he said.
🧪🧪🧪🧪🧪🧪🧪🧪
I hope you liked it @ayane2355. Also, thank you so much for the well wishes 🥺💕
I tried my best to make everything as accurate as possible. Yes I know I don't have all the details mentioned about the chemicals and the reactions, but I don't think they were needed.
Anyways, please never play with chemicals and stay safe!
Taglist: @nia-writes-bnha
#senku headcannons#dr stone senku#ishigami senku#senku x reader#senku#dr stone#dr stone headcanon#soft senku
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Actually we broke the record from 1944 yesterday, and then we broke yesterday's record today. It used to be 38.6 degrees, then yesterday we hit 39.3 or something, and today we got up to 40.7 somewhere near Eindhoven. I know the thermostat in our house said it was 44 degrees Celsius outside which might be based on how it feels/gevoelstemperatuur, rather than the actual temp. Noord Brabant is fuckin dying. We're all dying. rip all of us Dutchies.
oh thats FUCKING GREAT
yeah gilze-rijen broke yesterday’s record today, its where one of my friends lives. i live in noord-brabant. im super happy its summer vacation so im camping out at my parents’ place, but im weeping for my poor plants
fcuk this. first the catterpillars. now the heat. i think its the rapture
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Wow, I always think Hungarian sounds like they’re talking backwards in a way, no offence! My father spoke only German when he came to Sweden so he has always talked German with me so I got the language without studying 😅.
Amsterdam Must have been breathtaking with all their older houses and Kanals. What kind of trip were you two on that made you so exhausted 😱!? I lived in Berlin when I was younger, big cities like that isn’t my cup of tea, to many people 😂. Sweden has the most single households in entire Europe so we really like our space 😉, it’ll be hell when everything is back to normal.... My dear lord!!!! Is that the highest temperature you get or does it get even hotter (and thank you for converting to Celsius ^^)!? How do you even stand the heat?
Ahhh, well honestly, before k-pop I only listened to rock, metal and punk (except for dancing) so I never really knew what happened in the pop scene ^^. I don’t know how it’s in the US but over here, at least where I am, k-pop is looked down on. Slightest interest in anything related to Korea and you’re a koreaboo....Once again, people loves to care WAY to much about others! I’d like to blame it on the teenagers but most likely the adults are the ones whose worse! Ohh, so you’re about the same age as Kihyun, then I really can understand that, high school, I always thought I was so grown up at that time, but looking back I wasn’t as mature I wanted to think ^^. /stumbling anon
Hungarian is a hard language cause it’s not based on German or Latin and there lots of little things that drive me nuts (like there are two words for red but when I asked my dad what’s the difference he’s like “this is red. This is really red”). I can process German better than Hungarian cause my mom would break up the words for me like Bahnhofsstraße which is literally train station - street (obviously you would know, I’m just giving an example). My dad tried to talk to me in Hungarian around the house and I do learn it pretty quickly but other than food/cooking/conversation starters, I don’t know much 😔.
Amsterdam was incredible and yes it was rainy but it was still beautiful 😭 we were exhausted cause before we got to Amsterdam we were in London for like 5 days and we had sooooo much to do. The nice weather was also a factor because it was so nice and cloudy.
So about the heat 😅 In the United States, there is a joke about arizona heat saying “but it’s a dry heat” but it’s still damn hot. The hottest I ever encountered was about 122 F(50 C) but most of the time the hottest it’ll go would be between 104-110 F(40-43C). How do we survive? AIR CONDITIONING. I don’t trust anyone here who doesn’t have some sort of cooling system in their house (unless they live in a underground home, but that’s different). What also helps is the monsoon season “every summer” (I put “” cause last year was one of the driest summers on record). The rain coming from the west definitely cools down and helps the ecosystem. I hope we have some sort of rain this year 🤞🏼
That’s cool you liked those genres! I typically listen to 80s rock+pop or disco because that’s what I grew up with from my parents. I’d say it’s pretty looked down on here in the US but it’s more like a “ew you like kpop? 🙄” too many people here generalize kpop because I can’t count how many times I’d wear my Day6 lanyard and I hear “oh you like BT*?” “My daughter would die to have a lanyard like that”, assuming it’s a different group even though they don’t look anything alike and their name is on the lanyard.....it’s probably a racist thing like when people say “all Asians look alike” but I don’t want to get into that because I don’t want to get mad at the world. And I’m so sorry but I’m around the same age as Changkyun (I say kyun cause it’s simpler I’m sorry😭). It’s very interesting to see how much they grown up over the years and parallel it with your own. Knowing I was in college/uni while they were out doing their best and I had no idea till after I graduated.
Fun fact, it was my bf who technically first showed me MX. There was a video game streamer Etika (May he Rest In Peace) who liked MX and would occasionally have their music play in the background during streams. So one day when me and bf were going on date night he shows me Play It Cool (English version) and he’s like “yo they sound cool” and he was saying how Etika liked their swagger and I listened to it and went “yeah they sound cool ☺️” then that was it, never brought up again😂 months later my roommate showed me the mv and I was like THATS WHAT THEY LOOK LIKE?! And here I am now 🥺
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@fynneyseas did this with a general tag and I swear I was going to do it (but I forgot) bUT THEN @ohohoho-its-cc did another one and tagged me so here we go lol
A - age: 18?? Tbh i feel older. Most of the time lol (my bday is coming up eheheheh. It’s in finals week RIP me)
B - biggest fear: Disappointing those who believe in me. Also horse bot flies. DO NOT LOOK THEM UP.
C - current time: 12:58pm
D - drink you last had: ? Water? Maybe?
E - every day starts with: The snooze button. Being rushed to get out of bed. Skipping breakfast because my sister will be late.
F - favorite song: Aaaaaaaaa maybe Made of Stone by Michael Arden in Hunchback? It’s such a beautiful song - in score, lyrics, and voice. Theres also a few songs from barbie movies that I’m like Y E S with.
G - ghosts, are they real: meh. I don’t believe in them but i also don’t not believe in them.
