Month: March 2024

With hurricane season fast approaching, Florida Governor Ron Desantis has told a journalist that Florida’s insurer of last resort, Citizens, is “not solvent.”

Senator Sheldon Whitehouse, a member of the Senate Budget Committee, has concerns that a major storm could wipe out the Insurer, and Florida would seek a bailout from Federal Taxpayers.
The insurer says everything is fine. If needed, Florida will simply assess all its customers many thousands of dollars to make up any shortfall.
See? Easy.

Meanwhile WFLA Tampa reports:

So it is instructive to compare water temperatures in the Tropical Atlantic Ocean with previous years which ended up having active hurricane seasons. Right now, in February, sea surface temperatures in the main development region of the Tropical Atlantic are warm enough to be normal for July.

To put it into more relatable terms, considering what’s been normal for the most recent 30 years, the statistical chance that any February day would be as warm as it is right now is 1-in-280,000. That’s not a typo. This is according to University of Miami Researcher Brian McNoldy.

–

Hurricane season starts June 1.

"Economists have made-up their own numbers on climate change" based on a "crazy-bad assumption" says Australian economist @ProfSteveKeen

And if they are wrong, "we are screwed."

A fascinating final chat for our #ArcticAmbitions❄️coverage of the @ArcticCouncil on @CNBCi pic.twitter.com/ZbiwTjYidU

— Rosanna Lockwood (@Roolockwood) May 21, 2021

Above, Steve Keen of University College of London, makes a number of great points in the video above.
Chiefly, he points out that economists have done a very poor job of representing what economic damages will occur in the wake of currently-in-the-pipeline climate change in this century.

One example he gives is the very real and surprising (to me and a lot of people) magnitude of insolation at arctic latitude versus temperate or tropical areas.
In an ideal model, the solar radiation in the arctic summer is greater than that received by the equatorial region, in part due to the 24 hour daylight periods around the solstice.

This brought to mind the eye-popping graph below, some version of which I was shown by Geographer Jim Byrne a decade or so ago.
It underlines the experience of anyone that’s been in the arctic in summertime, that the sun is absolutely dominant and blazing, and eye and skin protection are major priorities.

Below, Andrew Dessler has been hammering the point recently on the divergence between what economic modeling is telling us, vs climate modeling.

New York closed down the Indian Point nuclear plant before having in place sufficient clean energy replacement resources, thus forcing an increase in greenhouse gas emissions.
Bad form.
Since my own state of Michigan saw a similar closure, of Palisades Nuclear plant, in recent years, (for the record, the plant was closed after the operator could not find another interested party to buy and continue operating it, and repair costs for worn seals on control rods were looming) it’s worth clarifying on this issue.
Nuclear plants exist, they are contributors of significant fractions of grid power, but many are aging. Older plants may have increased safety concerns or increased maintenance costs.
At Palisades, for instance, the state government has appropriated 120 million so far for a new operator to revamp and restart the facility, in addition to supporting an additional billion plus loan from the federal government.

Guardian:

When New York’s deteriorating and unloved Indian Point nuclear plant finally shuttered in 2021, its demise was met with delight from environmentalists who had long demanded it be scrapped.

But there has been a sting in the tail – since the closure, New York’s greenhouse gas emissions have gone up.

Castigated for its impact upon the surrounding environment and feared for its potential to unleash disaster close to the heart of New York City, Indian Point nevertheless supplied a large chunk of the state’s carbon-free electricity.

Since the plant’s closure, it has been gas, rather then clean energy such as solar and wind, that has filled the void, leaving New York City in the embarrassing situation of seeing its planet-heating emissions jump in recent years to the point its power grid is now dirtier than Texas’s, as well as the US average.

“From a climate change point of view it’s been a real step backwards and made it harder for New York City to decarbonize its electricity supply than it could’ve been,” said Ben Furnas, a climate and energy policy expert at Cornell University. “This has been a cautionary tale that has left New York in a really challenging spot.”

