Climate Change, Pollution, Clean Energy, and the Environment

[LFC]

More on the IPCC report.

There is no question that record heatwaves in North America and southern Europe, which sparked wildfires that destroyed thousands of homes and burnt through millions of acres of forests, are worrying. But according to the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change or IPCC report released Monday morning there is a far worse dilemma on the horizon: the Arctic is melting three times faster than anyone thought—their first update since 2013. “It’s just guaranteed that it’s going to get worse,” Linda Mearns, a senior climate scientist at the U.S. National Center for Atmospheric Research who co-authored the report said at its release. “I don’t see any area that is safe ... Nowhere to run, nowhere to hide.”

The 3,949-page IPCC report, which directly points a finger at humans for not heeding ample warnings over the climate change, says there is no more time to waste and, in fact, it might already be too late to save low-lying areas now threatened by rising seas. “We’ve known for decades that the world is warming, but this report tells us that recent changes in the climate are widespread, rapid, and intensifying—unprecedented in thousands of years,” Ko Barrett, IPCC vice chair said ahead of the report’s release. “The bottom line is that unless there are immediate, rapid, and large-scale reductions in greenhouse gas emissions, limiting warming to 1.5 degrees C—or 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit—will be beyond reach.”

The authors create five scenarios—essentially all bad—based on how even if world leaders start adhering to the 2015 Paris climate agreement things won’t get better, calling the current situation a “code red for humanity.”

[jackd]

In short, things are going to continue to get worse.

[Deleted]

Aug 10, 2021 16:39:32 GMT jackd said:

In short, things are going to continue to get worse... at an accelerated pace.

There!

The good thing out of all of this is future generations are not going to blame us.

[LFC]

More IPCC doom and gloom, not that any of this should be a shock to anybody who has paid attention for the past several decades. Scientists predicted it was coming. Right-wing politicians and paid hacks said it wasn't.

The world watched in July 2021 as extreme rainfall became floods that washed away centuries-old homes in Europe, triggered landslides in Asia and inundated subways in China. More than 900 people died in the destruction. In North America, the West was battling fires amid an intense drought that is affecting water and power supplies.

Water-related hazards can be exceptionally destructive, and the impact of climate change on extreme water-related events like these is increasingly evident.

In a new international climate assessment published Aug. 9, 2021, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change warns that the water cycle has been intensifying and will continue to intensify as the planet warms.

The report, which I worked on as a lead author, documents an increase in both wet extremes, including more intense rainfall over most regions, and dry extremes, including drying in the Mediterranean, southwestern Australia, southwestern South America, South Africa and western North America. It also shows that both wet and dry extremes will continue to increase with future warming.

[LFC]

The Dixie Fire is now the largest single fire in California's recorded history.

Many parts of the world are on fire right now, but California is in a league of its own. The Dixie Fire, which is currently roaring through Northern California, has burned through 487,764 acres as of Tuesday morning, making it the second-largest overall fire in state history and the largest single fire on record in California.

Last year’s massive August Complex Fire burned through a jaw-dropping 1,032,648 acres and occupies the top spot on the state’s largest fires list. However, as its name implies, that fire was what’s known as a “complex fire”—a superfire of sorts that formed after several smaller fires met up with each other. But in terms of single fires, the Dixie Fire has now easily blown past the previous record-holder, last fall’s Creek Fire, which destroyed 379,895 acres. The Dixie Fire has also now overtaken other complex fires in the state’s Top 20 largest fires list, including 2018’s Mendocino Complex Fire, which burned 459,123 acres, and last August’s SCU Complex Fire, which burned 396,624 acres.

The Dixie Fire, which began in mid-July, is actively burning through four counties and is currently only 25% contained as of Tuesday morning. This marks a significant expanse of the fire since last week, when it was 35% contained on Thursday. Officials last week said that they expected the fire to be contained by August 20, but pushed that prediction back 10 days on Monday. As of Tuesday, officials have made that date much more open-ended, changing the projected containment date to “to be determined.”

