Month: July 2022

Got to run up Greenland’s longest road today to do some recon.

We’ll be flying tomorrow to our research site at the glacier Issunguata Sermia, and I’ll be off the grid till late sunday or monday.

UPDATE: Just got word we are delayed for a day due to our chopper being called on an emergency rescue. This happens from time to time, so savvy teams build in extra time in their schedule. that gives me some needed time to review my back pack and see if I can shed some pounds….

While we’ll be choppering up there, the way back will be partially on foot, carrying our equipment out, so packing light tonight. Wish it could be lighter, but cameras are heavy.
Took some pictures of the ice sheet edge and the road up there.
I’ve not been in this area in 5 years, and the changes are dramatic.

More on that later.

Continue reading “Greenland Update”

ABC News:

WASHINGTON — The Energy Department is teaming with actor Robert Downey Jr. to recruit up to 1,000 new workers focused on climate change and clean energy.

Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm on Wednesday released a video with the “Iron Man” actor encouraging applicants from diverse backgrounds to join the department’s “clean energy corps” and take on jobs aimed at accelerating deployment of clean energy such as wind and solar power.

Participants will help build thousands of miles of electric transmission lines to carry wind and solar power and take on other jobs to research, develop and deploy ways to produce energy while cutting planet-warming greenhouse gas emissions, Granholm said. The new job corps is part of $62 billion awarded to the Energy Department under the bipartisan infrastructure law signed last year by President Joe Biden. 

In the animated video, Downey says viewers may know him from one of his “many day jobs” as a billionaire superhero in “Iron Man” or “world’s greatest detective,” Sherlock Holmes.

“But now I’ve got this sweet new office over the Department of Energy, and I’ve already been putting in some crazy hours helping out the Clean Energy Corps,” Downey says. “I’ve been working with some amazing people on fantastic new solutions” to climate change. 

Granholm, who also appears the video, tells Downey the Energy Department is “looking for folks to help us with pretty much everything,” from scientists to IT specialists, civil engineers, electrical engineers and more.

“My gosh, we mean everybody!” exclaims Downey, holding a coffee cup declaring him the “world’s best DOE intern.” 

“So why not come work with us and help the planet while you are at it?” he adds, as Granholm extols the “nice” benefits, including a healthier Earth.

Inside Climate News:

Roberts stopped short of the sweeping language many environmentalists feared, for example, by saying EPA had no power to act on climate change; instead, he focused on limiting EPA’s authority under one section of the Clean Air Act. And the Biden EPA clearly was expecting such a result. Early on, the agency indicated it did not plan to reinstate the Obama-era approach to regulating greenhouse gases, the Clean Power Plan. Joe Goffman, who heads up air pollution policy for the agency, was mum on exactly what approach the EPA was considering instead at his confirmation hearing before Congress last month. “We have identified different options for responding, depending on what the Supreme Court tells us the nature and contours of our authority are,” he said.

The options that are left for EPA, ironically, could be more restrictive and more expensive for the power sector than the cap-and-trade approach that the Supreme Court said was clearly outside the agency’s authority. Such an approach would have set carbon limits for each state, allowing them to shift electric generation to cleaner sources of power.

Good news

In fact, @USSupremeCourt did NOT reverse its previous decision to let @EPA regulate GHGs as air pollutants

"The court did not reverse-or even revisit-its 2007 decision that EPA has authority to regulate GHGs as pollutants under Clean Air Act"https://t.co/LCeGYP4Kg3 https://t.co/VKMnIrwlFR

— Mark Z. Jacobson (@mzjacobson) July 1, 2022

Instead, the court reads the law as saying EPA can only impose limitations on emissions within the fenceline of each individual power station. The think tank Resources for the Future has analyzed how the EPA could impose regulations limiting carbon emissions per megawatt-hour at coal power plants through technologies such as installing natural gas turbines onsite to assist in bringing down emissions—a strategy known as “co-firing” that some plants already have adopted to save money or address smog-forming pollutants. Or the agency could go even further, finding that carbon capture and storage is viable and cost-effective—the “best system of emissions reduction,” in the language of the law—and require that coal or natural gas plants install such technology to reduce their emissions. Congress, in fact, potentially made carbon capture and storage more viable by including $12 billion in direct support for the technology in last year’s bipartisan infrastructure bill.

