More good news than bad
27th February 2019 – Brian’s Musings – More good news than bad
As you read, you should find more positive news about the future of the world than usual. However, remember these are only snapshots and you need to stand back and mull on where all these observations fit into your own personal view of where the world is headed.
People Change:
Although the United Nations continues to predict that the world population will grow to above eleven billion people, other forecasters claim that fast reducing fertility rates in many countries will result in the population peaking at less than nine billion later this century. China, the world’s largest country, has a fertility rate of 1.5, India is at a replacement rate of 2.1 and Brazil has a fertility rate of 1.8. Meanwhile, people are living longer…
During January 2019, more than 70 people in the Philippines died of measles, a phenomenon attributed to resistance to vaccination. Italy could be next! The WHO warns that reported measles cases in 2018 were up 50% on 2017.
Climate Change
According to Carbon Brief, 2018 was the warmest year on record for ocean heat content, which increased markedly between 2017 and 2018; was the fourth warmest year on record for surface temperature; was the sixth warmest year in the lower troposphere; greenhouse gas concentrations reached record levels for CO2, methane, and nitrous oxide; sea ice was well below the long-term average at both poles for most of the year; and the summer Arctic sea ice minimum was the sixth lowest since records began in the late 1970s.
According to a new report in Science, at least a third of Asia’s mountainous ice fields will melt due to climate change, according to a landmark report, with serious consequences for the almost 2 billion people who source water from the glaciers.
January 2019 was Australia’s hottest year on record. While Townsville received record rains, further south drought prevails with more than a million fish dying in the Murray-Darling river basin. In January 2019, Melbourne received 9.7 percent of normal rainfall. Adelaide 0 percent. Perth 43.1 percent. Hobart 0.8 percent. Sydney 47.7 percent. Brisbane 17.9 percent. Some three percent of Tasmania has been destroyed in forest fires while across the Tasman New Zealand’s biggest fire is raging. And, while we’re in that part of the world, it turns out that Tasmania’s pristine mountain lakes are actually mong the most heavily polluted on the planet thanks to emissions from base metal smelters since the late 1800’s.
According to Carbon Brief, the UK’s CO2 emissions peaked in the year 1973 and have declined by around 38% since 1990, faster than any other major developed country.
A New South Wales Land and Environment Court judge has blocked a new Hunter Valley coal mine, citing urgent need to cut fossil fuel emissions and avoid "dire consequences" of climate change.
A new research report in Science Direct calculates that more than 40 per cent of insect species are declining and a third are endangered. The total mass of insects is falling by 2.5 per cent a year, according to the best data available, suggesting they could vanish within a century.
With countries and cities moving to ban single use plastic – straws, plastic cutlery, bottled water – it continues to surprise me that the same authorities require dog owners to collect their biodegradable pets’ faeces in a plastic bag to be sent to fester in the garbage tip – or be surreptitiously tossed into the nearest bush!
Low Cost Renewable Energy
The Global Wind Energy Council announced that 51.3 GW of new wind capacity was added in 2018, made up of 46.8GW of onshore wind and 4.49GW of offshore wind. Global commissioning of onshore wind turbines declined 3 percent in 2018, partly due to a slowdown in India and Germany. Developers commissioned a little over 45 GW of onshore wind turbines globally in 2018 compared with 47 GW a year earlier. Growth is expected to bounce back in 2019, with a 32 percent jump to 60 GW.
The world’s large offshore wind farm, the1.2GW Hornsea Project One project located off the coast of the UK near Hull is in production fifteen months after start of construction.
New solar installations in the European Union reached around 8 GW last year, marking a 36% increase on 2017, when the bloc installed 5.9 GW. The wider continent, including Turkey and Russia, also increased the rate of installation, to hit 11 GW, up 20% from the 9.2 GW recorded a year earlier, according to a statement by trade association Solarpower Europe.
Cambodia and Lithuania are the latest countries to install solar farms which float on reservoirs, cutting evaporation at the same time as generating electricity.