As of Tuesday, the fire has destroyed nearly 900 homes and buildings, as almost 6,000 firefighters work against the blaze. More than 12,000 people in eight different counties are now under evacuation orders as the fire grows larger. Last week, the fire destroyed the historic town of Greenville, burning nearly the entire downtown to ash and prompting panicked evacuation orders from local officials. Firefighters said Monday that they were able to make progress in containing the fire but worried that more hot weather later this week, with temperatures reaching around 100 degrees Fahrenheit (38 degrees Celsius), could hamper efforts on the especially fast-moving fire.

[goldenvalley]

Aug 10, 2021 22:03:33 GMT LFC said:

The Dixie Fire is now the largest single fire in California's recorded history.

And it's barely mid-August.  Last year's biggest fire started in mid August. There are lots of fire ready weeks left in this year. The fire that burned through Paradise started in November.  

I do hope that some of the climate deniers are starting to suffer a little smoke inhalation from all this burning.  The world really is a small place.

[RichTBikkies]

Aug 10, 2021 22:03:33 GMT LFC said:

The Dixie Fire is now the largest single fire in California's recorded history.

Many parts of the world are on fire right now, but California is in a league of its own. The Dixie Fire, which is currently roaring through Northern California, has burned through 487,764 acres as of Tuesday morning, making it the second-largest overall fire in state history and the largest single fire on record in California.

487,764 acres .=.  762 square miles. I have never in my life (i'm 71) been able to visualise the size of any plot if given in acres. Square yards or metres are OK: I can roughly take a square root in my head (cue for oafish punning jokes there!).

But grim — grimissimo — even in old English roods.

[pnwguy]

If we keep having dry springs and blazing hot summers here, the Pacific Northwest is going to burn like California as well.

I was up at Timberline Lodge on Mt. Hood Wednesday, and I don't think I've ever seen it so bare of snow.  And it probably won't get snow again until October, so there is plenty more melting to go. 

[goldenvalley]

Aug 15, 2021 21:07:48 GMT pnwguy said:

If we keep having dry springs and blazing hot summers here, the Pacific Northwest is going to burn like California as well.

I was up at Timberline Lodge on Mt. Hood Wednesday, and I don't think I've ever seen it so bare of snow.  And it probably won't get snow again until October, so there is plenty more melting to go. 

Good thing my son left Portland in June.  Now he's in Sacramento where he can breathe in smoke too.  At least there is air conditioning.

[LFC]

Shorter Scientists: "Yes, we can tell."

There’s a cliché that has popped up for years in discussions of climate and weather disasters: You can’t blame any individual event on climate change. Climate is all about trends and statistics, the reasoning goes, so you can’t necessarily draw meaningful conclusions from a single data point, be it a heat wave, a hurricane, or a drought.

But in recent years, climate scientists have been pushing back against this notion: Bolstered with better data and even clearer trends, they’re no longer reluctant to point the finger back at humanity for worsening these calamities. In the latest report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), a team of leading researchers convened by the United Nations presented some of the most robust research that connects the dots. It shows how some greater weather extremes can be traced back to rising average temperatures, which in turn stem from emissions of greenhouse gases, mainly from countries and corporations burning fossil fuels.

“On a case-by-case basis, scientists can now quantify the contribution of human influences to the magnitude and probability of many extreme events,” according to the report.

Scientists are not just confident that humans are warming the climate — that much is “unequivocal.” Now they’ve concluded it’s “an established fact” that signals of this warming shine bright in events like the severe heat and torrential rainfall that we’re seeing now, increasing their frequency, severity, or both. That’s why scientists only needed a few days to implicate climate change in recent Pacific Northwest heat waves, for example.

The field of extreme weather attribution has made enormous strides since the last major IPCC assessment in 2013, and it’s one of the most significant components of the new report. “What’s new in this report is that we can now attribute many more changes at the global and regional level to human influence — and better project future changes we will see from different amounts of emissions,” said Ko Barrett, vice chair of the IPCC and senior adviser for climate at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, during a press conference.

At the same time, the stunning, record-breaking disasters of recent memory have again forced a public discussion about the role of climate change. This year alone, the world has seen extreme fires in California, Siberia, Greece, and Turkey; devastating flooding in China and Germany; and heat waves and record drought across the US West, to name just a few.

