Month: August 2021

Park Williams PhD: Fingerprints of a Megadrought

Park Williams is Professor of Geography at UCLA, and is lead author of an influential study of Western US paleoclimate showing a repetitive occurrence of long periods of aridity – termed Megadroughts.

The period we’re in now already qualifies as a medium strength Megadrought, the only variable is how long it continues. This drought is also super charged by more than a 1 degree C rise in global temperatures in the last century.

Longest mega drought pattern in the last 1200 years lasted a century. Just sayin..

The African Roots of Vaccination in America

I was today years old when I learned this, thanks to several articles in The Washington Post.

Washington Post:

Around 3 a.m. one November morning in 1721, a bomb crashed through the window of Cotton Mather’s Boston home. It had been hurled with such force that the fuse fell off, and it failed to detonate. Attached to the explosive was a warning note: “Cotton Mather, you dog, dam you: I’ll inoculate you with this; with a Pox to you.’’

The would-be bomber was not angry over politics, or love, or a business deal gone wrong, but rather over Mather’s attempts to save Boston residents from one of the deadliest threats of the era: smallpox. The same Puritan minister who played a role in fueling the execution of 14 women and six men during the Salem witch trials was now calling for the use of an experimental new way to prevent disease. Mather supported inoculation, a precursor to vaccination.

Nearly 300 years later, doctors are working to develop a vaccine for coronavirus — an infection far less lethal than smallpox — as people around the world clamor for treatment.

In the 18th century, however, Boston’s colonists met Mather’s inoculation proposal with a terror that bordered on hysteria. They didn’t understand how inoculation worked, and the notion of choosing to infect yourself with a deadly disease struck them — perhaps understandably — as outrageous. Fear of science, suspicion of the ruling elite, and a belief that medicine might meddle with God’s will — these ideas guided the angry mobs in Boston in 1721 and linger today in some form in anti-vaccine movements.

Ironically, today —

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Could This Carbon Capture Idea Catch On?

Rooftop cooling towers already exist as part of building HVAC systems. Can they have a dual purpose to capture CO2?

Fast Company:

On top of a nondescript industrial building in the Bay Area city of San Leandro, a company is pioneering a new way to fight climate change: Hacking a cooling tower—the equipment used for air conditioning in large buildings—to help pull CO2 from the atmosphere. So-called direct air capture machines are already in use elsewhere. But they’re expensive to build and run. And by combining the technology with an existing cooling tower, the startup, called Noya, is working to make it more affordable so it can grow faster.

Cofounder and CEO Josh Santos, previously a project manager for electric vehicles at Tesla and Harley Davidson, started working on the technology with his roommate after conversations about climate change. “We just asked ourselves one day, the climate problem is caused by there being too much CO2 in the sky, so… can we just pull it out, and process it out of the sky? We started looking into this and trying to understand why people weren’t doing this at scale. And what we found was that we’ve had the technology to capture CO2 from the sky since the 1930s. But we haven’t been able to do it cheaply enough, and we haven’t been able to do it quickly.”

Direct air capture plants are typically massive and expensive. One under development in Texas, designed to eventually capture a million metric tons of CO2 a year, likely will cost hundreds of millions of dollars to build. Santos and cofounder Daniel Cavero, his former roommate, started thinking about how to reduce the cost. They eventually realized that cooling towers could be part of the solution. The devices already use fans to pull in outside air, just like typical direct air capture machines.

“Cooling towers are basically big boxes that have a fan on top of them that pulls in air from the ambient environment,” says Santos. Inside, the devices use water as part of the process of cooling. The company adds chemicals to the water, which allows it to soak up carbon from the air in the system. Since the fans, pumps, and other parts of the cooling tower are already running, combining the processes helps save energy. The CO2 is stored onsite, and additional equipment pressurizes the gas so it can be taken elsewhere and sold.

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