Shaping up to be a tough winter for Europe, which remains “..far more united than anyone expected.”
Month: August 2022
In Greenland : An Upwelling at Glacier Front
Having just returned from Greenland in recent weeks, I’ll be sorting out the video I gathered for a long time. In coming months there will be a Yale Climate Connections video covering the research I followed.
For now, here is small slice of what we saw.
Kentucky Flooding, NW Heat not Separate Events
Jennifer Francis called it in the days leading up to this weekend’s disastrous Kentucky flooding. Although the science is still very much in process, there seem to be increasing incidences of weather extremes tied to “stuck” or slow jet stream activity.
A slower jet stream is believed to be connected to climate change, possibly a side effect of the loss of arctic sea ice.
Whatever the mechanism, this week’s events in the Pacific Northwest, and across the Midwest, from Missouri to Kentucky, are examples of what we expect to see more of as the era of “no normal” evolves.
Music Break: Lake Street Dive – Nick of Time
Kentucky’s Floods More Evidence of Climate’s Jet Stream Impacts
A lot of schadenfreude going around about Appalachian residents getting hammered by recent climate-enhanced flooding, which is understandable. But also, probably counterproductive.
Point well taken, but how to get people to understand and make this a teachable moment? Recent experience, sadly, indicates that many folks refuse to review their priors even in the face of overwhelming evidence, and their own intense suffering.
Continue reading “Kentucky’s Floods More Evidence of Climate’s Jet Stream Impacts”Russians Using Gas as a Weapon, Nuclear Plant as a Shield
We know that Russia is wielding natural gas as a weapon against democracies the world over, hoping that wild price rises will weaken the will of NATO and the global community to resist a lawless aggressive war.
We’ve seen video of actual shelling of a large Ukrainian nuclear plant. Obviously that has a pretty glaring downside in that it risks sending clouds of radiation downwind into Russia itself. Now the Russians have settled on a more nuanced tactic, hiding and shooting from behind nuclear generators and waste storage, and betting Ukrainians won’t risk a counterstrike.
Tough to use solar panels as a weapon.
You can’t blackmail people with a wind turbine.
Moreover, a distributed grid is more diffuse and resilient, and can’t be destroyed or cut off in one blow, all the more so if communities have widely distributed solar generation and battery storage. The War in Ukraine is showing us something relevant to national security going forward.
NIKOPOL, Ukraine — Along most of the front line in Russia’s war in Ukraine, when one side lets loose with an artillery attack, the other shoots back.
But not in Nikopol, a city deep in southern farm country where the Ukrainian military faces a new and vexing obstacle as it prepares for a major counteroffensive: a nuclear power station that the Russian Army has turned into a fortress.
Nikopol, controlled by the Ukrainians, lies on the west bank of the Dnipro River. On the opposite bank sits a gigantic nuclear power plant — Europe’s largest — that the Russian Army captured in March. The Russians have been firing from the cover of the Zaporizhzhia station since mid-July, Ukrainian military and civilian officials said, sending rockets over the river at Nikopol and other targets.
It is, in effect, a free shot. Ukraine cannot unleash volleys of shells in return using American-provided advanced rocket systems, which have silenced Russian guns elsewhere on the front line. Doing so would risk striking one of the six pressurized water reactors or highly radioactive waste in storage. And Russia knows it.
“They are hiding there so they cannot be hit,” said Oleksandr Sayuk, the mayor of Nikopol. “Why else would they be at the electrical station? To use such an object as a shield is very dangerous.”
Residents have been fleeing Nikopol because of the dangers of both shelling and of a potential radiation leak. And those who remain feel helpless, as if they are targets in a shooting gallery.
“We are like condemned prisoners who must just stand still and be shot at,” said Halyna Hrashchenkova, a retiree whose home was hit by Russian artillery. “They shoot at us, and there is nothing we can do.”
I spoke to retired Marine General Richard Zilmer, former Commander of US Forces in Anbar Province, Iraq, who now studies energy security, about this vulnerability a few years ago.
Continue reading “Russians Using Gas as a Weapon, Nuclear Plant as a Shield”Evergreen Denial Meme. “The World has not warmed Since…..”
“Two things are infinite – the Universe and Human stupidity – and I’m not sure about the Universe.”
– Albert Einstein
We’re living in the future that scientists accurately predicted 50 years ago, and there are still those refusing to come to grips with it.
Below, a graph of actual global temperatures (heavy black line) along with the projections of various science teams since the 1970s – the accuracy, given the scale of the physics involved, is stunning over 50 years.
Nevertheless, in response to increasing disasters, we’re still seeing the warmed-over “it hasn’t warmed since” meme. My video from 2016 shows how it’s done, above.
More Nature in Recovery: “America’s Elephants”
Gotta start somewhere.