The question is not whether these individual events were “caused” by climate change — such disasters arise from a confluence of factors and could still happen even if humans weren’t spewing heat-trapping gases into the sky. The question is: How has human-caused climate change altered their likelihood and their severity?

“Over the last 10 years, we’ve seen a shift in the ways scientists answer that question,” said Kevin Reed, an associate professor at Stony Brook University who studies climate attribution but was not involved in the IPCC report. Rather than invoking general trends, scientists are now keen to quantify climate change’s role in specific events, and increasingly coming up with estimates while a given disaster is still fresh in people’s minds.

[LFC]

Here's a good overview of how small changes can equate to big impacts in our climate.

An excellent example of how climate change accumulates is Earth’s energy imbalance. I am a climate scientist and have a new book on this, about to be published by Cambridge University Press.

The Sun bombards Earth with a constant stream of about 173,600 terawatts (that is 12 zeros) of energy in the form of solar radiation. About 30% of that energy is reflected back into space by clouds and reflective surfaces, like ice and snow, leaving 122,100 terawatts to drive all the weather and climate systems around us, including the water cycle. Almost all of that energy cycles back to space – except for about 460 TW.

That remaining 460 TW is the problem we’re facing. That excess energy, trapped by greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, is heating up the planet. That is the Earth’s energy imbalance, or in other words, global warming.

In comparison with the natural flow of energy through the climate system, 460 TW seems small – it’s only a fraction of 1 percent. Consequently, we cannot go outside and feel the extra energy. But the heat accumulates, and it is now having consequences.

[LFC]

Predictable and predicted. A lot of politicians depended upon believing / pretending to believe in the fantasy that the Colorado River would always provide.

Two decades of drought have exacted a heavy toll on the Colorado River, bringing Lake Mead to its lowest level since 1937, when the reservoir was filling behind the newly completed Hoover Dam. That situation has prompted the US Bureau of Reclamation to declare the first-ever shortage for water users along the river.

Arizona, Nevada, California, and Mexico all rely on Lake Mead for fresh water, and all but California will see their supply drop due to negotiated agreements among those and four other states that draw water from the Colorado River. Nevada has already reduced its use through conservation, so the state doesn’t expect to be affected, but Mexico will see a 5 percent reduction, and Arizona will have its allocation slashed by 18 percent.

Arizona farmers are first in line to take a hit.

Farmers in Arizona will be the first to feel the pain of the cuts. In one county, farmers will receive 65 percent less water next year. The desert state continues to grow water-intensive crops like cotton and alfalfa in part because of the Central Arizona Project, a 336-mile long series of canals, pumping stations, and reservoirs that was completed in 1993 and draws from the Colorado River. The aqueduct has encouraged farmers to stop pumping groundwater, though many will undoubtedly restart the unsustainable practice as their fields begin to run dry. Others will have to switch to lower-water crops or let their fields lie fallow. Dry, fallow fields contribute to dust storms that envelop the region.

Allocation of the Colorado River was initially based on overstated flow assumptions and it's gotten much worse during this drought.

Lake Mead has been declining since 1999, when the current mega-drought set in. Though the drought formed because of shifts in Pacific Ocean surface temperatures, which blocked storms from reaching the Southwest, climate change has intensified the drought to make it the second-worst since at least 800 CE.

When the water from the Colorado River was first allocated in 1922, negotiators used 18 years of data to determine the total amount of water that could be divvied up. Unfortunately, that timespan included some of the river’s most turbulent years, with above-average water levels nearly every year. Negotiators in the 1920s had assumed they could apportion 17.5 million acre-feet of water per year, but the average annual yield over the 20th century was closer to 15 million acre-feet. During the drought, though, the river has averaged 12.4 million acre-feet per year.

[LFC]

Biden rights a particularly evil wrong of Trump and Scott Pruitt, may they both burn in hell.

A widely used pesticide that could cause potential health issues in children will no longer be used on food in the US, the Environmental Protection Agency said Wednesday, reversing a Trump-era decision not to ban the controversial chemical.
"Today EPA is taking an overdue step to protect public health. Ending the use of chlorpyrifos on food will help to ensure children, farmworkers, and all people are protected from the potentially dangerous consequences of this pesticide," EPA Administrator Michael Regan said in a statement.
"After the delays and denials of the prior administration, EPA will follow the science and put health and safety first," he added.

