nuclear-news

There’s no rational reason at all to doubt that the globe is heating up. In fact, those born after 1985 haven’t experienced a single year of average temperatures. For them, even the brief two year period following Pinatubo’s massive injection of shading aerosols into the stratosphere was but a minor less-hot spell. One that failed to, for even a short while, return the world to more normal temperatures.

(The global temperature record from 1880 through 2014 as provided by NOAA. As is plainly visible, the temperature increase since 1880 has been extraordinary — particularly during the years following 1975 as greenhouse gas buildup rates rapidly climbed to unprecedented levels. Image source: NOAA Global Analysis.)

Those living in this time of increasingly rarefied and weirded weather may as well be named, not by the colloquially meaningless terms generations Y and Z, but by the more contextually appropriate monikers — generation…

Certain people have perhaps been thinking, after the immense shock of the attacks of November 13, that the only thing that matters from now on, as a response to terrorism, is a security reinforcement, and of course, a reexamination of our priorities– since ISIS has declared war on us all.
However, people forget that the war that’s been declared on us is also psychological. The report released by ISIS to claim the massacre in Paris uses all the tools of conditioning and psychological manipulation: a turning of tables, presenting the Islamic State as a victim instead of an assassin, while promising to continue to spread terror, and criticizing policy makers for creating internal divisions– a criticism intended to bring about self-doubt.
Our first response should be to understand this psychological tactic, so that we don’t allow them to win. No, we do not have to be guilt-tripped into fighting these…

World:

¶ The task of electrifying Sarawak is no mean feat. Hampered by a lack of infrastructure, Malaysia’s largest state by land mass remains without constant supply of power in rural areas with a reported 33% of the state remaining off the grid. Now, one village will have a solar microgrid, the first of its kind in the state. [The Malaysian Insider]

Solar panels being installed in Sarawak. Malaysian Insider pic by Renai Mattu.

¶ New fast-charging lithium-in batteries were recently unveiled by workers from Watt Lab, an arm of the Central Research Institute at Huawei Technology Corporation, at the recent 56th Battery Symposium in Japan. The newly unveiled batteries reportedly charge ~10 times faster than conventional lithium-ion batteries do. [CleanTechnica]

¶ Indian solar could scale up substantially to be a significant energy source by 2025, with the market penetration of solar power expected to be 5.7%…