Month: December 2021

Stuart Stevens was a chief advisor to Mitt Romney’s 2012 Presidential campaign.
I spoke to him about how far the Republican Party has fallen down the anti-science rabbit hole.

My favorite bus ad. Gotta love Denmark. pic.twitter.com/E159fkD8Pe

— Lior Steinberg (@LiorSteinberg) December 21, 2021

Washington Post:

 Indigenous peoples have known for millennia to plant under the shade of the mesquite and paloverde trees that mark the Sonoran Desert here, shielding their crops from the intense sun and reducing the amount of water needed.

The modern-day version of this can be seen in the Santa Catalina Mountains north of Tucson, where a canopy of elevated solar panels helps to protect rows of squash, tomatoes and onions. Even on a November afternoon, with the temperature climbing into the 80s, the air under the panels stays comfortably cool.

Such adaptation is central to the research underway at Biosphere 2, a unique center affiliated with the University of Arizona that’s part of a movement aimed at reimagining and remaking agriculture in a warming world. In the Southwest, projects are looking to plants and farming practices that Native Americans have long used as potential solutions to growing worries over future food supplies. At the same time, they are seeking to build energy resilience.

Learning from and incorporating Indigenous knowledge is important, believes Greg Barron-Gafford, a professor who studies the intersection of plant biology and environmental and human factors. But instead of relying on tree shade, “we’re underneath an energy producer that’s not competing for water.”

On both sides of the Arizona border with Mexico, scientists are planting experimental gardens and pushing the potential of an “agrivoltaic” approach. Thirsty crops such as fruits, nuts and leafy greens — which require elaborate irrigation systems that have pulled vast quantities of water from underground aquifers and the Colorado and other rivers — are nowhere to be found.

“We’ve had 5,000 years of farmers trying out different strategies for dealing with heat, drought and water scarcity,” said Gary Nabhan, an ethnobotanist and agrarian activist who focuses on plants and cultures of the Southwest. Collectively, he added, “we need to begin to translate that.”

Some of the methods at Biosphere 2 — a facility marked by the largest closed ecological system in the world — are being applied in fishing villages on the parched Sonoran coast of Mexico. A multiyear effort there will help ensure water, energy and food sources for some 1,500 members of the Comcaac (or Seri) community.

Other researchers are creating a sustainability model for urban settings.

The University of Arizona’s Desert Laboratory on Tumamoc Hill will break ground next spring on Tumamoc Resilience Gardens, an initiative to be located at the base of a saguaro-studded hill within an 860-acre ecological preserve in the heart of Tucson. It will show how people can feed themselves in a much hotter, drier future.

Continue reading “Indigenous Knowhow to Fight Climate Chaos”

If you have not yet see this months Yale Climate Connections video, go there now.

Bloomberg:

Cold-stricken Europe is drawing a flotilla of U.S. liquefied natural gas cargoes amid an energy crisis that has sent gas prices to record levels.

Facing a winter shortage and little relief from the continent’s main supplier Russia, natural gas in Northwest Europe is trading for about $57.54 per million British thermal units, up almost a third from a week earlier. That’s roughly $24 higher than Asian prices and more than 14 times higher than gas being sold on U.S. benchmark Henry Hub. 

Out of 76 U.S. LNG cargoes in transit, 10 tankers carrying a combined 1.6 million cubic meters of the heating and power plant fuel have declared destinations in Europe, shipping data compiled by Bloomberg shows. Another 20 tankers carrying an estimated 3.3 million cubic meters appear to be crossing the Atlantic Ocean and are on a path to the continent. Nearly one-third of the cargoes come from Cheniere Energy Inc.’s Sabine Pass LNG export terminal in Louisiana, the shipping data shows. 

U.S. LNG export terminals are operating at or above capacity after reaching record flows on Sunday. Asia is typically the top destination for U.S. LNG cargoes, but that has changed this winter with the significant premium for gas in Europe. 

As the Bloomberg diagrams above and below indicates, LNG tankers in transit, can turn on a dime and head for wherever the highest prices are. That means competition that US consumers have never faced before.

Wall Street Journal:

Companies are poised to install record amounts of batteries on America’s electric grid this year, as government mandates and a steep decline in costs fuel rapid growth in power storage.

The U.S., which had less than a gigawatt of large battery installations in 2020—roughly enough to power 350,000 homes for a handful of hours—is on pace to add six gigawatts this year and another nine gigawatts in 2022, according to S&P Global Market Intelligence.

Demand for utility-scale storage is expected to keep rising world-wide for the next several years, driven by rapid growth in the U.S. and China, as new storage technologies and pressure to add renewable energy sources to stem carbon emissions reshape the electricity industry.

Giant batteries, often paired with solar farms, can charge when sunshine is plentiful, then send electricity to the grid later when the sun goes down or demand otherwise spikes and power is more valuable. The installations, most of which currently use lithium-ion batteries like the ones found in electric vehicles and laptops, resemble rows of boxy shipping containers, and usually provide up to four hours of backup power.

The surge in battery development has the potential to substantially change the power generation sector. Electricity discharged from batteries is increasingly replacing electricity generated by gas-fired power plants in certain parts of the country, especially those that only fire up during periods of peak demand. Already, utilities, power generators and investors are rethinking the need for conventional power plants, as batteries become cheaper and more viable.

Continue reading “The Battery Boom is Here”

John Cook PhD is the acknowledged expert on what works, and what doesn’t, to push back in the War on Science.

