[✔️] April 24, 2021 - Daily Global Warming News Digest
Richard Pauli
richard at theclimate.vote
Sat Apr 24 13:58:06 EDT 2021
/*April 24, 2021*/
[Minnesota and Texas]
*Minnesotans furious that they have to pay for Texas’ deep-freeze problems*
Natural gas prices surged across the country during Texas’ February freeze.
TIM DE CHANT - 4/23/2021
- -
In a twist, the biggest gas utility in Minnesota is CenterPoint Energy,
a Houston-based company that also supplies a large swath of Southeastern
Texas. The company said it spent an additional $500 million on gas that
week in February, and it has asked Minnesota’s utility commission for
permission to add a surcharge to customers’ bills. The surcharge not
only seeks to recoup the additional money CenterPoint spent on natural
gas, it also includes 8.75 percent interest. The company expects that
each customer would shoulder a burden of $300 to $400.
- -
The company appears to be planning similar requests in Arkansas and
Oklahoma.
Minnesota’s other major natural gas utility, Xcel Energy, also said it
will be seeking to recover its additional expenses from Texas’ deep
freeze, but it wouldn’t be charging customers interest. Xcel estimates
the interest charge would be around $25 million, while CenterPoint
expects its charge will be $60 million.
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2021/04/houston-based-utility-wants-minnesotans-to-pay-for-texas-deep-freeze-problems/
[Fire fighters lose fire flight]
*The 747 Supertanker shuts down*
Bill Gabbert
The company told government officials it is going to cease operations
The 747 Supertanker shuts down
AuthorBill GabbertPosted onApril 23, 2021CategoriesUncategorizedTags747,
747 air tanker
The company told government officials it is going to cease operations...
The investor group that owns the 747 Supertanker, Tanker 944, is
shutting down the huge air tanker. In an email sent April 21 to
officials in Colorado, Oregon, Washington, and the federal government,
Dan Reese the President of Global Supertanker gave them the news:
This week the investors that own the Global SuperTanker just informed me
that they have made the difficult decision to cease operations of the
company, effective this week…This is extremely disappointing as the
aircraft has been configured and tuned with a new digital drop system
and other upgrades to make it more safe and efficient...
- -
Opinion of a Lead Plane Pilot
I asked a Lead Plane Pilot who has worked with Tanker 944 for his
impressions of the aircraft. He is currently active and not authorized
to comment publicly:
It’s a specialized tool, and as such it has a niche that it fills and in
that niche there’s nothing else any better. That is, it puts out a huge
amount of retardant in one pass, and that sometimes can be a great
thing. It can travel halfway around the world and deliver product.
Having said that it is also a specialized tool in that it isn’t very
good at doing the little stuff.
I asked him about the retardant that sometimes trails off after a drop:
That trail off, that’s something they can beat them over the head with,
but at the end of the day hardly anybody I know gives a s**t about it.
Ok, well, it’s not a perfect tank...
https://fireaviation.com/2021/04/23/the-747-supertanker-is-ceasing-operations/
[no water]
*Why the intense U.S. drought is now a megadrought*
Almost the entire Southwest is mired in various stages of drought as of
April 21, 2021, resulting in falling water levels at the nation's two
largest reservoirs, Lake Mead and Lake Powell. The consequences could be
unprecedented. For the first time in Lake Mead's 85-year existence,
water levels may drop below a point this summer that triggers water cuts
in Arizona and Nevada. (This would largely mean cuts to farmers and
agriculture.)
Geological and climate records show that sustained droughts, lasting
decades, come and go in the Southwest. But the current prolonged drying
trend, which started some 20 years ago, is exacerbated by a rapidly
warming climate. This makes the current drought not just long, but
especially intense.
"It's two decades long and probably the worst drought in at least 400
years," said Benjamin Cook, a research scientist at Columbia
University’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory who studies drought...
- -
Droughts are cumulative, meaning it's unlikely one good year of rain
will eliminate a long regional drought. In 2019, for example, we saw
normal rainfall in parts of the Southwest and a pretty wet year in
California. But 2020 dashed hopes for climbing out of a prolonged
drought. On top of warmer temperatures, the region's typical summer
rainfall failed, and California received just half of its normal
precipitation this winter. An important rain-fed reservoir has dried up
in Northern California. The drought continues.
It's always possible a surprise late-season rain or snow changes the
trajectory of the current drought, like 2014's impressively wet "Miracle
May." But that's unlikely. "That's a hope against hope," said Overpeck.
"That's like buying a lottery ticket."
Overall, the evidence points to an increasingly drying Western world.
