[✔️] August 26 , 2022 - Global Warming News Digest

[Richard Pauli]

/*August 26, 2022*/

/[ setting a deadline for new car change ]
/*California bans gas cars by 2035. Northwest states to follow.*/
/The California Air Resources Board voted Thursday to ban the sale of 
gasoline-powered cars by the year 2035. The move is expected to trigger 
big changes in the Northwest and beyond.
While the new rules don’t affect cars and trucks that are already on the 
road, the end is in sight for the sale of gasoline-powered cars up and 
down the West Coast.
https://kuow.org/stories/california-bans-gas-cars-by-2035-northwest-states-to-follow/
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/[ book review - video interview - Finding Refuge on a Changed Earth ]/
*“At Home on an Unruly Planet” explores rootedness in a time of upheaval*
Madeline Ostrander’s new nonfiction book, "At Home on an Unruly Planet" 
is a series of deeply reported, vivid, and hopeful accounts of American 
communities confronting the climate crisis. Award-winning KUOW public 
radio reporter John Ryan joins Madeline to talk about the book, about 
writing and reporting long-form science stories, and about hope and 
solutions amid crisis.
Event produced by the Northwest Science Writers Association and Folio: 
The Seattle Athenaeum.
Speakers: John Ryan, KUOW.

Madeline Ostrander, author

    *At Home on an Unruly Planet**
    **Finding Refuge on a Changed Earth*

     From rural Alaska to coastal Florida, a vivid account of Americans
    working to protect the places they call home in an era of climate crisis

    How do we find a sense of home and rootedness in a time of
    unprecedented upheaval? What happens when the seasons and rhythms in
    which we have built our lives go off-kilter?

    Once a distant forecast, climate change is now reaching into the
    familiar, threatening our basic safety and forcing us to reexamine
    who we are and how we live. In At Home on an Unruly Planet, science
    journalist Madeline Ostrander reflects on this crisis not as an
    abstract scientific or political problem but as a palpable force
    that is now affecting all of us at home. She offers vivid accounts
    of people fighting to protect places they love from increasingly
    dangerous circumstances. A firefighter works to rebuild her town
    after catastrophic western wildfires. A Florida preservationist
    strives to protect one of North America's most historic cities from
    rising seas. An urban farmer struggles to transform a California
    city plagued by fossil fuel disasters. An Alaskan community heads
    for higher ground as its land erodes.

    Ostrander pairs deeply reported stories of hard-won optimism with
    lyrical essays on the strengths we need in an era of crisis. This
    audiobook is required listening for anyone who wants to make a home
    in the twenty-first century.

https://www.seattlechannel.org/videos?videoid=x140341/
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/[  Bill Nye saves the World  -- video series on Peacock ] / *Bill Nye: 
The Effects Of Climate Change Are So Obvious People Will Come Around*
Aug 25, 2022  Host and producer of the new Peacock program 'The End is 
Nye,' Bill Nye, joins Morning Joe to discuss global disasters and how to 
survive and prevent them.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MW2J313195E



/[ Well this is a deeply disturbing notion, not new science, but newly 
expressed  ]/
*Report of an ancient methane release raises questions for our climate 
future*
New research postulates dramatic events in the Eemian period, around 
125,000 years ago — but some experts say it’s not cause for alarm

By Chris Mooney
August 24, 2022

A group of scientists this week said they have discovered new evidence 
of how methane deposits stored deep in the seafloor can break free — and 
they are now trying to figure out what this could mean for our climate 
future.

The research published Monday suggests a major destabilization of 
seafloor methane off the coast of Africa around 125,000 years ago, after 
a global shift in currents warmed the middle depths of the ocean there 
by 6.8 degrees Celsius, or 12.2 degrees Fahrenheit — a massive rise.

Several scientists who reviewed the study said they weren’t ready to 
raise major alarms about the planet’s ample stores of subsea methane in 
the form of what are called hydrates. While most experts agree that this 
methane could cause tremendous warming if it somehow hits the 
atmosphere, many say that the gas would be unleashed only slowly as the 
planet warms, and that the ocean itself would protect us by absorbing 
most methane before it can escape to the air.

Still, the new findings, published in the Proceedings of the National 
Academy of Sciences, underscore how little we still know about how the 
planet will respond to our uncontrolled greenhouse gas emissions — and 
how unpredictable that response may be.

