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General Category => General Discussion => News and Information => Topic started by: droidrage on July 25, 2023, 11:06:25 PM
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Glenn Frey - The Heat Is On (From "Beverly Hills Cop" Soundtrack)
Climate change refers to long-term shifts in temperatures and weather patterns, mainly caused by human activities, especially the burning of fossil fuels.
Extreme heat spreads north and east as hospitalizations rise
Record-breaking temps make vivid the threat of deadly heat in a changed climate
‘It’s not off in the future. It’s here’: How climate change is driving record-breaking extreme heat
Millions of Americans continue to be impacted by extreme summer heat, with regions of the country experiencing prolonged periods of temperatures over 100 degrees. Climatologist Michael Mann joins Andrea Mitchell to discuss the causes of the record-breaking weather and the role climate change plays. “There's a little bit of extra juice because of an El Niño event, a natural warming in the Pacific that elevates global temperatures a little bit. But that's on top of this rising tide of warming from carbon pollution from the ongoing burning of fossil fuels, and those two things are now combining to give us truly unprecedented extreme weather events,” Mann tells Andrea. “Not just the heat domes, the heat waves, but the wildfires, the floods, the super storms. This is climate change. It's not off in the future. It's here, and we need to determine what we're going to do about it.”
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Extreme heat heading to heartland, as last three weeks mark hottest ever recorded on Earth
Phoenix breaks record with 19 days of 110-degree heat
Asia - Heat Of The Moment (Official Music Video)
50 Cent - Heat (Official Music Video)
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Nelly - Hot In Here
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Buster Poindexter- Hot Hot Hot
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Madonna - Burning Up
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Billy Idol - Hot In The City
NICK GILDER ☆ Hot Child in the City 【music video】
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Nuovo Testamento - Heat (Official video)
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SAVANT feat OMEGA SPARX - HEAT
Straplocked - All Day Heat (feat. Dana Jean Phoenix)
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Frisky Dingo - Global Warming
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Dangerous heat is spreading. See what it will be like in your city in 2030 and 2050.
WHERE DANGEROUS HEAT IS SURGING
https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/interactive/2023/extreme-heat-wet-bulb-globe-temperature?itid=hp-top-table-main_p001_f002
Phoenix, Ariz.
102 days with extreme heat in 2050
Belém, Brazil
222 days with extreme heat in 2050
Kolkata, India
188 days with extreme heat in 2050
The world is experiencing a surge in extremely hot days that put human health at risk, with the threat concentrated in some of the places least prepared to cope, according to an analysis of climate data by The Washington Post and CarbonPlan, a nonprofit that develops publicly available climate data and analytics.
By 2050, over 5 billion people — probably more than half the planet’s population — will be exposed to at least a month of health-threatening extreme heat when outdoors in the sun, the analysis shows, up from 4 billion in 2030 and 2 billion at the turn of the century.
The analysis calculated an approximate form of “wet-bulb globe temperature,” a metric that combines temperature, humidity, sunlight and wind. Scientists consider it the gold standard for evaluating how heat harms the human body.
The Post and CarbonPlan used a threshold of 89.6 degrees Fahrenheit, or 32 degrees Celsius, to delineate extremely risky heat, which is equal to a temperature of 120 degrees if it’s dry, or in the mid-90s if it’s very humid. At that point, even healthy adults who are active outside for more than 15 minutes in an hour can suffer heat stress; many deaths have occurred at much lower levels.
There are huge new risks even for people who escape the sun’s radiation. By 2050, 1.3 billion people will be exposed unless they can find some sort of cooling, up from 500 million in 2030 and 100 million in 2000.
This new epidemic of extreme heat represents one of the gravest threats to humanity, scientists say, but it won’t affect the world in a uniform way. While certain parts of rich countries will see a surge in days, most of the danger will come in poor countries in already hot regions such as South Asia and sub-Saharan Africa that lack widespread air conditioning and other advantages like advanced health-care systems.
“The resources just look vastly different,” said Tamma Carleton, an assistant professor of environmental economics at the University of California at Santa Barbara. “The story of heat is inequality.”
For example, 80 percent of the population affected by extremely hot days will live in countries that have an estimated 2030 gross domestic product per capita of less than $25,000 — a quarter of the United States’ predicted GDP per capita — while just 2 percent will live in countries with a GDP per capita of $100,000 or greater.
The danger of climate change is often associated with huge disasters: floods, fires, hurricanes. Heat, on the other hand, is a creeping, quieter risk — but one that is already transforming lives around the world.
People are dying of heat in fields, on construction sites, and in apartments without air conditioning. Others, forced to labor outside in the hot sun, are struck by kidney disease. Still others face heart attacks, strokes and even mental illness exacerbated by high temperatures.
“It is going to be one of the biggest challenges we face as a human society,” said Matthew Huber, a professor of earth science at Purdue University.
Unlike better-known metrics such as the heat index, wet-bulb globe temperature illustrates how sun and wind also affect people’s ability to stay cool. Most metrics assess only temperature and humidity, which can help show how the body struggles to cool itself by sweating when the air is humid. But they don’t account for the sun pounding down on the skin, or the cooling from a light breeze — factors that can also affect how well a person can endure hot conditions.
“It’s a better indicator of heat stress,” said Dan Vecellio, a researcher at Pennsylvania State University.
Ninety degrees doesn’t sound like much, but when it comes to wet-bulb globe temperature, it indicates punishing heat. Elderly people and those with preexisting conditions can be vulnerable at lower wet-bulb globe temperatures — but at 90 degrees, researchers say, almost everyone is vulnerable.
Absolute temperature isn’t everything — over time, regions and cultures have adapted to even very hot conditions. But the analysis shows which places will face sudden increases in scorching temperatures, threatening people’s ability to cope even in places that have long been hot.
And many have died in heat events that barely touched that threshold. In 2021, hundreds of people died during a record-breaking heat wave in the Pacific Northwest. In Portland, Ore., one of the key cities that was affected, wet-bulb globe temperatures reached only 90 degrees on one day. Dozens still died.
But while the impacts will be felt in developed countries, the biggest growth in high-risk days will be in low-income ones.
Many of the countries most affected have limited air conditioning. In India, for example, 270 million people will face extreme heat even indoors by 2030. But as of 2018, only about 5 percent of households in the country had air conditioning, according to the International Energy Agency.
Lucas Davis, a professor of environmental economics at the University of California at Berkeley, says research shows that once households in hot regions reach $10,000 in annual income, they tend to buy air-conditioning units. But in some of the poorest and hottest countries, particularly in sub-Saharan Africa, that level of income may remain unattainable for decades — leaving some of the world’s most vulnerable people at the mercy of dangerous heat.
