Month: August 2023

“Extreme heat is the climate disaster that kills the most people, in fact, it kills more people than all the other disasters combined.”

When you need Oven Mitts to touch your steering wheel, – it’s hot.
Phoenix remains the fastest growing city in the US.
But it’s not just Arizona – Winter in the Southern Hemisphere is blowing past records.

Washington Post:

It’s the middle of winter in South America, but that hasn’t kept the heat away in Chile, Argentina and surrounding locations. Multiple spells of oddly hot weather have roasted the region in recent weeks. The latest spell early this week has become the most intense, pushing the mercury above 100 degrees Fahrenheit, while setting an August record for Chile.

In Buenos Aires, where the average high on Aug. 1 is 58 degrees (14 Celsius), it surpassed 86 (30 Celsius) on Tuesday.

“South America is living one of the extreme events the world has ever seen,” weather historian Maximiliano Herrera tweeted, adding, “This event is rewriting all climatic books.”

The most extreme conditions have occurred in the southern half of the continent, and particularly in the Andes Mountains region.

Temperatures Tuesday rose past 95 degrees (35 Celsius) in numerous locations, including at elevations of about 3,500 to 4,500 feet in the Andes foothills. In some cases, the temperature crested above 100 degrees (38 Celsius) after leaping from morning lows in the 30s and 40s (single-digits Celsius).

Continue reading “CBS News: Heat Stress, Heat Domes, and Heat Deaths”

Jason Box has been doing some good explainers in recent months, focusing recently on some of the most important indicators of the record El Nino cycle we are living.

Above, one suggested cause of current high Atlantic Sea Surface Temps is of some unintended consequences, actually an example of inadvertent geo-engineering.

Science:

The Atlantic Ocean is running a fever. Waters off Florida have become a hot tub, bleaching the third-largest barrier reef in the world. Off the coast of Ireland, extreme heat was implicated in the mass death of seabirds. For years, the north Atlantic was warming more slowly than other parts of the world. But now it has caught up, and then some. Last month, the sea surface there surged to a record 25°C—nearly 1°C warmer than the previous high, set in 2020—and temperatures haven’t even peaked yet. “This year it’s been crazy,” says Tianle Yuan, an atmospheric physicist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center.

The obvious and primary driver of this trend is society’s emissions of greenhouse gases, which trap heat that the oceans steadily absorb. Another influence has been recent weather, especially stalled high-pressure systems that suppress cloud formation and allow the oceans to bake in the Sun.

But researchers are now waking up to another factor, one that could be filed under the category of unintended consequences: disappearing clouds known as ship tracks. Regulations imposed in 2020 by the United Nations’s International Maritime Organization (IMO) have cut ships’ sulfur pollution by more than 80% and improved air quality worldwide. The reduction has also lessened the effect of sulfate particles in seeding and brightening the distinctive low-lying, reflective clouds that follow in the wake of ships and help cool the planet. The 2020 IMO rule “is a big natural experiment,” says Duncan Watson-Parris, an atmospheric physicist at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography. “We’re changing the clouds.”

Continue reading “The Weekend Wonk: Jason Box on 5 Factors Behind the Global Heat Wave”

Clean Energy has been an unexpected success in Alberta. Now the Fossil Fuel industry’s loyal operatives are moving to shut it down. We’ll see what happens, as climate impacts continue to batter the province, and the rest of North America.
This type of action did not work in Texas a few months ago, simply because the overwhelming benefits and advantages of renewables have been too apparent for too long, to too many constituencies.

Global News Canada:

Alberta’s United Conservative government is pausing all approvals of large renewable energy projects in response to what it says are rural and environmental concerns.

In a statement Thursday, the government said the Alberta Utilities Commission is to institute a six-month moratorium on approving all wind and solar power projects greater than one megawatt over issues of development on agricultural land, effect on scenery, reclamation security and system reliability.

“We are proud of our leadership in responsible renewable energy development and we are committed to its continued growth,” said a statement from Nathan Neudorf, minister of affordability and utilities.

“This approach will provide future renewable investments with the certainty and clarity required for long-term development.”

With few regulatory barriers to entry and abundant wind and sunshine, Alberta has been a leader in renewable energy development in Canada. In 2022, 17 per cent of the province’s power came from wind and solar — exceeding the province’s 15 per cent goal.