The new sample of sediment unearthed from the seafloor paints a picture 
of tumultuous events during a period of Earth’s history around 125,000 
years ago, called the Eemian. The era has often stirred scientists’ 
fears about the future, for while the Earth was not much warmer than it 
is today, seas were 20 feet or more higher. Some suspect the West 
Antarctic ice sheet may have collapsed at that time — and a few have 
even postulated superstorms powerful enough to lift boulders atop cliffs 
in the Bahamas.

The new research suggests another Eemian climate cascade. It would have 
begun with large pulses of meltwater from the Greenland ice sheet, which 
slowed down the circulation of the North Atlantic Ocean — a change that 
would have reverberated around the globe. As the ocean’s so-called 
conveyor belt slowed and less cold water made its way into its middle 
depths, the paper’s authors contend, the continental shelf of the Gulf 
of Guinea along the coast of Africa was bathed in sudden, strong warmth. 
This, in turn, destabilized methane that had previously been suspended 
beneath the seafloor.

The warming of the middle layer of the ocean during the era was “much 
stronger than previous model studies have assumed,” said Syee Weldeab, a 
paleoclimatologist at the University of California at Santa Barbara, who 
led the research along with colleagues at institutions in Germany, China 
and Australia.

“And then, the release of methane is strong and persistent over a longer 
time, to make it basically noticeable through the sediment, through the 
water column, and potentially, to the atmosphere,” Weldeab added.

Methane is more than 80 times more potent than carbon dioxide for the 
first 20 years after it is released into the atmosphere. And current 
emissions of methane from fossil fuel leakage, cattle and landfills, 
among other sources, are driving a major part of the Earth’s warming.

But there are also enormous quantities of natural methane locked away in 
the form of hydrates, buried in the mud of the Earth’s continental 
shelves. The U.S. Geological Survey estimates that, at the low end, the 
amount of methane contained in hydrates around the globe is “more than 
4000 times the amount of natural gas consumed in the USA in 2010.” 
Scientists and policymakers have begun eyeing hydrates not only because 
of climate change concerns, but also because they might be tapped as an 
energy source.

Hydrates form over long geological periods, largely the result of tiny 
marine organisms powering their bodies in the absence of oxygen and 
releasing methane as a byproduct. The methane fuses with water and forms 
icy deposits, which remain stable as long as there is enough pressure on 
them from the weight of the water above — and as long as the temperature 
remains cool enough.

But how can we possibly know what these hydrates did 125,000 years ago?

The new study is based on the evidence contained within a core of ocean 
sediment measuring more than 100 feet long that was extracted in the 
Gulf of Guinea, off the coast of Cameroon. Going deeper into the 
seafloor mud is the equivalent of going back in time, and scientists can 
use the shells of tiny organisms that died in those ancient waters and 
sediment — “microfossils,” Weldeab calls them — to infer the state of 
the environment in different eras.

Those shells contain evidence of the major ocean-warming event. They 
also show a strong increase in the prevalence of a certain variant of 
carbon, called an isotope, that these small organisms were busily 
molding into their shells. That anomaly, as Weldeab and colleagues 
interpret it, signals an environment full of methane.

But because the study could not directly measure ancient methane, the 
scientists are inferring its presence based on this “proxy” evidence — 
Weldeab’s specialty. Still, it all comes down to how you interpret the 
pattern of carbon atoms contained in shells buried in ancient mud.

Experts had mixed views of the research — and its implications.

“Carbon isotopes are tricky, there are hundreds of stories told about 
carbon isotope excursions, and some excursions which no one can even 
come up with explanations for,” said David Archer, a geoscientist at the 
University of Chicago who has written in the past that hydrates will 
probably emit some methane this century but it will not be “catastrophic.”

“Conclusions from data like this are always provisional, [and] become 
stronger if they are confirmed in multiple proxies,” Archer said.

Carolyn Ruppel, chief scientist of the Gas Hydrates Project at the U.S. 
Geological Survey, called the new work “a very provocative study” and 
praised it for containing “very elegant data.”

“This may have truly happened in this place at this time because of 
weakening of AMOC,” Ruppel said, referring to the Atlantic Meridional 
Overturning Circulation, a highly sensitive part of the global ocean 
circulation system.

But “I don’t think that on average, it changes our perspective,” Ruppel 
continued.

For instance, Ruppel said, scientists believe that some small fraction 
of the world’s subsea methane hydrates are already breaking down today, 
in response to the relatively modest ocean warming that we have seen so 
far. But “very little of that methane is reaching the sea-air 
interface,” Ruppel added.