This demands improved water conservation, especially in water-gulping
agriculture. Lake Mead, the nation's largest reservoir, is now about 40
percent full. "It's pretty dire," said Overpeck.
https://mashable.com/article/drought-us-southwest-megadrought/
[Sarcastic video attacking Australia for a stupid Electric Vehicle policy]
*Honest Government Ad | Electric Vehicles*
Apr 23, 2021
thejuicemedia
The Australian Government has made an ad about its Electric Vehicle
policy, and it's surprisingly honest and informative.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fLflYkgnNBY
[Some prefer denial]
Capitol Weather Gang
*Don’t ask officials what they think of global warming — ask if they
want a warning*
By Dale Durran
April 23, 2021
“What is your opinion about global warming?” We ask this question of
political candidates, Supreme Court nominees and ourselves. But there is
something more fundamental we should ask first, because it changes the
framing of the discussion. The more fundamental question is: “If the
climate were changing and expected to produce problems like sea level
rise, floods and droughts, would you want a warning?”
As a professor of atmospheric sciences, I have researched weather and
weather forecasting for 40 years. Forecasters issue warnings for
hazardous weather because people answer yes to questions such as: “If
you live in Key West and a hurricane might hit, would you want a
warning?” Weather and climate are closely related, characterizing things
like temperatures, winds and rainfall on an hour-by-hour (weather) or a
season-by-season (climate) basis.
Turning from weather to climate, the analogous question becomes: “If you
live in Key West and climate change is expected to produce sea level
rise, would you want a warning?”
Weather forecasters weigh three concerns when deciding to issue a
warning. They don’t want to miss an event; they don’t want to issue
false alarms; and they need to issue the warning with enough lead time
for the public to take action.
The later forecasters wait to issue a warning, the easier it is both to
detect a developing event and to avoid a false alarm — but having an
earlier warning can save lives and protect property. That’s why
increasing the lead time for warnings has been a priority in the weather
forecasting community. From 2008 to 2019, the average lead time for
high-wind warnings issued by the National Weather Service increased from
6 to 12 hours, while the rate at which forecasters missed real events or
issued false alarms stayed essentially constant.
As an illustration of potential responses to long-lead-time forecasts,
evacuation orders for the Florida Keys were issued four days before
devastating Hurricane Irma came ashore in 2017. Major changes in
hurricane intensity can easily occur over four days and are very
difficult to forecast, but the Hurricane Irma warnings needed to go out
in time for people to evacuate along the sole escape route, U.S. Highway 1.
We also need long-lead-time warnings about climate change because our
extensive existing investments in cars, power plants and similar
infrastructure cannot be changed to quickly reduce the emissions from
burning fossil fuels such as coal, gas and oil. Meanwhile, most carbon
dioxide (CO2) added to the atmosphere each year by new emissions remains
there for hundreds to thousands of years. Each day of business as usual
allows more emissions to accumulate.
Can we rely on new technologies to solve the problem of climate change,
as some might be hoping, eliminating the need for long-lead-time
warnings? Geoengineering technologies proposed to remove CO2 from the
atmosphere have not demonstrated practical viability to significantly
reverse our current emissions. There is no guarantee they will ever
develop into anything more useful than the futile geoengineering effort
to weaken hurricanes.
Project Stormfury was launched in the 1960s with great optimism.
Stormfury appeared to score an initial success when a fleet of Navy
aircraft seeded the eyewall of Hurricane Debbie, and the winds
decreased. Yet subsequent studies showed the working hypothesis behind
Stormfury was incorrect, and the changes observed in Debbie occur
spontaneously in many hurricanes. Today, we still have no way to reduce
the intensity of a hurricane barreling down upon our coastal cities and
towns. Warnings remain our best tool to survive hurricanes — not weather
modification.
Since we can’t count on having practical tools to remove CO2, delaying
efforts to reduce current emissions amounts to placing an irreversible
bet against our scientific understanding that releasing more
heat-trapping gases will cause more global warming. Even if some are not
entirely convinced that human emissions are warming and disrupting the
climate, it’s worth returning to the fundamental question: Do we want
advanced warning about global warming and its impacts? As with
hurricanes, our response to the warnings will be far more effective if
we act before the storm is fully upon us.
We know that global average temperatures are increasing. The past six
years were the six hottest years in recorded history; two of the three
hottest years were 2019 and 2020. The observational and theoretical
evidence that this temperature rise will continue and is driven by the
emission of CO2 and other greenhouse gases is very strong. Even if we
can’t be 100 percent sure of the precise timing of global-warming
impacts, the available information is well above the threshold for
conscientious scientists to issue warnings.
The question for those of us planning for the future is: Do we want any
warning?
Dale Durran is a professor and past chair of the Department of
Atmospheric Sciences at the University of Washington and a fellow of the
American Meteorological Society.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/weather/2021/04/23/global-warming-warning/
- -
[By the author]
*Numerical Methods for Fluid Dynamics*
*With Applications to Geophysics*
https://www.google.com/books/edition/Numerical_Methods_for_Fluid_Dynamics/ThMZrEOTuuUC?hl=en&gbpv=1&printsec=frontcover
[between a Mom in Congress & Oil Lobbyist - notice the difference in
their offices]
*Katie Porter RIPS Big Oil lobbyist during hearing on fossil fuel subsidies*
Apr 22, 2021
The Hill
Rep. Katie Porter ripped a Big Oil lobbyist during a hearing on fossil
fuel subisidies.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vxj78z4EVd4
[Tilt-a-whirl]
*Climate change has altered the Earth's tilt*
By Meghan Bartels 12 hours ago
Human activity is literally moving Earth's poles.