Sierra Leone will soon face some of the hottest temperatures in the world. But according to one study by Lucas and other researchers, only 2 percent of the country’s households are expected to have air conditioning by 2030. Average income is less than $2,000 a year.
“In 2040, they still won’t be buying a lot of ACs – even if there’s good growth,” Davis said. “Sierra Leone just starts out so poor.”
People who labor outdoors are also often based in the hottest and most at-risk countries. In India and Pakistan — which are likely to face some of the most brutal hot days in the sun — outdoor workers make up 56 percent and 47 percent of the workforce, respectively, doing everything from agriculture to construction, according to data from the International Labor Organization. By contrast, outdoor workers account for only 10 percent of the U.S. workforce.
Even within single countries, those with fewer resources are at higher risk. Leonidas Ioannou, a researcher at the Jozef Stefan Institute in Slovenia who studies outdoor workers, has found that migrant workers are responsible for heavier and more demanding workloads — even at the same job site.
Experts recommend training outdoor workers to pace themselves and take rest breaks when the heat becomes untenable; some workers have experimented with ventilated vests with attached fans. Wearing white clothing has also been shown to reduce heat strain and skin temperature in people toiling outside.
Some of these interventions, Ioannou says, can help alleviate the strain of working in the heat — but legislation guaranteeing breaks and even containing prohibitions on working outdoors under particularly punishing conditions may also be needed. Only a few countries — Cyprus, the United Arab Emirates and Qatar — have legislation preventing outdoor work under conditions that are too hot. The United States has no uniform standard, although President Biden has asked the Occupational Safety and Health Administration to create one. In China, a law requires employers to pay more when temperatures rise above 95 degrees — but not to stop work in dangerous conditions.
People in developed countries aren’t immune. Researchers linked heat waves last year in Europe, where air conditioning is less prevalent than in the United States, to over 60,000 deaths. Globally, heat already claims about half a million lives every year, according to a 2021 study published in the journal Lancet Planetary Health. And many more people are experiencing chronic health conditions triggered or exacerbated by extreme heat.
“Heat can create increased heart attacks, strokes, kidney diseases, mental illnesses,” said Kai Chen, an assistant professor at the Yale School of Public Health. “Heatstroke is only the tip of the iceberg.”
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Where heat could become ‘unlivable’ for weeks or months at a time
https://www.washingtonpost.com/weather/2023/10/09/heat-waves-increased-temperatures-climate-change/
In the hottest parts of the world, high temperatures and humidity will, for longer stretches, surpass a threshold that even young and healthy people could struggle to survive as the planet warms, study says
Heat waves can already be deadly for the most vulnerable people — but in a warming world, temperatures and humidity will, for growing stretches of every year, surpass a threshold that even young and healthy people could struggle to survive, according to new research published Monday.
Lahore, Pakistan, already an epicenter of human ills linked to climate change, could surpass that survivability threshold for two or three weeks out of the year by the middle of the century, for example, the study, published Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, found. Under the most dramatic global warming scenarios, it could last for months.
In the Red Sea port of Al Hudaydah, Yemen, such oppressive conditions are expected to last a month or two — or, at the highest levels of global warming projections, would endure for most of the year, scientists found.
The research is the latest to build upon the idea that there is a limit to how much heat and humidity the human body can withstand, that it is likely lower than once thought, and that exposure to it will increase dramatically in the coming decades. The hottest parts of the planet have already surpassed it for brief periods, at least.
That doesn’t mean those places are already “unlivable” for humans, said Daniel Vecellio, the study’s lead author. But they could soon be, if their changing climates mean long stretches without respite from intense heat and humidity, he said.
“It’s when you see these accumulations of weeks or months of this at a time that things become ‘too hot for humans,’” said Vecellio, a postdoctoral researcher at George Mason University’s Virginia Climate Center.
Research has already found increasing likelihood of heat waves that could overwhelm the body’s ability to cool itself. A similar study published in September found that some 200 weather stations around the world have already at times surpassed the threshold. In places like Europe and North America, where people aren’t acclimated to intense heat, temperatures and humidity could surpass the survivability threshold a couple of times a decade even under the most ambitious timelines of global warming.
If that happened in Europe, for example, where air conditioning is rare and heat acclimatization is low, “you could have mass fatalities or casualties,” said Carter Powis, that study’s lead author and a researcher at the University of Oxford.
Both studies are based on research Vecellio and a team conducted at Pennsylvania State University testing an understanding that, at some level of heat and humidity, the human body can no longer cool itself and its internal temperature rises uncontrollably. The human body sheds heat when sweat evaporates into the air, and also by radiating warmth into the surrounding environment.
Past research found that transfer of heat could no longer occur at 35 degrees Celsius (95 degrees Fahrenheit) on what is known as the wet bulb temperature scale, which factors in both temperature and humidity. (Unlike the heat index, which also factors in both heat and humidity, the wet bulb temperature is not designed to be interpreted as a measure of how hot it feels outside.)
But, in a study published last year, the Penn State researchers found that threshold to be closer to a wet bulb temperature of 31 degrees Celsius (88 degrees Fahrenheit) for a sample of young and healthy research subjects who were not accustomed to such muggy conditions.
In their latest study, those researchers explored where and how often that threshold might be surpassed in future climate scenarios, in which average planetary temperatures rise above preindustrial levels by anywhere from 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) to 4 degrees Celsius (7.2 degrees Fahrenheit). They project hundreds — if not thousands — of hours a year with such extreme conditions across parts of Asia, the Middle East and Africa.
Lahore, for example, would surpass the heat and humidity threshold for 69.5 hours a year under the most conservative warming scenario — nearly nine days if the heat lasted eight hours a day, or more than two weeks if it lasted four hours a day. At 4 degrees Celsius of global warming, the wet bulb temperature would remain above the threshold for more than 1,000 hours a year.
In Al Hudaydah, where the study found the most enduring heat and humidity, conditions could remain at an unsurvivable extreme for more than 2,400 hours a year at the highest levels of global warming — equivalent to 100 straight days.
But if warming was limited to 1.5 degrees Celsius above preindustrial levels, a target global leaders agreed upon in Paris in 2015, the study projects the Yemeni city would experience less than 100 hours of such heat and humidity.
Vecellio said the data shows the planet can save countless lives by taking efforts to limit global warming.
“We can stave off some of the worst impacts,” he said.
Other places the study estimates would endure days or weeks above the heat threshold:
Delhi, with 39 hours at 2 degrees of warming and 556.9 hours at 4 degrees of warming
Hanoi, with 37.7 hours at 2 degrees of warming and 602.1 hours at 4 degrees
Dammam, Saudi Arabia, with 223.6 hours at 2 degrees of warming and 804.7 hours at 4 degrees
Dubai, with 117.7 hours at 2 degrees of warming and 783.9 hours at 4 degrees
Bandar Abbas, Iran, with 175.5 hours at 2 degrees of warming and 958.6 at 4 degrees
The study does not project such extreme heat and humidity in Europe, and only relatively brief stretches in North America. About a day’s worth of it could occur each year, on average, in New York City and Chicago under the most aggressive global warming scenarios, the researchers found.
