Month: September 2018

Quartz:

Another victim of Hurricane Florence: farm animals.

Millions of animals left on farms in North Carolina during the record-breaking rainfall have drowned in the flooding. As of Tuesday (Sept. 18), the North Carolina Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services, which has been counting livestock deaths in the field, says 3.4 million chickens and turkeys have died so far, along with 5,500 pigs.

“These numbers could change based on further recovery efforts,” the department said in a statement.

Sanderson Farms, one of the biggest poultry companies in the state, said about 30 of the independent farms it contracts to supply its chickens were isolated by flood waters as of Monday (Sept 17). Each farm houses approximately 211,000 chickens.

“Losses of live inventory could escalate if the Company does not regain access to those farms,” a Sanderson spokesperson wrote in a statement. An additional 64 chicken barns on various farms under Sanderson contract have already flooded, leaving 1.7 million chickens dead. Those chickens were included in the state agriculture department’s count.

North Carolina is the second-largest pork producer in the US, trailing only Iowa, and one of the largest poultry producers in the country. By the state’s count, there are 9.3 million hogs, 819 million chickens, and 33.5 million turkeys housed on farms in North Carolina. Between 65 and 70 million chickens are slaughtered in the state in an average month, along with roughly 2 million turkeys, according to US Department of Agriculture numbers from 2017.

Livestock deaths in North Carolina due to Hurricane Florence already exceed those caused by Hurricane Matthew in 2016. In Hurricane Floyd, which hit the state in 1999, losses ended up totalling 21,000 hogs and about 1 million poultry birds.

Meanwhile, 13 hog manure lagoons are overflowing from rainfall, another 55 are close to overtopping their walls and, and an additional four lagoons have suffered structural damage. Hog manure running into flood waters poses a substantial public health risk, according to experts.

Gentle reminder: Those who follow these videos will get an early heads up on emerging topics in climate change.

Stefan Rahmstorf’s 2015 paper (with Michael Mann and Dark Snow Chief scientist Jason Box) is, in the wake of Hurricane Florence, a hot topic of discussion – mainly in terms of the “cold blob” south of Greenland, and its possible effects the behavior of storms, like possibly Florence, Sandy and Harvey – causing them to veer into the US mainland, and dawdle as they come ashore.

Washington Post:

In late August 2017, Hurricane Harvey made landfall in Texas on San Jose Island. Over the following five days, Harvey’s forward movement slowed to a glacial pace, essentially stopping over the greater Houston area, weakening in terms of wind speed but retaining an immense amount of moisture that eventually fell as rain in catastrophic amounts.

A year later, residents in the southeast and Mid-Atlantic may face the exact same scenario with Hurricane Florence, and the reason will be eerily similar.

A ridge of high pressure, extreme especially for this time of year, will develop just off the coast of New England, shunting the path of Florence toward the southeast coast. The strength of this ridge will be unprecedented in 30 years, according to forecast models.

Below, the cold blob has been reliably visible south east of Greenland for several years.

Last year, I posted this interview with ice core expert J.P. Steffensen on the history of sudden climate shifts related to the Atlantic circulation.

Union of Concerned Scientists:

Atlantic hurricanes tend to develop off the coast of Africa, then move in a north/northwest direction. By the time they reach the position Florence was in a couple of days ago, they tend to take a hard right turn toward the north/northeast, staying well away from the US. In fact, as reported by Brian McNoldy and the Washington Post, of the nearly 80 recorded storms that passed within 200 nautical miles of Florence’s position on Friday, none made landfall on the US coast.

Florence’s path, however, has been blocked by a ridge of high pressure in the atmosphere, which is essentially blocking the storm from moving northward and keeping it on a westward trajectory toward the coast instead.

Six years ago, when Sandy slammed into the coast of New Jersey, a “blocking ridge” over the eastern half of northern North America prevented Sandy from moving north. Never before had we seen hurricane take such a perpendicular path toward the Mid-Atlantic coastline.  One important difference between the paths of Sandy and Florence, however, is that during Sandy, the blocking ridge also prevented a low-pressure storm system coming from the west from moving north, so the two storms collided (hence the “Superstorm Sandy” moniker).

If you missed Jennifer Francis’ interview that I posted the other day, she does a good job of integrating what we know about how arctic changes might be having major effects on the storm tracks that affect us here in the temperate zone. Most relevant – 1:45 to 7:15.

 

 

In other words, the ultimate Trumper wet dream.

Yahoo News:

About 3.4 million chickens and turkeys and 5,500 hogs have been killed in flooding from Florence as rising North Carolina rivers swamped dozens of farm buildings where the animals were being raised for market, according to state officials.

The N.C. Department of Agriculture issued the livestock mortality totals Tuesday, as major flooding is continuing after the slow-moving storm’s drenching rains. Sixteen North Carolina rivers were at major flood stage Tuesday, with an additional three forecasted to peak by Thursday.