–

In addition to restarting the existing plant, Holtec plans to develop two small modular reactors at the site, doubling the current power production.
Concerns remain about nuclear waste stored in casks at the site, and other sites like this around the Great Lakes.

Continue reading “New York’s Greenhouse Gaffe, and How to Manage Existing Nukes”

Nope, its a disinformation film from fossil fuel liars for hire https://t.co/dcbjMRHq2f

— BONUS (@TheDisproof) March 21, 2024

Donald Trump has shown that the key to success in right wing media circles is simply to have no shame.
One can hardly believe it, but almost 2 decades later, Martin Durkin, oddball lefty climate denier and purported film maker, (of the “Great Global Warming Swindle” from 2007) is back with another compendium of climate denial in film format. (How do these guys make a living? Serious question.)

A friend was at the big Red Carpet Premier event in DC the other day, and filed this report:

“(Theater) was about 1/3 full. 40-50 people total, and 1/3 of those were people in the film or staffers from CFACT/CO2 Coalition/etc. Old, white men predominantly (on and off screen)“

UPDATE: Review of new movie by Adam Lowenstein for Desmogblog:

Earlier this week I traveled to the Angelika Film Center in Fairfax, Virginia, for the premiere of Climate the Movie: The Cold Truth, a new documentary film that promises to reveal the real story behind what the film calls “the climate scare” — in other words, the notion that human beings are changing the climate through our use of fossil fuels. Directed by climate denier filmmaker, Martin Durkin, the screening was organized by the CO2 Coalition, a nonprofit that promotes carbon dioxide as playing a “vital role . . . in our environment.” The Heartland Institute and Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow (CFACT) co-sponsored the event.

Despite the happy, bright green CO2 Coalition banners welcoming us to the screening, Climate the Movie was, much like the bleaker corners of the internet from which it seems to take inspiration, snarky, vitriolic, and apocalyptic. Over nearly 80 minutes — a good majority of which passed before a single woman appeared onscreen, except in stock footage — the attendees and I, scattered throughout a theater that was about a third full, were offered a window into today’s anti-climate playbook with all of its tensions and motivations.

One of the interesting (“interesting”) things about watching a Donald Trump speech is to observe the former president’s attempts to stay on message. He knows what he’s supposed to say — it’s usually written right there on the teleprompter — but you can tell that it’s taking all of his strength not to deviate into rambling, sometimes incoherent, asides. Eventually, though, the strain becomes too great, and he tosses out the script and tells the audience what’s really on his mind.

Climate the Movie follows a similar trajectory. The first half of the film is a relatively sober outline of two scientific-sounding arguments — that global temperatures aren’t actually increasing, and that carbon emissions aren’t either. And even if they were, we should be glad, because plants need carbon dioxide, and they’re hungry because, on a geologic time scale, “we’re in a CO2 famine,” as one interviewee puts it.

Continue reading ““Swindle” Swindler Back with New Climate Denial Film”

In wind farm areas, most people will tell you that after a few weeks, the turbines kind of fade into the background and people stop noticing them.
One exception to that is the FAA required red lights that flash at night for aircraft safety.
New technology that will become standard on new wind farms going forward will greatly mitigate that effect.

Yale Climate Connections:

If you drive across Iowa at night, you might encounter a series of coordinated red lights flashing in the sky.

Greenwood: “It looks like a whole bunch of fireflies lighting up at the same time.”

Geoff Greenwood is with MidAmerican Energy, which operates 3,400 wind turbines across the state.

Red lights are placed on top of the turbines to prevent pilots from crashing into the structures, which can be more than 200 feet tall.

But that flashing lights up the night sky, which some people find annoying — so at three of its wind farms, MidAmerican Energy has installed a radar system that scans for nearby planes.

When a low-flying plane is detected within a few miles of the turbines, the warning lights start to flash.

But when the skies are clear, the lights stay off — and Greenwood says that since the system was installed, they stay off about 95% of the time.

