human actions, global climate change, global human solutions by 1kiki

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

Many plans that are eating up money are fueled by wishful thinking rather than by rational thought. Let’s have a look.

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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Thursday, May 16, 2024 7:40 AM

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

The Federal Aviation Administration reauthorization bill approved Wednesday by the U.S. House of Representatives includes language allowing Boeing an extra five years to produce 767 freighters for FedEx and UPS beyond the date when international standards mandating cleaner engine types kick in.

The bill gives Boeing (NYSE: BA) a bridge, in case the express carriers need extra capacity, until it can develop a new freighter next decade. Multiple industry sources familiar with the process said FedEx (NYSE: FDX) and UPS (NYSE: UPS), via surrogates, joined Boeing in lobbying Congress for a reprieve from the Jan. 1, 2028, production deadline. The legislation previously passed the Senate and will be sent to President Joe Biden to sign into law.

At face value, a split from international consensus would limit operation of freighters produced between 2028 and 2033 to the domestic U.S. market, but it’s possible some countries could permit access, according to experts. Freighters delivered before the end of 2027 aren’t covered by the enhanced carbon emission rules and won’t face any restrictions.

Under International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO) agreements, commercial aircraft manufacturers effectively can’t sell aircraft that don’t meet the 2028 carbon emissions standards. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency adopted the fuel efficiency standard in 2021 with the FAA following suit in February.

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/congress-exempts-boeing-767-freighter-1
92439771.html

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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Sunday, May 19, 2024 7:21 AM

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

Thorium reactors, designed by Copenhagen Atomics for mass manufacturing on assembly lines, could potentially offer the world's cheapest energy

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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Thursday, May 23, 2024 6:00 AM

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

UK breakthrough could slash emissions from cement – May 22, 2024

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cxee01m5yero

Scientists say they've found a way to recycle cement from demolished concrete buildings.

Cement is the modern world's most common construction material, but it is also a huge source of planet-warming gas emissions.

That is because of the chemical reactions when you heat limestone to high temperatures by burning fossil fuels.

Recycling cement would massively reduce its carbon footprint. Researchers say that if they switched to electric-powered furnaces, and used renewable energy like wind and solar rather than fossil fuels, that could mean no greenhouse gases would be released at all.

And that would be a big deal. Cement forms the foundation of the modern economy, both literally and metaphorically.

It is what binds the sand and aggregate in concrete together, and concrete is the most widely used material on the planet after water.

It is also a major driver of climate change. If cement was a country, it would be the third biggest source of emissions after China and the US, responsible for 7.5% of human-made CO2.

The problem is the material’s uniquely polluting chemistry.

It is made by heating limestone to up 1600 Celsius in giant kilns powered by fossil fuels.

Those emissions are just the start. The heat is used to drive carbon dioxide from the limestone, leaving a residue of cement.

Add both these sources of pollution together and it is estimated that about a tonne of carbon dioxide is produced for every tonne of cement.

The team of scientists, from Cambridge University, has found a neat way to sidestep those emissions.

It exploits the fact that you can reactivate used cement by exposing it to high temperatures again.

The chemistry is well-established, and it has been done at scale in cement kilns.

The breakthrough is to prove it can be done by piggybacking on the heat generated by another heavy industry – steel recycling.

When you recycle steel, you add chemicals that float on the surface of the molten metal to prevent it reacting with the air and creating impurities. This is known as slag.

The Cambridge team spotted the composition of used cement is almost exactly the same as the slag used in electric arc furnaces.

They have been trialling the process at a small-scale electric arc furnace at the Materials Processing Institute in Middlesbrough.

The BBC was present when the first high grade, or “Portland”, cement was produced.

They are calling it “electric cement” and described the event as a world first.

The lead scientist, Cyrille Dunant, told the BBC it could enable the production of zero-carbon cement.

“We have shown the high temperatures in the furnace reactivate the old cement and because electric arc furnaces use electricity they can be powered by renewable power, so the entire cement making process is decarbonised.,” he said.

He said it also makes steel recycling less polluting because making the chemicals currently used as slag has a high carbon cost too.

Mark Miodownik, Professor of Materials and Society at University College London, described the way the Cambridge team have combined cement and steel recycling as “genius” and believes, if it can be made to work profitably at scale, it could lead to huge reductions in emissions.

“Can it compete against the existing infrastructure that is very unsustainably going to keep pumping cement into our lives”, he asks.

“Cement is already a billion-dollar industry. It’s David and Goliath we are talking about here.”

The hope is electric cement will be cheaper to manufacture because it uses what is essentially waste heat from the steel recycling process.

Spanish company Celsa will attempt to replicate the process in its full-scale electric arc furnace in Cardiff this week.

The Cambridge team estimate, given current rates of steel recycling, their low carbon cement could produce as much as a quarter of UK demand.

But the use of electric arc furnaces is expected to increase in the future, potentially allowing more “electric cement” to be produced.

And, of course, the process could be duplicated all over the world, potentially cutting the emissions from cement dramatically.

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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Thursday, May 23, 2024 6:01 AM

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

Two new studies reveal signs of fundamental climate shifts in Antarctica

A steep decline of Antarctic sea ice may mark a long-term transformation in the Southern Ocean, and seawater intrusions beneath the Thwaites Glacier could explain its melting outpacing projections.

By Bob Berwyn | May 20, 2024

https://insideclimatenews.org/news/20052024/antarctica-fundamental-cli
mate-shifts-studies/

Antarctica’s vast ice fields and the floating sea ice surrounding the continent are Earth’s biggest heat shields, bouncing solar radiation away from the planet, but two studies released today show how global warming is encroaching even on the sunlight reflector in the coldest region on the planet.

Research by scientists with the British Antarctic Survey focused on last year’s dizzying sea ice decline. During the austral winter of 2023, Antarctic sea ice extent was about 770,000 square miles below average, an area bigger than Alaska.

Lead author Rachel Diamond said the modeling study showed that such an extreme decline would be a one-in-2,000-years event without climate change, “which tells us that the event was very extreme,” she said. “Anything less than one-in-100 is considered exceptionally unlikely.”

In a separate paper, another team of scientists documented how strong tides push seawater surprisingly far beneath the tongue of the Thwaites Glacier in West Antarctica, reinforcing concerns about the glacier’s melt speeding up and adding to sea level rise.

“Pressurized seawater intrusions will induce vigorous melt of grounded ice over kilometers, making the glacier more vulnerable to ocean warming, and increasing the projections of ice mass loss,” the authors wrote in the paper, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

“The worry is that we are underestimating the speed that the glacier is changing, which would be devastating for coastal communities around the world,” said coauthor Christine Dow, professor in the Faculty of Environment at the University of Waterloo in Ontario, Canada.

More at https://insideclimatenews.org/news/20052024/antarctica-fundamental-cli
mate-shifts-studies/

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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Friday, May 24, 2024 7:07 AM

'Boiling not warming': Marine life suffers as Thai sea temperatures hit record
https://www.reuters.com/business/environment/boiling-not-warming-marin
e-life-suffers-thai-sea-temperatures-hit-record-2024-05-23/

In a first, scientists precisely control thorium nuclei with lasers
https://interestingengineering.com/innovation/laser-controlled-atomic-
nuclei-breakthrough

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Friday, May 24, 2024 3:31 PM

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

Economic damage from climate change six times worse than thought

A 1C increase in global temperature leads to a 12% decline in world gross domestic product (GDP), the researchers found, a far higher estimate than that of previous analyses. The world has already warmed by more than 1C (1.8F) since pre-industrial times and many climate scientists predict a 3C (5.4F) rise will occur by the end of this century due to the ongoing burning of fossil fuels, a scenario that the new working paper, yet to be peer-reviewed, states will come with an enormous economic cost. https://www.nber.org/papers/w32450

A 3C temperature increase will cause “precipitous declines in output, capital and consumption that exceed 50% by 2100” the paper states.

