the close of 2022

 on the last day of 2022 we wish you a Happy 

"May the Force be with you"

Winter solstice in 2022

 

When is the winter solstice in 2022?

The winter solstice is on Wednesday 21 December 2022. It marks the first day of astronomical winter, and the precise time of the solstice will be at 9:47pm GMT. This differs from meteorological winter, which always begins on 1 December, every year.

 

There are two solstices every year, one in December and one in June.

 

What is the winter solstice?

The winter solstice is when the Sun reaches its lowest point in the sky, and here in the northern hemisphere, that results in the shortest day of the year. It’s not something that you can see, like a meteor shower or planet in opposition, but rather an event that occurs.

 

During the winter solstice, the northern hemisphere is tilted furthest away from the Sun, causing it to reach its lowest point visually in the sky. For us here on Earth, this means it takes the least amount of time to cross the sky, and so we get the shortest day (and longest night) of the year. After the winter solstice, the days begin to get longer and the nights shorter.

 

What does the word ‘solstice’ mean?

The word ‘solstice’ is the scientific term for this astronomical event that happens twice a year. The word solstice is derived from the Latin sol (sun) and sistere (to stand still). Both at the December solstice and the June solstice, the Sun reverses its apparent annual north-south motion and appears to stand still.

 

How the December solstice affects the poles

The Arctic and Antarctic circles are located at 66.5 degrees north and 66.5 degrees south, respectively. The latitude of the Arctic circle is essentially the line, above which the Sun never rises on the December solstice, resulting in 24 hours of darkness.

As you move closer towards the north pole, you’re moving closer towards the point on the Earth that is tilted furthest away from the Sun. The winter solstice is the darkest time of the year for the north pole, and during these winter months, the Sun doesn’t rise from mid-November to late January, buffered by a period of twilight on either side.

    

Sources/Links:

https://www.sciencefocus.com/planet-earth/winter-solstice-shortest-day-year/

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A Massive Global Reforestation Project Is How We Fix Climate Change

This guy has a way with arithmetic’s...

We can conclusively solve our climate change problem with a massive global reforestation campaign. This piece is a quick 2-minute summary

 

Here is how:

 

First, the basic unit of CO2 is a “ton.” A billion tons is a gigaton. Each year, the world emits about 45 billion tons, or 45 gigatons of CO2.

 

We know that forests absorb CO2. How much? An acre of forest absorbs about 15 tons of CO2 in a year. Other tree species absorb somewhat more or less, some of them a lot more.

 

This means we need 3 billion acres of forest to offset our entire worldwide CO2 emissions each year.

 

Does the world have this much land for new forest?

 

Yes, but we will need to regreen deserts. There are about 4.7 billion acres of desert available, and we’ll only need about 3 billion of that. People have been successfully regreening deserts for decades, e.g. in China, Jordan, UAE, and Israel.

 

The limiting factor to regreening a desert is irrigation. We have to irrigate the trees for about 20 years until the vegetation changes the climate and induces its own rainfall.

 

We cannot rely on existing freshwater supplies, as they are all spoken for (food, agriculture, etc), so the only other source is desalination of seawater. This is energy-intensive, so our energy sources need to be low or zero-carbon —solar, for instance.

 

On a per-acre basis, the cost to build a solar array sufficient to power the desalination needed to irrigate that acre of forest for 20 years is about $1000/year per acre.

 

Thus, to reforest 3 billion acres at current prices will cost the world an investment of $3 trillion/year for 20 years.

 

That sounds like a lot, but the world GDP of 2017 was $80 trillion.

 

Therefore, this plan would require an investment of a little less than 4% of world GDP every year for 20 years. Combined with even moderate and gradual reduction in fuel emissions, we would effectively offset all CO2 emissions within 20 years once the forests reach maturity.

 

If we were to reforest the remaining 1.7 billion acres, the excess sequestration capacity would remove all of the CO2 remaining in the atmosphere that we have emitted since 1750 (beginning of the Industrial Revolution) in under 35 years.

Sources/Links:

https://medium.com/@yishan/a-massive-global-reforestation-project-is-how-we-fix-climate-change-e37fa24436a3

https://medium.com/@yishan/a-massive-global-reforestation-project-is-%20-we-fix-climate-change-36afc6d4dc2

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and the Link Award for the Year 2022 goes to...

 

Link:

https://cm-lousa.pt/locais/vaqueirinho/

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"O Borda d'Água" and "O Seringador"

 

“O Borda d’Água” is one of the most iconic Portuguese Almanacs, along with “O Seringador”

In Portugal, both "O Seringador " (158 years of uninterrupted publication) and "O Borda d’Água " (94 uninterrupted years), do not have online version.

 

The century history of the printed Portuguese almanacs: "O Seringador" and "O Borda d’Água", empirical corpus of contemporary lusophony and communication practices.

 

The almanac is a popular cultural artifact, that means, a narrative that merges scientific knowledge and popular folklore, in one side in the traditionalism and another in the contemporary world.

 

The historiographical study combined with the theory of Folk Communication reveals the ways in which people experience and give meaning to the communication practices, distinguish the past and identify their culture. The Portuguese almanacs, "O Seringador" and "O Borda d`Água" are the empirical corpus: object folk comunicacional: visual, printed, almanac.

Sources/Links:

Almanaques de Cordel: um estudo sobre o Seringador e o Borda d’Água

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/320458597_Almanaques_de_Cordel_um_estudo_sobre_o_Seringador_e_o_Borda_d'Agua

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International Mountain Day - 11 December

 

The United Nations General Assembly designated 11 December “International Mountain Day”.

 

As of 2003, it has been observed every year to create awareness about the importance of mountains to life, to highlight the opportunities and constraints in mountain development and to build alliances that will bring positive change to mountain peoples and environments around the world.

 

Sources/Links:

https://www.fao.org/international-mountain-day/en/

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