A top-tier high risk of severe weather has been drawn by the Storm Prediction Center for the first time since 2021. An outbreak of tornadic supercells with numerous tornadoes, perhaps long track and violent, is expected. MyRadar meteorologist @MatthewCappucci has an update. pic.twitter.com/ykOv3vzlTc
Wanted to screenshot this because I can't recall if I've ever seen this before:
A Winter Weather MD (Blizzard), an MD for a potential PDS Tornado Watch Issuance, and two distinct areas that will likely be upgraded to a tornado-driven High Risk
Badge and Lander Busse tromped into the forest behind their house on a snowy Sunday in March, their three hunting dogs in tow. It was in these woods, just outside Glacier National Park, that the teenage boys learned to hunt, fish, dress a deer and pick birdshot from Hungarian partridges.
It was also here that the Busse boys grew attuned to the signals of a rapidly warming planet — torrential rains that eroded their hiking trails, wildfires that scarred the land, smoke so thick it forced them indoors.
Watching their cherished wilderness succumb to the effects of climate change enraged the Busse boys, and three years ago, they decided to do something about it. Along with 14 other local youth, they joined with an environmental legal organization and sued the state.
In their complaint, filed in 2020, the young activists seized on language in the Montana state Constitution that guarantees residents “the right to a clean and healthful environment,” and stipulates that the state and individuals are responsible for maintaining and improving the environment “for present and future generations.”
By virtue of those few words, they argue, Montana’s extensive support for fossil fuels like coal, oil and gas is unconstitutional because the resulting pollution is dangerously heating the planet and has robbed them of a healthy environment.
It is a concise but untested legal challenge to a state government that has taken a sharp turn to the right in recent years, and is aggressively defending itself. The trial, which legal experts say is the first involving a constitutional climate case, begins on June 12 in the state capital of Helena.
“There have been almost no trials on climate change,” said Michael Gerrard, director of the Sabin Center for Climate Change Law at Columbia Law School. “This is the first that will get into the merits of climate change and what needs to be done, and how the state may have to change its policies.”
The origins of the case stretch back nearly a decade. In 2011, a nonprofit called Our Children’s Trust petitioned the Montana Supreme Court to rule that the state has a duty to address climate change. The court declined to weigh in, effectively telling the group to start in the lower courts.
So the lawyers at Our Children’s Trust began building their case. They worked with the environmental community to identify potential plaintiffs. They cataloged the ways in which the state was being impacted by climate change. And they documented the state’s extensive support for the fossil fuel industry, which includes permitting, subsidies and favorable regulations.
A trio of Republican-sponsored bills seeking to limit local governments’ ability to steer their communities toward renewable energies are advancing through the Montana Legislature, despite pushback from two of the state’s largest and fastest-growing cities.
Officials for Bozeman and Missoula, both of which have climate action policies, say legislative meddling will impede elected officials’ ability to carry out the wishes of their residents and jeopardize their ability to develop the kind of energy infrastructure and policies that appeal to many of the competitive, high-dollar businesses that power those local economies. Proponents maintain the pro-petroleum fuel and anti-solar energy bills will preserve consumer choice, keep costs associated with new construction down, and help Montana stay ahead of “ill-advised” trends in places like Eugene, Oregon, which is considering a ban on new residential “fossil fuel infrastructure.”
If you attend a college-level earth science class in Ohio in the coming years, you might learn about how climate change is causing heat waves, flooding, and record storms, and how humanity has a shrinking window to drastically cut emissions and forestall the worst effects. But your instructor could also be forced to spend a big chunk of time talking about how a few largely discredited researchers and fossil-fuel funded lobbyists don’t think there’s really much of an issue.
That’s because just last week, the state senate began debating the Ohio Higher Education Enhancement Act, which would tie the hands of instructors at colleges and universities from teaching effectively on subjects the state legislature has labeled as “controversial,” including climate change. Those institutions would have to guarantee that they’re “encourag[ing] students to reach their own conclusions,” on such matters, which also include subjects like abortion rights. The schools are also obligated to not “seek to inculcate any social, political, or religious point of view” on students. Higher education institutions would also be barred from implementing sustainability initiatives. Diversity or equity programs would also be banned.
