Models Still Tracking Strong El Niño
Jeff Berardelli is Chief Meteorologist at WFLA Tampa, and my former colleague at Yale Climate Connections.
he strongest El Niño in 150 years? That’s not hype, it’s the actual median forecast right now for the developing event later this year. It could rival — or even surpass — the legendary 1877 El Niño, the strongest on record, which was linked to widespread drought, monsoon failure, and global food crises in parts of Asia, Africa, and South America. But what does that mean today? It means a tremendous amount of excess ocean heat being released into the atmosphere – energy that can rearrange weather patterns around the world. That typically leads to:
Increased flood risk in some regions
More intense/ prolonged heatwaves, drought and fires
A shift in severe storm tracks
And often a suppressed Atlantic hurricane season, but boosted in the East Pacific. Since it’s so huge, when the Pacific talks, the atmosphere listens! But this isn’t 1877… forecasting, infrastructure, and global awareness are far better today. We’ll be better prepared.
Continue reading “Models Still Tracking Strong El Niño”Music Break: Harry Styles – Sign of the Times
Figures prominently in Project Hail Mary, which I just took a few hours to see.
Well worth the time.
Version from the film is below, I have the video set to start after about a 3 minute talky intro. It’s an emotional and spiritual high point of a film which is full of them.
Continue reading “Music Break: Harry Styles – Sign of the Times”Anti-Solar Zealots Long for an Imaginary World
A little backstory.
A local township here in central Michigan, Ingersoll, recently refused (without legal justification) to approve a permit for a solar farm, for which the developer, Michigan utility DTE, had met or exceeded all ordinance requirements. The Planning Commission did so under duress and harassment by well organized and poorly informed “antis”, who came out in force to recent meetings, egged on by fossil fuel coordinated messaging on social media.
The issue will continue to percolate, and there will eventually be a solar farm – see the column further down.
When I came across the image above on their Facebook page, illustrating a naive and simple minded misunderstanding of the issues, I wrote this response.
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The farmer driving that Combine isn’t there for the “simple country life”.
His land is not his “vibe”, or his “lifestyle’ – it is HIS LIFE, and likely the life of his Father and Grandfather before him.
While you’re watching the sunset, drinking a margarita, and “vibing” – he’s working late into the night, again, because he has to make payments on that 400,000 dollar combine.
The price of a bushel of corn is not much higher than what his Dad was getting back in 1985, and his input prices keep jumping.
He knows that diesel and urea are going to cost him 20,000 dollars more this planting season because of the war in Iran.
Speaking of wars, he’s worried about his son, who is on deployment in the Arabian Sea. He hasn’t heard from him in a week or so, and is a little anxious.
He’s hoping junior will want to take over the farm, but with the economy the way it is, this way of life seems like a lot of work with not much security.
Solar Senator Quizzes Trump Toady
Senator Angus King is a former solar developer, and knows the energy industry well.
Here he quizzes Interior Secretary, Trump Toady, and grifter, Doug Burgum.
King asks why solar and wind, being domestic, reliable resources, should not be given equal permitting status with fossil fuels.
Burger talks about “the wind doesn’t blow all the time” – King says “that’s what batteries are for.”
Burger brings up the statistical canard about batteries only being able to supply the world for an hour, King’s not buying it.
The reason it’s bullshit is because batteries, which are growing exponentially, do not supply the whole world. They are backing up particular grids, states, and regional system operators.
For instance, as Mark Jacobson regularly points out on X, California, with big solar build, and rapidly increasing battery storage, has cut natural gas demand in a massive way in just a few years.
..battery output in 2026 is now almost half of gas output.
Solar output is 60% higher than gas output.
Gas is down 61%, batteries are up 320%, and solar is up 61% in 2026 vs ’23
28 straight and 94th of 118 days (80%) in 2026 with WindWaterSolar meeting >100% of demand for part of the day.
Continue reading “Solar Senator Quizzes Trump Toady”Australian Report Repeats Cobalt Canard
Much as I enjoyed listening to King Charle’s classic British intonations from yesterday, nothing beats a good Australian accent for my listening pleasure.
Anyway, Australian Broadcasting did a take down of rival Channel 7’s recent repetition of tired, obsolete and misleading stories about cobalt in batteries.
The default technology for stationary battery storage, and even most EVs these days, is Lithium Iron Phosphate, which contains no cobalt.