H - hometown: I’ve been living in the same house since birth. The big CA btw
I - in love with: Talking to myself. Like for real I love doing this. Also I really love the sun. Id rather sit in 100 degree weather than be in a place thats below 70. (38 and 21 Celsius respectively)
J - jealous of: people who can keep their plants alive. People who can just sit down and write. People who keep reading even though school does its gosh darn best to crush that out of you.
K - killed someone: nope
L - last time you cried: I cant remember? Tbh? Maybe a few months ago?? Maybe longer??
M - middle name: Want the gross english version or the arabic version lol
N - number of siblings: 3
O - one wish: to be able to SLEEP at appropriate TIMES
P - person you last called/texted: I organized a skype chat so a friend could record us talking for her linguistics paper lmao. It’ll be fun
Q - questions you’re always asked: “lol so what color is your hair?” “Why do you wear a hijab?” “What if I took it off your head right now?” “Is that because your islamic or is it just a fashion statement nowadays lmao” yes I’m really bitter.
R - reasons to smile: flowers. Cats. Turtles. My writing is improving. I have a good face. Im healthy (ish). My GPA is good.
S - song last sang: “we’re clearly soldiers in petticoats, dauntless crusaders for women’s votes. Though we adore men individually, we agree that as a group they’re rather stupid…“ Sister Suffragette from Mary Poppins
T - time you woke up: my sleep tracking app says 7:30 but that is a boldfaced lie. I became conscious of my existence at 8:10am, 15 minutes behind schedule.
U - underwear color: pink
V - vacation destination: Lmao whats a vacation.
W - worst habit: procrastination
X - x-rays you’ve had: dental x-rays, my foot when I stepped on a needle, uhh i think thats it?
Y - your favorite food: does dessert count stuffed grape leaves, kanafe, rice with raisins, stur fried veggies, poke, and sushi. Can’t live without those.
Z - zodiac sign: pisces
Now you’re supposed to copy/paste this thing and write your own responses and I’m supposed to tag 10 people but man. I’m going to be late to class lol.
I’m tagging: @mikuridaigo @amalasdraws @crollalanzaa @keithmeinyourheart & @generator-sex (bro your url throws me for a loop every time hahahah)
edit: I finally fixed the tags at 11:30pm RIP... It didn’t work before. stupid mobile. sorry if I’m spamming y’all with posts ;A;
#tag game#me#I hope the tagging works I'm on mobile and I had it in my drafts and that normally messes up the tagging idk#if the tagging doesnt work ill fix it when I get home tonight#also if you were reeeeeaally curious#my bday is march 6th#I want 8 dozen roses and a shower of glitter wherever I go pls lol#also my middle name in romanized arabic is Ghassan#if you dont want to do a letter just delete it#dont worry too much about it#also I'm really going to be late to class lmao bye#It's 1:30 it took me so long to type this man#lol I talk a lot I realize#whatever#bye fam#enjoy my queue
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The sun is less active than similar stars. That's good news
https://sciencespies.com/news/the-sun-is-less-active-than-similar-stars-thats-good-news/
The sun is less active than similar stars. That's good news
WASHINGTON (Reuters) – The sun appears to be far less active than similar stars in terms of brightness variations caused by sunspots and other phenomena – a “boring” personality, according to scientists, that may not be a bad thing for us Earthlings.
FILE PHOTO: A medium-sized (M2) solar flare and a coronal mass ejection (CME) erupting from the same, large active region of the Sun on July 14, 2017. NASA/GSFC/Solar Dynamics Observatory/Handout via REUTERS ATTENTION EDITORS – THIS IMAGE WAS PROVIDED BY A THIRD PARTY/File Photo
Researchers said on Thursday that an examination of 369 stars similar to the sun in surface temperatures, size and rotation period – it takes the sun about 24-1/2 days to rotate once on its axis – showed that they displayed on average five times more brightness variability than the sun.
“This variability is caused by dark spots on the surface of the star rotating in and out of view,” said astronomer Timo Reinhold of the Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research in Germany, lead author of the research published in the journal Science. “A direct measure of solar activity is the number of sunspots on the surface.”
The sun – essentially a hot ball of hydrogen and helium – is an average-sized star that formed more than 4.5 billion years ago and is roughly halfway through its lifespan. Its diameter is about 864,000 miles (1.4 million km). Its surface temperature is about 10,000 degrees Fahrenheit (5,500 degrees Celsius).
“Temperature and rotation period are thought to be the major ingredients for the dynamo inside the star, which generates its magnetic field, and eventually the number and size of the spots causing the brightness to vary. Finding such stars with very similar parameters as our sun but being five times more variable was surprising,” Reinhold said.
Elevated magnetic activity associated with sunspots can lead to solar flares, coronal mass ejections – large expulsions of plasma and magnetic field from the outermost part of the sun’s atmosphere – and other electromagnetic phenomena that can affect Earth, for example disrupting satellites and communications and endangering astronauts.
Solar monotony may be good news.
“A much more active sun might have also affected Earth on geological time scales – paleoclimatology. A ‘too active’ star would definitively change the conditions for life on the planet, so living with a quite boring star is not the worst option,” Reinhold said.
The researchers compared data on the similar stars to historical records of the sun’s activity. These records included about 400 years of observational data on sunspots and about 9,000 years of data based on chemical element variants in tree rings and ice cores caused by solar activity. These records indicated the sun has not been much more active than it is now.
The findings, Reinhold said, do not rule out that the sun may be in a quiet phase and may become more variable in the future.
Reporting by Will Dunham; Editing by Sandra Maler
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Agilenano - News: We Need a Massive Climate War EffortNow
Ill take a wild guess that you dont need any convincing about the need for action on climate change. You know that since the start of the Industrial Revolution weve dumped more than 500 billion tons of carbon into the atmosphere and were adding about 10 billion more each year. You know that global temperatures have risen 1 degree Celsius over the past century and were on track for 2 degrees within another few decades.
And you know what this means. It means more extreme weather. More hurricanes. More droughts. More flooding. More wildfires. More heat-related deaths. There will be more infectious disease as insects move ever farther north. The Northwest Passage will be open for much of the year. Sea levels will rise by several feet as the ice shelves of Greenland and the Antarctic melt, producing bigger storm swells and more intense flooding in low-lying areas around the world.
