Heat waves: What are the alternatives to air conditioning?

As climate change exacerbates heat waves, more and more people rely on energy-guzzling air conditioners to keep cool — a vicious cycle. Experts say passive cooling could alleviate some of the pressure.

Air conditioning is ubiquitous in some parts of the world — but there are better options

Kuwaiti summers are oppressive. Baking heat radiates from every corner of the city, making even the lightest of exercise excruciating. That is, unless you are lucky enough to live in an air-conditioned bubble. 

"In Kuwait, you're in your air-conditioned apartment or your air-conditioned car to go to your air-conditioned place of work or the air-conditioned mall," said Alexander Nasir, who used to live in the Gulf nation. "Of course it was absolutely atrocious for the environment, but it was the only way to avoid the inferno outside."

Nasir moved to Berlin in 2014, but he hasn't been able to escape sweltering temperatures. Though the German capital has much milder summers, he has already experienced heat waves of up to 38 degrees Celsius (100 Fahrenheit) — temperatures that felt more intense because German homes are rarely air-conditioned.  

"I can't and don't want to resort to AC again," he said. "But it's getting worse every year and we're not really adapting." 

Many Kuwaitis spend their summers in an air-conditioned bubble

Demand for space cooling is soaring 

The climate crisis has made heat waves more likely and more intense around the world. Even in 2018, the use of air conditioners and electric fans made up 10% of global electricity consumption, according to the International Energy Agency.

And that although air conditioners were only widespread in a few countries like Japan and the United States — where more than 90% of households have them — and only available to 8% of people in the hottest parts of the world. 
 
But as the summers get hotter demand for space cooling is soaring, especially in emerging economies. Electricity demand could more than triple by 2050, using as much energy as all of China and India today just to cool buildings.  

To break out of this loop, scientists point to passive cooling strategies that control the temperature using little to no energy. 

"Passive cooling is so promising because it's less expensive, it averts intensification of urban heat island effects, it increases survivability by diminishing reliance on air conditioning," said Alexandra Rempel, assistant professor of environmental design at University of Oregon in the US. "It also takes pressure off the electrical grid."

Demand for space cooling technologies like air conditioners is skyrocketing

Simple solutions for increased cooling 

In Mediterranean climates, surviving extreme heat can be as simple as opening the windows at night to let in cool air and drawing the shades when the sun hits the window during the day.  

Rempel authored a study that found natural ventilation and shading alone can lower indoor temperatures by about 14 degrees Celsius and reduce the load on air conditioners by up to 80%. The study made these simulations using data from a 2021 heat wave that killed hundreds in the Pacific Northwest region, usually known for its mild weather.  

Old cooling tricks can make a significant difference if they are communicated properly and facilitated, according to Rempel. This shows the Pacific Northwest, one of the few US regions where air conditioners aren't yet ubiquitous, can avoid adopting air conditioning or at least minimize it even as extreme heat becomes more likely, she said.

Wind catchers are very common in the Iranian city of Yazd

Designing buildings to be more energy efficient 

Passive cooling can also be integrated into a building's design. Some methods, such as wind catchers in North Africa and the Middle East, have been staving off heat for centuries.

These towers with open windows are positioned on top of buildings and, as the name suggests, are made to "catch" the wind. They direct the fresh air indoors and push the warm air back out through the tower. Though traditional wind catchers are largely out of use, commercial models using the same technology can be used in modern buildings.

Other features that help keep buildings bearable include louvered shading devices that block out the sun, double glazing that limits the amount of heat gained or lost through windows and water fountains that lower the air temperatures through evaporative cooling.  

Residential buildings in the United Arab Emirates could reduce their annual energy consumption by more than 20% through the use of passive cooling, according to a study by the British University in Dubai that looked at eight strategies. 

The California Academy of Sciences in San Francisco is an example of a building that made air conditioning a last resort. With its insulating green roof, louvers that open and close throughout the day and a ventilation system that makes use of natural air currents, the structure puts passive cooling at the forefront.

Medellin's 'green corridors' have reduced average temperatures in the Colombian city

What about the outside? 

But passive cooling isn't only about directly lowering indoor temperatures — it's also about reducing surface temperatures on the buildings and surrounding areas. Because it's not easy to stay cool in concrete jungles with little shade. 

"When the streets and sidewalks are just basking in heat all day, those materials are perfect thermal storage mass and continue to radiate heat back to the environment all night," said Rempel. "So that takes away some of the night ventilation resources and makes air conditioners work harder."

The solution to that is straightforward: more trees, more shade. In Medellin, Colombia, authorities have planted so-called "green corridors," vegetated passages keeping pedestrians and cyclists out of the direct sun. They have helped reduce the city's average temperatures by 2 degrees Celsius.  

Japan's capital, Tokyo, has also introduced pavements that stay cool with an insulating coating. And in tropical Singapore, dense vegetation on some skyscraper facades keeps them from heating up as much.

"By having at least 10 meters of greenery on the front of your buildings, you can reduce the surface temperature by 5 degrees Celsius," Ayu Sukma Adelia, an architect from the Cooling Singapore Research Project, told DW's Global 3000. 

For Nasir, who was dealing with another particularly hot day in Berlin, the idea of passive cooling sounds appealing.

"I welcome any solution so I don't have to sweat anymore," he said as he sat in a dark room and sprayed himself with water. 

