seen from Malaysia
seen from United States
seen from United States
seen from Netherlands
seen from Bangladesh
seen from China
seen from Italy
seen from China
seen from United States
seen from Chile
seen from Italy
seen from Russia
seen from United States
seen from United States
seen from Italy
seen from Iraq
seen from Pakistan
seen from Uzbekistan
seen from United States
seen from United States
Unused Civil War concept art for Wakanda, by Andrew Leung. Captivating and solarpunk as all hell, especially in contrast to some of the meh-modernism we’re seeing coming out from the Black Panther concept art.
(via Storming the Ivory Tower)
Global environmental change necessitates increased predictive capacity; for forests, recent advances in technology provide the response to this challenge. “Next-generation” remote-sensing instruments can measure forest biogeochemistry and structural change, and individual-based models can predict the fates of vast numbers of simulated trees, all growing and competing according to their ecological attributes in altered environments across large areas. Application of these models at continental scales is now feasible using current computing power. The results obtained from individual-based models are testable against remotely sensed data, and so can be used to predict changes in forests at plot, landscape, and regional scales. This model–data comparison allows the detailed prediction, observation, and testing of forest ecosystem changes at very large scales and under novel environmental conditions, a capability that is greatly needed in this time of potentially massive ecological change.
Here is the cybernetic meadow you requested: scientists are trying to figure out new methods of modeling and sensing forests, the better to help them survive climate change.
If Trump turns off the satellites, California will launch its own damn satellite. We’re going to collect that data.
Governor Jerry Brown, addressing the American Geophysical Union, December 14th, 2016
A further area of particularly rapid progress, also one dealt with at length by Chris Goodall, is energy storage. Most projects here focus on improvements in batteries and also the scaling up of battery factories, giving economies of scale unheard of even a decade ago. Some of the new approaches that are currently in an early state of development have huge potential in the longer term – and with luck that might translate to within a decade.
One such approach is to use surplus power from wind-turbine arrays – on windy nights, for example – to split water into its constituents of hydrogen and oxygen, then utilise micro-organisms that can combine the hydrogen with carbon from carbon dioxide to produce a range of hydrocarbons which can be stored for producing energy when the sun doesn’t shine and the wind doesn’t blow.
If these and other systems can be developed – and the outlook is positive – then this meets head on the argument against most renewable-energy sources: that they are intermittent, whereas demand is constant.
--Paul Rogers
(Photo by Richard Walker, Elan Valley, Wales)
Thin panels installed on existing roads could be used to power streetlights and homes within five years.
Read this, and just for a moment let your imagination wander. There’s plenty more fight to come, but reality is very much keeping pace with science fiction.
Imagine something futuristic, like something on the scale of an operating system or an encyclopedia, with the same degree of complexity, the number of human hours and the amount of knowledge that goes into it, and something else on that scale, like a Canary Wharf tower, and imagine it being built the way that we built Wikipedia. I have a plot of dirt, and I’m going to invite any stranger who has structural steel, trunking, rebar, cement, gravel, diggers, architectural drawings, or ideas to come and just muck around for a while. We’ll shout at each other a lot, and we’ll have some false starts. Some bits will come down, some bits will go up, and at the end, we will have not just an office tower, but the greatest office tower ever built, and it will be infinitely reproducible at zero cost. Imagine a space program run like that. Imagine an aviation system run like that. Imagine a state run like that. That’s a futuristic thing, right? That’s a futuristic parable that uses Wikipedia and any Linux project to think about the scale at which we can operate in the absence of hierarchy. It challenges our imaginations to think about the coordination of that much labor without hierarchy.
Cory Doctorow
Nine issues for climate leaders to think about on the journey home.
A detailed look at moving the entirety of society over to renewable energy that starts very policy-wonkish in the here and now, but moves into the science-fictional as we get closer and closer to zero carbon. Also includes Excellent grounding for why localist initiatives are an important part of a solarpunk future.
