The 9-hour ordeal involving Southwest flight 3094 included three passengers vomiting as the plane shook “like crazy,” recounted one North Carolina couple on board. Another person, the couple said, had a panic attack and passed out on the plane amid its wild approach into Raleigh — which was aborted at the last second at 1,350 feet, according to flight data.
The National Safety Transportation Board is investigating the death of a business jet passenger who died Friday during “severe turbulence” over New England.
Three passengers and two crew members were onboard the Bombardier Challenger 300 aircraft as it hit turbulence, according to the NTSB. The aircraft was en route from Keene, New Hampshire, to Leesburg, Virginia. It was eventually diverted to Bradley International Airport in Connecticut following the death.
Research has made it clear: Earth’s warming, the result of the burning of fossil fuels, is increasing the risks of bumpy flights.
It has to do with ways warming in the atmosphere influences winds at varying altitudes.
But that doesn’t necessarily mean flight turbulence is becoming more common, despite publicized incidents in recent months involving injuries on flights from Texas to Germany and from Arizona to Hawaii. Airlines have taken measures to minimize or avoid bumpy air, including through improved forecasting of atmospheric turbulence.
Here is what to know about the science behind turbulence and the ways climate change is influencing air travel:
Is global warming causing more turbulence?
Yes, according to Paul Williams, a professor of atmospheric science at the University of Reading in the United Kingdom. A research paper he co-authored in 2019 found it to be the case on a busy aviation route over the North Atlantic.
There’s no question climate change is contributing to changes in weather patterns. But when looking at particular weather events, it’s hard to tease out what is climate change and what is simply the natural variability of atmospheric weather patterns. “You have climate change warming temperatures, maybe providing some heavier precipitation events, and then you just have the randomness of our atmosphere. And then sometimes these things will coincide into this climate soup,” said Tom Di Liberto, meteorologist for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s climate prediction center.
While it’s difficult to disentangle climate change from other factors contributing to the winter storms, it’s clear that warmer temperatures add more moisture into the atmosphere. This creates the potential for heavier weather events, like the current snow storms the Northeast and West coast are experiencing.
Climate change also makes measuring unexpected weather challenging, both because it’s steadily becoming more intense every year and because it’s been happening over a relatively short period of time—the planet’s average surface temperature has risen 2 degrees Fahrenheit since the late 19th century. “We look at past seasons to inform the current season. But we’re looking at past seasons that may not have had the impact of climate change that the upcoming season will have,” said Andrea Lopez Lang, climate researcher at the University of Albany.
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If you have not seen this interview with Martha Shulski, State Climatologist of Nebraska, and Judah Cohen of MIT – do so now, and compare to last 2 weeks of experience.
The Curveball – La Nina:
Every three to seven years, the atmosphere’s ocean system goes through two opposing natural cycles; La Niña, a cool phase, and El Niño, a warm phase. They both have a strong impact on winter weather, and this year, the U.S. is returning to its third consecutive winterunder La Niña.
That means surface winds across the entire tropical Pacific are stronger than usual, which makes the water in the Pacific Ocean—the largest and deepest in the world—a few degrees colder. Even a small fluctuation like that can affect the weather across the entire world, and, here in the U.S., it usually creates drier-than-average conditions in some regions of the country.
This year, however, La Niña hasn’t followed that usual pattern. For example, usually California would undergo a drought, but instead, the state is getting hammered with snow and rain, alleviating droughtconditions, said Jeff Masters, meteorologist for Yale Climate Connections. La Niña also typically creates more rain over the Pacific Northwest, but this year it has deviated from its usual track. “We’ve seen an above average amount of rainfall across the Southwest and that’s not normally something we see with a La Niña,” said Di Liberto. “It tends to put most of that precipitation along the west coast or the Pacific Northwest.”
No mention of the “C” word in this impassioned sob story about the crashing price of gas and oil. Gas in particular has seen prices collapse during the unsettlingly warm winter across the US and Europe.
On the plus side, Vladimir Putin has lost his gamble, so far, if he hoped to have Europe groveling for gas this winter. On the other hand, winter will come around again, and there is no guarantee that the next one will be this mild. Meanwhile the race continues to wean from Russian gas, and in fact, all fossil fuels, as the Ukraine war has been a clarifying moment for anyone that wanted to believe a transition could be delayed..