Edited by: Tamsin Walker

Trump 2024 comeback would 'solve all of Russia's problems'

Although Russia may be bluffing with its new offensive, it's crucial for Western cohesion that Ukraine retake its south — particularly if Donald Trump were to make a comeback, says political scientist Francis Fukuyama.

Francis Fukuyama is best known for his book 'The End of History and the Last Man'

Francis Fukuyama is best known for his book "The End of History and the Last Man," where he argues that liberal democracy and free-market capitalism are the final point of society's evolution.

At the end of June, Russian authorities banned the American political scientist and philosopher from entering Russia. DW spoke with him just days after he joined the advisory board for Anti-Corruption Foundation International, newly formed by imprisoned Russian dissident Alexei Navalny.

DW: You are now on the entry ban list in Russia.How do you feel about being on this list?

Francis Fukuyama: I regard being on the list as an honor. All the important foreign critics of Russia and Russia's invasion of Ukraine have been put on the list, and I was actually wondering why it took them so long to get to me.

Months before the Berlin Wall fell in 1989, young political scientist 

Francis Fukuyama declared 'the end of history'

Why did you recently join the board of the Anti-Corruption Foundation?

I am a great admirer of Alexei Navalny, I met him in Warsaw in 2019. Corruption is a very great problem in Russia and around the world, and I am very happy to support his foundation in any way possible.

Russian President Vladimir Putin recently said, "We have only just begun," referring to the war in Ukraine. Is he bluffing?

I think he's lying, as he is about many things. Western military analysts who have looked at the Russian force posture have noted that right now, Russia is experiencing a very severe manpower shortage. They've also lost perhaps a third of all of the forces that they originally massed to defeat Ukraine. Estimates of Russian casualties are uncertain, but it's possibly 20,000 dead and maybe 60,000 wounded. With prisoners on top of that. And for a country the size of Russia, that's really pretty much a military disaster.

So I think that actually, given that the Russians have only made very marginal gains in the two months since they started focusing on Donbas, I don't think they've got a lot in reserve, and I think that Putin is bluffing when he says that they haven't even started.

What do you think might be a successful strategy for Ukraine?

The most realistic strategy at this point is to focus on the south, to reopen Ukraine's access to the Black Sea by retaking Kherson and other ports on the Sea of Azov. That's more important than the Donbas. I think retaking the Donbas is going to be quite difficult to accomplish in the next few months. But by the end of the summer, you could see some real progress in the south. It's really, really important for Ukraine to recover that access, so that it can resume exports of all of its agricultural commodities out of its Black Sea ports and to break the Russian blockade of Odesa.

How could the situation change if Donald Trump were to be reelected as US president?

If Donald Trump makes a comeback in 2024, that solves all of Russia's problems because he's apparently committed to pulling the US out of NATO. Russia will have achieved its major objectives simply by this change in American politics. And that's why I think it is really important that Ukraine make some progress and regain military momentum over the summer, because unity in the West really depends on people believing that there is a military solution to the problem in the near term.

If they feel that we're simply facing an extended stalemate that's going to go on forever, then I think the unity will start breaking, and there'll be more calls for Ukraine to give up territory in order to stop the war.

How do you see Russia in a broader global perspective? What kind of political regime is it?

More than anything else, it actually resembles Nazi Germany at this point. Its only ideology is a kind of extreme nationalism, but even less developed than that of the Nazis. It's also a very poorly institutionalized regime. It really revolves around one man, Vladimir Putin, who really controls all of the big levers of power.

Many believe the January 6 investigation will damage Trump enough to prevent reelection in 2024

If you compare it to China, they're very, very different. China has a big Communist Party with 90 million members, it has a lot of internal discipline. In Russia's case, you don't have that kind of institutionalization.

So I don't think it's a stable regime. I don't think it has a clear ideology that it can project outwards. I think that the people that align with it are simply people who don't like the West for different reasons.

After 30 years, do you have an update on your concept of the end of history?

We're in a different situation than we were 30 years ago, where there have been setbacks to democracy across the board, including in the United States and India and other big democratic countries over the last few years. But the progress of history has never been linear. We had huge setbacks in the 1930s that we survived. We had another set of setbacks in the 1970s, with the oil crisis and inflation in many parts of the world. So the idea of historical progress is not dead.

Sometimes you do have setbacks, but the underlying institutions and ideas are strong and they've survived over a very long period of time, and I expect them to continue to survive.

Is the war in Ukraine and other burning political crises overshadowing the more global, and more dangerous, climate crisis?

Obviously, short-term energy needs have led to a revival of fossil fuels and slowed down the progress toward reducing carbon emissions. But it is a temporary setback. And I think both of these issues have to be dealt with, it's not a choice of one or the other. You're really going to have to take both of them seriously.

But the climate crisis is a slowly unfolding one that will continue to be with us for the next generations. And so I don't think the fact that we're going backwards right now is necessarily the final position we will end up in.

Francis Fukuyama is political scientist at Stanford University in California.

The interview was conducted by Mikhail Bushuev, and it was condensed and edited for clarity by Sonya Diehn.

Mammals became warm-blooded later than thought: study

Being warm-blooded allowed mammals -- like this snow-covered deer -- to thrive in colder climates / © AFP/File

Author: AFP|Update: 20.07.2022 

The ancestors of mammals started to become warm-blooded around 20 million years later than previously thought, researchers suggested Wednesday, after analysing inner-ear fossils hoping to solve "one of the great unsolved mysteries of palaeontology".

