This is Not Cool

It’s called “Conserv-voltaics”, and I’m seeing more examples every week.

Go Wild with Annette on X:

Ecologists walked matching 200-meter transects across solar farms planted for wildlife in England’s East Anglian Fens and counted 35 birds on each solar pass against 12 on the cropland beside it, corn buntings and yellowhammers among the birds now working the rows between the panels

Solar farms designed for wildlife are harboring nearly three times more birds than the conventional crops they replaced, challenging long-held assumptions about renewable energy and nature.

Journal of Arid Environments – Desert kit foxes use solar energy facilities in southern California:

Our results show that the desert kit foxes we tracked ranged into solar facilities and used habitats there extensively, even daily, both during and post-construction. Thus, solar energy development may be compatible with conservation for this subspecies. Active management of solar facilities that increases their accessibility to wildlife may produce further conservation benefits for desert kit foxes.

Yahoo:

In addition to supplying clean energy, solar panels have a surprisingly positive impact on degraded land and local wildlife. The panels block the sun, allowing the soil to retain more moisture to the point where China’s largest solar farm is changing the desert around it, turning a once dry landscape green with plant life. Animals can also benefit from solar farms, including the San Joaquin kit fox, an endangered species that lives in central California, whose population faces many threats, including habitat loss and predators.

Continue reading “Conserv-Voltaics Another Benefit of Solar”

Not just the War, not just fossil fuel greed, not just supply chains and shortage of fertilizers, climate adds further pressure to food prices, affecting the most vulnerable.

Bloomberg:

Analysts at Zero Carbon Analytics, an international research firm, mapped food price spikes between 2022 and 2026, tracing them to extreme weather events they say are tied to climate change.

So far this year, they’ve connected all but one of the price jumps they documented to unprecedented temperatures, drought or rainfall, meaning the events were more extreme than any similar instance in the historical climate record. The lone exception was a winter storm that sent US tomato prices soaring about 40% but wasn’t made worse by climate change.

The findings are part of the growing body of research into how climate change is reshaping inflation, a phenomenon some economists dub “climateflation.”

“Climateflation represents a permanent rise in everyday living costs driven by fossil fuel dependency and extreme weather destruction, locking in persistent inflation that strains household budgets worldwide,” Joanne Bentley-McKune, a climate scientist and lead author of the Zero Carbon Analytics briefing, said in a state

CNN:

US consumers are likely to face steeper prices for their morning latte, thanks to the near-record strong super El Niño still strengthening in the Pacific Ocean. El Niño is expected to combine with preexisting supply chain pressures around the world to increase prices on tropical products such as coffee, chocolate and palm oil.

Continue reading “War, Climate-Flation Hitting Food Worldwide”

You can’t solve your AI anxiety by blocking the Data Center nearby.

They’ll just build it in the next county, the next State, in Tierra del Fuego, under the Ocean, or in Space.

This week, a first test bed satellite was launched to begin solving problems related to space based Data Centers. Google thinks they will be economically viable in the mid 2030s.

And don’t think that they’re just going to make humanity extinct in 5 years. We’re not getting off that easy.

We’re going to have to step up and figure this problem out with the right kind of guard rails and international agreements, and the path to doing that starts in next month’s election.

TechCrunch:

Google’s prototype of its orbital compute satellite took off today onboard a SpaceX rocket launched from California — the first time the tech giant has sent one of its advanced chips into space.

Built by Planet Labs, the satellite will prove that a Google Tensor Processing Unit, its competitor to Nvidia’s GPUs, can function in space. That means supplying a kilowatt of continuous power, cooling the chip, and running a series of models through their paces to see if anything goes wrong.

“We’ve done testing on the ground, but you know, there’s no test that’s completely as good as the real thing,” said Travis Beals, the Google executive managing Project Suncatcher, the tech giant’s plan to develop large-scale compute clusters in orbit around the Earth.

Continue reading “Google Launches Space Data Center Test”

I have many questions on the whole Air Taxi idea, some of which were addressed here, noise, and flight safety in particular.

Could be in service around New York City later this year. Hope this isn’t just one more way for Billionaires to soar above the peasants and become even more disconnected from actual humans.

Good interview above with Nick Potter, President of Equinor Natural Gas. A bit of a companion piece to the survey of energy executives I posted about nearby on this page.

This is a bit of a Rosetta Stone for understanding what gas markets will be doing. Potter uses soothing euphemisms, citing “what’s going on” in the MidEast and Russia. He obviously hopes that gas will be a big part of fueling Data Centers, which may be only partially true. As has been pointed out on these pages, it’s a big assumption that gas pipeline capacity will be available for AI in every case.