Greenwood: “It has a dramatic impact on the nighttime sky.”

He says safety is the priority, so if the radar system fails, the lights turn on automatically.

After testing the technology for a year, the company will look to install it at other wind farms — keeping pilots safe while reducing light pollution.

Greenwood: “This gives us the best of both worlds.”

I covered this story before, but had not seen Senator Sheldon Whitehouse’s letter to Florida’s tax funded Insurer of last resort.

A few months ago already, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis stated in an interview on CNBC that Citizens, the state’s insurance fund, was “insolvent’ and possibly at risk of failing in the event of a major storm. All this heading into a hurricane season that forecasters are already saying could be catastrophic, with ocean temperatures already reaching July like levels in February.

Look for wealthy Florida Republicans to appeal the the rest of us to bail out their beach houses in the event of another Ian, or Andrew.

US Senate Budget Committee:

Washington, DC—Senate Budget Committee Chairman Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) sent a letter on Monday to Citizens Property Insurance Corporation renewing all requests for information and documents set out in the Committee’s November letter related to the company’s plans to address increased underwriting losses from climate-related extreme weather events and other disasters.  The letter follows new comments from Florida Governor Ron DeSantis to CNBC that Citizens “is not solvent,” a statement that also appears at odds with claims Citizens has made to the Committee.  

In November, the Committee launched an investigation into Citizens amid growing concerns about the insurer’s long-term solvency and possible requests for a federal bailout should losses exceed the company’s ability to pay.  Florida is on the frontline of climate risk, and as the state-backed insurer of last resort, Citizens faces potentially catastrophic exposure to climate-related property losses.

Citizens has not adequately addressed the Committee’s questions and has ignored repeated attempts at follow up.  In a non-responsive letter dated December 15, Citizens’ President/CEO and Executive Director Tim Cerio referred to a Florida law enabling the company to levy special assessments on all policyholders as a basis for its solvency.  But as the Committee stated in its initial letter, because “it would be both politically and economically unfeasible for Citizens to attempt to recoup tens of billions of dollars in losses from Florida policyholders, the Committee remains concerned that Citizens and the state of Florida would turn to the federal government for a bailout.”  Citizens’ December letter did not address this concern or substantively respond to the Committee’s requests for information, communications, and documents.

“Citizens has failed to cooperate with our investigation,” said Chairman Whitehouse of his follow-up letter to Citizens.  “Governor DeSantis’s repeated statements that Citizens is not solvent and the company’s own public comments about their ability to shift their financial losses to Florida policyholders have done nothing to assuage the Committee’s concerns about possible future requests for a federal bailout.  Floridians are grappling with already astronomical insurance rates and one future storm could make things far, far worse.  I look forward to Citizens’ full compliance with our investigation.”

Continue reading “Senators Probe Florida Insurance Fund for Climate Risk”

Warmer seas absorb less oxygen.
That sounds bad.

“Our oceans, on the grandest scale, can take a lot—but we can’t.”

Marina Koren in the Atlantic:

Even after nearly three months of winter, the oceans of the Northern Hemisphere are disturbingly warm. Last summer’s unprecedented temperatures—remember the “hot tub” waters off the coast of Florida?—have simmered down to a sea-surface average around 68 degrees Fahrenheit in the North Atlantic, but even that is unprecedented for this time of year. The alarming trend stretches around the world: 41 percent of the global ocean experienced heat waves in January. The temperatures are also part of a decades-long hot streak in the oceans. “What we used to consider extreme is no longer an extreme today,” Dillon Amaya, a research scientist at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Physical Sciences Laboratory, told me.

The situation is expected to worsen. Research suggests that by the end of the century, much of the ocean could be in a permanent heat wave relative to historical thresholds, depending on the quantity of greenhouse gases that humans emit. Many other changes will unfold alongside those hot ocean temperatures: stronger hurricanes, rising sea levels, unmanageable conditions for marine life. Our seas, in other words, will be altered within decades.