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/article/2024/may/17/economic-d
amage-climate-change-report

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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Saturday, May 25, 2024 8:05 AM

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

Electricity production from renewable sources increased by 11.4% y-o-y at 320.0 TWh in February 2024.

Electricity generation from fossil fuels amounted to 397.3 TWh in February 2024, exhibiting a decline of 5.2% (equivalent to 21.8 TWh) compared to February 2023. The reduction is largely driven by lower electricity output from coal. Use of coal experienced an 8.3% year-on-year decrease, followed by gas with a decrease of 3.3% year-on-year. The decrease in coal-fired electricity generation was evident across all OECD regions, with OECD Europe experiencing the most significant decline at 20.3% year-on-year, followed by OECD Asia Oceania at 4.0% year-on-year and the OECD Americas at 3.3% year-on-year. The drop in natural gas electricity production was observed in OECD Europe (-26.4% y-o-y) and OECD Asia Oceania (-3.5% y-o-y), whereas the OECD Americas witnessed a 5.9% y-o-y increase. Overall, fossil fuels accounted for 45.7% of the electricity mix.

https://angrybearblog.com/2024/05/iea-global-electricity-statistics-an
alysis-february-2024

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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Tuesday, May 28, 2024 7:37 AM

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

The White House on Tuesday will announce steps to modernize a major roadblock to the clean energy transformation: America’s aging electrical infrastructure.

The new initiative between the feds and 21 states aims to make faster fixes and improvements to the grid, committing to build a bigger and more modern grid as part of a larger effort to reduce power outages and increase electrical transmission capacity – a massive hurdle to getting more clean energy on the grid and reducing the planet-warming pollution causing the climate crisis.

https://www.cnn.com/2024/05/28/climate/energy-grid-modernization-biden
/index.html

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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Wednesday, May 29, 2024 12:48 PM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.

Quote:
Originally posted by second:
The White House on Tuesday will announce steps to modernize a major roadblock to the clean energy transformation: America’s aging electrical infrastructure.

The new initiative between the feds and 21 states aims to make faster fixes and improvements to the grid, committing to build a bigger and more modern grid as part of a larger effort to reduce power outages and increase electrical transmission capacity – a massive hurdle to getting more clean energy on the grid and reducing the planet-warming pollution causing the climate crisis.

https://www.cnn.com/2024/05/28/climate/energy-grid-modernization-biden
/index.html

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

Wait.

Wasn't $7 billion just spent on improving EV charging?

Just in general, if we'll be facing hotter and more extreme weather, we SHOULD be upgrading our grid, making it easier to shuttle electricity from one region to another, more efficient (less line losses) and safer, more resilient to storms and able to isolate outages quickly.

Starting with EV charging stations ... and spending about a billion dollars on each location ... seems bass akwards. But I'll bet SOMEBODY made a metric crap ton of money!

So, when is DC gonna get off their various hobby- horses and pork- barrel "solutions" to global climate change, and get serious about this?

Or are they gonna keep spending hundreds of billions on wars of choice?

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"It may be dangerous to be America's enemy, but to be America's friend is fatal." - Henry Kissinger

Why SECOND'S posts are brainless: "I clocked how much time: no more than 10 minutes per day. With cut-and-paste (Ctrl C and Ctrl V) and AI, none of this takes much time."
Or, any verification or thought.

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Wednesday, May 29, 2024 12:52 PM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.

Quote:
Delhi records record high temperature of nearly 50C
A heatwave sweeping India with temps of over 120 degrees Fahrenheit has resulted in lower voter turnouts for its ongoing election

https://www.rt.com/india/598377-delhi-records-record-high-temperature/

And it's not even full summer yet.

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"It may be dangerous to be America's enemy, but to be America's friend is fatal." - Henry Kissinger

Why SECOND'S posts are brainless: "I clocked how much time: no more than 10 minutes per day. With cut-and-paste (Ctrl C and Ctrl V) and AI, none of this takes much time."
Or, any verification or thought.

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Monday, June 3, 2024 8:20 AM

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

Are electric cars better for the environment than fuel-powered cars? Here's the verdict from Australia

By Jo Lauder | Mon 27 May 2024 at 10:06pm

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-05-27/comparing-electric-cars-and-pet
rol-cars/103746132

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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Monday, June 3, 2024 8:32 AM

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:

Or are they gonna keep spending hundreds of billions on wars of choice?

How much has the USA spent on nukes and delivery vehicles and preparation for all-out war, without any achievements since Aug 6, 1945 – Aug 9, 1945? About $34 trillion (adjusted for inflation and including the time cost of money) which is approximately the size of the National Debt. This year's "defense" budget plus the Veterans Administration budget ($369.3 billion) will be over $1 trillion.
https://www.google.com/search?q=How+much+has+the+USA+spent+on+nukes

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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Friday, June 7, 2024 7:56 AM

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

Bill Gates has recently been under fire following an interview in which he said that planting trees won’t save us from climate change. Is he right? Is this just another quote taken out of context? What does the science say? Let’s have a look.

The global tree restoration potential
https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.aax0848

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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Friday, June 7, 2024 8:50 AM

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

During a year of extremes, carbon dioxide levels surge faster than ever

The two-year increase in Keeling Curve peak is the largest on record

June 6, 2024

Carbon dioxide is accumulating in the atmosphere faster than ever — accelerating on a steep rise to levels far above any experienced during human existence, scientists from NOAA and the Scripps Institution of Oceanography at the University of California San Diego announced today.

“Not only is CO2 now at the highest level in millions of years, it is also rising faster than ever,” said Keeling. “Each year achieves a higher maximum due to fossil-fuel burning, which releases pollution in the form of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. Fossil fuel pollution just keeps building up, much like trash in a landfill.”

https://www.noaa.gov/news-release/during-year-of-extremes-carbon-dioxi
de-levels-surge-faster-than-ever

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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Tuesday, June 11, 2024 5:55 PM

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

After 30 years, chlorofluorocarbon ban finally starts working

By Kevin Drum | June 11, 2024 – 2:32 pm

https://jabberwocking.com/after-30-years-chlorofluorocarbon-ban-finall
y-starts-working/

Here's a remarkable image:

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41558-024-02038-7

In 1987 we signed the Montreal Protocol to ban CFCs, which were producing a hole in the ozone layer. In 1992 the ban was extended to HCFCs. Both of these are powerful greenhouse gases that trap sunlight and contribute to global warming. The amount of warming they cause is called "radiative forcing."

It took until 2021, a third of a century later, to start reducing the radiative forcing of HCFCs in the atmosphere. That's a combination of how long it took to actually get rid of HCFCs and how long it took for existing HCFCs to start breaking down.

A third of a century. And carbon dioxide, the primary cause of global warming, takes much longer to break down than HCFCs. This is why addressing climate change is so urgent. Even if we banned carbon emissions tomorrow, the earth would continue to warm for decades. And we're not anywhere close to banning carbon emissions.

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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Saturday, June 15, 2024 6:29 AM

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

A Wild Plan to Avert Catastrophic Sea-Level Rise

The collapse of Antarctica’s ice sheets would be disastrous. A group of scientists has an idea to save them.

