Month: October 2021

Putin Pushed to Pivot on Climate

RUSSIA-POLITICS-ANIMALS-PUTIN

Bloomberg:

After years of publicly dismissing climate change, President Vladimir Putin is finally prodding officials to take the threat it poses to Russia’s economy more seriously. 

The shift in thinking means the Kremlin is likely to come to the COP26 climate change summit in Glasgow in November with proposals to synchronize its efforts to measure carbon emissions with those in Europe, according to four people familiar with the plans.

While the moves hardly amount to the kind of ambitious new emissions-reduction target for Russia that western capitals were hoping for, it’s a significant step for Putin as the leader of one of the world’s largest hydrocarbon producers, who until recently belittled climate issues.

Officials say the new approach is being driven by a belated realization the European Union, Russia’s largest trading partner, is serious about implementing carbon border regulations that will likely compel Russian companies to pay for excess emissions in key industries. The Kremlin also sees climate issues as among the few areas of possible cooperation with the U.S. and Europe after years of worsening relations. 

Russia’s delegation at the summit will focus on topics including standards for calculating CO2 emissions and the absorption capacity of its enormous forests, as well as a proposal to rate nuclear power as “green” energy for carbon accounting purposes, two of the people said.

As the fourth largest greenhouse-gas polluter, Russia dumps about 5% of all carbon dioxide into the atmosphere each year. Nearly 90% of all energy Russia consumes comes from carbon-heavy sources, above the global average of about 80%, and an accelerated deployment of renewables could save the country as much as $11 billion a year by 2030.

Two years ago, Putin was ridiculing clean energy, including the impact of wind turbines on worms.

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The Extravagant Life and Extratropical Death of Hurricane Sam

We live in an age of wonders when we can track a storm that, decades ago, would have played out largely out of human sight.

Former NRC Chair: Nuclear Not a Climate Solution

Gregory Jaczko in The Hill:

The only advanced nuclear technologies close to realization are called small modular reactors. These reactors are smaller than traditional reactors and are self-contained. These features allow companies to manufacture most of the reactor in a factory and ship it to a plant site. This concept evokes images of smart phones rolling out of factories by the billions — each design identical and mass produced. Their small size reduces the amount of radiation that can be released to the environment, greatly reducing — but not eliminating — safety to a plant’s community. And their modular nature promises operation that adapts to fluctuating power demands, addressing some grid flexibility concerns.

Yet the economic competitiveness of small modular reactors appears weak. Shrinking the size of a traditional reactor and splitting it among many modules increases the cost of the electricity it produces. It is the same reason airlines fly large capacity jets instead of private jets. You maximize the revenue per area of the aircraft hull. Proponents argue mass production will overcome this problem with fleet-wide economies of scale and construction efficiencies. Only wide scale adoption of the technology would deliver those benefits and there is no obvious market to support that today.  

Moreover, the nuclear industry always promises better, faster and cheaper yet it fails to deliver. A case in point: two traditional reactors currently under construction in Georgia are five years behind schedule and more than $10 billion over budget, even though they promised to do better. A “twin” reactor project in South Carolina failed before completion, leaving ratepayers holding the bag for billions in wasted costs.

Small modular designs are only promising to be cheaper than traditional reactors. Current estimates show they are more expensive than renewables, like wind and solar, even with storage and without subsidies. Small reactors have a long way to go to be competitive. Dramatic cost decreases for high-volume energy storage, which address the intermittency of some renewables, make the competitive case for any form of nuclear even tougher.

Even if everything else was lined up perfectly, nuclear has little time to catch up. After reentering the Paris Agreement, the U.S. will again strive to achieve drastic reductions in greenhouse gas emissions (GHG) within the next 10 years. Even in the most optimistic scenario, we won’t see even a handful of small modular nuclear reactors in the U.S. until 2029 or 2030, which means a large-scale impact would come far after the climate tipping point.

Nobel Underlines Rock Solid Physics of Climate Models

National Geographic:

Climate modelers are having a moment.

Last month, Time Magazine listed two of them—Friederike Otto and Geert Jan van Oldenborg of the World Weather Attribution Project—among the 100 Most Influential People of 2021. Two weeks ago, Katharine Hayhoe of Texas Tech University was a guest on the popular CBS talk show Jimmy Kimmel Live! And on Tuesday, pioneering climate modelers Syukuro Manabe and Klaus Hasselman shared the Nobel Prize for Physics with theoretical physicist Giorgio Parisi—a recognition, said Thors Hans Hansson, chair of the Nobel Committee for Physics, that “our knowledge about the climate rests on a solid scientific foundation, based on a rigorous analysis of observations.”

