Climate Change, Pollution, Clean Energy, and the Environment

[LFC]

Megadrought! Sounds like a bad movie. Instead it's a bad consequence of the refusal to address global warming.

About half of the contiguous US is currently experiencing moderate to extreme drought—including almost all of the West. That shouldn’t come as a surprise, as widely pervasive drought has been present for quite a while now in this region, where major reservoirs like Lake Powell and Lake Mead are hovering around all-time low-water levels. But how does this ongoing drought compare to the past? After all, the region is no stranger to dry stretches.

A 2020 paper examined the 2000-2018 data in the context of a tree ring reconstruction going back to the year 800 and stretching from Southern California to Wyoming. That team found that this was likely the second-driest period in the record, beat out only by a megadrought in the late 1500s.

At the time, the paper's authors guessed that good precipitation in 2019 would be enough to end the extended drought. But instead, a particularly wicked 2021 kept the drought alive. As a result, three of those researchers—UCLA’s Park Williams and NASA’s Benjamin Cook and Jason Smerdon—decided to update the numbers through 2021.

The term “megadrought” isn’t some sensationalist moniker from bad television; it's a term for the handful of two- to three-decade Southwestern droughts in the past millennium or so—some with history-defining impacts on the civilizations who lived there at the time.

With the analysis updated, 2000-2021 ranks as the driest such 22-year period in the data going back to the year 800. The megadrought years of 1571-1592 slip into second place. (Though the error bars on the two periods overlap.)

Between 2000 and 2021, 18 of those years saw soil moisture below the long-term average. Only two past megadroughts meet that level of consistent dryness. The years 2002 and 2021 rank as the 11th and 12th driest years in the whole record—and it has been three centuries since a drier year occurred. And although some megadroughts were focused in a particular region, the drought of the last two decades has been widespread across the West. That’s what you would expect to see from a drought driven more by global warming than by precipitation patterns.

To estimate the contribution of climate change, the researchers repeated their analysis of climate models run with and without warming temperatures. Their previous work had estimated that 46 percent of the severity of the 2000-2018 drought was due to human-caused warming. For 2000-2021, they get a similar answer of 42 percent despite using a new generation of climate model simulations.

[pnwguy]

Good thing we "elected" a president in 2000 that worked in the Oil Bidness and could craft federal policy of active inaction.

[goldenvalley]

Feb 16, 2022 16:56:17 GMT LFC said:

Megadrought! Sounds like a bad movie. Instead it's a bad consequence of the refusal to address global warming.

About half of the contiguous US is currently experiencing moderate to extreme drought—including almost all of the West. That shouldn’t come as a surprise, as widely pervasive drought has been present for quite a while now in this region, where major reservoirs like Lake Powell and Lake Mead are hovering around all-time low-water levels. But how does this ongoing drought compare to the past? After all, the region is no stranger to dry stretches.

A 2020 paper examined the 2000-2018 data in the context of a tree ring reconstruction going back to the year 800 and stretching from Southern California to Wyoming. That team found that this was likely the second-driest period in the record, beat out only by a megadrought in the late 1500s.

At the time, the paper's authors guessed that good precipitation in 2019 would be enough to end the extended drought. But instead, a particularly wicked 2021 kept the drought alive. As a result, three of those researchers—UCLA’s Park Williams and NASA’s Benjamin Cook and Jason Smerdon—decided to update the numbers through 2021.

The term “megadrought” isn’t some sensationalist moniker from bad television; it's a term for the handful of two- to three-decade Southwestern droughts in the past millennium or so—some with history-defining impacts on the civilizations who lived there at the time.

With the analysis updated, 2000-2021 ranks as the driest such 22-year period in the data going back to the year 800. The megadrought years of 1571-1592 slip into second place. (Though the error bars on the two periods overlap.)

Between 2000 and 2021, 18 of those years saw soil moisture below the long-term average. Only two past megadroughts meet that level of consistent dryness. The years 2002 and 2021 rank as the 11th and 12th driest years in the whole record—and it has been three centuries since a drier year occurred. And although some megadroughts were focused in a particular region, the drought of the last two decades has been widespread across the West. That’s what you would expect to see from a drought driven more by global warming than by precipitation patterns.