By Ross Andersen | June 12, 2024

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2024/07/nasa-nisar-missio
n-glaciers-sea-ice-thwaites/678522/

Many polar science projects are held together by duct tape and the grit of people like Truffer, who spend long months in the field away from their families. But ice preservation on Antarctica wouldn’t be an ordinary science project. If a consortium of governments became convinced that Thwaites glacier could be saved, and that trillions of dollars of flooding damage could be avoided, they might treat the project more like a military mobilization or mass vaccine deployment. By those standards, the many billions of dollars you might need—especially if the glacier had to be drilled and pumped continually, across many years—really isn’t that much money. Truffer remains skeptical of Tulaczyk’s project, but he said it would be much more imaginable if it were backed by those kinds of resources.

That’s really conceivable only in an asteroid-headed-for-Earth scenario where glaciologists are in total agreement that the loss of Thwaites is imminent. Funding, in that case, would be the easy part. Getting permission from Russia, China, and dozens of other parties to the Antarctic Treaty would likely be harder. Building an international consensus, manufacturing the equipment, and setting it up on Antarctica could take decades. Testing will certainly take decades.

In the meantime, the world’s ice will continue to dissolve. Even if we were to halt emissions immediately and entirely, we could still lose major glaciers at both poles within a century. We can see them fragmenting now, in real time. On my last night in Ilulissat, I went back to the fjord on a small icebreaker. As we moved through the pewter water, the thin sea ice beneath us fractured into every imaginable polygon. From the hills above, the icebergs had all seemed still and sculptural. Up close, it was easier to see that they were in flux. Meltwater glittered along their edges, and they were all drifting ever so subtly. One by one, they would soon head out to sea. If we want to keep our ice sheets and shores where they are, Tulaczyk’s idea may help. Maybe it will work all by itself, or in combination with other ice-control schemes. Or maybe all of these ideas are destined to fail. Either way, we should find out.
----------

Slawek Tulaczyk is a Professor of Earth Science at the University of California Santa Cruz. He focuses his research on ice sheets and glaciers as dynamic features interacting with geologic, hydrologic, and climatic processes on different timescales. To understand Thwaites Glacier's potential future contribution to sea level rise, he investigates the physical controls on ice flow velocity and constructs quantitative models of ice flow dynamics, including underlying geology. Tulaczyk explores geologic controls on glacier movement through sedimentological and geochemical analysis of subglacial sediment samples from West Antarctica. He uses multiple data sources—remote sensing, borehole experiments, subglacial sediment samples—to constrain the physics of the subglacial environment and its role in controlling ice flow velocities.

https://thwaitesglacier.org/people/slawek-tulaczyk

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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Saturday, June 15, 2024 6:12 PM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.

Quote:

Considering that the biochar is made from biological materials, there's no contribution to the surface CO2 load. I wonder if one can use biological materials to heat up the waste to such a high temperature, or if one needs to use fossil fuels for that.

It appears, though, that overall the creation and use of biochar has a net negative effect on surface CO2. "Worldwide use of biochar could cut CO2 levels by 8 parts per million within 50 years, according to NASA scientist James Hansen."

http://fireflyfans.net/mthread.aspx?tid=37599

Which is why I find thinning mile-wide firebreaks thru high fuel-load forests, and turning the trash vegetation into biochar so attractive: you solve three problems at the same time

Reduce catastrophic mega-fires

Convert the carbon to long-term storage (unlike mulching and composting)

Improve soil fertility

*****

I wonder if you could apply this technique to sandy, carbon- poor soils in arid areas. These soils can't retain moisture and nutrients, leading to a vicious cycle of non- vegetated areas drying out, maintaining desert conditions.

Also, there have been studies of using biochar in reforestation projects.

Altho nations, institutions, and corporations earn carbon credits based on how many trees they plant, "tree planting" is more of a scam, and not worth the carbon credits they "earn", because

98% of seedlings, or more, die.

The energy spent growing and trucking seedlings is wasted

However, if you plant seedlings with black carbon, the black carbon immediately calculates as net carbon absorbed, and because the seedlings have a higher chance of survival after five years the reforestation project by itself starts absorbing carbon dioxide.

-----------
"It may be dangerous to be America's enemy, but to be America's friend is fatal." - Henry Kissinger

Why SECOND'S posts are brainless: "I clocked how much time: no more than 10 minutes per day. With cut-and-paste (Ctrl C and Ctrl V) and AI, none of this takes much time."
Or, any verification or thought.

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Saturday, June 15, 2024 6:26 PM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.

SECOND, did you even READ the article???

Or did you just spam the board with headlines, again?

Please describe for us how to save the Thwaites Ice Field.

-----------
"It may be dangerous to be America's enemy, but to be America's friend is fatal." - Henry Kissinger

Why SECOND'S posts are brainless: "I clocked how much time: no more than 10 minutes per day. With cut-and-paste (Ctrl C and Ctrl V) and AI, none of this takes much time."
Or, any verification or thought.

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Saturday, June 15, 2024 8:53 PM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.

Just to say, that article was a stellar example of "How to turn a 3 paragraph article into a 5000- word bloated internet article".

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Tuesday, June 25, 2024 7:42 AM

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
SECOND, did you even READ the article???

Or did you just spam the board with headlines, again?

Please describe for us how to save the Thwaites Ice Field.

You will have trouble understanding this article, too, but that is a fundamental fact with all Trumptards about everything. It is no surprise that you Trumptards have difficult and confusing lives:

CO2 puts heavier stamp on temperature than previously thought, analysis suggests

By Royal Netherlands Institute for Sea Research | June 24, 2024

https://phys.org/news/2024-06-heavier-temperature-previously-thought-a
nalysis.html

A doubling of the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere could cause an increase in the average temperature on Earth from 7 to a maximum of 14 degrees. This is shown in the analysis of sediments from the Pacific Ocean off the coast of California, by researchers at NIOZ and the Universities of Utrecht and Bristol. Their results were published in Nature Communications.

"The temperature rise we found is much larger than the 2.3 to 4.5 degrees that the UN climate panel, IPCC, has been estimating so far," said the first author, Caitlyn Witkowski.

The researchers used a 45-year-old drill core extracted from the bottom of the Pacific Ocean. "I realized that this core is very attractive for researchers, because the ocean floor at that spot has had oxygen-free conditions for many millions of years," said Professor Jaap Sinninghe Damsté, senior scientist at NIOZ and professor of organic geochemistry at Utrecht University.

"As a result, organic matter is not broken down as quickly by microbes and more carbon is preserved," Damsté said. He was also the supervisor of Witkowski, whose doctorate thesis included this research.

"CO2 over the past 15 million years has never before been examined from a single location," Witkowski said. The upper thousand meters of the drill core correspond to the past 18 million years. From this record, the researchers were able to extract an indication of the past seawater temperature and an indication of ancient atmospheric CO2 levels, using a new approach.
Derived temperature

The researchers derived the temperature using a method developed 20 years ago at NIOZ, called the TEX86 method. "That method uses specific substances that are present in the membrane of archaea, a distinct class of microorganisms," Damsté explains.

"Those archaea optimize the chemical composition of their membrane depending on the temperature of the water in the upper 200 meters of the ocean. Substances from that membrane can be found as molecular fossils in the ocean sediments, and analyzed to this day."

CO2 from chlorophyll and cholesterol

The researchers developed a new approach to derive past atmospheric CO2 content by using the chemical composition of two specific substances commonly found in algae: chlorophyll and cholesterol. This is the first study to use cholesterol for quantitative CO2 and the first study to use chlorophyll for this time period. To create these substances, algae must absorb CO2 from the water and fix it via photosynthesis.

