It’s possible that I shall make an ass of myself. But in that case one can always get out of it with a little dialectic. I have, of course, so worded my proposition as to be right either way (K.Marx, Letter to F.Engels on the Indian Mutiny)
Monday, October 11, 2021
Nobel Physics Prize winner says Italy research underfunded
Italian scholar and physicist Giorgio Parisi, the winner of the Nobel prize for physics, has decried a lack of funding for research in his home country.
Italian Giorgio Parisi, winner of the 2021 Nobel Physics Prize, slammed Friday the lack of funding for research in Italy, saying it invested one of the lowest amounts in Europe
"Research is underfunded and the situation has worsened over the past 10-15 years," he told a press conference with the foreign press in Rome.
"I was pleased to see that Mario Draghi's government is committed to increasing the research budget, we are at the bottom (of the list of funding amounts)" in the European Union, he said.
Research Minister Cristina Messa promised six billion euros in funding for 60 projects on Thursday, including five billion this year.
According to 2019 data from Eurostat, Italy spent 1.45 percent of its Gross Domestic Product (GDP) on research, while the EU average is 2.19 percent. It lags far behind Germany, which spends 3.17 percent.
"Italy is not a welcoming country for researchers, whether Italian or foreign," said Parisi, who on Tuesday won the prize along with two other scientists, Japanese-American scientist Syukuro Manabe and Klaus Hasselmann of Germany.
"Research is like a vegetable garden, if you think you can water it every fortnight, things will go wrong," he said.
Nobel Prize for physics winner shaped ground-breaking Earth-observing mission
By Tereza Pultarova 1 day ago Professor Hasselmann developed a method for satellite ocean wave measurements.
The European Remote Sensing satellite (ERS-1) was put into orbit on 17 July 1991.
(Image credit: ESA)
This year's Nobel Prize in Physics laureate Klaus Hasselmann helped to shape a ground-breaking Earth-observation mission that paved the way for the modern study of our planet's environment.
The German oceanographer and climate modeler was awarded the coveted prize for his contribution to the physical modeling of Earth's climate that has enabled scientists to quantify the climate's natural variability and better predict climate change. Hasselman won half of the 2021 Nobel Prize for Physics last week, with the other half shared by scientists Syukuro Manabe and Giorgio Parisi for their own research on disorder and fluctuations in physical systems.
Hasselman, now 89 and still active at the Max Planck Institute for Meteorology in Germany, was also a member of an expert group that, in the 1970s, helped the European Space Agency (ESA) create its Earth observation program and build its first mission dedicated to studying Earth from above.
"We send our most sincere congratulations to Prof. Dr Hasselmann for his well-deserved Nobel Prize," ESA Director General Josef Aschbacher, said in a statement.
As a member of the space agency's High-Level Earth Observation Advisory Committee, Hasselman contributed to the development of the European Remote Sensing satellite (ERS-1) and its successor ERS-2.
For this mission, Hasselmann developed a method for measuring ocean waves using synthetic aperture radar (SAR) imaging, ESA said in the statement. SAR instruments send a signal to the ground and then measure how much of it is reflected back. These instruments are increasingly employed by environment-monitoring satellites today and the technique developed by Hasselmann is still in use on current Earth-observing satellites such as the European Copernicus Sentinel-1 radar mission.
"Without a doubt, it is largely thanks to Prof. Hasselmann that we have operational wave monitoring, or 'wave mode' from Sentinel-1 today — a source of essential data for ocean forecasting, keeping maritime traffic safe," Aschbacher said in the statement.
Coincidentally, the ERS-1 mission celebrated its 30th anniversary this year. Launched on July 17, 1991, ERS-1 was, at that time, Europe's most sophisticated spacecraft, the space agency said in the statement.
In addition to the imaging synthetic aperture radar that was used for the wave monitoring, the 5,256-lb. (2,384 kilograms) satellite also carried a radar altimeter (a sensor that sends a radar pulse to the ground and measures the distance based on the time it takes for the signal to return) and a wind scatterometer (which measures how a radar signal is affected by disturbances in Earth's atmosphere). The mission generated nine-years worth of data about Earth's atmosphere, oceans, ice coverage and land conditions before it failed in March 2000, having exceeded its expected life-span by 8 years.
Its successor, ERS-2, was already in orbit at that time, allowing ESA to seamlessly continue to gather data about the changing planet. Launched in 1995, ESR-2 also carried a dedicated sensor for ozone layer monitoring.
Hasselmann received the 2021 Nobel Prize for Physics together with Syukuro Manabe of Princeton University, and Giorgio Parisi of Sapienza University of Rome, Italy.
Syukuro also works in the physical modelling of Earth's climate and climate change prediction. He was the first to demonstrate how increased levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere lead to increased temperatures at the surface of the planet. Parisi's work centers on theoretical understanding of disordered materials and random processes including atom-scale as well as planetary-level developments.
NOBEL PRIZE WINNER IN PHYSICS
The most influential climate science paper of all time
Manabe modelled the links between temperature, altitude and CO2 levels. Credit: Johan Jarnestad / Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences / Manabe & Wetherald (1967), Journal of the Atmospheric Sciences
After the second world war, many of Japan's smartest scientists found jobs in North American laboratories. Syukuro (Suki) Manabe, a 27-year-old physicist, was part of this brain drain. He was working on weather forecasting but left Japan in 1958 to join a new research project by the US Weather Service to develop a numerical model that could be used to study the climate.