I’ve posted Jigar Shah’s warning to the AI bros about counting on Natural gas supplies.

There are now some indications that Jigar’s cautionary note has merit.

Continue reading “Americans Should Brace for Natural Gas Price Jump”

Rare event related to the El Niño cycle and global hydrology is happening again.

In 2011, rains fell so intensely across Australia and South America that ocean levels actually fell temporarily, as massive amounts of water moved from ocean onto land.

Science Daily November 19, 2012:

In August 2011, scientists at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif., and the University of Colorado in Boulder reported that global sea level rise had hit a speed bump.

The researchers found that between early 2010 and summer 2011, global sea level fell sharply, by about a quarter of an inch, or half a centimeter. Using data from the NASA/German Aerospace Center’s Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment (GRACE) spacecraft, they showed that the drop was caused by the very strong La Niña that began in late 2010. This periodic Pacific Ocean climate phenomenon changed rainfall patterns all over our planet, moving huge amounts of Earth’s water from the ocean to the continents, primarily to Australia, northern South America and Southeast Asia.

—

It might be happening again.

Meteorologist Ryan Hall flagged this on his YouTube channel.

Continue reading “Could Polo’s Massive Moisture Plume be Large Enough to Impact Sea Level?”

The Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas issues quarterly anonymous surveys of oil executives to gauge current sentiment in the industry, and anticipate future trends.

The current just-released survey indicates an expectation widely shared expectations that high diesel prices are baked in for at least a year.

Continue reading “Oil Tycoons – High Diesel, Nat Gas to Last”

I’ve been pretty hands off on the ongoing restart operation at the Palisades Nuclear facility on Lake Michigan. Generally, I wish them all the luck in the world, number one because I’m downwind, number two because low carbon electricity is good, and number three because a huge bipartisan majority exists that desperately wants this proof of concept to work, and has committed massive public funding to making it happen. (see below)

But this most recent incident does not sound normal or very auspicious for the effort.

Holtec International:

COVERT TOWNSHIP, Michigan – Holtec’s Palisades Nuclear Power Plant continues to perform the work necessary to return the plant to safe and reliable operation, including fuel-loading-related activities, plant testing and restoration, and preparations for the next stages of startup. This Holtec Highlights issue summarizes the present status.

Fuel Loading Activities

Palisades entered Mode 6 (Refueling) and began loading fuel into the reactor vessel on August 30, 2026. During fuel-loading activities, one fuel assembly tilted from its upright position after it had been placed, and the fuel-handling machine grapple had been disengaged. Plant personnel responded promptly in accordance with established procedures, and the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) was notified. Plant personnel evaluated the incident and determined that it did not trigger the safety reporting requirements under NRC regulations. Fuel loading remains paused while Holtec addresses the affected fuel assembly.

Continue reading “Reactor Restart Hits “Tilt””

Related to the other post on this page.
Just as post Hurricane damages far inland continue to weigh on the economy, Florida’s coastal cities, even with no storms this year, are suffering some of the worst flooding ever from ever rising, climate enhanced King Tides.

Local news report above correctly describes the tidal mechanism, and the moon’s orbital characteristics that make Fall the worst tidal season, but no mention of sea level rise or climate.

Report from WBTV – Charlotte NC.
Two years post Hurricane Helene, Bat Cave, North Carolina is still crippled from the climate fueled storm’s impacts.

Readers here will vividly remember how Hurricane Helene came ashore, moved hundreds of miles inland and exploded with flooding rains over the “climate haven” mountains of North Georgia and Western North Carolina. The steep hillsides and narrow river valleys turned out to be vulnerable death traps for people living in vulnerable areas.
Many losses were tragically predictable, but some of those affected lived in areas that had not previously flooded.
As recovery has progressed, some local communities are making the same mistakes, as residents economically crippled by the flood have moved to campers and mobile homes, the best shelter they can afford, in some of the most vulnerable areas.
Billions have been spent in recovery, but needed billions more may never come.
Communities like Bat Cave, as related above, have lost crucial tax base that funds critical services like Fire/Rescue, and face an economic death spiral even as road and infrastructure repairs continue.

Pro Publica:

Part of what made the storm so devastating to the region when it hit, 400 miles inland from where it made landfall, is that the Appalachian Mountains’ typically porous soils were already saturated by recent rainfall. The rainwater hit bedrock and raced down steep mountain slopes like water on a slide. It overran the banks of normally shallow creeks and rivers, carrying the earth above it. One in 4 of those who died from the storm in North Carolina did so because of mud and landslides.

Continue reading “Bat Cave NC Struggles a Glimpse of Climate Hobbled Future”