The Department of Environmental Quality said the earthen dam at one hog lagoon in Duplin County had breached, spilling its contents. Another 25 of the pits containing animal feces and urine have either suffered structural damage, had wastewater levels go over their tops from heavy rains or had been swamped by floodwaters. Large mounds of manure are also typically stored at poultry farms.

Vice:

The 40 inches of rain Hurricane Florence has dumped on North Carolina is leaving a trail of industrial waste as runoff from coal ash pits, inundated sewage systems, and feces from dozens of hog farms pours into rivers, lakes, and neighborhoods.

North Carolina is home to the densest population of hogs in the country with 2,100 hog farms producing an estimated 40 million gallons of hog poop a day, most of which ends up being stored in 3,000 open-pit earthen basins known as “lagoons.”

Before Florence made landfall, hog farms had been frantically trying to lower the level of those lagoons by spraying the waste on fields. But as of noon Tuesday, four hog lagoons in the hurricane area had been breached, 13 had overflowed and nine had been inundated. Another 55 were at or almost at capacity and in danger of overflowing, according to the Department of Environmental Quality.

“You basically have a toxic soup for people who live in close proximity to those lagoons,” said Sacoby Wilson, a professor of public health at the University of Maryland. “All of these contaminants that are in the hog lagoons, like salmonella, giardia, and E-coli, can get into the waterways and infect people trying to get out.”

These lagoons contain large amounts of nitrogen and phosphorus, which farmers spray as fertilizer onto nearby fields. In excess, these nutrients are also a primary contributor to algae blooms and so-called “dead zones,” large areas with such low levels of oxygen that animals can’t survive. Some, like the dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico is so big it can be seen from space.

Nitrogen from agricultural runoff is also the primary contributor to dangerous levels of nitrate in drinking water across parts of the U.S., which has been linked to different kinds of cancers and blue baby syndrome, a potentially fatal infant condition.

Below, the Cape Fear River is expected to crest today – almost 27 feet – like a 3 story building – above flood stage.

Proceedings of the National Academy of Science:

Three sequential hurricanes, Dennis, Floyd, and Irene, affected coastal North Carolina in September and October 1999. These hurricanes inundated the region with up to 1 m of rainfall, causing 50- to 500-year flooding in the watershed of the Pamlico Sound, the largest lagoonal estuary in the United States and a key West Atlantic fisheries nursery. We investigated the ecosystem-level impacts on and responses of the Sound to the floodwater discharge. Floodwaters displaced three-fourths of the volume of the Sound, depressed salinity by a similar amount, and delivered at least half of the typical annual nitrogen load to this nitrogen-sensitive ecosystem.

Continue reading “S**tStorm: Florence Brews a Toxic Poop Soup in NC”

Continue reading “Florence in Tweets”

Up until just a few years ago, Detroit based DTE, the second largest utility in Michigan, and a classic example of a big, coal-heavy rust belt electric producer, was still pushing back on efforts to decarbonize and enact more ambitious Renewable Portfolio standards in the state.
Then something happened.
Confess I’m not sure exactly what – but it might have something to do with the great performance of the wind farms the utility has been putting up in recent years, and the increasingly obvious results of economic models from across the county that show renewables outperforming fossil fuels in coming decades, and perhaps an enlightened self interest in realizing that there’s no fighting a technological disruption of this magnitude.

My jaw dropped when a company official affirmed commitment to the Paris Initiative, and a low carbon profile by mid-century.
I get it – it’s not enough. But given the progress of the last 5 years, and the rapid pace of technological change, I don’t think it’s naive to imagine even more ambitious goal setting in the not too distant future.
Above, and below, the company is touting it’s success with robust wind development throughout the state, and the spectacular benefits to local communities.

Continue reading “How a Big Coal Based Utility Pivots to Wind, Renewables”

AP climate reporter Seth Borenstein is tallying the lessons of Florence – and doing a pretty great job of brushing off denial trolls on his twitter feed.

Seth Borenstein for Associated Press:

For years, when asked about climate change and specific weather events, scientists would refrain from drawing clear connections. But over the past few years, the new field of attribution studies has allowed researchers to use statistics and computer models to try to calculate how events would be different in a world without human-caused climate change.

A couple of months after Hurricane Harvey, studies found that global warming significantly increased the odds for Harvey’s record heavy rains.

“It’s a bit like a plot line out of ‘Back to the Future,’ where you travel back in time to some alternate reality” that is plausible but without humans changing the climate, said University of Exeter climate scientist Peter Stott, one of the pioneers of the field.

A National Academy of Sciences report finds these studies generally credible. One team of scientists tried to do a similar analysis for Florence, but outside experts were wary because it was based on forecasts, not observations, and did not use enough computer simulations.

As the world warms and science advances, scientists get more specific, even without attribution studies. They cite basic physics, the most recent research about storms and past studies and put them together for something like Florence.

Continue reading “As Florence Still Drenches, Learning the Lessons”