Climate Change, Pollution, Clean Energy, and the Environment

[LFC]

Jul 2, 2021 19:29:54 GMT jackd said:

As I suspected, the repairs were delayed while the residents argued about the cost. The ensuing (so to speak) lawsuits are going to be messy.

I'm at a loss on this one. I believe a condo board is made up of residents elected by the majority of residents.  Meeting minutes with decisions made must be distributed to all residents. If repairs and costs were discussed and rejected with the resulting decisions disclosed then who would people sue? Each other / themselves? The city for not condemning the building on them? I don't understand who the targets would be and if any of them have deep pockets so could actually be forced to pay something.

[jackd]

Creative lawyers can always find targets. The various engineering firms and the town's inspector are probably a place to begin.

[LFC]

All I can say is, "f**********k." Bold mine.

A huge lake on the east coast of Antarctica has disappeared, causing 200 billion gallons of water to vanish without a trace.

In the winter of 2019 on the Amery Ice Shelf, the third-largest ice shelf on the continent, around 21 billion to 26 billion cubic feet (600 million to 750 million cubic meters) drained really quickly into the ocean. The lake’s disappearing act was noticed the following summer when scientists were looking at satellite photos of the region. The findings are chronicled in a new study.

“We believe a large crack opened briefly in the floating ice shelf and drained the entire lake into the ocean within three days,” Roland Warner, a scientist at the Australian Antarctic Program Partnership at the University of Tasmania who first spotted the major drainage on satellite imagery, said in a release. “The lake held more water than Sydney Harbor and the flow into the ocean beneath would have been like the flow over Niagara Falls, so it would have been an impressive sight.”

In the paper published last week in Geophysical Research Letters, Warner and his coauthors found that the sudden drainage may have been caused by meltwater in the ice. They theorize that there was meltwater stored underneath the deep, ice-covered lake, which put pressure on the ice shelf and caused a crack to open that sent the water right to the ocean, in a process known as hydrofracturing. The drained lake left a huge depression in the ice—around 4.24 square miles (11 square kilometers)—which quickly began to fill with meltwater again last summer.

Meltwater has been responsible for collapse and drainage on smaller ice shelves throughout the continent. But the Amery Shelf is around 4,593 feet (1,400 meters) thick, and this happened in the middle of winter. That makes this event pretty unusual. (Similarly leaky lakes have appeared in recent winters on the surface of Greenland’s ice sheet thousands of miles away in the Arctic as well.)

[AnBr]

Climate change has gotten deadly. It will get worse.

[LFC]

We continue to heat the planet with our emissions. Ironically our electrical grid, which is responsible for its fair share of greenhouse gases, isn't prepared to handle what's coming.

In Portland, Oregon, this week, the recorded official temperature reached 115 degrees Fahrenheit, power cables for the city’s streetcars melted, sagging overhead wires forced the light rail to shut down, and more than 6,000 people lost electricity.

But it’s far from the first time extreme weather has caused serious problems with the power grid in recent months. During the winter storm that hit Texas in February, nearly 5 million people lost power. In June, California suggested that residents charge their electric vehicles during off-peak hours to save energy. And for the first time ever, after power outages hit several neighborhoods during this week’s heat wave, New York City officials sent residents an emergency mobile alert urging them to conserve energy.

It’s abundantly clear that the power grid in the United States is not ready for the effects of climate change, including the extreme weather events that come with it. After all, climate change isn’t just increasing the demand for energy to keep people cool or warm amid heat waves and winter storms. It’s also damaging the grid itself. The country is now in a race against time to shift its energy supply toward renewable sources, like wind and solar, while also needing more and more electricity to do everything from powering more air conditioning to boosting the number of EVs on the road.

“I would probably give our power grid maybe a C minus,” Kyri Baker, an engineering professor at the University of Colorado Boulder, told Recode. “It’s like this perfect storm of extreme temperatures, more electricity consumption, and aging infrastructure.”

Having a reliable power grid can be a matter of life and death. In the most severe power outages during the winter storm in Texas this past February, 700 people are estimated to have died, according to BuzzFeed. Hundreds of people died during this past week’s heat wave in the Pacific Northwest and Canada. Meanwhile, the effects of heat waves have been disproportionately worse for historically marginalized brown, Black, and Indigenous communities. People who are elderly, very young, who have certain medication conditions, or who work outdoors are also more likely to feel the impacts of extreme heat.