Working alongside Joseph Smagorinsky, the Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory's visionary first director, Manabe led a team of computer programmers to add missingphysicsto the lab's weathermodel. Even the best computers in the world at the time were far less powerful than today's mobile phones. So to get the model to work, Manabe needed to make the physics as simple as possible. This meant making a range of coding approximations to quantify how the air exchanged heat and water vapor with the land, ocean and ice.
This climate model development—the first of its kind—was an ambitious 20-year project that ultimately earned Manabe a share of the 2021 Nobel prize in physics. The key paper came mid-way through this period: Manabe and Wetherald (1967).
Manabe is typically modest about intentions behind the work and from reading its title, "Thermal Equilibrium of the Atmosphere with a Given Distribution of Relative Humidity", you might be forgiven for thinking it could be a bit dull. Yet the Nobel committee, myself and the hundreds of colleagues around the world that voted it the most influential climate science paper of all time, would beg to differ.
In trying to simplify the code, Manabe and his colleague Richard Wetherald wanted to know the minimum number of discrete levels to use in his model atmosphere. They also wanted to know which greenhouse gasses it was necessary to include in the model to adequately represent the way temperatures vary with altitude, as these gasses absorb heat emitted from the Earth's surface, but at different levels. Their three-dimensional climate model was too computer-intensive to run these model tests, so they had to build a simpler one-dimensional model. They wanted to simulate how radiation and clouds interact to redistribute heat and water vapor through the atmosphere.
The bulk of the paper concerns itself with building the simple model and doing these tests. But they also do two other experiments in the paper to quantify how greenhouse gas might alter climate. And this is where the breakthrough occurred: they found they had built the perfect model to accurately estimate how human activities could alter the Earth's surface temperature.
Their first such climate-change experiment wasn't to look at the role of carbon dioxide, but was to look at the effects of water vapor injected high into the stratosphere from a potential fleet of supersonic jets, as this and a possible nuclear winter were the immediate concerns of the time. However, their Table 5 goes down in history as the first robust estimate of how much the world would warm if carbon dioxide concentrations doubled. Manabe and Wetherald estimated 2.36℃ of warming, not far off today's best estimate of 3℃.
Earlier attempts to estimate the warming from carbon dioxide increases had floundered, as scientists struggled to work out how water vapor, the most important greenhouse gas in the atmosphere, would respond as the Earth warmed. Manabe and Wetherald's simple model could accurately redistribute water vapor in a way that real deep clouds do, with water vapor broadly increasing in concentration up to a certain level of humidity. This increase was found to amplify the warming from carbon dioxide by around 75%. This water vapor feedback estimate has also stood the test of time.
Manabe, working with various colleagues, went on to write many more seminal climate modeling papers. He set the foundation for today's global climate modeling efforts. The physics was beguilingly simple so his models could run on these early computers. Yet, by being simple, the results could be understood and tested. His application of these simple models to the pressing problems of today was insightful.
After graduating with a degree in physics over 30 years ago, I chose a career in atmospheric science over particle physics. I always worried about how my applied physics was viewed by mainstream physics colleagues. With a Nobel prize in physics under our discipline's belt, it gives me and climate modeling colleagues the credibility and recognition we have yearned for: climate science is real science.
More information:Syukuro Manabe et al, Thermal Equilibrium of the Atmosphere with a Given Distribution of Relative Humidity,Journal of the Atmospheric Sciences(1967).doi.org/10.1175/1520-0469(1967)024<0241:TEOTAW>2.0.CO;2
Former NOAA scientist Suki Manabe shares Nobel Prize in Physics for pioneering climate prediction
October 5th, 2021
Today, Syukuro “Suki” Manabe, 90, was named among the winners of the 2021 Nobel Prize in Physics for his groundbreaking climate science achievements. His pioneering research in the 1960s laid the foundation for how scientists perceive the Earth’s climate and how human actions continue to influence it. Starting in the 1960s, Manabe, a senior meteorologist in Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences (AOS) based at Princeton University, developed the first three-dimensionalmodels of the atmosphere while working at NOAA‘s Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory (GFDL) along with founding director Joseph Smagorinsky.
Their research went on to predict what would happen to the globe as carbon dioxide built up in the atmosphere.
Manabe shares the Nobel Prize in physics this year with fellow climate scientist Klaus Hasselmann of the Max Planck Institute for Meteorology, Hamburg, Germany; and Giorgio Parisi of the Sapienza University of Rome, Italy. The decades of combined work by Manabe and Hasselmann presented the first physical modeling of Earth’s climate, which reliably predicted global warming. Parisi’s work revealed “the interplay of disorder and fluctuations in physical systems from atomic to planetary scales,” according to the Nobel Prize press release.
Manabe remains active today as a NOAA affiliate at Princeton University’s Forrestal campus.
“The timing of this award couldn’t be better as world leaders head to the 26th UN Climate Change Conference meeting, armed with the most recent update of climate science to underpin their commitments,” said Ko Barrett, NOAA Research Senior Advisor for Climate. “Society owes a debt of gratitude to Professors Manabe and Hasselmann for their fundamental discoveries about the climate system that have spurred 50 years of research and understanding about this existential threat. And at NOAA, we are forever grateful for all that Professor Manabe contributed to climate science at NOAA and helped mentor the new generation of climate scientists. ”
According to the Nobel committee, scientists had shown for decades how carbon dioxide traps heat, but Manabe’s work put specifics and prediction into that general knowledge. It allowed scientists to eventually show how climate change will worsen and how fast depending on how much carbon pollution is released.