Classroom politics have been at the center of an intense national discussion for years, with much of that controversy focusing on sexual orientation, gender identity, race, and American history. Climate science is sometimes thrown into the debate as well. Idaho, for instance, went through the legislative equivalent of a knock down drag out fight over a proposal to include climate change in the state’s academic standards back in 2019. Those tensions have recently been inflamed by Florida Governor Ron DeSantis’s increasingly zealous efforts to remake the state’s school systems and universities in opposition to what conservatives have termed “wokeness.” Now, the Ohio education bill may signal that that renewed conservative education push has extended to climate science as well, with politicians seeking to insert proven falsehoods into higher-education science courses.
Late Tuesday night, the Missouri House of Representatives voted for a state operating budget with a $0 line for public libraries. While the budget still needs to work its way through the Senate and the governor’s office, state funding for public libraries is very much on the chopping block in Missouri.
This comes after Republican House Budget Chairman Cody Smith proposed a $4.5 million cut to public libraries’ state aid last week in the initial House Budget Committee hearing, where Smith cited a lawsuit filed against Missouri by the American Civil Liberties Union of Missouri (ACLU-MO) as the reason for the cut.
ACLU-MO filed the suit on behalf of the Missouri Association of School Librarians and the Missouri Library Association (MLA) in an effort to overturn a state law passed in 2022 that bans sexually explicit material from schools. Since it was first enacted in August, librarians and other educators have faced misdemeanor charges punishable by up to a year in jail or a $2,000 fine for giving students access to books the state has deemed sexually explicit. The Missouri law defined explicit sexual material as images “showing human masturbation, deviate sexual intercourse,” “sexual intercourse, direct physical stimulation of genitals, sadomasochistic abuse,” or showing human genitals. The lawsuit claims that school districts have been pulling books from their shelves.
“The house budget committee’s choice to retaliate against two private, volunteer-led organizations by punishing the patrons of Missouri’s public libraries is abhorrent,” Tom Bastian, deputy director for communications for ACLU-MO said in a statement to Motherboard.
MO State Rep. Peter Merideth (D) on a just-passed GOP budget defunding libraries: "They actually took out all state aid for public libraries explicitly because librarians are suing over their First Amendment rights … We are starting to live in a dystopian future from 1984." pic.twitter.com/fej8ywxbCf
Electricity generated from renewables surpassed coal in the United States for the first time in 2022, the U.S. Energy Information Administration announced Monday.
Renewables also surpassed nuclear generation in 2022 after first doing so last year.
Growth in wind and solar significantly drove the increase in renewable energy and contributed 14% of the electricity produced domestically in 2022. Hydropower contributed 6%, and biomass and geothermal sources generated less than 1%.
“I’m happy to see we’ve crossed that threshold, but that is only a step in what has to be a very rapid and much cheaper journey,” said Stephen Porder, a professor of ecology and assistant provost for sustainability at Brown University.
California produced 26% of the national utility-scale solar electricity followed by Texas with 16% and North Carolina with 8%.
The most wind generation occurred in Texas, which accounted for 26% of the U.S. total followed by Iowa (10%) and Oklahoma (9%).
“This booming growth is driven largely by economics,” said Gregory Wetstone, president and CEO of the American Council on Renewable Energy. “Over the past decade, the levelized cost of wind energy declined by 70 percent, while the levelized cost of solar power has declined by an even more impressive 90 percent.”
“Renewable energy is now the most affordable source of new electricity in much of the country,” added Wetstone.
The Energy Information Administration projected that the wind share of the U.S. electricity generation mix will increase from 11% to 12% from 2022 to 2023 and that solar will grow from 4% to 5% during the period. The natural gas share is expected to remain at 39% from 2022 to 2023, and coal is projected to decline from 20% last year to 17% this year.
“Wind and solar are going to be the backbone of the growth in renewables, but whether or not they can provide 100% of the U.S. electricity without backup is something that engineers are debating,” said Brown University’s Porder.
Many decisions lie ahead, he said, as the proportion of renewables that supply the energy grid increases.
This presents challenges for engineers and policy-makers, Porder said, because existing energy grids were built to deliver power from a consistent source. Renewables such as solar and wind generate power intermittently. So battery storage, long-distance transmission and other steps will be needed to help address these challenges, he said.
High quality video above conveys daunting new observations of southern ocean dynamics that could affect critical global circulation.