There are another 15 renewable energy projects before the Alberta Utilities Commission, representing hundreds of millions of dollars in investment.

The Business Renewable Centre, a group that links buyers and producers of renewable energy, said Alberta was on track to see $3.7 billion worth of renewables construction by 2023, creating more than 4,500 jobs.

Neudorf said concern over that expansion is being expressed at commission hearings. The commission has written a letter to his office to that effect, he said.

That growth is part of what’s behind Thursday’s announcement, said University of Alberta energy economist Andrew Leach.

“The reason that this is happening is because renewable energy has taken off in Alberta. The power grid is wide open for investment,” Leach said.

“This is just how fast the energy transition is moving. And because Alberta has been open to it, it’s almost gone faster than anybody could have expected.”

Continue reading “Alberta Fossil Interests Halt Successful Clean Energy Rollout, as Climate Amped Fires, Floods, Storms Rage”

No; you’re not crazy. Well, OK, maybe you’re crazy, but the heat does get to you as well.

Above, Mayo Clinic, Below, American Psychiatric Association.

Mike Huckabee’s The Kids Guide dot Com – (no I won’t link to this grifter):

Our kids are terrified that the planet is facing a death sentence due to climate change, and they’re hearing that it could happen in their lifetime! As their teachers and the media are pushing an agenda that promotes fear and panic, kids need to understand the facts behind climate change so they can feel safe.

That’s why we created for The Kids Guide to The Truth About Climate Change. This important guide gives kids the facts about climate change, all while spotlighting the failed doomsday predictions throughout history.

Inside Climate News:

The guide argues that the climate crisis is not as dire as mainstream media would have you believe, but it does not list its authors or what their credentials might be. And though its title claims to present the “truth,” science educators and climate researchers have found the guide to be full of factual inaccuracies. 

“It’s propaganda,” said Glenn Branch, deputy director of the National Center for Science Education (NCSE), a nonprofit organization dedicated to promoting fact-based science education, including about evolution and climate change. “It’s highly slanted with a clear ideological message, and it’s very unreliable as a guide to climate change for kids.”

As climate debates remain polarized and politicized, Huckabee’s guide is part of a small but determined contingency of climate disinformation materials marketed to children and families. It also fits into a new niche in the broader landscape of climate skepticism. In recent years, efforts to erode public confidence in mainstream climate science—which have long been orchestrated by the fossil fuel industry—have trended away from outright denial of the climate crisis to a more nuanced narrative that doesn’t deny that the planet is warming but instead suggests it’s been overblown by scientists, politicians and mainstream media, and advocates for continued use of fossil fuels.

Climate skeptics’ arguments have been consistently debunked by scientists, but misinformation from the oil and gas industry and its proponents has continued to proliferate and seek out new audiences. 

Continue reading “Kids Worried About Climate? Grifters Have Child’s Garden of Climate Denial”

I recently posted on urban efforts to lighten surfaces, hoping to cool city neighborhoods.

Purdue University has developed the world’s whitest paint, that could help make more reflective and resilient cities going forward.

Purdue University:

WEST LAFAYETTE, Ind. — In an effort to curb global warming, Purdue University engineers have created the whitest paint yet. Coating buildings with this paint may one day cool them off enough to reduce the need for air conditioning, the researchers say.

In October, the team created an ultra-white paint that pushed limits on how white paint can be. Now they’ve outdone that. The newer paint not only is whiter but also can keep surfaces cooler than the formulation that the researchers had previously demonstrated.

“If you were to use this paint to cover a roof area of about 1,000 square feet, we estimate that you could get a cooling power of 10 kilowatts. That’s more powerful than the central air conditioners used by most houses,” said Xiulin Ruan, a Purdue professor of mechanical engineering.

🌎 The world's 'whitest paint' contains a very high concentration of barium sulfate, a compound widely used as a pigment in paints. Researchers say coating buildings with this paint may one day cool them off enough to reduce the need for air conditioning pic.twitter.com/v9br1qPFLS

— Reuters (@Reuters) August 3, 2023

The guy in this video does not, repeat, not, hate EVs, and he gets that climate is a crisis. But he makes some pretty strong points about fire concerns with legacy lithium ion EVs.
I’m sure that’s one huge driver behind the rapid move toward Lithium Iron Phosphate (LFP) batteries, which have many advantages (see below) and are rapidly reaching performance parity with Lithium Ion.

