Hi Climate change already affecting US.

HI Climate change already affecting US.

WASHINGTON (AP) -- When it came time to deliver a new federal report detailing what global warming is doing to America and the dire forecast for the future, President Barack Obama turned to the pros who regularly deliver the bad news about wild weather: TV meteorologists.

'We want to emphasize to the public, this is not some distant problem of the future. This is a problem that is affecting Americans right now,' Obama told 'Today' show weathercaster Al Roker. 'Whether it means increased flooding, greater vulnerability to drought, more severe wildfires - all these things are having an impact on Americans as we speak.'

Climate change's assorted harms 'are expected to become increasingly disruptive across the nation throughout this century and beyond,' the National Climate Assessment concluded, emphasizing the impact of too-wild weather as well as simple warming.

Still, it's not too late to prevent the worst of climate change, says the 840-page report, which the Obama administration is highlighting as it tries to jump-start often-stalled efforts to curb heat-trapping gases. Said White House science adviser John Holdren, 'It's a good-news story about the many opportunities to take cost-effective actions to reduce the damage.'

Release of the report, the third edition of a congressionally mandated study, gives Obama an opportunity to ground his campaign against climate change in science and numbers, endeavoring to blunt the arguments of those who question the idea and human contributions to such changes. Later this summer, the administration plans to propose new regulations restricting gases that come from existing coal-fired power plants.

Not everyone is convinced.

Some fossil energy groups, conservative think tanks and Republican senators immediately assailed the report as 'alarmist.' Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky said Obama was likely to 'use the platform to renew his call for a national energy tax. And I'm sure he'll get loud cheers from liberal elites - from the kind of people who leave a giant carbon footprint and then lecture everybody else about low-flow toilets.'

Since taking office, Obama has not proposed a specific tax on fossil fuel emissions. He has proposed a system that caps emissions and allows companies to trade carbon pollution credits, but it has failed in Congress.

Republican Sen. David Vitter of Louisiana said the report was supposed to be scientific but 'it's more of a political one used to justify government overreach.' And leaders in the fossil fuel industry, which is responsible for a large amount of the heat-trapping carbon dioxide, said their energy is needed and America can't afford to cut back.

'Whether you agree or disagree with the report, the question is: What are you going to do about it? To us that is a major question,' said Charlie Drevna, president of the American Fuel and Petrochemical Manufacturers. He called the report 'overblown.'

The report - it's full of figures, charts and other research-generated graphics - includes 3,096 footnotes referring to other mostly peer-reviewed research. It was written by more than 250 scientists and government officials, starting in 2012. A draft was released in January 2013, but this version has been reviewed by more scientists, including twice by the National Academy of Sciences, which called it 'reasonable' and 'a valuable resource.'

Environmental groups praised the report. 'If we don't slam the brakes on the carbon pollution driving climate change, we're dooming ourselves and our children to more intense heat waves, destructive floods and storms and surging sea levels,' said Frances Beinecke, president of the Natural Resources Defense Council.

Scientists and the White House called it the most detailed and U.S.-focused scientific report on global warming.

The report looks at regional and state-level effects of global warming, compared with recent reports from the United Nations that lumped all of North America together.

'All Americans will find things that matter to them in this report,' said scientist Jerry Melillo of the Marine Biological Laboratory, who chaired the science committee that wrote it. 'For decades we've been collecting the dots about climate change; now we're connecting those dots.'

In a White House conference call with reporters, National Climatic Data Center Director Tom Karl said his two biggest concerns were flooding from sea level rise on the U.S. coastlines - especially for the low-lying cities of Miami; Norfolk, Virginia; and Portsmouth, New Hampshire - and drought, heat waves and prolonged fire seasons in the Southwest.

Even though the nation's average temperature has risen by between 1.3 and 1.9 degrees since record-keeping began in 1895, it's in the big, wild weather where the average person feels climate change the most, said co-author Katharine Hayhoe, a Texas Tech University climate scientist. Extreme weather hits us in the pocketbook and can be seen with our own eyes, she said.

The report says the intensity, frequency and duration of the strongest Atlantic hurricanes have increased since the early 1980s, but it is still uncertain how much of that is from man-made warming. Winter storms have increased in frequency and intensity and have shifted northward since the 1950s, it says. Also, heavy downpours are increasing - by 71 percent in the Northeast. Heat waves, such as those in Texas in 2011 and the Midwest in 2012, are projected to intensify nationwide. Droughts in the Southwest are expected to get stronger. Sea level has risen 8 inches since 1880 and is projected to rise between 1 foot and 4 feet by 2100.

Climate data center chief Karl highlighted the increase in downpours. He said last week's drenching, when Pensacola, Florida, got up to 2 feet of rain in one storm and parts of the East had 3 inches in one day, is what he's talking about.

The report says 'climate change threatens human health and well-being in many ways.' Those include smoke-filled air from wildfires, smoggy air from pollution, and more diseases from tainted food, water, mosquitoes and ticks. And the ragweed pollen season has lengthened.

