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<p><i><font size="+1"><b>April 24, 2021</b></font></i></p>
[Minnesota and Texas]<br>
<b>Minnesotans furious that they have to pay for Texas’ deep-freeze
problems</b><br>
Natural gas prices surged across the country during Texas’ February
freeze.<br>
TIM DE CHANT - 4/23/2021<br>
- -<br>
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.<br>
- - <br>
The company appears to be planning similar requests in Arkansas and
Oklahoma.<br>
<br>
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.<br>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2021/04/houston-based-utility-wants-minnesotans-to-pay-for-texas-deep-freeze-problems/">https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2021/04/houston-based-utility-wants-minnesotans-to-pay-for-texas-deep-freeze-problems/</a><br>
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[Fire fighters lose fire flight]<br>
<b>The 747 Supertanker shuts down</b><br>
Bill Gabbert<br>
The company told government officials it is going to cease
operations<br>
The 747 Supertanker shuts down<br>
AuthorBill GabbertPosted onApril 23,
2021CategoriesUncategorizedTags747, 747 air tanker<br>
The company told government officials it is going to cease
operations...<br>
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:<br>
<br>
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...<br>
- -<br>
Opinion of a Lead Plane Pilot<br>
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:<br>
<br>
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.<br>
<br>
I asked him about the retardant that sometimes trails off after a
drop:<br>
<br>
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...<br>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="https://fireaviation.com/2021/04/23/the-747-supertanker-is-ceasing-operations/">https://fireaviation.com/2021/04/23/the-747-supertanker-is-ceasing-operations/</a><br>
<br>
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[no water]<br>
<b>Why the intense U.S. drought is now a megadrought</b><br>
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.)<br>
<br>
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. <br>
<br>
"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...<br>
- -<br>
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. <br>
<br>
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."<br>
<br>
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.<br>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="https://mashable.com/article/drought-us-southwest-megadrought/">https://mashable.com/article/drought-us-southwest-megadrought/</a><br>
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[Sarcastic video attacking Australia for a stupid Electric Vehicle
policy]<br>
<b>Honest Government Ad | Electric Vehicles</b><br>
Apr 23, 2021<br>
thejuicemedia<br>
The Australian Government has made an ad about its Electric Vehicle
policy, and it's surprisingly honest and informative.<br>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fLflYkgnNBY">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fLflYkgnNBY</a><br>
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[Some prefer denial]<br>
Capitol Weather Gang<br>
<b>Don’t ask officials what they think of global warming — ask if
they want a warning</b><br>
By Dale Durran<br>
April 23, 2021<br>
<br>
“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?”<br>
<br>
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.<br>
<br>
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?”<br>
<br>
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.<br>
<br>
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.<br>
<br>
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.<br>
<br>
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.<br>
<br>
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.<br>
<br>
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.<br>
<br>
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.<br>
<br>
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.<br>
<br>
The question for those of us planning for the future is: Do we want
any warning?<br>
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.<br>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/weather/2021/04/23/global-warming-warning/">https://www.washingtonpost.com/weather/2021/04/23/global-warming-warning/</a><br>
<p>- -</p>
[By the author]<br>
<b>Numerical Methods for Fluid Dynamics</b><br>
<b>With Applications to Geophysics</b><br>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="https://www.google.com/books/edition/Numerical_Methods_for_Fluid_Dynamics/ThMZrEOTuuUC?hl=en&gbpv=1&printsec=frontcover">https://www.google.com/books/edition/Numerical_Methods_for_Fluid_Dynamics/ThMZrEOTuuUC?hl=en&gbpv=1&printsec=frontcover</a>
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[between a Mom in Congress & Oil Lobbyist - notice the
difference in their offices]<br>
<b>Katie Porter RIPS Big Oil lobbyist during hearing on fossil fuel
subsidies</b><br>
Apr 22, 2021<br>
The Hill<br>
Rep. Katie Porter ripped a Big Oil lobbyist during a hearing on
fossil fuel subisidies.<br>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vxj78z4EVd4">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vxj78z4EVd4</a><br>
<br>
<p><br>
</p>
[Tilt-a-whirl]<br>
<b>Climate change has altered the Earth's tilt</b><br>
By Meghan Bartels 12 hours ago<br>
Human activity is literally moving Earth's poles.<br>
<br>
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.<br>
<br>
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.<br>
<br>
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.<br>
<br>
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.<br>
<br>
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.<br>
<br>
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.<br>
<br>
The research is described in a paper that was published last month
in the journal Geophysical Research Letters.<br>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="https://www.space.com/climate-change-tilting-earth-axis">https://www.space.com/climate-change-tilting-earth-axis</a><br>
- -<br>
[AGU Geophysical Research Letters]<br>
<b>Polar Drift in the 1990s Explained by Terrestrial Water Storage
Changes</b><br>
S. Deng S. Liu X. Mo L. Jiang P. Bauer‐Gottwein<br>
First published: 22 March 2021<br>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="https://doi.org/10.1029/2020GL092114">https://doi.org/10.1029/2020GL092114</a><br>
<b>Abstract</b><br>
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.<br>
<br>
<b>Plain Language Summary</b><br>
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.<br>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1029/2020GL092114">https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1029/2020GL092114</a><br>
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[Greenman Sinclair]<br>
<b>If Not Clean Energy, What?</b><br>
Apr 23, 2021<br>
greenmanbucket<br>
If not Clean energy, then what?<br>
The Fossil Fuel lobby has a plan for Michigan...<br>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e0MjXIxChvM">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e0MjXIxChvM</a><br>
<p><br>
</p>
<br>
[Digging back into the internet news archive]<br>
<font size="+1"><b>On this day in the history of global warming -
April 24, 2007 </b></font><br>
<p>PBS airs "Hot Politics," a "Frontline" special about the
extensive efforts of the fossil fuel lobby to frustrate efforts to
combat carbon pollution.<br>
<br>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/hotpolitics/">http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/hotpolitics/</a><br>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="http://www.climatesciencewatch.org/2007/04/26/hot-politicspbs-frontline-program-and-extended-interviews-online/">http://www.climatesciencewatch.org/2007/04/26/hot-politicspbs-frontline-program-and-extended-interviews-online/</a><br>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/hotpolitics/interviews/">http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/hotpolitics/interviews/</a><br>
</p>
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