By Robinson Meyer – The year 2018 was not an easy one for planet Earth.
In the United States, carbon emissions leapt back up, making their largest year-over-year increase since the end of the Great Recession. This matched the trend across the globe. According to two major studies, greenhouse-gas emissions worldwide shot up in 2018—accelerating like a “speeding freight train,” as one scientist put it.
Many economists expect carbon emissions to drop somewhat throughout the next few decades. But maybe they won’t. If 2018 is any indication, meekly positive energy trends will not handily reduce emissions, even in developed economies like the United States. It raises a bleak question:
Are we currently on the worst-case scenario for climate change?
When climate scientists want to tell a story about the future of the planet, they use a set of four standard scenarios called “representative concentration pathways,” or RCPs. RCPs are ubiquitous in climate science, appearing in virtually any study that uses climate models to investigate the 21st century. They’ve popped up in research about subjects as disparate as southwestern mega-droughts, future immigration flows to Europe, and poor nighttime sleep quality.
Each RCP is assigned a number that describes how the climate will fare in the year 2100. Generally, a higher RCP number describes a scarier fate: It means that humanity emitted more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere during the 21st century, further warming the planet and acidifying the ocean. The best-case scenario is called RCP 2.6. The worst case is RCP 8.5.
“God help us if 8.5 turns out to be the right scenario,” Jackson told me. more>
Siemens – Integrated hardware and software design and testing on electronic products are now part of a system of delivery needs, which can only be enforced by a tightly integrated and unified multi-discipline platform.
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By Françoise Pouliquen – There is a relentless push-pull from rapid business and technology change affecting operators today. On one hand, dramatic growth in subscriber demands are driving fronthaul and backhaul traffic and putting networks under intense pressure. While on the other, there’s an industry wide race to develop and commercialize new revenue-generating services, such as IoT use cases and 5G mobile services – and to implement the network technologies and architectures needed to support and deliver them. On top of that, new market entrants, including some of the largest internet companies, are deploying massive-scale network connections that support low-cost data transport between key locations and data centers with unrivalled economies of scale.
By John Toon – Black holes form when stars die, allowing the matter in them to collapse into an extremely dense object from which not even light can escape. Astronomers theorize that massive black holes could also form at the birth of a galaxy, but so far nobody has been able to look far enough back in time to observe the conditions creating these direct collapse black holes (DCBH).
By Kirsten Salyer – The autonomous shipping industry is making waves, as established companies and tech start-ups apply emerging technologies to one of the oldest industries in the world, maritime transport.
By David Held – The crisis of contemporary democracy has become a major subject of political commentary. But the symptoms of this crisis, the vote for Brexit and Trump, among other things, were not foreseen. Nor were the underlying causes of this new constellation of politics.
By Steve Denning – The article isn’t suggesting that firms embracing Agile are either angels or devils. I have yet to see a firm espousing Agile that has no flaws: those flaws must be seen for what they are and they need to be addressed.