To estimate the contribution of climate change, the researchers repeated their analysis of climate models run with and without warming temperatures. Their previous work had estimated that 46 percent of the severity of the 2000-2018 drought was due to human-caused warming. For 2000-2021, they get a similar answer of 42 percent despite using a new generation of climate model simulations.

The giddiness exhibited in CA after a very wet December has turned into saying things like "nice weather today, but it should be raining." In January there was a fire around the Big Sur area and last week Orange County had some wildfire going due to Santa Anna winds and mid 80's temps.

[LFC]

More coastal flooding and it's only going to increase.

Sea levels on U.S. coastlines are expected to rise an average of 10 to 12 inches by 2050, according to a new report led by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). It’s the latest jarring assessment of how climate change is disrupting life as we knew it.

The news is NOAA’s addendum to the massive report produced by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) last summer. That report found that droughts, storms, and heatwaves are happening more frequently and will continue to increase. It also put the matter of sea level rise in stark terms.

Bob Kopp, an IPCC co-author and director of the Rutgers Institute of Earth, Ocean and Atmospheric Sciences, told reporters at the time that “sea level rise is already impacting people around the world, and it’s led to a near doubling in the frequency of coastal flooding since the 1960s in many coastal sites around the world.” The new NOAA report merely affirms that people living in the United States will similarly be affected by the global shifts caused by greenhouse gas pollution.

Sea level rise in the United States is anticipated to vary by region, the report said; on the Gulf Coast, water levels could rise by a terrifying 18 inches. Besides that disastrous conclusion, the report projects that moderate flooding (“typically damaging,” NOAA notes) will occur more than 10 times more often than it does today, and major (“often destructive’’) flooding will be five times as frequent. If we are to change those projections, we’re going to have to do things differently.

2050 might feel far away. But last year alone, 20 weather or climate disasters cost the United States $1 billion in damages, not to mention vast human suffering. Rising seas are already affecting American coastlines, perhaps most visibly in the metropolises along the Florida coast, where king tides routinely gurgle up from below, inundating city streets. If you’re having trouble imagining what that rise could look like going forward, here’s a helpful visualization of sea level rise in different cities around the world.

High Arctic plants growing at wildly faster rates.

While the plants live across parts of the Antarctic islands and some of the peninsula, Cannone and her team concentrated their observations of the plants on Signy Island, in the South Orkney Islands range, because of a robust historical dataset related to the plants’ growth. The scientists then compared the growth rate over this nine-year period to previous surveys of growth taken since the early 1960s.

It turns out the plants are loving the warmer weather. The researchers found that Colobanthus grew five times faster between 2009 and 2018 compared to growth rates between 1960 and 2009. Deschampsia, meanwhile, really took off, growing 10 times more in the past decade than before. Signy Island has seen an overall increase of 1 degree Celsius (1.8 degrees Fahrenheit) in mean annual average air temperature between 1960 and 2018; it’s clear that these plants are benefiting from the new balmy environment.

“Our work provides the first evidence of accelerated impacts of climate warming in Antarctica,” Cannone said. Plants, she wrote, “are the best bio-indicator of the terrestrial ecosystems as they can’t avoid climate warming by moving” like animals can.

Just more hoaxes I guess.

[LFC]

I remember discussing this possibility before. Now it looks like it's starting to happen.

A water and electric utility in central California will install a first-of-its-kind network of solar panels on water canals. Turlock Irrigation District (TID) has secured a $20 million grant from the state to pursue the first-in-the-nation project, which could serve a beneficial double whammy: create renewable energy and save some water in the process.

Project Nexus is based off an analysis published last year in Nature Sustainability, which put some real numbers behind the idea that solar panels over canals could do some good. A lot of water in California wends its way through the state’s 4,000 miles (6,437 kilometers) of open delivery canals that comprise the aqueduct system, transporting water supply from the Sierra Nevada mountains and northern parts of the state to reservoirs, lakes, hydropower plants, and farms. The water supply in the state is already under serious dual threats from overuse and climate change, so every drop counts. And these exposed canals have a serious flaw: They allow some of that precious water to evaporate.

