Eine aufsehenerregende Idee aus dem Vereinigten Königreich. Dort wird überlegt Energie aus stillgelegten gefluteten Kohleschächten zu gewinnen. Die Temperatur in solchen Schächten kann bis zu 20 Grad betragen und das sehr konstant. Mittels Wärmepumpen ließe sich damit Heizwärme gewinnen. Das wäre ganzjährig möglich und wäre komplett wetterunabhängig. Der Guardian:
“The water is heated by geothermal energy, the heat from the Earth’s core, and in some places can reach temperatures of about 20C. Dan Mallin Martin, a hydrogeologist with the Coal Authority, the public body responsible for managing the effects of past coalmining, says this naturally heated water can be brought up through shafts or boreholes and passed through a heat exchanger – extracting the heat from the water. “Typically we can take out around five to 8C, which doesn’t sound like a lot, but if you pass that to a heat pump, which is effectively a fridge in reverse, it boosts the temperature to something we can use – something like 60 or 70 degrees centigrade – that can go into people’s homes, people’s businesses, into hospitals, heat networks, many different end users. […]” The process has no net water consumption – that is it does not take out more than it uses – as the mine water is put back into the flooded mines and recycled.”
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Missbrauchen Grundversorger bei Energie ihre Stellung? Die Tagesschau:
“Welche Versorger bis heute höhere Preise in der Ersatz- als in der Grundversorgung verlangen, haben vor kurzem Kollegen von Schröder exklusiv für das ARD-Politikmagazin Report Mainz ausgewertet. Die Ergebnisse der Verbraucherzentrale Rheinland-Pfalz legen nahe, dass viele Grundversorger die gesunkenen Energiepreise noch nicht an ihre Kunden in der Ersatzversorgung weitergegeben haben. Laut der Auswertung verlangen aktuell immer noch 32 Prozent aller Grundversorger in Deutschland höhere Preise in der Ersatz- als in der Grundversorgung, sowohl beim Gas als auch beim Strom. Stichtag der Erhebung ist jeweils der 15. Januar 2024 gewesen. Die Folgen können extrem teuer sein: Für einen Musterhaushalt von drei bis vier Personen haben die Verbraucherschützer bei etlichen Anbietern einen Preisunterschied zwischen Ersatz- und Grundversorgung.”
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China nimmt ein neuartiges Solarkraftwerk in Betrieb. Es soll auch nach Einbruch der Dunkelheit Strom liefern können. Focus:
“Am oberen Ende des Turms nimmt der Receiver die konzentrierte Sonnenenergie auf. Er wird von einer Flüssigkeit, einem Gemisch aus Salzen, durchflossen. Diese Salze sind für ihre Fähigkeit bekannt, hohe Temperaturen zu erreichen und Wärme über längere Zeiträume zu speichern. Die erhitzte Flüssigkeit wird dann genutzt, um Dampf zu erzeugen. Dieser Dampf treibt eine Turbine an, ähnlich wie in traditionellen Kohle- oder Kernkraftwerken. Die Turbine ist mit einem Generator verbunden, der die mechanische Energie in elektrische Energie umwandelt – also Strom erzeugt. Ein großer Vorteil von Solarturmkraftwerken ist die Möglichkeit, Wärmeenergie in thermischen Speichern zu lagern. Die gespeicherte Wärme kann genutzt werden, um auch nach Sonnenuntergang oder bei Bewölkung Strom zu erzeugen, was die Zuverlässigkeit und Verfügbarkeit der Energieerzeugung erhöht. Das Projekt zeichnet sich durch eine duale Struktur aus, die einen 110 MW Solar-Kraftwerksturm und ein 640 MW Photovoltaik-System (PV) kombiniert. Dieser hybride Ansatz maximiert nicht nur die Effizienz der Solarenergiegewinnung, sondern gewährleistet auch eine stetige und zuverlässige Stromversorgung.”
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Die perfekte Klima-Zeit. Roger Pielke Jr. über die Zeit von 1850-1900, die heute als Basislinie für das Klima gilt. In Sachen Opfer von Wetter und Klima war es alles andere als gut, wie Pielke auf seinem Blog ausführt.
