Johannes Eckert

4.6 Billion Years On, the Sun Is Having a Moment In the past two years, without much notice, solar power has begun to truly transform the world’s energy system.

Globally, roughly a third more power is being generated from the sun this spring than last. If this exponential rate of growth can continue, we will soon live in a very different world, @billmckibben.bsky.social‬ writes.

Extreme weather caused by climate change is raising food prices worldwide, study says | CNN Business Extreme weather caused by climate change is driving up the prices of basic food products worldwide and posing wider risks to society, a new study has found.

“Until we get to net-zero emissions, extreme weather will only get worse, and it’s already damaging crops and pushing up the price of food all over the world” guest researcher at PIK Maximilian Kotz in @cnn.com on how climate change is driving food inflation. edition.cnn.com/2025/07/21/b...

"The company’s Titan Forge Alpha prototype has successfully integrated a full-scale 50-cell Faraday Reactor validating its core technology at TRL 9, ... already generating e-methanol from air and solar power" www.businesswire.com/news/home/20...

"Social media, news, games, email, apps… They can suck a person in and hold them captive. ... This poem is my attempt at expressing some of these ideas. It’s actually an acrostic poem - the first letter of each line spells out incurvatus in se" onceuponawrittenword.wordpress.com/2021/07/31/i...

Indicators of Global Climate Change 2024: annual update of key indicators of the state of the climate system and human influence Abstract. In a rapidly changing climate, evidence-based decision-making benefits from up-to-date and timely information. Here we compile monitoring datasets (published at https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.15639576; Smith et al., 2025a) to produce updated estimates for key indicators of the state of the climate system: net emissions of greenhouse gases and short-lived climate forcers, greenhouse gas concentrations, radiative forcing, the Earth's energy imbalance, surface temperature changes, warming attributed to human activities, the remaining carbon budget, and estimates of global temperature extremes. This year, we additionally include indicators for sea-level rise and land precipitation change. We follow methods as closely as possible to those used in the IPCC Sixth Assessment Report (AR6) Working Group One report. The indicators show that human activities are increasing the Earth's energy imbalance and driving faster sea-level rise compared to the AR6 assessment. For the 2015–2024 decade average, observed warming relative to 1850–1900 was 1.24 [1.11 to 1.35] °C, of which 1.22 [1.0 to 1.5] °C was human-induced. The 2024-observed best estimate of global surface temperature (1.52 °C) is well above the best estimate of human-caused warming (1.36 °C). However, the 2024 observed warming can still be regarded as a typical year, considering the human-induced warming level and the state of internal variability associated with the phase of El Niño and Atlantic variability. Human-induced warming has been increasing at a rate that is unprecedented in the instrumental record, reaching 0.27 [0.2–0.4] °C per decade over 2015–2024. This high rate of warming is caused by a combination of greenhouse gas emissions being at an all-time high of 53.6±5.2 Gt CO2e yr−1 over the last decade (2014–2023), as well as reductions in the strength of aerosol cooling. Despite this, there is evidence that the rate of increase in CO2 emissions over the last decade has slowed compared to the 2000s, and depending on societal choices, a continued series of these annual updates over the critical 2020s decade could track decreases or increases in the rate of the climatic changes presented here.

Our new paper updating key metrics in the IPCC is now out, and the news is grim:

⬆️ Human induced warming now at 1.36C
⬆️ Rate of warming now 0.27C / decade
⬆️ Sharp increase in Earth's energy imbalance
⬇️ Remaining 1.5C carbon budget only 130 GtCO2

essd.copernicus.org/...

I hope there will be a spoilsport to avoid this kind of fun, but CDU/CSU might have been setting the stage for this with bold promises to drop the "green" heating legislative measurements, what now turned out just to be some cosmetic nuances ...

Let's see how ETS 2 will contribute to this by raising heating costs in 2027 ...

Novel methanation plant inaugurated at Empa in Dübendorf

New sorption-enhanced #methanation plant at Empa inaugurated: A future with renewable gas from hydrogen and #CO₂!
empa.ch/web/s604/ein...
#renewableenergy

China's New Policy on Sustainable Aviation Fuel (SAF): A Step Towards Greener Future As the world grapples with the urgent need to reduce carbon emissions, the aviation industry has come under increasing scrutiny

Chinese strategy even includes 15% SAF blend in 2030 moderndiplomacy.eu/2024/08/22/c... So what ist your path fo fix aviation fuel?

