Month: June 2023

Dude, you live in a desert. Time to get real.

CNN:

Arizona officials announced Thursday the state will no longer grant certifications for new developments within the Phoenix area, as groundwater rapidly disappears amid years of water overuse and climate change-driven drought.

A new study showed that the groundwater supporting the Phoenix area likely can’t meet additional development demand in the coming century, officials said at a news conference. Gov. Katie Hobbs and the state’s top water officials outlined the results of the study looking at groundwater demand within the Phoenix metro area, which is regulated by a state law that tries to ensure Arizona’s housing developments, businesses and farms are not using more groundwater than is being replaced. 

The study found that around 4% of the area’s demand for groundwater, close to 4.9 million acre-feet, cannot be met over the next 100 years under current conditions – a huge shortage that will have significant implications for housing developments in the coming years in the booming Phoenix metro area, which has led the nation in population growth.

State officials said the announcement wouldn’t impact developments that have already been approved. However, developers that are seeking to build new construction will have to demonstrate they can provide an “assured water supply” for 100 years using water from a source that is not local groundwater.

Under state law, having that assured supply is the key to getting the necessary certificates to build housing developments or large industrial buildings that use water. Many cities in the Phoenix metro area, including Scottsdale and Tempe, already have this assured water supply, but private developers also must demonstrate they can meet it. 

Thursday’s announcement is an example of the law working as intended, according to an analysis by Arizona State University’s Kyl Center for Water Policy. Growth in the Phoenix area will likely continue under the new restrictions, the analysis said, but the rate of growth will likely change. 

“It’s going to make it harder for developments to spring up on raw desert in the far-flung parts of town where developers like to develop,” Sarah Porter, the director of the Kyl Center for Water Policy, told CNN. “It’s another impediment to that kind of development, like new subdivisions out in Buckeye or Queen Creek.”

Continue reading “Bill Coming Due. Arizona Limits Development on Water Concerns”

To get the biggest package of clean energy incentives in history, President Biden had to agree to support Senator Joe Manchin’s pet project, a fracked-gas pipeline thru West Virginia, that has been bitterly opposed by environmentalists and landowners.
To get this week’s budget agreement, and avoid a catastrophic default on US debts, the pipeline was hard-wired into the agreement.

New York Times:

Environmental activists are enraged by the deal struck between President Biden and Republicans to raise the debt ceiling because it would also expedite construction of a bitterly contested gas pipeline and includes unusual measures to insulate that project from judicial review.

The $6.6 billion Mountain Valley Pipeline, intended to carry natural gas about 300 miles from the Marcellus shale fields in West Virginia across nearly 1,000 streams and wetlands before ending in Virginia, is a top priority of Senator Joe Manchin III, Democrat of West Virginia, but has been fought by environmentalists and many Virginia Democrats for a decade.

A constellation of environmental groups condemned the pipeline’s inclusion in a debt limit deal, with one group, Climate Defiance, planning to protest Tuesday evening at the New York home of Senator Chuck Schumer, the majority leader.

One of the companies behind the pipeline, NextEra Energy, is a major donor to Mr. Schumer and Mr. Manchin. In the 2022 cycle, NextEra’s employees and political action committees gave $302,600 to Mr. Schumer and $60,350 to Mr. Manchin, according to the Center for Responsive Politics.

Mr. Manchin faces a potentially difficult re-election campaign next year, and pushing the pipeline to completion could help him with voters. Gov. Jim Justice, a popular Democrat-turned-Republican, has announced he will seek the Senate seat in West Virginia, a ruby red state that President Trump carried by nearly 40 percentage points in 2020. Retaining that seat is a priority for Democrats.

“We are in a bleak moment,” Climate Defiance wrote on Twitter. “The politicians we trusted with our lives sold us out to fossil fuel CEOs. We have been stabbed in the back. We do not know if we will win but dammit we will not go down without a peaceful uprising like you’ve never seen.”

