Silicon Carbide (SiC) Is A Key Building Block For Next-generation Devices. It Takes Features From Diamonds,

HiPOD (2 May 2018): Clays in a Grouping of Small Craters 

  — 282 km above the surface. Black and white is 5 km across; enhanced color is less than 1 km.

NASA/JPL/University of Arizona

Exxon Confirmed Global Warming Consensus in 1982 with In-House Climate Models

Steve Knisely was an intern at Exxon Research and Engineering in the summer of 1979 when a vice president asked him to analyze how global warming might affect fuel use. "I think this guy was looking for validation that the greenhouse effect should spur some investment in alternative energy that's not bad for the environment," Knisely, now 58 and a partner in a management consulting company, recalled in a recent interview. Knisely projected that unless fossil fuel use was constrained, there would be "noticeable temperature changes" and 400 parts per million of carbon dioxide (CO2) in the air by 2010, up from about 280 ppm before the Industrial Revolution. The summer intern's predictions turned out to be very close to the mark.

This is the third in a series of articles published by InsideClimate News disclosing that ExxonMobil was conducting an extensive internal research project internally to analyze the effect of carbon emissions on atmospheric CO2, global warming and climate change. It’s clear from the material described and presented in the article that ExxonMobil, within its science group and at the highest management levels, was aware of the risk of climate change from carbon emissions. Notwithstanding that knowledge, ExxonMobil decided to protect its business model and go down the denial path.

What’s amazing is how accurate the ExxonMobil scientists were in their projections of the concentrations of CO2 in the atmosphere and the effect those levels of concentration would have on global warming.

Here’s an example of an internal memorandum. An explanation of this memo, including more on its contents, the context in which it was written and delivered and the identities of the author and addressee, are included in the article.

A timeline of ExxonMobil’s research and external outreach efforts on the climate change issue. If the text is too tiny or blurred, a better copy, which you can enlarge, is included in the article.

Apple yanks drone-strike-tracking app from App Store

The app, Metadata+, was created by Josh Begley, research editor for The Intercept; Begley changed its name from Drones+ after it was rejected as “objectionable” by Apple five times.

At the time, an Apple employee told Begley that the app would never be approved if it focused on US drone strikes, but would have a chance if he “broadened his topic” because “there are certain concepts that we decide not to move forward with, and this is one.”

Metadata+ never the word “drone” – this may be how it snuck past the Apple censorship board. But seven months later, Apple has unceremoniously yanked it.

Apple: a giant corporation that gets to decide which journalism you’re allowed to access with apps on your device, and whose lawyersrepeatedly told the US government that changing this situation should be a felony punishable by five years in prison and a $500,000 fine.

Ecosystems work great – they just fail miserably. The important part of a benevolent dictatorship isn’t the “benevolent” – it’s the “dictatorship.”

Read the rest

One of the World’s Most Powerful Central Bankers Is Worried About Climate Change

The governor of the Bank of England warns about risks to global financial stability.

A new speech about climate change is fascinating both for what it says and who said it.

Mark Carney, the governor of the Bank of England, declared that the warming climate presented major risks for the global economy and global financial stability, and that businesses and regulators needed to move more quickly to try to contain the potential economic damage even though it may seem uncertain and far off.

His warning, delivered in a 4,400-word speech with ample footnotes on Tuesday, is the latest example of how climate change has moved beyond theoretical scientific debates to the start of practical planning for safeguarding the economy and business.

“We don’t need an army of actuaries to tell us that the catastrophic impacts of climate change will be felt beyond the traditional horizons of most actors — imposing a cost on future generations that the current generation has no direct incentive to fix,” he said. “In other words, once climate change becomes a defining issue for financial stability, it may already be too late.”

Mr. Carney calls the economic challenges around climate the “tragedy of the horizon,” in contrast to the long-noted economic phenomenon of the “tragedy of the commons.” That is, the costs of a warming climate come on a time scale and with an uncertainty that go beyond the usual multiyear business cycle, beyond political cycles of presidential and parliamentary elections, or as he puts it, beyond “the horizon of technocratic authorities, like central banks, who are bound by their mandates.”

It might seem odd for a central banker to be talking about a long-term problem of global climate, all the more so when the global economy is looking rather shaky. After all, the job is typically to worry about price inflation and the banking system.

But if you back up and define a central banker’s job a little more broadly — to worrying about the economy and the stability of the financial system writ large — it quickly becomes clear why climate matters.

Good read from NYTimes.

Check in: The Tokyo hotel where guests can curl up with 1,700 good books

Book and Bed, a new Tokyo hotel, has created the sort of space that is impossible to leave. It is a cheap and cheerful dorm with a difference: guests’ bunk beds are hidden behind library shelves filled with hundreds of books in Japanese and English. | Read more

No amount of multivitamins, yoga, meditation, sweaty exercise, superfoods or extreme time management, as brilliant as all these things can be, is going to save us from the effects of too much work. This is not something we can adapt to. Not something we need to adjust the rest of our lives around. It is not possible and it’s unethical to pretend otherwise. Like a low-flying plane, the insidious culture of overwork is deafening and the only way we can really feel better is if we can find a way to make it stop.