Damsté said, "A very small fraction of the carbon on Earth occurs in a 'heavy form,' 13C instead of the usual 12C. Algae have a clear preference for 12C. However, the lower the CO2 concentration in the water, the more algae will also use the rare 13C. Thus, the 13C content of these two substances is a measure of the CO2 content of the ocean water. And that in turn, according to solubility laws, correlates with the CO2 content of the atmosphere."

Using this new method, it appears that the CO2 concentration dropped from about 650 parts per million, 15 million years back, to 280 just before the industrial revolution.

Stronger relationship

When the researchers plot the derived temperature and atmospheric CO2 levels of the past 15 million years against each other, they find a strong relationship.

The average temperature 15 million years back was over 18 degrees: 4 degrees warmer than today and about the level that the UN climate panel, IPCC, predicts for the year 2100 in the most extreme scenario.

"So, this research gives us a glimpse of what the future could hold if we take too few measures to reduce CO2 emissions and also implement few technological innovations to offset emissions," Damsté said.

"The clear warning from this research is CO2 concentration is likely to have a stronger impact on temperature than we are currently taking into account."

More information: Caitlyn R. Witkowski et al, Continuous sterane and phytane d13C record reveals a substantial pCO2 decline since the mid-Miocene, Nature Communications (2024). DOI: 10.1038/s41467-024-47676-9

Citation: CO2 puts heavier stamp on temperature than previously thought, analysis suggests (2024, June 24) retrieved 25 June 2024 from https://phys.org/news/2024-06-heavier-temperature-previously-thought-a
nalysis.html

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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Saturday, June 29, 2024 10:29 AM

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

Published Jun 28, 2024

https://grist.org/science/climate-models-puzzle-antarctica-tipping-poi
nt/

Three million years ago, the atmosphere’s carbon-dioxide levels weren’t so different from those of today, but sea levels were dozens of meters higher. Looking that far back presents a foreboding peek into the future, as satellite records show that melting Antarctic ice sheets are on their way to bulking up this epoch’s oceans, too. The puzzle for scientists is that the climate models they create can’t seem to match what they see with their own eyes.

“Lots of people have been scratching their heads trying to figure out what is missing from our ice sheet models,” said Alex Bradley, an ice dynamics researcher at the British Antarctic Survey, part of the United Kingdom’s Natural Environment Research Council.

This week, two new papers in the journal Nature added to the growing pile of evidence that scientists’ models aren’t capturing a complete picture of Antarctica’s rapid deterioration. One study, published on Thursday, found that more than twice as much meltwater could be weighing on the surface of ice shelves, extensions of glaciers that float on the sea, than scientists previously thought. The study published on Tuesday identified a new potential tipping point: Where the land-anchored ice meets the sea, warming ice is creeping underneath, melting it from the belly up.

From above and below, Antarctica’s vault of ice, holding back almost 60 meters of potential sea level rise, seems more imperiled than ever. But neither of the dynamics detailed by these recent studies are used in climate models — potentially leading to an underestimation of how high seas might rise in coming decades.

Much more at https://grist.org/science/climate-models-puzzle-antarctica-tipping-poi
nt/

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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Thursday, July 4, 2024 6:46 AM

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

Daily Sea Surface Temperature
https://climatereanalyzer.org/clim/sst_daily/

https://jabberwocking.com/ocean-temps-reach-almost-not-record-breaking
-level/

In related news:

The storm was the earliest Category 4 in the Atlantic Ocean when it made landfall in Grenada, beating a record previously held by 2005 storm Hurricane Dennis. The National Hurricane Center in Miami then said the storm's winds had increased to Category 5 strength on Monday.
https://www.newsweek.com/hurricane-beryl-aerial-photos-destruction-192
0685

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Friday, July 5, 2024 6:07 AM

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

Using copper to convert CO2 to methane could be game changer in mitigating climate change

By Rowan Hollinger | July 4, 2024

https://phys.org/news/2024-07-copper-methane-game-changer-mitigating.h
tml

Carbon dioxide from the atmosphere can be transformed into methane and once the methane is used, any carbon dioxide released can be captured and "recycled" back into methane. This would create a closed "carbon loop" that does not emit new carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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Friday, July 5, 2024 11:58 AM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.

They would need a source of hydrogen to convert CO2 to CH4.

So, where does this H come from? Water?

Are we talking about electrolyzing water, again?

And what is the conversion efficiency?

I wish the article had more detail, bc everybody likes to publish whizbang papers, but nobody like to repeat experiments to make sure that it works and determine if it is scalable.

MORE DETAILS, PLEASE.

-----------
"It may be dangerous to be America's enemy, but to be America's friend is fatal." - Henry Kissinger

Why SECOND'S posts are brainless: "I clocked how much time: no more than 10 minutes per day. With cut-and-paste (Ctrl C and Ctrl V) and AI, none of this takes much time."
Or, any verification or thought.

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Sunday, July 7, 2024 10:39 AM

15,000 Scientists Warn Society Could Collapse By 2100 Due to Climate Change

https://futurism.com/the-byte/scientists-warn-climate-collapse-2100

Kyoto Fusioneering looks toward a 'Made in Japan' approach for nuclear fusion
https://www.japantimes.co.jp/environment/2024/07/07/energy/kyoto-fusio
neering-nuclear-fusion-supply-chains/

other Nuclear spin offs

'A dream come true': Nuclear clock breakthrough could revolutionize study of the universe's fundamental forces
https://www.livescience.com/physics-mathematics/a-dream-come-true-nucl
ear-clock-breakthrough-could-revolutionize-study-of-the-universes-fundamental-forces

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Friday, July 12, 2024 10:59 AM

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

Tesla detailed the average battery-capacity retention per distance traveled of the Model 3 and Model Y cars with Long Range battery packs. For both models, the average battery capacity loss after 200,000 miles is 15%. In other words, the average capacity retention after that distance is 85%.

Longer battery life means EV drivers will save money, as they won't have to purchase a new battery replacement. According to data estimates from Tesla, Americans stop driving a car once it reaches about 200,000 miles. With the battery capacities noted in the 2023 Impact Report, Tesla batteries should not need to be replaced during the life span of the car.

https://www.msn.com/en-us/autos/news/tesla-s-recent-report-on-battery-
life-is-a-game-changer-for-ev-owners-we-have-a-reliable-data-set/ar-BB1pOi3R

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Friday, July 12, 2024 3:26 PM

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

The world of electric vehicles (EVs) might be on the brink of a dramatic shift thanks to a recent discovery from Nyobolt, a promising British startup focused on batteries.

This innovation could make the inconvenience of extensive battery-charging durations a thing of the past, bringing electric vehicle convenience closer to that of traditional gas-powered cars.

Headquartered in Cambridge, Nyobolt has recently made headlines with their novel 35kWh lithium-ion battery. The first live demonstration indicated that it could charge from 10% to 80% in just over four and a half minutes.

This is a significant leap from the usual 20 odd minutes spent on fast chargers like Tesla's Supercharger, and it's well on the way to the average gasoline fill-up time of two minutes.

"Our extensive research here in the UK and US has unlocked a novel battery technology that is ready and scalable right now. We are enabling the electrification of new products and services currently considered inviable or impossible," said Nyobolt CEO Sai Shivareddy.

More at https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/technology/new-electric-car-battery-cha
rges-in-just-4-5-minutes/ar-BB1pD91N

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Friday, July 19, 2024 8:20 AM

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

Natrium Reactor

Terrapower's Natrium Project and the ARDP Partnership

TerraPower is building its first plant through a public-private partnership with the U.S. Department of Energy's (DOE) Advanced Reactor Demonstration Program (ARDP).