Covering all the canals in the state with solar panels, last year’s analysis found, could save 63 billion gallons of water annually—about the amount needed to irrigate 50,000 acres of farmland or to supply 2 million people with their water needs. (California has 9 million acres of farmland, so this saved water isn’t exactly a panacea to the state’s water overuse—but in a drought, every drop counts.) Those panels, the study’s authors calculated, could supply 13 gigawatts of solar energy, about a sixth of the state’s total energy needs. The water’s cooling effect, in turn, could help keep those solar panels working more effectively, since solar panels lose some efficiency on very hot days.

[LFC]

This one stings a bit.

[LFC]

The impacts of climate change will be worse on humans than previously expected. Of course the poorer nations will bear the brunt of it all.

Climate change is already altering the planet, and the world will see catastrophic and unavoidable impacts over the coming decades, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change said in a wide-reaching report released Monday. The warming we’ve already seen has pushed many of the planet’s ecosystems toward points that scientists on a press call Sunday repeatedly called the “hard limits” of human adaptation—the physical inability for society to adjust any further to oncoming changes in our world.

“I have seen many scientific reports in my time, but nothing like this,” António Guterres, the UN secretary general, said. “Today’s IPCC report is an atlas of human suffering and a damning indictment of failed climate leadership.”

The world has already warmed 1.09 degrees Celsius (1.96 degrees Fahrenheit) above preindustrial levels, thanks to our addiction to fossil fuels. Some of the things we’re already seeing with our current levels of warming, the report finds, include:

• diseases migrating into new areas
• extinctions of species across the world
• local populations of plants and animals dying off or moving, which irrevocably alters local ecosystems
• mass die-offs of trees, plants, and mammals thanks to droughts and heat waves
• the beginning of the collapse of major food systems
• the transformation of former carbon sinks, like the Amazon rainforest and permafrost in the Arctic, into greenhouse gas emitters.

“We’re seeing adverse impacts being much more widespread and being much more negative than expected in prior reports,” said Camille Parmesan, an ecologist at the University of Texas at Austin and one of the lead authors of one of the report’s chapters, during a press briefing Sunday.

[LFC]

The tools for tracking methane emitters are improving, not that will change the political defense of allowing drillers to burn our planet to a crisp.

The fossil fuel industry is releasing millions of metric tons of methane gas in giant plumes during extraction and transportation of those fuels—at high costs for the climate, society, and even the industry’s pocketbooks.

Although methane emissions are relatively low compared to CO2 emissions, each ton has a whopping 30 to 80 times the relative warming potential (depending on the timescale of interest). On the plus side, methane has a much shorter atmospheric lifetime—roughly nine years. So reining in emissions as soon as possible represents one of the better bets for lowering temperatures in the coming decades.

But to date, methods for detecting methane emissions have been limited, and it has been challenging to find, measure, and curtail all anthropogenic sources. A recent study describes how researchers used a European Union satellite to carry out a global survey of unusually large methane plumes, finding 1,800 “ultra-emitters” during the time frame of 2019 to 2020. Two-thirds of these emitters were connected to the oil and gas industry, and just three countries—including the US—were responsible for the majority of the problem.

Eliminating these leaks could prevent about 0.005° C of warming over the next 10 to 30 years, potentially saving society billions of dollars in climate-related costs. Many such leaks are due to avoidable issues like maintenance practices and equipment failures—a particularly egregious way to heat up the planet.

[AnBr]

[pnwguy]

Mar 9, 2022 13:16:52 GMT AnBr said:

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True, but steel and cement production costs will certainly rise, for producing more of them.

If you hear interviews with Bill Gates, this is one of the areas for de-carbonization he most worries about, for good reason.

[LFC]

Lake Powell hit a new low.

One of the U.S. West’s most important water reservoirs is about to hit a new low.

Lake Powell, on the border of Utah and Arizona, is a crucial reservoir along the Colorado River, part of a system that supplies water for 40 million people in multiple states across the West. As of Tuesday, according to readings provided by the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation, the lake stood at 3,526 feet (1,074.73 meters) above sea level, or around 24% of its total capacity. That’s just 1 foot above a threshold of water outlined in drought contingency plans, which would trigger additional releases from upstream water sources. Authorities say that this month, the lake could dip below the 3,525-foot (1,074.2-meter) trigger point, part of a series of new lows the lake has been hitting since reaching its previous lowest level on record, 3,555.09 feet (1083.6 meters), in July. The image above, captured by the European Union’s Copernicus Sentinel-3 satellite in late February, shows the parched Colorado River and Lake Powell from space.

