Very nice overview of Arctic changes in past several decades, graphs worth bookmarking.
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Key Indicators of Arctic Climate Change: 1971-2017 – video abstract Box, J.E., W.T. Colgan, R Brown, M Wang, J Overland, J Walsh, U Bhatt, T Christensen, N Schmidt, M Lund, F-J Parmentier, E Euskirchen, V Romanovsky, R Corell, W Meier, B Wouters, S Mernild, J Mård, J Pawlak and M Olsen 2019 Key Indicators of Arctic Climate Change: 1971-2017, Environmental Research Letters, ERL-106063, 8 April 2019. https://doi.org/10.1088/1748-9326/aafc1b
editing and voice over J. Box
This work is developed in support of the Arctic Monitoring and Assessment Program (AMAP) and under the framework of the Network on Arctic Glaciology (NAG) of the International Arctic Science Committee (IASC). Financing for this study is primar- ily by DANCEA (Danish Cooperation for Environ- ment in the Arctic) under the Danish Ministry of Energy, Buildings and Climate.
Green For All, in collaboration with Big Picture Anthems, is thrilled to announce the release of our #FuelChange Anthem – a song and music video seeking to inspire and help mobilize a movement of people and resources for zero-emission cars, trucks, and buses in neighborhoods across America.
Transportation is the #1 source of greenhouse gas emissions in the U.S., and communities of color are most impacted by pollution from dirty cars due to their proximity to busy freeways and highways, diesel trucks on their way to the port, and diesel buses. The #FuelChange Anthem song and video features Black artists, Latino activists, and Filipino youth, who help tell the story of transportation pollution from the perspective of directly impacted communities, and connects the dots between transportation, climate, and health in a way that resonates with people’s daily lives.
Trees growing near the South Pole, sea levels 20 metres higher than now, and global temperatures 3C-4C warmer. That is the world scientists are uncovering as they look back in time to when the planet last had as much carbon dioxide in the atmosphere as it does today.
Using sedimentary records and plant fossils, researchers have found that temperatures near the South Pole were about 20C higher than now in the Pliocene epoch, from 5.3m to 2.6m years ago.
Many scientists use sophisticated computer models to predict the impacts of human-caused climate change, but looking back in time for real-world examples can give new insights.
The Pliocene was a “proper analogy” and offered important lessons about the road ahead, said Martin Siegert, a geophysicist and climate-change scientist at Imperial College London. “The headline news is the temperatures are 3-4C higher and sea levels are 15-20 metres higher than they are today. The indication is that there is no Greenland ice sheet any more, no West Antarctic ice sheet and big chunks of East Antarctic [ice sheet] taken,” he said.
Fossil fuel burning was pumping CO2into the atmosphere extremely rapidly, he said, though it took time for the atmosphere and oceans to respond fully. “If you put your oven on at home and set it to 200C the temperature does not get to that immediately, it takes a bit of time, and it is the same with climate,” Siegert said, at a Royal Meteorological Society meeting on the climate of the Pliocene.
He added that global temperature had already risen by 1C since the industrial revolution, when CO2 levels were 280 parts per million (ppm). CO2 was now at 412ppm and rising, suggesting the planet would be locked into rises of 3C-4C in the next few centuries. Ice melting, he said, took even longer and the huge sea level rises indicated by the Pliocene evidence would probably take a few millennia to come about.
Florida Power & Light is vowing to go global-scale on a new solar and energy storage combination.
The unit of NextEra Energy announced plans to build a 409-MW energy storage facility in Manatee County. FPL says the Manatee Energy Storage Center will be the world’s largest solar-power battery system by four-fold.
Manatee, once it’s completed in late 2021, will be charged by a nearby FPL solar power plant. The company says the plan to discharge batteries during times of higher demand will offset the need to run other power plants, thus reducing emissions and saving customers as much as $100 million through avoided fuel costs.
