[TheClimate.Vote] February 20, 2021 - Daily Global Warming News Digest

[Richard Pauli]

/*February 20, 2021*/

[World view from the Washington Post]
*Texas’s cold-weather catastrophe is a global warning*
Broadcast around the world, the scenes in Texas are another blow to 
America’s global image, already smeared by the pandemic and the Jan. 6 
insurrection. But there may be lessons for everyone in what is happening 
to the Lone Star state — and a warning for anyone not prepared for a 
changing climate.
At this stage, it is hard to provide a simple answer for why an 
energy-producing state so quickly turned into a belt of blackouts. Some 
Republicans in Texas have already pointed toward the shift to renewable 
energy, saying wind turbines in the state had failed because of the icy 
conditions.

“Texas’s biggest mistake was learning too many renewable energy lessons 
from California,” Rep. Dan Crenshaw (R-Tex.) tweeted Tuesday. Experts, 
however, noted that Texas was only receiving around 10 percent of its 
energy from wind turbines...
- -
There are turbines inside the Arctic Circle that can work at 
temperatures as low as -22 degrees Fahrenheit. Newer models of wind 
turbines have carbon fiber attached to the wings, which allows them to 
be automatically heated in cold weather.

Texas doesn’t use these models, for an obvious reason: It generally 
doesn’t get that cold. What happened this week is really unusual. On 
Monday, the temperature in Dallas was a high of 14 degrees, about 50 
degrees lower than normal for February. Experts have attributed this 
weather to a mass of cold air from the Arctic...
- -
Texas, a state where many pride themselves on low taxes and small 
government, had not budgeted for a freak cold snap. But this was not 
just felt in renewable energy sources. Jinjoo Lee at the Wall Street 
Journal noted that natural gas- and coal-fired power supplies had not 
fully winterized, while the “fairly market-driven” approach used by the 
grid, known as the Electric Reliability Council of Texas, offers little 
incentive for excess electricity generation.

In another unhelpful quirk, Texas’s electricity grid has only minimal 
connection to the United States’ two main power grids. That move, 
designed to sidestep federal oversight, also makes it harder to be 
supplied power by neighbors.

Some experts say a broader disinvestment has befallen the U.S. 
electricity production sector. Edward Hirs, an energy fellow at the 
University of Houston, told The Washington Post this week that it 
reminded him of the last days of the Soviet Union or today’s Venezuelan 
oil sector. “They hate it when I say that,” he said...
- -
Preparing for this new era of climate unpredictability won’t be fun. But 
the pandemic has shown the folly of not preparing for an unexpected 
crisis. As Sam White, a professor of history at Ohio State University, 
noted last year about the economic woes caused by the coronavirus: 
“Historically, people haven’t had the luxury of dealing with their 
disasters one at a time.”
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2021/02/18/texas-cold-global-climate-change/

- -

[...we have a problem]
*'California and Texas are warnings': blackouts show US deeply 
unprepared for the climate crisis*
...Over the past two decades, across the United States, severe weather 
has been the main cause of sustained power outages, Nateghi said.
An analysis of Department of Energy data published in September found 
weather-related power outages are up by 67% since 2000. Climate change 
is expected to continue fueling hotter heatwaves, more bitter winter 
storms and more ferocious hurricanes in the coming decades. As both 
California and Texas have discovered in recent years, power plants, 
generators and electrical lines are not designed to withstand the 
catastrophes to come. And all the while, the fossil fuels that both 
states rely on to power these faulty systems are driving the climate 
crisis, and hastening infrastructural collapse.

“We’re already seeing the effects of climate change,” said Sascha von 
Meier, a professor of electrical engineering at the University of 
California, Berkeley. “There will be more of this and it will get worse.”...
- -
To address all of these issues, scientists and advocacy groups are 
increasingly pushing for a decentralized power system that empowers 
communities to generate and store their own energy, using renewable 
sources – while investing in infrastructure that will allow regions to 
share power when disaster strikes.

Microgrids – small self-contained power systems that could draw from 
rooftop solar panels, nearby wind turbines and other sources, as well as 
larger regional grids – would allow communities to generate and ration 
their own electricity, von Meier said. “A neighborhood could essentially 
operate as a small power island,” she said. When the larger grid goes 
down due to natural disasters, a community could still keep basic 
infrastructure, hospitals and other necessities running with 
locally-sourced energy.