Warm-bloodedness is one of the quintessential characteristics of mammals, along with fur, but exactly when they first evolved the feature has long been a subject of debate.

Previous research has indicated that the ancestors of mammals began evolving warm-bloodedness, or endothermy, around 252 million years ago -- around the time of the Permian extinction, known as the "Great Dying".

However figuring out the timeline has proved difficult.

"The problem is that you cannot stick thermometers in your fossils, so you cannot measure their body temperature," said Ricardo Araujo of the University of Lisbon, one of the authors of a new study in the journal Nature.

He was part of an international team of researchers that found a new way to determine how body heat changed throughout time, by examining the semicircular canals in the inner ears of 56 extinct species of mammal ancestors.

Fluid runs through the tiny ear canals, which help animals keep their balance.

The researchers realised that as body temperatures warmed up, so did the ear fluid.

Araujo gave the example of oil used to fry hot chips.

Before you warm the oil up, it is "very viscous, very dense," he told AFP.

"But then when you heat it up, you'll see that the oil is much runnier, it flows much more easily."

The runnier ear fluid led to animals evolving narrower canals -- which can be measured in fossils, allowing the researchers to track body temperature over time.

Unlike previous research on this subject, the team developed a model that not only works on extinct mammal ancestors, but also living mammals, including humans.

"It can look at your inner ear and tell you how warm-blooded you are -- that's how accurate the model is," lead study author Romain David of London's Natural History Museum told AFP.

Using the model, they traced the beginnings of warm-bloodedness to around 233 million ago, in the Late Triassic period.

- 'Not a gradual, slow process' -

Michael Benton, a palaeontologist at Britain's University of Bristol who was not involved in the study, said the new metric "seems to work well for a wide array of modern vertebrates".

"It doesn't just provide a yes-no answer, but actually scales the 'degree' of endothermy in terms of actual typical body setpoint temperature," he told AFP.

Benton, whose previous research had given the 252 million years date, said the transition to warm-bloodedness likely took place in stages, and "there were several significant prior steps before this semicircular canal switch".

Araujo said the new research suggested that warm-bloodedness came about simply and "very quickly in geological terms, in less than a million years".

"It was not a gradual, slow process over tens of millions of years as previously thought".

David said it seemed unlikely that warm-bloodedness would begin around the extinction event 252 million years ago, because global temperatures were extremely hot then.

That would have been a disadvantage for warm-blooded animals -- but they could have thrived as temperatures cooled in the following millions of years.

"Being an endotherm allows you to be more independent of the whims of the climate, to run faster, run longer, explore different habitats, explore the night, explore polar regions, make long migrations," Araujo said.

"There were a lot of innovations at the time that started to define what a mammal is -- but also ultimately what a human being would be."

Idea of ice age 'species pump' in the Philippines boosted by new way of drawing evolutionary trees

Peer-Reviewed Publication

UNIVERSITY OF KANSAS

 

IMAGE: WHAT LOOKS LIKE A "RELAXED" ATTITUDE ON THE FACE OF THIS PHILIPPINE GEKKO MAY ACTUALLY BE A NEW WAY TO SEE EVOLUTIONARY TREES. view more 

CREDIT: RAFE BROWN AND JASON FERNANDEZ

LAWRENCE — Does the Philippines’ astonishing biodiversity result in part from rising and falling seas during the ice ages?

Scientists have long thought the unique geography of the Philippines — coupled with seesawing ocean levels — could have created a “species pump” that triggered massive diversification by isolating, then reconnecting, groups of species again and again on islands. They call the idea the “Pleistocene aggregate island complex (PAIC) model” of diversification.

But hard evidence, connecting bursts of speciation to the precise times that global sea levels rose and fell, has been scant until now.

A groundbreaking Bayesian method and new statistical analyses of genomic data from geckos in the Philippines shows that during the ice ages, the timing of gecko diversification gives strong statistical support for the first time to the PAIC model, or “species pump.” The investigation, with roots at the University of Kansas, was just published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

“The Philippines is an isolated archipelago, currently including more than 7,100 islands, but this number was dramatically reduced, possibly to as few as six or seven giant islands, during the Pleistocene,” said co-author Rafe Brown, curator-in-charge of the herpetology division of the Biodiversity Institute and Natural History Museum at KU. “The aggregate landmasses were composed of many of today’s smaller islands, which became connected together by dry land as sea levels fell, and all that water was tied up in glaciers. It’s been hypothesized that this kind of fragmentation and fusion of land, which happened as sea levels repeatedly fluctuated over the last 4 million years, sets the stage for a special evolutionary process, which may have triggered simultaneous clusters or bursts of speciation in unrelated organisms present at the time. In this case, we tested this prediction in two different genera of lizards, each with species found only in the Philippines.”

For decades, the Philippines has been a hotbed of fieldwork by biologists with KU’s Biodiversity Institute, where the authors analyzed genetic samples of Philippine geckos as well as other animals. However, even with today’s technology and scientists’ ability to characterize variation from across the genome, the development of powerful statistical approaches capable of handling genome-scale data is still catching up — particularly in challenging cases, like the task of estimating past times that species formed, using genetic data collected from populations surviving today.

Lead author Jamie Oaks of Auburn University and co-author Cameron Siler of the University of Oklahoma were both KU graduate students advised by Brown. They were joined by co-author Perry Wood Jr., now at the University of Michigan, who recently worked at Auburn with Oaks and, earlier at KU with Brown, as a postdoctoral researcher.

