Climate Change Will Alter The Way We Think About Energy

Although the current 413 ppm CO2 in our atmosphere may have been experienced as recently as the Miocene ten to fifteen million years ago, we have yet to see some of the radical effects of such a CO2 level. Seas were a hundred feet higher, and average surface temperatures were 11 degrees Fahrenheit hotter in the Miocene. 

One explanation may be that nowhere can we find a rate of change (upper 200s ppm to lower 400s ppm of CO2 over a period of a couple hundred years) as rapid as this, as far as we know, in the past three and a half billion years that life has been present on planet Earth.

Because of this blink-of-the-eye rise (geologically speaking), there may be a significant lag time before the Earth starts to once again look like the Miocene.

Because we are so short-lived, we scoff at people that warn us of these future changes. Yet, when these changes come along we think of them as normal because that’s the way it’s been most of our lives. This life span problem is a major disadvantage to our species. It ranks up there with greed and stupidity.

If we do manage to transition to lower CO2 levels and successfully reverse climate change, we should then be ever vigilant of our greenhouse gas outputs and our use, or misuse, of energy.

Read the story from Medium by Glen Hendrix - “Climate Change Will Alter The Way We Think About Energy."

‘Environment is our economy': Tourism wakes up to a reef in peril

Take a journey out to the Great Barrier Reef these days and it's highly likely your tour will include stunningly iridescent corals and a wondrous assortment of fish, turtles and even the odd shark that you came to see.

The location of the Blue Planet II documentary is barely
recognisable after the 2016 mass bleaching event.

But such a trip would offer only part of the picture.

Travel even a couple of kilometres away, as this correspondent did recently, and it's just as likely the visitor will see a reef in ruins: plate corals matted in thick algae, brittle staghorn corals littering the seabed, and only the grazing fish - though still luminescent parrot fish and other species - nibbling at the greenery.

The latter site, on the Opal Reef off Port Douglas, would be distressing for viewers of David Attenborough's Blue Planet II - a location chosen by the BBC as among the best of the best.

Read the story by Peter Hannam from The Age - “‘Environment is our economy': Tourism wakes up to a reef in peril.”

Commentators who don't understand the grid should butt out of the battery debate

The Australian electricity grid’s most recently announced extremity is a gargantuan battery system in South Australia, designed to bolster grid security. The facility has been met mostly with a warm welcome, interspersed with weird, interesting and tense hostility. 

‘Lithium ion batteries are perfectly suited to our millisecond
needs – they’re quick to build and incredibly responsive,
with no moving parts.’ 

Buried in the mix of reactions are clues about how a new phase of grid transition might play out, as we switch from the rapid build out of zero carbon power sources to building and integrating them into a system designed for fossil fuels.

Before we interrogate the misunderstandings of South Australia’s new battery, we have to step back and look at the system as a single, electric organism.

Read Ketan Joshi’s story on The Guardian - “Commentators who don't understand the grid should butt out of the battery debate.”