Impacts of the 2024 Election on the Fight Against Climate Change
The results of the 2024 election came out two weeks ago, and we saw that the Donald Trump administration is taking power for a second term. Another term with the Trump administration has serious implications on climate efforts and policies.
El Niño and Climate Change: Understanding Colombia's Intensifying Drought Challenges
El Niño events are a series of complex weather patterns in the Pacific ocean between Oceania and South America that result in irregular meteorological phenomena. Although El Niño events recur, they do not follow a specific cycle. These events lead to increased humidity, a higher frequency of intense hurricanes, and disrupted precipitation patterns. Due to its proximity to South America, the effects of El Niño are strongly felt in many South American countries, including Colombia. In particular, El Niño has contributed to persistent droughts across Colombia.
Synthetic Leaves Generate Electricity from Wind and Rain
The World Health Organization projects that climate change will cause over 250,000 additional deaths annually (Climate Change, 2023). Consequently, the issue tends to draw attention from people across the United States who demand immediate action. The most popular forms of renewable energy are solar power, wind power, and hydropower. Unfortunately, all of these methods of generating electricity have downsides, including cost and harm to the environment.
Geoengineering and Sulfur Dioxide: A potential coolant for our atmosphere?
Everyone has heard of brutal volcanic eruptions, such as Tambora or Krakatau. These volcanos, intuitively, release several kinds of harmful and dangerous chemicals into the atmosphere such as sulfur dioxide and acids. Recently, there was an underwater volcanic eruption of the Hunga Tonga–Hunga Ha’apai volcano in Tonga, a country in Oceania. This eruption released an unprecedented amount of water vapor into the atmosphere with the force of a nuclear weapon. The eruption happened over two uninhabited islands and it resulted in harms and benefits to the atmosphere in terms of climate change.
The Dark Side of Carbon Capture
Carbon capture, sequestration, and removal are all vital technologies we need to utilize to achieve net-zero carbon emissions. The difference between these technologies is that removal removes carbon that has already been emitted into the atmosphere, sequestration attempts to take carbon away at its source, such as from flue stacks, and carbon capture essentially encapsulates all of these different technologies.
The woman who really discovered the greenhouse effect
We spend a lot of time talking about the present and the future whether that’s at school, at work, in the stock market, or even when talking about the climate crisis. We are going to take a quick trip to the past and focus on who is to be credited for discovering the greenhouse effect.
Gigablue: Phytoplankton based carbon sequestration
One of the challenges in fixing the climate is not only making the shift to green technology, but also sequestering all the carbon dioxide that’s already in the atmosphere.
Green Hydrogen: benefits, obstacles, importance
Hydrogen is the most abundant chemical in the world. It turns out that hydrogen is actually a really effective fuel, however, it does not exist alone in nature. Hydrogen is a diatomic element meaning that it always appears as H2, among other elements in compounds and molecules, such as our favorite, water.
How do hybrid vehicles work? How beneficial are they for our all-electric future?
We all have heard about hybrid electric vehicles, but there has been a question that has been wandering my mind for weeks: how exactly do they work? How do you choose when to run it on gasoline versus electricity?
Carbon capturing fruits, modeled after the human lung
Carbon capture, removal, and storage technology is a relatively new technology, but it has been around for some time with little success. Essentially what the technology does is it sucks carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere and either converts it…
Fast Fashion: Quick Waste
You’ve probably heard the words consumerism before. It means the culture that we have developed to give consumers what they want and when they want it. However, it is said that consumerism is a really big contributor to climate change. The reason being that a lot of big…
Are EVs Greener than ICEs?
Many people think that electric vehicles (EVs) are 100% sustainable and environmentally-friendly. While research has shown that EVs produce on-net less emissions than internal combustion engines (ICEs), they still are not at their full green capacity.
What role does AI play in solving climate change?
Machine learning. Quantum computing. ChatGPT. We all have heard about these AI platforms and they clearly have so much potential. All the way from school essays to healthcare problems to encryption, AI will soon be the “new Google”.
Bioplastic: The Future Plastic?
Plastic is a huge problem in our world. In total, throughout their lifecycle, plastics are responsible for 3.4% of global greenhouse gas emissions. In the 1960s, plastic began to gain popularity as the ubiquitous material, which was cheap, versatile, and easy to make. However, now we know the truth.
How can Walt Disney world be more sustainable?
Walt Disney is a feature in many of our childhood memories. We all know about Mickey Mouse and Disney princesses. Watching Disney’s magic film productions led us to ask our parents to take us to Disney World. I recently visited Walt Disney World for the second time, and this time I viewed it from a climate standpoint and have some quick and easy sustainable recommendations.
The Future Should Be Nuclear.
Climate change. These two words immediately cause eyes to gloss over. Well, here is the truth: Climate change is not just a headline in newspapers; it is happening right now and it is happening fast. Because of the energy sources we are using right now, like fossil fuels, we are releasing chemicals (greenhouse gasses)