Denialism tends to be the same as it moves from one science field to another – it does not evolve and morph as readily as, say, a coronavirus. So once you learn the basic patterns, you can become better at not just countering, but preventing, a serious case.

More nuance on Natural Gas.

For those who plan for energy needs, shortages are bad, but volatility is a headache as well.

Axios via Yahoo:

This past fall, surging energy prices were one of the most visible and alarming side effects of the world’s monumental effort to reopen economies all at once.

• But just a few months later, a warm start to the winter — and worries that the Omicron variant will cause a slowdown — have cut the price of one of America’s main fuel sources nearly in half from its peak. 

Why it matters: Natural gas is a major source of heating and electricity for American homes. Heading into the winter, these lower prices shouldn’t cause the pocketbook shock that analysts had recently feared, as growing inventories change the pricing landscape.

• Compare that to Europe, which doesn’t produce its own gas and still faces steep shortages.

State of play: Rising prices in the U.S. often stem from the size of natural gas inventories held in storage. 

• In September, when prices were climbing toward their peak, storage levels had shrunk to 7.4% below the five-year average — thanks to a combination of the rapid demand increase from the reopening, the cooling needs from a hot summer, and then the disruption from Hurricane Ida, Sindre Knutsson, natural gas analyst at Rystad Energy, tells Axios. 
• But storage levels have recovered — in large part because of the unseasonably warm start to winter — and over the past few weeks are hovering right around the five-year average, according to the Energy Information Administration. 

The EIA’s next weekly report will probably show a surplus to the average for the first time since February, analysts at BofA Global Research write. 

The big picture: Weather can turn on a dime. A colder U.S. winter would likely deplete some of the inventory. But don’t expect prices to head back to the $5 or $6 area, Knutsson says. 

• More likely, are bouts of short-term volatility. “The market is much more healthy than it was” a few months ago, and can withstand a few cold snaps, he says. 

Meanwhile: Oil prices have eased as well. U.S. crude had its worst day of the month yesterday, down 3.7% — and is off 19% from its November peak. 

• However, oil prices still face many of the same longer-term supply and demand dynamics that pushed them up in the first place, says Phil Orlando, chief equity market strategist at Federated Hermes.
• And the Omicron economic cycle will pass, as other COVID waves have, he adds. “I expect energy prices in the first quarter of next year are going to be higher than they are now,” he says. 

The bottom line: To some degree, that may depend on the weather.

Scientists score another for my alma mater.

University of Michigan:

In an advance that could dramatically improve the productivity of solar panels in cold climates, a University of Michigan-led team has demonstrated an inexpensive, clear coating that reduced snow and ice accumulation on solar panels, enabling them to generate up to 85% more energy in early testing.

The coating is made chiefly of PVC or PDMS plastic and silicon or vegetable-based oils. It can be sprayed or brushed on in cold weather and, in its current iteration, can keep shedding snow and ice for up to a year.

“Renewable energy is really taking off right now, but snow is a huge problem in northern climates,” said Anish Tuteja, U-M professor of materials science and engineering, who led the study in collaboration with Sandia National Laboratories and the University of Alaska.

“Solar panels might lose 80 or 90% of their generating capacity in the winter. So figuring out a way for them to continue generating energy throughout the year was an exciting challenge,” he said.

While Tuteja’s lab has developed a number of effective ice-shedding coatings in the past, he explains that designing a coating that can passively shed both snow and ice represents a special challenge.

“Ice is relatively dense and heavy, and our previous coatings used its own weight against it,” Tuteja said. “But snow can be 10 times less dense than ice, so we weren’t at all certain that the tricks we use on ice would translate to snow.”

To find the right coating, Tuteja and his team turned to two key properties that have powered ice-shedding coatings in the past: low interfacial toughness and low adhesion strength. Low surface adhesion is basically slipperiness. Slipperiness alone works well on small areas, but the bigger the surface, the more force is needed to slide snow and ice off it. For larger areas, you need a way to break up the adhesion entirely. This is what low interfacial toughness does—it creates cracks between the ice and the panel. These propagate along the panel, regardless of its size, breaking the ice and snow free.

Continue reading “New Coating Helps Solar Panels Shed Snow”

Washington Post:

If you’ve been dreaming of a white Christmas, it’s probably time to throw in the towel. Most of the Lower 48 will be looking at a spike in temperatures over the coming days that could send highs some 30 degrees or more above normal. In many spots, the weather on Christmas Eve and Christmas Day will be more reminiscent of a typical Easter.

The upcoming warm pulse will be the fourth to take the reins of the nation’s weather this month. The first, which occurred early in December, shattered temperature records in four states. Violent weather, including deadly tornadoes in Kentucky and a record-setting derecho in the central states, accompanied the second and third, respectively.

While this upcoming shot of mildness may bring welcome springlike conditions in some spots, it reinforces the connection between human-induced climate change and the incidence of warm temperatures in the wintertime. Heat extremes have outpaced cold records at a rate greater than 2 to 1 this year, and the holidays are a time of year when that warming is especially pronounced.

Already, the National Weather Service Storm Prediction Center is sounding the alarm that the warmth could brew severe weather early next week, writing, “The quality and spatial extent [of the warmth] for late December bears watching.”

For my next video, I’ll be looking at Fox’s new Weather service – recently launched. The question arises, how does Fox report on extreme weather events as we progress rapidly on the path to unfamiliar and unprecedented conditions. Below, Fox Meteorologists display deer-in-headlights affect as they discuss the recent Minnesota Derecho + Tornado with a National Weather service expert.