Wei-Li Hong, a geochemist at Stockholm University, agreed and said the 
microfossil and isotope evidence is difficult to interpret. For 
instance, he said, the speed of the ocean’s currents can influence how 
much methane can accumulate in a particular spot for these tiny 
organisms to, in turn, incorporate it.

“Being a scientist, I think I should be open-minded,” Hong said. “I 
think everything is possible because I think that the problem with this 
debate is that no one is able to give definite evidence for one 
interpretation over the other.”

Even if these hydrates do come apart, the methane might not enter the 
atmosphere because of the protective layer of the ocean. The gas would 
still have to travel upward through waters half a mile or more deep. 
There are reasons to think that some or all of it may fuse with oxygen 
within the water column and lose its warming potency.

But Weldeab suggests that, at least 125,000 years ago, much of the 
methane could have escaped — in part because there was just so much of it.

“We find evidence there is methane release across the water column,” 
Weldeab said. “Starting from 1,300 meters, going up to the surface.”

Another key question is whether the methane breakdowns would have 
happened only in the Gulf of Guinea or whether they occurred all over 
the Earth.

“We and our colleagues should go out and see this in other areas to 
determine whether this was a local or more global event,” Weldeab said.

In the end, the study presents worrying evidence, but also leaves many 
unresolved questions. And the chain of causes that it posits — Greenland 
melts, oceans shift, newfound heat reaches the African coast thousands 
of miles away, and suddenly methane is mobile — may not play out in the 
same way today, even if it did all happen that way in the past. The 
Eemian is only an analogue — one of the closest we have for where we are 
now heading, but still imperfect.

Still, the newest theory about how the climate dominoes may fall 
underscores what the late Columbia University geoscientist Wallace 
Broecker famously observed as he studied the global ocean currents’ 
response to burning fossil fuels: “The climate system is an angry beast 
and we are poking it with sticks.”
Kasha Patel contributed to this report.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2022/08/24/methane-hydrates-ocean-global-warming/

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/[ PNAS research paper ]/
*Evidence for massive methane hydrate destabilization during the 
penultimate interglacial warming*
Syee Weldeab https://orcid.org/0000-0002-4829-5237 sweldeab at ucsb.edu, 
Ralph R. Schneider https://orcid.org/0000-0003-1453-9181, Jimin Yu 
https://orcid.org/0000-0002-3896-1777, and Andrew Kylander-ClarkAuthors 
Info & Affiliations
Edited by Mark Thiemens, University of California San Diego, La Jolla, 
CA; received February 3, 2022; accepted July 2, 2022
August 22, 2022
119 (35) e2201871119
https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2201871119

    *Abstract*
    The stability of widespread methane hydrates in shallow subsurface
    sediments of the marine continental margins is sensitive to
    temperature increases experienced by upper intermediate waters.
    Destabilization of methane hydrates and ensuing release of methane
    would produce climatic feedbacks amplifying and accelerating global
    warming. Hence, improved assessment of ongoing intermediate water
    warming is crucially important, especially that resulting from a
    weakening of Atlantic meridional overturning circulation (AMOC). Our
    study provides an independent paleoclimatic perspective by
    reconstructing the thermal structure and imprint of methane
    oxidation throughout a water column of 1,300 m. We studied a
    sediment sequence from the eastern equatorial Atlantic (Gulf of
    Guinea), a region containing abundant shallow subsurface methane
    hydrates. We focused on the early part of the penultimate
    interglacial and present a hitherto undocumented and remarkably
    large intermediate water warming of 6.8 °C in response to a brief
    episode of meltwater-induced, modest AMOC weakening centered at
    126,000 to 125,000 y ago. The warming of intermediate waters to
    14 °C significantly exceeds the stability field of methane hydrates.
    In conjunction with this warming, our study reveals an anomalously
    low δ13C spike throughout the entire water column, recorded as
    primary signatures in single and pooled shells of multitaxa
    foraminifers. This extremely negative δ13C excursion was almost
    certainly the result of massive destabilization of methane hydrates.
    This study documents and connects a sequence of climatic events and
    climatic feedback processes associated with and triggered by the
    penultimate climate warming that can serve as a paleoanalog for
    modern ongoing warming.

https://www.pnas.org/doi/full/10.1073/pnas.2201871119

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/[ USGS ]/
*Gas Hydrates Project Home Page*
https://www.usgs.gov/centers/whcmsc/science/gas-hydrates-primer

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*Global Monitoring Laboratory*
Earth System Research Laboratories
Trends in Atmospheric Methane
https://gml.noaa.gov/webdata/ccgg/trends/ch4_trend_all_gl.png
https://gml.noaa.gov/ccgg/trends_ch4/



