Global

How South Beach, Miami, could look if temperatures rise by 2C. Photograph: Nickolay Lamm/Courtesy of Climate Central/sealevel.climatecentral.org

As the UN sits down for its annual climate conference this week, many experts believe we have passed the point of no return

theguardian.com - by Robin McKie - December 2, 2018

On Sunday morning hundreds of politicians, government officials and scientists will gather in the grandeur of the International Congress Centre in Katowice, Poland . . . For 24 years the annual UN climate conference has served up a reliable diet of rhetoric, backroom talks and dramatic last-minute deals aimed at halting global warming . . .

. . . As recent reports have made clear, the world may no longer be hovering at the edge of destruction but has probably staggered beyond a crucial point of no return. Climate catastrophe is now looking inevitable.

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Houston residents Larry Koser Jr. and his son Matthew salvage possessions from their home after Hurricane Harvey. Photo by Erich Schlegel/Getty Images

CLICK HERE - STUDY - Anthropogenic influences on major tropical cyclone events

pbs.org - by Julia Griffin - November 14, 2018

Hurricane Harvey swamped Houston with seven days of pounding rain last August. When scientists went back to look at historical weather patterns, they reported Harvey dumped 20 percent more rain than it typically would have. The culprit: climate change.

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CLICK HERE - REPORT - Global Warming of 1.5°C, an IPCC special report on the impacts of global warming of 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels and related global greenhouse gas emission pathways, in the context of strengthening the global response to the threat of climate change, sustainable development, and efforts to eradicate poverty

Urgent changes needed to cut risk of extreme heat, drought, floods and poverty, says IPCC

the guardian.com - by Jonathan Watts - October 8, 2018

The world’s leading climate scientists have warned there is only a dozen years for global warming to be kept to a maximum of 1.5C, beyond which even half a degree will significantly worsen the risks of drought, floods, extreme heat and poverty for hundreds of millions of people.

The authors of the landmark report by the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) released on Monday say urgent and unprecedented changes are needed to reach the target, which they say is affordable and feasible although it lies at the most ambitious end of the Paris agreement pledge to keep temperatures between 1.5C and 2C.

New solar flow battery with a 14.1 percent efficiency. Photo: David Tenenbaum, UW-Madison

CLICK HERE - STUDY - Chem - 14.1% Efficient Monolithically Integrated Solar Flow Battery

theverge.com - by Angela Chen - September 27, 2018

Solar energy is becoming more and more popular as prices drop, yet a home powered by the Sun isn’t free from the grid because solar panels don’t store energy for later. Now, researchers have refined a device that can both harvest and store solar energy, and they hope it will one day bring electricity to rural and underdeveloped areas.

The problem of energy storage has led to many creative solutions, like giant batteries. For a paper published today in the journal Chem, scientists trying to improve the solar cells themselves developed an integrated battery that works in three different ways.

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