This is Not Cool

Peter Sinclair in the Midland Daily News:

Dr. Andrea Dutton is an Oceanographer at the University of Wisconsin, and a winner of the MacArthur “Genius award. As I spoke to her about climate driven sea level rise, she illustrated her points with sweeping waves of her arms.
She traced a graceful upward swoop of an imaginary graph, to illustrate the steady rise of oceans in response to global heating – and made a hard point.
“When you look at those graphs, it shows this smooth line going up, which gives you the impression it won’t get to say, 2 feet higher than today, until 2060, for example.”
“But I think that’s a little bit misleading, because in fact, during extreme storms or extreme high tides, you’ll reach 2 feet, but you’ll reach it with increasing frequency, as you approach 2060, till you’re there on average.”

“And so when you look at the projection, it gives you almost this false sense of complacency, that, “we have time, we’re not going to get to 2 feet until 2060”, for example, but in fact, we will get there, much before then, with increasing frequency.

And so using that graph on its own is a little bit dangerous, without understanding what it means.”

At the moment, her words are coming vividly to life in news reports from California, as just such an extreme event is evolving in the Pacific Ocean.

El Niño is a regular cycle occurring every 3 to 7 years, in which the world’s warmest ocean water, that normally pools in the southwest Pacific, around the Philippines and Indonesia, sloshes eastward and piles up for a time against the coasts of the Americas.
This cycle, scientists tell us, is still developing, but may be the most intense El Niño ever in the modern record.

That water, slowly surging against the west coasts of the Americas, being warm, expands, and it’s level rises well above normal, even more so as it presses up against the coasts. The expanding thousand mile lens of water is called a “Kelvin Wave”.
It’s not a wave like we see in pictures of crashing surf, but rather a massive swell, thousands of miles across.
As it presses up against shorelines, it may cause sea level to rise temporarily by as much as a foot or two.

Continue reading “Column: El Niño Giving a Glimpse of the Future”

Yellow Dot Studio, which has a history of producing high quality, laugh-because-it-hurts videos with climate themes, has a new one, voiced by Woody Harrelson.

The clean technology that Republicans love, and to be fair, the one that I still think could be a dark horse going forward, is geothermal.

Video above discusses in detail some of the red flags that are causing a wave of short selling of Fervo, the leading Geothermal contender.

Thermal decline, excessive water loss, and some history of earthquakes are all inherent to the technology, and definitely need to be discussed. What it tells us again is that, to meet the burgeoning demand for electricity, there is no readily available techno fix. Gas is limited by constraints on turbines and pipelines. Nuclear is not going to make a solid impact before the mid 2030s, assuming massive government support.

Solar, wind and batteries are cheap, well understood, and go up fast. We need to accelerate those technologies, not because they are good for the climate, but because they are literally the only thing in the cupboard for the near term.

Heatmap also has a good discussion of Fervo’s stumbles here.

Michigan State University is doing a good job thru its Ag Extension Service providing accurate information to local officials who are the critical front line to get clean energy and infrastructure sited in a timely manner.

A few weeks ago I attended an event for local officials near Saginaw, Michigan, to assess the messaging. For the stuff I knew first hand, it was spot on – and there was more that I learned that was new, as well.

Above, I asked Harmony Gmazel to restate what best evidence on rising electric rates has been. Neither Data Centers nor clean energy are implicated in rising electric rates – a bigger culprit is keeping aging transmission and distribution infrastructure updated in an era of changing climate and weather extremes.

I backed her up with a clip from Jigar Shah’s “Energy Empire” podcast, with the CEO of massive midwest utility ComEd backing her up.

Below, solar expert Charles Gould on the positive effects of solar fields on aquifers.

Continue reading “Educating Local Officials on Clean Energy Facts”

Fungal infections are on the rise, including Cladophialophora bantiana , which is the cause of a small, but increasing number of serious brain infections, and some observers believe is adapting, due to climate change, to live in the warmer confines of the human body.

That’s basically the elevator pitch for “The Last of Us”, the dystopian zombie-fungus series from a few years back.

Video above is a quick summary.

Below, deeper dive.

Continue reading “Could Little Known Fungus be Following “Last of Us” Script?”