That doesn’t mean there won’t be summers where dangerous heat could hit such places for much longer stretches, though, Powis said.
September was the planet’s most anomalously hot month ever observed, about 1.7 to 1.8 degrees Celsius hotter than preindustrial levels. If such a departure from the norm occurred in July or August, “you’re looking at substantial risk” of unsurvivable heat, Powis said.
The research underscores how the most severe impacts of climate change will be felt in countries that have done the least to create it, said Fahad Saeed, a Pakistan-based climate scientist with the German think tank Climate Analytics. It shows much of the worst and most lasting heat occurring in densely populated and underdeveloped parts of southern and southeastern Asia and Africa.
And while data has shown massive death tolls from heat waves in Europe, for example, the toll of the impacts in those hardest-hit regions is likely dramatically underestimated because of a lack of research and reporting, Saeed said.
“They are the ones who are bearing the brunt,” he said.
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Why many scientists are now saying climate change is an all-out ‘emergency’
https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2023/10/30/climate-emergency-scientists-declaration/
Escalating rhetoric comes as new study shows there’s just six years left to keep global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius at current CO2 emissions rate.
(https://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-apps/imrs.php?src=https://arc-anglerfish-washpost-prod-washpost.s3.amazonaws.com/public/TDKUEBTYYMLFHAAYCD4GV2XHUI.jpg&w=1200)
Bill Ripple had never been an activist.
The Oregon State University ecologist had spent his career wandering through the hills and canyons of Yellowstone National Park, tracking the health of wolves and other large carnivores. Nor was he particularly outspoken: As a college student, he was so concerned about taking a debate class that he considered dropping out and returning to his family farm.
But then, in 2018, Ripple saw pictures of a town called Paradise, Calif., completely destroyed by wildfire. Houses had disappeared in the blaze; all that remained were twisted hunks of metal and glass. Ripple started writing a new academic paper. He called it: “World Scientists’ Warning of a Climate Emergency.” He sent it to colleagues to see if anyone wanted to sign on. By the time the paper was published in the journal Bioscience in 2019, it had 11,000 signatures from scientists around the world — it now has more than 15,000.
“My life completely changed,” Ripple said. He is the subject of a 30-minute Oregon State University documentary; he gets constant media requests and calls to collaborate from scientists around the world. Last week, he published a new paper on the state of the climate system.
It was called “Entering Uncharted Territory.”
“Scientists are more willing to speak out,” Ripple said. “As a group, we’ve been pretty hesitant, historically.” But, he added, “I feel like scientists have a moral obligation to warn humanity.”
After a few years of record-breaking temperatures and extreme weather events, Ripple’s experience is a sign of how climate scientists — who once refrained from entering the public fray — are now using strident language to describe the warming planet. References to “climate emergency” and “climate crisis,” once used primarily by activist groups like the U.K.-based Extinction Rebellion or the U.S.-based Sunrise Movement, are spiking in the academic literature. Meanwhile, scientists’ communication to the media and the public has gotten more exasperated — and more desperate.
On Monday, scientists released a paper showing that the world’s “carbon budget” — the amount of greenhouse gas emissions the world can still emit without boosting global temperatures more than 1.5 degrees Celsius — has shrunk by a third. The world only has 6 years left at current emissions levels before racing past that temperature limit.
“There are no technical scenarios globally available in the scientific literature that would support that that is actually possible, or can even describe how that would be possible,” Joeri Rogelj, a climate scientist at Imperial College London, told reporters in a call.
Tim Lenton, one of the co-authors on Ripple’s most recent paper and a professor of earth system science at the University of Exeter, said that 2023 has been filled with temperatures so far beyond the norm that “they’re very hard to rationalize.” “This isn’t fitting a simple statistical model,” he said.
Lenton said he isn’t afraid to use terms like “emergency” or “climate and ecological crisis.” “If you say ‘urgent’ to a politician … that isn’t really enough,” he said.
The language has spilled into academic publications as well. As recently as 2015, only 32 papers in the Web of Science research database included the term “climate emergency.” In 2022, 862 papers contained the phrase.
It wasn’t always this way. In the 2000s and even early 2010s, most scientists shied away making any statements that could be seen as “political” in nature. Jacquelyn Gill, a professor of climate science and paleoecology at the University of Maine, said that when she was doing her PhD in the late 2000s, senior academics warned her against deviating at all from the science when interacting with the media or the public.
“We were actively told if we start to talk about solutions, if we start to talk about the policy implications of our work, we will have abandoned our supposed ‘scientific neutrality,’” Gill said. “And then people will not trust us anymore on the science.”
Susan Joy Hassol, a science communication expert who has worked with climate researchers for years, says that even a decade ago, climate scientists were uncertain what their role was in communicating the dangers of rising temperatures. “I think at least some of them felt that scientists communicate through IPCC reports,” Hassol said, referring to the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. “‘We do our science, we publish, we put together these reports, and it’s kind of up to other people to listen.’”
Now, she said that has changed. “We have reached this stage of crisis,” she said.
It isn’t just the fact that emissions still aren’t going down — or that policy hasn’t responded quickly enough to the challenge. (Carbon dioxide emissions related to energy use have continued to climb, even following the brief downturn of the covid-19 pandemic.) As the impacts of climate change escalate, scientists say that their language has changed to meet the moment.
When it comes to terms like “climate emergency,” Gill says, “it’s a little bit of strategy and a lot of honesty.” While climate scientists are still discussing whether warming is accelerating, she added, “it’s clear the impacts are becoming more noticeable and in-your-face.”
Hassol said that the shift is simple. In the 2000s, she said, climate change wasn’t yet at the level of an emergency. She recalls a 2009 report called the Copenhagen Diagnosis, which analyzed climate science to date and made suggestions for how to reach net-zero carbon emissions. If world governments had acted swiftly, the world would have only had to cut emissions by a bit over 3 percent per year. “We called that the bunny slope,” Hassol recalled.
If, on the other hand, governments didn’t start the transition until 2020, cuts would have to be much steeper — up to 9 percent per year. “We called that the double-black diamond,” she said. Despite the brief respite in CO2 emissions during the pandemic, humanity’s trajectory has veered closer to the double-black diamond path.
At the same time, many scientists realize that even the best communication in the world isn’t enough to overcome the inertia of a fossil-fuel based system — and the resistance of various oil and gas companies.