This particular low won’t be permanent; the spring runoff, the Bureau said, should help juice the lake back up. However, the fact that it’s so low in the first place is incredibly worrisome. The lake is sitting dangerously close to the cutoff level for Glen Canyon Dam, which can provide electricity for 5.8 million homes and businesses across Western states. The dam needs at least 3,490 feet of water to run; the 3,525-foot cutoff was designed to provide a buffer in order for the electricity to keep flowing.

“We’re kind of in some uncharted territory, socially and economically,” Justin Mankin, who helps lead the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Drought Task Force, told CNN. “It’s totally within reason to expect that the next couple of weeks or so for [Lake Powell] to fall below the critical level.”

[LFC]

Yes, we're losing the fight against climate change and will just keep putting ever larger expenses on future generations and poorer nations.

Just $1 billion has been allocated for international climate finance in the latest federal spending bill—a far cry from the $11 billion a year President Biden had promised to other world leaders. It’s also just $387 million more than the Trump administration put towards similar causes last year, according to calculations from the World Resources Institute.

Climate change exacerbates injustices: some of the countries that have started to face the most extreme impacts of climate change are also the least able to adjust and adapt to these massive changes. The Paris Agreement mandates that wealthier countries need to start paying for their historical emissions and helping less developed countries financially. One analysis estimates that the U.S. should actually be chipping in up to $50 billion each year in aid given its massive economy and influence on historic emissions.

“It’s a justice issue,” said Joe Thwaites, an associate in the Sustainable Finance Center at the World Resources Institute. “Developing countries have done generally the least to cause climate change, and yet they’re hit first and worst by the impacts.”

[goldenvalley]

At least we'll be spared the usual those "stupid green people won't let us handle the forests properly" trope.

The Eastland Complex fire — made up of three smaller wild fires in Central Texas — has incinerated more than 45,000 acres of land since sparking Thursday, destroying hundreds of homes and killing a deputy sheriff who was helping evacuate residents. Deputy Sgt. Barbara Fenley, 51, was evacuating homes in Carbon, the Eastland County Sheriff’s Office said, when, due to poor visibility and deteriorating conditions, she steered her vehicle off the road and into flames.

What a nasty way to go.

Texas Gov. Greg Abbott (R) declared a disaster in 11 counties affected by the blaze. Smoke on Friday drifted into skies above Houston, some 300 miles away. Only 15 percent of the fire was contained as of Saturday afternoon, officials said.
And conditions could worsen. Large swaths of Texas — from the Dallas and Fort Worth suburbs in the east to Lubbock in the north and Odessa and Midland in the west — are suffering extreme drought conditions. Meteorological officials expect winds from the arid southwest to kick up Sunday and Monday, fueling the fire’s spread.

We in California call that last bit "fire weather."  And now people in some parts of Texas will see a use for face masks...N95 masks in particular in smokey areas.  But you can smell and see smoke so I doubt the anti mask types will be deriding those who wear them as "afraid" of something.

[LFC]

Drought update. Reports seem to be solidifying that it's going to be bad. It looks like both the West and Midwest can expect to take a hit.

A large portion of the U.S. will experience drought-related conditions this year, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration said this week. The last time something like this happened was back in 2013.

This past winter showed signs of the exceptionally dry spring to come. It was the 12th driest winter in the last 128 years, according to NOAA. In many areas of the country, less snowpack means less water for nearby lakes and rivers when the snow melts in the spring.

Many areas are already experiencing drought, and the few parts of states like Arizona and Texas that have been spared will soon be suffering the same, the New York Times reported.

[LFC]

Texass a-holes like Ted Cruz love to mock California but don't have much to say when they're own state experiences the same issues. Welcome to the world of wildfires.

Firefighters in Texas have finally gotten the upper hand on devastating wildfires that began last week. But fires continue to blaze across areas of the state and may escalate due to dry weather, as people in some of the hardest-hit areas begin to assess the damage.