Below, US prices over last 3 years as of March 3, 2023.
About 1 million acres of Wisconsin farmland produces corn for ethanol fuel, but an environmental group says the land could produce 100 times as much energy if planted with solar farms instead.
In addition, it would take less than one-third of the land currently used for ethanol corn to house enough solar generation to eliminate carbon-based energy in the state by 2050, according to Clean Wisconsin. The organization released a report Tuesday comparing the efficiency of using farmland to grow corn for ethanol with using it for solar power.
“There is a concern that we’re going to take too much farmland out of production to put on solar panels,” said Paul Mathewson, Clean Wisconsin’s science program director, in the organization’s press announcement. “But we’re already using a lot of land to primarily harvest energy in the form of corn made into ethanol. This analysis demonstrates how, with solar, we can harvest more energy using far less land.”
The report calculates not just the energy produced by corn compared with solar arrays on the same amount of land, but also the energy inputs involved: growing, harvesting and processing corn into ethanol, and manufacturing and installing solar panels.
“When accounting for inputs, the net energy production of solar is over 100 times that of corn ethanol,” Mathewson said.
Raising corn requires the use of pesticides and nitrogen fertilizer, Mathewson said, and nitrogen is a widespread groundwater contaminant. Working the land to raise corn can disrupt soil and lead to erosion, further threatening the health of water bodies and drinking water quality, he added.
More than 60 prominent climate scientists this week called for breaking a taboo about solar geoengineering—artificially cooling the planet by making it more reflective—by boosting research on it. Some activists and scientists are staunchly opposed to even studying geoengineering, arguing that it distracts from the necessity of cutting greenhouse gas emissions.
But the open letter says decisions on implementing geoengineering schemes are likely in the coming decades, and that simulations and field experiments are needed to understand the schemes’ effectiveness and risks. Among the signatories are retired NASA scientist James Hansen, one of the first to warn about the dangers of global warming, and Harvard University climate scientist David Keith, who has for years tried to gain permission to perform a small-scale geoengineering experiment.
Some climate scientists have signed an open letter calling for more research devoted to geoengineering. While I know many of these folks & often agree with them, IMO this is misguided & unlikely to be helpful in reducing the impacts of climate change. https://t.co/qsqEYQwaXS
Elon Musk got some attention a few years ago when he mentioned to Joe Rogan, between tokes, that Tesla’s heat pump technology might be headed for home systems. Then he went dark on the subject for several years. Now in a recent media event, the Tesla heat pump has been in the spotlight again.
This is far from the first time Musk has talked about heat pumps, an electric heating technology that works a bit like a refrigerator in reverse. Heat pumps are already installed in Tesla’s Model Y SUV and in newer versions of the company’s other models. In 2020, Musk sang the praises of Tesla’s in-car heat pump, telling investors on an earnings call that it was key to the Model Y’s superior range. “This is especially excellent at low-temperature driving. And the feedback we’re getting from customers who have received the Model Y thus far has been universally positive,” he said, adding that he was “extremely excited” to build a home heating, ventilation and air-conditioning system that could include particle filtration.
Home heat pumps, which could reduce global carbon dioxide emissions by at least 500 million tonnes by 2030, are having a bit of a moment. Installations exploded last year in Europe as Russia’s invasion of Ukraine led countries such as Poland to rapidly ramp up their heat pump programs. In the UK, there’s a heat pump price war underway, prompted by two of the country’s biggest utilities competing to match the cost of a gas boiler.
In the US, the Inflation Reduction Act offers incentives for households to install a heat pump, which is expected to boost the market. Demand is growing by 10% year-on-year, said Drew Baglino, Tesla’s senior vice president of powertrain and energy engineering, at Wednesday’s event. Baglino characterized heat pumps as key to the energy transition. “It’s about displacing all the fossil fuel heating that we can,” he said.
When used in electric vehicles, heat pumps can add to range because they’re more efficient than the resistive heating traditionally used to warm homes and cars. Rather than using one unit of power to make one unit of heat, they can provide two or three. But Tesla has also struggled to implement the technology in its cars. Last year, the company issued a recall to fix poor windshield defrosting and cabin heating, which affected some 26,000 Teslas, particularly in very cold weather.
