Month: June 2018

Above, Science all-star team breaks down Hurricane Harvey’s relationship to a record-warm ocean.

Below, Houston Chronicle editors break down Commander in Chief’s ignorance and arrogance in the face of natural disaster.

Vocab advisory:
I had to look up exegete.  — one who can explain an obscure text, like a religious tract.

Houston Chronicle:

So now we know: Thousands of heedless Houstonians were out pleasure-boating during that fateful Hurricane Harvey weekend and had to be rescued by U.S. Coast Guard sailors.

How do we know?

President Donald J. Trump said so last week. During a conference call with state and federal leaders preparing for another hurricane season, he thanked the Coast Guard for helping save 16,000 people after hurricanes Harvey and Maria and other storms. The Coast Guard doesn’t “get enough credit,” he said.

Then he said this: “Sixteen thousand people, many of them in Texas, for whatever reason that is. People went out in their boats to watch the hurricane. That didn’t work out too well.”

Anyone who can make sense of such absurdity is a better Trump exegete than we.

Venturing a guess, the president seems to believe that the Coast Guard only rescues people at sea and that those bobbing boats he might have seen on cable news last August were foolish Houstonians seeking a little late-summer recreation in the face of impending mortal danger. Like Civil War-era Washingtonians picnicking near the First Battle of Bull Run, we were irresponsible gawkers, perhaps even deserving of the consequences of our own making.

Texas House Speaker Joe Straus was quick to respond. “The people who took their boats into the water during Harvey were not storm-watchers,” the San Antonio Republican said. “They were heroes who went toward danger to rescue friends, neighbors, strangers. Texans helping Texans in a time of desperate need.”

A sarcastic Harris County Sheriff Ed Gonzalez also responded: “I’ll be sure to invite the president to ride out the next hurricane in a jon boat in Galveston Bay the next time one approaches.” Continue reading “Houston Chronicle on Trump’s Hurricane of Ignorance”

Description:

Sonam Wangchuk is an engineer who has come up with an innovative way to provide fresh water to villages in Ladakh, one of the high-altitude deserts in the world located in the Himalayas. Wangchuk sources water from streams and uses it to create artificial glaciers, which store fresh water until it’s needed in springtime.

A certain amount of global warming is baked unavoidably into the climate cake. It is coming. We will need to adapt.
One of the most critical needs will be for communities that depend on mountain glaciers as a year round water supply – who will be in deep trouble as glaciers melt and disappear.
This might be a small scale solution. Not sure how it works at macro-scale.

Description:

This is an updated version of the short film ‘The Monk, The Engineer and The Artificial Glacier’. It has upadates about the work on the pilot project carried out in Jan- Feb 2015, appended to the original film. Through the Ice Stupa Artificial Glacier Project, Ladakh attempts to solve its water crisis caused by melting glaciers/climate change. To support this project go to http://www.icestupa.org

Below, Glacier experts describe the possible impacts of disappearing glaciers. Continue reading “Can Arid Areas Adapt to Climate Change? Artificial Glaciers Might Help”

Above, properties of graphene, a form of carbon that may make huge improvements possible in key renewable tech like batteries and Solar cells.

Below, a friend sends news of yet more amazing possibilities for energy storage – as battery tech follows a similar performance curve as computer processor speed and memory, as well as solar energy deployment have seen in recent decades.

New Atlas:

Combining the unique strengths of lithium batteries with crazy-fast charging, carbon ultra-capacitors could save a ton of weight and add significant range and power to electric vehicles, according to Nawa Technologies. Based outside Marseilles, this fascinating French startup is working on a new type of battery it believes could offer some huge advantages in the EV space, among many others.

Nawa Technologies’ core product is a new type of carbon ultra-capacitor with a set of remarkable advantages over typical lithium-ion battery cells.

To start with, as a capacitor, its charge and discharge rates are absolutely spectacular compared with batteries – up to 1,000 times faster. We’re talking about charging an entire car battery in a matter of seconds, maybe three times quicker than filling a tank with fossil fuel.

And since there’s no chemical reaction taking place, merely a physical separation of protons and electrons, super-fast charging doesn’t cause any heat build-up or swelling of the battery. That gives the carbon ultra-capacitor an exceptionally long lifetime, up to a million charge cycles.

The ultra-capacitor’s monster discharge rate also offers another advantage over lithium batteries. In high-powered EVs, the slow discharge rate of the batteries often means you need to up battery capacity in order to add performance. The Tesla Model S, for example, wouldn’t be able to activate its Ludicrous speed mode with a smaller battery pack, because the slow discharge rates of the batteries would cause a power bottleneck. That’s absolutely not a problem with an ultra-capacitor; these things discharge fast enough to output enormous power with a very small battery.

It’s also very cheap and simple to manufacture, using a process that Nawa Founder and COO Pascal Boulanger describes to us over the phone as “the same process used to create photovoltaic panels. It’s industry proven, highly efficient and cost effective.”

But these remarkable advantages are not the key driver for Boulanger. He believes the carbon ultra-capacitor’s environmental benefits are its biggest calling card.