For two centuries, naturalists who studied species distributions in the Philippines have discussed, debated and written extensively about the ideas behind modern species pump theory or, in the Philippines, predictions now making up the “PAIC Paradigm.” Historically, researchers focusing on particular animals or plants have endorsed the general idea, but others expressed skepticism because it didn’t seem to hold up in other species they studied.

“Over the last quarter century, with widespread availability of genetic data, the model’s specific predictions have been tested much more rigorously, objectively and quantitatively — with real data from natural populations — which was a major step forward in Philippine biogeography,” Brown said. “In some animals and plants, predictions held up. But in others, when the same predictions were tested with real data and appropriately rigorous statistical methods, they were rejected over and over. In many of our own studies at KU, when we examined corollaries of the PAIC model in individual genera, or groups of closely related species, we were surprised to find the ice ages time window wasn’t even related to much of the species diversity we find today. In study after study, individually focusing on a genus of bats, or a group of frogs, we found that fewer and fewer of today’s species seemed to have diverged in the Pleistocene. At that point, with a lack of evidence piling up, we kind of rephrased the question. We went back to the data from all those earlier studies and asked — across all these different groups of animals, can we find any statistical support for species formation, clustered in the Pleistocene time window? And the answer kept coming back ‘no’ — until now.”

Brown said the key to understanding the genomic evidence came from Oaks, who started looking at gecko groups with a new approach to conceiving phylogenetic trees. Instead of one species branching from another in isolation — as phylogenetic trees are traditionally drawn — a plethora of new species might branch away at roughly the same time in something that looks more like a “shrub” than a tree.

“Shared ancestry underlies everything in biology, whether it's a gene sequence, viral strain or species,” Oaks said. “Each branching point on a phylogenetic tree represents biological diversification — for example, one species diverging into two. We have long assumed the processes responsible for these divergence events affect each species on the tree of life in isolation. However, we have long appreciated that this assumption is likely often violated. For example, changes to the environment will affect whole communities of species, not just one. Our approach allows multiple species to diversify due to a shared process. By doing so, we are now better equipped to ask questions about such processes and test for the patterns they predict.”

By relaxing the assumption of independent divergences, the genomic data from Philippine geckos supported patterns of shared divergences, as “predicted by repeated fragmentation of the archipelago by interglacial rises in sea level,” according to the researchers.

“This type of pattern of shared divergences can now be tested with our new phylogenetic approach,” Oaks said. “Gekko and Cyrtodactylus are two genera of geckos that are good test cases to look for these patterns, because they have been widespread across the Philippines since long before glacial cycles started, and so we know they were present on the large ice age islands, when they were fragmented by rising sea levels. We used information from their genomes to reconstruct their phylogenetic trees and test for patterns of shared divergences predicted by the island-fragmentation hypothesis. We did find support for such patterns, and now we see evidence for the effect of the glacial cycles, but it’s important to remember that the overall phylogenetic history of these lizards is consistent with a more complex story.”

With this part of the “species pump” hypothesis now supported in the Philippines, Brown said there are many other cases where biogeographers could use the same approach to detect geographic or environmental changes that touched off similar explosions of biodiversity.

“The idea that some barrier could affect unrelated groups like birds, frogs, lizards and insects — possibly impacting whole faunas together at the same time — has been something evolutionary biologists have been grasping at for a long time. But strong support for simultaneous timing of these processes has been kind of elusive,” Brown said. “There are lots of theories about shared mechanisms, and the ‘species pump’ idea is just one of them. But, in general, common mechanisms of diversification, or shared processes of speciation, have always been big, tantalizing topics for evolutionary biologists, especially for biogeographers.”

The PNAS research in the form of a preprint also is available at the open access science repository bioRxiv. Oaks showcased the new approach in 2021 at the annual meetings of the Society for the Study of Evolution’s and, next month, Brown will share it with the scientific community in the Philippines while attending the 4th Southeast Asian Gateway to Evolution (SAGE) meetings, in Manila.

---

JOURNAL

Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences

DOI

10.1073/pnas.2121036119 

GREEN CAPITALI$M TRANSITION TO SOCIALISM

Danish town embraces circular economy in bid to go green

An industrial park in Skive is trying to solve two of Western societies' most urgent problems: climate change and the effect of urbanization on rural areas. A pilot project is showing circular economy at its best.

GreenLab's concept draws on the resources of the entire community to fuel industrial and power production

On the outskirts of Skive — a small Danish town of 20,000 inhabitants — the GreenLab industrial park is trying to validate energy systems based on the concept of circular economy. Inaugurated two years ago, the site wants to create a symbiosis between companies, allowing them to share their excess resources and eventually use the others' waste as feedstock.

The industrial processes at GreenLab are powered by renewable energies, including wind turbines with a total capacity of 56 megawatts (MW) and solar-energy installations of 24 MW.

"The main purpose is to attract new investors to the area. One of our purposes is also to show the world the benefits of our approach to a circular economy. We do not only look at theoretical systems, but we also implement them," Skive's mayor, Peder Christian Kirkegaard, told DW.

The mayor said GreenLab got the timing right, as the current focus on climate change, and the ongoing energy crisis, helped the Skive project make it into the headlines. Even former US President Barack Obama recently came to the town to speak about the green transition.

Speaking to DW in the mayor's office that overlooks the Skive Fjord on Denmark's Jutland Peninsula, Birgitte Bahat, head of communications of the municipality, noted proudly: "Skive is already on the map."

