[✔️] March 15, 2024 Global Warming News | Old Electric lines Texas fire, Hellacious hail, New sandy beach lasted 3 days, American resiliency, Oceans gone, 2012 Rachael meets Inofe

Fri Mar 15 15:39:59 EDT 2024

/*March*//*15, 2024*/

/[ danger of decrepitude  - NPR listen or read ]/
*Old power lines plus climate change mean a growing risk of utilities 
starting fires*
MARCH 12, 20246:23 AM ET
By Julia Simon
A power pole "that appeared to be decayed at the base."

That's what Texas state investigators now say appears to have fallen and 
caused the largest wildfire in the state's history. The electric utility 
- Xcel Energy - said in a statement that "its facilities appear to have 
been involved in an ignition of the Smokehouse Creek fire."

The U.S. is brimming with aging power infrastructure. Many of the 
nation's power lines were built 60 to 70 years ago, says Rob Gramlich, 
president of consulting firm Grid Strategies. "Old, literally rusted 
assets," he says.

Many utilities don't have the technology to know when power lines are 
overheating or sagging, potentially onto brush or trees, he says. These 
things spark fires...
- -
And now those old power lines are coming into contact with the growing 
impacts of human-caused global warming. Drier vegetation and hotter 
weather caused by climate change can fuel larger, more intense wildfires.
Climate change has brought fire risk to unexpected places, like 
Louisiana's wetlands and Maui, where high winds downing utility power 
lines are under investigation for causing catastrophic fires. Utilities 
are waking up to the threat of fire in new places and new times of the 
year, says Scott Aaronson, senior vice president of security and 
preparedness at the Edison Electric Institute, the leading trade group 
for investor-owned utilities.

"This is not normal," Aaronson says. "There's not a single 
investor-owned electric company that does not have fire risk on their 
list of things that they are concerned about."

But not all these power companies are prepared, says Michael Wara, 
director of the Climate and Energy Policy Program at the Woods Institute 
for the Environment at Stanford University. He says his research in the 
West finds too few utilities are adopting simple solutions that greatly 
reduce the chance of igniting a wildfire.

"There are some utilities that are really leaders and are getting ahead 
of the risk," Wara says. "And then there are others that we look at and 
think are walking into a catastrophe."
- -
Whether utilities dedicate necessary resources to wildfire prevention 
will not just affect Americans' safety, but also the affordability of 
electric bills across the country, Wara says. He notes some utility 
investors see growing financial risk because of increased wildfires.

"We cannot afford – literally, in terms of our pocketbooks – to have 
utilities be perceived by their investors as high risk," Wara says. 
"There is a set of practices that utilities can take that do not cost an 
arm and a leg that can dramatically cut the risk of outcomes like we saw 
in Texas."
https://www.npr.org/2024/03/12/1237063598/texas-fire-xcel-energy-climate-change-utility-power-lines

/[ Hellacious Hail Storm - brief video - baseball size ]/
*The worst hailstorm in history brings China to its knees! Natural disaster*
Painful Earth Shorts
  Mar 14, 2024  КИТАЙ
The worst hailstorm in history brings China to its knees! Natural disaster

In Guizhou, China, a storm of incredible intensity accompanied by 
massive hailstones wreaked havoc.
The hail, reportedly as large as big apples, shattered 850 houses and 
several thousand vehicles, causing chaos among the residents.
Emergency services rushed to the affected areas to assess the damage and 
provide assistance to those affected by the calamity.
Residents are grappling with the aftermath, as the storm's ferocity left 
streets littered with debris and shattered glass.
Authorities are urging residents to remain cautious as they work to 
restore normalcy in the wake of this unprecedented storm event.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=czVdIL3MSSM

/[ Hubris humor or Lessons not learned will be repeated.  Even for 
Massachusetts ]/
*Swept away: $500,000 sand dune built to protect US homes disappears in 
days*
Property owners dumped 15,000 tons of sand in a Massachusetts town to 
fend off dangerous tides, but it was swept away in 72 hours
Erum Salam
Wed 13 Mar 2024
A sand dune that cost homeowners on a Massachusetts beach more than half 
a million dollars to construct has washed away after just three days.

An affluent group of beachfront property owners in Salisbury, 
Massachusetts – a coastal town 35 miles north of Boston – are mourning 
the loss of their investment after a safety measure they took to protect 
their homes faile
The dune, made of 15,000 tons of sand, was meant to keep dangerous tides 
from encroaching on to the shore and damaging beach houses. The dune had 
just been completed in February but was gone within 72 hours.