“The problem is not that scientists haven’t been communicating clearly enough,” Hassol said. “We communicated pretty darn clearly. Anyone who wanted to hear the message — it was there.”
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Earth breached a feared level of warming over the past year. Are we doomed?
https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2024/02/08/1-5-celsius-global-warming-record/
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It’s official: For the past 12 months, the Earth was 1.5 degrees Celsius higher than in preindustrial times, scientists said Thursday, crossing a critical barrier into temperatures never experienced by human civilizations.
According to the European Union’s Copernicus Climate Change Service, the past 12 months clocked in at a scorching 1.52 degrees Celsius (2.74 degrees Fahrenheit) higher on average compared with between 1850 and 1900.
At some level, that’s not surprising — the past 12 months have been scorching, as a warm El Niño cycle combined with the signal of human-caused warming generated heat waves and extreme weather events around the globe.
“This El Nino maximum is riding on top of a base climate that is continuously warming due to climate change,” Andrew Dessler, a climate scientist at Texas A&M University, said in an email. “The combination of them is what’s giving us such hot global temperatures.”
But does this mean that the world’s most famous climate goal is out of reach? Not ... exactly.
Here’s what you need to know:
Where did the 1.5 Celsius goal come from?
In the 2016 Paris climate agreement, almost 200 nations agreed to keep the global average temperature from exceeding 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) above preindustrial levels — and to “pursue efforts” to keep it below 1.5 degrees Celsius. The latter addition largely came from pressure from small-island states, who are at risk of disappearing under rising seas if temperatures get much higher.
Scientists have shown that holding the temperature rise to 1.5C could mean the survival of coral reefs, the preservation of Arctic sea ice and less deadly heat waves.
Momentum has gathered around that more ambitious goal — even as carbon emissions continue to rise. Activists and environmentalists have chanted “1.5 to stay alive” and pointed out that emissions will have to be cut dramatically by 2030 to meet that target.
Does this mean we have missed the 1.5C climate goal?
No. There’s actually some disagreement about what exactly counts as breaching that threshold — but scientists and policymakers agree that it has to be a multiyear average, not a single 12-month period. Scientists estimate that without dramatic emissions reductions, that will happen sometime in the 2030s. But there could be other single years or 12-month periods that cross the line before then.
Can we still avoid passing 1.5C?
Most scientists say passing 1.5C is inevitable. “The 1.5-degree limit is deader than a doornail,” Columbia University climate scientist James Hansen said in a call with reporters late last year.
Scientists and economists use complicated models to try to predict how fast the world can transition away from fossil fuels. The Washington Post analyzed 1,200 modeled pathways for the world to shift to clean energy and found that only four of them showed the world hitting the 1.5C target without substantially overshooting or using speculative technology (like large-scale carbon capture) that doesn’t yet exist. At this point, many experts believe that the economy is too stuck on fossil fuels to transition fast enough for 1.5 degrees.
Does that mean we’ll pass catastrophic tipping points?
That’s a more difficult question. Scientists don’t know exactly when certain tipping points — like the collapse of the Greenland ice sheet or the release of greenhouse gases from thawing permafrost — will occur. It’s very hard to predict and model these types of catastrophic changes.
And 1.5C isn’t a magic threshold; it’s not as though as soon as we pass that number, Antarctic ice sheets will collapse and ocean circulations will grind to a halt. But one thing is certain: For every tenth of a degree of warming, tipping points are more likely. Two degrees is worse than 1.9 degrees, which is worse than 1.8 degrees, and so on.
And at each tenth of a degree, the infrastructure and systems that the world has built — electric grids, homes, livelihoods — will become more strained. Our modern world simply was not designed for temperatures this high. At some level, the final temperature of the planet isn’t what matters most. It’s where countries can actually get carbon emissions to zero — and stop contributing to future warming altogether.
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Global warming threatens Antarctica’s meteorites
The continent is home to Earth’s largest concentration of the objects from outer space
https://www.washingtonpost.com/science/2024/04/27/warming-climate-antarctica-meteorite-melt/
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Antarctica is home to Earth’s largest concentration of meteorites — so many that over 60 percent of meteorite finds originate there. But global warming is endangering Antarctica’s meteorites, and a new analysis forecasts that close to three-quarters of the continent’s meteorites could disappear from the ice sheet surface by century’s end, making it nearly impossible to spot or retrieve the precious space rocks.
The research, published in Nature Climate Change, used a machine-learning algorithm to project how Antarctic meteorites will fare under simulated climate conditions. Antarctica’s meteorites built up in stranding zones on the continent thousands of years ago, becoming embedded in ice. Today, they are usually found in “blue ice” areas — pockets where wind reveals older ice that looks blue in contrast with the continent’s large expanses of white.
Meteorites are particularly sensitive to temperature, the researchers explain, and when they are exposed to the sun, their darker surface warms, which can melt the ice beneath and cause them to sink away from the ice surface.
The researchers project that in all emissions scenarios, at least 5,000 meteorites a year will disappear from the surface. Every tenth of a degree of temperature increase is correlated with a loss of between 5,100 and 12,200 meteorites, and under a high-emissions scenario, 76 percent of the areas currently covered by meteorites will be lost.
This would represent a catastrophic loss to space scientists, who prize meteorites because of the information they contain about the development of our solar system. Since they formed up to billions of years ago, the space rocks offer important clues about stars, planetary formation, and even Earth’s geologic history.
As a result, the researchers say, it’s important to “rapidly and purposefully” collect as many such specimens as possible before they become inaccessible to science.
“We need to accelerate and intensify efforts to recover Antarctic meteorites,” Harry Zekollari, a glaciologist who led the research while working at ETH Zurich’s department of civil, environmental and geomatic engineering, said in a news release. “The loss of Antarctic meteorites is much like the loss of data that scientists glean from ice cores collected from vanishing glaciers — once they disappear, so do some of the secrets of the universe.”
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Hawaii’s Mauna Loa Observatory just captured ominous signals about the planet’s health
Carbon dioxide is accumulating in the atmosphere faster than ever.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/weather/2024/05/10/carbon-dioxide-record-mauna-loa/
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Hawaii’s Mauna Loa’s Observatory just captured an ominous sign about the pace of global warming.
Atmospheric levels of planet-warming carbon dioxide aren’t just on their way to yet another record high this year — they’re rising faster than ever, according to the latest in a 66-year-long series of observations.
Carbon dioxide levels were 4.7 parts per million higher in March than they were a year earlier, the largest annual leap ever measured at the National Oceanic Atmospheric Administration laboratory atop a volcano on Hawaii’s Big Island. And from January through April, CO2 concentrations increased faster than they have in the first four months of any other year. Data from Mauna Loa is used to create the Keeling Curve, a chart that daily plots global atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration, tracked by Scripps Institution of Oceanography at the University of California at San Diego.
