[Mar 13-19’23] Weaponizing AI generated images

Arctic and antarctic sea ice peaks, floatovoltaics, food waste emissions represent 50% of food emissions, fossil think tank uses AI generated image in fake story.

Welcome to this week’s edition of The Weekly Climate 🎉

References: [1], [2], [3], [4] and [5].

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‼️News you can’t miss

Here’s one important scary/bad (🙀), good (😻), interesting (😼) and fossil (💩) news item.

🙀 Arctic and Antarctic sea ice is very low this year, again.

😻 Floatovoltaics has a big potential to power cities around the world

😼 Food waste emissions are on the level of global emissions of US and EU combined

💩 Fossil think tank in Texas uses AI generated image in fake story

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👩‍⚕️ Status: Climate & Science

Let’s look at how we’re doing this week!

[#ice] — This years Arctic sea ice winter peak is the 5th lowest in the past 45 years of recording. And this is what relatively calm Arctic conditions. Antarctic sea ice on the other hand reached it’s lowest for the second year in a row.

[#extremeweather] — A new study has found that climate change is indeed supercharging water related extreme weather events, i.e. droughts and floods.

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📰 The 7 Grand Challenges

⚡️Decarbonize Electricity

Clean electricity is the one do-or-die challenge we must solve.

[#wind] — On March 14 33% of EUs electricity came from wind which also explains why electricity prices dropped even more than usual. In fact the entire week was very windy which is always good for electricity prices. So good that I could, here in Denmark, charge my EV with 3.6€ or about 0.009€/km. Anybody who says renewables are expensive can GTFO.

[#nuclear] — The UK is looking revive investments in nuclear power by looking into whether it can be labelled as sustainable. And in short: No. It uses a finite resource, uranium, so it’s by definition not sustainable. But is it green? That’s a different matter and of course it’s much better than fossil fuel counterparts, but whether or not UK can do without it is an entirely different and much more heated debate.

[#floatovoltaics] — A new study has found that floating solar panels, i.e. solar panels mounted on rafts and deployed on local water reservoirs can power more than 6200 major cites in 128 countries around the world. All these cities would need to do is to cover 30% of their nearby water reservoirs with solar panels. So called “floatovoltaics” is still produces less than 1% of total electricity produced.

🛁 Clean non-electrifiable activities

Some activities we do today can’t be electrified, these must be cleaned some other way.

[#flying] — A review of global companies plans to reduce corporate flying reveals that 85% of the biggest global companies doesn’t have any plan to reduce emission from corporate flying.

🌳 Protect and grow nature

Nature is our ally, we must protect it and help it help us.

[#seaweed] — Here’s a detailed look at the potential wonders of seaweed when it comes to climate change, from replacing plastic to carbon neutral cattle feed, but it also looks at the many unknowns about using seaweed like this in a large scale.