Spanish Transport Minister Óscar Puente said he was suspending all commuter trains in northeast Catalonia, a region with 8 million people, on request from civil protection officials.
Mobile phones in Barcelona screeched with an alert for “extreme and continued rainfall” on the southern outskirts of the city. The alert urged people to avoid any normally dry gorges or canals.
Puente said that the rains had forced air traffic controllers to change the course of 15 flights operating at Barcelona’s airport, located on the southern flank of the city.
Several highways have been closed due to flooding.
Faced with worsening climate-driven disasters and an electricity grid increasingly supplied by intermittent renewables, the US is rapidly installing huge batteries that are already starting to help prevent power blackouts.
From barely anything just a few years ago, the US is now adding utility-scale batteries at a dizzying pace, having installed more than 20 gigawatts of battery capacity to the electric grid, with 5GW of this occurring just in the first seven months of this year, according to the federal Energy Information Administration (EIA).
This means that battery storage equivalent to the output of 20 nuclear reactors has been bolted on to America’s electric grids in barely four years, with the EIA predicting this capacity could double again to 40GW by 2025 if further planned expansions occur.
California and Texas, which both saw all-timehighs in battery-discharged grid power this month, are leading the way in this growth, with hulking batteries helping manage the large amount of clean yet intermittent solar and wind energy these states have added in recent years.
Historians picking thru the wreckage to find out just who played the biggest part in crashing democracy, and ultimately, civilization, will, of course, assign blame to Petro-Dictators like Vladimir Putin and Mohammed bin Salman Al Saud. But a chapter will have to be written about the nihilistic egotism of people like Jill Stein, Ralph Nader, and their burn-it-down lefty followers.
Jill Stein has refused to drop out of the race for the White House despite calls from more than a dozen Green parties to do so.
The US Green Party candidate is under pressure to end her presidential campaign just days before polling day, amid claims that she could fatally wound Kamala Harris and hand the election to Donald Trump.
A coalition of European parties across Europe has used an open letter to urge Ms Stein to suspend her campaign and endorse Ms Harris instead.
Otherwise, they warn, she risks splitting the Left-wing vote in key battleground states.
The Stein campaign told The Telegraph that it was “categorically not considering” dropping out.
Some commentators believe Ms Stein, who is on the ballot in almost every swing state, was crucial to Trump’s election in 2016 by siphoning votes away from Hillary Clinton.
The extraordinary downpours were driven in part by higher temperatures in the Mediterranean, a largely enclosed sea whose warmth is a store of energy that can only be released via evaporation, creating the conditions for intense storms. Francisco Martín León, a meteorologist at global weather network Meteored, said the Mediterranean was acting as a “petrol can” by feeding water vapour — the fuel for rainfall — into the atmosphere.
Scientists say that process has been exacerbated by climate change. “Then the fire that ignites it for us is a cold front or area of low pressure” that crashes into that humidity, as occurred this week, he said. In Spain the phenomenon is known as Dana, an acronym for a high-altitude isolated depression.
No Food. No Water. Many homeless. More than 200 dead with many missing. Many remote areas still isolated. Military deployed. More flood warnings still being issued.
Climate change is like fighting a war that never ends.
Late Thursday and Friday, rains spread to other southern regions. Heavy rain fell overnight in Andalusia, with the western province of Huelva the worst hit. Residents were out celebrating Halloween when sheets of rain began to fall, local news media reported. The authorities urged people to stay home, and avoid celebrating All Saints Day on Friday, which is usually done by visiting a cemetery or church, warning of the risk of flooding.
“This Friday the most complicated situation will be in the southwest of the peninsula,” Rubén del Campo, spokesman for the national meteorological agency, said. “The instability will continue on Saturday.”
I’ve mentioned before how Coldplay was the first band to set a goal of cutting their tour’s carbon footprint by 50%. According to their latest update, they’ve cut their emissions by 59% in the last two years, compared to their previous tour, through reducing air travel and even using a power-generating dancefloor: similar to that of a concert venue I reported on a few months ago in Glasgow, Scotland, that’s heated and cooled using the stored body heat of concertgoers.
It’s time for an update, though, because there are a lot more efforts afoot to curb the emissions from the music industry and call for climate action at a broader level. This week, the whole newsletter focuses on the music industry – the good news, the not-so-good news, and my top inspiration. Read on!
Music Declares Emergency is a UK-based charity that counts performers from Billie Eilish and Radiohead to the London Symphony Orchestra and Julian Lloyd Webber among its activists. (Did you catch the Instagram Live I did with Billie’s mom a few weeks ago, and the live-streamed Overheated event they’re hosting next week?) MDE has a new campaign titled No Music on a Dead Planet to “bring together artists, music industry professionals and music fans to call for an immediate governmental response to the climate change emergency to protect all life on Earth.”
To facilitate climate action within the industry, MDE has created climate info packs with practical steps the music sector can take to shrink its carbon footprint, from planning efficient tour routes with multiple stops in the same country or even the same city, to greening their banks and switching to a renewable energy provider. For fans, they’ve teamed up with the The ClimateMusic Project to create the BeCool campaign that focuses on civic engagement, emission reductions, and climate education.
No big deal, just two idiots sitting at a bar, trading rumors and conspiracy theories. Then you remember that one of them has a media platform with millions of followers, and the other could soon be Vice President of the United States.
Probably as dense a collection of utter bullshit on clean energy, particularly wind, as would be possible in a mere 6 minutes, all enunciated with the utter certainty that only true ignorance can grant. Joe Rogan starts out by citing Donald Trump as his source on environmental aspects of wind energy, and it goes downhill from there. JD Vance demonstrates once again what an utter moral an intellectual vacuum he is.
At this point, there is no scientific evidence that noise resulting from offshore wind site characterization surveys could potentially cause whale deaths. There are no known links between large whale deaths and ongoing offshore wind activities.
Offshore wind developers conduct high resolution geophysical surveys to image the ocean bottom. The noises these surveys produce may disturb marine mammals. This is why offshore wind operators have requested Incidental Harassment Authorizations to allow for Level B harassment. This includes actions that could disturb, but not injure or kill, a marine mammal by disrupting behavioral patterns, including migration, breathing, nursing, breeding, feeding, or sheltering.
The sound from these high resolution geophysical surveys are very different from seismic airguns used in oil and gas surveys or tactical military sonar. They produce much smaller impact zones because, in general, they have lower noise, higher frequency, and narrower beam-width. The area within which these sounds might disturb a marine mammal’s behavior is orders of magnitude smaller than the impact areas for seismic airguns or military sonar. Any marine mammal exposure to sound from these surveys would be at significantly lower levels and shorter duration, which is associated with less severe impacts to marine mammals.
In 2017, NOAA Fisheries declared an Unusual Mortality Event for humpback whale strandings along the Atlantic coast from Maine to Florida. The event is ongoing, and includes animals stranded since 2016. Vessel strikes and entanglement in fishing gear are the greatest human threats to large whales. The rest of the whales in this Unusual Mortality Event either had an undetermined cause of death (due to a limited examination or decomposition of the carcass), or had other causes of death, including parasite-caused organ damage and starvation.
