Researchers are closing in on turning a decades-old chemistry experiment into a new form of renewable electricity generation. The technique, dubbed “blue energy”, makes electricity from salt water and fresh water mixing. Given the amount of fresh water the world’s rivers dump into oceans, blue water could crank out as much as 2.6 terawatts. That’s about as much as a third of the world’s total current electricity generation capacity. There’s a lot of work to do to make the method practical and scale it up, but there’s now a path from the lab to production. Here’s a news write up from Science.

Meanwhile, climate models – once a preferred target of climate change deniers’ campaigns of spreading fear, uncertainty and doubt – have been vindicated. Turns out they’ve been pretty darn accurate all along.