McKinsey & Company predicts that global primary energy demand will plateau after 2035 when renewables will account for more than fifty per cent of global electricity generation. Electricity consumption will double until 2050, by which time renewables will account for more than 73 per cent of supply. Natural gas will increase its share of global energy demand, the only fossil fuel which grows its share, but it too will begin to lose ground as it plateaus after 2035. Coal demand will fall 40% by 2050.
Natural gas and renewable energy generated 53 percent of U.S. electricity in 2018, up from 35 percent in 2009. Coal dropped from 44 per cent to 27 per cent. Wind and solar capacity has more than quadrupled since 2009
Bloomberg New Energy Finance reported that America installed 11.7 GWdc of new solar capacity in 2018 despite the tariffs on solar imports, an increase of 15% over earlier estimates. 292 MW of batteries were also installed. Despite new solar and wind growth, and coal closures, however, emissions still rose from 2017 levels on the back on increased gas use.
Australia’s large scale solar generation trebled in 2018 with renewables providing more than 20% national electricity output. The Australian National University concluded that Australia is on track to reach 50% renewable electricity in 2024 and 100% in 2032 at a net cost “of approximately zero”. This despite a national government that is devoted to coal.
It’s not clear whether China’s slowing of Australian coal imports is a political ploy or the next stage in reducing the use of coal.
Price falls for solar modules and inverters will drive a rise in solar power capacity installation figures in almost 90 countries this year, according to IHS Market Module and inverter price falls of 32% and 18%, respectively, in the last two years European PV demand will be at its strongest since 2012, with 18 GW of installations expected. Solar modules have become 25% more efficient over the last decade and higher performing technologies, such as monocrystalline cells, are becoming mainstream.
The Indian Cabinet Committee on Economic Affairs has approved a plan for Tamil Nadu to build 9 GW of new PV by 2022. The Indian government approved $US 6.48 billion for rooftop and farmland solar. Germany plans to build 10 GW of new PV by 2022.
Australian renewable energy development company Windlab is developing 16 East African wind energy projects totalling around 1.65 GW of potential capacity.
Mass Data Mining and Storage
Groupe Speciale Mobile Association predicts that 5G networks, which underpin everything from the Internet of things to automated vehicles, will account for 15% of global mobile connections by 2025.
23andMe, which has compiled one of the largest databases of personal DNA information has announced plans to sell access to their data to the highest bidders.
Nature Medicine described how a group of researchers in the United States and China trained an Artificial Intelligence application on medical records from 1.3 million patient visits at a major medical centre in Guangzhou, China. When tested on previously unseen cases, the application could diagnose glandular fever, roseola, influenza, chicken pox and hand-foot-mouth disease with between 90 and 97 per cent accuracy. When tested against 20 doctors, the AI system made more accurate diagnoses than junior medics. It was more than 90 percent accurate at diagnosing asthma; the accuracy of physicians in the study ranged from 80 to 94 percent. In diagnosing gastrointestinal disease, the system was 87 percent accurate, compared with the physicians' accuracy of 82 to 90 percent.
Global credit and debit card spending is forecast to reach US$ 45 trillion a year by 2023.
A hacker demonstrated how they were able to hack into a popular internet-connected LIFX mini white light bulb and extract the owner’s Wi-Fi login and password, as well as other valuable data, in under an hour. The light bulb is controlled by an app on the users’ phone.
Automation Based Unemployment
Tencent Holdings-backed online education firm Yuanfudao has developed an artificial intelligence-powered maths app that can check children’s arithmetic problems through the simple snap of a photo. Based on the image and its internal database, the app automatically checks whether the answers are right or wrong. So far in its first year the app has checked an average of 70 million arithmetic problems per day, saving users around 40,000 hours of time in total.
eMarketer predicts that digital advertising in America will overtake advertising in traditional media for the first time in 2019, with mobile taking two thirds of the digital pot. TV advertising will drop 2.2 per cent and print 17.8 per cent this year.