Von Meier herself loses power often due to shutoffs, and was without 
electricity at her home in Bay Area hills for nearly 24 hours last fall 
during fire season. “With a local grid, rather than having these very 
clumsy rotating power outages, where an entire neighborhood gets shut up 
completely, our neighborhood could have kept at least the basics 
running,” she said.

“What’s happened in California and Texas are warning signs,” said 
Nateghi. “These are signs we need to act now, and rethink our systems.”
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2021/feb/19/power-outages-texas-california-climate-crisis

- -

[news media briefing paper]
*KEY CONCEPTS*
-- Extreme weather is causing frequent damage to our aging electrical 
grid, costing Americans and the economy tens of billions of dollars each 
year and impacting public health.
-- Climate Central updated an analysis of national power outage data, 
which shows a 67% increase in major power outages from weather-related 
events since 2000. Two-thirds of states (34 states and Washington, D.C.) 
experienced an increase in outages caused by extreme weather in recent 
years.
-- The frequency of weather-related power outages varies by region of 
the country, with the greatest number of outages occurring in the 
Northeast and Southeast. The largest increases in outages over the last 
two decades happened in states in the Northeast, followed by the 
Southwest and the Southern Great Plains.
-- While upgrading the nation’s grid to become more resilient is 
expensive and challenging, there are a number of promising solutions to 
help us adapt to increasingly extreme weather, and many that can even 
lower carbon emissions.
https://medialibrary.climatecentral.org/resources/power-outages



[From the Washington Post]
*Opinion: Texas is making the case for the Green New Deal*
Opinion by Helaine Olen
Columnist Feb. 18, 2021
Texas Gov. Greg Abbott (R) knows who and what to blame for the fact that 
a subfreezing cold snap and winter storm has left millions of people in 
his state without access to heat, water and electricity for days. It’s 
not him. It’s not the climate change-denying Republican Party. Instead, 
it’s the Green New Deal.

He’s wrong, of course: The Texas climate catastrophe makes the case for 
a Green New Deal.

Abbott, faced with an ongoing human catastrophe — according to reports, 
several hundred people in the Houston area have been treated for carbon 
monoxide poisoning as a result of the rolling blackouts — decided the 
best use of his time was to appear on Sean Hannity’s Fox News program 
Tuesday night. He ducked any responsibility for the crisis, instead 
pinning the blame on the state’s renewable solar energy, which froze up 
in the cold weather. “This shows how the Green New Deal would be a 
deadly deal for the United States of America,” he claimed. “Fossil fuel 
is necessary for the state of Texas.”
Abbott isn’t the only one making that claim. The “wind turbines did it” 
is becoming the Republican rallying cry and talking point: Former Texas 
governor Rick Perry (R) says it; Sen. Steve Daines (R-Mont.) believes 
it; controversial freshman Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-Colo.) is parroting 
it, too. But this jeremiad of the environmental culture war is not just 
wildly inaccurate: If anything, the situation in Texas reveals the exact 
opposite to be true. It demonstrates exactly why we need massive 
government action on the climate and infrastructure — what a Green New 
Deal would provide.

What is happening in Texas is a confluence of bad weather — of the sort 
we can expect more of as the pace of climate change quickens — and a 
lack of investment in infrastructure, combined with the downside of a 
go-it-alone mentality.

Yes, many of the state’s wind turbines froze up, but that’s because of a 
failure to put in place the equipment to keep them going in cold 
weather. The state’s utilities did not make the investment — something 
Abbott failed to mention. In other places, these investments are made, 
which is why this isn’t a nonstop issue in colder climes. And at the 
same time, solar energy is only responsible for a small portion of 
state’s energy needs. Oil and natural gas are responsible for providing 
a majority of the Texas’s energy, and, what do you know, those utilities 
froze up, too. In the view of many experts, Texas prioritizes low 
electricity prices over preventive maintenance and worst-case-scenario 
planning.
Well, it happens, you must be thinking. It’s Texas: It’s almost always 
warm, and it practically never snows, so why spend the money on 
something unlikely to happen? But climate change means we will 
experience such severe weather events more frequently. Our planet’s 
increasing temperature means everyone will experience extremes of 
temperature. It’s why we’re seeing both record heat waves in the summer 
and more severe snowstorms in the winter. This is why the term “global 
warming” doesn’t fully convey the scope of the environmental catastrophe 
we are facing.

