All righty then. Republicans are desperate for a way to find their footing on climate change. Realizing that, after a summer of shocking extreme weather events, public alarm on climate is rising sharply.
Moreover, Republicans know they lost the last election principally in suburbs that were formerly safe for them, as women and college educated voters deserted them precisely on issues like climate. Ominously for the GOP, climate impacts are no longer limited to polar bears on the cover of magazines, but are hammering suburbs in key electoral states like Michigan, Colorado, Arizona, and Nevada.
Easy to understand that puzzled Repubs are noodling around their “conservative” solutions to the problem they’ve been actively denying for 40 years.
A Republican state legislative candidate in Virginia posed an interesting question on Twitter recently.
I’m curious, Do you think the sea level would lower, if we just took all the boats out of the water? Just a thought, not a statement,” wrote Scott Pio, who is challenging Democratic Del. David Reid in Loudoun County’s District 32.
One problem for Repubs is that they’ve spent 30 years attracting a crowd of science-illiterate morons as candidates. Half a decade ago, then rising star in the party Bobby Jindal suggested Republicans “stop being the stupid party”. That movement has only accelerated, and Jindal is no longer on anyone’s list of Presidential hopefuls.
After Russia rode to Europe’s rescue and offered to increase gas supplies to the region amid soaring prices, experts said one thing had become abundantly clear: Europe is now largely at Russia’s mercy when it comes to energy, just as the U.S. had warned.
Natural gas contracts hit new highs in Europe this week — and regional benchmark prices are up almost 500% so far this year — with heightened demand and a squeeze in supply putting pressure on the energy sector as the weather turns colder.
Prices seesawed on Wednesday, hitting new highs before retreating after Russian President Vladimir Putin stepped in, offering an increase in Russia’s gas supplies to Europe.
Market analysts said the move showed that Europe was increasingly vulnerable to Russia, which is waiting for Germany to certify the controversial Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline project which will bring more Russian gas to Europe via the Baltic Sea.
The $11 billion pipeline has now been completed much to the annoyance of the U.S. which has long-opposed the project, warning for years during its construction that it compromises Europe’s energy security and that Russia could seek to use energy supplies as leverage over the region.
“Europe has now left itself hostage to Russia over energy supplies,” said Timothy Ash, emerging markets senior sovereign strategist at Bluebay Asset Management, in a research note Wednesday, calling the situation “unbelievable.”
″[It’s] crystal clear that Russia has Europe (the EU and U.K.) in an energy headlock, and Europe (and the U.K.) are too weak to call it out and do anything about it,” he said, calling it a form of “energy blackmail.”
“Europe is cowering as it fears [that] as it heads into winter Russia will further turn the screws (of energy pipelines off) and allow it to freeze until it gets its way and NS2 is certified.”
Many experts believe that Russia has withheld gas supplies to Europe on purpose, in a bid to speed up Germany’s certification of the Nord Stream 2 pipeline. Russia has refuted this, however, with Putin’s spokesman Dmitry Peskov denying on Wednesday that Russia has had any role in Europe’s energy crisis.
Nonetheless, Russia’s Deputy Prime Minister Alexander Novak noted on Wednesday that the expected German certification of the controversial pipeline could help cool prices.
90 percent of all the leafy greens grown in the US during winter are grown around Yuma, Arizona, totally dependent on the rapidly diminishing water resource from the Colorado River. That’s going to have to change.
The global population is headed toward 10 billion people by 2050, and the UN predicts that we will need to produce 70% more food to feed them. Jonathan Webb, founder and CEO of AppHarvest, believes AI-powered greenhouses are a solution.“We have to figure out how to grow a lot more food with a lot less resources, all the while in the middle of climate disruption,” says Webb. “We can do that by using technology.”
Built in 2020 and set across 60 acres, AppHarvest says its state-of-the-art greenhouse yields 30 times more per acre than open fields, while using 90% less water.
“The facility allows you to control the light, the heat, and the nutrition of the crops,” says Josh Lessing, AppHarvest’s chief technology officer. “When you have that much control over the environment, you can do a lot of interesting things,” he says.LED lights are used to supplement natural light and crops are grown without soil, in an alternative growing medium that allows water and nutrients to be absorbed by the plant root.Using 300 sensors and AI, the facility collects data from more than 700,000 plants, and growers can remotely monitor the microclimate to ensure that crops receive the ideal amount of nutrients and water.AppHarvest’s robots assess which tomatoes are ripe enough to be harvested, and then pick and prune them using their robotic arms.