This program authorizes a 50/50 cost share and authorizes up to $2 billion for the Natrium project. TerraPower and partners will match this investment dollar for dollar. The first-of-a-kind cost for the Natrium demonstration plant will include the reactor design and licensing, codes and methods development, fuel development and qualification, and the design, construction and operation of two supporting facilities: the Natrium Fuel Fabrication Facility and Sodium Test and Fill Facility. The sodium facility will be used to test and demonstrate the performance of first-of-a-kind equipment prior to operations in the reactor plant.
https://www.terrapower.com/natrium/

The U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) is currently engaged in pre-application activities interactions for the Natrium reactor. The Natrium design combines features from the previous GEH PRISM and TerraPower Traveling Wave designs. The proposed Natrium reactor is a 345 MWe pool type sodium fast reactor using HALEU metal fuel.
https://www.nrc.gov/reactors/new-reactors/advanced/who-were-working-wi
th/licensing-activities/pre-application-activities/natrium.html

Why Bill Gates’ New Natrium Reactor is a Big Deal

@chapter4travels
2 weeks ago
You covered the thermal storage pretty well but left out some of the more interesting parts/advantages.
Natrium is a low-pressure/high-temperature reactor, this is the most important aspect of this technology. Low-pressure means no expensive forgings and containment structures that high-pressure water reactors need. This saves a lot of money and improves safety at the same time.

High-temperature allows for thermal storage but also separates the power conversion side of the plant from the nuclear side. All the equipment is off-the-shelf stuff that doesn't need to be nuclear certified. This saves a lot of money and allows you to start construction early, like you see in the thumbnail. You can't do this with a LWR.

High-temperature along with fast neutrons means much higher efficiency and later
waste burning. High-temperature also means cheap industrial process heat, something neither LWRs or renewables can provide. The demand for process heat is double that of electricity alone. This is a huge deal.

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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Monday, July 22, 2024 7:42 AM

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

Why do we need carbon capture?

Joel Eissenberg | July 20, 2024 8:27 am

Why do we need carbon capture at all? Can’t we just conserve our way out of global warming?

No.

Here are a couple of reasons why the *only* way to avert climate disaster is to start removing carbon from the atmosphere:

1. The half-life of CO2 in the atmosphere is ca. 120 years. What that means is that if all sources of CO2—man-made, forest fires, vulcanism, etc—ceased worldwide starting tomorrow, it would take 120 years for atmospheric CO2 to drop by half. So conservation isn’t enough to reverse the march to climate crisis. Suggesting that carbon capture is just a distraction from having Americans drive less is, to put it gently, hopelessly and tragically naïve.

2. The global anthropogenic sources of CO2 will only expand. 3rd world nations want the economies that the industrialized nation built with burning coal, oil and gas, and it is futile (and arrogant) to admonish them to forego improving their standard of living to that of the industrialized world.

Carbon capture isn’t the enemy of conservation. The world needs *both* carbon capture and conservation if it is to avert climate disaster and resource wars that threaten to destroy human civilization in the next thirty years. This isn’t the time for virtue signaling. Are there risks associated with geoengineering? Sure. But there is a risk bordering on certainty that catastrophe will follow if we rely solely on the hope that somehow the world will dial down energy consumption.

https://angrybearblog.com/2024/07/why-do-we-need-carbon-capture

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Wednesday, July 24, 2024 9:00 AM

Monday was hottest day ever measured by humans, beating Sunday, European science service says; "Uncharted territory"

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/hottest-day-monday-edging-out-sunday-clli
mate-change-european-science-agency/

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Thursday, July 25, 2024 1:14 PM

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

Model Behavior: Visualizing Global Carbon Dioxide
https://svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/14631

This global map of CO2 was created by NASA’s Scientific Visualization Studio using a model called GEOS, short for the Goddard Earth Observing System. GEOS is a high-resolution weather reanalysis model, powered by supercomputers, that is used to represent what was happening in the atmosphere — including storm systems, cloud formations, and other natural events. GEOS pulls in billions of data points from ground observations and satellite instruments, such as the Terra satellite’s MODIS and the Suomi-NPP satellite’s VIIRS instruments. Its resolution is more than 100 times greater than your typical weather model.

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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Sunday, July 28, 2024 3:20 PM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.

Quote:
Park Fire Burns '5,000 Acres An Hour' In California

https://www.zerohedge.com/weather/park-fire-burns-5000-acres-hour-cali
fornia

Better forest management needed!!!

-----------
"It may be dangerous to be America's enemy, but to be America's friend is fatal." - Henry Kissinger

Why SECOND'S posts are brainless: "I clocked how much time: no more than 10 minutes per day. With cut-and-paste (Ctrl C and Ctrl V) and AI, none of this takes much time."
Or, any verification or thought.

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Tuesday, July 30, 2024 7:59 AM

nature making noise

New study disputes Hunga Tonga volcano's role in 2023–24 global warm-up

https://phys.org/news/2024-07-disputes-hunga-tonga-volcano-role.html

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Tuesday, July 30, 2024 11:50 AM

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

Quote:
Originally posted by JAYNEZTOWN:
nature making noise

New study disputes Hunga Tonga volcano's role in 2023–24 global warm-up

https://phys.org/news/2024-07-disputes-hunga-tonga-volcano-role.html

"Our paper pours cold water on the explanation that the eruption caused the extreme warmth of 2023 and 2024," Dessler explained. "Instead, we need to focus primarily on greenhouse gases from human activities as the main cause of the warming, with a big assist from the ongoing El Niño."

According to Dessler, this research has important implications for both scientists and the general public. By dismissing the volcanic eruption as a major factor in the recent warming, the team's study reinforces his point that human-induced greenhouse gas emissions are the primary driver of climate change. This focus is particularly relevant, given the ongoing debate and misinformation about the causes of global warming.

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Thursday, August 1, 2024 1:20 PM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.

Quote:
Raging California Wildfire Swells to 5th Largest in State History
The Park fire has destroyed more than 300 structures, mostly single-family homes, and is bigger than the city of Los Angeles.

https://www.theepochtimes.com/us/massive-california-wildfire-only-18-p
ercent-contained-after-a-week-5697599

In addition to releasing tremendous amounts of greenhouses gases and reducing carbon capture for decades to come, the fire is damaging two of the last remaining viable salmon watersheds.

-----------
"It may be dangerous to be America's enemy, but to be America's friend is fatal." - Henry Kissinger

Why SECOND'S posts are brainless: "I clocked how much time: no more than 10 minutes per day. With cut-and-paste (Ctrl C and Ctrl V) and AI, none of this takes much time."
Or, any verification or thought.

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Wednesday, August 7, 2024 5:33 AM

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

Climate denialists – 23 in Senate and 100 in House – are all Republicans

https://www.americanprogress.org/article/climate-deniers-of-the-118th-
congress/

This analysis explores rhetorical shifts from outright climate denial to subtler types of obstruction, which may further delay action on the climate crisis as well as prolong the influence of the fossil fuel industry on environmental and energy policy in the United States. While “climate denial” is arguably the most commonly understood and historically used term, it only describes one type of an ever-widening array of tactics.

Some members of Congress have shifted from outright climate denial to other rhetorical tactics. Examples include redirecting responsibility for addressing the climate crisis, such as deferring U.S. actions to reduce greenhouse emissions until other countries act first; portraying climate activism as alarmism; or spreading misinformation.

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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Wednesday, August 7, 2024 8:29 AM

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

The lost history of what Americans knew about climate change in the 1960s
It wasn't just scientists who were worried, but Congress, the White House, and even Sports Illustrated.