Also worth remembering that one historically large use for cobalt has been in refining gasoline, but I don’t recall anyone on in the Right Wing echo chamber being much upset about that until EVs starting giving serious. competition to combustion vehicles.
Hail and Farewell to Affordable Insurance
Not just homes. Cars. Animals.
Yesterday a massive hail storm wrecked cars across Springfield, MO.
This morning, a Wall Street Journal report on soaring home insurance costs across the midwestern heartland.
It’s not just hurricanes in Florida we have to worry about. Extreme storms with hail and damaging winds are changing the economics of home ownership across the heartland.
Welcome to the rest of our lives.
The old home-insurance rules are being upended. For decades, coastal states with hurricanes bore the brunt of rate increases, while inland states enjoyed cheap coverage. Now, hailstorms, wildfires and wind damage are hammering places once thought to be shielded from the worst rate hikes, a Wall Street Journal analysis of premiums and natural disasters nationwide found.
Hail-prone Iowa has seen approved home-insurance rates increase 91% since 2021: In Florida, despite the hurricane risk, the increase is 35%, S&P Global Market Intelligence data through March show.
Home-insurance premiums can vary dramatically, depending on where you live: Crossing a county line can more than double the cost.
“Pound Sand”: Fossil Fuel Agenda in Disarray
Trump cabinet members begging oil execs to boost drilling in the face of war imposed Oil demand destruction.
I’ve been telling you – these guys boast constantly about being free marketers, but they’re just grifters.
The Strait of Hormuz oil shock has yet to crash demand as the rich world borrows from its stocks and pays up to secure supply. Traders are now sounding the alarm that a harsh adjustment is coming.
The longer the vital oil channel doesn’t reopen, traders say, the more consumption is going to have to recalibrate lower to align with supply that’s dropped at least 10%. And for that to happen, people will have buy less, either through prices they ca
A billion barrels of supply loss is already all-but guaranteed — more than double the emergency inventories that governments released not long after the conflict began at the end of February. Buffers are being used up fast, helping to keep a lid on oil prices for now. But with the closure now in its ninth week, demand destruction that started in less obvious sectors like petrochemicals in Asia, is quietly spreading to everyday markets the world over.
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Below, Goldman Sachs expert: Hormuz will never be the same.
Electric Rate’s are About Much More than Data Centers
The CBS spot above isn’t really as nuanced as it needs to be, a kind of frames a “Data Centers cause price increases” story that isn’t exactly accurate.
But what it gets right is, setting the story in Georgia, pointing out that one of the big drivers in that state has been the startup of the Vogtle Nuclear plants, which have given that industry a massive black eye in terms of affordability.
They interviewed Patty Durand, who I just met thru her Op-Ed below.
In April 2024, Georgia Power completed the first new nuclear units in the United States in 30 years. But for Georgia Power customers, the project did not come with a celebration: It came with an almost 25% rate increase.
And Plant Vogtle came with its own “Let them eat cake” moment for Georgians: On May 31, 2024, U.S. Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm joined federal and state officials at a ribbon-cutting ceremony on site in Waynesboro, Georgia. There, she called for building 200 more gigawatts of reactors without mentioning the Vogtle’s $36 billion price tag, while attendees enjoyed cake shaped like nuclear reactors.
Throughout construction, as cost overruns ran into the billions of dollars, these same regulators declined to put consumer protections in place, claiming that a thorough review to determine what costs were prudent and reasonable would take place at the end. Yet that review never happened. Georgia is one of only a handful of states with no consumer utility counsel or advocate to represent consumers in complex, billion-dollar rate cases. For Vogtle, that absence had profound consequences: as the project neared completion, PSC staff and Georgia Power reached an agreement under which cost overruns would be passed directly to customers, without a full record of hearings or prudency review. The result is little national understanding of the drivers of the cost overruns, allowing all kinds of beliefs about nuclear energy to take root without a factual record.
Continue reading “Electric Rate’s are About Much More than Data Centers”Interview: Jeffrey Sachs on Coming Shocks
The interviewer is the execrable hypocrite and liar Tucker Carlson, I know.
But he doesn’t say much.
It’s mostly Sachs talking, and worth a sober listen.
We’ve crossed some kind of Rubicon here, and this is an outline of an array of unprecedented economic and physical shocks that we, as a planet, are about to experience.