2019年8月24日

Brazil has seen 100,000 fire alerts in 10 days, but it's not just the Amazon

Scientists have recorded more than 76,000 fires in Brazil so far this year, but the problem isn’t confined to one country. Many other parts of South America are burning too.

Global Forest Watch, an organisation sponsored by the World Resources Institute, monitors forests and tracks fires, using satellite data. The group reported more than 109,000 fire alerts in Brazil between August 13 and yesterday, but its map of current blazes (below) shows fires in many other regions as well.

So far this year, Brazil’s neighbour, Bolivia, has experienced more than 17,400 fires. Paraguay, to the south, has had just under 10,000, and Colombia, to the north, 14,000.Since August 15, more than 9,500 new forest fires have started across Brazil, primarily in the Amazon basin. Year over year, that’s an 83% increase in fires.

The fires in Brazil aren’t natural disasters: Environmentalists and researchers say humans are to blame.In total, the fires have created a layer of smoke estimated to be 1.2 million square miles wide that can be seen from space. The smoke plumes from blazes in the Amazon have spread far from the state of Amazonas – on Monday, smoke blotted out the sun in São Paulo, a city more than 2,000 miles away.

But when trees burn, they release carbon dioxide back into the atmosphere, and that further fuels climate change.

'Project Titan' — Tesla's covert program to replace solar-panel parts

Last summer, Tesla began “Project Titan,” an attempt to quietly replace defective solar-panel parts across the US.The program primarily focused on connectors made by Amphenol and optimizers, which regulate the amount of energy and heat that flows to a solar panel. If a solar panel gets too hot, it can set on fire.

Project Titan came about a year before Walmart sued Tesla, claiming the company failed to manage and maintain solar panels on hundreds of Walmart roofs around the US according to their agreement. Tesla described Project Titan as “a remediation effort to limit any impact the connector may have had, even though we are not aware of any equipment manufacturer or regulator that has determined any substantial hazard exists.”

Amphenol connectors and SolarEdge optimizers were “quarantined” as part of Project Titan and were either reworked and put back on roofs or scrapped. To execute Project Titan, Tesla ordered supplies including ladders and tool belts and sent crews out around the United States. “Over the past year, less than 1% of sites with this connector have exhibited any abnormal behaviour,” a Tesla representative said.

According to one internal document from early April, Tesla mandated that all repair teams use refurbished parts as their first choice to replace damaged optimizers and connectors by the end of the month. “Based on data from the 3.6 gigawatts of solar we currently have deployed across thousands of commercial sites and hundreds of thousands of residential sites, we know that our installations are safe and responsibly installed, monitored, and maintained,” a Tesla representative said.

A former Tesla employee described being unsure whether Tesla was able to find and replace all of the defective parts. “We don’t have a dedicated department to do this stuff,” the person said. “Everything flows one way – make the product, sell the product, install the product.”

China shows its hand in the intensifying competition with the US

China has launched a new “world-leading unmanned warship” that is supposedly ready for combat, Chinese media reports. The JARI multi-purpose unmanned combat vessel, a new product of the state-owned China Shipbuilding Industry Corporation, is 50 feet in length and displaces 20 tons. Chinese media reports that this ship is capable of conducting the same missions as China’s Type 052 destroyers, namely air-defence, anti-ship and anti-submarine missions.

“Like those boats, there is a mount on the forward deck that would normally carry a machine gun. It may also have some vertically-launched rockets or small missiles in cells on the rear deck or behind the gun.” China has yet to say what type of missions this vessel might conduct. “This boat doesn’t have the range for operations very far from Chinese territory. Therefore, it may only be good for patrolling around China’s islands in the South China Sea or around Chinese ports,” he said.

China first revealed a model of the JARI unmanned warship last year in South Africa at the Africa Aerospace and Defence exhibition. The model showed a 30mm main gun with eight vertical launch systems behind the cannon and two light torpedo launchers on each side of the superstructure.

The US military has experimented with small crewless swarm boats, as well as medium-sized unmanned surface vessels like the Sea Hunter. Earlier this month, the US Navy expressed an interest in the development of a large unmanned surface vessel, “a high-endurance, reconfigurable ship able to accommodate various payloads for unmanned missions to augment the Navy’s manned surface force.”

Expert observers suspect the new revelation is a response to US Navy plans. “I believe one of the drivers for this rollout from the PLA is the US Navy’s recent announcement of its proposed Large USV,” Clark said.