The United States and the entire planet are poised to clinch their most humid summer on record, scientists say. The sweltering conditions, which have pushed this year’s heat close to the limits of survivability in some areas and fueled flooding downpours, are part of a long-term increase in humid heat driven by human-caused climate change.
Climate models have long predicted that a warming world would lead to higher humidity, because warmer air evaporates more water from Earth’s surface and can hold more moisture. The consequences of more humid heat include greater stress on the human body, increased odds of more extreme rainfall, warmer nights and higher cooling demand.
With only a few days left in meteorological summer, defined as June to August, this summer is on track to be the most humid in the United States in 85 years of recordkeeping based on observations of dew point — a measure of humidity — compiled by Hudson Valley meteorologist Ben Noll. It’s also likely to end up being the most humid summer globally, Alaska-based climate scientist Brian Brettschneider said in an email to The Washington Post.
Scientists have unearthed the remnants of more than 1,700 viruses from deep inside a glacier in western China. Most of these viruses are new to science.
With this discovery, the number of ancient viruses recovered from glaciers has grown fiftyfold.The viruses, gathered from a 1,000-foot ice core taken from the sprawling Guliya Glacier on the Tibetan Plateau, date back 41,000 years and span three major shifts from cold to warm.
Scientists say the viruses differed markedly between colder and warmer eras, noting that a distinct community of viruses formed during the most dramatic of these climatic shifts, at the end of the last ice age some 11,500 years ago. “This at least indicates the potential connection between viruses and climate change,” said ZhiPing Zhong of Ohio State University, lead author on the research.
HT to Michael Mann for flagging, and explaining this. New research helps answer the white knuckle panic that some climate-watchers have expressed about a recent dramatic acceleration in global temperatures. That said, some pretty good scientists have expressed concerns about the larger than expected IMPACTS of the expected temperature rise.
After a long stretch of silence, it’s looking like Atlantic hurricane season may awaken once again. Two areas to watch have been outlined on National Hurricane Center outlooks, including one that could become a problem for the Caribbean or Gulf of Mexico next week.
The disturbance, located over the central tropical Atlantic, has a 40 percent chance of development according to the Hurricane Center. It’s rather disorganized right now, and different weather models simulate varying degrees of intensification.
By early next week, it will be closing in on the Lesser Antilles, the island chain that separates the open tropical Atlantic Ocean from the Caribbean Sea, perhaps as a tropical depression — the precursor to a tropical storm.
Behind it, another tropical wave has been highlighted by meteorologists as having at least a low chance of eventual development. It’s more likely to stay out to sea, but it bears watching nonetheless.
Trump: Some people don't eat bacon anymore. This was caused by their horrible energy. Wind. They want wind all over the place. When it doesn't blow, we have a problem. pic.twitter.com/z9FnkHnYOU
Rather odd interviewer. Did she say “billion” when she meant “millions? Anyway, heat energy storage technology is coming on faster than most people realize, and that’s worth knowing.
Many people are now installing arrays of batteries at their homes. As of April, more than half of rooftop solar buyers in California chose to install batteries with their solar systems so that when the grid goes down, the house doesn’t. Nationally, sales of these solar-plus-battery systems jumped in the U.S. last year, according to Wood Mackenzie, a consulting firm.
They expect 27% of new home solar systems in the U.S. this year to be paired with storage, almost doubling the share of buyers, 14%, that chose this option last year. These systems easily cost thousands of dollars, but solar and battery prices have fallen, bringing them within reach of more people. Government incentives help, too.
On the portable side, “solar generators” and boxes known as solar power stations are becoming more popular. They are not truly generators because they do not generate electricity, instead they store it for when it’s needed. Users have to prioritize certain devices or appliances during an outage, to avoid draining the battery.
One, called the “Patriot Generator,” and marketed on 4Patriots.com, costs about $2,500. It holds enough energy to run a refrigerator for 19 hours, medical devices for 15 hours or personal electronics for over 100 hours.
Falling prices making battery storage increasingly attractive
Authorities in central Greece said on Thursday that they had dredged more than 100 tons of dead fish from the waters around the port of Volos, a scenic summer destination, after a mass die-off of fish that is believed to be linked to climate change.
As televised images on Thursday showed fishing boats trawling through a silvery blanket of dead fish that formed off the port earlier this week, passers-by snapped photographs of the gruesome scene on their cellphones.
Greek officials traded accusations over the disaster as seafront businesses dependent on tourism said they have seen their revenues slashed by 80 percent since the freshwater fish showed up earlier this week.
The federal government and the state of Michigan are spending nearly $2 billion to restart the reactor on the shores of Lake Michigan. When it reopens, Palisades will become the first decommissioned nuclear plant anywhere to be put back to work.
For years, it’s been cheaper to generate electricity with natural gas, and big sections of the public have been uncomfortable with nuclear power, after devastating accidents at Three Mile Island in Pennsylvania, Chernobyl in Ukraine and Fukushima in Japan.
That feeling has shifted, with a revived understanding of nuclear energy as green power that could add to renewable energy sources such as wind, solar and hydropower. Nuclear-produced electricity is also seen as more consistent than wind or solar. – Utilities have asked regulators to extend the licenses of 14 aging reactors in the past year. Nearly all of the nation’s 94 operating reactors have already had their licenses extended once, to 60 years, and two have been extended to 80 years—twice as long as the original licenses. —
I’m choosing neutrality in this issue. Governor Gretchen Whitmer, who has been a staunch friend and indispensable ally of clean energy with strong initiatives encouraging solar, wind and battery storage, is also a proponent of restarting the mothballed Palisades Nuclear reactor – profiled in this week’s Wall Street Journal, above.
Counterproductive for greenies to form a circular firing squad, and I certainly don’t have the bandwidth for it. I tell my pro-nuclear friends that, since a restart process will take years, (assuming the never-before-attempted process is even do-able) – join me today in helping site solar, wind and batteries – because there is no scenario for decarbonizing that does not include a lot of those. I tell my anti-nuclear friends, that solar, wind and batteries are, at least for now, cheaper than nuclear, help me encourage siting more of those, and we may find out they simply out-compete future nuclear builds. Worth noting as well, that I consider Enhanced Geothermal to be a dark horse here that may very well make nuclear obsolete by the 2030s.
And I tell everyone, that if we’re going to build new nuclear, or revamp old nuclear, we should go in with eyes open, because there are grave and legit challenges that will have to be met and managed. By all means, if you can, build nuclear, but be aware that it hasn’t been hobbled by protesting hippies so much as real economic and engineering foulups and snafus.
There are still some available accounts of the troubled history of the Palisades nuclear plant that are very much worth keeping in mind for anyone working on re-animating it.
Two jaguar cubs burned to death, their small bodies carbonized. Tapirs with raw, bloodied paws had been scalded by smoldering cinders. Nests of unhatched eggs from rare parrots were consumed by flames as tall as trees.
Wildfires are laying waste to Brazil’s Pantanal, the world’s largest tropical wetland and one of the most important biodiversity sanctuaries on the planet.
And the blazes, the worst on record since Brazil started tracking fires in 1998, are taking a deadly toll on wild animals, including at-risk species that scientists have been working for decades to protect.
“We’re watching the biodiversity of the Pantanal disappear into ash,” said Gustavo Figueirôa, a biologist working for SOS Pantanal, a conservation nonprofit. “It’s being burned to a crisp.”
The Pantanal is a maze of rivers, forests and marshlands that sprawl over 68,000 square miles, an area 20 times the size of the Everglades. About 80 percent lies within Brazil, with the rest in Bolivia and Paraguay.