Green rural transition

Skive is a cozy place with a long fishing and agriculture tradition. But a huge budget problem in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis resulted in a social crisis that made Skive struggle for its reputation. Many young people have migrated since, leaving behind an aging population.

In the streets of Skive, bicycles are less common than in other Danish towns. Some teenagers working in the local cafes said they prefer Copenhagen and Aarhus — the two biggest cities in the Jutland peninsula — because of their "diversity."

Asked about Skive's green transition and regional growth, they are not wholly aware of the developments at GreenLab some 11 kilometers (6.8 miles) away. "It sounds cool, but it is very complex," said one young woman working in a coffee shop.

The industrial park was co-funded by the local municipality, in hopes that GreenLab might contribute to solving Skive's demographic and social problems. The project has already created about 100 jobs, said Mayor Kirkegaard, who seems convinced the green transition will attract even more young professionals.

"Much of the green transition will take place outside the big cities because we have the space."

The municipality has already bought 55 hectares (136 acres) of land and invested a total of 80 million Danish kroner (€ 10.8 million/$10.74 million) in the industrial park. Revenues it receives annually from rent payments from companies are in the region of 3 million kroner. Under expansion plans, Skive is considering buying an additional 70 hectares.

According to Kirkegaard, the private-public partnership is creating benefits that would otherwise be impossible. "When you start a project like this, you will find a lot of barriers. The public sector can help solve the roblem before it even becomes a problem. For example, working with related laws."

Tackling complexities with partners

In May 2021, the Danish Energy Agency granted the GreenLab industrial park the status of an official regulatory energy test zone, allowing it to operate outside the existing electricity regulations. With the permit, the park can bring as much renewable energy online as it wants with the aim of gaining green-transition know-how, including clean energy storage, green fuels, agriculture and industry.

As hydrogen is scheduled to replace natural gas in production processes, GreenLab is, for example, expected to tackle the complexity of the shift and redesign production processes. GreenLab offers services to the companies located in the industrial park in order to find the gaps in their processes and overcome them with the support of researchers from Denmark's technical universities.

"We plan to start training projects directly within a year, which will serve entire Northern Europe for what concerns PtX [Power to Gas] project skills, but also integration with district heating, and water treatment," said GreenLab Chief Executive Christopher Sorensen.

Sorensen told DW that current investors are Norway's Quantafuel and Equinor and as well as consortia of local fishermen and farmers. Spanish-German Siemens Gamesa is active in the industrial complex too, as part of the EU-funded hydrogen project.

At the moment, GreenLab's partner Eurowind is installing the last wind turbines, while installations for a solar park will start in September. A hydrogen production complex is also planned and will be commissioned in phases. The first 6 MW of hydrogen electrolyzer capacity should enter operation within this year, with another 106 MW  being added within the next two years.

Solar and wind energy will play a key role at GreenLab, where Eurowind Energy is an investor

Symbiosis at work

GreenLab is trying to merge corporate efforts with those of local green transition initiatives. Biomass and residuals from farms in the area are, for example, used to produce jet fuel. Manure is planned to become the primary feedstock for a biogas facility that will eventually power production processes. 

Sun and wind though, will remain the primary energy sources that power the electrolyzers to produce green hydrogen. The gas will then be mixed with CO2 — a byproduct of biogas production — to produce bio-methanol. Finally, excess green hydrogen is planned to be used in biogas production where it interacts with bacteria to boost output.

Moreover, one company in the industrial park aims to extract proteins from Denmark's endemic starfish to replace soy-based animal feed for the region's farmers. And Quantafuel, which is working on solutions to the world's plastic waste problem, has set up a plant to transform soiled plastic into new products, collaborating with clients like BASF and Lego.

CEO Sorensen thinks "everything that is locally based makes the puzzle easier."

"You identify the resources available in the region, create community engagement, and identify the things you don't have in order to achieve a circular economy. At that point, you invite new possible companies in," he said.

A former business consultant who moved from New York to Denmark more than two decades ago, Sorensen said companies' values and long-term commitment are key factors. Wind turbines and large-scale industry are often not attractive for local communities, he added, but it is different when they are part of a concept to create new competencies, supporting green transition and local growth. "This methodology could be soon replicated."

Denmark's greening

GreenLab is part of a broader decarbonization effort throughout Denmark. Under plans, the country's largest coal-fired power station will replace coal entirely with wood chips by 2023.

Denmark is also building a vast artificial island off the coast of Jutland to set up around 200 offshore wind turbines with a combined capacity of 3 gigawatts.

Another pilot project is being developed in Kalundborg, near the capital Copenhagen, where a plant will use industrial waste as a new source of revenue.

Denmark's renewable energy plans, including the buildup of green industrial parks and the urban-industrial symbiosis, are closely monitored by academic research to ensure that best-practice solutions are adopted on a wider scale.

GREEN CAPITALI$M'S TRANSITION TO SOCIALISM

 

Explaining the Circular Economy and How Society Can Re-think Progress | Animated Video Essay

 

Rethinking The World's Waste: Circular Economy | Climate For Change: Closing The Loop | Ep 1/2

Jul 30, 2021

CNA Insider

By 2050, there will be more plastic in our oceans than marine life. And plastic has a notoriously long life in landfills. We meet entrepreneurs discovering new ways to retrieve plastic from our waterways, turning it into fuel or back into plastic again. Others look to reduce single-use plastic in our daily lives, by working on alternative materials.