For decades, CO2 concentrations at Mauna Loa in the month of May have broken previous records. But the recent acceleration in atmospheric CO2, surpassing a record-setting increase observed in 2016, is perhaps a more ominous signal of failing efforts to reduce global greenhouse gas emissions and the damage they cause to Earth’s climate.
“Not only is CO2 still rising in the atmosphere — it’s increasing faster and faster,” said Arlyn Andrews, a climate scientist at NOAA’s Global Monitoring Laboratory in Boulder, Colo.
A historically strong El Niño climate pattern that developed last year is a big reason for the spike. But the weather pattern only punctuated an existing trend in which global carbon emissions are rising even as U.S. emissions have declined and the growth in global emissions has slowed.
The spike is “not surprising,” said Ralph Keeling, director of the CO2 Program at Scripps Institution, “because we’re also burning more fossil fuel than ever.”
Why carbon dioxide levels keep rising
Carbon dioxide levels naturally ebb and flow throughout each year. At Mauna Loa, they peak in April and May and then decline until August and September. This follows the growth cycle of northern hemisphere plants: growing — and sequestering away carbon — during the summer months and releasing it during fall and winter as they die and decompose.
Once CO2 makes it into the atmosphere, it stays there for hundreds of years, acting as a blanket trapping heat. That blanket has been steadily thickening ever since humans turned materials that were once dense stores of carbon — oil and coal, primarily — into fuel to burn.
That means the Keeling Curve reaches new heights each May, forming a new peak in a sawtooth-like pattern.
The chart originated when Charles David Keeling, Ralph Keeling’s father, started recording atmospheric concentrations of CO2 atop the Mauna Loa volcano in the late 1950s. It was the first effort to measure the planet-warming gas on a continuing basis and helped alert scientists to the reality of the intensified greenhouse effect, global warming and its impact on the planet.
Each annual maximum has raised new alarm about the curve’s unceasing upward trend — nearing 427 parts per million in the most recent readings, which is more than 50 percent above preindustrial levels and the highest in at least 4.3 million years, according to NOAA. Atmospheric CO2 levels first surpassed 400 parts per million in 2014. Scientists said in 2016 that levels were unlikely to drop below that threshold again during the lifetime of even the youngest generations.
Since that year, carbon dioxide emissions tied to fossil fuel consumption have increased 5 percent globally, according to Scripps.
The increase in carbon dioxide from year to year is not precisely consistent. One factor that tends to cause levels to rise especially quickly: the El Niño climate pattern.
El Niño is linked to warmer-than-average surface waters along the equator in the eastern and central Pacific. That warmth affects weather patterns around the world, triggering extreme heat, floods and droughts.
The droughts in particular contribute to higher-than-normal spikes in atmospheric carbon dioxide, Keeling said.
Tropical forests serve as reliable stores of carbon because they don’t go through the same seasonal decay as plant life at higher latitudes. But El Niño-linked droughts in tropical areas including Indonesia and northern South America mean less carbon storage within plants, Keeling said. Land-based ecosystems around the world tend to give off more carbon dioxide during El Niño because of the changes in precipitation and temperature the weather pattern brings, Andrews added.
That can allow CO2 concentrations to rise especially quickly on the tail end of El Niño events — such as the current one, which NOAA scientists said Thursday is likely to end this month.
The increase observed at Mauna Loa over the past year is some five times larger than the average annual increases seen in the 1960s, and about twice as large as in the 2010s, according to NOAA data.
A record surge in early 2016 was also at the end of a historically strong El Niño.
It will take some four decades to stop the annual growth in CO2 concentrations, even if all emissions began declining now, Andrews said. Because Earth’s carbon cycle is so far out of its natural equilibrium, plants, soils and oceans would give off stores of extra CO2 in response to any reduction in humans’ emissions, she said.
And for CO2 concentrations to fall back below 400 parts per million, it would take more than two centuries even if emissions dropped close to zero by the end of this century, she added.
In the natural carbon cycle, the element passes through air, soil and water, and plants and animals, eventually making its way into deep ocean sediments and fossils deep underground. Carbon’s movement throughout Earth systems helps regulate our planet’s temperatures — unlike on Venus, for instance, where CO2 accounts for most of the atmosphere, making that planet’s surface hellishly hot.
But human emissions of CO2 throw that system out of balance. It’s like adding more and more trash to a dump, Andrews said. Even if each load of trash gets smaller, “it’s still piling up.”
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Sometimes it’s easier to believe in space lasers than climate change
Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) would seemingly rather claim that the government can create hurricanes than that warm Gulf water does.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2024/10/08/sometimes-its-easier-believe-space-lasers-than-climate-change/
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Hurricane Helene roared through the Southeast two weeks ago, destroying an uncounted number of buildings, triggering massive flooding and leaving more than 200 people dead. In a statement, President Joe Biden extended his sympathies, saying he was “praying for those who lost loved ones from Hurricane Helene, and for those whose homes, businesses, and communities were impacted by this terrible storm.”
Except that if Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) is to be believed: Maybe he caused it??
Greene is perhaps America’s second most-famous conspiracy theorist, having risen to national attention by combining doomsday rhetoric with Republican politicking — mirroring the person who holds the top spot.
One of her best-known and most dubious assertions centered around a natural disaster. When a wildfire erupted in California, Greene speculated that the conflagration had been caused by a laser beam targeted from space at the direction of investment bankers. This was not when she was a kid, mind you; she offered this explanation in 2018. So perhaps it is not surprising that her explanation for Helene’s 2024 arrival is broadly similar.
She got there slowly. First, on Oct. 3, she posted a hard-to-read map showing how Helene’s path overlapped with heavily Republican areas of Florida, Georgia and North Carolina. This isn’t incorrect, as The Washington Post also reported, but the idea is hampered by the same inaccuracy that plagues presidential election maps: lots of lightly populated rural areas vote red but occupy a lot of square mileage.
Later that day, she made the subtext explicit.
“Yes they can control the weather,” she wrote on X, the rumor-driven site that replaced Twitter. “It’s ridiculous for anyone to lie and say it can’t be done.”
A “community note” — a form of internal fact-checking — was appended to that post noting that control of the weather to the scale of a hurricane was very much not possible.
But Greene dug in. Two days later, she shared a clip from CBS News describing how lasers could be used to control the weather. What was presented was theoretical, though, with the scientist being interviewed indicating that the idea was not demonstrably functional. What’s more, the same issue of scale applied. Making rain fall from a cumulonimbus is very different than ginning up massive regions of rain-filled clouds.
