If the sea invades coastal areas, floods start to be recurrent, storms form at a speed never seen before, droughts impede agriculture, global warming causes water shortages, heat waves become the norm, new diseases appear and animals and plants disappear. What could happen?
Portugal has had a shared language and close social ties with Brazil since it discovered and started colonising this huge South American country five centuries ago, but it now finds itself in danger of suffering an environmental catastrophe, partly because of the on-going destruction of the Amazon rainforest more than 4,500 kilometres away.
So far, it’s been a savage summer with deadly wildfires, storms and flash floods around the world. Hundreds of wildfires in Portugal, Spain, Italy, Greece and Turkey have been another reminder, as if one were needed, that the climate is changing.
Climate change and global warming are monumental problems that are threatening the existence of human civilization. Across the globe, many regions have been experiencing a spate of extreme weather events, including cyclones, blizzards, heatwaves, and forest fires. The severity and frequency of such events have also escalated.
The recent rural wildfire that encroached on the municipality of Portimão in the Algarve was yet another reminder that scientists consider Portugal to be one of the most vulnerable countries in Europe to climate change.
Portugal and all the other member states of the European Union have just been presented with an ambitious new climate change plan formulated by the EU Commission that hopes to influence other major countries in the lead up and during the crucial Cop-26 climate summit conference in Glasgow this November.
The Confederation of Enterprises, CIP, have good webinars on Circular Economy. Good for the environment, saves raw materials, reduces waste and garbage, and innovates. Many other countries have laws to run this, we do not, yet.
Robert Stirling made his heat-saver in 1816. He used less fuel compared to the existing steam engines. He pumped water out from a quarry. A float moves the enclosed air between the hot and cold ends of the immersed cylinder, in a closed cycle, with external heat.