We’ve already become so used to these localized climate emergencies that 
we quickly forget them. The West Coast was on fire in the late summer 
and early fall. Remember that? It happened in 2017 and 2018, too. Since 
Abbott was first elected to the governorship in 2014, Houston has 
experienced three floods so severe that they would previously have been 
considered once-in-500-years events. No more.

Despite the increasing number of severe weather crises, the Republican 
Party and its politicians continue to deny the impact of climate change 
and claim that they are protecting jobs and local economies. Abbott 
recently promised aggressive legal challenges if President Biden, as 
expected, attempts to further regulate the natural gas and oil 
industries. “Texas is not going to stand idly by and watch the Biden 
administration kill jobs,” he proclaimed. He continues to claim that the 
case for climate change is still not settled.

All this needs to be called out for the appalling ignorance and 
political expediency that it is. The consequences of climate denial are 
getting more severe. A Green New Deal is needed to combat extreme 
weather, as well as upgrade, modernize and improve our infrastructure so 
it works better and we ultimately become less reliant on fossil fuels.

What’s happening in Texas this week is exactly what we can expect to 
happen more often as the accelerating pace of climate change continues 
to collide with the United States’ deteriorating infrastructure and 
continuing Republican inaction, intransigence and excuse-making. It’s 
leaving us all out in the cold.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/02/18/texas-is-making-case-green-new-deal/



[Well summed]*
**Kerry: Climate change among 'most complex security issues we've ever 
faced'*
Special envoy John Kerry called climate change “among the most complex 
security issues we've ever faced” at the virtual Munich Security 
Conference on Friday.

Kerry pointed to Texas’s struggle to keep the power on this week amid 
unusually cold temperatures, an unprecedented number of tropical storms 
last year that quickly exhausted naming conventions and a melting Arctic 
creating competition over new shipping passageways as proof people “just 
have to look out the window” to see the effects of climate change.

“What these extreme weather events translate to on the ground should 
concern every single one of us,” the former secretary of State said, 
calling climate change a threat multiplier.
Kerry’s speech to the conference comes as the U.S. officially rejoined 
the Paris climate accord, an automatic result following the request 
President Biden made on his first day in office.
Kerry’s first-of-its-kind position in the Biden administration affords 
him a seat on the National Security Council, putting him in a position 
to engage not only on international climate negotiations but also to 
ensure climate change is incorporated into U.S. security policy.

He noted how changing weather patterns can cause desperation for farmers 
while natural disasters can push people from places they’ve lived a 
lifetime, driving humanitarian crisis.

“When we talk about the impacts of climate change, we're talking about 
security, energy security, economic security, food security, even 
physical security. And the question now is, pregnantly, what will the 
world do about it?” Kerry said, noting the need to limit the planet's 
warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius.
https://thehill.com/policy/national-security/539619-kerry-climate-change-among-most-complex-security-issues-weve-ever




[More]
*The crisis in Texas underscores the deadly risks when the grid goes down*
Feb 17, 2021
https://grist.org/energy/the-crisis-in-texas-underscores-the-deadly-risks-when-the-grid-goes-down/ 




[video lecture summaries https://youtu.be/_HcABNcc5x0]
*Brutally Cold US Outbreak Connections to Climate Change Mangled Jet 
Streams and Polar Vortex*
Feb 17, 2021
Paul Beckwith
The ongoing cold in the USA extending as far south as the Gulf of Mexico 
and the Mexican border continues to wreak havoc on much of the US, with 
Texas being affected the most due to its third world, rickety, totally 
unreliable privately run electrical power grid. Many millions of people 
are still without power (for days), and the water treatment plants in 
places including Houston are not operating. People in the suburbs of 
major cities are freezing in the dark, with pipes in their homes 
bursting, no potable water from the taps, while skylines in the nearby 
cities are still lit up like Christmas trees. Completely dystopian.