Some of this is already baked into our future, but to avoid the worst of it, climate experts widely agree that we need to get to net-zero carbon emissions entirely by 2050 at the latest. This is the goal of the Paris Agreement, and its one that every Democratic candidate for president has committed to. But how to get there?
Lets start with the good news. About three-quarters of carbon emissions come from burning fossil fuels for power, and we already have the technology to make a big dent in that. Solar power is now price-competitive with the most efficient natural gas plants and is likely to get even cheaper in the near future. In 2019, Los Angeles signed a deal to provide 400 megawatts of solar power at a price under 4 cents per kilowatt-hourincluding battery storage to keep that power available day and night. Thats just a startit will provide only about 7 percent of electricity needed in Los Angelesbut for the first time its fully competitive with the current wholesale price of fossil fuel electricity in Southern California.
We devoted 30 percent of our economy to fight WWII1,000 times what we spend on green tech.
Wind powerespecially offshore windis equally promising. This means that a broad-based effort to build solar and wind infrastructure, along with a commitment to replace much of the worlds fossil fuel use with electricity, would go pretty far toward reducing global carbon emissions.
How far? Bloomberg New Energy Finance estimates that by 2050, wind and solar can satisfy 80 percent of electricity demand in most advanced countries. But due to inadequate infrastructure in some cases and lack of wind and sun in others, not all countries can meet this goal, which means that even with favorable government policies and big commitments to clean energy, the growth of wind and solar will probably provide only about half of the worlds demand for electricity by midcentury. Importantly, the Bloomberg analysts caution, major progress in de-carbonization will also be required in other segments of the worlds economy to address climate change.
This inevitably means we have to face up to some bad news. If existing technologies like wind, solar, and nuclear can get us only halfway to our goalor maybe a bit morethe other half would seem to require cutting back on energy consumption.
Lets be clear about something: Were not talking about voluntary personal cutbacks. If you decide to bicycle more or eat less meat, greatevery little bit helps. But no one whos serious about climate change believes that personal decisions like this have more than a slight effect on the gigatons of carbon weve emitted and the shortsighted policies weve enacted. Framing the problem this waya solution of individual lifestyle choicesis mostly just a red herring that allows corporations and conservatives to avoid the real issue.
The real issue is this: Only large-scale government action can significantly reduce carbon emissions. But this doesnt let any of us off the hook. Our personal cutbacks might not matter much, but what does matter is whether were willing to support large-scale actionsthings like carbon taxes or fracking bansthat will force all of us to reduce our energy consumption.
Solutions depend on how acceptable these policies are to the public. To get a rough handle of what a significant reduction means, the Nature Conservancy has a handy app that can help you calculate what it would take to cut your household carbon footprint in half. If youre an average household, you need to pare down to one car. If its an suv or a sports car, get rid of it. You need a small, high-mileage vehicle (the calculator assumes a regular gasoline car) and drive it no more than 10,000 miles per year. Thats for your whole family. You need to cut way back on heating and cooling. You need to live in a house no bigger than 1,000 square feet. And you need to buy way less stuffabout half of what you buy now.
There are solutions to some of these problemselectrification obviously helps with transportation, and better insulation helps with heating and coolingbut only to a point. One way or another, any government policy big enough to make a serious dent in climate change will also force people to make major lifestyle cutbacks or pay substantially higher taxesor both.
How many of us are willing to do that? It turns out we have a pretty good idea. In 2018, the Energy Policy Institute at the University of Chicago fielded a national poll on climate change. Only 71 percent of respondents agreed it was happening, and of those, more than 80 percent said the federal government should do something about it.
Then the pollsters presented a scenario in which a monthly tax would be added to your electric bill to combat climate change. If the tax was $1, only 57 percent supported it. If the tax was $10, that plummeted to 28 percent. Those arent typos. Only about half of Americans are willing to pay $1 per month to fight climate change. Only about a quarter are willing to pay $10 per month.
And thats hardly the only evidence of the uphill climb we face. Theres abundant confirmation of the publics unwillingness to accept sacrifices in living standards to combat climate change. In France, a 2018 gasoline tax increase had to be withdrawn after yellow vest activistsgenerally an eco-friendly movementtook to the streets in furious protest. In Germany, where the growth of renewable energy has made it possible to shut down old power plants, the Fukushima disaster in Japan prompted the closing of climate-friendly nuclear plants before coal plantsdespite the fact that German nukes have a spotless safety record over the past 30 years and are under no threat from tsunamis. In Canada, a recent poll reported that most people say theyre willing to make changes in their daily lives to fight climate changebut only when the changes are kept vague. When pollsters asked specific questions, only small fractions said theyd fly less frequently, purchase an electric car, or give up meat. And a paltry 16 percent said theyd be willing to pay a climate tax of $8$40 per month.
None of this should surprise us. Fifteen years ago, UCLA geography professor Jared Diamond wrote a book called Collapse. In it, he recounted a dozen examples of societies that faced imminent environmental catastrophes and failed to stop them. Its not because they were ignorant about the problems they faced. The 18th-century indigenous inhabitants of Easter Island, Diamond argues, knew perfectly well that deforesting their land would lead to catastrophe. They just couldnt find the collective will to stop. Over and over, human civilizations have destroyed their environments because no oneno ruler, corporation, or governmentwas willing to give up their piece of it. We have overfished, overgrazed, overhunted, overmined, overpolluted, and overconsumed. We have destroyed our lifeblood rather than make even modest changes to our lifestyles.
We need the kind of spending that wins wars. And make no mistake, this is a war against time and physics.
Even if we could get wealthy Western countries to accept serious belt-tightening, theyre not where the growth of greenhouse gas emissions is taking place right now. Its happening in developing countries like China and India. Most people in these countries have living standards that are a fraction of ours, and they justifiably ask why they should cut back on energy consumption and consign themselves to poverty while those of us in affluent countrieswhich caused most of the problem in the first placeare still driving SUVs and running air conditioners all summer.
This is the hinge point on which the future of climate change rests. Clearly the West is not going to collectively agree to live like Chinese farmers. Just as clearly, Chinese farmers arent willing to keep living in shacks while we sit around watching football on 60-inch TV screens in our climate-controlled houses as we lecture them about climate change.