Continue reading “Carbon, Common Materials, a Key Enabler of New Battery Tech”

We sometimes hear that the need for expensive or toxic materials in lithium Ion batteries is a drawback or limitation on electric vehicle adoption.

Important to understand that the battery chemistry we have today is not the chemistry of tomorrow, – rapid change occurring.
Technology. Who’da thunk it?

CleanTechnica:

With cobalt prices soaring and ethical questions about artisanal mining continuing, Panasonic has announced that it is in the process of developing cobalt-free EV batteries. Panasonic, the world’s largest automotive lithium-ion battery manufacturer and Tesla’s exclusive battery cell supplier for the Model 3 sedan, produces the cells at the joint Gigafactory 1 in Nevada.

Cobalt material is commonly used in the production of rechargeable batteries for a wide range of consumer electronics devices, stationary energy storage units, and electric vehicles. The cathode materials of batteries typically contain the rare metal cobalt, such as in the form of lithium cobalt oxide (LiCoO2).

Portable electronic devices currently use the majority share of cobalt, but batteries for electric cars can require 1,000 times more cobalt than a phone. Tesla CEO Elon Musk said recently that battery cells used in Model 3 have achieved the highest energy density while “significantly reducing cobalt content,” increasing nickel content, and still maintaining superior thermal stability.“The cobalt content of our Nickel-Cobalt-Aluminum cathode chemistry is already lower than next-generation cathodes that will be made by other cell producers with a Nickel-Manganese-Cobalt ratio of 8:1:1.” (For more on such developments, see this and this.)

“We have already cut down cobalt usage substantially,” Kenji Tamura, who is in charge of Panasonic’s automotive battery business, confirmed. “We are aiming to achieve zero usage in the near future, and development is underway.”

Below, Dan Kammen of the University of California discusses EV development, and mentions new battery design. Continue reading “New Battery Chemistry Promises Better EVs”

Earther:

Weather watchers may be more preoccupied of late with storms popping off in the Gulf of Mexico and the eastern Pacific, but a very unusual cyclone also spun up over the Arctic this week—and it could spell more bad news for the region’s ailing sea ice.

The Arctic is no stranger to cyclones, but the latest no-name storm, which emerged in the Kara sea north of Siberia, has garnered attention both for its size and timing. The storm’s central pressure (a measure of its strength) bottomed out Thursday at about 966 millibars, placing it par with the Great Arctic Cyclone of 2012, one of the most extreme summertime storms in recent memory. That storm reached a minimum central pressure 963-966 millibars, depending on which analysis you trust.

The new storm’s occurrence in June is also noteworthy. Big cyclones like this don’t normally start hitting the Arctic until late summer. The Great Arctic Cyclone of 2012 spun up in August as did a major storm in 2016.

“Preliminarily, this storm could rank in the Top 10 for Arctic Cyclones in June as well as for the summer (June through August) in strength,” Steven Cavallo, a meteorologist at the University of Oklahoma, told Earther via email.

Xiangdong Zhang, a scientist at the International Arctic Research Center who specializes in Arctic cyclones, cited a few factors responsible for the storm’s formation, including low sea ice cover in the North Atlantic which has increased the amount of heat in the atmosphere, a strong temperature gradient between land and sea, and the stratospheric polar vortex, an area of low pressure just above the storm.
—

Current #Arctic sea ice extent is not anywhere close to average…

Compared to previous decades:
• about 850,000 km² less the 2000s mean
• about 1,360,000 km² less the 1990s mean
• about 1,790,000 km² less the 1980s mean pic.twitter.com/dGhGn5YrWl

— Zack Labe (@ZLabe) June 10, 2018

“This storm is very quick-moving and occurring earlier in the season,” University of California, Irvine Ph.D. candidate Zack Labe told Earther via Twitter direct message. “Its impacts to sea ice are likely not comparable to these other strong cyclones that have occurred later in the summer.”

Labe noted that early summer storms can favor cooler, cloudier conditions, slowing down the loss of sea ice, which typically bottoms out in September. However, he added that a storm of this strength “may precondition the ice for easier melt later in the season.”

Zhang said that due to the storm’s location, it can transport more sea ice out of the Arctic through the passage between Greenland and Svalbard known as the Fram Straight. “This will contribute to Arctic sea ice decrease, in particular thick ice,” he said.

Below, animation of the 2012 storm, which contributed to the extreme low ice minimum that year.

Continue reading “Record Arctic Cyclone Leaves Ice Shaken and Stirred”

Rob Meyer in The Atlantic:

A team of scientists from Harvard University and the company Carbon Engineering announced on Thursday that they have found a method to cheaply and directly pull carbon-dioxide pollution out of the atmosphere.

If their technique is successfully implemented at scale, it could transform how humanity thinks about the problem of climate change. It could give people a decisive new tool in the race against a warming planet, but could also unsettle the issue’s delicate politics, making it all the harder for society to adapt.