As of Monday, according to the Texas A&M Forest Service, more than 178 fires of varying sizes had burned more than 108,000 acres in Texas and destroyed more than 150 homes and buildings. The fires were supercharged by dry winds, low humidity, and stretches of drought-stricken land that sparked easily and helped flames spread. As of last week, according to the U.S. Drought Monitor, more than 90% of Texas was in some form of drought, with 40% of the state in extreme or exceptional drought, the highest levels. Governor Greg Abbott on Friday declared states of emergency in 11 counties in Texas where fires were raging. Twenty-three fires were active in the state on Sunday, a Forest Service spokesperson told CNN.

The largest of these fires, the Eastland Complex Fire blazing outside of Fort Worth, is comprised of seven smaller fires that started from Thursday to Sunday; together, these fires had burned through more than 54,000 acres as of Monday afternoon and were 60% contained. The Texas A&M Forest Service reports that this fire likely won’t be contained before the end of the week. Dry, windy, and warm conditions forecast for the area from Wednesday through the weekend could help it spread again.

[LFC]

Speaking of wildfires...

Wildfires across the globe are contributing to conditions that make future fires more likely, new research finds. The study estimates that brown carbon emissions from sources like wildfires are a greater contributor to warming in the Arctic atmosphere than previously thought. And because this warming then contributes to the weather conditions that give rise to wildfires in the first place, today’s fires are likely helping fuel increasingly stronger ones in the future, the researchers say.

Brown carbon aerosol particles are known by their ability to absorb sunlight. This then traps solar radiation within Earth, as opposed to other aerosol particles that reflect it back out to space. Alongside black carbon—caused by the incomplete burning of fossil fuels that can be seen from sources like diesel engines—brown carbon is thought to play an important role in climate change, but there’s still much we don’t know about its relative contributions to it.

This new research, published in the journal One Earth, was five years in the making. In 2017, scientists took the Chinese icebreaker ship Xue Long on a two-month expedition to the Arctic. Once there, they took direct measurements of the atmosphere, focusing particularly on brown carbon emissions that had ended up there.

The Arctic has been warming even faster than the rest of the world, and the team’s modeling, based on the direct observations made from their trip, indicate that brown carbon has been one major reason why.

“The warming effect of brown carbon in the Arctic was generally ignored in previous climate models,” study author Pingqing Fu, a professor of atmospheric chemistry and biogeochemistry at Tianjin University, told Gizmodo in an email. “By the addition of it, we find that brown carbon can be a strong warming agent in the Arctic, which highlights the importance to manage the wildfires in its surrounding regions in the future.”

Fu and his team now figure that brown carbon’s warming effect in the Arctic is about 30% of that of black carbon’s. About 60% of these emissions come from sources of biofuel burning, including wildfires in the middle and high latitude areas of the world, which release both black and brown carbon into the air. And as the Arctic warms, so do other regions of Earth, setting the stage for an ever-increasing ramp-up of climate disaster.

“The increase in brown carbon aerosols will lead to global or regional warming, which increases the probability and frequency of wildfires. Increased wildfire events will emit more brown carbon aerosols, further heating the earth, thus making wildfires more frequent,” Fu said.

So far, wildfires are holding up their end of the bargain. Last year, fires broke regional records in carbon emissions, including in parts of Siberia close to the Arctic. Last month, a UN report estimated that the number of wildfires is likely to increase around 30% percent by 2050 and 50% by 2100. Much as the current study’s authors found, these fires are likely to have a “mutually exacerbating” effect on climate change, the UN authors concluded—one that countries aren’t prepared for.

[goldenvalley]

Mar 22, 2022 17:59:05 GMT LFC said:

Texass a-holes like Ted Cruz love to mock California but don't have much to say when they're own state experiences the same issues. Welcome to the world of wildfires.

Firefighters in Texas have finally gotten the upper hand on devastating wildfires that began last week. But fires continue to blaze across areas of the state and may escalate due to dry weather, as people in some of the hardest-hit areas begin to assess the damage.

As of Monday, according to the Texas A&M Forest Service, more than 178 fires of varying sizes had burned more than 108,000 acres in Texas and destroyed more than 150 homes and buildings. The fires were supercharged by dry winds, low humidity, and stretches of drought-stricken land that sparked easily and helped flames spread. As of last week, according to the U.S. Drought Monitor, more than 90% of Texas was in some form of drought, with 40% of the state in extreme or exceptional drought, the highest levels. Governor Greg Abbott on Friday declared states of emergency in 11 counties in Texas where fires were raging. Twenty-three fires were active in the state on Sunday, a Forest Service spokesperson told CNN.