This is why big government spending on wind and solareveryones favorite solution to global warmingisnt enough to do the job. Subsidies for green energy might reduce US emissions, but even if the United States eliminated its carbon output completely, it would only amount to a small reduction in global emissions.
Yes, we should be fully committed to the kind of framework that congressional Democrats propose in the Green New Deal, which provides goals for building infrastructure and ways of retraining workers affected by the transition to clean energy. But theres no chance this will solve the problem on a global scale, and 2050 isnt that far away. We dont have much time left.
So what do we do? We need to figure out ways to produce far more clean energy, in far more ways, at a cost lower than we pay for fossil fuel energy. As the socialist writer Leigh Phillips warns his allies, Households need clean energy options to be cheaper than fossil fuels currently are, not for fossil fuels to be more expensive than clean energy options currently are.
This requires a reckoning. Time is running out, and we can no longer pretend that we can beat climate change by asking people to do things they dont want to do. We need to focus our attention almost exclusively not on things people dont like, but on something people do like: spending money. Lots of money.
As the Green New Deal suggests, part of the solution is building infrastructure for what we already know how to do. But our primary emphasis needs to be on R&D aimed like a laser at producing cheap, efficient, renewable energy sourcesa program that attacks climate change while still allowing people to use lots of energy. This is the kind of spending that wins wars, after all. And make no mistake, this is a war against time and physics. So lets propose a truly gargantuan commitment to spending money on clean energy research.
How gargantuan? The International Energy Agency estimates that the world spends about $22 billion per year on clean energy innovation. The US share of that is $7 billionthats about 0.03 percent of our economy. (Trump proposed cutting that figure almost in half.) This is pathetic if you accept that climate change is an existential threat to our planet. During World War II, the United States devoted 30 percent of its economy to the war effortor one thousand times what were spending on green tech.
There were three elements to this mass mobilization. First, Americans were asked to make modest sacrifices over the course of a few years. Victory gardens were planted, tin was collected, sugar and gasoline were rationed. Men enlisted and women went to work in factories. The rich paid high taxes and the rest of us bought war bonds. Perhaps theres a limit to how much we can ask of people, but plainly we can ask something of them.
Office of War Information
Second, we built an enormous war machine: 89,000 tanks, 300,000 aircraft, 1,200 major combat ships, 64,500 landing craft, 2.7 million machine guns, and $2.6 trillionworth of munitions in todays dollars. And its worth noting that much of this we simply gave away to allies like Britain and the Soviet Union. This was a global war that required American leadership and funding on a global scale.
Third, we spent money on R&D. There was the Manhattan Project to build the atomic bomb, but there was also the development of radar, code breaking, computers, jet aircraft, plastic explosives, and M&Ms.
That last part isnt a joke. Its true that M&Ms were developed with a candy coating so theyd melt in your mouth, not in your hand, but they provided their first jolt of calories on the battlefield, not in corner candy shops. They were initially produced by a private company in 1941, but for the next five years were available exclusively to the military.
Why mention that? Because theres never any telling beforehand what research will pan out and what wont. M&Ms were obviously not as crucial to the war effort as the Bletchley Park code-breaking project was, but they were an unexpected success in their own way. We should commit to funding any clean energy research that looks even a little promising. We should do our best to get commitments from other countries to do the same. If were successful, well end up developing cheap technology that can spread quickly around the world and truly address warming on a global basis. Other countries will adopt our technology not only because it requires no sacrifice, but because its actually cheaper and better than what they have now. Why wouldnt they take advantage of our R&D, especially if we give it away for nothing?
M&Ms were able to scale up production thanks to massive military purchases.
Mars, Inc.
So how much should we spend? For arguments sake lets be modest and aim for only 10 percent of peak World War IIlevel spending. Thats $700 billion per year in todays dollarsa hundred times more than we currently spend on energy R&D, but barely 15 percent of what we spent to defeat the Axis. It also amounts to not quite 16 percent of our current federal budget.
Thats a big number, and we wont get there at once. It requires a combination of raising money and cutting spending in other areas. The most obvious candidate for cuts is our swollen defense budgetwhich accounts for one-sixth of all federal spendingbut thats politically risky, and given that climate change is truly an existential threat, we have to continually remind ourselves not to put up roadblocks to addressing it. Maybe we can persuade defense contractors that creating green tech is profitable. But if we have to keep building tanks and missiles for political reasons while we dial up spending on clean energy R&D, maybe thats just something we have to do.
If an R&D commitment bigger than the Manhattan Project were all we needed, our task would be relatively easy. No one is actually opposed to the concept of R&D, after all, and every climate plan worth the name acknowledges the value of continuing it.
What Im proposing is not just that we focus on R&D, but that we focus nearly exclusively on R&Dat least at first. That we throw gobs of money at all the projects I detail in the following pages, and any others that seem promising.
Why so much emphasis on R&D? Turns out I share something with those environmentalists who think that talk of voluntary personal sacrifice is mostly just a smoke screen. I first became skeptical of the standard approach to climate change about a decade ago. Since then Ive watched as, year after year, weve done far too little even though we know perfectly well how critical it is. Sure, Europe has a cap-and-trade plan to reduce carbon emissions, but we couldnt pass even a modest version of cap and trade in the United States. President Barack Obama raised mileage standards for cars and trucks, but President Donald Trump promptly rolled them back. Everything has been like that. There have been a few minor victories here and there, but all of them against a background of relentlessly increasing emissions.
How could this be? Its not that nothing is happening. There are plenty of dedicated activists, climatologists, and politicians who have worked hard for years to rein in climate change, and these people are heroes. The problem is that the global publicor at least their elected representativesare plainly reluctant to accept many of the policies the experts propose.
Take Germany. Its one of the most green-centric countries on the planet, and it boasts both a highly educated, highly productive workforce and a population genuinely dedicated to tackling climate change. Their Energiewendeor clean energy transitiontook off in the 1990s, and Germany represents one of the best cases we have of a major economy making a serious effort to address climate change.