Climate change means that extreme weather events are becoming more intense and common, which is worrisome not just because the power grid is aging. The grid is woefully unprepared for an imminent and disturbing future.

[LFC]

As we would expect some birds and mammals are getting smaller as our climate gets warmer.

The link between body size and temperature
We already know climate change will impact wildlife in a number of ways, from shifting the distribution of some species to altering the color of others. But it might be surprising to learn about changes in something as fundamental as body size.

In ecology, a principle called Bergmann’s rule suggests that individuals of a population of warm-blooded animals like birds or mammals will be larger in cooler climates and smaller in warmer ones. Intuitively, this makes sense: Larger individuals have an easier time conserving heat when it's cold, and smaller animals have an easier time cooling off when it’s hot. This has to do with the ratio of an animal’s body size to its surface area. (It’s the same reason why a large ice cube melts relatively slower than a small one.)

The idea that warming is linked to smaller body sizes also bears out in fossil evidence. During the largest warming event in the early Eocene, about 56 million years ago — when temperatures increased between 5 to 8 degrees Celsius within 10,000 years — many animals got smaller, including mammals (which scientists learned by measuring fossilized teeth). Another past warming event called the Eocene Thermal Maximum 2, which saw temperatures increase by 3°C, was also associated with shrinking animals.

Scientists look to these warming periods to understand what the future might look like. If current warming continues, we can expect the planet to be 1.5°C warmer by 2040, compared to pre-industrial levels. And it will go up from there. “Reductions in body size in fossils,” two ecologists wrote in a 2011 perspective for Nature Climate Change, “are particularly informative of what we can expect in the coming century.”

Then again, nature is complicated and tends to surprise even the brightest minds.

Many animals are getting smaller, but it’s not a universal trend
In 2019, when scientists examined more than 70,000 bird specimens in the Field Museum collection, they found that individuals from 52 bird species shrank by an average of 2.6 percent between 1978 and 2016. A part of the birds’ legs, known as the tarsus, also got smaller, on average.

“We had no idea until two years ago that 52 of the most common, well-known species of North American bird have all gotten smaller over the last 40 years,” said Brian Weeks, the lead author of the study and an assistant professor of ecology and evolution at the University of Michigan. “It has big implications for what’s going to happen in the future.”

Other studies on birds, deer, rodents, insects, and fish show similar patterns. Research in 2017, for example, found that the body size of a small, silver fish called menhaden, which is widely used for animal feed and bait, has shrunk on average by 15 percent over the last 65 years — most likely due to warming. “As the Earth’s atmosphere and oceans continue to warm, the future of menhaden, it seems, will be even smaller,” said R. Eugene Turner, the author of the study and a professor at Louisiana State University.

What’s interesting is that fish and other so-called ectotherms don’t generate their own heat, so having a smaller body doesn’t help them stay cool. Instead, they might shrink in response to warming for other reasons, said Jennifer Sheridan, assistant curator for amphibians and reptiles at Carnegie Museum of Natural History and the lead author of the 2011 perspective. Warm temperatures, for example, speed up the development phases of frogs, from egg to tadpole and so on, but their rate of growth doesn’t keep up, she said. As a result, they’re smaller by the time they arrive at adulthood.

[LFC]

The heat wave in British Columbia cooked over one billion sea creatures that live in the tidal zone. This is how entire ecosystems collapse in a very short period of time.

Christopher Harley, a marine ecologist at the University of British Columbia, told the outlet about how he had noticed a foul odor from dead intertidal animals on rocks at Vancouver's popular Kitsilano Beach as the city experienced record heat. Harley then set off with a team of researchers to gather data on nearby coastlines.

What the researchers noticed, CBC reported, were "endless rows of mussels with dead meat attached inside the shell, along with other dead creatures like sea stars and barnacles."