“This is a monumental milestone in realizing the full benefits of solar power and yet another example of how FPL is working hard to position Florida as the global gold standard for clean energy,” said Eric Silagy, president and CEO of FPL. “Even as we aggressively execute on our plan to install 30 million solar panels by 2030, we never lose sight of finding innovative ways to bring our customers the benefits of solar energy, even when the sun’s not shining. Replacing a large, aging fossil fuel plant with a mega battery that’s adjacent to a large solar plant is another world-first accomplishment and while I’m very pleased of that fact, what I’m most proud of is that our team remained committed to developing this clean energy breakthrough while saving customers money and keeping their bills among the lowest in the nation.”
Florida Power & Light’s plan is to accelerate the retirements of two nearby 1970s-era gas-fired generation units, while planning to install smaller battery systems across the state. At peak efficiency, the Manatee energy storage system could power 390,000 homes for up to two hours.
Last year, FPL added a 10 MW/40-MWh battery storage project into operations at its 74.5-MW Babcock Ranch Solar Energy Center in Charlotte County. Babcock Ranch was built in 2016.
Antifaxxers are working together. Fox News spreading doubts about Vaccines, Climate change, renewable energy, science and verifiable fact in general. Trump joins in with claims that wind turbines cause cancer.
Wind Turbines have been blamed for everything from Headaches, to Herpes, to Hemmorhoids, to “vibrating lips”.
The inaudible sound caused by wind farms is no worse than that from other rural and urban environments and does not affect human health, a review by the Victorian Department of Health has found.
Some groups claim the inaudible noise from wind turbines, known as infrasound, can trigger health problems including dizziness, headaches, and insomnia. Together, the syndromes are sometimes described as ”wind turbine syndrome”.
The Health Department review, released late last week, assessed the evidence and found it does not ”support claims that inaudible sounds can have direct physiological effects. Physiological effects on humans have only been detected at levels that are easily audible.”
The report says infrasound is generated by many sources, such as trains, breaking waves and airconditioners. The department found the evidence showed wind farms produced no more infrasound than the background level in other environments.
”Humans have been exposed to high levels of infrasound throughout our evolution, with no apparent effects,” the report says.
WATCH: White House Aide refers to Puerto Rico as "that country." #MTPDaily@chucktodd: "Let's all be clear, Puerto Rico is not a them. Puerto Rico is an us." pic.twitter.com/BgamCL4DLw
Early in the first episode of Hostile Planet, an ambitious six-part nature series that will premiere tonight on National Geographic, viewers are introduced to a pair of barnacle geese and their trio of fuzzy chicks. The chicks happened to have been hatched atop a remote rock spire in Greenland, in a nest made in haste as their parents adapted to an early spring that disrupted their typical migration and nesting patterns. Unfortunately for the as-yet flightless goslings, food and water are on the valley floor some 400 feet below their aerie. It’s a long, perilous drop, and predators await. Cue shot of a hungry fox.
“If the chicks don’t feed within 36 hours, they’ll starve, [but] these chicks won’t be able to fly for another month,” says host and narrator Bear Grylls, his voice familiar though not exactly comforting. “There is a solution, just not an easy one.” And then, as dramatic music kicks in, the chicks begin their seemingly suicidal plunges, flapping their useless winglets as they fall. It’s not giving away too much for a series with “hostile” in the title to reveal that not all the youngsters make it—in that scene and many others. “With the seasons increasingly unpredictable, fewer chicks will survive,” Grylls narrates. “A changing climate is affecting life in mountains across the world.”
The series is stunningly beautiful, but also not shy about highlighting the Darwinian harshness that comes with that beauty. The natural world here is awe-inspiring, yes, but far from benign; it’s less “mother nature” and more “nature is a motherfucker.” “We didn’t try to sweeten the story or put more hope into it than there is—we wanted it to show people the reality,” says executive producer Tom Hugh-Jones, an Emmy-winning veteran of the BBC Natural History Unit who worked on both Planet Earth and Planet Earth II. In Hostile Planet, he saw a chance to make the nature documentary’s next evolution, utilizing every aspect of filmmaking, from the soundtrack to the editing to the cutting-edge camerawork, in order to move beyond the somewhat more prim David Attenborough format and tell a more urgent story. (Coincidentally, Netflix is also releasing a climate-change-focused nature documentary this week, Our Planet, narrated by Attenborough.) “We wanted to make something that was more current, both in the way we told the story and the way we addressed the situation that we are all facing on this planet.”