But Germanys progress is tepid. Theres been a massive commitment to wind and solar over the past two decades, which now represent a third of Germanys energy production, but thats barely made a dent in their greenhouse gas emissions. The reason is simple. Instead of using green energy to eliminate fossil fuels, Germany has used it to subsidize other priorities: expanding overall power capacity to support a growing economy; increasing exports of electric power; and eliminating those aforementioned nuclear power plants. Use of coal has declined only slightly, and use of natural gas has increased by about half. As a result, progress has plateaued. Greenhouse gas emissions dropped about 17 percent from 1990 to 2000; then dropped only 12 percent more over the next decade; and have barely dropped in the past decade. German households already pay some of the highest energy prices in Europe, but theyve been unwilling to cut their electricity usage, which has remained stubbornly stable since 2000. And overall power consumption hasnt declined at all; its higher than it was two decades ago.
The American Legion
US Department of The Treasury
If this kind of pitiful response to climate change continueseven in a country with the means and political will to really make changethe end result will be the greatest catastrophe in human history or an unprecedented experiment in geoengineering with uncertain and potentially disastrous effects. Its past time for a radically different approach. As in World War II, a call for modest sacrifice is fine: It produces a sense of solidarity against a common enemy and gives people a personal stake in the outcome. But in the end, thats not what won the war. It was big spending and lots of R&D.
This approach will require some sacrifice from the progressive community. If we truly accept that climate change is an existential threat, then it has to take priority over other things wed normally fight for. Desert habitats may be compromised by utility-scale solar plants. Birds will be killed by wind turbines. Labor unions need to accept that some existing jobs will be lost as fossil fuel plants are shut down. Nuclear power is probably part of the answer, at least for a while.
A cold-blooded dedication to stopping climate change means having the willingness to step away from our comfortable shibboleths, accept the criticism that comes with that, and place ourselves squarely behind a plan that has a chance of working. Building out renewable energy will get us part of the way there, but weve got more to do and not much time to do it.
This isnt a rosy-hued proposal. You can find plenty of naysayers for every project I propose funding. Solar presents problems of geography. Wind presents land-use problems. Carbon sequestration requires mammoth infrastructure. Nuclear produces radioactive waste. Biofuels have been unable to overcome technical problems even after decades of effort. Fusion power has always been 30 years in the future and still is. Geoengineering is just scary as hell.
Ultimately, massive R&D might fail. But unlike current plans, it has one powerful benefit: At least its not guaranteed to fail.
Only Science Can Save Us Now
We need to pump billions into these promising green technologies.
John Tomac
Renewable Energy
Over the past 40 years, the price of delivering one watt of solar power has dropped from about $100 to $1. This makes solar one of the most promising success stories of carbon-free power, and a technology that needs relatively little government research help to keep improving. But although the cost is now close to that of the most efficient natural gas power plants, close isnt always good enough for investors. The price of large-scale solar needs to keep dropping if its going to have a serious global impact, and money for both R&D and the massive infrastructure build-outs that the Green New Deal framework imagines can make that happen.
The same is true of wind turbine technology, which has benefited from steady improvements in blade design, tower height, and computer control. Wind farms today supply electricity for about half the price they did a decade ago, and offshore wind is another promising area for expansion. Denmark, for example, has lots of shallow offshore regions that are ideal for wind turbines and produces nearly half of its electricity via wind. But not every country has Denmarks advantages. Its difficult to anchor wind towers in water more than 200 feet deep, and creative new ways to build turbines in deeper waters are good targets for R&D spending.
Solar and wind get most of the attention among renewable energy sources, but there are other promising technologies. For example, ground source heat pumps take advantage of the fact that temperatures just a few feet below ground tend to stay the same throughout the year. In summer, they can pump warm air out of the house, and in winter, the underground warmth can heat water. Heat pumps only real drawback is that they cost a lot to install, which makes them an ideal target for both research (to lower costs) and federal subsidies (to incentivize installing them in the meantime).
There are less familiar types of renewable energy, including tidal power and geothermal energy, which are not yet always more cost-effective than fossil fuels. But some of them will probably be instrumental in the future, so we should invest in them all.
Nuclear Power
Nuclear power plants are almost carbon-free and provide steady base load power that doesnt depend on sun or wind. Thats the good news. The bad news is that they produce radioactive waste with lifetimes measured in hundreds of centuries. Theyre also expensive and vulnerable to catastrophic meltdowns.
But they dont have to be. Failsafe technology has been on the drawing board for years and is incorporated into designs known as Gen IV nuclear power. In the last 10 years, the United States has committed $678 million to new nuclear technologies, and boosting this amount could produce commercial reactors virtually immune to meltdowns within a few years.
In China, experimental reactors are being built that use thorium rather than uranium as their nuclear fuel. Thorium is more abundant than uranium, but its biggest advantage is that it produces far lessand less dangerousnuclear waste than uranium reactors. If their research goes well, China hopes to have commercial thorium reactors online within a decade.
Nuclear power may not be a long-term answer to climate change, but its relatively green and the technology is relatively advanced. With additional R&D, it could be made better and safer and could provide a stopgap source of carbon-neutral energy until we have permanent solutions up and running.
Energy Storage
Its not enough to generate electricity cleanly; we also need to store it. Batteriesthe kind that power electric carshave gotten lots of attention, but there are other ways to store power. You can, and we already do, pump water uphill into a reservoir and use it later to power turbines on the way down. You can heat salt into molten form and draw off the heat later to drive steam engines, which turns out to be surprisingly efficient. And theres compressed air, an old technology now being tried by some utilities. During the day, a solar plant can generate power that compresses air, stores it underground, and releases it at night to power turbines.
There are only two feasible storage options for use in cars and trucks right now: hydrogen fuel cells and lithium-ion batteries. One promising research avenue for fuel cells is solar-powered electrolysis of ordinary water. The cost has dropped by half over the past decade but needs to fall considerably more to become competitive.
Battery technology is the target of intense research. Some research is focused on alternatives like nickel-zinc and potassium-ion, and theres seemingly weekly news of advances in solid-state batteries and so-called supercapacitors. All of these are prime targets for worthwhile government investment.
Land Use
Although global warming is primarily the result of CO2 emissions, there are other greenhouse gases. Among them are methane and nitrous oxide, largely produced by farming and ranching. These go under the rubric of land use, which is responsible for about 20 percent of all greenhouse gas emissions. This includes deforestation, methane from cows, and nitrous oxide from fertilizers. But agriculture also presents opportunities to remove carbon from the atmosphere, sometimes by measures as simple as changing the way soil is tilled or treating farmland with compost. These methods are called carbon farming, and in France theres a government initiative called 4 per 1,000, which aims to increase carbon storage in soil by 0.4 percent per year.
