Reuters’ investigation into global heatwaves has led them to conclude that we need a new term for them. They’re calling them heatstorms, and their report is an interesting crossover of journalism and science.
On the subject of heatwaves, studies in Nature Health have calculated that there were 50,000 heat-related deaths in Europe this summer, the hottest on record. Remember this number for the next time a climate denying nostalgist starts telling you about 1976.
Plug-in solar is a democratising force bringing the benefits of solar to people on lower incomes and in rented accomodation. It’s now arrived in the US. The UK is proving a little slower so far, with the panels legal as of September, but few on sale and it looks like next year will be the big one.
How do you get enormous wind turbine blades to site for installation? With a blade lifter, a truck that can carry an 80m blade at a sixty degree angle so that you can drive it – very slowly – through little villages or up mountain roads. The videos of this are majestic and absurd and highly recommended.
Also recommended, the new album While the flood rages, by contemporary classical composer Max Richter. It’s inspired by the Maddaddam trilogy by Margaret Atwood, one of my favourite writers. If you know the novels, you’ll know the sorts of themes involved – the tension between science and nature, competing visions of salvation through technology or a retreat from it, the hubris of biotech versus the earthy rapport between a beekeeper and the hive. Explored musically, it’s an album that playfully contrasts orchestral and electronic sounds, field recordings from nature and the city, and occasional appearances from a wordless choir. The lovely concluding track, Now we can sing, holds back its human voices for the very end, a gentle and hopeful affirmation of humanity on the other side of dystopia. Here’s a review from The Line of Best Fit.
Recent highlights
Let’s paint some roofs white
I’m doing a lot of work on overheating at the moment, and have been visiting schools to help them understand why their buildings get too hot in the summer and what they can do about it. One of the solutions that keeps coming up is painting roofs white. It’s well documented that white roofs reflect…
The science of hope
The Living Planet Report is produced every two years by WWF and the Zoological Society of London, serving as a regular health-check on wild nature. It’s not been positive news, and over the years its headline finding has become increasingly well known: that since 1970, average wildlife populations have declined by 73%. (This is frequently…
Should we put solar panels on railway lines?
A few years ago there was a flurry of internet hype about solar roadways – imagine a world where roads generated power for the streetlights! Or where solar-powered LEDs along the road replaced the white painted lines for no good reason! A lot of money was spent on this across various projects, the biggest being…
