Climate impacts of critical mineral supply chain bottlenecks for electric vehicle deployment.

New tailpipe emissions standards aim to increase electric vehicle (EV) sales in the United States. Here, we analyze the associated critical mineral supply chain constraints and enumerate the climate consequences of these constraints. Our work yields five findings.

Carbon opportunity cost increases carbon footprint advantage of grain-finished beef.

Beef production accounts for the largest share of global livestock greenhouse gas emissions and is an important target for climate mitigation efforts. Most life-cycle assessments comparing the carbon footprint of beef production systems have been limited to production emissions. None also consider potential carbon sequestration due to grazing and alternate uses of land used for production.

Climate warming increases extreme daily wildfire growth risk in California.

California has experienced enhanced extreme wildfire behaviour in recent years, leading to substantial loss of life and property. Some portion of the change in wildfire behaviour is attributable to anthropogenic climate warming, but formally quantifying this contribution is difficult because of numerous confounding factors and because wildfires are below the grid scale of global climate models. Here we use machine learning to quantify empirical relationships between temperature (as well as the influence of temperature on aridity) and the risk of extreme daily wildfire growth (>10,000 acres) in California and find that the influence of temperature on the risk is primarily mediated through its influence on fuel moisture.

Land-use intensity of electricity production and tomorrow's energy landscape.

The global energy system has a relatively small land footprint at present, comprising just 0.4% of ice-free land. This pales in comparison to agricultural land use- 30-38% of ice-free land-yet future low-carbon energy systems that shift to more extensive technologies could dramatically alter landscapes around the globe.

Genetically modified crops support climate change mitigation.

Genetically modified (GM) crops can help reduce agricultural greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. In addition to possible decreases in production emissions, GM yield gains also mitigate land-use change and related emissions. Wider adoption of already-existing GM crops in Europe could result in a reduction equivalent to 7.

The Chinese Carbon-Neutral Goal: Challenges and Prospects.

On 22 September 2020, within the backdrop of the COVID-19 global pandemic, China announced its climate goal for peak carbon emissions before 2030 and to reach carbon neutrality before 2060. This carbon-neutral goal is generally considered to cover all anthropogenic greenhouse gases. The planning effort is now in full swing in China, but the pathway to decarbonization is unclear.

An Assessment of Earth's Climate Sensitivity Using Multiple Lines of Evidence.

We assess evidence relevant to Earth's equilibrium climate sensitivity per doubling of atmospheric CO, characterized by an effective sensitivity . This evidence includes feedback process understanding, the historical climate record, and the paleoclimate record. An value lower than 2 K is difficult to reconcile with any of the three lines of evidence.

Capillary Rise of Nanostructured Microwicks.

Capillarity refers to the driving force to propel liquid through small gaps in the absence of external forces, and hence enhanced capillary force has been pursued for various applications. In this study, flower like ZnO nanostructures are successfully deposited to enhance capillarity of microwick structures that are specially designed to augment boiling heat transfer performance. Microreactor-assisted nanomaterial deposition, MAND, is employed with a flow cell to deposit the ZnO nanostructures on a large sized microwick (4.

Forecasting future global food demand: A systematic review and meta-analysis of model complexity.

Predicting future food demand is a critical step for formulating the agricultural, economic and conservation policies required to feed over 9 billion people by 2050 while doing minimal harm to the environment. However, published future food demand estimates range substantially, making it difficult to determine optimal policies. Here we present a systematic review of the food demand literature-including a meta-analysis of papers reporting average global food demand predictions-and test the effect of model complexity on predictions.

Reducing the environmental impact of global diets.

It is well established in the literature that reducing the amount of meat in global diets would reduce the environmental impacts of food production. However, changes to livestock production systems also have significant potential to reduce environmental impacts from meat production, and yet are not as widely discussed in the literature. Modern, intensive livestock systems, especially for beef, offer substantially lower land requirements and greenhouse gas emissions per kilogram of meat than traditional, extensive ones.

Large-scale Generation of Patterned Bubble Arrays on Printed Bi-functional Boiling Surfaces.

Bubble nucleation control, growth and departure dynamics is important in understanding boiling phenomena and enhancing nucleate boiling heat transfer performance. We report a novel bi-functional heterogeneous surface structure that is capable of tuning bubble nucleation, growth and departure dynamics. For the fabrication of the surface, hydrophobic polymer dot arrays are first printed on a substrate, followed by hydrophilic ZnO nanostructure deposition via microreactor-assisted nanomaterial deposition (MAND) processing.

The ecological footprint remains a misleading metric of global sustainability.

In this Formal Comment, Blomqvist et al. note that the main points of their Perspective, “Does the Shoe Fit? Real versus Imagined Ecological Footprints,” are robust to Rees and Wackernagel's response, “The Shoe Fits, but the Footprint is Larger than Earth.”

Does the shoe fit? Real versus imagined ecological footprints.

The global overshoot indicated by Ecological Footprint calculations consists entirely of an unreliable reframing of human carbon emissions and none of the five other land-use categories—cropland, grazing land, built-up land, fishing grounds, and forests. The Ecological Footprint is therefore “so misleading as to preclude its use in any serious science or policy context,” argue Blomqvist et al. in this perspective.