MsBelle

perscientiamlibertas:

Terry Hash pauses after searching in the cracked soil for cotton seeds in his 175-acre cotton field in Garfield on Thursday, August 18, 2011. Hash planted 800 acres of cotton, corn, wheat and sorghum, and almost all of it was destroyed by the drought. Despite having insurance, Hash said he worries about how he is going to pay his farm loans and borrow more money for next season’s crops. ‘Lots of sleepless nights,’ Hash said. ‘You lay in bed wondering what the hell you’re going to do.’ Image: Jay Janner

• “Well it’s hotter ‘n blazes and all the long faces / there’ll be no oasis for a dry local grazier” – Tom Waits
• “What we’re seeing is stark evidence that the gradual temperature increase is not the important story related to climate change; it’s the rapid regional changes and increased frequency of extreme weather that global warming is causing. As the Arctic warms at twice the global rate, we expect an increased probability of extreme weather events across the temperate latitudes of the northern hemisphere, where billions of people live.” - Jennifer Francis
• [W]hen we learn that in the collapse now underway resides the seeds of a different style of agriculture that does not carry all the historic baggage that burdens us, we may, with good justification, rejoice.” – Albert Bates

As the toxic trappings of industrial civilization crumble around us, agriculture is set to regain its place at the forefront of our daily American lives. …And won’t we be surprised to find out that it barely works anymore! Worsening climate destabilization, combined with the legacy of industrial ecosystem degradation and the loss of crucial pre-industrial agricultural genetics and knowledge, will severely challenge our ability to feed ourselves in the decades ahead. So perhaps it’s time we re-think our modern food-acquisition strategies in the face of the massive changes bearing down on us. …And I mean REALLY re-think them.

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(via wespeakfortheearth)

perscientiamlibertas:

New analysis points the way to optimizing efficiency of an integrated system for harvesting sunlight to make storable fuel.

Image: MIT

Bringing the concept of an “artificial leaf” closer to reality, a team of researchers at MIT has published a detailed analysis of all the factors that could limit the efficiency of such a system. The new analysis lays out a roadmap for a research program to improve the efficiency of these systems, and could quickly lead to the production of a practical, inexpensive and commercially viable prototype.

Such a system would use sunlight to produce a storable fuel, such as hydrogen, instead of electricity for immediate use. This fuel could then be used on demand to generate electricity through a fuel cell or other device. This process would liberate solar energy for use when the sun isn’t shining, and open up a host of potential new applications.

The new work is described in a paper this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences by associate professor of mechanical engineering Tonio Buonassisi, former MIT professor Daniel Nocera (now at Harvard University), MIT postdoc Mark Winkler (now at IBM) and former MIT graduate student Casandra Cox (now at Harvard). It follows up on 2011 research that produced a “proof of concept” of an artificial leaf — a small device that, when placed in a container of water and exposed to sunlight, would produce bubbles of hydrogen and oxygen.

The device combines two technologies: a standard silicon solar cell, which converts sunlight into electricity, and chemical catalysts applied to each side of the cell. Together, these would create an electrochemical device that uses an electric current to split atoms of hydrogen and oxygen from the water molecules surrounding them.

The goal is to produce an inexpensive, self-contained system that could be built from abundant materials. Nocera has long advocated such devices as a means of bringing electricity to billions of people, mostly in the developing world, who now have little or no access to it.

“What’s significant is that this paper really describes all this technology that is known, and what to expect if we put it all together,” Cox says. “It points out all the challenges, and then you can experimentally address each challenge separately.”

Winkler adds that this is a “pretty robust analysis that looked at what’s the best you could do with market-ready technology.”

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Further reading:

• Modeling integrated photovoltaic–electrochemical devices using steady-state equivalent circuits

(via wespeakfortheearth)