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Some people think that carbon and sustainable development are not compatible. This textbook shows that carbon dioxide (CO₂) from the air and bio-carbon from biomass are our best allies in the energy transition, towards greater sustainability. We pose the problem of the decarbonation (or decarbonization) of our economy by looking at ways to reduce our dependence on fossil carbon (coal, petroleum, natural gas, bitumen, carbonaceous shales, lignite, peat). The urgent goal is to curb the exponential increase in the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and hydrosphere (Figures 1.1 and 1.2) that is directly related to our consumption of fossil carbon for our energy and materials The goal of the Paris agreement (United Nations COP 21, Dec. 12, 2015) of limiting the temperature increase to 1.5 degrees (compared to the pre-industrial era, before 1800) is becoming increasingly unattainable (Intergovermental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), report of Aug. 6, 2021). On Aug. 9, 2021 Boris Johnson, prime minister of the United Kingdom, declared that coal needs to be consigned to history to limit global warming. CO₂ has an important social cost…

The evaporation of four-dimensional spherically symmetric black holes is presented in the framework of quantum field theory in curved spacetimes and semiclassical gravity. It is discussed how the evaporation process can be sourced by the presence of the trace anomaly of a massless, conformally coupled scalar field outside the apparent horizon of the black hole.

The evaporation and condensation of a polyatomic vapor in contact with its condensed phase has received much less attention than the monatomic case. In this paper we investigate the structure of the Knudsen layer formed in the steady evaporation and condensation of a vapor whose molecules behave as rigid rotators. The vapor motion is obtained by the numerical solution of the Boltzmann equation by the Direct Simulation Monte Carlo (DSMC) method. The obtained results are also compared with the solutions of a simplified kinetic BGK-like model equation. The relationships between the problem parameters are determined in numerical form for evaporation and condensation flows. It is shown that the present results are in good agreement with previous moment method investigations of evaporation flows.

Using the exactness criteria of entropy from the first law of black hole thermodynamics, we study quantum corrections for axially symmetric black holes.