Another month, another new record — for rising temperatures.
The latest NASA data reveals that April was the warmest month ever recorded on Earth. The new record marks the 12th consecutive month of record-high global temperatures, as the scientific consensus remains that human activity is contributing to detrimental climate change across the globe.
For John Church, a leading authority on sea-level rise caused by global warming, there was much that was fitting – and yet callous – about being sacked at sea.
The veteran scientist was well into one of dozens of research voyages he had taken since joining CSIRO as a post doctoral student in 1979.
His vessel, the RV Investigator, was midway between Antarctica and New Zealand and steaming north on the 170 degree longitude when he received Thursday’s call to tell him he was “potentially redundant”.
Sitting with a supporter in the ship’s conference room, Dr Church was told his services were no longer needed.
“I was OK during the call but it is certainly not a nice feeling to have what you have worked for – for so many years – thrown on the scrapheap,” the 64 year-old told Fairfax Media after finishing a 12-hour stint on watch.
Republican presidential contender Donald Trump has turned to one of America’s most ardent drilling advocates and climate change skeptics to help him draft his energy policy.
The New York billionaire has asked U.S. Republican Congressman Kevin Cramer of North Dakota – a major oil drilling state – to write a white paper on energy policy, Cramer and sources familiar with the matter told Reuters. Cramer and some other Trump energy advisers also recently met with lawmakers from western energy states, who hope Trump will open more federal land for drilling.
Cramer said his paper would emphasize the dangers of foreign ownership of U.S. energy assets, burdensome taxes, and over-regulation.
Forecasters becoming more confident in predicting current fading El Nino will morph into a La Nina later in the year. Both conditions have a characteristic fingerprint.
Above, NASA JPL’s Josh Willis, interviewed in late 2011, discusses the last time we had an El Nino followed by a strong La Nina. Strong effects on global precipitation, and potentially, the coming hurricane season.
A La Nina, a weather pattern marked by a cooling of the Pacific Ocean’s surface, might begin as soon as summer in the Northern Hemisphere, threatening an increase in the number of hurricanes that develop in the Atlantic.
La Nina is the inverse of the warming that characterizes an El Nino pattern. One of the strongest El Ninos on record is now weakening in the equatorial Pacific.
“We are still technically in an El Nino but we are seeing a lot of cold water bubbling up near the coast of South America,” said Michelle L’Heureux, a forecaster with the U.S. Climate Prediction Center in College Park, Maryland. “It is not widespread at this point, but it is indicative to a transition and a fairly quick one.”
Both phenomena can alter global weather patterns. More hurricanes tend to develop in the Atlantic in a La Nina year because it cuts down on wind shear across the basin that can rip budding storms apart. Strong La Ninas also threaten to bring drier conditions across agricultural areas of southern Brazil and flooding to parts of Australia.
The center isn’t making forecasts on the strength of the La Nina yet, in part because many predictive models aren’t always as accurate during spring in the Northern Hemisphere. U.S. forecasters believe there is a 75 percent chance a La Nina will form by the end of 2016, and they are favoring it to develop over the summer, L’Heureux said.
Here, recently released prediction for the coming year from Penn State’s Earth Systems group. You can compare to previous performance.
ESSC scientist Michael E. Mann, alumnus Michael Kozar, and researcher Sonya K. Miller have released their seasonal prediction for the 2016 North Atlantic hurricane season, which officially starts on June 1st and runs through November 30th.
LONDON — Nissan announced a new home energy-storage device Monday, made out of recycled batteries sourced from its Leaf electric cars.
The xStorage system, which Nissan unveiled at an event in East London and is produced in partnership with power =-management company Eaton, is essentially the company’s answer to Tesla’s Powerwall.
The product, which will be powered by 12 Nissan Leaf battery modules, connects to a residential power supply.
It charges up when either renewable energy (from, say, solar panels) is available, or when energy from the grid is cheap (typically at night). Then it releases that energy, powering the house, when energy costs are higher. It will also allow consumers to sell energy back to the grid, Nissan say.
