[✔️] September 20, 2022 - Global Warming News Digest

Tue Sep 20 15:46:07 EDT 2022

/*September 20, 2022*/

/[ NPR says ] /
*Climate change likely helped cause deadly Pakistan floods, scientists find*
September 19, 2022
REBECCA HERSHER...
It is likely that climate change helped drive deadly floods in Pakistan, 
according to a new scientific analysis. The floods killed nearly 1500 
people and displaced more than 30 million, after record-breaking rain in 
August.

The analysis confirms what Pakistan's government has been saying for 
weeks: that the disaster was clearly driven by global warming. Pakistan 
experienced its wettest August since the country began keeping detailed 
national weather records in 1961. The provinces that were hardest hit by 
floods received up to eight times more rain than usual, according to the 
Pakistan Meteorological Department.
- -
For example, while it's clear that intense rain will keep increasing as 
the Earth heats up, climate models also suggest that overall monsoon 
rains will be less reliable. That would cause cycles of both drought and 
flooding in Pakistan and neighboring countries in the future.

Such climate whiplash has already damaged crops and killed people across 
southeast Asia in recent years, and led to a water crisis in Chennai, 
India in 2019.

The new analysis also makes clear that human caused climate change was 
not the only driver of Pakistan's deadly floods. Scientists point out 
that millions of people live in flood-prone areas with outdated drainage 
in provinces where the flooding was most severe. Upgrading drainage, 
moving homes and reinforcing bridges and roads would all help prevent 
such catastrophic damage in the future.
https://www.npr.org/2022/09/19/1123798981/climate-change-likely-helped-cause-deadly-pakistan-floods-scientists-find

/[ Text of innovation necessary in energy storage - simple design ]/
*"Brick toaster" aims to cut global CO2 output by 15% in 15 years. 
Seriously.*
By Loz Blain
September 15, 2022
Industrial heat consumes a huge proportion of global energy. Rondo 
Energy says its brick-toasting heat storage device is so cheap and 
efficient that it makes decarbonization an instant no-brainer across a 
huge range of industries. Bill Gates agrees.
A quarter of humanity's carbon emissions come from industrial energy use 
– and a huge portion of that energy goes into creating heat for various 
processes. And right there lies a slam-dunk decarbonization opportunity 
that'll pay for itself incredibly quickly, reasons Oakland company Rondo 
Energy...
- -
The first generation of Rondo brick toasters are optimized for low cost, 
super-fast deployment and scale, and are capable of holding heat up to 
1,500 °C (2,732 °F), which O'Donnell says can cover approximately 80% of 
industrial heat requirements globally. Down the track, using more 
expensive heaters and brick materials chosen for the purpose, he says 
it's possible to hit 1,800 °C (3,272 °F) or so, which brings steelmaking 
into range, and would cover somewhere around 92% of industrial use cases.

"The couple of years of science and investigation are behind us, and we 
are right now making the journey from the labs, through late-stage 
prototypes, to our first customer installations this year with a goal of 
being at very large scale next year in the year beyond," said O'Donnell. 
"And we're looking very hard at the project finance community and the 
pathways that enable scaling the fastest."

Rondo's first customers, he says, have zero interest in being "green" or 
advertising their decision. They're in this for the bottom line, taking 
advantage of the arbitrage opportunity that intermittent clean energy 
presents. And right now, it's a hell of an arbitrage opportunity. 
"Today, electricity through a Rondo unit driving an industrial process 
in Saudi Arabia is one half the cost of oil-fired heat... straight up 
economics, solar PPA prices vs fuel prices," he said...
- -
On the other hand, arbitrage only works where a supply/demand imbalance 
exists. If Rondo's idea kicks off at large scale, industrial demand for 
intermittent renewable energy could skyrocket, turning price dynamics 
upside down. But O'Donnell says this works out to be a good thing. An 
entirely new sector coming from fossil fuels into the electricity 
market, offering to buy enormous amounts of power exactly when the rest 
of the grid doesn't want it? "This is a class of load that will make new 
renewable projects more profitable," he says. "And for industrials, it's 
a chance to lock in long-term energy supply costs, where today they have 
to be price takers."
- -
https://newatlas.com/energy/rondo-heat-battery-brick-toaster/

