Are We Becoming too Dumb to Solve the Big Problems such as Climate Change?

Climate State
Published on Oct 29, 2018

Recent studies suggest that various pollution sources contribute to the decline of cognitive abilities, IQ scores, human intelligence. Could this trend potentially affect our collective efforts to combat climate change? Support Climate State on Patreon http://patreon.com/ClimateState Sources Video narrated by Cormac Bren – Sound and Music by Epic Stock Media http://epicstockmedia.com –
Additional video material via Pixabay.com, NASA, and Unsplash.com IQ scores are falling and have been for decades, new study finds https://edition.cnn.com/2018/06/13/he…
High CO2 Levels Inside & Out: Double Whammy? https://www.yaleclimateconnections.or…
Air pollution causes ‘huge’ reduction in intelligence, study reveals https://www.theguardian.com/environme…
Xi Chen discusses the study he co-authored on air pollution and intelligence https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-W3bC…
If we were really smart, we’d get over our fixation on the IQ test https://www.theguardian.com/commentis…
Are we getting smarter or dumber, or both? Frank Salter interviews Michael A. Woodley https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Taw5O…
Teaser image via https://unsplash.com/photos/XhMSz5I1kn8 Photo by Alex Iby on Unsplash

Can We Build a Giant Wall to Stop Sea Level Rise?

Climate StatePublished on Oct 30, 2018

Is unavoidable sea level rise an engineering problem, do we have the capabilities for a technological fix? John C. Moore from the Arctic Centre of the University of Lapland presents these ideas in his October 2018 talk, “Stopping the flood – Can we engineer ice sheets and save the homes of a billion people?” Support Climate State on Patreon (Including exclusive Patreon Content Access) http://patreon.com/ClimateState

Open lecture of Research Professor John C. Moore from the Arctic Centre on how we could slow sea-level rise by stabilizing the ice sheets. The lecture took place on United Nations Day on 24th October 2018 in Rovaniemi, Finland. Sea level rise will happen even if we stop using fossil fuels in the next few decades. Globally they are expected to rise by a metre this century costing tens of billions euro per year in coastal protection and forcing relocation of hundreds of millions of people and loss of many wetland ecosystems. Much of this rise is unavoidable even by cooling the climate because of ice sheet instabilities especially in Antarctica. The research, led by John C. Moore, show that we could stabilize the ice sheets by modifying the way they slide over their beds, or by increasing the buttressing that resists them as they float across the Antarctic coastline. It is not a substitute for reducing greenhouse gas emission, rather a potential solution for one symptom of warming, and one which will not work indefinitely.
Original version source https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qrkzB…
Marine ice sheet instability https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marine_…
Jakobshavn Glacier https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jakobsh…
West Antarctic Ice Sheet https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/West_An…

Egypt now owns largest Solar Power Plant in the World!

Climate State
Published on Oct 30, 2018

Egypt is “entering the world of solar energy” after it inaugurated the largest solar power plant in the world early this year. the superpower plant was built in the city of Aswan, southern Egypt. It began supplying the national grid last December. Worlds largest solar Park Egypt Benban Solar Park https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benban_… The plant consists of 200,000 solar panels and 780 sun trackers which allow the panels to move and face the sun throughout the day. It generates up to 1.8 gigawatts of power, which is enough to service 20,000 households. Abaza reiterated that this is the largest solar power plant in the world, noting that his country is heading towards more investment in this kind of power as part of its plans for sustainable development. He also said that solar power energy is better than oil because it is renewable, stressing that the “green economy” is a mechanism to achieve sustainable development. https://www.middleeastmonitor.com/201…

Fracking Water Use Explodes | Climate Denial Crock of the Week

Inside Climate News:

As the fracking boom matures, the drilling industry’s use of water and other fluids to produce oil and natural gas has grown dramatically in the past several years, outstripping the growth of the fossil fuels it produces.

A new study published Wednesday in the peer-reviewed journal Science Advances says the trend—a greater environmental toll than previously described—results from recent changes in drilling practices as drillers compete to make new wells more productive. For example, well operators have increased the length of the horizontal portion of wells drilled through shale rock where rich reserves of oil and gas are locked up.

They also have significantly increased the amount of water, sand and other materials they pump into the wells to hydraulically fracture the rock and thus release more hydrocarbons trapped within the shale.

The amount of water used per well in fracking jumped by as much as 770 percent, or nearly 9-fold, between 2011 and 2016, the study says. Even more dramatically, wastewater production in each well’s first year increased up to 15-fold over the same years.

“This is changing the paradigm in terms of what we thought about the water use,” Avner Vengosh, a geochemist at Duke University and a co-author of the study, said. “It’s a different ball game.”

Monika Freyman, a water specialist at the green business advocacy group Ceres, said that in many arid counties such as those in southern Texas, freshwater use for fracking is reaching or exceeding water use for people, agriculture and other industries combined.

“I think some regions are starting to reach those tipping points where they really have to make some pretty tough decisions on how they actually allocate these resources,” she said.

…(read more).

See related:

• Oil & Water + Agriculture = ?
• Local & ‘Transboundary’ Water Stress on the ‘Blue Planet’