What's going to happen?

 The COVID-19 pandemic has far from gone away , Storm Francis rages and we await the potential arrival of whatever's left of the unprecedented two hurricanes affecting the Gulf of Mexico. 

This could change the world, big time. https://newatlas.com/aircraft/reaction-e ngines-ammonia-carbon-free-aviation-fuel/ Alan Bond, Chief Designer at Reaction Engines Ltd has a history. He was involved in the'90s with an attempt together with Rolls Royce Aeroengines, to build a hypersonic vehicle called Hotol . With scramjet engines, it would only carry oxygen to power flight out of the atmosphere. More recently, Reaction Engines Ltd, with some funding from the UK government, had the European Space Agency certify their plans to use a supercooler to lower the intake temperature and velocity. It's unlikely this proposal will be any more successful, convincing the British Government, historically dominated by upper-class classics and arts graduates, that a technical idea could really change the world has always proved impossible in the past.

It was an amazing achievement but Mars is probably a bridge too far. We should extend out into space, but with small steps. The ISS, a permanent moon base, asteroid mining. Each building more infrastructure, more habitable spaces to go. Hundreds of years ago many sailors died on a world with a breathable atmosphere, mostly liveable temperatures, water - not always fresh. It took centuries for systems to evolve that improved navigation & propulsion enough that most sea voyages did not result in the deaths of the voyagers. And that was of course on our home planet. One NASA engineer was quoted as saying there were still 57 total loss mission-failure scenarios they did not know how to solve a couple of years ago. Mars contains nothing of special appeal apart from the explorer thrill of standing on another world. It's a very cold, hostile place with no breathable atmosphere and no accessible resources to sustain a long landing and return. The nine-month each way journey gives no pr...

UK generation Look at any day, week or month. See the red line? That's gas turbines.  Burning gas is better than coal for soot, but carbon is carbon. Methane plus oxygen generates heat plus carbon dioxide. https://www.ucsusa.org/resources/environmental-impacts-natural-gas The blue line, that's wind. There's about 14GW of total capacity in the UK at the moment. That's about half the UK's average demand.  https://www.gridwatch.templar.co.uk/ Except on Tuesday, when it was almost zero. So it is on any hour, day, week or month you look at.  Electricity demand varies a bit, but the red line is almost a mirror image of the blue. That's because electricity can't be stored in any great quantity. The pumped storage and batteries on the grid at the moment are used only for smoothing, not covering major gaps in the wind.  Every time the wind turbines stop, the gas turbines start In a BBC News report yesterday, the 9th of June 2020, a screen showed a picture of coal gen...