GFDL Director V. “Ram” Ramaswamy said much of Manabe’s historic work took place while associated with the NOAA lab at Princeton. In a combined statement with Stephan Fueglistaler, director of Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences (AOS) and NOAA’s Cooperative Institute for Modeling the Earth System (CIMES), the two celebrated Manabe’s achievements.
“We congratulate and applaud Suki for being awarded the extremely high honor of the 2021 Nobel Prize in Physics,” according to their statement. “Suki is a remarkable pioneer in the development and application of computational models to understand climate and climate change. His research has been central to explaining the changes in climate due to increases in greenhouse gases. His modeling and science have enabled the construct of the Paris Agreement on climate, with his numerical models proving remarkably prescient in the prediction of the patterns of climate change.”
In a Nobel Prize press release, the award committee praised how Manabe demonstrated to the world how increased levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere lead to increased temperatures at the surface of the Earth.
“In the 1960s, he led the development of physical models of the Earth’s climate and was the first person to explore the interaction between radiation balance and the vertical transport of air masses. His work laid the foundation for the development of current climate models,” the release states.
Born in 1931, Manabe received a doctorate from the University of Tokyo in 1958 and went to the United States to work at the General Circulation Research Section of the U.S. Weather Bureau, now GFDL, continuing until 1997. He worked until 2001 at the Frontier Research System for Global Change in Japan serving as director of the Global Warming Research Division. In 2002, he returned to the United States as a visiting research collaborator in the collaborative GFDL – Princeton AOS program.
Suki Manabe
Highlights of Manabe’s Career at GFDL 1958-1963: Research Meteorologist, General Circulation Research Section, U.S. Weather Bureau 1963-1997: Senior Research Meteorologist, Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory, NOAA 1968-1997: Lecturer with Rank of Professor, Program in Atmospheric & Oceanic Sciences, Princeton University 1967: Meisinger Award, American Meteorological Society 1967: Fellow, American Geophysical Union 1987: Second Half Century Award, American Meteorological Society 1990: Member, U.S. National Academy of Sciences 1992: Rossby Medal, American Meteorological Society 1993: Revelle Medal, American Geophysical Union 1992: First recipient of Blue Planet Prize, Asahi Glass Foundation 1997: Honorary Member, American Meteorological Society 1997: Fellow, American Association for the Advancement of Science 1997: Volvo Environment Prize, Volvo Environment Prize Foundation 1997: Minister’s Award, Japan Ministry of Environment
A new study has shown for the first time how Australia's rich geological history is reflected deep below the Earth's surface
Author of the study, Dr. Caroline Eakin from The Australian National University (ANU), said the Australian land mass is made up of different building blocks that fused together over 1.3 billion years ago.
"Australia is an old, stable continent," Dr. Eakin said.
"Australia's different building blocks are reflected on the Earth's surface, but it's been unclear to what depth these geological differences would be reflected below the Earth's crust."
Dr. Eakin used observations of scattered surface waves—known as Quasi-Love waves—created by distant earthquakes to study Australia's geological makeup.
"These Quasi-Love waves show boundaries deep within and surrounding the Australian continent that correspond to the same tectonic boundaries seen at the surface," Dr. Eakin said.
"This suggests these kinds of geological features are preserved for billions of years."
According to Dr. Eakin this new information about what's happening 100–200 kilometers below the Earth's surface indicates the deeper part of our continent is just as geologically diverse as the crust.
It is the most detailed analysis of this kind of data in Australia to date, taking into account over 2000 earthquake recordings made at seismometers across the Australian continent.
The study has been published in Communications Earth & Environment.
More information:Caroline M. Eakin, Quasi-Love wave scattering reveals tectonic history of Australia and its margins reflected by mantle anisotropy,Communications Earth & Environment(2021).DOI: 10.1038/s43247-021-00276-7
Australian Billionaire Forrest Plans Green Energy Factory to Rival China
Dan Murtaugh, Bloomberg News
Andrew Forrest, chairman of Fortescue Metals Group Ltd., reacts during a panel session on day two of the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum (SPIEF) in St. Petersburg, Russia, on Thursday, June 3, 2021. President Vladimir Putin will host Russia’s flagship investor showcase as he seeks to demonstrate its stuttering economy is back to business as usual despite continuing risks from Covid-19 and new waves of western sanctions. , Bloomberg
(Bloomberg) -- Billionaire mining magnate Andrew Forrest is planning a massive factory to build equipment to produce green hydrogen in a key Australian coal hub.
Fortescue Metals Group Ltd.’s energy unit will build a plant with initial capacity to make two gigawatts of electrolyzers a year in Gladstone in Queensland, home to one of the world’s largest coal-export terminals. Construction will start in February with manufacturing targeted to begin in early 2023, the company said in a Sunday statement.
The initial capacity would make the plant among the largest in the world and vault Australia into early competition with China as a leading producer of the equipment. When paired with renewable energy, electrolyzers can make hydrogen that can be stored and transported and eventually converted into carbon-free energy for power or transportation.
“This initiative is a critical step in Fortescue’s transition from a highly successful pure play iron ore producer, to an even more successful green renewables and resources powerhouse,” Forrest said.
Investment by Fortescue Future Industries, initially $83 million and potentially rising to $650 million, is part of a boom for the equipment, which runs an electric current through water to separate it into hydrogen and oxygen. About 16 gigawatts of manufacturing capacity could come online by 2024, according to BloombergNEF, likely leaving the market over-saturated.
