Earth

In the last week four reports have made the headlines with human induced climate change playing a principal role in each.

This week's five stories look at:

• Tripling the Efficiency of Organic Solar Cells;
• New Technology to Fight Coastal Flooding Using Irregular Concrete Blocks;
• Long Duration Human Space Flight Being Tested on the ISS;
• Pacific Island Entrepreneurs Receive Award for Green Initiatives;
• Delivering Wind and Solar Power Over Long Distances Possible with New HVDC Circuit Breaker.

 

A recent article over at io9 offers a rapid-fire scroll of lovely pictures of lovely gardens from Tivoli and Versailles to Suzhou and the Mehtab Bagh. The bright-green images are from Flickr, their vapid captions read like snippets from Wikipedia, but the ideological operation of the article (which may fancy itself "Bright Green") is pure, pernicious futurological bunkum.

The not-so-distant future (2030-2045) may turn out very different from how we commonly imagine. It may turn out very different from what we desire.

At that time, those of us who remain alive and who still have the faculty to think critically, may well bemoan the fact that we didn’t properly anticipate the intervening turn of events, and didn’t organise ourselves effectively to enable a better future to unfold. We may bitterly regret our present-day pre-occupations with celebrity gossip and 24×7 reality TV and rivalries between the latest superphones and by bickering over gullible interpretations of antiquated religious folk tales.

There is a lot of chatter in the news from the neo-cornucopians about how "wait, resource scarcity was merely a false alarm, there's more than enough resources to keep growth going for years - like lots of new oil!" When you read the fine print, it turns out that the "new oil reserves" make very little mention of how much oil is going to flow each day, at what cost, and to replace what level of lost capacity in critical places such as Mexico, Saudi Arabia, Venezuela and the U.S.

A speech made by ExxonMobil CEO Rex Tillerson at the Council on Foreign Relations last month has been attracting greater and greater attention as its implications sink in.