Food waste does not seem to make sense in a world where so many are hungry, but it’s a major problem. And food in landfills releases methane, a potent greenhouse gas. We meet the people trying to divert food from landfills in New Zealand and Singapore by repurposing it for human consumption, animal feed and now even biofuel.

We also meet entrepreneurs in the USA and Europe going a step further to avoid producing food from animals completely. They’re developing cultivated meat, now on sale in Singapore. Is this the food of the future?

Part 2 of Climate For Change: Closing The Loop: https://youtu.be/E_FGmc3EYGw

========

About the show: Waste is generated on an epic scale. Unless we go ‘circular,’ it's game over for the planet. How can waste from one industry become another’s resource?  And how do we unlock the economic benefits?

=================

  

Natural Capitalism: definition & examples

Mar 15, 2016

Sustainability Illustrated

This whiteboard animation video presents the concept of Natural Capitalism: a way of doing business that recognizes the market value of natural and human resources and life-supporting ecological services. In a nutshell, natural capitalism means taking good care of the goose that lays the golden egg: what nature provides for your business should be on your balance sheet.

Natural Capitalism Book: Creating the Next Industrial Revolution -- https://amzn.to/2PyEYJF (by Paul Hawken, Amory Lovins & L. Hunter Lovins)

"Natural Capitalism" - Hunter Lovins

Feb 7, 2019

Global Institute of Sustainability and Innovation

October 6, 2006 | Hunter Lovins introduces the concept of Natural Capitalism and how it pertains to sustainability.

 

Paul Hawken - Natural Capitalism to Distract the Ruling Elites from a Green Coup d'Etat | Bioneers

May 5, 2020

Paul Hawken is an environmentalist, entrepreneur, author and activist who has dedicated his life to environmental sustainability and changing the relationship between business and the environment. He is one of the environmental movement’s leading voices, and a pioneering architect of corporate reform with respect to ecological practices. His work includes founding successful, ecologically conscious businesses, writing about the impacts of commerce on living systems, and consulting with heads of state and CEOs on economic development, industrial ecology, and environmental policy. Paul is Founder of Project Drawdown, a non-profit dedicated to researching when and how global warming can be reversed. The organization maps and models the scaling of one hundred substantive technological, social, and ecological solutions to global warming. This speech was presented at the 1999 Bioneers National Conference. Since 1990, Bioneers has acted as a fertile hub of social and scientific innovators with practical and visionary solutions for the world's most pressing environmental and social challenges. To experience talks like this, please join us at the Bioneers National Conference each October, and regional Bioneers Resilient Community Network gatherings held nationwide throughout the year. For more information on Bioneers, please visit http://www.bioneers.org

The need for diversity in genome sequencing

A majority of the DNA that has been sequenced for research comes from donors of European ancestry. That causes a knowledge gap about the genome of people from the rest of the world.


Humans across the world share a lot of the same DNA, but there are decisive differences.

Among various things that unite humans around the world, the DNA sequence hovers at the top: a whopping 99.9% of human DNA sequences are identical among people.

Gregor Mendel, a monk and scientist whose 200th birthday is this Wednesday (July 20), proposed that certain "invisible factors" were responsible for the various characteristics we display. Today, we know that these factors are genes, which make up our DNA, or deoxyribonucleic acid.

This acid molecule gives genetic instructions to living beings. If humans share so much of the same DNA, why is diversity important in the context of DNA sequencing?


Gregor Mendel first discovered pea plants varied in color based on what we today know as genes

To understand that, we have to shift our focus to the 0.1% of the difference in the human DNA sequences. The seemingly small difference stems from variations among the nearly 3 billion bases (or nitrogen-based compounds) in our DNA.

All the dissimilarities we know between different humans, including hair or eye color or the height of a person, are due to these variations.

However, over the years scientists found that these variations could also give us vital information on a person's or a population's risk for developing a specific disease.

We can then use the risk assessment from the genetic data to design a health care strategy that is tailored to the individual.

Genetics and disease risk assessment

Many of us have had the experience of filling out forms at the doctor's office that ask us about the different diseases that have affected our parents or relatives. You are warned to stay away from sweets and processed sugars if a parent was diabetic, for example.

While transfer of heart diseases, cancer or diabetes between one generation to another is known more commonly, there are many more diseases that can be inherited genetically.

For example, we know that sickle cell anemia occurs when a person inherits two abnormal copies of the gene that makes hemoglobin, a protein in our red blood cells, one from each parent.

In recent decades, genetic research has advanced to the point that scientists can isolate the genes responsible for many of these diseases.

Here's the catch: We know this correlation between genes and diseases for a very restricted population.

Eurocentric data

Sarah Tishkoff, a geneticist and evolutionary biologist at the University of Pennsylvania in the US, is one of many in the scientific community pushing for more diverse genomic datasets.

"Let's say that a study focused on people with European ancestry identifies genetic variants associated with risk for heart disease or diabetes, and uses that information to predict risk for disease in patients not included in the original study," said Tishkoff.

"We know from experience that this prediction of disease risk doesn't work well when applied to individuals with different ancestries, particularly if they have African ancestry."

Historically, the people who have provided their DNA for genomics research have been overwhelmingly of European ancestry, "which creates gaps in knowledge about the genomes from people in the rest of the world," according to the National Human Genome Research Institute in the US.