Checking in on the reliably cuckoo “The Earth is Cooling” crock.
The talking point still active in the increasingly isolated pockets of climate denial, is that the sun is just about, any time now, entering into a quiescent phase that will send the world into a cooling tailspin.
In 2020 Cycle 25 had 80% more sunspots overall than the equivalent period for Cycle 24, suggesting that the current cycle may in fact be stronger, rather than weaker. The international Solar Cycle 25 Prediction Panel said in September 2020 that they expect Cycle 25 to be about as strong as Cycle 24. Has the consensus changed since then, or is it still the same?
“The consensus has not changed,” panel co-chair Doug Biesecker told All About Space. The consensus is still that the current cycle will be much like Cycle 24. “We have not seen anything that differs significantly in the early stages of this cycle that varies from the panel prediction of a peak of 115 [sunspots] in July 2025.” The predictions are based on the 13-month “smoothed sunspot number” — a statistical method for calculating sunspots. And you have to be patient when studying the sun. As Biesecker said: “It can take up to three years after the cycle begins before we can say with confidence whether the prediction is still valid.”
Above, 2011 example of a genre of climate denial classified under “The World is really Cooling”. Here delivered by reliably wrong Joe Bastardi, then of Weather Bell forecasting.
Solar activity bottomed out in December 2019, signaling the beginning of a new sunspot cycle — number 25. The current expectation is that we will reach a maximum around mid-2025. But even for this, not all solar scientists are on the same page regarding how strong it will ultimately become. The general consensus is that solar cycle 25 may have a slow start but will peak with a sunspot range of 95 to 130. This is well below the average number of sunspots, which typically ranges from 140 to 220 sunspots per solar cycle.
However, a forecast published in the journal Solar Physics in November 2020, was diametrically opposite, predicting that “Sunspot Solar Cycle 25 could have a magnitude that rivals the top few since records began.”
..he sings about a man who dreamed about a woman named fatma. and he was so in love and knew she was real that he traveled the whole country to find her. hes from the south and the girl lives in the north. the meaning behind it is that mali is one country and that the people should realise that instead of seperating it in north and south like the man in the song did until he finds his love..
John Trudell (February 15, 1946 – December 8, 2015) was a Native American author, poet, actor, musician, and political activist. He was the spokesperson for the United Indians of All Tribes‘ takeover of Alcatraz beginning in 1969, broadcasting as Radio Free Alcatraz. During most of the 1970s, he served as the chairman of the American Indian Movement, based in Minneapolis, Minnesota.
After his pregnant wife, three children and mother-in-law were killed in 1979 in a suspicious fire at the home of his parents-in-law on the Shoshone-Paiute Tribes Duck Valley Indian Reservation in Nevada, Trudell turned to writing, music and film as a second career. He acted in films in the 1990s. The documentaryTrudell (2005) was made about him and his life as an activist and artist.
LOS ANGELES — Northern California wildfires may have killed hundreds of giant sequoias as they swept through groves of the majestic monarchs in the Sierra Nevada, an official said Wednesday.
“It’s heartbreaking,” said Christy Brigham, head of resource management and science for Sequoia and Kings Canyon national parks.
The lightning-caused KNP Complex that erupted on Sept. 9 has burned into 15 giant sequoia groves in the park, Brigham said.
More than 2,000 firefighters were battling the blaze in sometimes treacherous terrain. On Wednesday afternoon, four people working on the fire were injured when a tree fell on them, the National Park Service reported.
The four were airlifted to hospitals and “while the injuries are serious, they are in stable condition,” the report said. It didn’t provide other details.
The KNP Complex was only 11% contained after burning 134 square miles (347 square kilometers) of forest. Cooler weather has helped slow the flames and the area could see some slight rain on Friday, forecasters said.
The fire’s impact on giant sequoia groves was mixed. Most saw low- to medium-intensity fire behavior that the sequoias have evolved to survive, Brigham said.
However, it appeared that two groves — including one with 5,000 trees — were seared by high-intensity fire that can send up 100-foot (30-meter) flames capable of burning the canopies of the towering trees.
That leaves the monarchs at risk of going up “like a horrible Roman candle,” Brigham said.
Two burned trees fell in Giant Forest, which is home to about 2,000 sequoias, including the General Sherman Tree, which is considered the world’s largest by volume. However, the most notable trees survived and Brigham said the grove appeared to be mostly intact.