No, it’s not you: why ‘wellness’ isn’t the answer to overwork (via brutereason)

Greenland is Melting Away

This river is one of a network of thousands at the front line of climate change.

 By NYTimes: Coral Davenport, Josh Haner, Larry Buchanan and Derek Watkins                                    

On the Greenland Ice Sheet — The midnight sun still gleamed at 1 a.m. across the brilliant expanse of the Greenland ice sheet. Brandon Overstreet, a doctoral candidate in hydrology at the University of Wyoming, picked his way across the frozen landscape, clipped his climbing harness to an anchor in the ice and crept toward the edge of a river that rushed downstream toward an enormous sinkhole.

If he fell in, “the death rate is 100 percent,” said Mr. Overstreet’s friend and fellow researcher, Lincoln Pitcher.

But Mr. Overstreet’s task, to collect critical data from the river, is essential to understanding one of the most consequential impacts of global warming. The scientific data he and a team of six other researchers collect here could yield groundbreaking information on the rate at which the melting of the Greenland ice sheet, one of the biggest and fastest-melting chunks of ice on Earth, will drive up sea levels in the coming decades. The full melting of Greenland’s ice sheet could increase sea levels by about 20 feet. [bold/itals mine]

“We scientists love to sit at our computers and use climate models to make those predictions,” said Laurence C. Smith, head of the geography department at the University of California, Los Angeles, and the leader of the team that worked in Greenland this summer. “But to really know what’s happening, that kind of understanding can only come about through empirical measurements in the field.”

For years, scientists have studied the impact of the planet’s warming on the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets. But while researchers have satellite images to track the icebergs that break off, and have created models to simulate the thawing, they have little on-the-ground information and so have trouble predicting precisely how fast sea levels will rise.

Dire report by three excellent Times journalists covering a team of researchers camped out on the icesheets of Greenland. The conclusion is that glaciers and land ice are melting at rates far higher than scientists anticipated, or that climate models have shown. This means that sea levels are rising faster than projected, and many coastal communities are in grave danger.

The economic impacts are incalculable.

10 reasons why cities hold the key to climate change and global health 

(cross-posted on the MIT Center for Civic Media blog)

A few years ago when I was working on the Civic Commons project with Code for America and OpenPlans, I did a presentation at Living Cities called “Cities that Work Like the Web” which discussed using open standards and…

Hunting for Organic Molecules on Mars

Did Mars once have life? To help answer that question, an international team of scientists created an incredibly powerful miniature chemistry laboratory, set to ride on the next Mars rover.

The instrument, called the Mars Organic Molecule Analyzer Mass Spectrometer (MOMA-MS), will form a key part of the ExoMars Rover, a joint mission between the European Space Agency (ESA) and Roscosmos. A mass spectrometer is crucial to send to Mars because it reveals the elements that can be found there. A Martian mass spectrometer takes a sample, typically of powdered rock, and distinguishes the different elements in the sample based on their mass.

After 8 years of designing, building, and testing, NASA scientists and engineers from NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center said goodbye to their tiny chemistry lab and shipped it to Italy in a big pink box. Building a tiny instrument capable of conducting chemical analysis is difficult in any setting, but designing one that has to launch on a huge rocket, fly through the vacuum of space, and then operate on a planet with entirely different pressure and temperature systems? That’s herculean. And once on Mars, MOMA has a very important job to do. NASA Goddard Center Director Chris Scolese said, “This is the first intended life-detecting instrument that we have sent to Mars since Viking.”

The MOMA instrument will be capable of detecting a wide variety of organic molecules. Organic compounds are commonly associated with life, although they can be created by non-biological processes as well. Organic molecules contain carbon and hydrogen, and can include oxygen, nitrogen, and other elements.

To find these molecules on Mars, the MOMA team had to take instruments that would normally occupy a couple of workbenches in a chemistry lab and shrink them down to roughly the size of a toaster oven so they would be practical to install on a rover.

MOMA-MS, the mass spectrometer on the ExoMars rover, will build on the accomplishments from the Sample Analysis at Mars (SAM), an instrument suite on the Curiosity rover that includes a mass spectrometer. SAM collects and analyzes samples from just below the surface of Mars while ExoMars will be the first to explore deep beneath the surface, with a drill capable of taking samples from as deep as two meters (over six feet). This is important because Mars’s thin atmosphere and spotty magnetic field offer little protection from space radiation, which can gradually destroy organic molecules exposed on the surface. However, Martian sediment is an effective shield, and the team expects to find greater abundances of organic molecules in samples from beneath the surface.

On completion of the instrument, MOMA Project Scientist Will Brinckerhoff praised his colleagues, telling them, “You have had the right balance of skepticism, optimism, and ambition. Seeing this come together has made me want to do my best.”

In addition to the launch of the ESA and Roscosmos ExoMars Rover, in 2020, NASA plans to launch the Mars 2020 Rover, to search for signs of past microbial life. We are all looking forward to seeing what these two missions will find when they arrive on our neighboring planet.

Learn more about MOMA HERE.

Learn more about ExoMars HERE.

Follow @NASASolarSystem on Twitter for more about our missions to other planets.

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