Chinese solar manufacturers have been leading that surge, with Longi Green Energy Technology Co. and Sungrow Power Supply Co. expected to commission a combined 2.5 gigawatts of manufacturing capacity by the end of 2022, BNEF said in a July report.
Fortescue will also carry out a study with fertilizer supplier Incitec Pivot Ltd. on the feasibility of converting an ammonia production facility in Brisbane from natural gas to green hydrogen, the company said in a separate Monday statement.
Fortescue Future Industries founder Dr Andrew Forrest and Queensland Premier Annastacia Palaszczuk announcing the project in Gladstone.
(ABC News: Katrina Beavan)
Fortescue Future Industries (FFI) will build the world's largest green energy hydrogen manufacturing facility in Central Queensland, mining billionaire and company founder Andrew "Twiggy" Forrest says.
Key points:
Fortescue Future Industries' new facility is expected to double the world's green hydrogen capacity
The $1 billion-plus investment is expected bring thousands of jobs into the future When completed, its green hydrogen manufacturing facility will be the biggest of its kind in the world
The first step in the project — a $115 million manufacturing facility set to be built in Aldoga, west of Gladstone — is expected to double the world's green hydrogen production capacity and bring thousands of jobs to Queensland’s energy industry for years to come.
The plant will be manufacturing green energy infrastructure and equipment — such as electrolysers, cabling and wind turbines — to create green hydrogen that will be exported across the world.
Mr Forrest said the announcement marked the first stage of a "billion-plus dollar", six-step operation.
The first stage of the operation, which is expected to be completed early next year, is set to create 120 construction jobs and 53 operational jobs.
Mr Forrest described the proposed facility as a "breakthrough" for Australia's green energy market that signalled the start of an industrial revolution.
"We will not allow the world to keep on cooking — we will not allow our children to inherit a much-less stable environment."This is the future," Mr Forrest said from the Port of Gladstone.
"I'm convinced we have thousands of times more energy available than we'll ever need
.
"The world absolutely can — and, therefore, must — move on from a polluting future."
Mr Forrest said the facility would double the world's green hydrogen production capacity, with the first stage expected to produce 2 gigawatts of hydrogen electrolysers each year.
Electrolysers split hydrogen from water, producing emission-free energy.
Mr Forrest said he had spent the past 15 months travelling to 62 countries across the globe to determine the best location to build the facility.
"Queensland has the beautiful combination of wind and solar and you have a hard-working, educated people [and] a great government steering into a green hydrogen future," he said.
Mr Forrest said he expected the first electrolysers to be produced and ready to be exported by 2023.
Electrolysers split hydrogen from water, producing emission-free energy.(ABC News)
Renewable 'energy superpower'
Premier Annastacia Palaszczuk said the announcement secured Queensland as part of the "green renewably hydrogen energy revolution".
"Hydrogen is part of Queensland's future and [this] sets Queensland up to be an energy powerhouse in green renewable energy," she said.
Ms Palaszczuk said the announcement was as significant for the state's future as winning the right to host the 2032 Olympic Games.
"Our close proximity to Asia, our great trading relationships but, in terms of manufacturing, this will mean there will be ongoing jobs … into the thousands into the future," she said.
The Premier said 300 jobs would be created in regional Queensland over the lifespan of the facility.
"Now we are moving to the next level. The next 11 years leading up to the Olympics will transform our state," Ms Palaszczuk said.
An artist's impression of FFI's green energy hydrogen manufacturing facility in Gladstone in Central Queensland.(Supplied)
Queensland Treasurer Cameron Dick said the announcement heralded "a sunrise on a new industry for Queensland".
Mr Dick said the facility was expected to double the world's green hydrogen capacity, with the first stage of the operation expected to generate 2 gigawatts.
"We will almost triple it right here in this state … we can be that energy superpower for the world," Mr Dick said.
He said the facility would mean Traditional Owners in the Gladstone region could be offered secure work in the industry, while training would be set up in local high schools.
He said his company had committed to going carbon neutral by 2030.
The announcement comes as the federal government remains yet to set a target of net-zero emissions by 2050.
Australia has faced increasing international pressure to agree to the 2050 goal after the US and UK sought assurances of a sufficient reduction in emissions.
Map showing FFI's master plan.(Supplied) Posted 9 Oct 2021,
‘Good seas, good grids and good wind’: Australia’s tentative first steps towards an offshore wind industry
Australia seems made for industrial-scale wind energy, but a federal government move to finally make it legal has left some disappointed
A wind farm off the coast of Britain. Australian supporters of offshore wind energy see a federal government bill as a crucial first step, but some have criticised the ‘legislate first, amend later’ approach.
The way Ron Ipsen looks at it, the Latrobe Valley is the beating heart of Victoria.
From here, a tangle of transmission lines snake their way 145km west to Melbourne and beyond, branching out like a vascular system across the landscape.
Though Ipsen is long since retired, the 64-year-old third-generation power station worker still lives across the lake from the Yallourn “W” power plant, which he spent the best years of his working life keeping alive.
Though he respects the technical ingenuity and misses the work, Ipsen – a veteran of the fight against the state government over the Hazelwood mine fire – says the good life coal once offered is gone, and there is a new future to be won.
“The product we have always produced is energy. Whether it’s selling coal or across a cable to Singapore,” Ipsen says. “We’re not changing what we’re selling, we’re just changing the way we transmit it and the jobs associated with that.”
Among the long list of photovoltaic solar and onshore windfarm projects planned for the region, the most compelling is the proposed offshore windfarm, which Ipsen says offers “massive” potential for a whole new industry.
