Interesting Links for 08-06-2018

[andrewducker]

Belfast woman to challenge NI abortion law

(tags: NorthernIreland abortion )

Breakthrough pregnancy blood test can predict delivery date and help tackle risky premature births

(tags: babies pregnancy blood genetics )

Sucking carbon dioxide from air is cheaper than scientists thought

(tags: co2 Technology )

Edinburgh city-centre roads to close for Clean Air Day

(tags: edinburgh environment pollution scotland )

Comments

[momentsmusicaux]

That headline is REALLY misleading.

It's actually:

> TWO key roads in the centre of Edinburgh will shut to traffic for festivities to celebrate Clean Air Day.

Two. And two fairly short ones at that. They can come back when they close something substantial like Lothian Road.

[danieldwilliam]

I'm a bit ambivalent about the Supreme Court ruling.

Generally I'm in favour of the judiciary keeping out of the political realm as much as possible. I'm also concerned about the persistence of devolution settlements in the UK - the last two times these have been tested in the Supreme Court the result was not good for the devolution settlements.

That said the law on abortion in Northern Ireland is currently not optimal.

[danieldwilliam]

I think the project fall in costs for CO2 removal is a good thing but it's not an uncomplicated solution to global warming.

Firstly, it isn't necessarily the case that removing the excess CO2 returns the climate to its state prior to the addition of the CO2. Climate systems are non linear and the climate might move to a different state when the CO2 is removed.

Secondly, if we are going to remove all of the excess CO2 then we probabkly need to budget on using about twice as much energy as we extracted from burning the coal, oil and gas. That's a lot since 1750.

Thirdly, we need to find something to do with truly geological amounts of CO2.

We might be able to use CO2 extraction to slow down global warming and buy us some more time to change our energy systems whislt using it as a way to soak up short term energy imbalances caused by solar PV and wind intermittency. Either by using the excess electricity to extract and sequester CO2 or using it to round trip electricity in to methane and back to electricity.