As the energy demand for destillation is mentioned, the membrane of Prometheus Fuels founder Rob McGinnis (a chemist) might still be useful: "... his membranes could cut the distillation cost by 90% in an ethanol market worth $50 billion per year in the United States" www.science.org/content/arti...

Thanks for that interesting article, adding some news from Brazil from February, the results have been published in nature agencia.fapesp.br/new-enzyme-c...

Will ethanol fuel a low-carbon future? After decades of false starts, cellulosic ethanol may arrive just as the chemical and fuel industries clamor for a low-carbon feedstock

Will ethanol fuel a low-carbon future?

After decades of false starts, cellulosic ethanol may arrive just as the chemical and fuel industries clamor for a low-carbon feedstock. cen.acs.org/business/spe...

What about cheap gas-based russian fertilizer?

You can vote for the young Inventors Prize 2025 of @epo.org, 19 great ideas have been selected www.epo.org/en/news-even... They include sustainable paper components for electronic devices, recycling of rare earth elements or cellulose textiles made of CO2

This paint ‘sweats’ to keep your house cool This new passive cooling paint reflects sunlight, emits heat and mimics sweating to cool buildings without air conditioning, even in the tropics.

This new passive cooling paint reflects sunlight, emits heat and mimics sweating to cool buildings without air conditioning, even in the tropics.

True. But I keep up with what they are doing. And building really new stuff is incredible hard. Terraform now has about 50 open positions on their website, so it seems that they are busy doing things. And their bet on cheap solar could be a win www.pv-magazine.com/2025/06/05/f...

So if sequestration is scarce, RFNBO is still to expensive and degrowth seems no option, I just want to mention Prometheus Fuels and Terraform Industries that work on cheap RFNBO. Here's an on-site visit at Terraform, aiming at 'good enough' tech to scale (⬇️🪨-DAC) www.freethink.com/series/hard-...

"Now, a team of chemists ... has developed a catalyst that can cleave these C–F bonds within seconds and at room temperature. ... the catalyst consists of 2 boron atoms, which have been embedded in a carbon framework in a manner that makes them resistant to air and moisture" tinyurl.com/5y2jjvuw

Our First Product We’re proud to announce our first product — a 99.9% pure, carbon neutral methanol fuel that is molecularly identical to fossil methanol, but made from air. Orders for our first 11 million tons of the ...

So companies like Prometheus Fuels prometheusfuels.com/news/our-fir... or Terraform Industries terraformindustries.wordpress.com will turn PV into Methanol in sunbelt regions as a backup fuel. And PV is still getting cheaper www.pv-magazine.com/2025/06/05/f...

Thank you for this interesting episode. For motor innovation I just want to add Infinitum bsky.app/profile/futu... (and yes, 66% less copper is a thing news.umich.edu/can-we-mine-...)

Making electric motors better Tackling a billion small gas engines with electric motors

Today on Volts: a key technology at the center of the electric revolution gets very little attention. The motor! Some 40% of all electricity passes through motors & that number is only rising. I talk to a company making motors lighter, easier to manufacture, and free of rare earth metals.

"Looking ahead, two key areas to watch are how startups improve performance and drive down costs - with effective systems integration being key to both" rmi.org/innovation-t... @rockymtninst.bsky.social

"The membrane is a thin film that can be manufactured using a technique that is already widely used in industrial processes, potentially allowing it to be scaled up for widespread use" news.mit.edu/2025/new-app...

This start-up turns steel and aluminum waste into usable metals Chicago-area Sun Metalon removes gunk and grime from metal slivers normally thrown away, helping to reduce emissions from aluminum and steel production.

“You’ve got a company throwing something away, in some cases paying to throw it away because it’s contaminated with toxic materials. [Sun Metalon is] offering a way to create value from that.”

Dem Mittleren Teil der Abgründe haben wir Frankfurt ein Denkmal gesetzt (ich denkmal ...) frankfurt.de/themen/umwel...

YouTube video by Andrew Faith No More - As The Worm Turns (Patton Studio Version) *RARE*

They got a song, too: "As The Worm Turns" www.youtube.com/watch?v=Os1O...

"These simulations show that global CO2 flows increase linearly when the two methods are used in combination - in other words, efficiency losses do not occur" www.lmu.de/en/newsroom/...

Fraunhofer ISE unveils micro-CPV module with cost-reducing design Researchers in Germany have unveiled new high-efficiency, micro concentrator photovoltaics technology that taps established micro-components manufacturing processes to enable lower costs. A demonstrat...

Fraunhofer ISE unveils micro-CPV module with cost-reducing design www.pv-magazine.com/2025/06/05/f...