Month: April 2023

Reuters:

Chinese battery giant CATL (300750.SZ) on Wednesday unveiled a condensed matter battery that it said could supply enough energy to power electric passenger aircraft for civil aviation use.

The battery, a type of semi-solid state product with condensed electrolyte and new anode and separator materials, will have an energy density of 500 Watt hours per kilogramme (Wh/kg), according to Wu Kai, CATL’s Scientist in Chief, speaking to reporters at the Shanghai auto show.

The battery, a type of semi-solid state product with condensed electrolyte and new anode and separator materials, will have an energy density of 500 Watt hours per kilogramme (Wh/kg), according to Wu Kai, CATL’s Scientist in Chief, speaking to reporters at the Shanghai auto show.

Chinese electric vehicle (EV) maker Nio (9866.HK) is planning to power its ET7 cars with a semi-solid state battery with 360 Wh/kg energy density developed by Beijing Welion New Energy Technology.

CATL on Tuesday also announced its targets to achieve carbon neutrality with all its battery making plants by 2025, and across its battery value chain by 2035.

The commitments are important for CATL to meet increasing standards and regulations for the carbon footprint of its batteries in Europe and the United States as CATL expands into those markets.

Robin Zeng, CATL Chairman, said last year that it is essential to reduce carbons emissions in the batteries, which account for nearly 40% of all carbon emissions produced in the cycle of battery electric vehicles.

Zeng said his company had ramped up efforts since 2019 to analyse and seek solutions for carbon reduction in the battery-making industry, saying battery makers in China, Japan and South Korea have had a significant carbon footprint.

Teslarati:

In the world of batteries, one brand has come to dominate nearly all others, CATL. The Chinese battery producer has quickly become the world’s largest battery producer and supplies some of the largest brands in the world, including some of the most prominent automakers. Now, the company is attempting to expand into the aviation sector as it has unveiled its most energy-dense battery ever, designed for use in electric planes.

CATL announced the new electric plane “Condensed Battery,” at the Shanghai auto show yesterday, and it has captured significant attention for its incredible energy density. According to CATL, the new battery will have an energy density of 500Wh/Kg, a number which is roughly double the Tesla 4680 at ~270Wh/Kg. Moreover, this project isn’t some concept that will never see the production line. CATL states the new battery will be entering mass production later this year.

Continue reading “Could New Battery Power Planes?”

They expected to get an ice core.
They got slush and a watery aquifer.

Videos worth sharing.

Washington Post:

Tech companies have grown secretive about what they feed the AI. So The Washington Post set out to analyze one of these data sets to fully reveal the types of proprietary, personal, and often offensive websites that go into an AI’s training data.

To look inside this black box, we analyzed Google’s C4 data set, a massive snapshot of the contents of 15 million websites that have been used to instruct some high-profile English-language AIs, called large language models, including Google’s T5 and Facebook’s LLaMA. (OpenAI does not disclose what datasets it uses to train the models backing its popular chatbot, ChatGPT)

The Post worked with researchers at the Allen Institute for AI on this investigation and categorized the websites using data from Similarweb, a web analytics company. About a third of the websites could not be categorized, mostly because they no longer appear on the internet. Those are not shown.

The data set was dominated by websites from industries including journalism, entertainment, software development, medicine and content creation, helping to explain why these fields may be threatened by the new wave of artificial intelligence. The three biggest sites were patents.google.com No. 1, which contains text from patents issued around the world; wikipedia.org No. 2, the free online encyclopedia; and scribd.com No. 3, a subscription-only digital library. Also high on the list: b-ok.org No. 190, a notorious market for pirated e-books that has since been seized by the U.S. Justice Department. At least 27 other sites identified by the U.S. government as markets for piracy and counterfeits were present in the data set.

Some top sites seemed arbitrary, like wowhead.com No. 181, a World of Warcraft player forum; thriveglobal.com No. 175, a product for beating burnout founded by Arianna Huffington; and at least 10 sites that sell dumpsters, including dumpsteroid.com No. 183, that no longer appear accessible.

Others raised significant privacy concerns. Two sites in the top 100, coloradovoters.info No. 40 and flvoters.com No. 73, had privately hosted copies of state voter registration databases. Though voter data is public, the models could use this personal information in unknown ways.

Business and industrial websites made up the biggest category (16 percent of categorized tokens), led by fool.com No. 13, which provides investment advice. Not far behind were kickstarter.com No. 25, which lets users crowdfund for creative projects, and further down the list, patreon.com No. 2,398, which helps creators collect monthly fees from subscribers for exclusive content.

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Meanwhile, The Post found that the filters failed to remove some troubling content, including the white supremacist site stormfront.org No. 27,505, the anti-trans site kiwifarms.net No. 378,986, and 4chan.org No. 4,339,889, the anonymous message board known for organizing targeted harassment campaigns against individuals.

We also found threepercentpatriots.com No. 8,788,836, a downed site espousing an anti-government ideology shared by people charged in connection with the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol. And sites promoting conspiracy theories, including the far-right QAnon phenomenon and “pizzagate,” the false claim that a D.C. pizza joint was a front for pedophiles, were also present.
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Long article with much more info at the link.

Sharp eyed water researcher Peter Gleick, looking thru the interactive graphic, turned this up. Among the “Community” websites included in the training was wattsupwiththat, the notorious purveyor of climate denial misinformation.

Below, long time climate activist and friend of the blog, entrepeneur Rob Honeycutt engaged ChatGPT in a conversation about possible impacts of defective training.

Continue reading “Climate Denial, Hate Sites Used to Train AI. What Could Go Wrong?”