- -

/[ interview with a radical capitalist  - audio ]/
*Decarbonizing Industrial Heat - John O'Donnell, CEO and Founder , Rondo 
Energy*
According to the IEA, heat is the world’s largest energy end use, 
accounting for almost half of global final energy consumption in 2021, 
significantly more than electricity (20%) and transport (30%). Of that, 
industrial processes are responsible for 51% of the energy consumed.
In this episode, co-hosts Thomas Obermeier and Ellie McDonald sit down 
with John O'Donnell, founder and CEO of Rondo Energy, which is seeking 
to provide low-cost zero-carbon industrial heat through its Rondo Heat 
Battery. We discuss why industrial heat has historically been seen as a 
hard to decarbonize industry, how Rondo is seeking to change that by 
deploying its Heat Battery, and how its product differs from other 
energy storage technologies.
https://open.spotify.com/episode/6pa4JtmrwkGlCYMWYhLwfd?si=7eae62d15fd8446f&nd=1

/[  The structure of the academic paper allows a relatively safe 
examination of this very difficult subject ]/

*Climate Endgame: Exploring catastrophic climate change scenarios...*
Edited by Kerry Emanuel, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 
Cambridge, MA; received May 20, 2021; accepted March 25, 2022
August 1, 2022
119 (34) e2108146119
https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2108146119
*Abstract*
Prudent risk management requires consideration of bad-to-worst-case 
scenarios. Yet, for climate change, such potential futures are poorly 
understood. Could anthropogenic climate change result in worldwide 
societal collapse or even eventual human extinction? At present, this is 
a dangerously underexplored topic. Yet there are ample reasons to 
suspect that climate change could result in a global catastrophe. 
Analyzing the mechanisms for these extreme consequences could help 
galvanize action, improve resilience, and inform policy, including 
emergency responses. We outline current knowledge about the likelihood 
of extreme climate change, discuss why understanding bad-to-worst cases 
is vital, articulate reasons for concern about catastrophic outcomes, 
define key terms, and put forward a research agenda. The proposed agenda 
covers four main questions: 1) What is the potential for climate change 
to drive mass extinction events? 2) What are the mechanisms that could 
result in human mass mortality and morbidity? 3) What are human 
societies' vulnerabilities to climate-triggered risk cascades, such as 
from conflict, political instability, and systemic financial risk? 4) 
How can these multiple strands of evidence—together with other global 
dangers—be usefully synthesized into an “integrated catastrophe 
assessment”? It is time for the scientific community to grapple with the 
challenge of better understanding catastrophic climate change...
- -
*Conclusions*
There is ample evidence that climate change could become catastrophic. 
We could enter such “endgames” at even modest levels of warming. 
Understanding extreme risks is important for robust decision-making, 
from preparation to consideration of emergency responses. This requires 
exploring not just higher temperature scenarios but also the potential 
for climate change impacts to contribute to systemic risk and other 
cascades. We suggest that it is time to seriously scrutinize the best 
way to expand our research horizons to cover this field. The proposed 
“Climate Endgame” research agenda provides one way to navigate this 
under-studied area. Facing a future of accelerating climate change while 
blind to worst-case scenarios is naive risk management at best and 
fatally foolish at worst.
https://www.pnas.org/doi/abs/10.1073/pnas.2108146119

/[The news archive - looking back]/
/*September 20, 2013*/
September 20, 2013: The Obama administration proposes new EPA 
regulations intended to reduce carbon dioxide emissions from new power 
plants in the US.

http://america.aljazeera.com/articles/2013/9/13/epa-to-announce-carbonlimitsonnewpowerplants.html

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