Salisbury Beach Citizens for Change, the volunteer organization behind 
the dune project, said on Facebook that even though the expensive 
protection mechanism was destroyed within days, “the sacrificial dunes 
did their job”, arguing that much more could have been destroyed were it 
not for the presence of the dune.

As oceans around the world get warmer, sea levels rise due to thermal 
expansion and weather patterns get more extreme, boosting coastal erosion.

Salisbury has suffered from rising sea levels, stronger winds and severe 
storms in recent months, including two in January, that have battered 
the area.

Digital meteorologist Jonathan Belles of the Weather Channel said: “From 
nor’easters to hurricanes, Salisbury gets touched by several large 
storms each year.”

“Their proximity to the Atlantic Ocean gives them a source of moisture 
and their northern latitude also firmly places them under the powerful 
jet stream during much of the year,” Belles said. “The town is also 
affected by coastal flooding pushed ashore by storms out in the Atlantic.”

Now, the homeowners have asked the state to step in and provide assistance.
*Local news outlet Fox59 reported that the Republican state senator 
Bruce Tarr was working to secure $1.5m in state funding to replenish the 
sand.*

Tarr, noting that a more permanent seawall was not an option because 
hard structures like these are not allowed on Massachusetts beaches, 
said: “We’re managing a natural resource that protects a lot of interests.”
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/mar/13/sand-dune-tide-beach-house-massachusetts

/[   Surprise, surprise!  Yikes! ]/
*Time To Get Weird: Bad Ocean News*
American Resiliency
Mar 14, 2024
Folks, it's time for an earth systems health check, and I don't like 
what I see.  You know I don't like freaking people out, but it's 
important to keep our eyes open, and I think there's stuff worth looking 
at as you think about how you want to spend your time. Particularly as 
we investigate a viewer question about the North Pacific Gyre.  Have you 
heard of that?  I hadn't.  Let's take a look.

Observational Tools:
https://climatereanalyzer.org/clim/sst_daily/
https://zacklabe.com/arctic-sea-ice-extentconcentration/

Paper for This Video:
https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1029/2021GL092911
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1yIEyigxUVw

/[ Oh just accept it.  ]/
*The Oceans We Knew Are Already Gone*
As far as humanity is concerned, the transformation of our seas is 
“effectively permanent.”
By Marina Koren
Even after nearly three months of winter, the oceans of the Northern 
Hemisphere are disturbingly warm. Last summer’s unprecedented 
temperatures—remember the “hot tub” waters off the coast of 
Florida?—have simmered down to a sea-surface average around 68 degrees 
Fahrenheit in the North Atlantic, but even that is unprecedented for 
this time of year. The alarming trend stretches around the world: 41 
percent of the global ocean experienced heat waves in January. The 
temperatures are also part of a decades-long hot streak in the oceans. 
“What we used to consider extreme is no longer an extreme today,” Dillon 
Amaya, a research scientist at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric 
Administration’s Physical Sciences Laboratory, told me...
- --
The idea of that permanence is chilling. Humanity’s tenure on Earth may 
be but a blink in our planet’s history, and yet we have made a certain 
cosmic choice that will affect the course of the universe. As I’ve 
written before, Earth has the only good oceans that we know of, despite 
the fact that the cosmos is excellent at forging new planets around 
faraway suns. Just this week, scientists released telescope observations 
of dozens of stars surrounded by swirling disks of gas and dust, the 
stuff that can eventually coalesce into whole worlds.

Perhaps there are many other Earths out there, and their inhabitants 
have, like us, altered them. Usually, when scientists and writers 
imagine such modifications, they envision planet-enveloping Dyson 
spheres to harness solar energy, or some other megastructure meant to 
support the hum of life—something that signals a more enlightened and 
seamless existence. Humans are certainly creating impressive, 
life-sustaining technologies. But it seems possible that our most 
lasting cosmic mark will instead make things more difficult for our 
oceans, the beings within, and ourselves.
https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2024/03/ocean-heat-wave-cosmic-choice/677672/

/[The news archive -  Inhofe interviewed by Rachel Maddow - see all 
three about the Senate's top propagandist of that era ]/
/*March 15,  2012 */
March 15, 2012: MSNBC's Rachel Maddow interviews Senator James Inhofe 
about his bizarre insistence that climate change is some sort of hoax.
http://youtu.be/Nrwem8waEx8  (Part 1)
http://youtu.be/TdaZ5zIWB-M  (Part 2)
http://youtu.be/9kbxIa4LGUs  (Part 3)

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