Firefighters have taken extraordinary measures to protect the sequoias by wrapping fire-resistant material around the bases of some giants, raking and clearing vegetation around them, installing sprinklers and dousing some with water or fire retardant gel.
However, the full extent of the damage won’t be known for months, Brigham said. Firefighters are still occupied protecting trees, homes and lives or can’t safely reach steep, remote groves that lack roads or even trails, she said.
The U.S. disaster costs for the first 9 months of 2021 are $104.8 B, surpassing the costs for all of 2020 ($100.2 B) Hurricane Ida is the most costly disaster in 2021, > $60 billion and will be ranked among the top-five most costly hurricanes on record. https://t.co/cR23ZMoXqNpic.twitter.com/8Nr94iKDqj
For September, the average contiguous U.S. temperature was 67.8°F, 3.0°F above the 20th-century average, the fifth-warmest September in the 127-year period of record. For the year-to-date, the contiguous U.S. temperature was 57.0°F, 1.9°F above the 20th-century average, ranking 10th warmest in the January-September record.
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NCEI updated the 2021 billion-dollar weather and climate disaster dataset to include 10 additional events — five severe storm events, four tropical cyclone events and one wildfire event. This brings the year-to-date total to 18 weather and climate disaster events with losses exceeding $1 billion each across the U.S. and is four events shy of the 2020 record for the most disasters on record in a calendar year.
France 24 piece above, which starts at about :45, is one of the better explainers I’ve seen. There is also a nice podcast here.
It’s going to be a question about what winter looks like.
Energy markets going nuts right now, in what might be a preview of the roller coaster that we’ll be on during this unprecedented technological transition.
Globally, gas is in tight supply, with Europe and China in most jeopardy, but energy is a global market, and we’re all going to feel it, however things shake out. We will see an attempt to spin things agains the energy transition, although as the expert interviewed above points out, the rational market response to soaring fossil fuel prices will be increased momentum towards renewables. It really is a critical moment in the energy transition, and it’s important to understand the story of what is going on. Here’s a primer:
– Gas has been underperforming for investors for a decade, despite continued promises of rich returns – demand crashed due to the Covid crisis, and a lot of wells, here and abroad were shut down – as demand ramped up, gas companies have remained focused on paying off long suffering investors rather thanopening or re-opening wells, which is expensive – US now has significant Liquid gas (LNG) export capacity which means US consumers will compete with Asia and Europe on price – something that was not true even 5 years ago, and that arbitrage has begun – Europe is over-dependent on Russia for gas, and the Russians are not responding to requests for more supply (although today Vladimir Putin promised to loosen up supplies) – UK is massively screwed up due to Brexit – climate enhanced weather extremes are battering all sectors, from Norwegian hydro, which has suffered from low snowfall, a period of low winds this past summer, which is clearing out now, harsh winter last year in Central Asia, which battered gas stores, drought in Brazil slamming hydro, and hurricane Ida, which damaged wells in the Gulf
The wind speed in Europe in 2021 compared to the last decades was very low: for 3-5 weeks this summer the speed was consistently low, often the lowest since 1980. Data from @CopernicusECMWF ERA5. Note: weekly wind speed correlates perfectly with wind power generation. pic.twitter.com/9Jo1dOar9D
— Matteo De Felice @matteodefelice@mastodon.energy (@matteodefelice) October 6, 2021
– ironically, one of the major complaints is that gas stores (ie energy storage) are low going in to winter. Energy storage is of course, key to clean energy, but we’ve always been told gas is always there when you turn it on. Turns out that’s not so, as the Texas situation last year showed.
Every so often the tectonic geopolitical plates that hold up the world economy suddenly shift in ways that can rattle and destabilize everything on the surface. That’s happening right now in the energy sphere.
Several forces are coming together that could make Vladimir Putin the king of Europe, enable Iran to thumb its nose at America and build an atomic bomb, and disrupt European power markets enough that the upcoming U.N. climate conference in Glasgow could suffer blackouts owing to too little clean energy.
“If governments can’t get their act together and do this, insurance companies might do it for them.” – Andrew Hoffman, University of Michigan
“If governments can’t get their act together and do this, insurance companies might do it for them.” – Andy Hoffman, University of Michigan, Ross School of Business
Front page articles in The Washington Post and New York Times in recent weeks underline the realization among business leaders, and increasingly, homeowners, that climate change is not just about polar bears. Insurance, mortgages, and the communities they live in may be at stake.