We’ve talked a lot, and I’ve produced several videos, documenting slowdown in the Atlantic Meriodonal Overturning Current (AMOC), due to processes in Greenland and the Arctic. Here is perhaps even more concerning evidence of related processes occurring in the Antarctic.
A “dramatic” change to ocean circulation could unfold in the Southern Ocean over the next three decades with wide-reaching effects on weather and fisheries, according to researchers.
The landmark study, published in Nature on Thursday, examined waters at the deepest layers of the ocean that play a crucial role in circulating heat and nutrients around the globe.
Deputy director of the Australian Research Council’s Centre for Excellence in Antarctic Science, Matthew England, who coordinated the study, said the results were both significant and “concerning”, likening their projecting to the premise of The Day After Tomorrow.
The fictional film, which was based on the real-life slowdown of the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation current, saw polar melting disrupt the North Atlantic current, setting off a chain of events that influenced weather around the globe.
“In our simulation, [the slowing circulation] in the Antarctic outpaces the North Atlantic by two to one,” Dr England said.
“We know so much about the Atlantic overturning and it’s been such an established part of science, so much so that a film has been made about it.
“And here we have an overturning circulation that’s just as important to humanity, where we still don’t understand why things are changing, what the drivers are, and what the future is.”
The findings of the study all have to do with the production of incredibly dense water, formed around Antarctica, known as Antarctic Bottom Water.
Ali Velshi reports on Vanuatu getting the United Nations to vote to agree to ask the International Court of Justice to assign responsibility for the destruction caused by climate change.
Oil majors are facing civil lawsuits in courts from Hoboken to Honolulu that could cost the industry hundreds of billions of dollars for its role in producing planet-warming emissions.
But can petroleum producers be held criminally responsible for climate-related deaths that occurred after companies allegedly deceived the public about the dangers of burning fossil fuels? A new academic paper says they can, and authors of the research say the novel legal theory — known as “climate homicide” — is already stirring interest from prosecutors.
“We have some indication they’re at least listening and curious,” said David Arkush, director of Public Citizen’s climate program and a fellow at the Roosevelt Institute. “To someone who knows the criminal law, there’s a moment of ‘What!?’ and then, ‘It’s OK. It’s not crazy.’“
Prosecutors regularly bring homicide charges against individuals and corporations whose reckless or negligent acts or omissions cause unintentional deaths, as well as those whose misdemeanors or felonies cause unintentional deaths. Fossil fuel companies learned decades ago that what they produced, marketed, and sold would generate “globally catastrophic” climate change. Rather than alert the public and curtail their operations, they worked to deceive the public about these harms and to prevent regulation of their lethal conduct. They funded efforts to call sound science into doubt and to confuse their shareholders, consumers, and regulators. And they poured money into political campaigns to elect or install judges, legislators, and executive officials hostile to any litigation, regulation, or competition that might limit their profits. Today, the climate change that they forecast has already killed thousands of people in the United States, and it is expected to become increasingly lethal for the foreseeable future. Given the extreme lethality of the conduct and the awareness of the catastrophic risk on the part of fossil fuel companies, should they be charged with homicide? Could they be convicted? In answering these questions, this Article makes several contributions to our understanding of criminal law and the role it could play in combating crimes committed at a massive scale. It describes the doctrinal and social predicates of homicide prosecutions where corporate conduct endangers much or all of the public. It also identifies important advantages of homicide prosecutions relative to civil and regulatory remedies, and it details how and why prosecution for homicide may be the most effective legal remedy available in cases like this. Finally, it argues that, if our criminal legal system cannot focus more intently on climate crimes—and soon—we may leave future generations with significantly less for the law to protect.
Below, Josh Pearce PhD discusses the prospects for civil, not criminal, cases.
South Delta Animal Rescue was among the buildings wiped out by the deadly storms in the Mississippi Delta over the weekend. All of the animals at the animal shelter in Rolling Fork have been accounted for; however, board member Alex Frisbee said some were found “under treetops,” and they aren’t sure how they survived. He also said he’s received several inquiries from people wanting to adopt.
When Billy Woodford and his friends set out to build a new kind of battery that could replace a coal plant, their breakthrough technology took inspiration from the disposable hand-warming sacks that spectators use at football stadiums. The battery’s key ingredient: rust.