On Monday evening, Greene posted a meme getting at her original point, that evidence of the ability to manipulate weather was extensive. But it relied on a familiar tactic in the world of conspiracy theorizing: scraping together and misrepresenting a number of disparate and unrelated things.
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Finally, about an hour later, Greene offered her most revealing assessment of the situation. Sharing a post from another user on X, she sarcastically joked that her theory was no more ludicrous than the idea that such storms were caused by “cow farts.” The question she was posing to readers was obvious: Which seemed more likely, that the government could whip up a hurricane or that Helene and other storms are worsened by methane emissions from the cattle industry?
The answer, of course, is the cow one.
Let’s set aside the ridiculousness of the weather-control argument, an argument that depends on nonexistent technology and on our assuming that the government never used this to, say, ground Russian aircraft preparing to invade Ukraine but instead saved it so they could wipe out western North Carolina.
Let’s instead focus on the abundant and convincing evidence that climate change is real, contributes to strengthening storms like Helene (and Hurricane Milton, now headed toward Florida) — and is driven to a small degree by emissions from livestock.
Climate change is a broad term referring primarily to the increase in global temperatures that has resulted from emissions of gases such as carbon dioxide and methane. Those gases rise into the upper atmosphere and remain there, keeping some heat that would otherwise escape into space within the atmosphere. That has raised global air and water temperatures, including in the Gulf of Mexico.
Hurricanes draw energy from ocean water, with warmer water offering the storms more fuel. Warmer air holds more precipitation. In a warmer world, then, we would expect to see hurricanes grow large, quickly. And we do.
Cow flatulence doesn’t contribute a lot of methane to the atmosphere. As NASA explains, cow burps are the bigger problem. It’s emissions from the agriculture industry more broadly that are the bigger contributor to atmospheric methane, though. And while methane is more effective at trapping heat, it makes up much less of the greenhouse gas that blankets the planet than carbon dioxide, produced largely by burning fossil fuels.
We don’t need to post random memes with patent numbers to demonstrate this. We can, instead, point to voluminous, detailed scientific research.
But Republicans such as Greene have invested enormous political capital in the idea that climate change isn’t real or is overstated. The issue has been deeply politicized over the past two decades, in part thanks to the efforts of fossil fuel companies. By now, the partisan damage has been done, with politicians such as Greene tossing out goofy claims about cow farts as a way to trigger conditioned scoffing from her political allies. To her and to many of her allies, climate change is as ridiculous an explanation for a hurricane as “maybe it was a government megalaser” is to objective observers.
This is the world we live in, one where a random person’s motivated poking around on the internet is presented as equivalent to actual controlled research. Where the poking around, when done by the right person, can spur a cadre of allies to step up in defense — regardless of how silly the results of the “research.”
Over on her official X account, Greene summarized her argument, again suggesting that the weather is under government control.
“Climate change is the new Covid,” she claimed. But this is backward. The right spent more than a decade devising ways to undercut climate science and stoke distrust in scientists, efforts that were leveraged to undercut confidence in the pandemic response and vaccines.
At the very least, Greene is (seeming inadvertently) admitting that climate change, like covid, is dangerous.
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Scientists have said that we can cool the planet back down. Now they’re not sure it will be so easy.
It might be possible to “overshoot” and then return to our climate targets. But some changes will be irreversible.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2024/10/09/overshoot-climate-targets-one-point-five/
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For years, scientists and world leaders have pinned their hopes for the future on a hazy promise — that, even if temperatures soar far above global targets, the planet can eventually be cooled back down.
This phenomenon, known as a temperature “overshoot,” has been baked into most climate models and plans for the future. In theory, even if global warming reaches the dreaded 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) above preindustrial temperatures, it could be brought back down by pulling carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere.
But a new study published Wednesday in the journal Nature shows that blowing past climate goals is more dangerous than it originally seemed. Even if temperatures come back down to 1.5 degrees C, the authors found, many climate impacts — like rising sea levels and thawing permafrost — will persist for centuries to millennia.
For example, for every 10 years Earth’s temperature remains 1.5 degrees C above preindustrial levels, the researchers calculated, sea level will rise by about 4 centimeters, or 1.6 inches. Even a small increase in sea-level rise can lead to more dangerous flooding when hurricanes and heavy rains strike. (In Florida, which is currently facing the danger of Hurricane Milton, sea levels are already 8 inches higher than they were in 1950.)
And as the planet teeters closer to that temperature limit, overshoot is looking more and more likely.
“A 1-in-10 chance of an existential threat is not small,” Joeri Rogelj, a professor of climate science at Imperial College London and one of the authors of the new paper, said on a phone call with reporters on Tuesday.
Since the Paris agreement, world leaders have promised to attempt to hold the global temperature rise to 1.5 degrees C. That target has stayed in place, even as countries have failed to limit fossil fuel burning: Carbon dioxide concentrations in the atmosphere are rising at a record pace, according to observations in March at Hawaii’s Mauna Loa Observatory.
But in a special United Nations report in 2018, scientists and climate modelers popularized a controversial idea: that nations could “overshoot” the target temporarily, and then bring temperatures back down in the future.
By using techniques like direct air capture or other forms of sucking carbon out of the atmosphere, scientists said, countries could cool the Earth back down even if the planet has already reached 1.6 C or 1.7 C above preindustrial levels.
In recent years, as emissions have continued to climb, the idea of “overshooting” climate targets hasn’t just become popular — it’s now essential to reach the world’s most famous climate goal.
“Emissions reductions haven’t happened as planned,” said Glen Peters, a senior researcher at the Center for International Climate Research in Norway who was not involved in the new study. “So if you still want to get to 1.5 degrees, you need overshoot.”
Last year, The Washington Post analyzed 1,200 pathways to 1.5 degrees C, and found that there were no pathways with “reasonable” assumptions about technological development that didn’t include some kind of overshoot.
But scientists have begun to warn that flying past our climate goals and then returning to them isn’t the same as meeting them in the first place.
In the new study, the authors warn that sea-level rise and melting permafrost may be irreversible for hundreds, if not thousands of years, even if temperatures later come back down. The extinction of species that could result from these massive planetary shifts, they added, are also not reversible.
“Excess deaths are not reversible,” said Rogelj. “If you have a couple of decades in which large proportions of vulnerable people are exposed to extreme heat in a society that is not adapted to this — that’s not reversible.”
Other recent papers have shown that catastrophic tipping points are more likely for each increment above 1.5 degrees C. In a study released in Nature Communications in August, researchers found that every tenth of a degree above that threshold increased the likelihood of triggering tipping points — like the Amazon rainforest transforming into a dry savanna or the collapse of the Atlantic Ocean circulation system — by 1 to 1.5 percent.