Since 2019 the International Energy Agency has singled out offshore wind as one of the big three new sources of power generation, along with PV solar farms and onshore wind.
Globally, 200GW of new capacity is planned to come online by 2030. Among the world leaders are the US and China – China alone accounted for half the installed capacity in 2020.
This is just a fraction of what Australia could produce. With 60,000km of coastline and some of the best resources in the world – wind speeds in the Bass Strait reach 12 metres a second – Australia seems made for industrial-scale wind projects. ‘Economic benefits for a generation’
One analysis by the Blue Economy Cooperative Research Centre, published in July, found Australia had the potential to generate 2,000GW from offshore wind in areas less than 100km from existing substations.
Jeff Colgan, a political scientist and director of the Climate Solutions Lab at the Watson Institute for Public and International Affairs at Brown University, says Australia has much to gain.
“Offshore wind is set to be big business globally as the political fights over locating wind farms on land intensify,” Colgan says. “If Australia positions itself well on offshore wind now, it could reap economic benefits for its workforce for at least a generation.”
But while oil production hubs such as Aberdeen in Scotland have leveraged offshore wind to reinvent themselves as a renewable energy centres, Australia has so far been slow to move. Advertisement
When the Australian Energy Market Operator (AEMO) released its 2020 integrated system plan, a roadmap for planning the power grid that is updated every two years, offshore wind didn’t rate a mention.
However, in the 18 months since that report, 10 new projects have been announced with four – two in New South Wales, one in Victoria and another on the north-west coast of Tasmania – being factored in to AEMO’s forward planning.
The total capacity of these 10 projects offers more than 25GW of energy.
The earliest and most developed is the Star of the South, a proposed 2.2GW offshore wind farm off the coast of Victoria in the Bass Strait.
So far 200 wind turbines have been planned for a 496sq km area, with the energy generated transmitted onshore by cable to a substation. The $10bn project will be one of the largest offshore wind farms in the world, capable of meeting nearly 20% of Victoria’s current energy demand, with the potential to add more turbines in the future.
The company’s chief executive, Casper Frost Thorhauge – who started his working life as an engineer in a thermal coal plant – says Australia is hugely attractive for offshore wind development.
“Most [existing power plants in Australia] are closing in on the end of their technical life, which creates the opportunity for new power generation to be made,” Thorhauge says. “And then the fundamentals are there: good seas, good grids and good wind.”
With several other projects now in various stages of planning, the business case for setting up local manufacturing in the supply chain is stronger.
“Being one project, it has always been hard for us to attract the global supply chain and for them to set up here in Australia,” he says. “Having multiple projects proposed, it becomes an industry.” ‘Incomprehensibly late first step’
Tom Quinn, the head of policy for Beyond Zero Emissions, says a lucky quirk of fate and geography means offshore wind can deliver more than zero-emissions power generation.
“Our industrial regions are right next door to some of the richest wind regions in the world,” Quinn says. “To do the big capital investments required to overhaul our existing industry like steel furnaces and the like, it’s much easier if you have that supply of power.” Advertisement
As demand grows over the next decade for products such as green steel, hydrogen, aluminium and a host of other minerals needed to build cars, batteries and other components, he says there is “big money” to be made – and a lot of work to be done.
A wind farm off the coast of Blackpool, Britain. Australian supporters say there is ‘big money’ to be made from offshore wind – and a lot of work to be done. Photograph: Phil Noble/Reuters
The national assistant secretary of the Electrical Trades Union, Michael Wright, says coal, oil and gas workers already have the skills needed to run these operations.
“The fact that these projects are so close to the areas that are going to take it in the teeth from this transition means there is a really good opportunity for workers to transition into good jobs,” Wright says.
“You don’t get that with solar farms. They’re short-term builds. There’s an old joke: it just takes two security guards and an Alsatian to run them.”
Getting people on board, however, has proved tricky. Resistance within some union branches to jobs in renewable energy stems largely from bitter experience. In some cases promised jobs never appeared, and those that did came with poor pay and conditions.
The hope is that things will be different by partnering offshore wind with green manufacturing – though until recently no one has been able to take the initial steps as such projects have been illegal.
In early September the federal government sought to resolve this by introducing the Offshore Electricity Infrastructure Bill that would make licences available for feasibility studies and commercial development.
Those looking for a clear set of guide-rails for a potentially lucrative new industry were disappointed. Despite years of lobbying, very little in the bill is binding, with the word “may” appearing throughout the text 406 times to describe ministerial obligations or procedural requirements. Green giants: the massive projects that could make Australia a clean energy superpower
In its current form the bill offers no clear guidance about environmental regulations, requirements for negotiations with native title holders, a clear safety regime for workers, or marine spatial planning requirements.
Dr Tina Soliman Hunter, a professor of energy and resources law at Macquarie University law school, says she has concerns about this “legislate first, amend later” approach.
“The bill is extremely weak, and relies on regulations that do not exist and may never be written, and is essentially placing an each-way bet on a two-horse race [between fossil fuels and offshore wind],” Hunter says.
As the bill will need to be updated after it passes, Hunter says the rules will have to be written on the fly, creating uncertainty for investors as things change, or leaving the government open to influence.
But those who have been working to get the green light for the industry – environmental groups, NGOs, unions, industry figures and think tanks – say they support the bill as a critical first step.
“It is an incomprehensibly late first step for what is a really important industry,” Wright says. “There is no expectation this is the final version of the legislation, but if the industry doesn’t get this, there’s no point to continue to invest.
“Why would you bother to start if it’s not legal?”