“Beyond the massive impacts associated with the 1877/1878 El Niño, there were also many other extreme events with impacts well beyond those of recent times, such as the Great Midwest Wildfires of 1871 which killed as many as 2,400 people, the 1872 Baltic Sea flood, a 1875 midwestern U.S. locust swam of an estimated 12.5 trillion locusts, the 1878 China typhoon that killed as many as 100,000 people, and the U.S. experienced 6 landfalling major hurricanes in the 1870s, compared to just 3 in the 2010s.8
This cursory overview of various events of the 1870s indicates that notion that the period 1850 to 1900 was somehow safer or less extreme in terms of climate extremes and impacts is simply false. If the weather gods offered me the opportunity to replay over the next decade the weather and climate of the1870s, instead of the uncertain future before us, I’d take the uncertain future for sure. The 1870s were one of the most extreme climatic decades in modern human history.
Of course, the impacts of weather and climate are much more a result of our collective adaptive capacity, including technology, policy and overall societal wealth. Whatever the weather and climate future holds in store for us, we are collectively much better prepared to deal with it than we were 150 years ago.
A careful look at history tells us that the global average surface temperature is not a control knob that we can set to a preferred value to “prevent suffering.””
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Jan Berndorff, Paul Scherrer Institute:
How trees influence cloud formation
As part of the international CLOUD project at the nuclear research center CERN, researchers at PSI have identified so-called sesquiterpenes—gaseous hydrocarbons that are released by plants—as being a major factor in cloud formation. This finding could reduce uncertainties in climate models and help make more accurate predictions. The study has now been published in the journal Science Advances.
[…]
The mystery of cloud formation
Particularly the way in which cloud cover will develop in the future remains largely nebulous for the time being. However, this is a key factor in predicting the climate because more clouds reflect more solar radiation, thus cooling the earth’s surface.
To form the droplets that make up clouds, water vapor needs condensation nuclei, solid or liquid particles on which to condense. These are provided by a wide variety of aerosols, tiny solid or liquid particles between 0.1 and 10 micrometers in diameter, which are produced and released into the air both by nature and by human activity. These particles can include salt from the sea, sand from the desert, pollutants from industry and traffic, or soot particles from fires, for example.
However, about half the condensation nuclei are actually formed in the air when different gaseous molecules combine and turn into solids, a phenomenon that experts call „nucleation“ or „new particle formation“ (NPF). To begin with, such particles are tiny, barely larger than a few nanometers, but over time they can grow through the condensation of gaseous molecules and then serve as condensation nuclei.
Ganzen Artikel auf phys.org lesen.
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Duration and ice thickness of a Late Holocene outlet glacier advance near Narsarsuaq, southern Greenland
Greenland Ice Sheet (GrIS) outlet glaciers are currently losing mass, leading to sea level rise. Reconstructions of past outlet glacier behavior through the Holocene help us better understand how they respond to climate change. Kiattuut Sermiat, a southern Greenland outlet glacier near Narsarsuaq, is known to have experienced an unusually large Late Holocene advance that culminated at ∼1600 cal yr BP and exceeded the glacier’s Little Ice Age extent. We report sedimentary records from two lakes at slightly different elevations in an upland valley adjacent to Kiattuut Sermiat. These reveal when the outlet glacier’s surface elevation was higher than during the Little Ice Age and constrain the associated outlet glacier surface elevation. We use bulk sediment geochemistry, magnetic susceptibility, color, texture, and the presence of aquatic plant macrofossils to distinguish between till, glaciolacustrine sediments, and organic lake sediments. Our 14C results above basal till recording regional deglaciation skew slightly old due to a reservoir effect but are generally consistent with regional deglaciation occurring ∼ 11 000 cal yr BP. Neoglacial advance of Kiattuut Sermiat is recorded by deposition of glaciolacustrine sediments in the lower-elevation lake, which we infer was subsumed by an ice-dammed lake that formed along the glacier’s margin just after ∼ 3900 cal yr BP. This timing is consistent with several other glacial records in Greenland showing neoglacial cooling driving advance between ∼ 4500–3000 cal yr BP. Given that glaciolacustrine sediments were deposited only in the lower-elevation lake, combined with glacial geomorphological evidence in the valley containing these lakes, we estimate the former ice margin’s elevation to have been ∼ 670 m a.s.l., compared with ∼ 420 m a.s.l. today. The ice-dammed lake persisted until the glacier surface fell below this elevation at ∼ 1600 cal yr BP. The retreat timing contrasts with overall evidence for cooling and glacier advance in the region at that time, so we infer that Kiattuut Sermiat’s retreat may have resulted from reduced snowfall amounts and/or local glaciological complexity. High sensitivity to precipitation changes could also explain the relatively limited Little Ice Age advance of Kiattuut Sermiat compared with the earlier neoglacial advance.