At the same time, scientists warn that cooling the planet might not even be technically feasible. The tools to pull carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere and reverse warming have not been deployed at a large scale. At the moment, companies pull about 2 million tons of CO2 out of the air every year — but that number would need to be increased by a factor of 1,000 in just the next few decades.
And future generations may not even be motivated to do so. Oliver Geden, a senior fellow at the German Institute for International and Security Affairs, says that once the world warms more than 1.5 degrees C, countries may not want to spend the money and energy to bring temperatures back down. “We’re in a world that does not even manage to bring emissions down now,” he said.
One thing, scientists say, is clear: Humanity is headed for a world with more than 1.5 degrees C of warming. The planet has already experienced a 12-month period during which temperatures exceeded that limit, and by the early 2030s, it will be above that mark for multiple years at a time — which is what matters under the text of the Paris agreement.
Overshoot is a way of softening that blow, of making it seem like the world’s climate target is still within reach. But sooner or later, world leaders will have to wrestle with the fact that the most famous climate goal is impossible to meet.
Geden says that many scientists accept that the world will go beyond 1.5 degrees C. “But,” he added, “nobody can decide what the next target will be.”
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A utility promised to stop burning coal. Then Google and Meta came to town.
An energy crunch forces continued coal burning in a low-income area as data centers strain the regional power supply.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2024/10/08/google-meta-omaha-data-centers/
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OMAHA — Residents in the low-income, largely minority neighborhood of North Omaha celebrated when they learned a 1950s-era power plant nearby would finally stop burning coal. The community has some of the region’s worst air pollution and high rates of asthma.
But when the 2023 deadline to rid that plant of coal arrived, the power company that owns it balked. Eliminating toxic emissions conflicted with a competing priority: serving massive, power-hungry Meta and Google data centers the utility helped recruit to the region before it secured enough new energy to meet the extra demand.
The fast-growing data centers — which provide computing power for artificial intelligence — are driving explosive growth in the area’s energy use. Electricity demand in Omaha has increased so much overall, according to the Omaha Public Power District, that permanently switching off the two coal-burning generators at its North Omaha plant could buckle the area’s electricity system.
“A promise was made, and then they broke it,” said Cheryl Weston, who has lived for five decades in North Omaha. “The tech companies bear responsibility for this. The coal plant is still open because they need all this energy to grow.”
Coal is now planned to burn in North Omaha through 2026, according to the utility, although Weston and other critics are skeptical it will stop then.
The disputes in Omaha over data centers and power demand are playing out across the United States. Rapid data center growth has also been accompanied by utility plans to prolong the use of coal in Georgia, Utah and Wisconsin. The Nebraska story reveals in detail how the race by giant technology companies to gain the advantage in AI is conflicting with climate goals and potentially harming public health.
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Power Grab
The artificial intelligence industry is driving a nationwide data center building boom. These sprawling warehouses of computing infrastructure are creating explosive demand for power, water and other resources. Power Grab investigates the impacts on America and the risks AI infrastructure creates for the environment and the energy transition.
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The Omaha Public Power District blames the missed closure date for its North Omaha coal-burning units on the slow arrival of clean energy supplies from wind and solar, which have met with heavy opposition in rural areas. It also cites regulatory delays that have slowed a plan to replace coal-burning units with natural gas, pointing to long waits to connect new projects to the regional electrical grid and mandates for minimum power supplies. But others in the energy industry say that’s not the full story.
The electricity that Google and Meta — the parent company of Facebook and Instagram — are devouring is a major factor in the extension of coal burning, they say. According to the utility’s own estimates, two-thirds of projected growth in demand in the Omaha area is attributable to the massive data centers rising largely on former farmland in the surrounding prairie.
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“If not for the data centers and poor planning by the utility, they would not need to push to keep those coal units open,” said Devi Glick, a principal at the consulting firm Synapse Energy Economics. “It is disingenuous to say that is not what is driving this.”
The data centers’ need for electricity is enormous. Meta’s Nebraska data center alone used nearly as much energy as the North Omaha coal units produced in 2023, company and federal energy disclosures show. It is enough electricity to power more than half the homes in Omaha.
Google’s electricity use in the Omaha region eclipses that of Meta, according to tracking by the research firm DC Byte. The data shows Google uses more total electricity in Nebraska than anywhere in the United States.
The conflicts in Omaha are not unique. Companies are scouring the nation for alternative sites for data centers as they encounter land and energy shortages in tech hubs such as Northern Virginia and California’s Bay Area. Communities that recently landed on the radar of Silicon Valley are being visited by battalions of tech executives, energy developers and real estate brokers looking for power.
Omaha emerged as prime territory because of its bountiful, cheap electricity and seemingly endless opportunities to convert cornfields into vast solar and wind farms.
Despite the slow arrival of new solar and wind sources into the utility’s portfolio, tech companies insist their data center operations in Nebraska are green. By signing contracts with distant renewable power developers, they claim to have “net zero” impact on greenhouse gas emissions, even as the North Omaha coal plant continues to pollute locally.
Residents say those faraway clean power purchases offer little comfort. Asthma rates in North Omaha, where people of color make up 68 percent of the population, are among the highest in the country, according to a study released last year. Coal power plants have been linked to asthma and elevated mortality rates in neighboring communities nationwide.
The newest Omaha-area data centers are so massive, and so unexpected among the corn stalks and sorghum plants, that they seem like science fiction come to life. Meta’s sprawling facility is 4 million square feet spread over nine giant complexes. The largely windowless Google and Meta buildings are filled with the racks and servers that power the world’s cloud computing needs today and increasingly power the revolution in AI.
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Data centers could consume as much as 17 percent of all U.S. electricity by 2030, according to new research from Bloomberg Intelligence, nearly quadruple what they consume today. In the Omaha region, utility officials have announced they will need to double the amount of electricity they generate by that time.
Meta originally passed over Omaha. To woo the tech company, local utility executives created a special industrial electricity rate in 2017. The utility then aggressively marketed the rate to Google. Then-Gov. Pete Ricketts (R) said in 2020 that the Omaha Public Power District was the “linchpin” to getting Google to come to Nebraska.
“It took us 75 years to get where we are today,” Omaha Public Power District CEO Javier Fernandez said in a blog post. “By 2030, we are going to nearly double our generation portfolio. That’s incredible.” Utility officials say they will eventually bring online a huge amount of wind and solar energy — enough to meet as much as 60 percent of the new electricity demand. Much of the rest would come from gas.
Local activists are dismayed by what they say is a muted tech company response to the continued use in Omaha of fossil fuels, not just coal but also natural gas. They say these companies need to be clear that they will not continue to expand if the power company serving them is using dirty energy.
“They’re sitting on the sidelines and watching,” said Preston Love, a longtime North Omaha community organizer who is running for the U.S. Senate as a Democrat. “They’re not in the game. Shame on them. They need to be speaking up.”