By Kate Yoder | Aug 05, 2024

https://grist.org/science/lost-history-climate-1960s-clean-air-act-sup
reme-court/

Naomi Oreskes, a historian of science at Harvard University, has found more than 100 examples of congressional hearings that examined CO2 and the greenhouse effect prior to the adoption of the Clean Air Act.

The research adds weight to arguments that Congress intended to give the EPA a broad authority to regulate pollution, including greenhouse gas emissions — a matter that has become more important, the authors say, in the aftermath of the West Virginia v. EPA decision in 2022 that limited the agency’s ability to regulate power plant emissions. The court’s conservative majority invoked a new argument called the “major questions doctrine,” requiring a very clear statement from Congress to authorize regulations that have “vast economic and political significance.”

Oreskes’ paper demonstrates that members of Congress, when discussing the Clean Air Act in 1970, were aware that addressing climate change could have significant economic consequences, for energy production and the automotive industry, for example. Oreskes hopes the paper will “put the lie to the myth that has been propagated that the Clean Air Act had nothing to do with carbon dioxide” and spur conversation among lawyers, judges, and legal scholars.

By the mid-1960s, climate change was already becoming a matter of concern to the federal government, the new analysis shows. A 1965 report from the National Science Foundation found that the ways humans were inadvertently changing the world — through urban development, agriculture, and fossil fuels — were “becoming of sufficient consequence to affect the weather and climate of large areas and ultimately the entire planet.”

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Tuesday, August 13, 2024 8:58 AM

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

Estimated 75% jump in electricity demand! (Because of Climate Change. Climate Change Deniers in the State Legislature deny that Texas needs more electricity.)

The Electric Reliability Council of Texas predicts that electricity demand will reach 150 gigawatt in less than six years.

By Sara DiNatale | August 12, 2024

https://www.expressnews.com/business/article/is-ercot-2030-texas-power
-demand-overblown-19626094.php

Energy experts are challenging the state grid operator’s jaw-dropping projection for how high electrical demand could rise by 2030, saying that even as Texas faces explosive growth, there is no way its thirst for electricity will reach 150 gigawatt in less than six years — a forecast that has put lawmakers in a tizzy. The Electric Reliability Council of Texas’s Long Term Load Forecast is at https://www.ercot.com/gridinfo/load/forecast

To date, the highest peak demand recorded by the Electric Reliability Council of Texas is about 85.5 gigawatts. And Juan Arteaga — a senior analyst with Enverus, which recently published its own study on demand projections — is skeptical of the motivation behind those who say it could rise 75% by the end of the decade.

“These guys are not stupid,” Arteaga said. “They’re just using that number to push for either more funds or more infrastructure investment. They run the system. They know it’s unrealistic.”

Enverus puts its demand projection for Texas in 2030 at 93.5 gigawatts — still a 10% jump accounting for population growth and electric vehicles, but far less jarring than ERCOT’s estimate that total demand could more than double from its level in 2020.

ERCOT’s latest end-of-decade projections sent shock waves through the Capitol that manifested during June hearings by the Texas House and Senate. The figure is still top of mind for lawmakers, as they consider increasing the Texas Energy Fund’s $5 billion of available taxpayer-backed funding to support low-interest loans for more natural gas plants.

ERCOT stood by the estimate as recently as last week during a second energy-focused hearings at the Texas House.

Rep. David Spiller, R-Jacksboro, asked ERCOT Senior Vice President and Chief Operating Officer Woody Rickerson whether he concurred with the roughly 150 gigawatt estimate that CEO Pablo Vegas had shared with lawmakers.

Rickerson said he did, as Spiller shared his concerns about what that level of sudden demand growth would do to the grid’s reliability.

“We may be able to get there, should be able to get there. Hopefully, we’ll be able to get there in that time frame,” Spiller said about the challenge to increase generation capacity accordingly. “My concern is the interim. I mean, the next year, two, three, and four (years) are the biggest concerns that I’ve got.”

When Spiller asked Rickerson whether he shared such concern, the ERCOT executive said he did.

“If the load growth occurs more rapidly than the generation shows up, we’ll have some scarcity conditions for sure,” Rickerson said.

ERCOT’s estimate origins

After ERCOT’s estimate was made public, Gov. Greg Abbott and Lt. Gov Dan Patrick said they would seek to increase the Texas Energy Fund “as soon as possible.”

“If the new estimate is correct, the updated numbers provided by Mr. Vegas call for an immediate review of all policies concerning the grid,” Abbott and Patrick said in a joint statement last month.

ERCOT recently updated the estimate to 151 gigawatts.

Texas law and the Public Utility Regulatory Act call for ERCOT to consider factors such as historical load and forecasted growth as part of its evaluation of needed transmission. Recent changes to the law also call for ERCOT to consider proposed development in the queue, even projects that are speculative and not backed by things such as signed contracts or interconnection agreements.

ERCOT said in a statement that its analysis includes about 62 gigawatts of large loads.

“The process consists of two parts,” ERCOT said. “The first part of the process is to establish a bounded load level which provides a baseline of the expected load growth excluding any large load including crypto, data center, hydrogen, and oil and gas load.”

ERCOT said in the second part, it relies on transmission companies to provide “quantifiable evidence” to assess large loads that may have not been included during the first step.

Arteaga and his team at Enverus, which sells its analytics and software to companies tracking energy industries, took a close look at ERCOT’s queue of load-heavy projects and considered their feasibility. He said that ERCOT’s estimates lack nuance.

“They just took anything and everything that at some point showed some interest to interconnect to ERCOT and they assume it will become reality,” Arteaga said. “That’s why the numbers are so ridiculously high.”

A grain of salt

Arteaga isn’t the only one questioning ERCOT’s 2030 estimate. Joshua Rhodes, a research scientist at the University of Texas at Austin, has similar reservations.

Rhodes said the figure could paint a picture that’s more dire than reality to the average Texan.

“With the large load interconnection queue being so full of what I would call aspirational projects, we haven’t had enough time to develop how big of a ‘grain of salt’ to take with those,” Rhodes said.

That’s what Arteaga said he and his team tried to account for when creating their methodology and what he considers a “cleaner” data set. He used the green hydrogen industry as an example of a sector that likely has more hype than tangible loads.

The Department of Energy selected Houston as one of seven regional clean hydrogen hubs in the nation and granted up to $1.2 billion in funding — a boon for development. Green hydrogen is produced through the electrolysis of water using electricity from renewable sources, such solar, wind or hydropower.

Enverus assessed what green hydrogen projects had backing, grants or nearby infrastructure. Researchers also examined the history of developers themselves. It looked at every interconnection request critically, Arteaga said.

“We found there’s some developers that are just speculative,” he said. “They just put the project out to create a lot of hype, and then they sell it, and if they can’t sell it, then it never happens.”

In addition to green hydrogen, many of the biggest projected loads could come from the influx of data centers — especially as every leading tech company is an arms race for such centers to support artificial intelligence tools.

Much of the June hearings focused on lawmakers concerned that cryptocurrency miners will increase demand for power excessively before generation and transmission would be available to support it. Some went as far as to suggest banning crypto mining altogether.

The Texas Blockchain Council, a cryptocurrency mining trade group, has also said that it believes ERCOT’s count of potential miners is much higher than what will actually come online. The group supports raising the criteria to be considered in ERCOT’s count.

