Well, the emergence from hibernation took some time (it’s a long story). So since I’ve been away, let’s firstly start by depressing everyone with four charts from the excellent and scary NASA’s “Vital Signs of the Planet”:
Not forgetting this:
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Plus this:
And of course this:
Also for Arctic sea ice extent, below is how we have started the current melt season (hint: not good), from National Snow and Ice Data Center):
So am I totally depressed (it seems an occupational hazard for anyone paying attention to climate change these days, see here)? While the above charts do not fill me with joy, I will finish this new post (after a very long time away) with something a bit more upbeat: batteries.
Now in prior posts, I was a little bit skeptical about the battery revolution. But that was in 2015 and it is now 2018.
The evangelist of the great battery nirvana is Tony Seba, who sees EVs plus battery storage as the next great disruption: a disruption so massive that it will eclipse the computer and compete with the coming of the railways and the spread of electrification.
Being a grumpy old Brit, I was somewhat cynical about Tony and his PowerPoint battery slide deck. But, to repeat, that was 2015 and this is 2018. And after doing a deep dive into battery material miners over the last few month, I feel I may have been a tiny bit wrong and Tony a tiny bit right. Quite how wrong I was and how right he is I have yet to fathom. So for my return to blogging, we are going to go ‘full on’ battery nerd for a while. So it is Battery Banter Redux folks.
For those of you who think this is all tech ‘blah’, I actually disagree. In fact, I think batteries hold the key as to whether we can constrain climate change to around two degree of warming (give or take a bit), or the dystopian three and up. So I will finish this post with what I think is a very upbeat chart from a company called Nemaska Lithium. And in future posts I am going to explain why I don’t think this chart is barking mad (in fact it could be conservative) and why, if true, it will change everything.
Risk and Well-Being 