Industries often abhor such direct prescriptions from government. In fact, the power industry intervened in the West Virginia case, filing an amicus brief and delivering oral arguments in support of EPA’s authority to take a more flexible approach to drive the electric system to clean energy. But 20 states, led by fossil fuel-dependent West Virginia and North Dakota and joined by the coal mining industry, asked the court to restrict EPA authority, even before the Biden administration had a chance to write its own greenhouse gas rules. 

Continue reading “SCOTUS Ruling is No Life Raft for Coal”

https://twitter.com/TwstdSkyStudios/status/1544647374751952896?s=20&t=vejJNGuddPlDlof45ecBow

Spitballing here, but is this Mother Earth’s reaction to West Virginia v EPA?

Scientific American:

If the sky turns green during a thunderstorm, gather up your pets and other loved ones and head for the cellar, a twister is on the way. So goes the common wisdom in much of the central U.S.—and other tornado-prone regions in the world, like Australia—when faced with a threatening sky (although some swear green means hail). Scientifically speaking, however, little evidence supports either the tornado or hail claims, though there is some evidence for green thunderstorms.

Over the past 15 years, a small group of scientists have weathered the elements working on green thunderstorms as a pet project, publishing a handful of articles in meteorological journals. All point to the existence of green skies with severe thunderstorms but no direct connection to tornadoes or hail can be made.

“Green skies are associated with severe weather,” says physicist and occasional green thunderstorm guru Craig Bohren at Pennsylvania State University. “In areas where tornados are common, they are said to be the cause of green storms. Or you will be told, often with considerable vehemence, that hail causes the greenness. Both explanations are easily refuted by observations.”

The first question researchers faced: Is a green sky real, or just an optical illusion caused by light reflected off the ground and back up into the sky, as some green sky dissenters suggest? Frank Gallagher, now a meteorologist for the U.S. Army at Dugway Proving Ground in Utah, tackled this issue for his thesis at the University of Oklahoma. He joined a tornado-chasing research team called VORTEX and recorded the wavelengths of light coming from storms in Texas and Oklahoma using a spectrophotometer, a tool about the size of an old video camera that can measure the color and intensity of light.

WOW!! This was the view from a DOT camera in Sioux Falls, South Dakota on I-29 as the derecho / severe wind storm approached.

Talk about going green…. pic.twitter.com/sCyjfIVi7n

— Peter Soregi (@PSoregi) July 5, 2022

Gallagher found that the dominant wavelength of light was green in several severe thunderstorms and that the color was independent of the terrain underneath the storm. As meteorology professor William Beasley, Gallagher’s advisor at Okalahoma, put it, “[He] measured green wavelengths of light over a green wheat field and over freshly plowed fields with red-brown Oklahoma dirt.”

Threatening green skies during a thunderstorm also proved entirely independent of the type of severe weather that came with it. Gallagher measured hailstorms where the dominant wavelength of light was green as well as hailstorms where it was the typical gray-blue color of thunderstorms. Tornado-producing storms proved similarly divorced from any particular sky color, other than dark.

Continue reading “Oh Right, and the Sky is Green, Sure…What?”

Spent a good part of yesterday sleeping and recovering from travel and jet lag.

I did get out a couple of times to shoot some of the surroundings. Much is the same since I was last here, 5 years ago.

Kangerlussuaq is a dusty village, a former Strategic Air Command base with one of the longest runways in the world (for B-52s), and relatively predictable weather, which makes it an ideal target for the daily Air Greenland flight that comes in from Copenhagen, year round. It is Greenland’s main international hub., with most of the 250k passengers annually connecting to other flights here. In Greenland, the absence of roads and impassable terrain make flying the primary means of travel for more than a few miles.

However, this won’t last, because the permafrost underlying Kangerlussuaq is softening, and there is more than just talk about eventually expanding the airstrip in Ilulissat, somewhat north of here, to handle heavy planes in the future.

