Environment and Engineering News published an article on December 8th quoting a new paper from AirUCI faculty Steve Davis on the true costs of wildfires. Official death tolls count only those killed directly by wildfires, but exponentially more deaths are attributed to the smoke and air pollution they generate. The paper also counts tens of billions of dollars in economic disruption and health costs that are not included in official estimates of $24.7 billion in damage, which tallies only property that was destroyed or damaged.
The study represents an expansive way of calculating disaster costs that is essential for the public to grasp as climate change intensifies events such as wildfires, hurricanes, and flooding, notes Steve. "It's been a challenge for people arguing to take action on climate change," he said. "It's very easy to know the benefits of using fossil fuels, but it's a lot harder to tally up all of these diffuse costs that the climate changing is having. This is just one step in trying to do that." Read the article
News
Here's the latest news from AirUCI — our events, our people, our science.
2020
AirUCI faculty Steve Davis is among the most highly cited researchers in the world. Last week, Clarivate, an analytics company, announced its annual list of highly cited researchers. To make the list a researcher’s publications need to be in the top one percent of citations in a field in a given year. Twenty UCI researchers are on the list, and 10 are from the School of Physical Sciences, including Steve — many congratulations!
AirUCI grad student Annie Rohrbacher (Finlayson-Pitts research group) has been awarded an academic scholarship from the Southern California Timing Association, an association in which she participates in motorcycle land speed racing. The SCTA-BNI Scholarship Program assists dedicated students that are an asset to the sport of Land Speed Racing. The SCTA is the sanctioning body of the world’s fastest speed trials. Annie participates with Anderson Miller Racing, which has achieved three land speed records at the Ohio Mile and the Bonneville Salt Flats. Well done, Annie!
AirUCI faculty Jack Brouwer is quoted in a New York Times article on the increasing use of hydrogen as a fuel, especially for transportation. Jack is director of the National Fuel Cell Research Center, AirUCI partner organization at UCI, which has experimented with hydrogen for years and formed partnerships with local governments and major corporations to popularize its use in Southern California.
Jack does not think hydrogen will become the dominant energy source soon, but he argues that it has great potential as a fuel for vehicles, power plants, and appliances. Hydrogen, he said, will complement the use of lithium-ion batteries, solar panels, wind turbines, and natural gas. “Almost any objective analysis for getting to zero CO2 emissions includes hydrogen,” said Jack, Read the article
AirUCI faculty (and Chemistry Professor Emeritus) Benny Gerber has been awarded the Gold Medal of the Israel Chemical Society (ICS) "for his fundamental contributions to the structure and dynamics of polyatomic molecular systems and deciphering mechanisms of atmospheric reactions". This prize is the ICS's highest honor, drawing on Benny's decades of groundbreaking work in Israel, in Irvine, in Finland, and elsewhere. Congratulations, Benny! Additional details
AirUCI faculty Jim Smith has been nominated for the Innovator of the Year award presented by the UCI Beall Applied Innovation Center. The center, with generous support from Don and Ken Beall, created awards to recognize UCI researchers who are actively working to promote commercialization of university intellectual property, which supports industry growth and moves inventions from the lab to market to benefit humankind. The awards will be announced at a virtual event on October 27, 2020.
AirUCI faculty Steve Davis is quoted in an article in Scientific American on the drop in CO2 emissions due to the COVID virus. Global emissions fell 1,550 million metric tons in the first half of 2020, according to a study published yesterday in the journal Nature Communications, the most since the end of WWII, underlining the depths of the economic damage wrought by the coronavirus pandemic this year.
“Considering how disruptive the pandemic has been in all our lives, it seems like a small number,” said Steve, who contributed to the study. “The task of decarbonizing our planet will not mean just changes in personal behavior but changes in the energy structure.” Read the article
AirUCI faculty Jack Brouwer's decade long research into storing energy using hydrogen is attracting new attention. HIs 2016-2020 campus demonstration project, in conjunction with the Southern California Gas Company, was a success. it made renewable hydrogen from solar power using an electrolyzer, then took that renewable hydrogen, injected it into our natural gas grid, then delivered it through our natural gas grid to a natural gas combined cycle plant to make partially decarbonized electricity from it.
The energy industry’s interest in using power-to-gas as a storage vehicle comes as a way of achieving a grid that runs predominantly on intermittent renewables, yet will require large amounts of storage to smooth out supply for when the sun isn’t shining and wind isn’t blowing. "If you need to store terawatt hours of energy — which is what the grid will need if it’s 100% renewable — it’s going to be way cheaper to store it in the form of hydrogen," Jack said. Read the article
AirUCI faculty Steve Davis is co-author of a study which shows that replacing coal powered energy generating plants with natural gas powered plants may not have the intended effect of reducing global warming gases. While burning natural gas reduces by half the CO2 released into the atmosphere, the emissions and methane leaks from new gas plants zero out the CO2 cuts achieved from closing coal plants.
The new study marks one of the first major attempts to measure the cumulative lifetime emissions from the U.S. power sector since the fracking boom shifted the majority of electricity production to natural gas. "The increased reliance on gas plants has slashed current emissions, but it has extended the runway, and the tradeoffs are negating each other,” said Steve. Read the article
AirUCI faculty Michael Prather was among a group of international researchers who recently completed the most thorough review yet of nitrous oxide from emission to destruction in the planet’s atmosphere. Their work, published in Nature, documents the details of human-sourced N2O emissions and how they have intensified by 30 percent over the past four decades, the dominant share coming from synthetic nitrogen fertilizers and animal manure used in agriculture.
“Nitrous oxide emissions are increasing faster than any scenarios considered by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change – so fast that if left unchecked, they along with carbon dioxide will push the rise in global mean temperature to well above 2 degrees Celsius from pre-industrial levels, the nominal goal of the Paris climate agreement,” Michael said. More details Read the article in Nature