Earth's poles are moving — and that's normal. But new research suggests
that within just decades, climate change and human water use have given
the poles' wandering an additional nudge.
Any object's spin is affected by how its weight is distributed. Earth's
weight distribution is always changing, it turns out, as the planet's
molten innards roil and its surface morphs. Water is a key influencer,
since it's so heavy. In the past two decades, two supersensitive NASA
satellite missions — the Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment (GRACE)
and its successor — have analyzed this shifting weight, but those
observations began only in 2002.
In the new research, scientists were particularly focused on shifts in
Earth's tilt in the 1990s, before that satellite data existed. Instead,
the researchers turned to observations of the water itself —
measurements of ice loss and statistics on groundwater pumped out for
human use — to combine with studies of how the poles drifted, according
to a statement released by the American Geophysical Union (AGU), which
published the new research in one of its journals.
And drift the poles did: In 1995, polar drift changed direction
completely, and between that year and 2020, the speed of the pole
movement increased about 17 times compared to the average speed measured
between 1981 and 1995, according to the AGU.
By combining the polar drift data with the water data, the researchers
showed that most of the pole movement was triggered by water loss from
polar regions — that'll be ice melting off land and flowing into the
oceans — with smaller input from water loss in other regions, where
humans pull groundwater up to use.
Intriguingly, there are plenty more pole-drift observations where these
came from: according to the AGU, researchers have measured the
phenomenon for 176 years. Those data and the new methods could help
scientists track water movement before good records of ice loss and
groundwater use begin. "The findings offer a clue for studying past
climate-driven polar motion," Suxia Liu, a hydrologist at the Chinese
Academy of Sciences and the corresponding author of the new study, said
in the AGU statement.
The research is described in a paper that was published last month in
the journal Geophysical Research Letters.
https://www.space.com/climate-change-tilting-earth-axis
- -
[AGU Geophysical Research Letters]
*Polar Drift in the 1990s Explained by Terrestrial Water Storage Changes*
S. Deng S. Liu X. Mo L. Jiang P. Bauer‐Gottwein
First published: 22 March 2021
https://doi.org/10.1029/2020GL092114
*Abstract*
Secular polar drift underwent a directional change in the 1990s, but the
underlying mechanism remains unclear. In this study, polar motion
observations are compared with geophysical excitations from the
atmosphere, oceans, solid Earth, and terrestrial water storage (TWS)
during the period of 1981–2020 to determine major drivers. When
contributions from the atmosphere, oceans, and solid Earth are removed,
the residual dominates the change in the 1990s. The contribution of TWS
to the residual is quantified by comparing the hydrological excitations
from modeled TWS changes in two different scenarios. One scenario
assumes that the TWS change is stationary over the entire study period,
and another scenario corrects the stationary result with actual glacier
mass change. The accelerated ice melting over major glacial areas drives
the polar drift toward 26°E for 3.28 mas/yr after the 1990s. The
findings offer a clue for studying past climate‐driven polar motion.
*Plain Language Summary*
The Earth's pole, the point where the Earth's rotational axis intersects
its crust in the Northern Hemisphere, drifted in a new eastward
direction in the 1990s, as observed by space geodetic observations.
Generally, polar motion is caused by changes in the hydrosphere,
atmosphere, oceans, or solid Earth. However, short‐term observational
records of key information in the hydrosphere (i.e., changes in
terrestrial water storage) limit a better understanding of new polar
drift in the 1990s. This study introduces a novel approach to quantify
the contribution from changes in terrestrial water storage by comparing
its drift path under two different scenarios. One scenario assumes that
the terrestrial water storage change throughout the entire study period
(1981–2020) is similar to that observed recently (2002–2020). The second
scenario assumes that it changed from observed glacier ice melting. Only
the latter scenario, along with the atmosphere, oceans, and solid Earth,
agrees with the polar motion during the period of 1981–2020. The
accelerated terrestrial water storage decline resulting from glacial ice
melting is thus the main driver of the rapid polar drift toward the east
after the 1990s. This new finding indicates that a close relationship
existed between polar motion and climate change in the past.
https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1029/2020GL092114
[Greenman Sinclair]
*If Not Clean Energy, What?*
Apr 23, 2021
greenmanbucket
If not Clean energy, then what?
The Fossil Fuel lobby has a plan for Michigan...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e0MjXIxChvM
[Digging back into the internet news archive]
*On this day in the history of global warming - April 24, 2007 *
PBS airs "Hot Politics," a "Frontline" special about the extensive
efforts of the fossil fuel lobby to frustrate efforts to combat carbon
pollution.
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/hotpolitics/
http://www.climatesciencewatch.org/2007/04/26/hot-politicspbs-frontline-program-and-extended-interviews-online/
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/hotpolitics/interviews/
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