ITS A FLASHBACK TO THE EIGHTIES
WITH THE ULTIMATE POSTMODERN
PUNK ROCK OPERA SINGER; NINA HAGEN
AND HER FABULOUS BAND LIVE IN RIO
Hot Air by Peter Stott review – the battle against climate change denial
Atmospheric pressure … Jurong Island, Singapore.
Photograph: Terence Chiew/National Geographic Your Shot A personal account of one climate scientist’s struggle to promote facts in the face of contrarian prejudice
Hot Air, by the leading climate scientist Peter Stott, offers an explanation. On the one hand it details the four-decade journey taken by him and his peers, especially in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), to determine whether the world is genuinely heating at a dangerous rate, and if human activities are the primary cause. (It is, and they are.) On the other hand, it exposes the sustained efforts of a coalition of business lobbies, politicians, maverick scientists and contrarian attention-seekers to discredit and undermine that enterprise – efforts that continue even now, as the world literally burns.
We are approaching a point where those denialist efforts are more than cynical, irresponsible and self-interested: they are starting to look like crimes against humanity. But they alone do not explain why there has been such a lack of effective action against climate change. A few loudmouthed pundits and wrongheaded scientists do not wield such power. Their actions, and the lobbying of multinationals, would count for far less if they were not so eagerly embraced by politicians who, for short-term electoral gain, have shied away from taking difficult decisions. It remains unclear whether they will behave any differently at the Cop26 meeting in Glasgow this November, which some regard as pretty much our last hope of averting disaster.
The biggest value of Stott’s account is in giving the lie to the denialists’ accusation that climate scientists are (for reasons they never make clear) conjuring alarmist narratives from error-prone computer models and shoddy data. In contrast, he shows – sometimes in a little too much detail – how slowly and carefully the scientists have edged towards the current consensus since the 1980s, comparing temperature records from many sources, testing their models’ ability to reproduce past climate patterns, exploring their sensitivity to different assumptions, and looking for the distinctive “fingerprints” in climate data that can distinguish human-made from natural effects.
One of Stott’s key papers, published in Nature in 1999, reported such a telltale signature. As an editor of that journal since the late 1980s, I have witnessed the rigour with which such studies are conducted and reported. I have seen how the scientists bend over backwards to avoid leaping to conclusions, how they refuse to let their worst fears compromise their scientific caution. It wasn’t until 1995 that the IPCC was ready to declare that “The balance of evidence suggests a discernible human influence on global climate.” Its latest wording, though, leaves no doubt: “It is unequivocal that human influence has warmed the atmosphere, ocean and land.”
Some environmentalists argue that the scientists were too cautious and sounded the alarm too late. But Stott’s descriptions of the IPCC’s debates – hours spent wrangling over words like “substantial”, “likely” and “unequivocal” as delegates from nations such as Saudi Arabia with a vested interest in the status quo sought to dilute the message – show what a difficult task they faced. And it’s true, however, that every expression of uncertainty would be exploited relentlessly by merchants of doubt with no such qualms about rigour or honesty.
Railway tracks destroyed by flooding at Rech near Dernau, Germany,
August 2021. Photograph: Ina Fassbender/AFP/Getty Images
Indeed, those climate-change deniers have offered flimsy, ad hoc arguments accompanied by attacks on the integrity of their opponents. In one of the most depressing chapters, Stott recounts his experiences as a British envoy to the Russian Academy of Sciences in July 2004, where he and other experts, including the UK’s then chief scientific adviser David King, were pitched against a motley crew of climate sceptics that included wayward meteorologist (and now ardent anti-vaxxer) Piers Corbyn, who presented “a wild-eyed sales pitch for his outlandish … solar-based weather forecasting technique”.
It is, however, not Putin but his buddy the former US president Donald Trump, until January the most powerful climate-science denier in the world, whom Stott has in sights when he warns that: “For the safety of humanity on Earth, we can’t afford to have any more powerful leaders who promote the false belief of climate change denial.” Mercifully, Trump’s decision to withdraw from the 2015 Paris Aagreement on climate change has been reversed by Joe Biden, but only a fool would consider that battle over.
This is very much a personal account of one climate scientist’s journey, with little analysis or synthesis. Climate-change deniers appear merely as a succession of obstacles to the truth, not as a phenomenon that needs to be understood. It is not hard to fathom the motives of the oil companies, nor those of the conservative thinktanks they have funded, such as the George C Marshall Institute or the Koch Foundation. But in the UK such denialism is kept in the public eye by a small band of professional contrarians including James Delingpole, Sherelle Jacobs and Peter Hitchens via outlets such as the Telegraph, Spectator and Mail on Sunday – the same people and media that have argued against life-saving measures to prevent the spread of Covid-19. The Venn-diagram overlap on these two unrelated issues is so complete that we’re clearly looking at a psychological issue – a phobia, perhaps, of anything deemed to constrain personal liberty. Perhaps some “sceptics” are genuinely in denial, in the psychoanalytic sense of refusing to accept or confront aspects of reality so as to avoid potential feelings of discomfort. The pandemic really is scary, and climate change even more so.
A wildfire approaches Kochyli beach near Limni, on Evia, Greece,
in August. Photograph: Thodoris Nikolaou/AP
More puzzling are the maverick scientists who throw their lot in with the denialist cause. Here again, though, there is a pattern of contrarianism. Before they became key climate-deniers, the environmental scientists Fred Singer and Patrick Michaels argued that ozone depletion had little or nothing to do with human activities, either. That case, too, was “scientific hokum”, Stott says. Yet denialism pays: Singer and Michaels have been generously supported by fossil-fuel companies. We now have coteries of scientists using the same tactics as some climate-change deniers to challenge the consensus on Covid-19: a cherry-picking of evidence, a mantra that “consensus has no role in science” (wrong), and a shameless determination to move on every time they are proved wrong, driving an exhausting game of whack-a-mole.
