Greenhouse Mending

Climate Jui-Jitsu The Jui-Jitsu school of martial arts has many techniques; however, Jui-Jitsu is most noted for its throws and trips achieved by yielding. When an opponent pushes forward, the Jui-Jitsu fighter yields to the direction of the attack and then turns the resulting momentum with a trip or a throw. The stronger the thrust of the opponent, the harder the fall for that opponent. A similar philosophy might be applied even more so to an attack of excessive (at least to us) global warming. Seriously hotter temperatures would open new physical ways to respond, and clearly visible major changes would cause people to more readily support radical countermeasures. In the last century and a half, the world has only seen increased carbon dioxide in the atmosphere by about a third (0.03 to 0.04 of one-percent) and slight warming of about 1 degree Celsius. These two changes have actually increased crop yields. More carbon dioxide increases the photosynthetic efficiency of ...

A week ago, I had just finished my first day of Craig Duswalt’s Rock Your Life Conference in Frisco, Texas. (You can just call it Dallas if you’re not local.) Besides being a conference for entrepreneurs, the event had a strong motivational bent.  One of the first speakers was actor Glenn Morshower from 24, Transformers, Ozark, and other productions. But that day, he had his philosopher’s hat on. He gave us a new word, pronoia. Pronoia is a state of mind that is the opposite of paranoia. Whereas a person suffering from paranoia feels that persons or entities are conspiring against them, a person experiencing pronoia feels that the world around them conspires to do them good. Morshower declared that, indeed, the Universe does conspire to give us good and give it abundantly. He cautioned that we consider carefully what we ask for because the Universe is most likely going to give it to us.  That’s all true. A species small than the apex predators — “Lions and tigers and...

  For the more distant future, University of California – Riverside researchers have found a way to bypass the sunlight for photosynthesis and synthesize food with chemical processing—chemosynthesis.   This science-fictionish concept is still only a distant and far-future possibility, but it has tremendous possibilities.  The technology uses a two-step process.   First, an electrocatalytic process converts carbon dioxide (CO 2 ), electricity, and water (H 2 O) into acetate (vinegar attached to some anion).   Food-producing organisms (plants or fungi) then consume acetate to grow without the need for light. Even better this chemosynthesis process might be 18 times the conversion efficiency of the 1% in photosynthesis. The researchers involved were able to pursue the potential food production because they developed a more efficient process for electrocatylyzing acetate from water and carbon dioxide.   When the non-light chemical bio-energy input can be d...

  There is a surprisingly new addition to air conditioning from nanotechnology, radiative cooling.   Radiative-cooling panels pointing straight up into the sky can tap a vast freely available heat sink only slightly above absolute zero. The radiative panels emit more energy in infrared (heat waves) than they absorb in visible. Their emission frequency band is optimized to be in the band that best penetrate the atmosphere so that energy can dissipate out into space.   On clear nights, heat radiates even more strongly out to the cold of outer space.   Researchers at the University of California Berkeley are developing even more exotic roof coatings that radiatively cool in hot weather and absorb light for heat in cold weather.   Such variable cooling/absorbing roof coatings could theoretically reduce American electrical use by 10%. Radiative cooling will not replace air conditioning, but it can reduce the needed size and energy use of air conditioners ne...