Many detailed climate projections focus on the state of the oceans by 2100, a short time frame that allows for relative certainty. “That’s what policy makers want to know about,” Sandra Kirtland Turner, a paleoceanography professor at UC Riverside, told me. It’s also a year in which many people being born today will still be living, witnessing the consequences of what we’re doing currently. But Earth has many, many millennia ahead of it, and that deep future is being shaped by the burning of fossil fuels happening right now. If we continue down the path we’re on, Earth’s oceans may be irrevocably transformed over the next several hundred years. Imagine yourself in space, hovering over the planet as an astronaut would, a few centuries from now. “The ocean will still be blue and beautiful,” Amaya said. But even from space, you’d know something was different. And the closer you got to the waves, the more clearly you’d see how things went awry.

Continue reading “The Oceans Have Already Changed”

Good friend John Abraham interviewed on PBS Newshour in relation to the “gobsmacking” warming of the last El Nino year.

As John mentions, there is indeed a discussion going on among scientists as to whether the striking jump we have seen is a) the expected results of El Nino on top of underlying global warming signal, or b) some kind of unknown “X” factor, which might be putting us in “Uncharted territory” – and equally accomplished scientist Gavin Schmidt, Director of NASA’s Goddard Institute of Space Studies, wrote this week in Nature.

Gavin Schmidt in Nature:

When I took over as the director of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, I inherited a project that tracks temperature changes since 1880. Using this trove of data, I’ve made climate predictions at the start of every year since 2016. It’s humbling, and a bit worrying, to admit that no year has confounded climate scientists’ predictive capabilities more than 2023 has.

For the past nine months, mean land and sea surface temperatures have overshot previous records each month by up to 0.2 °C — a huge margin at the planetary scale. A general warming trend is expected because of rising greenhouse-gas emissions, but this sudden heat spike greatly exceeds predictions made by statistical climate models that rely on past observations. Many reasons for this discrepancy have been proposed but, as yet, no combination of them has been able to reconcile our theories with what has happened.

For a start, prevalent global climate conditions one year ago would have suggested that a spell of record-setting warmth was unlikely. Early last year, the tropical Pacific Ocean was coming out of a three-year period of La Niña, a climate phenomenon associated with the relative cooling of the central and eastern Pacific Ocean. Drawing on precedents when similar conditions prevailed at the beginning of a year, several climate scientists, including me, put the odds of 2023 turning out to be a record warm year at just one in five.

El Niño — the inverse of La Niña — causes the eastern tropical Pacific Ocean to warm up. This weather pattern set in only in the second half of the year, and the current spell is milder than similar events in 1997–98 and 2015–16.

However, starting last March, sea surface temperatures in the North Atlantic Ocean began to shoot up. By June, the extent of sea ice around Antarctica was by far the lowest on record. Compared with the average ice cover between 1981 and 2010, a patch of sea ice roughly the size of Alaska was missing. The observed temperature anomaly has not only been much larger than expected, but also started showing up several months before the onset of El Niño.

Continue reading “Global Heat in Uncharted Territory? Or Right on Track?”

Describes a new paper by Judah Cohen, which detects an odd upward tick in the severity of arctic cold outbreaks in the Central US.
Another peculiar data point in the puzzle of climate amped extreme weather.

Dr Cohen spoke to me about this when I interviewed him a few years ago, along with Martha Shulski, who was at that time State Climatologist for Nebraska.

I’ll be doing a Twitter space tonight, and just putting a few short links of highlights that listeners can come and dip in to.
Above, farmers tell about threats against themselves, their families and businesses from anti-Clean energy mobs.

Below, the universally shared sense farmers have that the mobs at local township meetings were being, as they said, “coached”.

Below, more tales of abuse.

For more complete videos, see my page here.

Good story this week from Canary Media confirms my observations.

For more clean energy resources, see

Wind101.info
Wind101 on Facebook

Sun101.org
Sun101 on Facebook