The largest of these fires, the Eastland Complex Fire blazing outside of Fort Worth, is comprised of seven smaller fires that started from Thursday to Sunday; together, these fires had burned through more than 54,000 acres as of Monday afternoon and were 60% contained. The Texas A&M Forest Service reports that this fire likely won’t be contained before the end of the week. Dry, windy, and warm conditions forecast for the area from Wednesday through the weekend could help it spread again.

Yup been snickering about this since I first heard about it.  Poor forest management practices in Texas???  Stupid greens won't let them mitigate fire hazards?

[pnwguy]

Mar 22, 2022 19:30:45 GMT goldenvalley said:

Mar 22, 2022 17:59:05 GMT LFC said:

Texass a-holes like Ted Cruz love to mock California but don't have much to say when they're own state experiences the same issues. Welcome to the world of wildfires.

Yup been snickering about this since I first heard about it.  Poor forest management practices in Texas???  Stupid greens won't let them mitigate fire hazards?

Issue every Texan a rake!  No guvmint intervention.  We'll take care of them forests!  

[goldenvalley]

Mar 22, 2022 17:55:44 GMT LFC said:

Drought update. Reports seem to be solidifying that it's going to be bad. It looks like both the West and Midwest can expect to take a hit.

A large portion of the U.S. will experience drought-related conditions this year, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration said this week. The last time something like this happened was back in 2013.

This past winter showed signs of the exceptionally dry spring to come. It was the 12th driest winter in the last 128 years, according to NOAA. In many areas of the country, less snowpack means less water for nearby lakes and rivers when the snow melts in the spring.

Many areas are already experiencing drought, and the few parts of states like Arizona and Texas that have been spared will soon be suffering the same, the New York Times reported.

Very, very grim map there.  To get a micro view of the map look at Sacramento. It did not rain in Sacramento from mid March 2021 to mid October 2021, about 210 days. In October the bomb cyclone hit. Lots of rain in a single storm. Then it didn't rain again until December which was quite wet gaining about 6.4 inches which is about 1/2 the average rainfall in a water year.  That was the end of rain fall for about 66 days until last week when it rained a wee amount.  We're pretty much at the end of the regular rainy season so unless something highly unusual happens 2022 will be even more dry than last year was.  

[LFC]

Mar 22, 2022 19:30:45 GMT goldenvalley said:

Yup been snickering about this since I first heard about it.  Poor forest management practices in Texas???  Stupid greens won't let them mitigate fire hazards?

And by "mitigate fire hazards" you mean "tear out all the trees", of course. It would probably be implemented much like Bush's "Healthy Forests" gift to loggers that ensure that the large logs would be hauled away, the risky brush would remain and even increase, and dead fuel would remain and also increase. It was SUCH a Republican proposal.

[LFC]

Oh, look! More "natural variation."

Unusually warm temperatures broke several records in both Antarctica and the Arctic late last week. The Concordia research base in Eastern Antarctica, one of the most remote research facilities in the world, reported temperatures at around -11 degrees Celsius or about 11 degrees Fahrenheit. That’s 70 degrees Fahrenheit higher than usual on the icy continent.

Over at the North Pole, temperatures reached new heights at around the same time. According to tweets from a climate scientist at the Norwegian Meteorological Institute the mercury hit around 3.9 degrees Celsius, or 39 about degrees Fahrenheit. That’s 50 degrees F (30 degrees C) higher than normal, not to mention higher than the point at which ice melts.

Université Grenoble Alpes post doc researcher Jonathan Wille tweeted that, at around this time of the year, temperatures are supposed to be falling in Antarctica, especially after the South Pole’s summer solstice has already passed and days start to become noticeably shorter. “This is [like] a Pacific Northwest 2021 heatwave kind of event,” he tweeted. “Never supposed to happen.”

[LFC]

Nothing to see here, just 450 square miles of ice breaking away from Antarctica.

