Month: April 2023

Two new Earth Day polls on climate have similar findings – Americans concerns about climate continue to grow as they experience more extreme weather events.
At Fox News, above, skies remains their perfectly normal clear green, as they have always been, and we don’t like to talk about it anyway.

AP-NORC poll results here.

CBS poll and results here.

ClickonDetroit:

An overwhelming majority of people in the United States say they have recently experienced an extreme weather event, a new poll shows, and most of them attribute that to climate change.

But even as many across the country mark Earth Day on Saturday, the poll shows relatively few say they feel motivated when they talk about the issue.

The findings from The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research poll echo growing evidence that many individuals question their own role in combating climate change. Still, the poll suggests people are paying attention.

About half of U.S. adults say they have grown more concerned about the changing climate in the past year, and a growing number say they are talking about it. 

Adriana Moreno said she feels like she’s been talking about climate change for years, but it’s only recently that the 22-year-old high school teacher has noticed her older family members bringing up the issue more and more – “almost every time I see them,” said Moreno, a Democrat in New York.

Her family on the East Coast talks about how the seasons have changed while her family in El Salvador talks about how poorly some crops on their farm are faring. After years of hearing about Moreno’s own interest in the issue, her parents have themselves become more interested.

It’s not that they didn’t believe in climate change before, Moreno said, but it was “out of sight, out of mind.” 

Overall, about 8 in 10 U.S. adults say that in the past five years they have personally felt the effects of extreme weather, such as extreme heat or drought, according to the poll. Most of them – 54% of the public overall – say what they experienced was at least partly a result of climate change. They’re not wrong, said the head of the federal agency overseeing weather and climate issues.

Continue reading “Weather Extremes Moving the Needle on Climate Concerns – Everywhere Except Fox News”

Right now, no.
California’s record snowpack from relentless winter rains and atmospheric rivers is now starting to melt, and reservoirs do not have enough capacity to hold the additional water – leading to flooding, and overflow simply running down to the ocean.
Meanwhile, depleted groundwater aquifers still remain at low levels following decades of historic drought.

With patterns of extreme dry punctuated by extreme rains a very likely pattern for the future, there is a need for rethinking infrastructure.

As farmers and homeowners see water use cuts, Saudi owners of Arizona farmland are taking advantage of wrong headed rules to grow water intensive crops for export.

Below, local Arizona report adds details.

Amazing article, it’s long, excerpts here.

New York Times:

MENOMINEE COUNTY, Wis. — Amid the sprawling farmlands of northeast Wisconsin, the Menominee forest feels like an elixir, and a marvel. Its trees press in, towering and close, softening the air, a dense emerald wilderness that’s home to wolves, bears, otters, warblers and hawks, and that shows little hint of human hands.

Yet over the last 160 years, much of this forest has been chopped down and regrown nearly three times. The Menominee Tribe of Wisconsin, its stewards, have pulled nearly two hundred million cubic feet of timber from this land since 1854 — white pine cut into museum displays and hard maple made into basketball courts for the Olympics.

Yet the forest has more trees on the same acreage than it did a century and a half ago — with some trees over 200 years old. 

The Menominee accomplished this by putting the well-being of the forest and their people ahead of profits and doing the exact opposite of commercial foresters. They chop down trees that are sick and dying or harvest those that have naturally fallen, leaving high-quality trees to grow and reproduce. It is regarded by some as the nation’s first sustainable forest.
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“In a way, we’re fighting modernization, because nobody wants to pick up a manual handsaw,” said John Awonohopay, lumber operations manager for Menominee Tribal Enterprises, the company that oversees the forest. “Think of it as a garden. Right now we’ve spent 150 years plucking all the weeds, and have it pristine. But we can’t harvest the pristine fast enough.”

Left alone, the forest will grow dense, stunting the growth of some trees and inviting invasive diseases and pests, which are already an increasing menace because of climate change.
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An hour’s drive northwest of Green Bay, the Menominee forest is so lush it pops in images from space. At 235,000 acres, it’s home to about 4,300 tribal members and roughly two dozen species of trees, hardwoods and softwoods like red oak, pine, maple, aspen and hemlock that fill 90 percent of the land.