The statement said the agency would revoke all "tolerances" for chlorpyrifos, which is used on crops including soybeans, broccoli, cauliflower, and fruit and nut trees and also has "non-food uses." The chemical has "been associated with potential neurological effects in children," the statement said.

Under then-President Donald Trump, the EPA announced in 2019 that it would not ban the pesticide after it concluded there is not sufficient evidence of the chemical's dangers to justify the ban requested by environmental groups and a group of states.

In 2017, then-EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt denied a petition from 2007 that requested the agency ban the use of chlorpyrifos in the US.

[LFC]

Maybe if they put all of that lobbying and FUD money into fortifying their infrastructure against the next (now last) hurricane.

In recent years, a growing chorus of voices has been calling to hold oil and gas companies like Exxon accountable for lying about climate change while keeping the world hooked on fossil fuels. But utilities are also in need of some scrutiny. And Entergy, the utility that has left New Orleans and surrounding communities in the dark following Hurricane Ida, is one of those most deserving.

On Sunday, the entirety of New Orleans lost power after Entergy suffered what it called “catastrophic transmission damage” after a major transmission line crumpled into the Mississippi River and numerous lines fell throughout the region. Now, the utility is scrambling to fix the mess, though it currently has no idea when electricity access will be restored and said it could take weeks. That means the more than 793,000 Entergy customers without power will be forced to deal with blistering heat without air conditioning and nowhere to store fresh food, all while trying to put the pieces of their lives back together.

Scientists haven’t yet analyzed exactly how climate change influenced Ida. But an abnormally hot ocean fueled the storm, and its heavy rains, roaring storm surge boosted by rising seas, and slower movement are all hallmarks of the climate crisis. Entergy has been integral in contributing to that crisis and has failed to prepare its own rickety grid for disaster.

“Entergy has known for decades—including longer than almost any of the general public who are suffering through Ida and its aftermath—that burning fossil fuels causes climate change, that climate change causes more extreme weather, and that these effects would create vulnerabilities for the electric grid,” David Pomerantz, the executive director of the Energy and Policy Institute, said in an email. “Despite that knowledge, Entergy has used deception, bullying and political power only available to monopolies to continue burning fossil fuels and to delay or kill efforts that might have made its customers become more resilient to climate change.”

The utility has also had ample warnings of those impacts on the grid. In 1988, a paper published by EPRI—again, of which Entergy was a member—explicitly said that “system reliability could be affected if climatic changes result in more-frequent and more-severe [sic] storms.” In 2005, Entergy saw a clear illustration of that fact when Hurricane Katrina knocked its energy infrastructure offline and left more than 2 million people without power—and now it’s once again dealing with a similar problem post-Ida.

Yet in the intervening years, Entergy has consistently opposed efforts to get off oil and gas and efforts to make the grid more resilient. Last year, it announced a plan to reach net zero by 2050... by expanding the use of carbon-polluting natural gas. The previous year, the firm pushed to gut a plan to pay customers for excess solar energy that they sell back to the grid, and according to emails obtained by Energy and Policy Institute, Entergy’s president of utility operations Rod West baselessly accused the “solar lobby” of stoking a “class war.”

The company loves gas so much, an independent investigation found that it even hired actors to show up at a 2018 city council vote in a show of astroturfed support of a new gas plant in New Orleans despite widespread local opposition. (The plant was approved over those local objections, though Entergy coughed up a $5 million fine.)

The utility has fought tooth and nail against federal climate regulations, too, including a 2007 bill to increase renewable power, a landmark 2009 cap and trade bill, and the Environmental Protection Agency’s 2015 Clean Power Plan.

At the same time, it’s fought against policies to make the grid ready to handle to extreme weather. In December 2019, it threatened to sue New Orleans for passing a “resilient renewable portfolio standard” requiring city electricity to reach net-zero carbon by 2050 and strengthen its climate resilience. All these efforts have both worsened the climate crisis and made catastrophic damage to the grid all but inevitable.

[LFC]

California carbon offsets are literally going up in smoke.