In this video I chat all about the polar vortex (this term refers to the 
stratospheric polar vortex) and the role of the jet streams in covering 
most of the USA with a persistent trough causing the brutal cold snap. I 
show, using graphics from a website ironically called Tropical Tidbits, 
how the surface temperature anomalies have changed from Feb 14th to 
today, and how they are forecast to change in the next 3 weeks. This 
thing is not over yet.

I then introduce 3 peer reviewed scientific papers that I will discuss 
in further videos, on the linkages between the stratosphere and 
troposphere, leading to mangling of the jet streams and extreme weather.
https://youtu.be/_HcABNcc5x0

- -

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1WMsbnSVG-Q
*Review: Arctic Temperature Amplification Influence on Polar Vortex 
Causing Severe Winter Weather*
Feb 18, 2021
Paul Beckwith
In my last few videos I discussed the brutal cold snap that has extended 
downward in the USA, as far south as the Mexican border and the Gulf of 
Mexico. It temporarily wiped out about 1/3 of the Texas power grid, 
plunging 4.5 million Texas households into extended cold and darkness. 
If you assume that each household has an average of 3 people, that’s 
13.5 million people. As bad as it was, it came very close to knocking 
out the entire state power grid.

In this video I get into the scientific details on how abrupt climate 
system change has warmed the Arctic much faster than the lower latitudes 
(Arctic Amplification) and this in turn is leading to frequent 
disruptions of the polar vortex. I discuss a review paper that examines 
the various process that lead to observations of slowing and wavier 
(more meridional) Jet Streams, which are in turn leading to more likely 
Sudden Stratospheric Warming which then fractures (splits) the polar 
vortex causing cold Arctic air to spill far southward in North America 
and in Eurasia.

Essentially, the Arctic is warming like crazy on its own. This warming 
near the surface and near the troposphere-stratosphere border region of 
the Jet Streams is rising even higher into the stratosphere fracturing 
the stratospheric polar vortex. Consequently, the cold Arctic air spills 
southward. Of course, when you think about it, massive amounts of cold 
air moving from the Arctic to the deep southern latitudes is simply 
another manifestation of a greatly warming Arctic, since the cold air 
lost there in the far North is replaced by warmer air moving into the 
far north.

Of course, most people have not cared in the least that the Arctic is 
warming like crazy. However, they do care, even in Texas, when the 
Arctic breaks and the cold Arctic air spills into their cities and takes 
out their power grid.

I can guarantee you that people will care, when the broken Arctic 
disrupts the global air circulation and ocean circulation patterns 
enough to take out much of the global food supply in the near future, as 
we plunge towards a total loss of summer Arctic sea ice BOE (Blue Ocean 
Event).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1WMsbnSVG-Q



[Of course]
*What if net-zero isn’t enough? Inside the push to ‘restore’ the climate.*
By Emily Pontecorvo on Dec 11, 2020
Disagreements about how to tackle the climate crisis abound, but in 
2020, it seemed much of the world finally reached consensus about at 
least one thing: getting to net-zero by 2050, or sooner. Net-zero is a 
state where greenhouse gases are no longer accumulating in the 
atmosphere — any emissions must be counterbalanced by sucking some 
carbon out of the air — and this year, a tidal wave ofgovernments 
<https://grist.org/beacon/moons-net-zero-moonshot/>,businesses 
<https://grist.org/climate/microsoft-cant-achieve-its-climate-goals-alone-so-its-enlisting-other-companies-to-go-net-zero-nike-starbucks-mercedes-unilever/>, 
andfinancial institutions 
<https://grist.org/beacon/barclays-banks-on-net-zero/>pledged to reach it.
But for a new movement of young activists, the net-zero rhetoric is 
worrisome. “Hitting net-zero is not enough,” they wrote in aletter 
<https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2020/nov/13/hitting-net-zero-is-not-enough-we-must-restore-the-climate?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other>published 
in the Guardian last month. Instead, the group behind the letter, a 
youth-led organization calledWorldward <https://www.worldward.org/>, 
urges the world to rally around a different goal, one they call “climate 
restoration.” The letter was co-signed by prominent climate scientists 
James Hansen and Michael Mann, in addition to writers, artists, and 
other activists.
“The climate today is not safe,” said Gideon Futerman, the 17-year-old 
founder and president of Worldward, who lives in a suburb north of 
London. “Millions of people are suffering and millions more will.” By 
the time net-zero is achieved, he said, the climate will be considerably 
more dangerous.
https://grist.org/climate/can-we-restore-the-climate-these-young-activists-want-us-to-try/