The xStorage battery is being touted by the company as “the first… to provide a fully integrated energy storage unit for homeowners.” It will be installed by certified installers and connects to a smartphone app that will allow consumers to manually switch between energy sources.
Not a good month in court for the purveyors of climate disinformation. Notably, we had a decision in Minnesota wherein (the late) Peabody Coal brought up Science Denial’s version of Team Ironman in a case to determine how Minnesota should view the economic and social costs of coal burning.
In this case, the Team Captain America role was ably filled by Dr. John Abraham, and Dr. Andrew Dessler whose briefs to the Court were, to mix my comic universes, like Kryptonite to stupidity and dishonesty.
Peabody Energy, the world’s largest private sector coal company (now bankrupt), recently faced off against environmental groups in a Minnesota court case. The case was to determine whether the State of Minnesota should continue using its exceptionally low established estimates of the ‘social cost of carbon’, or whether it should adopt higher federal estimates.
The social cost of carbon is an estimate of how much the damages from carbon pollution cost society via climate change damages. In theory, it represents how much the price of fossil fuels should increase to reflect their true costs.
Warming has been less than models predicted [False]
This means the climate’s sensitivity to the increased greenhouse effect is low [False]
Carbon pollution is great anyway and should be subsidized, not taxed [False]
In between these primary arguments, Peabody coal’s witnesses made a variety of false and/or conspiratorial statements, dredging up numerous long-debunked climate myths.
we now stand at 18 years without warming in the real climate system.
This statement is unequivocally false. Over the past 18 years the surface has warmed, the atmosphere has warmed, the oceans have warmed, ice has melted, sea levels have risen, and so on. Even Spencer’s own satellite data showed that the atmosphere had most likely warmed over the cherry-picked 18-year period in question. Anyone can easily check the warming trends with this useful tool.
Not long ago, newly discovered documents revealed that, way back in the 70s, and even before, Exxon scientists were studying the potential impacts of fossil fuel burning on global climate.(see video at end of this piece) Now, a group of Attorneys General is starting to ask why, when they knew the science, Oil giants started paying groups like The American Enterprise Institute, the Heartland Institute, and others, to confuse and deny the facts, and misinform customers and investors.
Having been caught out – the dodge we are now seeing is that denying climate science when you know the truth – is exercising “free speech”. Practically a patriotic duty, fer gosh sakes.
Some friends were doing a little searching in the Tobacco archives for examples of how Tobacco apologists were playing the “our right to free speech” card when caught out lying about what their own scientists knew on the effects of Tobacco products.
Turns out the in 1987, Mobil Oil stood up for Big Tobacco’s right to lie to customers and shareholders about the risks of using, and investing in, their products.
Maybe they were looking forward to a time when they might be in the same hot seat?
Years ago, state and federal prosecutors proved that tobacco companies lied about the dangerous and addictive nature of cigarettes.Big Oil stood up for Big Tobacco’s “right” to lie
Today, state attorneys general are investigating fossil-fuel companies and asking similar questions as their predecessors: what did oil companies know about the dangerous, climate-altering effects of their products, and what did they do to hide that information from investors, the public and policymakers?
The lawsuits against the tobacco companies produced an archive of more than 14 million industry documents, which are available for free to the public. They paint a damning picture of an industry that employed a small army of lawyers and lobbyists to try to hide the truth from the public — and the parallels to the oil industry are undeniable.
Here, video of Tobacco executives exercising “Free Speech”.
There’s a moment, after a resuscitation attempt has been ongoing for a while, after you’ve basically emptied the crash cart into a carcass being held in stasis with chest compressions – when the supervising Doc looks up and says, “I don’t think we’re making a difference here – anyone have any objections?”
That’s kind of where the US coal industry is right now.
Which doesn’t stop political candidates from trying to make hay on the pain in coal country.
Malignant corn chip Donald Trump campaigned in West Virginia over the weekend, where he regaled an audience of coal miners with a series of impassioned thoughts about hairspray and how it can’t possibly affect the ozone layer. This is basically just performance art at this point.