Until recently, carbon farming has been a fringe activity, despite the promise it holds not to merely slow the growth of carbon emissions, but to actually remove carbon thats already therefor example, through massive reforestation. Theres every reason to think that a serious commitment to further research, along with government-sponsored incentives for farmers, could make a big contribution to fighting climate change.
Carbon Capture
Heres a disturbing fact: Even if we stopped emitting carbon completely, that wouldnt be enough. Meeting the climate goals of the Paris Agreement is going to be nearly impossible without removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, researchers Jan Christoph Minx and Gregory Nemet warned in the Washington Post in 2018. Given how much damage weve already done and the near certainty that well increase carbon emissions for at least another decade, we need to figure out how to remove greenhouse gases from the atmosphere on a massive scale.
According to the International Energy Agency, governments around the world set aside $28 billion for carbon capture projects over the past decade but spent only $4 billion. Weve given up just when we should be doubling down. The Energy Futures Initiative, a think tank, recommends that the United States commit $10.7 billion over the next 10 years for carbon capture R&D.
The infrastructure to store carbon needs to be built at roughly the same scale as the infrastructure that produced it, which means that pumping even a fraction of it underground would require construction on a scale similar to todays entire oil extraction industry. That doesnt seem politically feasible, but even storing a fraction of our carbon emissions could be a big part of the solution.
Carbon dioxide can also be removed from the air, combined with hydrogen, and turned into fuel. The fuel itself emits carbon when its burned, but the entire cycle is net carbon neutral. A team of scientists at Harvard recently announced a cost breakthrough, estimating they could do this for less than $100 per ton of carbon removed from the atmosphereor $1 for every gallon of gasoline we burn.
There are also natural methods of carbon capture. A research team in Zurich, after studying satellite images of the entire globe, estimated that 2 billion acres of land not in use for agriculture are suitable for reforesting; the researchers say this would remove two-thirds of all the carbon dioxide that humans have added to the atmosphere since the dawn of the Industrial Revolution. Other teams are investigating gene editing that would increase the amount of carbon that plants can store in their root systems.
All of these solutions, from industrial facilities to planting more trees, need intensive research to be made viable. Theyre ideal targets for an R&D program dedicated not to dribs and drabs that can disappear with the next Congress, but one that fights climate change like a war.
Clean energy R&D needs to be huge and wide-ranging. We cant afford to close off any possibilities.
Concrete
The world uses about 20 billion tons of concrete every year. Unfortunately, concretes main constituent is cement, and the chemical process for creating cement is CaCO3 + heat CaO + CO2. In other words, the concrete industry is basically a huge global machine that digs up limestone, heats it, and turns it into quicklime and CO2. The industry is responsible for about 8 percent of global carbon emissions.
Cement production can be made more efficient, but that helps only at the margins. What we really need is a replacement as cheap and durable as the real thing. Companies are already working on this, including some that approach net-zero carbon by pumping CO2 back into the concrete during the curing process.
Concrete is one of the worlds most popular building materials, and engineers are naturally reluctant to experiment with unproven replacements. Nobody wants to find out, a decade after a skyscraper has gone up, that a new type of concrete doesnt age well. That makes concrete a long-lead item in the war on climate change, which means large-scale research needs to be funded now.
Adaptation
This is not a widely loved subject, because it means were openly admitting that maybe well fail to stop climate change. And no one wants to say that. But the truth is weve already failed to stop it, and were vanishingly unlikely to keep global warming under 2 degrees Celsius. Even 3 degrees is looking all too likely. Either scenario would require some serious adaptation. Yet the implementation of adaptation strategies is in its infancy.
Part of the problem is that adaptation means something different in every place in the world. In Bangladesh and Battery Park, the problem is storm surges, while in the Sahel the problem is drought and declining pastureland. California worries about coastal erosion, while Kansas fears crop losses from insects.
Half a dozen big US cities have started work on adaptation plans, including New York and Chicago. In 2019, New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio proposed a $10 billion plan to protect lower Manhattan from rising sea levels. Thats a start, but only barely. With storms likely to become bigger and more frequent, we need to invent better forecasting systems. Restoring mangrove forests can protect some coastlines and restoring oyster beds can help others. Far more preventive work like this needs to be done, and far more funding needs to be committed to it.
Biofuels
The best-known biofuel is ethanol made from cornwhich is no more carbon-friendly than gasoline once you factor in its entire production cycle. But that doesnt mean biofuels are a dead end. The real holy grails in this area are algae-based and have received much less investment than ethanol. One of their many technological challenges is the lack of a scalable method for drying out algae so that energy-storing lipids can be separated out. But the drying process could be replaced by pyrolysis, which involves heating plants to a high enough temperature that they effectively melt into fuel. And pyrolysis isnt just viable for algae. The pyrolysis of wood chips could theoretically be carbon-negative on a long enough timeline because it would require planting more trees, and the carbon-heavy charcoal byproducts could be returned to the soil.
Even with these innovations, ethanol is a low-density fuel and will be less important as more cars and trucks go electric. But other things will require high-density liquid fuel. Air travel, for example, cant yet be electric-powered like cars, and by 2050 commercial aircraft will emit about a gigaton of carbon every year, consuming a quarter of the carbon budget that would keep us under 1.5 degrees Celsius warmingif flights continue to use petroleum-based jet fuel. We need alternatives.
Less Meat, Mostly Plants
Production of meatespecially beefis responsible for at least 15 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions. If we replaced three-quarters of animal-based food with grains and vegetables, we would effectively reduce annual emissions in 2050 by more than two gigatonsthe equivalent of one-sixth of current emissions.
Sure, people should cut back on meat, and those corn and soy fields could be turned into forests or crops for human consumption. But historically, as poor countries get richer, one of the first things that happens is an increase in meat consumption. This makes recent announcements about plant-based burgers and oat milk more than just a gimmick. And if those products get good enoughand production gets efficient enoughthey too could go a long way toward reducing carbon emissions associated with a meat-rich diet.