[Center for Research on Environmental Decisions]
*4. Beware the Overuse of Emotional Appeals*
It may be tempting to conclude that an effective way to communicate 
climate change information is to place a greater emphasis on its 
possible consequences. Some go even further, accentuating the risks by 
declining to mention the uncertainties involved. Such an approach evokes 
strong reactions in audiences, including fear of worst-case climate 
change scenarios and even heightened interest in what can be done to 
avoid them. But while an emotional appeal may make people more 
interested in a presentation on climate change in the short run, it may 
backfire down the road, causing negative consequences that often prove 
quite difficult to reverse.
http://guide.cred.columbia.edu/guide/sec4.html



[Meanwhile, the fires]
*How fires have spread to previously untouched parts of the world*
Fires have always been a part of our natural world. But they’re moving 
to new ecosystems previously untouched by fire – and this is concerning 
scientists
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/ng-interactive/2021/feb/19/how-fires-have-spread-to-previously-untouched-parts-of-the-world



[New Yorker on Nukes]
*The Activists Who Embrace Nuclear Power*
By Rebecca Tuhus-Dubrow
February 19, 2021
- -
Our energy system is in flux. There are innovations under way in the 
renewables sphere—advances in battery storage, demand management, and 
regional integration—which should help overcome the challenges of 
intermittency. Nuclear scientists, for their part, are working on 
smaller, more nimble nuclear reactors. There are complex economic 
considerations, which are inseparable from policy—for example, nuclear 
power would immediately become more competitive if we had a carbon tax. 
And there are huge risks no matter what we do.

To be fervently pro-nuclear, in the manner of Hoff and Zaitz, is to see 
in the peaceful splitting of the atom something almost miraculous. It is 
to see an energy source that has been steadily providing low-carbon 
electricity for decades—doing vastly more good than harm, saving vastly 
more lives than it has taken—but which has received little credit and 
instead been maligned. It is to believe that the most significant 
problem with nuclear power, by far, is public perception. Like the 
anti-nuclear world view—and perhaps partly in response to it—the 
pro-nuclear world view can edge toward dogmatism. Hoff and Zaitz 
certainly seem readier to tout studies that confirm their views, and 
reluctant to acknowledge any flaws that nuclear energy may have. Still, 
even if one does not embrace nuclear power to the same extent, one can 
recognize its past contributions and question the wisdom of counting it 
out in the future.

One of the last times I spoke with Zaitz, she noted that a lot of people 
seemed to be feeling discouraged at this moment, overwhelmed by the 
scale of the challenges ahead. But she counselled against despair. “The 
hopeful way to go into that is, ‘Oh, wow, we actually have technology 
that can do this,’ ” she said. “And that’s nuclear. And so I’d rather 
stay hopeful.”
https://www.newyorker.com/tech/annals-of-technology/the-activists-who-embrace-nuclear-power



[Digging back into the internet news archive]
*On this day in the history of global warming - February 20, 2013 *

Associated Press reporter Dina Cappiello notes that President Obama, 
"who rarely uttered the words 'climate change' or 'global warming' 
during the second half of his first term and during the re-election 
campaign, has re-inserted it boldly back into his lexicon. In his latest 
State of the Union address before Congress, Obama sounded like he did in 
his first, urging lawmakers to limit gases blamed for global warming 
'for the sake of our children and our future.' Those words followed his 
inaugural address, in which he said, 'We will respond to the threat of 
climate change.'

"The difference between then and now is that Obama knows Congress is 
unlikely to agree. He said that if Congress won't act, he will through 
executive action. The question is: What will he do?"

http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2013/02/20/choices_loom_for_obama_on_climate_change_117082.html


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