The institute states that 87% of all the genome data we have is from individuals of European ancestry, followed by 10% of Asian and 2% of African ancestry.

As a result, the potential benefits of genetic research, which includes understanding early diagnoses and treatment of various diseases, may not benefit the underrepresented populations.

Lack of equitability in treatment

The problem does not stop with disease risk assessment. It permeates the space of equitable health care as well, said Jan Witkowski, a professor from the Graduate School of Biological Sciences at the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in the US state of New York.

"Say you have two groups: group A and group B, who are very different. The knowledge and information you learn about people in group A may not apply to people in group B. But imagine developing medical treatments based on information from just group A for everyone," he said, adding, "it is not going to work on group B."

By including diverse populations in genomic studies, researchers can identify genomic variants associated with various health outcomes at both the individual and population levels.

The National Human Genome Research Institute also states, however, that diversifying the participants in genomics research is an expensive affair and requires the establishment of trust and respectful long-term relationships between communities and researchers.

FROM THE FINGERPRINT TO BIOMETRIC DATA

A standard in modern forensics for 125 years

In 1891, a Croatian born, Argentine criminologist, Juan Vucetich, started building up the first modern-style fingerprint archive. Since then, fingerprints have become one of the main forms of evidence used to convict criminals. Here, a police officer spreads dust on the lock of a burglarized apartment. Fingerprints become visible.

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Edited by: Carla Bleiker

The complex negotiations to get grain out of Ukraine


Sofia BOUDERBALA
Wed, July 20, 2022 


Talks are progressing on the opening of sea corridors to allow 20 million tonnes of grain still blocked in Ukraine and the upcoming harvests to be shipped around the world.

But even if an agreement is reached, it will not provide any immediate relief for importing countries.

- Crucial negotiations -

Negotiations have intensified since the beginning of June, with Turkey acting as mediator between Russia and Ukraine, which together account for around 30 percent of global trade in crops.

The talks are crucial insofar as no other country has come forward so far able to make up for the shortfall on the market of initially 25 million tonnes of Ukraine grain. And prices for agricultural commodities were already high before Russia invaded Ukraine on February 24, notably as a result of the post-Covid economic recovery.

The war has sparked a surge in the price of grains such as wheat and corn to levels unsustainable for countries dependent on their import, such as Egypt, Lebanon and Tunisia.

In recent weeks, prices have progressively receded again on the prospect of the upcoming harvest, fears of recession and the progress made in the negotiations regarding the sea corridors.

Negotiations have accelerated in recent days: Turkey said an agreement in principle had been reached on creating a protected sea corridor.

Russian President Vladimir Putin said "progress" had been made in discussions before telling reporters that any deal hinged on the West's willingness to yield some ground.

"We will facilitate the export of Ukrainian grain, but we are proceeding from the fact that all restrictions related to possible deliveries for the export of Russian grain will be lifted," he said.

However, market experts say that no sanctions directly target Russian agricultural goods, but are nonetheless penalised by sanctions on the country's banking sector.

- What is Turkey's role? -

"There's only a handful of countries -- Turkey is one, Qatar is another -- that's able to kind of speak to almost everybody and avoid major blowback," said Colin Clarke, director of research at the US-based Soufan Group.

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has "proven that he can do it and that's why he's been a trusted broker not only by the Russians, but I think begrudgingly NATO countries -- that's the best that they have," the expert said.

Turkey had "a strong hand to play here", Clarke continued.

"Erdogan gets to play the hero, he gets to tell everybody that he's working to solve the global food crisis, but we know that Turkey is doing a lot to obstruct negotiations in other areas.

"They've got their concerns, and their priorities don't always align with the priorities of the international community, the priorities of NATO, or even the priorities of their allies."

- What sort of deal? -

As much as 90 percent of Ukrainian exports of wheat, corn and sunflower were transported by sea, mostly from the port of Odessa, which accounts for 60 percent of all port activity in the country.

Any agreement to resume large-scale shipping will have several stages: the de-mining of the ports that Ukrainians mined; the loading of the ships, which could be put under the supervision of the UN; the inspection of the shipments; and the escorting of the boats, as demanded by Russia to ensure that the cargoes do not include weapons, said Edward de Saint-Denis, trader at Plantureux and Associates.

Diplomatic sources say however that complete de-mining is not necessary as safe transit routes remain in the measures meant to protect coastal areas from invasion.

A number of other points remain very controversial: if Moscow manages to control -- and even seize -- boats, will the checks be carried out in Ukrainian or international waters? Which vessels will be authorised to transport the shipments and what will the nationality of their crews be?

"Russians don't want Ukrainians and vice versa," de Saint-Denis said.

At one point, Turkey suggested using its fleet, but a compromise could be reached to use "flags of convenience", according to one market observer.

- What are the consequences? -

"In the very short term, agreement would bring down prices, but in terms of the flow of grain shipments, nothing would change immediately," said Edward de Saint-Denis.

"One or two months would be needed to de-mine the ports," the expert said.

And the loading areas would have to be renovated, notably in Odessa where part of the port administration was damaged in the fighting, he said.

Despite the various possible obstacles, agricultural market analyst, Gautier Le Molgat said that it was now "in everyone's interests that maritime traffic resumes on the Black Sea: first and foremost for the Ukrainians, but also for the Russians, who have an exceptional harvest to export".

sb/spm-rl/gw

Rights group slams Morocco, Spain over migrant deaths

AFP - TODAY

A rights group on Wednesday said Moroccan and Spanish authorities were responsible for a horrific border tragedy last month in which two dozen migrants died.