/[ This is an almost spiritual -- important educational video -- about 
energy ]/
*The Fascinating Truth About Energy With Professor Jim Al-Khalili | 
Order and Disorder | Spark*
Sep 2, 2019  The great 19th-century Austrian physicist, Ludwig Boltzmann 
was one of the most important proponents of the idea that all matter is 
made of atoms.
Today no one doubts this is true but in Boltzmann's day it was a 
controversial idea and many of his contemporaries disagreed with him. 
But Boltzmann used brilliant mathematical arguments to show that many 
aspects of the world we observe, like the behaviour of heat, can be 
explained if one accepts that atoms are real.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aeaQpuYPsy8



/[ aspirational -- but near ]
/*Cheap, high capacity, and fast: New aluminum battery tech promises it all*
John Timmer  --  08/24/2022

Today, a paper is being published that appears to offer a low price 
combined with a big boost in several of those measures. The 
aluminum-sulfur batteries it describes offer low-priced raw materials, 
competitive size, and more capacity per weight than lithium-ion—with the 
big plus of fully charging cells in far less than a minute. The one 
obvious problem it has right now is that it needs to be at 90° C (nearly 
the boiling point of water) to work...
- -
*A few caveats*
There are some notable cautions here. One is that the battery needs to 
be at about 110° C for this sort of performance. With good insulation, 
this only requires a small heater to get things molten; after that, the 
heat generated during charge/discharge cycles should keep things 
working. And, while insulation may add a bit to the bulk of the battery, 
you can get away without the cooling hardware some lithium-ion 
applications require.

The bigger caution is that, with any water contamination of the 
materials, the battery will start producing hydrogen sulfide, which is 
both poisonous and highly flammable. So, while the battery can't catch 
fire like some lithium-ion options, if its contents come in contact with 
the environment, there's a window of time where fire risks are possible 
before the salt cools down and solidifies...
- -
On the plus side of the trade-offs, the charge per volume will likely be 
similar to some existing lithium chemistries, and the raw material costs 
are almost comically low—the researchers calculate under $9 per 
kilowatt-hour, or about 15 percent of lithium-ion. The chemistry's also 
not especially fussy; the researchers picked up aluminum foil from the 
grocery store and found that it worked just fine as an electrode. That 
hints at the possibility that mass production may still be compatible 
with the high performance of these handmade cells.

Finally, the team notes that the simplicity of the chemistry should 
boost the recyclability of the batteries at end-of-life.

None of this is to say that this technology can let us punch a one-way 
ticket to battery nirvana. While a company has already been formed to 
commercialize the tech, there's already a huge infrastructure dedicated 
to lithium-ion battery production, and the tech there is constantly 
improving, too. But if supplies of the raw materials for mainstream 
batteries ever become constrained, it could be very useful to have a 
tech based entirely on abundant chemicals waiting in the wings.
Nature, 2022. DOI: 10.1038/s41586-022-04983-9
https://arstechnica.com/science/2022/08/new-aluminum-sulfur-battery-tech-offers-full-charging-in-under-a-minute/?amp=1/
/



/[The news archive - looking back at carbon corruption and duplicity ]/
/*August 26, 2001*/
August 26, 2001: The Los Angeles Times reports:

    "Throughout February and March, executives representing electricity,
    coal, natural gas and nuclear interests paraded quietly in small
    groups to a building in the White House compound, where the new
    administration's energy policy was being written.

    "Some firms sent emissaries more than once. Enron Corp., which
    trades electricity and natural gas, once got three top officials
    into a private session with Vice President Dick Cheney, who headed
    the energy task force. Cheney did 'a lot of listening,' according to
    a company spokesman.

    "Many of the executives at the White House meetings were generous
    donors to the Republican Party, and some of their key lobbyists were
    freshly hired from the Bush presidential campaign. They found a
    receptive task force. Among its ranks were three former energy
    industry executives and consultants. The task force also included a
    Bush agency head who was involved in the sensitive discussions while
    his wife took in thousands of dollars in fees from three electricity
    producers.

    "The final report, issued May 16, boosted the nation's energy
    industries. It called for additional coal production, and five days
    later the world's largest coal company, Peabody Energy, issued a
    public stock offering, raising about $60 million more than expected.
    While Peabody was preparing to go public, its chief executive and
    vice president participated in a March 1 meeting with Cheney."

http://articles.latimes.com/2001/aug/26/news/mn-38530

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