Month: August 2011

USAToday, which has been doing more and more good work on climate change and climate science (ok, a pretty weak field..) – has a good piece on this summer’s heat, and what it indicates. Here’s a sample, worth reading the whole piece.

Here’s one way to think of it: The atmosphere is juiced like athletes on performance-enhancing drugs. During baseball’s steroid era, steroids didn’t turn singles into home runs. But what used to be fly balls to the warning track ended up over the fence.

Similarly, climate change and urbanization don’t cause heat waves and droughts so much as intensify them. So what used to be a 95-degree day can become a 100-degree day. Or what once was a 75-degree nighttime low can turn into an 80-degree night.

And, one might add, what once would have been a summer thunderstorm can turn into a gulley washing, basement flooding, tornado spawning monster. And what once might have been a hot spell turns into a drought of biblical intensity.

Some 98% of climate scientists agree that global warming is real and is very likely caused primarily by human activity. The evidence continues to mount: Nine of history’s 10 hottest years have occurred in the past 13 years. In the USA, new high temperature records outnumbered low temperature records by more than 2-to-1 over the past decade. And the volume of Arctic sea ice reached record lows for July.

Too often, climate change is discussed as something to be worried about far off into the future, so far that it dims in importance compared with more pressing concerns. Both the latest global data and the USA’s sweltering summer suggest, however, that the future might be now.

Mike Papantonio talks with Bill McKibben, founder of 350.org, about the ongoing denial of climate change coming from the Right.

YouTuber and friend of climatecrocks Collin Maessen offers this telling and hilarious take down of yet another Monckton claim – that he’s actually published a peer reviewed paper.

 Huntsville Times – River Temp forces Nuke to Power Down:

Not even TVA can beat the heat.

On Wednesday, the utility had to bring a third reactor at Browns Ferry Nuclear Plant down to 50 percent power to avoid environmental sanctions because the water in the Tennessee River — where the plant’s cooling water is discharged — already was at 90 degrees.

“When the river’s ambient temperature reaches 90 degrees, we can’t add any heat to it,” said TVA’s nuclear spokesman Ray Golden.

Similar problems last summer forced the Tennessee Valley Authority to spent $50 million for replacement power, according to Golden. The extra expense translated to something between 50 cents and $1 on most electric bills several months later, officials have said.

Reuters:

All existing nuclear plants use vast amounts of water as a coolant. But in recent years — often far from the public eye — hot river and lake temperatures have forced power plants worldwide to decrease generating capacity.

Experts say the problem is only getting worse as climate change triggers prolonged heat waves, prompting calls for changes in siting processes.

“As a long-range strategy, [the industry] might change where we site new plants to have better use of water resources,” Gary Vine, an independent consultant, told SolveClimate News. Vine has worked in the nuclear industry for decades and is a former employee of Electric Power Research Institute, a utility group.

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Preliminary data from the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS), an environmental and nuclear watchdog group based in Cambridge, Mass., shows that seven nuclear units at five facilities had to reduce generating capacity due to warm waters on at least 15 occasions between May and September 2010. The plants were in New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Illinois and Georgia. While such incidents didn’t affect plant safety, they posed economic risk and decreased power availability.

Nuclear power is not alone in sucking tremendous amounts of water during operations – Power generated from thermal power plants – coal, natural gas and nuclear, withdraws more freshwater per year than the entire agricultural sector; with nuclear using the most.

Continue reading “Heat Waves Spotlight Nuclear Achilles Heel”

Steve Doocy must have spewn a mouth full of Frankenberries across the room when he saw Sponge Bob talking about Climate Change.

More evidence that climate deniers, Windbaggers, and Birthers are the same band of idiots. Donald Trump joins the Koch Brothers in fighting the future.

Guardian:

Donald Trump has pledged to use “any legal means” to block the building of an offshore windfarm near his championship golf course in Aberdeenshire, claiming the development would spoil his view.

The proposed windfarm in Aberdeen Bay, about 1.5 miles from the golf resort, would install the next generation of offshore wind turbine technology.
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Continue reading “New Windbagger Blowhard: Trump Threatens to Fire Offshore Wind”

From NOAA Environmental Visualization Laboratory –

How hot was the month of July in 2011? So hot that just by plotting the location of each daily heat record that was broken, a nearly complete image of the contiguous United States is visible. Almost 9,000 daily records were broken or tied last month, including 2,755 highest maximum temperatures and 6,171 highest minimum temperatures (i.e., nighttime records). It should be noted that the tally of records collected so far is not complete – more are expected to come in as station data from across the U.S. is mailed to the National Climatic Data Center. The statistics reported here only include weather stations with real-time electronic reporting, which accounts for about two-thirds of the locations. Final numbers should be available later in August.

This image plots how many times a heat record was broken or tied in a given location. Some cities reached daily high temperatures 19 out of the 31 days in the month. The largest concentration of these records occur in the southern Plains, Midwest, and Northeast U.S., which were gripped by a series of heat waves pushing heat indices well into the 100’s (Fahrenheit) for many days at a time.

Temperature records are based on historical data from NCDC’s Cooperative Summary of the Day data set and the preliminary reports from the Cooperative Observers and National Weather Service stations around the country. All stations have at least 30 years of data upon which these records are based.

Note. One of the fingerprints of human caused global warming is that increased warming is happening at night, in winter, and in polar regions — indicating that solar heating is not the cause.
Continue reading “Picture of the Day: July Day and Nightime Heat Records”