The relentless heat will only grow in intensity through next week, which is expected to have 93-96 degree days each day, per Space City Weather. In fact, the Bayou City is forecast to tie or break numerous heat records from Saturday through Thursday, baking along with much of the Lone Star State.
Earlier this week, Austin-based energy consultant Doug Lewin, announced that the Energy Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT) is expecting demand for power across Texas to reach 69.3 gigawatts on Saturday, as temperatures in Houston and Dallas hit highs in the low-to-mid ’90s and eclipse 100 in towns such as Midland and Laredo. ERCOT issued a follow-up statement saying it has asked power plants to delay or curtail planned power outages accordingly.
Below, Josh Rhodes of University of Texas says the Texas Grid held up on Saturday:
430pm and all is well! Can see some of the transmission constraints/outages showing up in multi-hundreds of dollars price differentials. But in general $-West << $-Houston… if only there was some way of getting electricity from where it’s cheap to where it is under high demand! pic.twitter.com/Mhm8fFQuOk
Record-breaking heat wave signals a record-breaking year: “The highest temperatures on Saturday are expected to appear from Amarillo to Laredo, Texas, with highs over 100 in major cities like Lubbock, Abilene, Austin, Midland and San Antonio” https://t.co/dIXvlq3P0z
ISLAMABAD: A massive glacial lake outburst flood on Saturday occurred in Hunza District’s Hassanabad Village after the glacial lake formed over Shisper Glacier started receding 5,000 Cusecs water while initiating the glacial melting prior to the normal duration.
Remote Sensing Specialist at the International Centre for Integrated Mountain Development (ICIMOD) Dr Sher Mohammad told APP that the glacial lake size was 15 percent more than the recorded lake size for the past three years at the pre-outburst level of the glacial lake.
This is how the annual temperature has changed in Pakistan since the 19th Century using data from @BerkeleyEarth
As our planet warms, heatwaves will become more intense. Dangerous levels of heat can also occur at a greater portion of the year. pic.twitter.com/AwLokflzpT
Climate science does not rely on models. But as the saying goes, :all models are wrong, but some are useful”. And some useful models might not be the best to apply in every situation.
An all-star team including Gavin Schmidt, Zeke Hausfather, and Kate Marvel has looked at a number of climate models that they describe as running “too hot”. It’s important to recognize that we are in big trouble, but also not to overstate what we know.
We are climate modellers and analysts who develop, distribute and use these projections. We know scientists must treat them with great care. Users beware: a subset of the newest generation of models are ‘too hot’2 and project climate warming in response to carbon dioxide emissions that might be larger than that supported by other evidence3–7. Some suggest that doubling atmospheric CO2 concentrations from pre-industrial levels will result in warming above 5 °C, for example. This was not the case in previous generations of simpler models.
Earth is a complicated system of interconnected oceans, land, ice and atmosphere, and no computer model could ever simulate every aspect of it exactly. Models vary in their complexity, and each makes different assumptions about and approximations of processes that happen on small scales, such as cloud formation. – The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), to its credit, has recognized this ‘hot model’ problem. Scientists contributing to the main sections of its Sixth Assessment Report (AR6; published over the past few months) reconciled the newest climate models with key observational constraints on global mean warming, sea-level rise and ocean heat content, and other analyses. They applied statistics to determine the most reasonable projections, consistent with many lines of evidence, which they call ‘assessed warming’.
Unfortunately, little guidance was made available for scientists wishing to study projections in other contexts. We are concerned that in the absence of such guidance, much of the scientific literature is at risk of reporting projections that are inconsistent with the approach taken by the IPCC, and that are overly influenced by the hot models.
Studies that cover monthly or daily extremes or regional climate impacts, for example, are instead left to use the full set of CMIP6 models. And simply taking an average of those leads to higher projections of warming than the IPCC’s assessed-warming averages. As a result, some studies have reported projections that might be inconsistent with AR6 assessments. Findings that show projected climate change will be ‘worse than we thought’ are often attributable to the hot models in CMIP6. It is important to emphasize that, whereas unduly hot outcomes might be unlikely, this does not mean that global warming is not a serious threat. Multiple lines of evidence establish that the planet is more than 1 °C warmer than it was before the Industrial Revolution, and that further warming poses severe risks to society and the natural world. There are many aspects of climate change we do not yet understand, hence the continued necessity of climate science. But there is no serious disagreement that continued emissions will lead to dangerous levels of warming.
Overall, climate models remain incredibly successful research tools, and nothing about this “too hot” generation invalidates the tenets of climate science, says Kate Marvel, a climate scientist at NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies and co-author of the commentary. The greenhouse effect is still warming the planet. Ice is melting, seas are rising, and droughts are becoming more frequent in some areas. But the models are not perfect, Marvel says. “They’re not crystal balls.”
The final version of the IPCC 6th Assessment Report WG1 is out! Now you can see a decent looking (and full page) version of my figure in Ch. 1 on performance of old climate models compared to observations in the years after they were published: https://t.co/leC7zDO2ajpic.twitter.com/OGG0Xfl1Te
Above, Zeke Hausfather’s comparisons of historic climate models shows the rather amazing accuracy even going back to the 70s. Below, because you can’t repeat this too often, my interviews with James Hansen, Michael Mann and others on the accuracy of Hansen’s climate models, delivered to the US Senate on my birthday in 1988.
I interviewed Dr Peter Schubert, a Professor of electrical and computer engineering and the Director of the Richard G. Lugar Center for Renewable Energy (LCRE) at Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI)
Below, ground screws being installed as supports for a solar array.
Here’s a glimpse of one of our ground mounted solar array solutions where we use ground screws instead of typical cement anchored structures. The ground screws hold stronger, and get stronger over time, as opposed to other alternatives and allow us to leave your ground undisturbed when the array is finished. These ground screws install deeper than the frost line leaving you a ground mounted solar array that will withstand the test of time. Call us today at 1-833-SUNERGY (1-833-786-3749) or check out our website at http://www.SUNERGY.com to find out more!