It’s likely that such voices speak to similar public audiences, too: to those prone to conspiracy theory and a sense of marginalisation. Already, Covid sceptics and climate sceptics are converging. These trends can’t be tackled just by more and better information, but by an understanding of the psychology involved. How the BBC let climate deniers walk all over it George Monbiot
The bigger challenge is to motivate concerted political action in the ever-shrinking window of time that remains. In 2004, Stott published a paper showing that extreme summer heatwaves like that of the previous year were made more likely by global heating – a breakthrough idea that extracted meaningful probabilistic information even though it is all but impossible to ascribe the causes of individual events. “Summer of scorching heat will be back”, The Times warned.
And it surely has been: if here in the UK we’re left wondering where summer went, it was a different story in North America and southern Europe. “The abnormal was becoming normal at a frightening pace”, Stott says of the 2019 European heatwave. All 10 of the hottest years on record have occurred since 2005; the hottest five have all been since 2015, and this year of extreme wildfires and soaring mercury will join them. There’s still time to avert the worst, but only if we both mandate and demand it from our leaders.
Hot Air: The Inside Story of the Battle Against Climate Change Denial is published by Atlantic (£18.99). To support the Guardian and the Observer buy a copy a guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
3 US-based economists win Nobel prize for societal research
by David McHugh and David Keyton
Permanent Secretary of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences Goran K Hansson, center, announces the 2021 Nobel prize for economics, flanked by members of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences Peter Fredriksson, left, and Eva Mork, during a press conference at the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, in Stockholm, Sweden, Monday, Oct. 11, 2021. From left on the screen above are the winners David Card of the University of California at Berkeley; Joshua Angrist from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology; and Guido Imbens from Stanford University.
Credit: Claudio Bresciani/TT via AP
A U.S.-based economist won the Nobel prize for economics Monday for pioneering research that showed an increase in minimum wage does not lead to less hiring and immigrants do not lower pay for native-born workers, challenging commonly held ideas. Two others shared the award for creating a way to study these types of societal issues. Canadian-born David Card of the University of California, Berkeley, was awarded one half of the prize for his research on how minimum wage, immigration and education affect the labor market, while the other half was shared by Joshua Angrist from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Dutch-born Guido Imbens from Stanford University for their framework for studying issues that can't rely on traditional scientific methods.
The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences said the three have "completely reshaped empirical work in the economic sciences." "Card's studies of core questions for society and Angrist and Imbens' methodological contributions have shown that natural experiments are a rich source of knowledge," said Peter Fredriksson, chair of the Economic Sciences Committee. "Their research has substantially improved our ability to answer key causal questions, which has been of great benefit for society."
Card worked on research that used restaurants in New Jersey and in eastern Pennsylvania to measure the effects of increasing the minimum wage. He studied what happened when New Jersey raised its minimum wage from $4.25 to $5.05, using restaurants in bordering eastern Pennsylvania as a comparison group.
A April 17, 2015 file photo shows a gold Nobel Prize medal. The Nobel Prize for Economics will be announced on Monday Oct. 11, 2021.
Credit: AP Photo/Fernando Vergara, File
Contrary to previous studies, he and his late research partner Alan Krueger found that an increase in the minimum wage had no effect on the number of employees. Card later did further work on the issue. Overall, the work concluded that the negative effects of increasing the minimum wage are small and significantly smaller than believed 30 years ago, the Nobel committee said.
Card also found that incomes of those who are native born in a country can benefit from new immigrants, while immigrants who arrived earlier are the ones at risk of being negatively affected.
Angrist and Imbens won their half of the award for working out the methodological issues that allow economists to draw solid conclusions about cause and effect even where they cannot carry out studies according to strict scientific methods.
Speaking by phone from his home in Massachusetts, Imbens told reporters that he had been asleep when the call came.
A Tuesday, Dec. 8, 2020 file photo of a Nobel Prize medal. The Nobel Prize for Economics will be announced on Monday Oct. 11, 2021.
Credit: AP Photo/Jacquelyn Martin, File
"I was just absolutely stunned then to get a telephone call" he said. "And then I was just absolutely thrilled to hear the news, a particular kind of hearing that I got to share this with Josh Angrist and and David Card were both very good friends of mine."
The award comes with a gold medal and 10 million Swedish kronor (over $1.14 million).
Unlike the other Nobel prizes, the economics award wasn't established in the will of Alfred Nobel but by the Swedish central bank in his memory in 1968, with the first winner selected a year later. It is the last prize announced each year.
Last week, the 2021 Nobel Peace Prize was awarded to journalists Maria Ressa of the Philippines and Dmitry Muratov of Russia for their fight for freedom of expression in countries where reporters have faced persistent attacks, harassment and even murder.
From left, on the screen are the winners of the 2021 Nobel prize for economics; David Card of the University of California at Berkeley; Joshua Angrist from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology; and Guido Imbens from Stanford University, announced during a press conference at the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, in Stockholm, Sweden, Monday, Oct. 11, 2021. Credit: Claudio Bresciani/TT via AP
Ressa was the only woman honored this year in any category.
