Heavy showers and thunderstorms continued to pour rain into East Texas Friday, adding more water to swollen rivers that have prompted mandatory evacuations as water levels rise in some towns to levels rivaling Hurricane Harvey’s devastating floods of 2017.
Officials are closely watching lakes and streams where additional rainfall on Sunday could fall at 1″ to 3″ per hour and soak many of the communities still waterlogged by the workweek event.
NOAA’s Weather Prediction Center has placed much of the north Houston metro under a Level 3 out of 4 threat for additional flooding.
Florida, perhaps the most vulnerable state to sea-level rise and extreme weather, is on the verge of repealing what’s left of a 16-year-old law that lists climate change as a priority when making energy policy decisions. Instead, the state would make energy affordability and availability its main focus.
A bill waiting to be signed by Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis would strip the term “climate change” from much of state law and reverse a policy then-Gov. Charlie Crist championed as he built a reputation for being a rare Republican fighting to promote green energy over fossil fuels.
While Florida is distinct for having an enormous coastline and being flat — Miami’s average elevation is roughly 6 to 7 feet (2 meters) above sea level — the chairman of House Infrastructure Strategies Committee said it also has unique challenges and the climate change language in law makes meeting them more difficult.
“We’re protecting consumers, we’re protecting consumer pricing, we’re protecting them with great reliability and we’re protecting to make sure we don’t have a lack of energy security in our state. That’s where we’re moving as far as our policies,” said Republican Rep. Bobby Payne.
But critics say now is not the time to go backwards when it comes to climate change policy, including Crist, who is now a Democrat who last served in the U.S. House.
“It’s disappointing to see a continuing lurch in the wrong direction, particularly when Florida, with our coastline, is probably the most vulnerable to rising sea levels, I mean if we don’t address it, who’s going to?” Crist said. “It breaks my heart.”
In 2008, the bill to address climate change and promote renewable energy passed unanimously in both legislative chambers. Crist signed the bill with fanfare at an international climate change conference he hosted with guests such as then-California Republican Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger.
Rep. Jamie Raskin shuts down Republican Ron Johnson and delivers a brilliant breakdown on how fossil fuel companies have intentionally deceived the public about their “commitment” to achieve zero net emissions. Raskin rips apart Johnson for being a climate fatalist and so much more in epic fashion.
Some of the world’s largest oil companies have privately expressed skepticism of the Paris agreement, federal climate regulations and their own goals of reaching “net zero” emissions by mid-century, even as they publicly voiced support for these efforts, according to documents that congressional Democrats released Tuesday.
The documents also detail industry efforts to fund universityresearch into the environmental benefits of natural gas. They were obtained by Democrats on the House Oversight and Accountability Committee and the Senate Budget Committee as part of a years-long investigation.
Democrats say the findings demonstrate that the oil industry has misled the public about its role in causing and addressing climate change, an allegation the industry rejects. The new documents come as oil companies already face a wave of lawsuits that seek to hold them responsible for extreme weather events fueled by global warming.
The U.S. Senate approved on Tuesday legislation to bar imports of Russian uranium, as the United States continues to seek to disrupt Russia’s efforts in its war against Ukraine.
The Senate passed the measure by unanimous consent, meaning that no senators objected to it. The House of Representatives passed the bill in December.
Uranium is used to power commercial nuclear reactors that produce electricity.
The legislation would ban the imports 90 days after enactment. It contains waivers in case there were supply concerns for domestic reactors. The bill also frees up $2.7 billion passed in previous legislation to build out the domestic uranium processing industry.
The United States banned Russian oil imports shortly after Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022 and instituted a price cap on some exports of its crude and oil products.
Is the Atlantic Ocean circulation hashtag#AMOC approaching a tipping point? This lecture video is globally respected researcher Stefan Rahmstorf’s take after researching this topic for over 30 years, and receiving the Alfred Wegener Medal of the European Geosciences Union.
One of the most prominent climate tipping elements is the Atlantic meridional overturning circulation (AMOC), which can potentially collapse because of the input of fresh water in the North Atlantic. Although AMOC collapses have been induced in complex global climate models by strong freshwater forcing, the processes of an AMOC tipping event have so far not been investigated. Here, we show results of the first tipping event in the Community Earth System Model, including the large climate impacts of the collapse. Using these results, we develop a physics-based and observable early warning signal of AMOC tipping: the minimum of the AMOC-induced freshwater transport at the southern boundary of the Atlantic. Reanalysis products indicate that the present-day AMOC is on route to tipping. The early warning signal is a useful alternative to classical statistical ones, which, when applied to our simulated tipping event, turn out to be sensitive to the analyzed time interval before tipping.
Rahmstorf’s talk is based on this recent paper in Oceanography.
In 1751, the captain of an English slave-trading ship made a historic discovery. While sailing at 25°N in the subtropical North Atlantic Ocean, Captain Henry Ellis lowered a “bucket sea-gauge,” devised and provided to him by the British clergyman Reverend Stephen Hales, through the warm surface waters into the deep. By means of a long rope and a system of valves, water from various depths could be brought up to the deck where its temperature was read from a built-in thermometer. To his surprise, Captain Ellis found that the deep water was icy cold.
He reported his findings to Reverend Hales in a letter: “The cold increased regularly, in proportion to the depths, till it descended to 3900 feet: from whence the mercury in the thermometer came up at 53 degrees (Fahrenheit); and tho’ I afterwards sunk it to the depth of 5346 feet, that is a mile and 66 feet, it came up no lower.”
These were the first ever recorded temperature measurements of the deep ocean. They revealed what is now known to be a fundamental and striking physical feature of the world ocean: deep water is always cold. The warm waters of the tropics and subtropics are confined to a thin layer at the surface; the heat of the sun does not slowly warm the depths during centuries or millennia as might be expected.
Interview with Atlanta Journal-Constitution reporter who has been following the project.
I want very much for this project to succeed – simply because we can’t afford to have 30 billion dollars aimed at carbon mitigation go to waste. That said, the history of this project has pretty much guaranteed there will be no projects of this size planned in the US any time soon. All hopes are pinned to the success of a newer generation of small modular reactors, that have yet to be proven in real life.
Paul Schroeder is yet another farmer I’ve gotten to know in the course of standing up for clean energy across the midwest. I interviewed him at his operation near Montague, Michigan, a few months ago.
Like so many others, Paul tells me that having a diversified income is critical for Farmers that want to keep the farm solvent, and in the family. This area is a prime one that developers are salivating to take over, and it’s only farmers like Paul that stand in the way of a permanent wave of burger joints, gas stations, subdivisions, ranchettes, strip malls, concrete and sprawl.