Above, good ABC News report points out the dilemmas poor communities face near California’s Salton Sea.

Below, my video from last year fleshes out the potential for Lithium deposits nearby.

Another example of how climate extremes create unexpected knock-on effects, in this case, transportation back-ups rippled out into a wave of panic buying of gasoline by worried drivers, creating 1970’s style gas lines across South Florida.

The PBS Weathered series on climate is top notch, and does a good job here pushing back against the tired-but-newly-revived-on-twisted-twitter climate crock that goes “There’s been no warming since (insert last global record heat year)”.
We’ve discussed this way too many times, but here’s an update to share with the confused.

Helpful graph shows exactly how it’s done.

My friend John Abraham PdD, an expert on ocean heating, underlined recently that the most accurate measure of planetary heating is ocean heat content, which we can now measure with some accuracy, has been much more clear and definitive than the surface temp record, which bounces around every time the ocean burps, hiccups, or farts.

While most of us see the effects of the #ClimateCrisis on land, our oceans are the "critical part of the climate", says Dr John Abraham @UofStThomasMN. "Global warming really is ocean warming." And our oceans are warming at an alarming rate – with devastating impacts. pic.twitter.com/NmNyZemrmy

— Michael Holmes (@holmescnn) January 15, 2023

Below, I treated this in some detail several years ago, showing how climate denier Senator Ted Cruz was misusing the data.

Continue reading “PBS: For the Nth Time, No, The Planet is Not Cooling”

Huge disappointment that we did not get to see attorneys grilling Rupert Murcoch, Tucker Carlson, and Sean Hannity about their documented pattern of lies following the 2020 election, and January 6 insurrection.
Still hope that another, larger, voting machine company, Smartmatic, that also has a suit pending, may yet proceed with that. There are also shareholder suits yet to be heard. Above, Brian Stelter, a long time Fox critic, on the settlement.

No surprise to readers here that Fox News has been revealed to be exactly what we already knew it was – a sewer of lies, misinformation and fossil fuel propaganda. It’s also, sadly, no surprise that Fox’s business model, – that a sizable segment of the population want a channel that will reliably lie to them, is spot on.

Misinformer of the Year: Tucker Carlson https://t.co/EAhMQoK1XH pic.twitter.com/8ZHuiyMEhA

— Media Matters (@mmfa) December 19, 2022

Public Citizen:

Climate denial claims dominated 86% of climate change segments on Fox News this year, according to a new Public Citizen analysis.

In 2018, myriad extreme weather events wreaked havoc across the globe, yet dangerous climate denial still persists in our political institutions, funded by Big Polluters and fed to large parts of the populace by right-wing media, further contributing to ongoing and deadly inaction.

A review of Fox News programs for the first half of 2019 reveals that the network continues to give ample airtime to long-debunked climate myths and fringe deniers. Of Fox’s 247 segments that involved considerable discussion on the issue, 212 (86%) were dismissive of the climate crisis, cast warming and its consequences in doubt or employed fearmongering when discussing climate solutions.

Fox News programs had 10 contributors who commented on climate-related issues at least twice during the six-month period. None of these contributors is a climate scientist and none has appeared on another network. In absolute terms, “Tucker Carlson Tonight” ran the most climate denial segments with 41 or approximately seven per month, followed by “Hannity” with 32 and “The Five” with 29. However, two programs, “Special Report With Bret Baier” and “Fox News @ Night” together accounted for 24 of the 35 segments that were neutral when mentioning climate change or discussion of climate solutions.

I love reposting Fox’s continued reporting on “Global Cooling” which they have claimed, over and over, for more than a decade, is just around the corner.

Continue reading “Settlement Aside, History Will Record Who, and What, Fox News Really Is”

Below, update on a giant chunk of ice shelf, that, having cracked off Thwaites (the so-called “Doomsday”) Glacier in 2002, is finally drifting into the open ocean.
Above, clips from my conversations with glacier scientists for more of an overview.

NASA Earth Observatory:

An enormous iceberg located off the Antarctic coast for more than two decades finally started moving out to sea in late 2022. With the longtime nearshore feature now gone, scientists are waiting to see if the change will affect nearby Thwaites Glacier—one of the largest contributors to global sea level rise from the West Antarctic Ice Sheet.

The iceberg on the move is known as B-22A. Measuring more than 3,000 square kilometers as of March 2023, it is the largest-remaining piece of the Rhode-Island-sized berg that broke from Thwaites Glacier in early 2002. In the decades since being set adrift in the Amundsen Sea, B-22A has stayed relatively close to Thwaites Glacier. It became stuck (grounded) by 2012, and has remained parked in a relatively shallow part of the sea just 100 kilometers (60 miles) from its birthplace; that is, until recently.

In autumn 2022, Iceberg B-22A broke from the seafloor and started to drift northwest. The movement is visible in this animation, made with images from the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) instruments on NASA’s Terra and Aqua satellites. It shows the berg sailing away from the continent between October 24, 2022, and March 26, 2023. During this time, B-22A drifted about 175 kilometers (110 miles). (Thwaites Glacier is located off the top of these images.)

It is uncommon—but not unheard of—for an iceberg to persist for so long. “Twenty-plus years is a long-lived iceberg, generally speaking,” said Christopher Shuman, a University of Maryland, Baltimore County, glaciologist based at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center. Its unmooring is also notable because of what it might mean for the future of Thwaites Glacier. Grounded icebergs play an important role in stabilizing the area’s sea ice, which in turn helps to buttress glacial ice onshore and slow its flow into the sea. While icebergs do not contribute to sea level rise (because they are already floating in the ocean), land ice from glaciers does contribute.