Their research seems almost to smuggle technologies out of the realm of science fiction and into the real. It suggests that people will soon be able to produce gasoline and jet fuel from little more than limestone, hydrogen, and air. It hints at the eventual construction of a vast, industrial-scale network of carbon scrubbers, capable of removing greenhouse gases directly from the atmosphere.

Above all, the new technique is noteworthy because it promises to remove carbon dioxide cheaply. As recently as 2011, a panel of experts estimated that it would cost at least $600 to remove a metric ton of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.

The new paper says it can remove the same ton for as little as $94, and for no more than $232. At those rates, it would cost between $1 and $2.50 to remove the carbon dioxide released by burning a gallon of gasoline in a modern car.

“If these costs are real, it is an important result,” said Ken Caldeira, a senior scientist at the Carnegie Institution for Science. “This opens up the possibility that we could stabilize the climate for affordable amounts of money without changing the entire energy system or changing everyone’s behavior.”

Here’s where it got sticky.
Ken Caldeira is a real, highly regarded scientist, and a lot of people thought this quote which seems to unreservedly endorse the new science seemed a little overly enthusiastic.

One scientist said Caldeira’s statement “..will leave you scratching your head.”

Many pointed out that there was insufficient info to say just how this tech would pencil out, and overly optimistic projections of as-yet-undemonstrated carbon capture technology are used by climate deniers and delayers to justify slow walking on renewables and efficiency.

Dr. Caldeira apparently heard the questions, and felt he was already being quoted out of context by the usual suspects – he posted Saturday to his blog.

Ken Caldeira

I woke up this morning to read The Federalist quoting me out of context, putting words in my mouth that I did say but wished I had worded more carefully. For those not familiar with The Federalist, they are a right wing think tank who are widely credited for successfully stacking the U.S. Federal Judiciary with right wing judges such as Neil Gorsuch.

The paragraph in question was:

“This opens up the possibility that we could stabilize the climate for affordable amounts of money without changing the entire energy system or changing everyone’s behavior,” Ken Caldeira, a senior scientist at the Carnegie Institution for Science, told The Atlantic.

Here is the full email I sent to Robinson Meyer, writer for The Atlantic:

Rob,

I am no expert in systems costing, but I read the paper as saying that Direct Air Capture of carbon dioxide would cost somewhere in the range of $100 to $250 per ton.

If these costs are real, it is an important result.

If you look at this paper (and this is what I could find quickly on the web)

https://thinc.blog/wp-content/uploads/2018/06/84d2c-guivarch2crogelj-carbonprices2c.pdf

Carbon prices projected for this century look like this for 2 C stabilization from a business-as-usual scenario:

Continue reading “Air to Gasoline Story Starts a Fire”

Dark Snow Project Chief Scientist Jason Box in Montenegro, May 2018.

Many worthwhile slides, some background noise, but valuable, arctic-focused overview, includes good discussion of sea level rise.

 

Most of the info is in the first 2 or 3 minutes of the video above.
Tesla, for now, seems stable and moving forward on goals.

Bloomberg:

Tesla has consistently missed its production targets since deliveries of the Model 3 began last July. The first major snag was at Tesla’s Gigafactory in Reno, Nevada, where software defects caused robots to fail, meaning that thousands of cells had to be pieced together by hand. Production has steadily improved since then, and Musk told shareholders on Tuesday that the company is on track to meet its goal of 5,000 cars a week by the end of June.

Tesla says there isn’t any single problem slowing production down now. Instead, the heavy reliance on automation and new production methods have created a galaxy of smaller problems that must each be addressed individually. Musk’s claim is that once the process is tuned, the company will set a new standard for speed, precision, and scalability in manufacturing.

–

Assembly Putting together the pieces of the car’s body is an area that all automakers automate to varying degrees. However even state-of-the-art factories tend to rely on people to transport parts and load them onto the machines. Car parts are packed together for storage and shipping, and picking them back up is difficult without human fingers.

This is one area that Tesla may have gone too far, too fast. In April, Musk acknowledged that he had to rip out a complex conveyor system for parts and replace it with workers. Various robots throughout the line met a similar fate or had to be reprogrammed. Even so, Tesla says the Model 3 body line is now 95 percent automated, including the transfer, loading, and welding of parts.

–
Quality Control Tesla says it has 47 robots deployed in scanning stations throughout the body line. They measure 1,900 points in every Model 3 to match them to design specs—with a precision of 0.15 millimeters. Torque measurements are also automatically recorded for every bolt that’s fastened. During the final test drives on the track, sound recorders measure squeaks, rattles and wind and road noise that a test driver might miss. All of this data is stored with each car’s unique Vehicle Identification Number, or VIN, so service centers can trace any issue back to a root cause in the factory. The idea is that Tesla will be able to improve its cars, even after they’re in a customer’s driveway.

 

No Colbert in this clip, just the apex of dumbness.

Look upon this and marvel.

Description:
Steve Harris comes from many generations of farmers. There is no question that being a farmer is hard work, and the certainty provided by the wind being generated on his farm in rural North Carolina is making it a little easier. Wind energy leases on agricultural land are bringing steady revenue to farmers faced with unpredictable crop yields and an aging workforce.