The Nobel Prize for literature was awarded to U.K.-based Tanzanian writer Abdulrazak Gurnah, who was recognized for his "uncompromising and compassionate penetration of the effects of colonialism and the fate of the refugee."
The prize for physiology or medicine went to Americans David Julius and Ardem Patapoutian for their discoveries into how the human body perceives temperature and touch.
Three scientists won the physics prize for work that found order in seeming disorder, helping to explain and predict complex forces of nature, including expanding our understanding of climate change.
Benjamin List and David W.C. MacMillan won the chemistry prize for finding an easier and environmentally cleaner way to build molecules that can be used to make compounds, including medicines and pesticides.
Canadian-born David Card named as Nobel prize winner in economics
By Simon Johnson and Niklas Pollard Reuters
Posted October 11, 2021
WATCH: David Card, Canadian-born economist, named joint winner of Nobel Prize in economics
Economists David Card, Joshua Angrist and Guido Imbens won the 2021 Nobel economics prize on Monday for pioneering “natural experiments” to show real-world economic impacts in areas from the U.S. fast-food sector to migration from Castro-era Cuba.
Unlike in medicine or other sciences, economists cannot conduct rigidly controlled clinical trials. Instead, natural experiments use real-life situations to study impacts on the world, an approach that has spread to other social sciences.
“Their research has substantially improved our ability to answer key causal questions, which has been of great benefit to society,” says Peter Fredriksson, chair of the Economic Sciences Prize Committee.
Past Nobel Economics prizes have been dominated by U.S. institutions and this was no exception. Canada-born Card currently works at the University of California, Berkeley; Angrist at Massachusetts Institute of Technology; and Dutch-born Imbens at Stanford University. Questions about cause and effect
One experiment by Card on the impact on the fast-food sector of a minimum wage increase in the U.S. state of New Jersey in the early 1990s prompted a review of the conventional wisdom that such increases should always lead to falls in employment.
Another studied the impact of a move by Fidel Castro in 1980 to allow all Cubans who wished to leave the country to do so. Despite high ensuing migration to Miami, Card found no negative wage or labor effects for Miami residents with low levels of education.
“Many important questions are about cause and effect. Will people become healthier if their income increases. ..do lockdowns reduce the spread of infections?” Nobel panelist Eva Mörk said.
“This year’s laureates have shown that it is still possible to answer these broad questions about cause and effects and the way to do that is to use natural experiments.” 2:20Alberta-based scientist awarded Nobel Prize for discovering hepatitis CAlberta-based scientist awarded Nobel Prize for discovering hepatitis C – Oct 5, 2020
Mörk, economics professor at Uppsala University, noted that the pandemic had created scope for a good natural experiment on education outcomes due to the varying disruption caused to children in different school years but whose birth times in some cases were only separated by hours.
“So here, nature has given us an experiment that makes it possible to answer questions that otherwise would not have been possible to answer,” she said. 'Absolutely stunned'
The committee noted that natural experiments were difficult to interpret, but that Angrist and Imbens had in the mid-1990s solved methodological problems to show that precise conclusions about cause and effect can be drawn from them.
“I was just absolutely stunned to get a telephone call, then I was just absolutely thrilled to hear the news,” Imbens said on a call with reporters in Stockholm, adding he was thrilled to share the prize with two of his good friends. Angrist was best man at his wedding.
The prize, formally known as the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel, is the last of this year’s crop of Nobels and sees the winners share a sum of 10 million Swedish crowns ($1.14 million).
The prestigious prizes for achievements in science, literature and peace were created and funded in the will of Swedish dynamite inventor and wealthy businessman Alfred Nobel.
They have been awarded since 1901, though the economics prize – created through a donation from Sweden’s central bank on its 300th anniversary – is a later addition that was first handed out in 1969.
While the economics award has tended to live in the shadow of the often already famous winners of the prizes for peace and literature, laureates over the years include a number of hugely influential economists, such as the Austrian-British Friedrich August von Hayek and American Milton Friedman.
The US Is Addicted to Fossil Fuel Cars. Could High-Speed Rail Set It Free?
Trains have come a long way in the last few years, implementing futuristic technologies that are bound to impress. What they still haven't managed to successfully do is replace automobiles.
Now, one railway company is hoping its trains will help do so. Brightline is investing in five new trains it hopes will put the user experience first and help convert car-lovers.
“We’re trying to get people to think differently about what riding a train is like,” Mike Reininger, CEO of Brightline told Fast Company. “The real objective here is to change people’s behavior."
Brightline is targeting destinations that are “too far to drive, too short to fly,” Reininger said. Therefore, it's building routes between locations that are about 300 miles (482 km) apart.
Its first route is a connection between Miami and West Palm Beach that is about 65 miles (104 km). Brightline's new trains offer many perks like speedy internet, many device chargers, more comfortable seats to sleep in, and larger tables to accommodate laptops but will it be enough to tempt travelers?
Since Brightline is a privately funded company, it needs people to buy seats on its newly developed advanced trains in order to survive. To achieve that goal the company has worked with Siemens over the past decade to develop a new and more optimized user-friendly train design.
Sleeper trains have already been touted as a viable alternative to expensive flights. Could the same be true for Brightline's trains and the automobile?
There are many advantages to using trains for certain destinations such as no need to find parking, avoiding the exhaustion of driving, and even being able to relax and do work while getting to your destination. If Brightline is making trains that make all these options possible they could very well become the future for destinations in their targeted 300 miles mark.
And it seems that Brightline is indeed offering all these added perks and innovations. “We thought about every little detail of the guest experience,” Reininger concluded.
