Andrew Dessler and Zeke Hausfather discuss major developments of 2024.
Obviously the election was a giant piece, but not the end of climate action.
As Zeke said, “The world is big, the US is a small part of that, and climate is long, and 4 years is a small part of that.”
Biggest concern might be what the Trump administration will do to American Competitiveness in the age of clean energy.
Geothermal energy presently only meets less than 1 per cent of global demand. But the IEA, one of the world’s most respected sources of energy data and analysis, said that if governments and businesses invested the $2.8tn required to develop full geothermal potential, it could provide up to 8 per cent of the global electricity supply by 2050. “New technologies are offering the possibility of meeting a significant portion of the world’s rapidly growing demand for electricity securely and cleanly,” said Fatih Birol, head of the IEA.
He added that it was a “major opportunity to draw on the expertise of the oil and gas industry”. The idea of drilling wells to draw heat from underground reservoirs to the surface is more than a century old, but is now used at scale in only a handful of countries that have suitable sources close to the surface, notably the US, Indonesia, Turkey, the Philippines, Kenya, Iceland and New Zealand.
Two new technologies were offering to transform the sector, said the IEA. One involves artificially fracking rocks to create the conditions needed to inject and heat water. The other is a closed-loop system where water is contained within pipes that are built deep into the earth. The IEA said that “with the right support, costs for next-generation geothermal could fall by 80 per cent by 2035”.
Reaching this would require the overcoming of hurdles such as the speeding up of project approvals and achieving significant corporate investment.
At that point, it estimated that geothermal plants could generate electricity for around $50 per megawatt-hour, making them “one of the cheapest dispatchable sources of low-emissions electricity, on a par or below hydro, nuclear and bioenergy”. The IEA added that geothermal would also be “highly competitive” with solar and wind power paired with battery storage.
Continue reading “IEA: Geothermal Could Rival Solar, Wind in Next Decade”Reposting this one originally from 2010.
Above, trailer for a film about the Solar Panels that Jimmy Carter symbollically placed on the White House, harkening to a new direction for the US economy, one in which life on earth, and the well being of the next 50,000 generations of children, had value.
The rest is history.
Americans elected a Daddy who gave them everything they wanted and asked no responsibility or sacrifice from them, opened the Treasury to enrich the wealthy, while laying increasing burdens, both economic, and environmental, on future generations.
One of Ronald Reagan’s first acts was removing solar panels from the White House.
If we can believe the long range forecast from the (soon to be muzzled, per Project 2025) National Weather Service, we’re going to see a massive, maybe record breaking, cold air outbreak event over Eastern North America.
At the same time, a northern ridge of the Jet will bring anomalously warm air into Canada and Alaska.
This has been explained many times, and the science, while not completely nailed, seems to only keep reinforcing, that climate change and a warming arctic are making for a more unstable jet stream, and making these events more likely, and more extreme.
Video below, from a few years ago, has probably the best collection of scientist interviews of any I’ve made – so useful if you know anyone that is confused.
If this is unsettling, don’t fret.
When Project 2025 makes NOAA go away, you won’t have to worry about silly stuff like massive weather anomalies anymore.
Tipped off by a “skeet” from Atmospheric expert Andrew Dessler, sure enough, real estate listing service Zillow is now listing climate risks on for-sale properties. Zillow says that more than 80 percent of buyers are now considering climate risks when buying a home.
The increasing power of storms, floods and wildfires have made more potential home buyers pay attention to climate risks when shopping for a home. If you’re one of those buyers, you can now see whether a property you’re eyeing is at risk for a climate-related event by checking climate risk data on every home listed for sale on Zillow.
Climate risk data tells you whether a property you’re considering on Zillow is at risk for flood, wildfire, high winds, extreme heat and/or poor air quality. It also gives you a history of previous climate-related events, and an estimate of the likelihood that such an event could affect that home over the next 30 years.
The information can help you determine the degree of risk you could be assuming when you buy any given property for-sale, and how much those risks could add to the cost of insuring and heating/cooling a home you’re considering.
“Climate risks influence where most prospective buyers shop for a home,” says Manny Garcia, a senior population scientist at Zillow. “While all generations juggle trade-offs like budget, floor plans and commute times, younger home shoppers are more likely to face another consideration: They want to know if their home will be safe from rising waters, extreme temperatures and wildfires.”
Compared to five years ago, more homes listed for sale in the U.S. are associated with major climate risks, according to a Zillow® analysis of new listings in August 2024. The analysis was fueled by data from First Street, a trusted leader in climate risk modeling that Zillow is partnering with to offer climate risk data. The analysis found that 16.7% of new listings were at major risk of wildfire, while 12.8% came with a major risk of flooding.
Having run promising to bring world peace in the first 24 hours, Trump has, weeks before taking office, threatened invasion of Mexico, Annexing Canada, and the Panama Canal.
Deranged Christmas post by the incoming President again asserts the “need” for the United States to control Greenland, which is territory of NATO ally Denmark.
I have no special expertise, but IMHO is this fixation was seeded, or at least encouraged, in conversation with Vladimir Putin.