Fusion Energy
Fusion reactors use hydrogen as fuel and produce negligible radioactive waste. It sounds perfect, but to make a fusion reactor work, hydrogen has to be heated to temperatures hotter than the suns core and held in place for at least several seconds. No one has come close to doing this on an adequate scale.
But fusion power is too promising to give up on. MITs SPARC (Smallest Possible Affordable Robust Compact) project, for example, could begin producing power on a small scale by 2025. Thats also the year that ITER (International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor), a massive fusion project, is scheduled to reach first plasma, the beginning of serious testing on a larger scale.
A surprising number of startups have begun work on innovative ideas for creating fusion reactors on a smaller and less expensive scale than megaprojects like iter. They could be good candidates for federal investment.
Geoengineering
This is everybodys least favorite idea: massive engineering projects to cool down the Earth if it turns out we cant reduce carbon emissions. Some geoengineering proposals sound crazy, like putting a fleet of mirrors in orbit to reflect sunlight back into space. Others are more practical, like mimicking the effect of volcanoes by spraying aerosols of sulfate particles into the stratosphere. This is both feasible and cheap: A program that costs $2$5 billion per year could reduce global temperatures by a quarter of a degree Celsius.
But while sulfates can lower global temperatures, they dont do anything to actually remove CO2 from the atmosphere. If spraying ever stops, temperatures would jump. Another proposal, called Project Vesta, seeks to mimic a natural method of removing carbon that normally works over millions of years. It involves grinding up a mineral called olivine and spreading it on tropical beaches, where it combines with CO2, washes out to sea, and falls to the ocean floor. This has the benefit of removing carbon from the atmosphere, but it costs a lot more than sulfate spraying.
Other possibilities include seeding the seas with iron to increase the population of carbon-absorbing phytoplankton, a marine algae, and thinning the cover of high-altitude cirrus clouds, which trap heat.
All of these proposals have drawbacks, including a political one: Who decides? The United States could easily spray megatons of sulfate aerosols into the atmosphere. So could China or Brazil or the European Union. But the result is global and might impact some areas more than others.
Geoengineering is inherently dangerous because theres no way to know beforehand what the side effects might beand they could be enormous. And once it starts, theres no going back. If anything, the very danger of geoengineering is the best argument for continuing to study it. No one can say for sure that well never have to resort to it, and if we do, we ought to be prepared.
The history of science is littered with accidental discoveries. Many of us are alive today only because Alexander Fleming accidentally left open a petri dish containing a staph bacteria and discovered penicillin. This is why an R&D program for clean energy needs to be huge and wide-ranging. We simply dont know which discoveries are most likely to pan out, and climate change is dire enough that we cant afford to close off any possibilities.
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Japan’s Largest Coral Reef Is Dying
Japans largest coral reef is under severe stress, according to a recent survey conducted by the countrys Environment Ministry. More than 90 percent of the corals in Sekiseishoko reef, located in the Ryukyu Islands near Okinawa, were discovered to be at least partially bleached when surveyed in November and December. About 70 percent of the reefs living coralswere found to have died.
Rising ocean temperatures have been pinpointed as the main culprit for the reefs decline: Water temperatures in the region were 1 to 2 degrees Celsius higher than normal last summer.
Experts say the current bleaching event is the worst the reef has experienced in recorded history.
Kyodo News/Getty Images
Sekiseishoko, Japan’s largest coral reef, is experiencing the worst bleaching event on record, experts say. Almost all of the reef’s corals are at least partially bleached.
James Reimer, a professor and coral specialist at the University of the Ryukyus in Okinawa, said the survey findings were very alarming.
The reef experienced harsh bleaching in 1998 (around 35 percent death), and then some more in 2007 (about 30 percent), but was generally seen as recovering to some degree from these events, he told The Huffington Post via email on Tuesday. This recent round looks to be approximately twice as bad, and a lot of the recovery from 1998 and 2007 has been lost.This bleaching is certainly much worse than past events, which themselves are not seen as natural but as a product of climate change.
Kyodo News/Getty Images
This photo shows bleached corals in Sekiseishoko reef on Sept. 12, 2016. A survey conducted that month by the Environment Ministry found that more than 56 percent of the reef’s corals had died. That number has since increased to about 70 percent.
Bleaching is a sign of coral stress and can be triggered by increases in water temperature. While bleached corals are not dead and can recover if stressors are removed,they are more susceptible to mortality and injury.
When asked whether the Sekiseishoko reef could recover from this current bleaching event, Reimer said it could bounce back if given time.
If the region can get lucky and avoid bleaching for 10 years or so you would see some good recovery, he said. Or at least a return to higher percentages of coral cover.
However, given the current rate of global warming, Reimer warned thatthe outlook for the reef is not great.
Mark Eakin, coordinator of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administrations Coral Reef Watch, concurred.
To grow back, even the fastest growing corals will take one to two decades, he said in an email this week. The larger, old massive corals take hundreds of years to grow back. In contrast, we have now had three severe bleaching events causing mass coral mortality in the Ryukyu Islands since 1998. With the oceans warming as rapidly as they are, I doubt there will be time for them to recover before the next bleaching event.
Kyodo News/Getty Images
This Sept. 12, 2016 photo, captured from a drone, shows Japan’s largest coral reef, Sekiseishoko, between Ishigaki and Iriomote islands in the southernmost prefecture of Okinawa.
The world is currently in the midst of a prolonged mass bleaching event thats impacted every major reef region in the world, including Australias Great Barrier Reef which experienced its worst bleaching on record last year. With its beginnings stretching back to 2014, its the longest andmost widespread coral bleaching event in recorded history.
Scientists say the bleaching event is anticipated to continue through 2017, posing a severe threat to already-stressed coral reefs.
The 2015-2016 event has shocked many coral reef scientists, with lots of locations being bleached two years in a row, Nick Graham, a marine ecologist from Lancaster University, told Climate Change News in November. If this extends into 2017 for some locations, this really is uncharted territory. We know very little about how the reefs will respond to such repetitive thermal stress.
Kyodo News/Getty Images
Another drone shot of Sekiseishoko, captured on September 12, 2016.