Record high temperatures in Antarctica are believed to have contributed to the complete collapse of an ice shelf 20 times the size of Manhattan. The Conger ice shelf, which had an approximate surface area of 450 square miles, collapsed around March 15, scientists said Friday. The collapse was recorded in a series of astonishing satellite images with the process accelerating following record high temperatures in recent weeks, with reports of temperatures as high as 10F on March 18, when it would more typically be -50F. Catherine Colello Walker, an earth and planetary scientist at NASA, told The Guardian, “It is one of the most significant collapse events anywhere in Antarctica since the early 2000s, when the Larsen B ice shelf disintegrated. It won’t have huge effects, most likely, but it’s a sign of what might be coming.” She said the shelf had been shrinking gradually for two decades but the process accelerated dramatically in 2020.

[LFC]

The Great Barrier Reef takes it in the shorts ... again.

Australia's spectacular Great Barrier Reef is suffering "mass bleaching" as corals lose their color under the stress of warmer seas, authorities said Friday, in a blow widely blamed on climate change.

The world's largest coral reef system, stretching for more than 2,300 kilometers (1,400 miles) along the northeast coast of Australia, is showing the effects of the heat, said the Reef Authority.

Aerial surveys showed coral bleaching at multiple reefs across a large area of the system, "confirming a mass bleaching event, the fourth since 2016," it said in a report.

The Great Barrier Reef, home to some 1,500 species of fish and 4,000 types of mollusk, was suffering despite the cooling effect of the La Nina weather phenomenon, which is currently influencing Australia's climate, the authority said.

The area, which comprises about 2,500 individual reefs and more than 900 islands, suffers from bleaching when corals expel algae living in their tissues, draining them of their vibrant colors.

[LFC]

Just what clean energy needs, a f***ing scam organization. CleanChoice Energy has apparently been sued in multiple states for deceptive business practices and unexplained price hikes.

While at first glance, CleanChoice Energy may look like just another green brand catering to deep-blue consumers, the clean-energy company’s business practices and tactics have customers, advocates, and watchdogs all seeing red.

Interviews with former customers, experts, and a review of both official and online complaints point to a disturbing pattern of behavior for CleanChoice, which advertises itself in eight states and the District of Columbia as a green alternative to local utility companies. Critics say the firm targets well-intentioned progressives with postal advertising, sharply spiking prices, and a fundamentally misleading for-profit business model that capitalizes on a lack of popular understanding about how electrical grids operate.

“They prey on the ignorance of people about how green energy works,” Martin Cohen, a Chicago-based green energy consultant and former state director of consumer affairs, told The Daily Beast.

In statements to The Daily Beast, a CleanChoice spokesperson maintained the company is upfront with customers about the higher bills they will pay, and blamed drastic price spikes on conditions in the larger energy market.

“We aren’t aware of other businesses in energy who take this extraordinary step to tell consumers that their service is more expensive,” a company spokesperson wrote. “Recently, there has been a lot of energy inflation. It has been well-reported that energy prices have been volatile and inflationary through the last year.”

But some customers The Daily Beast interviewed said that their local utility companies’ prices did not rise anywhere near as steeply, suggesting CleanChoice’s hikes were hardly in line with a broader trend. The company retorted that, compared to highly regulated utility companies, it suffers greater financial exposure to global fluctuations and thus must pass more costs immediately onto consumers.

For his part, Sam Duerr of Pittsburgh reported an experience similar to Berends’ over almost the exact same period—except he said he didn’t even realize he was a CleanChoice customer until it was too late, thanks to the company’s advertising strategy.

He recalled being “bombarded” in 2020 with what appeared to be promotions from his electricity provider, the Duquesne Light Company, offering renewably sourced electricity for only a little more per kilowatt-hour than he was then paying. Like Berends, Duerr is an engineer and passionate about environmental issues, and decided saving the planet was worth the extra cash out of his pocket.

Duerr said it wasn’t until the summer of 2021, when his electricity rate was three times his previous cost, that he called the local company and learned he was in a contract with CleanChoice Energy.

“I had no idea this company I was going through was CleanChoice Energy, I just thought it was my current provider Duquesne Light providing renewable energy from the grid,” said Duerr, who believes the solicitations he received were deceptive. They “look[ed] like they were from the power company that was supplying my energy,” he said.

[goldenvalley]

Mar 29, 2022 18:29:29 GMT LFC said:

Just what clean energy needs, a f***ing scam organization. CleanChoice Energy has apparently been sued in multiple states for deceptive business practices and unexplained price hikes.

The market place will always offer some scam operations.  The point is to make money, not to fill a need.