In 2013, California passed a landmark law that capped greenhouse gas emissions, but let companies offset their pollution overages by investing in forest preservation throughout the country—the idea being that trees absorb excess carbon from the atmosphere. The statute was considered a model initiative to combat climate change, while providing businesses some flexibility in reducing their pollution.

Eight years later, though, there is a big problem: As of last week, there were more than 41,000 wildfires across the country, torching more than 4.6 million acres—a swath nearly the size of New Jersey. And more than 150,000 of those acres have been in West Coast forests that were supposed to be offsetting corporations’ carbon emissions.

When the original program was conceived, California presumed that some forests would naturally burn—and therefore the law required polluters to buy slightly more woodland as an insurance mechanism to account for such losses. But experts say the amount of woodland set aside in these so-called “buffer pools” wildly underestimated the amount of trees that are now burning in the era of climate change.

[LFC]

The flood stage for the Perkiomen Creek near me is 11'. It crested at 20.6', the highest ever recorded with the previous record being set last year. The Schuylkill River that flows through Philadelphia hit a record high as well and there are still major roads that are impassable. Here's the stream gauge graph for the Perkiomen:

[Traveler]

Yup, this was a 100+-year event. We got 8.0 inches of rain here. Stream flow records being broken all over the place. Check this out for local flavor. Tornadoes that strong are really rare here.  But a lot more frequent than they used to be. 

[LFC]

Sept 2, 2021 16:40:11 GMT Traveler said:

Yup, this was a 100+-year event. We got 8.0 inches of rain here. Stream flow records being broken all over the place. Check this out for local flavor. Tornadoes that strong are really rare here.  But a lot more frequent than they used to be. 

Of course not so 100 year anymore.

I saw the damage to those big homes in Mullica Hill, NJ and my first thought was "I wonder if they were built by Toll Brothers." (They're being sued left and right for putting up McMansions that are built like crap.) Walls ripped completely off and not a scrap of Tyvek to be seen.

[goldenvalley]

Sept 2, 2021 16:55:04 GMT LFC said:

Sept 2, 2021 16:40:11 GMT Traveler said:

Yup, this was a 100+-year event. We got 8.0 inches of rain here. Stream flow records being broken all over the place. Check this out for local flavor. Tornadoes that strong are really rare here.  But a lot more frequent than they used to be. 

Of course not so 100 year anymore.

I saw the damage to those big homes in Mullica Hill, NJ and my first thought was "I wonder if they were built by Toll Brothers." (They're being sued left and right for putting up McMansions that are built like crap.) Walls ripped completely off and not a scrap of Tyvek to be seen.

To parrot my East Coast mother in law...how can you keep living in a place that has ____(weather events or other natural disasters) like that?  

[LFC]

The river at this spot is about 1/4 mile wide. That's a fair sized tornado (see video).

The engineers who designed the Burlington-Bristol Bridge should be feeling pretty good about themselves this morning. Incredible footage shot Wednesday shows a massive tornado passing through the bridge—which spans the Delaware River between New Jersey and Pennsylvania—and it appears to have stood up to the test. The National Weather Service said several “large and extremely dangerous” tornadoes were spotted in the Philadelphia region Wednesday as the remnants of Hurricane Ida hammered the Northeast. At least seven people lost their lives to flash flooding in New York City, according to The New York Times, and one more person was killed in Passaic, New Jersey. A state of emergency was declared in New York, the NYC subway was shut down, and a ban on non-emergency travel was temporarily imposed.

[LFC]

Wildfires in Australia are triggering massive algae blooms way out in the ocean.

Two years ago, in the southern Pacific Ocean, an explosion of algae grew to more than 2,000 miles wide — about the width of Australia.

Giant algal blooms are often tied to land pollution such as runoff from farmland, which is full of nutrients like nitrogen that these plant-like organisms need to thrive. But there were no nearby farms or factories here in the middle of the ocean.

The sprawling bloom was fueled instead by something faraway and unexpected: wildfires thousands of miles to the west.

In a landmark new study published in the journal Nature, researchers conclude that smoke rising from Australia’s historic 2019 wildfires drifted out to sea and fertilized vast communities of algae. The smoke, which contained the nutrient iron, gave rise to algal blooms that were together larger than Australia, the authors write.