Arctic Today:

Damage to the runway was first documented in 1973 when the pavement at the western threshold had settled up to 30 centimeters resulting in local repairs. More extensive excavation and replacements occurred in 1988/89 when the entire runway was repaved. However, the runway continued to settle and by 2006 a 400-meter-long section had settled unevenly by up to 40 centimeters. Further studies conducted in 2013 measured settling of 52 centimeters leaving scientists to conclude that the western part of the runway sinks by 2.6 centimeters per year.

Continue reading “Kangerlussuaq, July 5 2022”

#ERCOT peak demand forecast for ~78.2GW today. A new record was set yesterday at 77.5GW, higher than ERCOT expected in its Seasonal Assessment (77.3GW).

Projections for next Monday are for 80.6GW (!)

We still have 75% more gas/coal plants offline (7.1GW) than expected.#txlege pic.twitter.com/fEwL8nwyz3

— Doug Lewin (@douglewinenergy) July 6, 2022

Texas Tribune:

Texans are seeing skyrocketing home electric bills this spring and summer, with many customers paying at least 50% more than they did for electric bills at this time last year.

And nobody seems to know when costs will go down.

“I am worried people are going to be shocked,” said John Ballenger, vice president at Texas retail electric provider Champion Energy. “Realizing this is 50 or 60 or 70% higher than what they had paid before, I’m just not sure it’s real to people yet. If it’s not, it will be very, very soon when the bills hit this summer.”

The elevated utility bills have primarily been driven by the price of natural gas, which has shot up more than 200% since late February when Russia, a top gas-producing country, invaded Ukraine and upended the world’s energy market.

Since then, Texas, the leading natural gas-producing state in the U.S., has not been able to keep offering its own residents cheap energy.

Since the war in Ukraine began, Texas has been exporting more natural gas than ever before, sending much of it to Europe as many countries try to wean themselves off Russian gas. Congress lifted a longtime ban on exporting U.S. oil and gas in 2015, which opened world markets to Texas oil and gas producers.

Continue reading “Texas’ Summer of Energy Anxiety Continues”

Hate myself for stooping to tech-porn, but made you look.
Sure got my attention. Maybe we can use that.

Interesting Engineering:

The Earth 300 is an ambitious scientific project aimed at raising awareness about climate change all while doubling up as a luxury research vessel funded in part by billionaire guests, according to a report by the BBC’s Science Focus.

Slated to launch in 2025, the Earth 300 megayacht will contain 22 laboratories and will carry 450 passengers, including scientists, environmentalists, and a few billionaires for good measure.

The 300m long vessel will include a 13-story ‘science sphere,’ in which the entrepreneur behind the project, Aaron Olivera, aims to get some of the world’s best scientists to collaborate on climate change solutions, using high-end technology aboard the ship.

The idea is to sell space aboard the vessel to the rich and put 80 percent of the profits back into the science being conducted aboard the ship. Luxury apartments will be available, meaning the wealthy can contribute to science in more ways than one.

“It is really an opportunity for the wealthy to contribute to science and participate in science. This is not having a billionaire in a bathtub, sipping a glass of champagne,” Aaron Olivera the entrepreneur behind the project explained in an interview with the Sydney Morning Herald.

Among the technology available to the scientists aboard the ship will be robotics, artificial intelligence software, built-in sensors, and the world’s first commercial, seafaring quantum computer to process the huge amounts of data collected aboard the ship.

The Earth 300 vessel is planned to be zero-emission, running on nuclear energy from an onboard molten salt reactor based on technology similar to that being built by the Bill Gates-backed TerraPower. 

BBC Science Focus:

What you’re looking at is a nuclear-powered research vessel that’s the size of a cruise ship and packed with 22 laboratories. It’s being built by a crazy entrepreneur with a shade of Tony Stark about him and when it launches in 2025, the ship will carry 450 people, including scientists, environmentalists and the odd billionaire on voyages to study the climate.

The Earth 300 is hugely ambitious but that’s exactly the point, according to the man behind it. Aaron Olivera wants to build an awe-inspiring object that will galvanise public interest in climate change. He describes it as this generation’s Eiffel Tower or the Olympic Torch of global science.