In many ways, the reservation is an island. It borders farmland long ago shorn of trees. Its people overwhelmingly vote blue in a sea of red. During statewide wolf hunts, wolves on the reservation go untouched: The Menominee respect them as kin, and also hunt only for food.

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According to Michael Skenadore, president of Menominee Tribal Enterprises, the tribe began logging shortly after the formation of its reservation, when it recognized the revenue potential of white pine. The government wanted the tribe to clear the trees and to farm, according to Michael Dockry, assistant professor at the University of Minnesota’s forest resources department.
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But the Menominee people had no intention of destroying their forest.

Instead, they saw it as a collective resource that, if carefully harvested, could allow them to maintain their cultural connection to the land while providing for plants, animals and the tribe for generations to come. A quotation attributed to the tribe’s legendary Chief Oshkosh set their course. If the Menominee took only very old, sick and fallen trees, he said, “the trees will last forever.”

Continue reading “Every Day is Earth Day: Tribal Loggers Put Forest First”

I first posted on this (maybe) crazy idea a few months ago.
Is this real? or Cold Fusion 2.0?

New Scientist (paywall):

In mid-March, workers began pumping water out of a 3.5-kilometre-deep hole drilled in the middle of a Nebraska cornfield. It would have been an unremarkable scene if they had been in search of oil or natural gas. But the well is the first in the world drilled in search of naturally occurring hydrogen, which some think could become a significant source of clean fuel.

“We want to make a new discovery from scratch,” says Viacheslav Zgonnik at Natural Hydrogen Energy, the Colorado-based company exploring the well in partnership with Australian firm HyTerra. The tests started in March are now on pause due to a pump failure, but should soon reveal whether the well contains significant concentrations of the gas.

Researchers have long known geologic processes generate hydrogen, which emits only heat and water vapour when burned, but they didn’t think it would make a viable source of energy. “No one was really expecting to find it in large quantities,” says Zgonnik. “Because of that, no one was looking.”

Now, new estimates of the amount of hydrogen within Earth have driven researchers and some start-ups to take the hunt for geologic hydrogen, also known as gold hydrogen, more seriously.

“If it can be produced in large quantities – still a big ‘if’ – it could play a major role in helping reduce carbon emissions,” says Adam Brandt at Stanford University in California.

A sizeable discovery in Nebraska would be “a very significant milestone in geologic hydrogen development,” says Geoffrey Ellis at the US Geological Survey. Globally, there is one well currently extracting geologic hydrogen that was accidentally discovered in Mali, and many wells drilled for methane or helium have encountered hydrogen, says Ellis. But the Nebraska well would be the first to go looking for hydrogen and find it.

Zgonnik offered few details about why the Nebraska well – which was completed in 2019 just outside the small town of Geneva – was drilled at that particular site, but there is some evidence hydrogen is present there.

According to a 2022 assessment of HyTerra data by an outside consultant, hydrogen concentrations above 30 per cent were detected in mud bubbles deep in the well. Gas from the well also burned with an invisible flame in direct sunlight, which Ellis says indicates there is at least some hydrogen in the gas.

However, the assessment concluded that “considerable uncertainty in the hydrogen gas concentration in the well remains” and more tests are needed.

On 14 March, the Nebraska site’s operators initiated a “flow test” to estimate total production, which first required pumping water out of the well. They intended to complete the test by April, but there was a mechanical issue with the pump and testing is now on hold.

Zgonnik declined to give more details, adding that other companies searching for hydrogen may have similar issues. “There are some technical challenges to be overcome,” he says.

Continue reading “Is Nebraska Geologic Hydrogen Site a Black Swan for Clean Energy?”

Above, new estimates of ice cap melt in Greenland and Antarctica have implications for Sea Level Rise. Includes interview with Twila Moon of the National Snow and Ice Data Center, who I first met 7 years ago in Ilulissat, Greenland.

Below, more data on mountain glaciers in US and Europe.