Hostile Planet interweaves stories from across the seven continents, grouping them together thematically in each episode by type of ecosystem—mountains, oceans, grasslands, jungles, deserts, polar—many featuring animals struggling with new uncertainty. They are adapted evolutionarily to a certain set of expectations about when the seasons will change and when the storms will arrive, about when they should begin a migration and what other animals they can expect to find at their journey’s end. Increasing unpredictability, however, undermines those assumptions, which can have dire results. “The aspiration is to show how the animals are managing to cope in such a fast-changing world,” Grylls told me. “Life is hard on the edge for animals anyway, but the edge is just getting harder and sharper because of what’s happening with climate change and weather extremes.” The planet is changing. Animals are adapting where they can, dying where they can’t.
n rural Honduras, farming has been many residents’ livelihood for generations. But now, rising temperatures and declining rainfall are killing crops and jeopardizing the farmers’ very survival. Special correspondent Marcia Biggs and videographer Julia Galiano-Rios explore how climate change affects these rural populations, driving them into urban areas and ultimately, even out of the country.
Above, Dr. Jeffrey Ellenbogen is arguably one of, if not the, best informed expert on wind turbine “health effects” on the planet. Dr. Ellenbogen was a professor at Harvard Medical School, and concurrently director of the Harvard Sleep Lab at Mass General Hospital, for 6 years. He specialized in the relationship between acoustic energy and health.
President Trump has long despised wind power. He has repeatedly blamed wind turbines for killing birds (which they do at a lower rate than other energy sources) and for allegedly causing electrical power to halt when the wind stops blowing (in fact, electricity grids using mixed power sources and battery storage have solved this problem.) In a speech tonight to House Republicans, Trump claimed that wind turbines cause cancer.
“They say the noise causes cancer,” the President of the United States asserted.
Wind turbines do not cause cancer. Some people blame the noise for causing a variety of other health ailments, but these charges have zero scientific validity. Cancer is not caused by noises of any kind.
A power source that does cause many health problems, including cancer, is coal, an extremely dirty fuel Trump loves and has attempted to bolster, with almost no success. Aside from costing more to produce energy than other sources of power, and in addition to enormous air pollution side effects, coal also emits greenhouse gases in large amounts. Though this of course is another aspect of science Trump rejects.
In the same speech, Trump urged his fellow Republicans, “Hey, you gotta be a little bit more paranoid than you are. We have to be a little bit careful, because I don’t like the way the votes are being tallied.” Trump subscribes to wild fears over systematic Democratic voter fraud, a belief – like climate science skepticism – that is extremely common inside his party.
We just got some massive news in the ongoing drive to switch to renewable energy: scientists have identified 530,000 sites worldwide suitable for pumped-hydro energy storage, capable of storing more than enough energy to power the entire planet.
Pumped-hydro is one of the best technologies we have for storing intermittent renewable energy, such as solar power, which means these sites could act as giant batteries, helping to support cheap, fully renewable power grids.
Added together, these hundreds of thousands of sites have the potential to store around 22 million Gigawatt-hours (GWh) of energy. It’s more than enough to get the entire planet running on renewables, which is where we want to get to.
As of now the sites have only been identified by an algorithm, so further on-the-ground research needs to be done. But it was previously assumed there were only limited suitable sites around the world, and that we wouldn’t be able to store enough renewable energy for high-demand times – which this study shows isn’t the case at all.
“Only a small fraction of the 530,000 potential sites we’ve identified would be needed to support a 100 percent renewable global electricity system,” says one of the researchers involved in the survey, Matthew Stocks from the Australian National University (ANU).
“We identified so many potential sites that much less than the best 1 percent will be required. The perception has been there are limited sites for pumped hydro around the world, but we have found hundreds of thousands.”