“It has been designed to capture peoples attention but also their hearts and imaginations,” Olivera told Science Focus. “If we want to make big, bold changes we need everybody’s help, and we mean everybody, all ages, backgrounds and even all types of intelligences.”

To get everyone’s help, generate some interest, and make big bold changes, I have a modest, but maybe more effective, suggestion..

Continue reading “Can Super Yacht Save the Climate?”

Touched down in Kangerlussuaq today after 2 days of travel.
It’s been a while, but things are much the same. Quiet today and I’ll be resting up. The international team I’ll be joining, lead by Dr. Marek Stibal, arrives tomorrow.

A Double-jet does not double your fun.

Columbia University:

Heat waves over Europe have increased three to four times faster than in the rest of the northern mid-latitudes, including the United States and Canada. Why? In a new study, an international team of scientists has shown the increase is linked to changes in the jet stream, the fast air current that flows west to east about 10 kilometers above the surface of the Northern Hemisphere. Periods during which the jet stream is split into two branches—so called double jet states—have become longer. These double-jet states explain almost all of the upward trend in heat waves in western Europe, and around 30 percent over the larger European domain, say the authors. The study was just published in the journal Nature Communications.

“While summer heat waves are not a new phenomenon, what is new is that extreme heat events in Europe have been occurring with greater frequency and intensity in the past years,” said lead author Efi Rousi of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK). Most recently, Europe has seen extremely hot summers in 2018, 2019 and 2020; it is already seeing abnormally warm weather now.

To conduct the analysis, the scientists defined persistent heat waves as at least six consecutive days during which the maximum air temperature exceeded the threshold of the hottest 10 percent of days in a given location. They examined daily climate data for the two hottest European months, July and August, over a period of 42 years.

“We found that there are typically three states of the jet stream, one of them being the double jet state, consisting of two jet stream branches with increased wind, one over southern and one over northern Eurasia,“ said co-author Kai Kornhuber, an adjunct researcher at the Columbia Climate School’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory. While the number of double jet events per year did not change much, they became more persistent.

Continue reading “More Evidence: Climate-Jacked Jet Stream Behind Europe’s Heat Waves”

“Reliable” natural gas is not that reliable if it is held hostage by global events beyond the consumer’s control.
Russia’s war on Ukraine has been a clear demonstration that Europe, and the world, need to speed the transition away from fossil fuels.

At current natural gas prices, Germany's gas bill is €175bn, up from 15bn pre-crisis. The increase is 4% of GDP.

— Lion Hirth (@LionHirth) July 5, 2022

See below: workers in Norwegian oil fields went on strike this week, spiking prices yet again and threatening a shut down of gas production from a critical source. The Norwegian government triggered emergency powers and stepped in to block the strike – for now.

Reuters:

Oil and gas from Norway, Europe’s second-largest energy supplier after Russia, is in high demand as the country is seen as a reliable and predictable supplier, especially with Russia’s Nord Stream 1 gas pipeline due to shut for maintenance from July 11 for 10 days.

The British wholesale gas price for day-ahead delivery leapt nearly 16%, though the price of Brent crude fell as fears of a global recession outweighed concerns about supply disruption, including the strike in Norway.

“The strike has begun,” Audun Ingvartsen, the leader of the Lederne trade union said in an interview, adding the union would escalate the strike to pressure employers to address demands for wage increases to compensate for rising inflation.

Members of the union are senior staff members, considered crucial to operations, and among the best-paid employees working offshore.

In a worst case scenario, Belgium and Britain would not receive any piped Norwegian gas from Saturday, gas pipeline operator Gassco said, because of the risk of a shutdown at Sleipner, a gas transportation hub in the North Sea.

“If the conflict, in the worst case, also results in that the Sleipner Riser has to shut down for safety, then we will have zero deliveries towards Easington (in Britain) and towards Zeebrugge (in Belgium),” Alfred Hansen, Gassco’s director of system operations, said.

Continue reading “Europe’s Gas Crisis Deepens”