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Developing high-efficiency cooling with safe, low–global warming potential refrigerants is a grand challenge for tackling climate change. Caloric effect–based cooling technologies, such as magneto- or electrocaloric refrigeration, are promising but often require large applied fields for a relatively low coefficient of performance and adiabatic temperature change. We propose using the ionocaloric effect and the accompanying thermodynamic cycle as a caloric-based, all–condensed-phase cooling technology. Theoretical and experimental results show higher adiabatic temperature change and entropy change per unit mass and volume compared with other caloric effects under low applied field strengths. We demonstrated the viability of a practical system using an ionocaloric Stirling refrigeration cycle. Our experimental results show a coefficient of performance of 30% relative to Carnot and a temperature lift as high as 25°C using a voltage strength of ~0.22 volts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on innovative textiles that help to cool the person who wears them. It discusses the impact of global warming on the textile industry. It is noted that the energy saving, challenges and opportunities exist for the radiative cooling textiles. It mentions that a radiative cooling textile with coupled dynamic evaporative cooling can cool the human body even when the ambient temperature is higher than the skin.

The effect of anthropogenic aerosols on clouds is one of the most important and least understood aspects of human-induced climate change. Small changes in the amount of cloud coverage can produce a climate forcing equivalent in magnitude and opposite in sign to that caused by anthropogenic greenhouse gases, and changes in cloud height can shift the effect of clouds from cooling to warming. Focusing on the Amazon, we show a smooth transition between two opposing effects of aerosols on clouds: the microphysical and the radiative. We show how a feedback between the optical properties of aerosols and the cloud fraction can modify the aerosol forcing, changing the total radiative energy and redistributing it over the atmospheric column. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Two global coupled climate models show that even if theconcentrations of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere had been stabilizedin the year 2000, we are already committed to further global warming ofabout another half degree and an additional 320% sea level rise causedby thermal expansion by the end of the 21st century. Projected weakeningof the meridional overturning circulation in the North Atlantic Oceandoes not lead to a net cooling in Europe. At any given point in time,even if concentrations are stabilized, there is a commitment to futureclimate changes that will be greater than those we have alreadyobserved. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on the research about the world oceans. Basing on the observations, the world oceans have been warming for the past 50 years. The said findings are significant confirmations of global warming inferences based on surface atmospheric temperature measurements. Researcher John M. Lyman and associates have expanded its study to present a global temperature data set for the upper 750 meters of the world oceans. Their study uncovers a large cooling since 2003 which have implications beyond the pattern and extent of cooling.

The article presents information on an announcement made by a National Research Council panel that the last ten years of the 20th century were probably warmer than any comparable period in the past 1000 years. The outlines of the near-iconic "hockey stick" temperature curve is confirmed by this announcement. The temperature curve means a long cooling followed by a sharp warming during the past millennium. For greenhouse contrarians, the temperature curve become a favorite target. The proof in parts of the hockey stick is blurred than the public and many scientists might have thought. For most of the millennium, the resulting temperature curve sloped gently downward and then grew sharply into the 20th century. Later it peaked the relative warmth of 800 to 1000 years ago. Hence it means that humans have played a major role in the recent warming.