At a rally in Charleston, Trump exulted in being the presumptive GOP nominee for like, a solid minute and a half. Then, as the Associated Press video above shows, he popped on a safety helmet, pantomimed a shoveling motion, removed it just as quickly, and then, well:
That is great. My hair looks OK. I got a little spray. Give me a little spray. You know you’re not allowed to use hairspray anymore because it affects the ozone. You know that, right? I said, ‘You mean to tell me’ — because you know, hairspray’s not like it used to be. It used to be real good. When I put on that helmet — and by the way, look [pats own hair] it really is mine. Lookit. My hair. Give me a mirror. Today ya put the hairspray on and it’s good for twelve minutes, right? They say you can’t — I said, ‘Wait a minute, so if I take hairspray and I spray it in my apartment which is all sealed, you’re telling me that affects the ozone layer?’ Yes? I say no way folks. No way.
Donald Trump’s promise to open shuttered coal mines in Appalachia might be as hard to fulfill as getting Mexico to pay for a new wall, analysts suggested.
The vow by the presumptive Republican presidential nominee would likely mean turning back regulations on greenhouse gases and perhaps toxic air pollutants, experts said. Even then, it’s unlikely that the cost of extracting coal from eastern mines would be cheaper than using natural gas in power plants, they said, making a widespread mining revival improbable.
“It’s very, very, very unlikely he could do something to get coal back to where it was seven years ago,” said John Deskins, director of the Bureau of Business and Economic Research at West Virginia University.
On Thursday, Trump drew wild applause in Charleston, W.Va., by telling miners in hard hats and reflective stripes to get ready to be “working your asses off” in reopened mines if he’s elected. Some people waved signs saying, “Trump digs coal,” and the business tycoon joked about needing a spritz of hair spray after trying on a miner’s helmet, the gift of an industry group.
“I’m thinking about the miners all over this country,” Trump said. “We’re gonna put the miners back to work. We’re gonna put the miners back to work. We’re gonna get those mines open.”
Obviously, drilling for oil in the Arctic is a stupid idea. A lot of people are angry with President Obama for approving the new effort by oil giant Shell, which is nudging a huge rig up the coast of Alaska toward the Chukchi Sea.
But context is everything. The President has followed a pattern of choosing his battles carefully in relation to climate. The playing field is changing rapidly – and Shell’s efforts in the arctic, in light of the current global price for oil, seem ill advised. I’m not the only one that thinks so.
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In the case Shell’s current Arctic foray, today’s oil prices make it pretty easy for the Obama administration to acoommodate an oil major’s rush to burn cash, while the real action is taking place elsewhere, as low oil prices fail to ignite further global demand, and we increasingly glimpse the outlines of a new normal, where drilling for exotic, expensive oil, in the arctic or elsewhere, ceases to make economic sense.
Shell, of course, gave up on it’s drilling attempt last summer, after which I wrote:
As I’ve been posting for some time, Shell’s drilling in the Arctic was an exercise in very expensive futility, given the price of oil. Whoever gambled that oil prices were going to pop back up, and that some amazing discovery would make it all worthwhile, just lost to the Gambler in Chief.
I’ve said before that the President’s game is not three dimensional chess, as is so often asserted, but poker. Green campaigners who have been beating the president up over the Arctic decision might take a step back and ask themselves if in fact, given the Congress we have, and the political climate, whether they were a little too quick to judge an executive who plays the long game.
Which is why, if you read this blog – today’s news did not surprise you.
After plunking down more than $2.5 billion for drilling rights in U.S. Arctic waters, Royal Dutch Shell Plc, ConocoPhillips and other companies have quietly relinquished claims they once hoped would net the next big oil discovery.
The pullout comes as crude oil prices have plummeted to less than half their June 2014 levels, forcing oil companies to cut spending. For Shell and ConocoPhillips, the decision to abandon Arctic acreage was formalized just before a May 1 due date to pay the U.S. government millions of dollars in rent to keep holdings in the Chukchi Sea north of Alaska.
The U.S. Arctic is estimated to hold 27 billion barrels of oil and 132 trillion cubic feet of natural gas, but energy companies have struggled to tap resources buried below icy waters at the top of the globe.
