The feels-like temperature in Rio de Janeiro reached a blistering 138.7 degrees Fahrenheit (59.3 degrees Celsius) over the weekend. Taylor Swift postponed her Saturday show after 1,000 fans fainted from the heat and one person died at her concert on Friday. The brutal conditions have also sparked wildfires and raised the risk of power outages.
The Department of Energy announced funding today for nine different heat pump projects across 15 sites in the US. This is the first round of funds stemming from Joe Biden’s authorization of the use of the Defense Production Act in 2022 to boost domestic manufacturing of clean energy technologies including heat pumps. It’s a more environmentally friendly appliance that’s starting to replace traditional heating and air conditioning.
Can New York make heat pumps work for renters? It’ll try with public housing first.
Called GraphCast, Google’s new AI model was able to make 10-day weather forecasts faster and with greater precision than a traditional model. It outperformed the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF) in 90 percent of test cases. How? Google’s model was trained on historical data and leverages deep-learning hardware to make forecasts more efficiently.
[MIT Technology Review]
Americans have a worse opinion of science now than they did before the covid-19 pandemic. It doesn’t come as a surprise after all the disinformation that’s been swirling around since then. Now we can see how much trust in science has eroded in the latest survey by the Pew Research Center. The number of participants who say science “has had a mostly positive impact on society” fell from 73 percent in 2019 to 57 percent today.
The US is the world’s biggest producer of oil and gas. Can Granholm chart a path to a more sustainable future?