They tracked temperatures too, recording 50°C (122°F) on rocky shoreline habitats, well above the high 30s (around 100°F) mussels can endure for short spurts. Harley likened a mussel on the rock enduring the scorching temperatures to "a toddler left in a car on a hot day"—stuck "at the mercy of the environment" until the tide returns. "And on Saturday, Sunday, Monday, during the heat wave, it just got so hot that the mussels, there was nothing they could do."

[goldenvalley]

Yes, climate change and burning fossil fuels are very much linked and is creating a crisis for us.  But there's something else too...human hubris.  Read this about Chicago with its lovely skyscrapers built on a swamp...it is no better off than Miami.

[indy]

Jul 9, 2021 1:21:16 GMT goldenvalley said:

Yes, climate change and burning fossil fuels are very much linked and is creating a crisis for us.  But there's something else too...human hubris.  Read this about Chicago with its lovely skyscrapers built on a swamp...it is no better off than Miami.

Not really quite the same because last I read is that the models are predicting a slight decrease in Great Lake water levels through the end of the 21st century. The consensus of the models seems to be that the land won't be reclaimed by water like a lot of Miami likely will be because all the Great Lakes really need is to be at a higher elevation than the eventual sea level and they will drain. Chicago is still 600 feet above sea level even if it is built on a swamp. Miami is at 7 feet.

Not to say that more severe precipitation events won't cause more frequent flooding like 1987, but on the other hand less snowfall during the winter probably means less flooding due to the significant spring melt. 9 inches of rain will be a problem no matter where you live.

And, of course, models are just models and the complex interplay of weather, precipitation, capacity, watershed hydrology, etc. don't give me all that much faith in the predictions but being at 600 feet is still a lot better position than being at 7 feet.

[jackd]

The Times story about Chicago's reason for being and development with resulting flooding issues is excellent. As the story points out, there is a reason that they went to all that trouble: it is a perfect transportation hub; initially for water connections between the Atlantic and the Mississippi River, and later for its geographic location for land and air connections.

[LFC]

The Western wildfires are bad. Very bad.

Huge parts of the western United States are on fire. According to USA Today, more than 300,000 acres are burning across six states as the West continues to roast under record temperatures. The biggest single blaze is the Bootleg Fire, which has ripped through over 140,000 acres in Oregon and, as of Sunday night, was zero percent contained. Fire Incident Commander Al Lawson said: “The fire behavior we are seeing on the Bootleg Fire is among the most extreme you can find and firefighters are seeing conditions they have never seen before.” The fire is threatening to take down a major power grid that connects Oregon and California, and the National Weather Service in Medford has warned that it looks set to grow over the coming days. “The fire has doubled in size in each day for the last three days,” an alert reportedly said. “If you live in or near an evacuation area, get set to leave. No possession is worth your life.”

[goldenvalley]

California fires are burning hotter, faster, more intensely.   

In 2015, climate scientist Alex Hall co-wrote a study that found the size of wildfires are closely linked to both heat and dryness. The study predicted that by 2050, fire would each year burn twice as many acres in Southern California, on average.

But the region is on pace to reach that mark much sooner: In 2020, for example, fires scorched twice as much land statewide as they did in 2018.

Hall said the recent rapid increase in fire behavior could in part be due to bigger swings between wet and dry years that have caused vegetation to grow and then dry out, and aggressive fire suppression tactics that have caused a buildup of dead and dry fuels in forested areas.

Anecdotally, a career CalFire firefighter that I know talked about how quickly fires moved 6 or 7 years ago compared to when he was a front line fighter.  He's no longer on the front lines but was a shift commander on the scene back then.  It adds to the risk of firefighting.  

[LFC]

A natural cycle of the moon may increase the height of high tides in another 15 years. Stacked on top of sea level rise this is bound to cause problems.

Recurrent high-tide floods are expected to worsen as sea levels continue to rise on account of climate change, but, as a new study warns, a regularly occurring 18.6-year cycle involving the Moon could trigger unprecedented flooding along U.S. coasts in the 2030s.

Nuisance flooding, sunny day flooding, or high-tide flooding—it’s all the same thing, and an annoying pain in the ass. In 2019, NOAA tracked more than 600 of these recurring high-tide flooding events, in which high tides extend 2 feet (0.6 meters) above the norm. These floods aren’t life threatening, but they can damage coastal infrastructure in affected areas and create annoyances like flooded parking lots. Needless to say, nuisance flooding is happening more frequently on account of human-induced climate change, and it’s poised to get even worse as sea levels continue to rise.

