Are we, as the IET, declaring a climate emergency?
It's really that simple a topic, should we be adding our professional voice to the growing number of countries and organisations declaring such an event, to bring better awareness of the threat of the climate crisis and to encourage more discussion in addressing it!
If someone makes a new battery discovery tomorrow that changes everything
I feel that just about every combination of elements and their salts will have been tried by now. Doubtless lithium ion and even lead acid batteries will be refined further, but even one order of magnitude of increased capacity seems unlikely.
If every property in UK had a battery (and inverter), how big would they need to be; and would there be enough raw materials to make them?
More people need more food, meat, houses, hot water, cars all of which need fuel.
The planet has many different types of fuels but nearly all concentrated fuels are hydrocarbons and emit CO2.
The planets answer is to defrost the tundra and icecaps so more vegetation can absorb the CO2
Gods very sensible solution and one we must live with..
This is my understanding too.
The recent world population boom is most probably due to global warming and human CO2 both of which have increased in the last 300 years since the little ice age.
The planet and humans thrive in our current climate and set to increase further.
As we know from ice core and sediment samples the past has been much warmer than today with CO2 in the thousands of parts per million. The current 423PPM is great for us. Also, its known that we are coming to the end of our current interglacial period, when things start to get cold humans will struggle, crops will fail and the world population will shrink.
The IPCC models fail to predict anything useful with there model runs failing to match observations. Indeed they can't even tell what the temperature will be in 10 days time.
Not necessarily no. Consider Power Electronics, we'd been using silicon devices for decades before Silicon Carbide came around as a potential replacement and it actually started becoming more commercially viable.
Before I left working in a power electronics department I was aware this was being brought forward as a replacement to current silicon based IGBT/Thyristor modules, which are directly used in this case in wind turbine converter modules.
battery wise, you're thinking of it the wrong way. Think of it from a recycling point of view, if every bad segment of an EV battery was repaired seperately and transitioned to home storage rather than EV, or heck, using your EV as the storage device as V2G V2H trials have been establishing - it's not the creation of something new it's using what's already there.
This has already been debunked.
While there has been an increase in the amount of CO2 being absorbed by plantlife, it's offset by the increase in global temperatures which are decimating the very same plants.
"A new study by scientists at Stanford University, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, tested whether hotter temperatures and higher carbon dioxide levels that we’ll see post-2050 will benefit the kinds of plants that live in California grasslands. They found that carbon dioxide at higher levels than today (400 ppm) did not significantly change plant growth, while higher temperatures had a negative effect."
Their position on sustainability and climate change points towards a potential acceptance to declare that though.
Our Sustainability and Climate Change Position - The IET
How are engineers meant to push towards things that sort the climate out if the organisation they're a part of hasn't declared that there is an issue?
It's well known now that institutions, councils and governments worldwide are declaring a climate emergency.
Why?
Because the more 'places', 'groups' etc. that do so raise the profile of the issue and encourage a more open mindset in working together collectively in solving it.
Consider the comments regarding activism. XR Engineers, XR Scientists etc. are literally people who exist in professional institutions often time with professional memberships who are declaring this is an issue and looking for those who will work with them to address things.
Well there is an awful lot of funding available if you join the Green path.
That really says it all.
Bare in mind that China holds 95% of the lithium mines. So apart from funding slave labour and a communistic state while they build hundreds of coal fired generators.
I heard a programme about the guy who developed the lithium battery and he said that this was as far as anyone could go with battery technology. Maybe one day an alternative may be discovered.
The Grauniad is a left wing green path follower. You'll get nothing sensible from them other than the usual scaremongering.
Did you read the actual 2016 study and see how limited it was?
Meanwhile in the real world cereal production is increasing steadily in spite of increasing temperatures and CO2 levels:
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