The trade group’s president, Lee Bratcher, has said an average of 90 megawatts of cryptocurrency mining energy demand is being added each month. Currently, he says there are about 2,900 megawatts of energy demand among cryptocurrency miners in the state.
Future planning

Enverus projects that the biggest explosion in data centers will happen farther in the future, after 2030. By the end of the decade, the researchers estimate that current demand of 100 megawatts by data centers will hit 900 megawatts, or just under 1 gigawatt. By 2050, Enversus projects that number to grow tenfold.

Meanwhile, Enverus predicts cryptocurrency mining to double in the short term, reach close to 2 gigawatts by 2030 and remain flat heading toward 2050.

Rhodes said ERCOT keeping tabs on all proposed projects in the queue is important.

Transmission, the expansive network that moves power across the state, takes longer to build than both large-load projects and power plants. Already, ERCOT has said it is behind in predicting needs regarding what is now a transmission chokepoint in San Antonio.

“It’s useful in that it does give you locationally and directionally an idea of where the projects need to be built,” Rhodes said. “It’s a good way of directing investment to certain areas, … but to take those projects and say ‘We need to build a certain amount of generation’ is another story.”

That’s why some experts — such as Rhodes and Arteaga — worry about increasing the Texas Energy Fund further based primarily on ERCOT’s projection, especially given that the legislation behind the fund restricts eligibility for its low-interest loans mainly to natural gas plants.

Rhodes said he would prefer that the funding had different terms — such as including generation that could be available for four hours, turned on and off easily, regardless of its source. As is, the current criteria largely excludes battery systems.

“Even if we wanted to, I don’t think we could physically build that many power plants in that span of time,” Rhodes said, referring to building for ERCOT’s 2030 estimate. “Texas would consume all the power plant supply chain ourselves.”

ERCOT doesn’t build power plants, but it manages the grid and encourages growth where it thinks it’s needed. Much of the state’s recent energy policymaking has been heavily influenced by Winter Storm Uri in February 2021, when a near total collapse of the grid led to long-lasting outages and contributed to the deaths of 246 Texans.

Arteaga said that while having more natural gas generation available is good for the grid and its reliability, there’s a balance. Texas can hit a point where it has too much, he said.

The new gas plants need to make their money back — that means running continuously, not just 15% of the year when conditions are especially tight, the researcher said. Texas risks having costly gas plants sitting idle if it spurs too many to be built, he said.

What’s enough growth?

So far, the state has received 72 applications requesting more than $24.4 billion to finance projects to generate more than 38 gigawatts of electricity through the natural gas-focused loan fund — far exceeding the $5 billion available.

Spiller raised that issue during the last House hearing, asking Rickerson whether the state was doing enough in terms of the loan program and the calls to increase it.

“The 38,000 (megawatts) certainly is a good start,” Rickerson said. “But if that amount of load does show up, it won’t be adequate for all of that load — especially on a day when there’s no wind.”

Artega said to put ERCOT’s load estimate into perspective, consider that the biggest grid network in the country — PJM — covers 13 states and Washington, D.C., encompassing 65 million people. That’s more than twice the population of Texas.

By ERCOT’s 151 gigawatt estimate, Texas’ demand in less than six years would match what PJM expects to hit this summer.

Energy experts agree that historic increases in demand are coming this state’s way.

“But to reach that figure in five or six years when it took us 100 years to get us where we are now?” Rhodes posed. “If I really thought all that load was going to show up, I’d be terrified. But I’m not running around saying the sky is falling because I don’t believe it is.”

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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Tuesday, August 13, 2024 10:52 AM

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

Climate Change Deniers in Texas Government want to INCREASE greenhouse gases with low-interest loans to build natural gas power plants

July 2, 2024 • Claire Hao, San Antonio Express-News, TNS

Texas Gov. Greg Abbott and Lt. Gov Dan Patrick will seek to expand a taxpayer-backed program that primarily funds low-interest loans to build natural gas power plants across the state to $10 billion from $5 billion "as soon as possible," they said Monday.

The move comes in response to new estimates from the Electric Reliability Council of Texas, the state's power grid operator, that the state could need 152 gigawatts of power in six years, roughly doubling the current record of 85.5 gigawatts. Though the projection has been public since April, there has been fresh concern among state leaders — including a sharp turn by some against the cryptocurrency industry — after ERCOT CEO Pablo Vegas spooked lawmakers in June with his testimony at legislative hearings regarding the grid.

https://www.governing.com/finance/texas-seeks-to-double-taxpayer-backe
d-fund-for-natural-gas

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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Friday, August 16, 2024 6:14 AM

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

Global warming, local benefits
The international dimension of climate change is what makes it so hard to solve

Matthew Yglesias | Aug 14, 2024

https://www.slowboring.com/p/global-warming-local-benefits

Since the 2008 presidential campaign and the 2009 UN climate summit in Copenhagen, I feel like there’s been significant unlearning of the fact that addressing climate change involves a complicated global coordination problem.

This problem is extremely difficult to solve, and as a result, it basically hasn’t been.

The response of much of the climate advocacy community, its associated lobbying apparatus, and much of what passes for climate journalism has been to ignore the global coordination aspect of the problem and bluster ahead. This leads to bad judgment about specific issues, to a tendency to set incorrect priorities, and also to a lot of confusion.

Last week, I was talking to someone who doesn’t follow policy closely, who voted for Biden in 2020 but isn’t sure about 2024. She told me her top issue is climate change, which she described in fairly apocalyptic terms. I told her that Biden had enacted historic climate legislation and that Democrats had made this their top priority. She said if they’d really solved climate change, she would surely have heard about it. At which point I tried (and failed) to convince her that climate worst-case scenarios were, in fact, now off the table, while also conceding that Biden’s climate actions had only a modest impact on global average temperature projections. But that’s not because the IRA energy provisions aren’t a big deal. It’s because the United States has a modest (and falling) share of global emissions.

What share of global CO2 emissions are emitted by the US?
https://ourworldindata.org/co2/country/united-states#what-share-of-glo
bal-co2-emissions-are-emitted-by-the-country

Summary of Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) provisions related to renewable energy
https://www.epa.gov/green-power-markets/summary-inflation-reduction-ac
t-provisions-related-renewable-energy

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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Thursday, August 22, 2024 9:39 AM

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

The disagreement between two climate scientists that will decide our future

In his new paper, Hansen ( http://www.columbia.edu/~jeh1/ ) argues that if the atmospheric concentration of greenhouse gases remains close to its current level, the surface temperature will stabilise after several hundred years between 8°C and 10°C above the pre-industrial level.

Of this, at least 2°C will emerge by mid-century, and probably a further 3°C a century from now. A temperature increase of this magnitude would be catastrophic for life on Earth. Hansen adds that to avoid such an outcome, brightening Earth is now necessary to halt the warming in the pipeline from past emissions.

Time for reflection

The differences between Mann and Hansen are significant for the global response to climate change.

Mann says that allowing emissions to reach net zero by mid-century is sufficient, while Hansen maintains that on its own it would be disastrous and that steps must now be taken in addition to brighten the planet.

Brightening Earth could also reverse the reductions in reflectivity already caused by climate change. Data indicates that from 1998 to 2017, Earth dimmed by about 0.5 watts per square metre, largely due to the loss of ice.

Given what’s at stake, we hope Mann and Hansen resolve these differences quickly to help the public and policymakers understand what it will take to minimise the likelihood of imminent massive and widespread ecosystem destruction and its disastrous effects on humanity.

While 1.5°C may be dead, there may still be time to prevent cascading system failures. But not if we continue to squabble over the nature and extent of the risks.