Coral reefs are some of the most diverse and valuable ecosystems on Earth, according to NOAA. Reefs are critical to the wellbeing of other marine life,and they protect miles and miles of coastline from storm surge.
Reefs are also important sources of new medicines for humans.Many drugs are now being developed from coral reef animals and plants as possible cures for cancer, arthritis, human bacterial infections, viruses and other diseases, NOAA said.
Coral reefs additionally provide economic and environmental services to millions of people through industries like fishing and tourism. In the U.S., the commercial value of U.S. fisheries from reefs is reportedly over $100 million.
The Sekiseishoko reef is similarly important to the people of Japan.
This is the largest reef area in Japan, and incredibly important to local fisherman and tourist operators, said Reimer. Damage on this scale will have long-term economic and social repercussions.
______
Dominique Mosbergen is a reporter at The Huffington Post covering climate change, extreme weather and extinction. Send tips or feedback to [email protected] or follow her on Twitter.
Related Coverage
World's Coral Reefs Are Headed For Major Die-Off
Much Of The Great Barrier Reef Has Become A Coral Graveyard
Catastrophe: How Coral Bleaching Is Destroying The Great Barrier Reef
Great Barrier Reef Experiences Its Worst Coral Die-Off
The Great Barrier Reef Is Screwed If Climate Change Continues
This Is What Climate Change Has Done To The Great Barrier Reef
Read more: http://ift.tt/2jVh9us
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Japans largest coral reef is under severe stress, according to a recent survey conducted by the countrys Environment Ministry. More than 90 percent of the corals in Sekiseishoko reef, located in the Ryukyu Islands near Okinawa, were discovered to be at least partially bleached when surveyed in November and December. About 70 percent of the reefs living coralswere found to have died.
Rising ocean temperatures have been pinpointed as the main culprit for the reefs decline: Water temperatures in the region were 1 to 2 degrees Celsius higher than normal last summer.
Experts say the current bleaching event is the worst the reef has experienced in recorded history.
Kyodo News/Getty Images
Sekiseishoko, Japan’s largest coral reef, is experiencing the worst bleaching event on record, experts say. Almost all of the reef’s corals are at least partially bleached.
James Reimer, a professor and coral specialist at the University of the Ryukyus in Okinawa, said the survey findings were very alarming.
The reef experienced harsh bleaching in 1998 (around 35 percent death), and then some more in 2007 (about 30 percent), but was generally seen as recovering to some degree from these events, he told The Huffington Post via email on Tuesday. This recent round looks to be approximately twice as bad, and a lot of the recovery from 1998 and 2007 has been lost.This bleaching is certainly much worse than past events, which themselves are not seen as natural but as a product of climate change.
Kyodo News/Getty Images
This photo shows bleached corals in Sekiseishoko reef on Sept. 12, 2016. A survey conducted that month by the Environment Ministry found that more than 56 percent of the reef’s corals had died. That number has since increased to about 70 percent.
Bleaching is a sign of coral stress and can be triggered by increases in water temperature. While bleached corals are not dead and can recover if stressors are removed,they are more susceptible to mortality and injury.
When asked whether the Sekiseishoko reef could recover from this current bleaching event, Reimer said it could bounce back if given time.
If the region can get lucky and avoid bleaching for 10 years or so you would see some good recovery, he said. Or at least a return to higher percentages of coral cover.
However, given the current rate of global warming, Reimer warned thatthe outlook for the reef is not great.
Mark Eakin, coordinator of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administrations Coral Reef Watch, concurred.
To grow back, even the fastest growing corals will take one to two decades, he said in an email this week. The larger, old massive corals take hundreds of years to grow back. In contrast, we have now had three severe bleaching events causing mass coral mortality in the Ryukyu Islands since 1998. With the oceans warming as rapidly as they are, I doubt there will be time for them to recover before the next bleaching event.
Kyodo News/Getty Images
This Sept. 12, 2016 photo, captured from a drone, shows Japan’s largest coral reef, Sekiseishoko, between Ishigaki and Iriomote islands in the southernmost prefecture of Okinawa.
The world is currently in the midst of a prolonged mass bleaching event thats impacted every major reef region in the world, including Australias Great Barrier Reef which experienced its worst bleaching on record last year. With its beginnings stretching back to 2014, its the longest andmost widespread coral bleaching event in recorded history.
Scientists say the bleaching event is anticipated to continue through 2017, posing a severe threat to already-stressed coral reefs.
The 2015-2016 event has shocked many coral reef scientists, with lots of locations being bleached two years in a row, Nick Graham, a marine ecologist from Lancaster University, told Climate Change News in November. If this extends into 2017 for some locations, this really is uncharted territory. We know very little about how the reefs will respond to such repetitive thermal stress.
Kyodo News/Getty Images
Another drone shot of Sekiseishoko, captured on September 12, 2016.
Coral reefs are some of the most diverse and valuable ecosystems on Earth, according to NOAA. Reefs are critical to the wellbeing of other marine life,and they protect miles and miles of coastline from storm surge.
Reefs are also important sources of new medicines for humans.Many drugs are now being developed from coral reef animals and plants as possible cures for cancer, arthritis, human bacterial infections, viruses and other diseases, NOAA said.
Coral reefs additionally provide economic and environmental services to millions of people through industries like fishing and tourism. In the U.S., the commercial value of U.S. fisheries from reefs is reportedly over $100 million.
The Sekiseishoko reef is similarly important to the people of Japan.
This is the largest reef area in Japan, and incredibly important to local fisherman and tourist operators, said Reimer. Damage on this scale will have long-term economic and social repercussions.
______
Dominique Mosbergen is a reporter at The Huffington Post covering climate change, extreme weather and extinction. Send tips or feedback to [email protected] or follow her on Twitter.
Related Coverage
World's Coral Reefs Are Headed For Major Die-Off
Much Of The Great Barrier Reef Has Become A Coral Graveyard
Catastrophe: How Coral Bleaching Is Destroying The Great Barrier Reef
Great Barrier Reef Experiences Its Worst Coral Die-Off
The Great Barrier Reef Is Screwed If Climate Change Continues
This Is What Climate Change Has Done To The Great Barrier Reef
Read more: http://ift.tt/2jVh9us
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