Since his first term, President-elect Donald Trump has insisted that the United States should purchase Greenland — to the bewilderment of aides asked to investigate such a possibility, and despite repeated denials by top officials in Greenland and Denmark, of which the island is an autonomous territory, that it would ever be for sale at any price.
As he prepares to assume office, Trump has returned to the idea. “For purposes of National Security and Freedom throughout the World, the United States of America feels that the ownership and control of Greenland is an absolute necessity,” the president-elect wrote on Truth Social, his social media platform, over the weekend, in a statement announcing his choice for ambassador to Denmark. Kenneth Howery, the newly announced pick, is a co-founder of PayPal.
The Arctic island, which is roughly three times the size of Texas, has a population of about 57,000 people. It is on the North American continent, to Canada’s northeast, but is in practice part of Europe and is an autonomous territory of Denmark, which ruled over the island for more than 200 years and still maintains some control over its foreign policy.
Continue reading “Who Owns Greenland Anyway?”
Bad News first, then glimmers of hope.
No time to give up.
No telling what will happen to US climate science under a new regime of lawless, oil funded oligarchs, so we may want to pay attention to the high quality data and images that the European Space Agency is giving us.
A disturbing new video shows 13 years of melt at the Greenland Ice Sheet. The video was stitched together based on NASA and European Space Agency (ESA) satellite data.
The video reveals how the edges of the ice sheet are melting more rapidly than the center, particularly at spots where glaciers flow into the sea. The new research finds that between 2010 and 2023, Greenland lost 563 cubic miles (2,347 cubic kilometers) of ice, which is enough to fill Lake Victoria, Africa’s largest lake. The Greenland Ice Sheet has been losing mass since 1998, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and it’s currently the second-biggest contributor to sea level rise after the expansion of water that occurs due to warming temperatures.
The research, published Dec. 20 in the journal Geophysical Research Letters, wasn’t just about quantifying ice loss, though. Both NASA and ESA have satellites keeping a close eye on the region. ESA’s CryoSat-2 uses radar to measure the height of Earth’s surface, while NASA’s ICESat-2 uses laser measurements. Both methods have pros and cons, and researchers wanted to be sure the two measurements returned similar results and could be combined for greater accuracy.
Geophysical Research Letters – Greenland Ice Sheet Elevation Change From CryoSat-2 and ICESat-2:
Although fluctuations in ice sheet surface mass balance lead to seasonal and interannual elevation changes, it is unclear if they are resolved differently by radar and laser satellite altimeters. We compare methods of computing elevation change from CryoSat-2 and ICESat-2 over the Greenland Ice Sheet to assess their consistency and to quantify recent change. Solutions exist such that interannual trends in the interior and the ablation zone agree to within −0.2 ± 1.5 and 3.3 ± 6.0 cm/yr, respectively, and that seasonal cycle amplitudes within the ablation zone agree to within 3.5 ± 38.0 cm. The agreement is best in the north where the measurements are relatively dense and worst in the southeast where the terrain is rugged. Using both missions, we estimate Greenland lost 196 ± 37 km3/yr of volume between 2010 and 2022 with an interannual variability of 129 km3/yr.
Continue reading “Greenland Ice Loss Update”Prices for batteries in China are plummeting, and the implications are just starting to ripple outward for the global automotive market.
Over the last year, the price for lithium iron phosphate, or LFP, battery cells in China has dropped 51% to an average of $53 per kilowatt-hour. The average global price of these batteries last year was $95/kWh.
There are several factors driving prices lower. The first is raw-material prices, which have fallen sharply over the last 18 months. The cathode is where most of the raw-material costs in a battery come from, and the cathode share of total cost for an LFP cell in China has fallen from 50% at the beginning of 2023 to less than 30% this year.
The second driver is overcapacity that’s leading manufacturers to cut prices to maintain market share. China’s battery production is already higher than global EV demand, and that overcapacity problem is set to get worse before it gets better.
Overcapacity tends to lead to competitive shakeouts that shift volume toward the most efficient plants with the newest production technology, while others fall by the wayside. Average capacity utilization of battery plants in China fell from 51% in 2022 to 43% in 2023, and will be lower again this year.
BNEF’s bottom-up battery cost model shows how close average prices are now to estimated manufacturing costs, indicating that margins for vendors are shrinking.
Continue reading “Battery Boom is Coming Despite Trump”I don’t like everything about this video, there’s a clip of the President elect at the beginning that is misleading, and a poorly done graph, but the main point is accurate and clear – we are not prepared to meet the climate extremes now coming our way.
Recovery in the Smokey Mountain region devastated by Hurricane Helene will be slow and painful, over years, or decades, if it comes at all.
Disaster expert Samantha Montano, an informational MVP, is interviewed.
I found myself asking, OK, so who did you vote for? Because if you voted for a Republican, you voted for more of this. We came within a hair this week of a Musk/Trump engineered government shutdown that would have defunded all FEMA relief, and the Project 2025 game plan, now being staffed and implemented, is for dismembering FEMA and leaving disaster recovery costs to state and local units.