Flooding alone may cost $325 billion by the year 2100 in one of the worst-case scenarios, with $130 billion of that in Florida, the report says. Already the droughts and heat waves of 2011 and 2012 have added about $10 billion to farm costs, the report says.

Hi Achieve "Cooling Efficiency.!"

Hi Achieve " Altering surface textures in 'counter intuitive manner' may lead to cooling efficiency gains."

Uncovering the physical secrets underlying surface phenomena may increase cooling efficiency for a wide range of applications, according to MIT and Boston University researchers

WASHINGTON, D.C. Nov. 12, 2013 -- Researchers across the globe are racing to find ways to improve the cooling of hot surfaces -- for technologies ranging from small handheld electronics all the way to industrial-sized applications such as nuclear power plants.

By zeroing in on the physics at play underlying surface phenomena, a team of Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and Boston University researchers made a significant breakthrough. Although somewhat counter-intuitive, they discovered that by creating sparsely packed textures on surfaces rather than densely packed ones, they were able to hold droplets in place and enable cooling.

Their findings, described in Applied Physics Letters, which is produced by AIP Publishing, have the potential to enabling cooling efficiency gains in a wide variety of applications.

Worldwide, nearly 86 percent of our energy is currently derived from steam cycles. "If we're able to improve this efficiency by even 1 percent and deploy it to all of the power plants, it could have a significant impact," explains Kripa K. Varanasi, Doherty Chair in Ocean Utilization, as well as an associate professor of mechanical engineering at MIT.

Varanasi's lab is known for tailoring or modifying surfaces to significantly improve efficiency. One of their recent creations was a slippery surface coating, which is now being commercialized by a spinoff called Liqui Glide. They're commercializing a container liner that makes toothpaste and other difficult-to-remove products, such as ketchup, slide right out of their tubes and containers -- greatly reducing waste.

For this particular study, the goal was the exact opposite of creating slippery surfaces. The researchers wanted to make liquid come into direct contact with hot surfaces so cooling could occur. They began by exploring the physics of surface phenomena, because whether focusing on mass transfer, momentum transfer, energy transfer, or charge transfer, the commonality is that the transfer occurs on a surface.

Water Droplets (1 of 2)

Image Caption: These are micro graphs showing water droplets landing on specially designed silicon surfaces (top images) at different temperatures. At higher temperatures, the droplets begin to exhibit a new behavior: instead of boiling, they bounce on a layer of vapor, never really wetting and cooling the surface. At 400 C, the droplet continues to boil only on the surface that combines micro-scale posts with a coating of nano scale particles (last column). These results demonstrate that this micro nano surface can be effectively cooled even at high temperatures.

"Vapor films are created beneath the droplets, which is a critical problem in boiling. Once the vapor films start forming, they act as a barrier to heat transfer because vapor has a lower thermal conductivity than liquid," Varanasi says.

In boiling, ideally the liquid will make contact with the solid. But this phenomenon has a certain threshold known as a "critical heat flux" -- once it's reached, a catastrophic event may occur. For example, in the absence of cooling fluid during an emergency situation in a nuclear power plant, a nuclear fuel rod's surface can become very hot. Pouring water on it to attempt to cool it results in the formation of a vapor film that actually interferes with cooling. As a result, droplets float on the hot surface, which is known as the "Leiden-frost effect."

To overcome the vapor film issue, Varanasi and colleagues textured surfaces using sparsely packed micron-scale structures coated with nano particles to create a capillary attraction effect to hold droplets in place.

"Vapor that forms as the evaporation of the droplet is able to escape through the surface texture," Varanasi explains. "Interestingly, there are two simultaneous competing forces occurring in this situation. As the vapor forms, it exerts an upward force on these droplets. And the texture pulls on the droplet with capillary attraction. This allows the liquid to come into contact with the surface and cool it."

They can engineer similar structures using a variety of materials and techniques, according to Varanasi. Right now, the team's focus is on exploring the energy, water and agriculture nexus because it's all interrelated. "We're hoping in our own humble way -- since many phenomena occur upon surfaces -- to improve them and enable big efficiency in this nexus," he says.

Key markets that may benefit from greater cooling efficiency gains include, but aren't limited to, nuclear power plants, semiconductors and electronics, oil and gas, fire suppression, desalinization, and metallurgy.

Water Droplets (2 of 2)

Click here or image above to view video link 

Image Caption: These images show droplets being deposited on silicon surfaces that are smooth (top) and that have micro-scale silicon posts placed either close together (middle) or relatively far apart (bottom). At 270ºC (left), droplets land and boil on all three surfaces—behavior conducive to efficient cooling. But at 300ºC, they boil only on the surface with the widely spaced posts. On the other surfaces, they bounce on a layer of vapor.

The paper, "Increasing Leidenfrost point using micro-nano hierarchical surface structures" by Hyuk-min Kwon , James C. Bird and Kripa K. Varanasi appears in the journal Applied Physics Letters. See link: To view link click here or the image below.

ABOUT THE JOURNAL

Applied Physics Letters features concise, rapid reports on significant new findings in applied physics. The journal covers new experimental and theoretical research on applications of physics phenomena related to all branches of science, engineering, and modern technology. See link: To view link click here or image below.