But White House negotiators, who inserted the pipeline language into the debt limit deal, say Mr. Biden was honoring an agreement that he struck last summer with Mr. Manchin to secure the senator’s tiebreaking vote to pass the landmark Inflation Reduction Act, which includes more than $370 billion for clean energy projects.

White House officials say that the benefits from that law far outweigh any new greenhouse gas emissions produced as a result of the West Virginia pipeline. They also noted that they were able to block Republicans from rolling back many of the climate law’s clean energy provisions as part of the debt limit compromise.

Senator Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island is one of the Senate’s foremost climate hawks – who will swallow hard and vote in favor of the compromise.

Senator Sheldon Whitehouse:

Okay, the Mountain Valley Pipeline approval is a blow. I get it. But once we’ve put this MAGA default threat behind us, we’ll need to focus on four things. 

Continue reading “Manchin’s Pipeline: Did We Save the Economy and Kill the Climate?”

Simon Donner from University of British Columbia notes:

An El Nino event is very likely, but not all El Ninos are created equal. It is unlikely to be as extreme an event as 2015/2016 or 1997/98. Simple comparison is that the eastern equatorial pacific warming is more constrained at this stage (left) relative to previous big events.

—

But with an ocean that is already at record high temps, what is the effect of even a weaker El Nino?

Continue reading “Will This Year’s El Nino be As Intense as 2015, 1998? Does it Matter?”

Recent paper has caught my eye that sought to quantify what effect air pollution control, and an atmosphere cleansed of particulates, might have on warming. Will less reflected sunlight be another amplifier of warming?

Not everyone is on board.

First a summary:

Science:

It’s one of the paradoxes of global warming. Burning coal or gasoline releases the greenhouse gases that drive climate change. But it also lofts pollution particles that reflect sunlight and cool the planet, offsetting a fraction of the warming. Now, however, as pollution-control technologies spread, both the noxious clouds and their silver lining are starting to dissipate.

Using an array of satellite observations, researchers have found that the climatic influence of global air pollution has dropped by up to 30% from 2000 levels. Although this is welcome news for public health—airborne fine particles, or aerosols, are believed to kill several million people per year—it is bad news for global warming. The cleaner air has effectively boosted the total warming from carbon dioxide emitted over the same time by anywhere from 15% to 50%, estimates Johannes Quaas, a climate scientist at Leipzig University and lead author of the study. And as air pollution continues to be curbed, he says, “There is a lot more of this to come.”

“I believe their conclusions are correct,” says James Hansen, a retired NASA climate scientist who first called attention to the “Faustian bargain” of fossil fuel pollution in 1990. He says it’s impressive scientific detective work because no satellite could directly measure global aerosols over this whole period. “It’s like deducing the properties of unobserved dark matter by looking at its gravitational effects.” Hansen expects a flurry of follow-up work, as researchers seek to quantify the boost to warming.

Some aerosols, such as black carbon, or soot, absorb heat. But reflective sulfate and nitrate particles have a cooling effect. For many years, they formed from polluting gases escaping from car tailpipes, ship flues, and power plant smokestacks. Technologies to scrub or eliminate this pollution have spread slowly from North America and Europe to the developing world. Only in 2010 did air pollution in China begin to decline, for example, and international restrictions on sulfur-heavy ship fuel have come just in the past few years.

The new study, submitted as a preprint to Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics in April and expected for publication in the next few months, grew directly out of last year’s U.N. climate assessment. It included studies showing aerosol declines in North America and Europe but no clear global trends. Quaas and his co-authors thought two NASA satellites, Terra and Aqua, operating since 1999 and 2002, might be able to help.

The satellites tally Earth’s incoming and outgoing radiation, which has enabled several research groups, including Quaas and his colleagues, to track the increase in infrared heat trapped by greenhouse gases. But one instrument on Aqua and Terra has also shown a decline in reflected light. Models suggested a decrease in aerosols is partly responsible, says Venkatachalam Ramaswamy, director of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory. “It’s very hard to find alternate reasons for this,” he says.

Continue reading “Will Clearer Skies Mean Runaway Warming?”