A Special Place for Blog Lovers with a Touch of Science!

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Clouds and climate change

New computational approaches help researchers include cloud physics in global models

We hear a lot about how climate change will change the land, sea and ice. But how will it affect clouds? "Low clouds could dry up and shrink like the ice sheets," said Michael Pritchard, an Earth system scientist at the University of California, Irvine. "Or they could thicken and become more reflective."

These two scenarios would result in very different future climates. That, Pritchard says, is part of the problem. "If you ask two different climate models what the future will be like when we add a lot more CO₂, you get two very different answers. And the reason for that is the way clouds are included in climate models."

Credit: Drone flying over Hong Kong cityscape; Gettyimages

Uncrewed aircraft responding to fire and medical emergencies will be used to save lives - if digitalised air-traffic control can help them navigate safely in the skies over Europe.

In a city in the future, a fire breaks out in a skyscraper. An alarm is triggered and a swarm of drones swoops in, surrounds the building and uses antennas to locate people inside, enabling firefighters to go straight to the stricken individuals. Just in the nick of time – no deaths are recorded.

Elsewhere in the city, drones fly back and forth delivering tissue samples from hospitals to specialist labs for analysis, while another rushes a defibrillator to someone who has suffered a suspected cardiac arrest on a football pitch. The patient lives, with the saved minutes proving critical.

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22^nd International Multidisciplinary Scientific GeoConference SGEM 2022 (2 - 11 July 2022) will take place at Maritim Paradise Blue, Congress centre in the picturesque region of Albena Resort & Spa, Bulgaria. Once again, we will unite scientists from all around the world and thereby create a platform for international scientific discourse and cooperation in the area of GeoSciences.

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1. "Did the genome of our cave-dwelling predecessors contain a set or sets of genes which enable modern man to compose music of infinite complexity and write novels with profound meaning? …It looks as though the early Homo was already provided with the intellectual potential which was in great excess of what was needed to cope with the environment of his time."

-Susumu Ohno (geneticist, 1928-2000)

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The race is on to reuse waste as energy in the most effective way possible. Combined heat and power is an old idea for saving fuel with a new imperative to slash emissions. Innovative furnaces based on biofuel systems will generate heat and power from waste materials with near-complete efficiency and very low emissions.

The old mantra of waste not, want not, goes for energy as well as food. The less energy we waste, the lower will be our carbon emissions.