Autonomous Electric Vehicles
As of early 2019 there are 5.6 million electric vehicles on the road worldwide, a 64 per cent increase from the same time in 2018, and the second year in a row to see unprecedented growth in the zero emissions transport market. 2.2 million electric vehicles were registered worldwide, adding to the previous total of 3.4 million.
Electric vehicles accounted for 1.3 percent of total vehicles sold in the U.S in the 4th quarter of 2017. By the third quarter in 2018, that had nearly doubled to 2.5 percent, then hit 3 percent by the fourth quarter.
Tesla and China’s BYD each sold nearly 250,000 electric vehicles in 2018. Half of the top ten sellers of electric cars were Chinese OEMs.
Looking at a complete range of cost factors in five European countries in owning a VW Golf, researchers found that over four years the battery electric and plug-in hybrid versions are cheaper to own.
Increasing Inequality
Google paid $900 million more in EU fines than income taxes last year.
Forecasts show the richest 1% of the world’s population on target to own two-thirds of all wealth by 2030
More than two million Americans are behind on car loan payments.
India’s politicians are considering the introduction of a universal basic income grant.
South Africa
In line with the structure of my book, I have kept South African developments separate.
Lost in the dismay at load shedding resulting from poor performance of Eskom’s coal fired power stations was the news that Sener and Acciona have inaugurated the 100 MW Kathu Solar Park in South Africa, a plant that combines solar parabolic trough collectors and five hours of storage from a molten salt storage system.
According to the South African Wind Energy Association, South Africa’s renewable power programme has already created about 36,500 jobs and has the potential to create many more.
In 2018, coal exports out of Richards Bay Coal Terminal declined 4% because of lower global demand. Transnet is planning to increase rail capacity to the terminal – why on earth given forecasts of declining demand for coal.
Rain and Huawei plan to build one of the world’s first 5G networks in South Africa by mid 2019.
I hope these comments have given you good for thought as you too sit back and mull our precarious existence in the huge universe – which astronomers now say is expanding much faster than they previously thought.
As you read, you should find more positive news about the future of the world than usual. However, remember these are only snapshots and you need to stand back and mull on where all these observations fit into your own personal view of where the world is headed.
People Change:
Although the United Nations continues to predict that the world population will grow to above eleven billion people, other forecasters claim that fast reducing fertility rates in many countries will result in the population peaking at less than nine billion later this century. China, the world’s largest country, has a fertility rate of 1.5, India is at a replacement rate of 2.1 and Brazil has a fertility rate of 1.8. Meanwhile, people are living longer…
During January 2019, more than 70 people in the Philippines died of measles, a phenomenon attributed to resistance to vaccination. Italy could be next! The WHO warns that reported measles cases in 2018 were up 50% on 2017.
Climate Change
According to Carbon Brief, 2018 was the warmest year on record for ocean heat content, which increased markedly between 2017 and 2018; was the fourth warmest year on record for surface temperature; was the sixth warmest year in the lower troposphere; greenhouse gas concentrations reached record levels for CO2, methane, and nitrous oxide; sea ice was well below the long-term average at both poles for most of the year; and the summer Arctic sea ice minimum was the sixth lowest since records began in the late 1970s.
According to a new report in Science, at least a third of Asia’s mountainous ice fields will melt due to climate change, according to a landmark report, with serious consequences for the almost 2 billion people who source water from the glaciers.
January 2019 was Australia’s hottest year on record. While Townsville received record rains, further south drought prevails with more than a million fish dying in the Murray-Darling river basin. In January 2019, Melbourne received 9.7 percent of normal rainfall. Adelaide 0 percent. Perth 43.1 percent. Hobart 0.8 percent. Sydney 47.7 percent. Brisbane 17.9 percent. Some three percent of Tasmania has been destroyed in forest fires while across the Tasman New Zealand’s biggest fire is raging. And, while we’re in that part of the world, it turns out that Tasmania’s pristine mountain lakes are actually mong the most heavily polluted on the planet thanks to emissions from base metal smelters since the late 1800’s.