“We know that these fires have catastrophic impacts on local ecosystems,” said Nicolas Cassar, a study co-author and professor of biogeochemistry at Duke University. But by spreading nutrients, he said, “they also impact ecosystems that are thousands of kilometers away.”

As regions from the American West to the Mediterranean grapple with another devastating wildfire season, the study adds a new dimension to our understanding of how climate-fueled disasters are transforming the planet. We’re learning that the impacts of fires go well beyond the human death toll, the leveled homes, and the charred forests. Extreme wildfires are also altering underwater ecosystems far from the flames.

[LFC]

The IPCC report plotted 5 potential scenarios for warming through 2100. Basically the world is f***ed. Here's a list of the scenarios with just the first sentence or so of description. There's much more detail at the link. I think #4 is the most likely scenario unless green energy becomes vastly cheaper than fossil fuels. (OK, maybe more like scenario #3.5.)

1) SSP1-1.9 — This scenario has been described as “taking the green road.”

2) SSP1-2.6 — This pathway envisions that the world will eventually get its act together on climate change, but more slowly than in the optimistic path of SSP1-1.9.

3) SSP2-4.5 — Sometimes described as “middle of the road,” this scenario lines up with what countries have pledged to do so far about climate change.

4) SSP3-7.0 — In this narrative, nationalism is resurgent and countries retreat from international cooperation, focusing instead on their own economic goals. “I sort of jokingly refer to this as Trumpworld,” said Zeke Hausfather, director of climate and energy at the Breakthrough Institute and a contributing author to the latest IPCC report. “It’s a reasonable storyline for what a worst-case world could look like.”

5) SSP5-8.5 — Imagine a world where humanity doesn’t just do nothing about climate change but continues to make it worse. This scenario envisions global economic growth across the board fueled by burning coal, oil, and natural gas, with the planet’s population leveling off at 7 billion people. While resources are devoted to adapting to climate change, there is little effort to mitigate emissions.

Here are the projected impacts of each scenario.

[goldenvalley]

#4 or #5 are what we are headed for.

[LFC]

Seth Meyers went after Joe Manchin who is apparently objecting to measures that address global warming.

“Progressives in Congress, including Senate Budget Chairman Bernie Sanders, are pushing forward with a transformative $3.5 trillion spending plan that would invest heavily in climate infrastructure amid historic wildfires, droughts, and flooding,” Meyers began. “And now centrists with ties to the fossil fuel industry are trying to water it down.”

The “centrist” he was referring to, of course, was Sen. Joe Manchin (D-WV) who has called for a “pause” on the budget resolution. After reviewing the details of a study that shows clean energy is actually more cost-effective in the long term than a continued reliance on carbon emission-producing fuels like oil, gas, and coal, Meyers directly called out Manchin for being a “powerful ally” of fossil fuel industry who is “doing their bidding” in Congress.

Then, noting that Manchin still reportedly owns stock worth between $1 million and $5 million in a coal brokerage firm he founded, the host asked, “How is it acceptable that the guy writing our climate policy personally profits from coal?”

“It’s like if instead of hiding his gambling, Pete Rose called his bookie from second base,” Meyers joked.

[goldenvalley]

Flood risks discovered by a group other than FEMA show more areas to be flood prone than FEMA thinks. 

Across much of the United States, the flood risk is far greater than government estimates show, new calculations suggest, exposing millions of people to a hidden threat — and one that will only grow as climate change worsens.

That new calculation, which takes into account sea-level rise, rainfall and flooding along smaller creeks not mapped federally, estimates that 14.6 million properties are at risk from what experts call a 100-year flood, far more than the 8.7 million properties shown on federal government flood maps. A 100-year flood is one with a 1 percent chance of striking in any given year.

The federal government’s flood maps guide where and how to build, whether homeowners should buy flood insurance, and how much risk mortgage lenders take on. If the new estimates are broadly accurate, it would mean that homeowners, builders, banks, insurers and government officials nationwide have been making decisions with information that understates their true physical and financial risks.

I was happy to see that my county is properly assessed.  But then Sacramento was 2nd only to New Orleans back in the '80' and '90's when we had significant intense rainfall and flooding.  The Army Corps did a lot of work to reinforce levees to improve the situation.