Autoweek:

A better way of looking at electric vehicle fires is to compare the number of fires per 100,000 vehicles sold. Researchers from insurance deal site Auto Insurance EZ compiled sales and accident data from the Bureau of Transportation Statistics and the National Transportation Safety Board. The site found that hybrid vehicles had the most fires per 100,000 sales at 3474.5. There were 1529.9 fires per 100k for gas vehicles and just 25.1 fires per 100k sales for electric vehicles.

The reason why it’s easy to think that electric car fires are so common is because EVs are still novel and still unknown to a large portion of the public. News and media outlets report on electric car fires more often because of its, which can make it seem like they are a common occurrence. What’s more, when there are highway vehicle fires, they can require a tremendous amount of effort from emergency personnel to extinguish the blaze. A chain reaction inside the batteries—sometimes called thermal runaway—can occur when the battery generates more heat than it can dissipate.

ON the other hand, more and more EVs are being fitted with Lithium Iron Phosphate batteries, which use no cobalt, no Nickel, perform better in the cold, have longer lives, and purportedly will not burn.

Relion:

Phosphate-based batteries offer superior chemical and mechanical structure that does not overheat to unsafe levels. Thus, providing an increase in safety over lithium-ion batteries made with other cathode materials. This is because the charged and uncharged states of LiFePO4 are physically similar and highly robust, which lets the ions remain stable during the oxygen flux that happens alongside charge cycles or possible malfunctions. Overall, the iron phosphate-oxide bond is stronger than the cobalt-oxide bond, so when the battery is overcharged or subject to physical damage then the phosphate-oxide bond remains structurally stable; whereas in other lithium chemistries the bonds begin breaking down and releasing excessive heat, which eventually leads to thermal Runaway.

Continue reading “Heading Off Hazmat Headaches from Burning Batteries”

Good tempering discussion of last week’s breathless headlines about the “Collapse of the Gulf Stream”.
I get why reporters on deadlines use “Gulf Stream’ as short hand for the unwieldy mouthful “Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation”, (AMOC) but it’s lead to some confusion.
Possible consequences of AMOC collapse are of course, dire, but clickbait headlines lead a lot of people out onto the ledge a little prematurely.

Been meaning to highlight Stefan Rahmstorf’s “Real Climate” piece on this, so now’s a good time.

Real Climate:

1. The AMOC is a big deal for climate. The Atlantic meridional overturning circulation (AMOC) is a large-scale overturning motion of the entire Atlantic, from the Southern Ocean to the high north. It moves around 15 million cubic meters of water per second (i.e. 15 Sverdrup). The AMOC water passes through the Gulf Stream along a part of its much longer journey, but contributes only the smaller part of its total flow of around 90 Sverdrup. The AMOC is driven by density differences and is a deep reaching vertical overturning of the Atlantic; the Gulf Stream is a near-surface current near the US Atlantic coast and mostly driven by winds. The AMOC however moves the bulk of the heat into the northern Atlantic so is highly relevant for climate, because the southward return flow is very cold and deep (heat transport is the flow multiplied by the temperature difference between northward and southward flow). The wind-driven part of the Gulf Stream contributes much less to the net northward heat transport, because that water returns to the south at the surface in the eastern Atlantic at a temperature not much colder than the northward flow, so it leaves little heat behind in the north. So for climate impact, the AMOC is the big deal, not the Gulf Stream.

2. The AMOC has repeatedly shown major instabilities in recent Earth history, for example during the Last Ice Age, prompting concerns about its stability under future global warming, see e.g. Broecker 1987 who warned about “unpleasant surprises in the greenhouse”. Major abrupt past climate changes are linked to AMOC instabilities, including Dansgaard-Oeschger-Events and Heinrich Events. For more on this see my Review Paper in Nature.

3. The AMOC has weakened over the past hundred years. We don’t have direct measurements over such a long time (only since 2004 from the RAPID project), but various indirect indications. We have used the time evolution of the ‘cold blob’ shown above, using SST observations since 1870, to reconstruct the AMOC in Caesar et al. 2018. In that article we also discuss a ‘fingerprint’ of an AMOC slowdown which also includes excessive warming along the North American coast, also seen in Figure 1. That this fingerprint is correlated with the AMOC in historic runs with CMIP6 models has recently been shown by Latif et al. 2022, see Figure 2.

Continue reading “Don’t Panic About the Atlantic. Just Yet.”