It resulted in the highest migrant death toll in years of attempts to enter the Spanish enclave of Melilla, one of the European Union's only land borders with Africa.

"The tragedy of June 24 cost the lives of 27 migrants and was due to unprecedented repression by the Moroccan authorities, with the complicity of their Spanish counterparts," Omar Naji of the Moroccan Association for Human Rights (AMDH) told journalists in Rabat.

Moroccan authorities have said 23 migrants died when some 2,000 people, many from Sudan, stormed the frontier.

Naji, presenting a report on the deaths, called it "a despicable crime, the result of deadly migration policies".

The report accuses Moroccan forces of "massive use of tear gas" as migrants tried to enter a cramped border post or scale the barbed wire-topped metal barrier.

"The decision to violently attack the asylum seekers once they arrived at the barrier is probably the main cause behind the very heavy toll," the report reads.

Morocco's state-backed CNDH rights group said last week that 23 migrants had died, mostly likely from suffocation, in a crush at a border post where manual turnstiles allow the passage of a single person at a time.

The CNDH said videos apparently showing security forces beating prone migrants were "isolated" cases.

But the AMDH linked the incident to a resumption in cooperation between Madrid and Rabat in March after a year-long diplomatic spat.

Since then there has been a sharp uptick in Moroccan police raids of migrant camps in the forest near the border, it said.

It added that Spanish authorities had "turned back about 100 migrants" on June 24, while some 64 are still missing.

Spanish premier Pedro Sanchez initially blamed "human trafficking mafias" for what he said was "a well-organised violent assault" on the frontier.

But Naji dismissed that as part of a "discourse of criminalisation" of migrants, pointing out that those at the Melilla frontier were attempting to cross "free of charge, unlike those who try to cross by sea".

A Moroccan court on Tuesday sentenced 33 migrants to 11 months in jail for "illegal entry", while a separate trial of 29 migrants including a minor is set to resume on July 27.

kao-agr/fka/par/pjm

MORE FUZZY FOTOS

Webb telescope may have already found most distant known galaxy

Issam AHMED 

Wed, July 20, 2022 

Just a week after its first images were shown to the world, the James Webb Space Telescope may have found a galaxy that existed 13.5 billion years ago, a scientist who analyzed the data said Wednesday.

Known as GLASS-z13, the galaxy dates back to 300 million years after the Big Bang, about 100 million years earlier than anything previously identified, Rohan Naidu of the Harvard Center for Astrophysics told AFP.

"We're potentially looking at the most distant starlight that anyone has ever seen," he said.

The more distant objects are from us, the longer it takes for their light to reach us, and so to gaze back into the distant universe is to see into the deep past.

Though GLASS-z13 existed in the earliest era of the universe, its exact age remains unknown as it could have formed anytime within the first 300 million years.

GLASS-z13 was spotted in so-called "early release" data from the orbiting observatory's main infrared imager, called NIRcam -- but the discovery was not revealed in the first image set published by NASA last week.

When translated from infrared into the visible spectrum, the galaxy appears as a blob of red with white in its center, as part of a wider image of the distant cosmos called a "deep field."

Naidu and colleagues -- a team totaling 25 astronomers from across the world -- have submitted their findings to a scientific journal.

For now, the research is posted on a "preprint" server, so it comes with the caveat that it has yet to be peer-reviewed -- but it has already set the global astronomy community abuzz.

"Astronomy records are crumbling already, and more are shaky," tweeted NASA's chief scientist Thomas Zurbuchen.

"Yes, I tend to only cheer once science results clear peer review. But, this looks very promising," he added.

Naidu said another team of astronomers led by Marco Castellano that worked on the same data has achieved similar conclusions, "so that gives us confidence."

- 'Work to be done' -

One of the great promises of Webb is its ability to find the earliest galaxies that formed after the Big Bang, 13.8 billion years ago.

Because these are so distant from Earth, by the time their light reaches us, it has been stretched by the expansion of the universe and shifted to the infrared region of the light spectrum, which Webb is equipped to detect with unprecedented clarity.

Naidu and colleagues combed through this infrared data of the distant universe, searching for a telltale signature of extremely distant galaxies.

Below a particular threshold of infrared wavelength, all photons -- packets of energy -- are absorbed by the neutral hydrogen of the universe that lies between the object and the observer.

By using data collected through different infrared filters pointed at the same region of space, they were able to detect where these drop-offs in photons occurred, from which they inferred the presence of these most distant galaxies.

"We searched all the early data for galaxies with this very striking signature, and these were the two systems that had by far the most compelling signature," said Naidu.

One of these is GLASS-z13, while the other, not as ancient, is GLASS-z11.

"There's strong evidence, but there's still work to be done," said Naidu.

In particular, the team wants to ask Webb's managers for telescope time to carry out spectroscopy -- an analysis of light that reveals detailed properties -- to measure its precise distance.

"Right now, our guess for the distance is based on what we don't see -- it would be great to have an answer for what we do see," said Naidu.

Already, however, the team have detected surprising properties.

For instance, the galaxy is the mass of a billion Suns, which is "potentially very surprising, and that is something we don't really understand" given how soon after the Big Bang it formed, Naidu said.

Launched last December and fully operational since last week, Webb is the most powerful space telescope ever built, with astronomers confident it will herald a new era of discovery.

ia/sst