According to Carbon Brief, the UK’s CO2 emissions peaked in the year 1973 and have declined by around 38% since 1990, faster than any other major developed country.
A New South Wales Land and Environment Court judge has blocked a new Hunter Valley coal mine, citing urgent need to cut fossil fuel emissions and avoid "dire consequences" of climate change.
A new research report in Science Direct calculates that more than 40 per cent of insect species are declining and a third are endangered. The total mass of insects is falling by 2.5 per cent a year, according to the best data available, suggesting they could vanish within a century.
With countries and cities moving to ban single use plastic – straws, plastic cutlery, bottled water – it continues to surprise me that the same authorities require dog owners to collect their biodegradable pets’ faeces in a plastic bag to be sent to fester in the garbage tip – or be surreptitiously tossed into the nearest bush!
Low Cost Renewable Energy
The Global Wind Energy Council announced that 51.3 GW of new wind capacity was added in 2018, made up of 46.8GW of onshore wind and 4.49GW of offshore wind. Global commissioning of onshore wind turbines declined 3 percent in 2018, partly due to a slowdown in India and Germany. Developers commissioned a little over 45 GW of onshore wind turbines globally in 2018 compared with 47 GW a year earlier. Growth is expected to bounce back in 2019, with a 32 percent jump to 60 GW.
The world’s large offshore wind farm, the1.2GW Hornsea Project One project located off the coast of the UK near Hull is in production fifteen months after start of construction.
New solar installations in the European Union reached around 8 GW last year, marking a 36% increase on 2017, when the bloc installed 5.9 GW. The wider continent, including Turkey and Russia, also increased the rate of installation, to hit 11 GW, up 20% from the 9.2 GW recorded a year earlier, according to a statement by trade association Solarpower Europe.
Cambodia and Lithuania are the latest countries to install solar farms which float on reservoirs, cutting evaporation at the same time as generating electricity.
McKinsey & Company predicts that global primary energy demand will plateau after 2035 when renewables will account for more than fifty per cent of global electricity generation. Electricity consumption will double until 2050, by which time renewables will account for more than 73 per cent of supply. Natural gas will increase its share of global energy demand, the only fossil fuel which grows its share, but it too will begin to lose ground as it plateaus after 2035. Coal demand will fall 40% by 2050.
Natural gas and renewable energy generated 53 percent of U.S. electricity in 2018, up from 35 percent in 2009. Coal dropped from 44 per cent to 27 per cent. Wind and solar capacity has more than quadrupled since 2009
Bloomberg New Energy Finance reported that America installed 11.7 GWdc of new solar capacity in 2018 despite the tariffs on solar imports, an increase of 15% over earlier estimates. 292 MW of batteries were also installed. Despite new solar and wind growth, and coal closures, however, emissions still rose from 2017 levels on the back on increased gas use.
Australia’s large scale solar generation trebled in 2018 with renewables providing more than 20% national electricity output. The Australian National University concluded that Australia is on track to reach 50% renewable electricity in 2024 and 100% in 2032 at a net cost “of approximately zero”. This despite a national government that is devoted to coal.
It’s not clear whether China’s slowing of Australian coal imports is a political ploy or the next stage in reducing the use of coal.
Price falls for solar modules and inverters will drive a rise in solar power capacity installation figures in almost 90 countries this year, according to IHS Market Module and inverter price falls of 32% and 18%, respectively, in the last two years European PV demand will be at its strongest since 2012, with 18 GW of installations expected. Solar modules have become 25% more efficient over the last decade and higher performing technologies, such as monocrystalline cells, are becoming mainstream.
The Indian Cabinet Committee on Economic Affairs has approved a plan for Tamil Nadu to build 9 GW of new PV by 2022. The Indian government approved $US 6.48 billion for rooftop and farmland solar. Germany plans to build 10 GW of new PV by 2022.