If that’s not bad enough, an 18.6-year lunar cycle is expected to amplify this effect even further, according to new research published in Nature Climate Change. The authors of the paper, led by Phil Thompson from the University of Hawaii, say the confluence of rising sea levels and a periodic wobble in the Moon’s orbit will increase the frequency and severity of high-tide floods along U.S. ocean coastlines. By the mid-2030s, tidal floods could occur in batches that last for a month or more and on a nearly daily basis, the scientists say. Members of NASA’s Sea Level Change Science Team from the University of Hawaii contributed to this research.

Scientists have known about this wobble in the Moon’s orbit since the early 18th century, as well as how alignments involving the Moon, Earth, and Sun can influence the tides. During the first half of this cycle, high tides are below the normal average and low tides are higher than normal. During the other half of the cycle, both the high and low tides are amplified, appearing both higher and lower than usual. The reason for this has to do with the Moon’s gravitational pull, which causes Earth’s ocean tides. We’re currently in the amplification phase of this cycle, but the Moon’s gravity is not affecting tides to the degree expected in the mid-2030s when the amplification phase renews.

[AnBr]

[LFC]

There are cities and states looking at "managed retreat" to start moving people from homes in some of the most flood prone areas. Things are getting worse in multiple places.

Cities all along the U.S. coasts have seen high-tide flooding days increase. In 2021, the U.S. coasts are projected to see an average of three to seven high-tide flooding days, rising to 25-75 days by midcentury, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration warns in its annual high-tide flooding outlook, released July 14, 2021.

Low-lying Charleston saw a record-breaking 14 days of high-tide flooding in 2020, and parts of the city count even more flood days. The city is considering new sea walls to protect against hurricanes, and other measures to try to keep tidal and storm flooding out of threatened neighborhoods. But it has also started helping resident relocate away from high-risk areas. It’s a strategy known as managed retreat – the purposeful movement of people, buildings and other infrastructure away from highly hazardous places.

Managed retreat is controversial, particularly in the United States. But it isn’t just about moving – it’s about adapting to change and building communities that are safer, addressing long-overlooked needs and incorporating new technologies and thoughtful design for living and working in today’s world.

We argue in a special issue of the journal Science that managed retreat is an opportunity to preserve the essential while redesigning high-risk areas in ways that are better for everyone.

AFAIC a big part of this is to revamp the federal flood insurance program. First, make it pay for itself. Second, put in rules that will limit the amount of payout. There have houses that have been rebuilt 10 times or more. This is insane. I don't want to sound cruel but nobody has any right to have the taxpayers foot bills like that even if it is your home. There comes a point where reality must be faced and that point should be around the 2nd or 3rd need for a rebuild. There also appears to be problems with enforcement of rebuilding with flood protection measures.

More than 2,100 properties across the U.S. enrolled in the National Flood Insurance Program have flooded and been rebuilt more than 10 times since 1978, according to a new analysis of insurance data by the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC). One home in Batchelor, Louisiana has flooded 40 times over the past four decades, receiving $428,379 in insurance payments. More than 30,000 properties in the program, run by the Federal Emergency Management Agency, have flooded multiple times over the years. Those homes, known as “severe repetitive loss properties,” make up just 0.6 percent of federal flood insurance policies. But they account for 10.6 percent of the program’s claims — totaling $5.5 billion in payments.

The new data illustrates the serious problems facing the nation’s flood insurance program. The National Flood Insurance Program (NFIP), which currently provides policies for more than 5 million American homes, is $23 billion in debt following a string of major natural disasters over the last decades, including as Hurricanes Katrina and Sandy. Six U.S. states have experienced deadly flooding in the last 15 months, including Texas, South Carolina, and, most recently, Louisiana. Scientists and policy experts warn that as seas continue to rise and extreme weather becomes more frequent as a result of climate change, more properties will flood more often, causing further strain on an already financially stressed system.