More at https://theconversation.com/the-disagreement-between-two-climate-scien
tists-that-will-decide-our-future-217759

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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Monday, August 26, 2024 5:53 AM

Disney cruise ship sails past Amsterdam due to Extinction Rebellion blockade

https://nltimes.nl/2024/08/25/disney-cruise-ship-sails-past-amsterdam-
due-extinction-rebellion-blockade

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Sunday, September 8, 2024 6:05 AM

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

In 2021, the South Korean National Assembly passed a law requiring the government to reduce its greenhouse gas emissions by at least 35 percent by 2030 and to become carbon neutral by 2050. In response to the law, the government set a goal of reducing carbon emissions by 40 percent by 2030, which the plaintiffs argued was insufficient to protect their fundamental right to life and a clean environment.

The court, which examines the constitutionality of laws, ruled that the intermediary 2030 goal was adequate — but it ordered the National Assembly to develop additional concrete plans to ensure that progress continues at a robust pace after 2030, in order to meet the 2050 goal of carbon neutrality. The decision is a partial victory for plaintiffs, and it requires the National Assembly to revise the existing climate law by the end of February 2026.

“The Korean constitutional court is very conservative,” Byung-Joo Lee, an attorney for the plaintiffs, told Grist. “But the court made it very clear that the climate crisis is a scientific and legal fact, and they acknowledged that the state has a duty to protect people from climate change. It’s a clear, constitutional right of the people.”

https://grist.org/international/south-korea-climate-lawsuit/

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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Sunday, September 8, 2024 8:28 PM

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

Donald Trump gets everything wrong about the climate crisis

By Bill McKibben | Fri 6 Sep 2024 08.36 EDT

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2024/sep/06/preside
ntial-election-climate-crisis-project-2025-trump

Here is the biggest thing happening on our planet as we head into the autumn of 2024: the Earth is continuing to heat dramatically. Scientists have said that there’s a better than 90% chance that this year will top 2023 as the warmest ever recorded. And paleoclimatologists were pretty sure last year was the hottest in the last 125,000 years. The result is an almost-cliched run of disasters: open Twitter/X anytime for pictures of floods pushing cars through streets somewhere. It is starting to make life on this planet very difficult, and in some places impossible. And it’s on target to get far, far worse.

Here’s the second-biggest thing happening on our planet right now: finally, finally, renewable energy, mostly from the sun and wind, seems to be reaching some sort of takeoff point. By some calculations, we’re now putting up a nuclear plant’s worth of solar panels every day. In California, there are now enough solar farms and wind turbines that day after day this spring and summer they supplied more than 100% of the state’s electric needs for long stretches; there are now enough batteries on the grid that they become the biggest source of power after dark. In China it looks as if carbon emissions may have peaked – they’re six years ahead of schedule on the effort to build out renewables.

And here’s the third biggest thing in the months ahead: the American presidential election, which looks as if it is going down to the wire – and which may have the power to determine how high the temperature goes and how fast we turn to clean power.

Donald Trump gave an interview last week, in which he laid out his understanding of climate change:

Quote:
You know, when I hear these poor fools talking about global warming. They don’t call it that any more, they call it climate change because you know, some parts of the planet are cooling and warming, and it didn’t work. So they finally got it right, they just call it climate change. They used to call it global warming. You know, years ago they used to call it global cooling. In the 1920s they thought the planet was going to freeze. Now they think the planet’s going to burn up. And we’re still waiting for the 12 years. You know we’re down almost to the end of the 12-year period, you understand that, where these lunatics that know nothing, they weren’t even good students at school, they didn’t even study it, they predict, they said we have 12 years to live. And people didn’t have babies because they said – it’s so crazy. But the problem isn’t the fact that the oceans in 500 years will raise a quarter of an inch, the problem is nuclear weapons. It’s nuclear warming … These poor fools talk about global warming all the time, you know the planet’s going to global warm to a point where the oceans will rise an eighth of an inch in 355 years, you know, they have no idea what’s going to happen. It’s weather.

I’ve quoted this at length because this could again be the most important man on the planet, talking about the most important issue the planet has ever faced. And he’s gotten every word of it wrong. It’s gibberish.

But it’s gibberish in the service of something very important and very dangerous: doing all that he can to block the energy transition, in America and around the world. His friends at Project 2025 have laid out in considerable detail how you translate that gibberish into policy. It lays out in loving detail many of the steps his administration would use to bolster oil, gas and coal while sidetracking sun and wind.

More at https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2024/sep/06/preside
ntial-election-climate-crisis-project-2025-trump

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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Saturday, September 21, 2024 12:50 PM

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

The hype for hybrid cars will not last

Angry Bear | September 21, 2024 8:00 am

https://angrybearblog.com/2024/09/the-hype-for-hybrid-cars-will-not-la
st

The car industry’s effort to decarbonize revolves around replacing petrol with batteries. A growing number of customers want both. Buyers who cannot afford a fully electric car, or worry about the availability of charging points, are turning to plug-in hybrid electric vehicles (PHEVs), sales of which are rocketing. But the hype for hybrids may prove to be short-lived.

Worldwide sales of cars running purely on batteries (BEVs) were more than double those of PHEVs last year. But the gap has been rapidly closing. Sales of PHEVs were up by almost 50%, year on year, in the first seven months of 2024, compared with just 8% for BEVs, according to estimates from Bernstein, a broker.

Carmakers have been cooling on BEVs and warming to hybrids. This month Volvo backtracked on its commitment to go all-electric by 2030. It now says BEVs and PHEVs will together account for 90% of its sales by the end of the decade. Last month Ford announced that it was abandoning plans to make a large fully electric suv, opting instead for hybrid power. Hyundai is doubling its range of hybrids from seven to 14 models. Volkswagen, too, has pledged to increase investments in hybrids as it rethinks its plans for bevs.

Consumers are turning to hybrids partly because they are cheap. The big batteries required to run fully electric vehicles make them far more expensive than petrol cars. That is a problem when it comes to selling to the mass market; most buyers “will not pay a premium”, says Jim Farley, the boss of Ford. Plug-in hybrids, by contrast, run on much smaller batteries: they typically have a 20-kilowatt-hour unit, around a third of the size of those in BEVs. As a consequence, PHEVs are only a little more expensive than petrol-powered cars, and cost less to run. Although hybrids can typically travel only around 40 miles on their batteries, the option of using petrol avoids the anxiety many drivers of bevs have about running out of charge.

For their part, carmakers are fond of hybrids because they are usually as profitable as petrol-powered cars, in contrast to BEVs, many of which are loss-making. Smaller batteries mean lower production costs. Hybrids also allow legacy carmakers to draw more on their existing expertise and supply chains.

The fashion for hybrids, however, may prove to be fleeting. Rules in California, adopted by 16 other American states, stipulate that by 2035 only 20% of the new vehicles sold by carmakers can be plug-in hybrids; the remainder must be fully electric. The EU plans to slam the brakes on even harder: the bloc will ban the sale of all cars that run on petrol engines, including hybrids, by 2035.

Hybrids may already be less competitive by then. Battery prices have been falling, and will fall further as production expands and new chemistries are developed. Carmakers such as Renault have plans to roll out BEV models that cost significantly less than their current offerings, spurred on by Chinese competition. Charging networks are continuing to expand.

Bernstein predicts that phevs will capture a growing share of the car market until around 2030, but that sales will then stabilise and eventually decline as those of BEVs speed up (see chart). Hybrids are “winning now, but bevs will win eventually”, reckons Patrick Hummel of UBS, a bank. Xavier Smith of AlphaSense, a consultancy, thinks the obsession carmakers currently have with hybrids will prove short-sighted. Those that lose focus on electrification could soon fall behind.

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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Sunday, September 22, 2024 3:13 AM