Could the heat and extreme weather shift climate change denial?

London: Huge, deadly wildfires in Greece and California, forest fires out of control across Sweden, a record-setting heatwave in northern Europe, heatstroke deaths up fourfold in a baking Tokyo … and British academic Dr Rupert Read got a call.

The heatwave grips the UK - will it budge
 the thinking of climate change deniers?

BBC Radio Cambridgeshire wanted the Green House think tank chairman to debate climate change on air with a climate science denier.

He's done it before. This time he got a bit hot under the collar.

"I said NO," Read said, in a Tweet that has since been retweeted tens of thousands of times.

"I told them it was a disgrace that they still give climate deniers airtime at a time like this. I won't be part of such charades any longer.”

Read the story from The Age by Nick Miller - “Could the heat and extreme weather shift climate change denial?”

How to ensure resilience in the grid of the future

Recently it was reported that a political dispute between Serbia and Kosovo is sapping a small amount of energy from the local grid, causing a domino effect across the 25-nation network spanning the continent from Portugal to Poland and Greece to Germany.

Collapsed electricity pylon
after a tornado in Australia.

“The deviation from Europe’s standard 50 Hz frequency has been enough to cause electric clocks that keep time by the power system’s frequency, rather than built-in quartz crystals, to fall behind by about six minutes since mid- January.”

This is a good example for a phenomenon known as the fragility of complex systems: the tendency for multilayered and interconnected systems like electricity grids, transport networks (think gridlock) and the world health system (think pandemics and antibiotic resistance) to become increasingly prone to failure as layers of organisation and connectivity are added.

Read the piece from energypost by Mark Bryne - “How to ensure resilience in the grid of the future.”