Above, former Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm describes how aggregating small batteries at homes and businesses, (as well as rooftop solar, smart thermostats, and other “Distributed Energy Resources” – DERs) is a quick, cheap and effective way to not only power new demand, like Data Centers, but gain the social license and community support to do so.

Such an arrangement is called a “Virtual Power Plant”, and energy experts have been clamoring for decades for utilities to start using them. Now with the desperation to meet new demand from Data Centers, and deep pocketed hyperscalers willing to meet some, or all, of the costs, it’s finally happening.

Voltus:

Voltus will aggregate new capacity from local businesses and homes into a Google-funded Virtual Power Plant. When the grid is under strain, Voltus signals those sites, which then can use batteries, smart thermostats, industrial process adjustments and other flexible assets to reduce energy use.

Voltus then delivers financial benefits, such as bill savings and direct payments, to participating customers, turning Google’s capacity demand into real economic benefits for PJM customers. A recent report from The Brattle Group predicts U.S. consumers could save more than $100 billion over the next decade through better grid utilization.

Continue reading “It’s Happening: Virtual Power Plants Bring Speedy Power Online”

Good explainer from Public Media in California on the ongoing battery storage boom in California, which is neck and neck with deep Red Texas in deploying clean energy and storage.

The graphs below from CAISO, the California grid operator, shows how batteries are changing the way that grid works – allowing massive and growing solar energy collected during the day to be saved for evening hours, and increasingly displacing gas.

If you wonder why the current Energy Secretary and Gas Baron Chris Wright wants so badly to curb the clean energy transition, this is why. A few more years and where this is going will be obvious to everyone.

The Berkeley Earth monthly global temperature numbers show continued warming with a few striking points, notably a record high temperature for oceans, most likely related to the ongoing El Niño event, which has reached record strength, eclipsing 2015 and even the 1877 event, the largest on record.

According to Zeke Hausfather, senior scientist at Berkeley Earth, “We may be in the strongest El Niño event in 1000 years.”

Continue reading “Oceans Hit Record High as El Niño Emerges as Strongest Ever”

Predicting how the millionth domino will fall. MIT uses AI to peer further into chaotic weather systems.

Massachusetts Institute of Technology:

In 2021, Texas suffered the worst energy infrastructure failure in state history, following three severe winter storms in February. At least 246 people were killed as a result of the disruptions, which led to food, water, heat and electricity shortages.

If energy officials had had more time to prepare for the storms, for example by bringing in more trucks of natural gas to disrupted areas, damage from the event could have been mitigated. Unfortunately, weather forecasts beyond two weeks are notoriously unreliable, making for a tighter window for energy operators, farmers, and emergency response officials around the globe.

A new technique by a team including researchers at MIT significantly improves weather forecasting beyond two weeks. The researchers developed a machine-learning model that learns to correct errors in existing forecasting models to improve their output over the two-to-six-week time frame. When applied to a gold-standard forecasting model, it doubled forecasting accuracy over that time frame, placing first in a prominent international forecasting competition.

In a new paper in Nature, the researchers describe their approach and show how it enables forecasts that for the first time beat climatologic averages between two and six weeks.

Continue reading “MIT Extends Weather Forecasting Window”

AP reports the United Nations Environment Program (UNEP) has a new evaluation of global efforts to mitigate climate change, and the US is failing.

Associated Press:

If all the countries do what they promise to reduce heat-trapping emissions, Earth will likely still warm another 2.2 degrees Fahrenheit (1.2 degrees Celsius) above current temperatures, according to Wednesday’s update of climate calculations by the United Nations Environment Programme. That’s about two-tenths of a degree Fahrenheit (0.1 degrees Celsius) more than last year’s projections by the same science team.

“This is a worse outcome than expected last year, as a result of the formal withdrawal of the United States of America from the Paris Agreement and revised estimates of historical emissions,” the report said. The report also blames the United States for increased emissions last year, saying all the other top 20 major economies reduced their carbon pollution or at least slowed the growth in how much carbon dioxide was spewed from the burning of coal, oil and gas.

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That said, probably worth noting that Donald Trump’s catastrophic war in the Persian Gulf has jump started a global renewable transition. Ok, it’s not the way I would have done it, but it’s been pretty damn effective.

The Financial Times reported this week that President Trump is losing his battle with green energy.

Continue reading “Report: Losing Ground on Climate Change, US at Fault. Is there a Silver Lining?”