“The way we have dealt with properties that are at a high risk of flooding is massively expensive, of limited utility at reducing the nation’s risk from flood damages, and is unworkable as a solution in the face of sea level rise and rising risk of flooding due to climate change,” said Rob Moore, a flood policy analyst at the NRDC, which obtained the records from FEMA using a Freedom of Information Act request.

Of the 30,000 homes analyzed by the NRDC, the average cumulative payout per property as a result of repeated flooding was $181,444. Nearly half of these repetitive loss properties have been paid more in flood insurance money than their houses are worth, the NRDC found.

Part of the problem, Moore said, is that the NFIP only requires that structures damaged more than 50 percent be rebuilt in a way that reduces their future flood risk. The program also doesn’t consider previous flood damage when assessing claims. According to the FEMA data, 75 percent of the 30,000 owners of repetitive loss properties have never gotten money or taken steps to reduce their flood risk, such as elevating the home.

[AnBr]

Change it so that the payout is only for relocation, not rebuilding on the same floodplain/coastal area or any other flood prone place. If they do not want to move to higher ground, then tough titty. No payout to them.

[Traveler]

Tough to find available higher ground you can afford.  

That said, Your problem cannot be repeated problem. 

[AnBr]

So maybe they need to move back even further from the shore. Life is such that you do what you need to do. We help where we can, but we cannot continue to help stupidity over and over.

[Rue Bella]

Sobering video of smoke across the nation from all the wildfires.

"See How Wildfire Smoke Spread Across America"


www.nytimes.com/interactive/2021/07/21/climate/wildfire-smoke-map.html?campaign_id=54&emc=edit_clim_20210721&instance_id=35891&nl=climate-fwd%3A®i_id=80724309&segment_id=64044&te=1&user_id=539834d832680a57fa7414bdd30c20e6

[LFC]

Jul 22, 2021 3:52:58 GMT AnBr said:

So maybe they need to move back even further from the shore. Life is such that you do what you need to do. We help where we can, but we cannot continue to help stupidity over and over.

This. Soooooo this. It's a bit like paying for a lung transplant so somebody can get back to smoking.

[LFC]

A graphic so simple even a MAGAt could understand it ... maybe.

[goldenvalley]

Melting permafrost and the release of methane...

Scientists have long been worried about what many call “the methane bomb” — the potentially catastrophic release of methane from thawing wetlands in Siberia’s permafrost.

But now a study by three geologists says that a heat wave in 2020 has revealed a surge in methane emissions “potentially in much higher amounts” from a different source: thawing rock formations in the Arctic permafrost.
The difference is that thawing wetlands releases “microbial” methane from the decay of soil and organic matter, while thawing limestone — or carbonate rock — releases hydrocarbons and gas hydrates from reservoirs both below and within the permafrost, making it “much more dangerous” than past studies have suggested.

and in other melting news (same article)

The Arctic has also delivered other sobering news. Polar Portal, a website where Danish Arctic research institutions present updated information about ice, said last week that a “massive melting event” had been big enough to cover Florida with two inches of water.

[Traveler]

Texass 

[LFC]

A good primer on the first IPCC report of the year from TPM. This on sea level change:

Since the previous reports, scientists have made substantial advances in modeling the behavior of ice sheets. At the same time, we’ve been learning more about ice sheet physics, including recognizing the potential ways ice sheets can become destabilized. We don’t well understand the potential speed of these changes, but they have the potential to lead to much more rapid ice sheet loss if greenhouse gas emissions grow unchecked.

These advances confirm that sea level is going to continue to rise for many centuries to come, creating an escalating threat for coastal communities.

Sea level change through 2050 is largely locked in: Regardless of how quickly nations are able to lower emissions, the world is likely looking at about 15 to 30 centimeters (6 to 12 inches) of global average sea level rise through the middle of the century.

But beyond 2050, sea level projections become increasingly sensitive to the world’s emissions choices. If countries continue on their current paths, with greenhouse gas emissions likely to bring 3-4 C of warming (5.4-7.2 F) by 2100, the planet will be looking at a most likely sea level rise of about 0.7 meters (a bit over 2 feet). A 2 C (3.6 F) warmer world, consistent with the Paris Agreement, would see lower sea level rise, most likely about half a meter (about 1.6 feet) by 2100.

[Deleted]

Glad I got to live during peak humanity.