Woodford’s startup, Form Energy Inc., went into business in 2017 with a clear and ambitious goal. The battery needed to soak up renewable energy during the day and release it at night, and to keep running after sunset and on windless days. A lithium-ion battery, like those in EVs and smartphones, would work, but no utility can afford to run that type of battery on the grid for more than a few hours. Utilities need one that will also be cheap enough to deploy for 100 hours or more. “You can have pretty much any battery do any duration on the grid,” says Mateo Jaramillo, who worked at Tesla Inc. before co-founding Form and is today its chief executive officer. (Woodford is chief technology officer.) “It always comes down to cost.”
Form’s five co-founders, who also include Yet-Ming Chiang, Ted Wiley and Marco Ferrara, started by spitballing ideas for materials, discarding most as soon as they came up. Some suggestions had already been commercialized, like flow batteries using materials such as vanadium and big vats of liquid. But a 100-hour battery could rely only on dirt-cheap, abundant elements, and the short list eventually came down to iron and sulfur. Because it’s the easier material to handle, iron won.
Woodford then turned to an unlikely source for inspiration: the disposable hand warmers he used on cold days growing up in Pennsylvania. Crushing these little sacks filled with crystals begins a process of rusting iron—it essentially reacts with oxygen to form iron oxide—that’s sped up with chemicals. The reaction releases energy in the form of heat. Woodford and Chiang, Form’s science brains, thought that with the right setup they could use the same reaction to release energy as electrons instead.
Jaramillo wasn’t convinced. “I thought I was going to disprove the idea,” he says. “You might as well prove it’s a terrible idea first, rather than finding out later.”
Except the idea wasn’t terrible. After thousands of experiments, Woodford’s bet on hand warmers is at the heart of Form’s battery. The company, based in Somerville, Massachusetts, has raised almost $900 million from the likes of the Bill Gates-led Breakthrough Energy Ventures and inked partnerships with Georgia Power, Great River Energy and Xcel Energy. Next comes construction of a $760 million battery-manufacturing facility in West Virginia, which the company says it wants to have up and running by the end of 2024.
Balduin Hesse, CEO and chairman of Frontier Renewables, discusses the challenges and opportunities for investing in renewable energy, as Europe and other parts of the world continue to shift away from fossil fuels
It’s a bit of a joke – “2010 called and they want their climate denial talking point back”.
But why? Does it just seem that way, or is it real, that just as climate change has been emerging in all the more horrifying clarity, climate denial is on a whole new roll, especially on Elon Musk’s twitter. And yes, as I’ve pointed out for more than a decade, somehow that seems to go together with racism, misogyny, and anti-semitism.
As I wrote recently here on my site, Elon Musk’s reputation as a ‘climate hero’ has been badly exaggerated. Every good thing he’s contributed to sits alongside a collection of actively counter-productive things. One of those things is killing a space that climate activists, communicators and experts used regularly – that is, Twitter. Still my core social media space, but a broken, burning one.
Musk has been more and more open about his right-wing tendencies, particularly his own transphobia and support for white supremacists, white nationalists and racists. Musk flew on a private jet to the World Cup, and sat next to right-wing media mogul Rupert Murdoch (who later praised Musk’s progress with Twitter – it’s all a bit amusing given the preponderance of the feeling among Tesla stans that the media is out to get them).
Since the takeover at the end of October last year, it’s been tough not to feel this ideology directly, particularly as someone who’s sunk plenty of time and effort into Twitter as a main platform for climate and energy communication.
Apart from the very obvious bad vibes, shitty replies and short tempers, there is real data to support a rise in right-wing content. Antisemitism, for instance, has flared up.
Hate speech has gotten worse because Musk’s understanding of free, healthy speech is at the level of a 12 year old in the year 2013. Content moderation has rolled back, and a whole swathe of previously-banned accounts have been unsuspended, including a bunch of really, really bad racists and white supremacists.
It feels like something more fundamental in site dynamic has changed – particularly around which accounts and tweets get boosted and promoted.
I recently noticed that climate deniers, or climate delayers (who argue for no or slow climate action) have had massive increases in their followings, whereas pro-climate accounts have either lost followers, or gained very few of them. Musk has himself been cosying up with climate deniers, boosting, for instance, a conspiracy theory video from Australian climate denier and member of far-right xenophobic party One Nation, Senator Malcolm Roberts. “[Musk is] doing a marvellous job of rekindling freedom of speech,” Roberts told the SMH. “That alone is worthy of high praise.”