Climate modelers are experts from earth or planetary science, often with experience in applied physics, mathematics, or computational science, who take physics and chemistry to create equations, feed them into supercomputers, and apply them to simulate the climate of Earth or other planets. Models have long been seen by climate change deniers as the soft underbelly of climate science. Being necessarily predictive, they have been tarred as essentially unverifiable and the result of flawed input producing unreliable results.

A 1990 National Geographic article put it this way: “Critics say that modeling is in its infancy and cannot even replicate details of our current climate. Modelers agree, and note that predictions necessarily fluctuate with each model refinement.”

However, more recent analyses, dating back decades, have found that many of even the earliest models were remarkably accurate in their predictions of global temperature increases. Now, as computing power increases and more and more refinements are added to modeling inputs, modelers are more confident in defending their work. As a result, says Dana Nuccitelli, author of Climatology versus Pseudoscience: Exposing the Failed Predictions of Global Warming Skeptics, “there’s definitely been a shift away from outright climate science denial; because the predictions have turned out to be so accurate, it’s getting harder and harder to deny the science at this point.”

That 1990 article quoted Manabe—generally considered the father of modern climate modeling—as saying that, in some early models, “all sorts of crazy things happened … sea ice covered the tropical oceans, for example.” But in a seminal 1970 paper, the first to make a specific projection of future warming, Manabe argued that global temperatures would increase by 0.57 degrees Celsius (1.03 degrees Fahrenheit) between 1970 and 2000. The actual recorded warming was a remarkably close 0.54°C (0.97°F).

A 2019 paper by Zeke Hausfather of the University of California, Berkeley, Henri Drake, and Tristan Abbott of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Gavin Schmidt of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies analyzed 17 models dating back to the 1970s and found that 14 accurately predicted the relationship between global temperatures as greenhouse gases increased. (The estimates of two were too high, and one was too low.) That’s because the fundamental physics have always been sound, says Dana Nuccitelli, research coordinator at Citizens’ Climate Lobby and author of Climatology versus Pseudoscience: Exposing the Failed Predictions of Global Warming Skeptics.

Below, more archival video illustrates how bang-on climate science has been for 40 years.

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Nobel Committee Recognizes Climate Modeling Pioneers

BBC:

Three scientists have been awarded the 2021 Nobel Prize in Physics for their work on understanding complex systems, such as the Earth’s climate.

Syukuro Manabe, Klaus Hasselmann and Giorgio Parisi were announced as the winners at an event in Stockholm.

Research by Manabe and Hasselmann led to computer models of the Earth’s climate that could predict the impact of global warming.

The winners will share the prize money of 10 million krona (£842,611).

It is incredibly difficult to predict the long-term behaviour of complex physical systems such as the climate. Computer models that anticipate how it will respond to surging greenhouse gas emissions have therefore been crucial to our understanding of global warming as a planetary emergency.

Below, Manabe and others predicted that climate changes would be politically destabilizing in critical regions like the Middle East.

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Oil Spill Killing Wildlife in Southern Cal

Wall Street Journal:

Saturday morning, workers from Houston-based Amplify EnergyCorp. noticed oil in the water near an oil-processing plant off the coast of Huntington Beach, Calif. The offshore platform receives oil from about 70 wells and then sends it to a local refinery. 

Where did the spill happen?

The spill took place underwater about 5 miles off the coast of Huntington Beach, one of several famed beaches in Orange County. Huntington Beach is located about 37 miles southeast of Los Angeles. 

How bad is the oil spill?

The spill totaled about 126,000 gallons of oil. By Sunday, there were reports of dead fish and birds washing ashore near Newport Beach and Huntington Beach, according to Orange County Supervisor Katrina Foley. 

Several beaches were closed. Local health officials told residents in the affected area to avoid walking, swimming or surfing near the affected beaches and wetlands. They also advised people to avoid touching any oil on beaches or attempting to rescue any wildlife affected by the oil.

Dr. Clayton Chau, director of the Orange County Health Care Agency, said the county planned to issue a health advisory related to the spill. He advised residents to seek medical attention if they experience effects from vapors such as irritation to their eyes and throat or dizziness and vomiting. 

Rep. Michelle Steel sent a letter Sunday to President Biden requesting a major disaster declaration for Orange County.

Who is Amplify Energy?
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