Australian renewable energy development company Windlab is developing 16 East African wind energy projects totalling around 1.65 GW of potential capacity.
Mass Data Mining and Storage
Groupe Speciale Mobile Association predicts that 5G networks, which underpin everything from the Internet of things to automated vehicles, will account for 15% of global mobile connections by 2025.
23andMe, which has compiled one of the largest databases of personal DNA information has announced plans to sell access to their data to the highest bidders.
Nature Medicine described how a group of researchers in the United States and China trained an Artificial Intelligence application on medical records from 1.3 million patient visits at a major medical centre in Guangzhou, China. When tested on previously unseen cases, the application could diagnose glandular fever, roseola, influenza, chicken pox and hand-foot-mouth disease with between 90 and 97 per cent accuracy. When tested against 20 doctors, the AI system made more accurate diagnoses than junior medics. It was more than 90 percent accurate at diagnosing asthma; the accuracy of physicians in the study ranged from 80 to 94 percent. In diagnosing gastrointestinal disease, the system was 87 percent accurate, compared with the physicians' accuracy of 82 to 90 percent.
Global credit and debit card spending is forecast to reach US$ 45 trillion a year by 2023.
A hacker demonstrated how they were able to hack into a popular internet-connected LIFX mini white light bulb and extract the owner’s Wi-Fi login and password, as well as other valuable data, in under an hour. The light bulb is controlled by an app on the users’ phone.
Automation Based Unemployment
Tencent Holdings-backed online education firm Yuanfudao has developed an artificial intelligence-powered maths app that can check children’s arithmetic problems through the simple snap of a photo. Based on the image and its internal database, the app automatically checks whether the answers are right or wrong. So far in its first year the app has checked an average of 70 million arithmetic problems per day, saving users around 40,000 hours of time in total.
eMarketer predicts that digital advertising in America will overtake advertising in traditional media for the first time in 2019, with mobile taking two thirds of the digital pot. TV advertising will drop 2.2 per cent and print 17.8 per cent this year.
Autonomous Electric Vehicles
As of early 2019 there are 5.6 million electric vehicles on the road worldwide, a 64 per cent increase from the same time in 2018, and the second year in a row to see unprecedented growth in the zero emissions transport market. 2.2 million electric vehicles were registered worldwide, adding to the previous total of 3.4 million.
Electric vehicles accounted for 1.3 percent of total vehicles sold in the U.S in the 4th quarter of 2017. By the third quarter in 2018, that had nearly doubled to 2.5 percent, then hit 3 percent by the fourth quarter.
Tesla and China’s BYD each sold nearly 250,000 electric vehicles in 2018. Half of the top ten sellers of electric cars were Chinese OEMs.
Looking at a complete range of cost factors in five European countries in owning a VW Golf, researchers found that over four years the battery electric and plug-in hybrid versions are cheaper to own.
Increasing Inequality
Google paid $900 million more in EU fines than income taxes last year.
Forecasts show the richest 1% of the world’s population on target to own two-thirds of all wealth by 2030
More than two million Americans are behind on car loan payments.
India’s politicians are considering the introduction of a universal basic income grant.
South Africa
In line with the structure of my book, I have kept South African developments separate.
Lost in the dismay at load shedding resulting from poor performance of Eskom’s coal fired power stations was the news that Sener and Acciona have inaugurated the 100 MW Kathu Solar Park in South Africa, a plant that combines solar parabolic trough collectors and five hours of storage from a molten salt storage system.
According to the South African Wind Energy Association, South Africa’s renewable power programme has already created about 36,500 jobs and has the potential to create many more.
In 2018, coal exports out of Richards Bay Coal Terminal declined 4% because of lower global demand. Transnet is planning to increase rail capacity to the terminal – why on earth given forecasts of declining demand for coal.
Rain and Huawei plan to build one of the world’s first 5G networks in South Africa by mid 2019.
I hope these comments have given you good for thought as you too sit back and mull our precarious existence in the huge universe – which astronomers now say is expanding much faster than they previously thought.
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