Greenlandic Glacial Rock Flour Improves Crop Yield in Organic Agricultural Production:

The application of mechanically crushed silicate minerals to agricultural soils has been proposed as a method for both improving crop yields and sequestering inorganic carbon through enhanced mineral weathering. In Greenland, large quantities of finely grained glacial rock flour (GRF) are naturally produced by glacial erosion of bedrock and deposited in easily accessible lacustrine and marine deposits, without the need for energy-intensive grinding. To determine if this material can improve crop yields, we applied 10 and 50 t GRF ha⁻¹ to a sandy, organic agricultural field in Denmark. Two field trials were carried out to test the first-year yield response to GRF in both maize and potatoes, residual effects on potato yields in the year after application, and second and third-year residual effects on spring wheat. Reference-K treatments were included for comparison to determine if the beneficial effects of GRF were primarily due to its K content (3.5% K₂O). This alternative source of silicate minerals improved crop yields in the year of application. Though there was no improvement in yield with the reference-K treatments, for each additional ton of GRF applied, maize dry yield increased by 59 kg ha⁻¹ and potato tuber yield by an additional 90 kg ha⁻¹. No residual effects on crop yields were observed in the following years, but we suspect that benefits might persist over multiple seasons at sites with lower initial fertility. The increase in yields achieved with GRF could offset some of the costs of applying silicate minerals as a CO₂ sequestration scheme.

If you’ve ever been to the front of a land terminating glacier in Greenland, you’ll know about the dust.

Microscopically fine, it gets into literally everything, and steady winds keep it whipping across vast effluvial plains, where it exists in kilometers wide deposits hundreds of meters deep.

A reader sent this along, which I had not seen before, and frankly, though I wish very much to imagine the time is long past for this kind of nonsense, but Twitter, and my personal experience working and recording across Middle America, shows me that is wrong.

In advocating for clean energy, one still cannot assume in every forum that climate is an issue that persuades. The argument for clean energy has to proceed on topics of economics, benefits to farmers, local economies, schools, roads, and public services, as well as energy independence, freedom from fossil fuel black mail, clean air, clean water (which are very much of high value in every situation), property rights for farmers and landowners, and American technological leadership.
Fortunately, there is a powerful story to tell on those points.
Climate as an issue is there, in the room, but not yet the central concern. But people watch the news, and they do have eyes, and, when events like last week’s deluge in Florida, 26 inches of rain in 8 hours, keep happening, I see subtle signs that the barriers are coming down.

The sermon itself was posted in 2014, but according to the article, the speaker himself has been consistently a science – and more recently, covid, denier right up to the present.

Paul Braterman in The Conversation October 12, 2020:

Every so often you come across a piece of writing so extraordinary that you cannot help but share it. One such piece is a sermon on global warming by American pastor John MacArthur. Full of beautifully constructed rhetorical flourishes, it is forcefully delivered by an experienced and impassioned preacher to a large and appreciative audience.

For me, as a man of science, it is the most complete compilation of unsound arguments, factual errors and misleading analogies as I have seen in discussions of this subject. But it’s important because climate change is a big election issue this November in the US, where there is a growing movement of evangelical Christians who deny its existence, while Joe Biden promises a “clean air revolution”.

The minister of the COVID-denying, law-defying Grace Community Church in Sun Valley, California – which has encouraged worshippers to congregate as normal despite state COVID-19 restrictions – MacArthur is an impressive figure whose Study Bible has sold almost 2 million copies.

He regards the infallibility of the Bible, from Genesis to Revelation, as essential to his faith, and his sermon about global warming can only be understood in that context. MacArthur’s rejection of the science is shared by other major US ministries and organisations such as Answers in Genesis, Creation Ministries International and the Discovery Institute.

In this sermon, MacArthur paraphrases “a scientist at Cal Tech” (except not a scientist at all, but the novelist Michael Crichton, best known for Jurassic Park), as saying in a lecture:

Consensus science is the first refuge of scoundrels … invoked only in situations where there is a political, social, financial agenda but no scientific support.

The reverend has the most serious reasons possible for rejecting the scientific consensus concerning the age of the Earth, the origins of humankind, the history and prehistory of the ancient near East and the peopling of continents: it is totally incompatible with the Genesis account of creation, Adam and Eve, the flood and the dispersion of peoples from the Tower of Babel.

Continue reading “The Disposable Planet: Notes from a Climate Denial Sermon”

What might have seemed impossible not too long ago is real, solid, and very cool.