The tech companies, which declined interview requests, said every watt of power they use for their data centers is matched with purchases of clean energy elsewhere on the regional power grid. But those contracts feed into a vast power grid, spanning 14 states from Louisiana to Montana. Many experts and activists say much of that clean power would probably get produced whether the tech companies were signing contracts or not.
“These tech companies are doing a lot of paper pushing in Nebraska, and there are not enough real projects being built that get new wind and solar on the grid now,” said Jane Kleeb, founder of Bold Nebraska, which played a key role in killing the proposed Keystone XL pipeline project.
She said tech companies should help overcome rural opposition that has emerged to huge wind and solar arrays. “The Googles and Metas are basically saying ‘Yes, we’re net zero’ and then leaving all the responsibility of actually building clean energy to us, without supporting our efforts,” she said.
The Omaha Public Power District’s marquee solar project in development, a 2,800 acre industrial-scale project on York County farmland, 100 miles from Omaha, is getting a frosty reception from locals. At community meetings they have expressed alarm about the project size, its impact on agriculture, alleged chemicals in solar panels and worries the solar generation will be noisy. Some of the anxieties are spawned from what experts say is misinformation spreading online, but others are concerns of a rural community fearing its farming heritage is under threat.
Some of the tension is rooted in resentment that Omaha recruited the data centers and is getting the tax revenue and jobs they bring, but is now looking to far-flung, rural communities to host the industrial-scale energy installations needed to power them.
“I guarantee the people who say they are in favor of this project wouldn’t want to have them in their backyard,” local resident Jim Jackson said at a county meeting in June, according to the meeting minutes.
“Why pick on prime farm ground?” York County commissioner Stan Boehr said to Omaha utility officials at the gathering. “Why not go to places where you are not interfering with people’s lives?” County officials did not respond to requests for comment. York County’s draft ordinance would prohibit large solar projects from being installed within a half-mile of other properties.
Fernandez, the Omaha Public Power District CEO, called the York County measure “unreasonable and detrimental to crucial clean energy projects.”
Omaha Public Power itself sided against a battery project that clean energy advocates say is needed to support wind and solar farms in the state. (Batteries maintain a steady flow of electricity when solar and wind are not producing energy.)
The Omaha Public Power District ruled in April that the developer, Eolian, could not connect to the grid batteries it plans to install on an industrial lot near Omaha’s coal-fired plant. The power company said private companies are prohibited from hooking up such projects because Nebraska is a “public power” state where infrastructure must be community owned.
Eolian officials, after working on their plan for six years, say they were blindsided by the decision. They argue Nebraska law has specific exemptions allowing the purchase of clean energy from private firms.
“Given the large and growing data center footprint in Omaha, it is confounding that the local utility would intentionally impede the addition of multi-hour battery energy storage resources,” said Eolian CEO Aaron Zubaty. The utility said in a statement that the exceptions are limited and do not allow for “a privately owned, stand-alone battery storage facility.” Eolian and the utility will now make their case to the Nebraska Power Review Board, which has authority to approve the project.
As these controversies play out, North Omaha residents accuse the power company and tech firms of dealing with the challenges not by curbing energy use, but by turning North Omaha into a “sacrifice zone.”
Residents in the community say it has been neglected and underserved for decades. The average household income of $47,300 is far below that of the rest of the city. While tech companies and local politicians say the data centers have brought hundreds of millions of dollars in investment and thousands of jobs to the region, North Omaha residents say they are seeing little of it. But they are stuck with two more years of coal emissions.
“This would never be allowed to happen to an affluent White community,” said Anthony Rogers-Wright, a North Omaha activist. “People here are seen as expendable. … If the power company was not ready to provide clean energy, it should not have been recruiting these data centers to come to Omaha.”
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Everyone loves rooftop solar panels. But there’s a problem.
One of the most popular methods to cut your household’s carbon footprint may be a mixed bag.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-solutions/2024/10/16/rooftop-solar-emissions-climate-change/
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Over the past decade, millions of solar panels have been installed on homes from California to Massachusetts. These solar panels allow their owners to cut down on their bills, pull electricity directly from their rooftops, and sometimes even store it in home batteries to use later in the day.
But are those solar panels the best way to reduce fossil fuel emissions?
The answer is more complicated than it seems. Researchers argue that home solar panels are raising the price of electricity and reducing the need for cheaper large solar farms — making the entire transition to clean energy more expensive. And as more and more homeowners turn to solar, thanks in part to more generous government incentives, that could actually make it harder for the United States to meet its overall climate goals.
Jesse Jenkins, a professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering at Princeton University, said that rooftop solar is an example of the “crises and mismatches” that occur when electricity is billed in the wrong ways. “Some people are going to pay more than they should, and some people are going to pay less than they should,” he said. “It’s going to cause unnecessary costs.”
The issue is that solar, unlike other energy sources, only produces power during a particular time of day — when the sun is shining. Solar panels can provide a ton of power between the hours of 9 a.m. and 5 p.m.; in states like California during the spring, solar can almost provide all of the state’s energy during those hours.
That means that solar on peoples’ homes is partly competing with large solar farms run by utilities. “I call it a ‘solar-shaped hole’ in the electricity grid,” Jenkins said. “The more rooftop solar you have, the less valuable utility-scale solar is.”
At some level, that’s not a big problem: As long as there are solar panels producing power, why does it matter whether they come from a big farm in the desert or the rooftop of a suburban home?
But rooftop solar costs much more than a giant solar farm. Installing solar panels on the roof of a house or apartment building will cost a homeowner around $4.20 per watt before tax breaks and incentives — while installing them in a large solar farm costs closer to $1.16 per watt.
“Pooling together private and federal money, it’s just going to be a lower cost way to get kilowatt-hours of solar, if it’s utility-scale,” said Duncan Callaway, a professor of energy and resources at the University of California at Berkeley.
Rooftop solar groups counter that the cost of utility-scale solar doesn’t include all of the other expenses involved in building big solar farms.
“They are not adding in the cost of what it takes to deliver that electron to your home,” said Bernadette del Chiaro, the executive director of the California Solar and Storage Association.
At the moment, about 28 percent of all solar installed in the country is on the rooftops of homes and businesses, according to Wood Mackenzie and the Solar Energy Industries Association. By 2035, the country needs around 1,000 gigawatts of solar power to hit climate goals — if more of that is rooftop solar than utility-scale solar, the country could spend billions of extra dollars on the transition to clean energy.
Some of that cost is covered by the individuals installing systems on their homes; but part of it is covered by government tax credits and lower electricity rates faced by those customers. At the moment, homeowners can receive a federal tax credit for 30 percent of the cost of installing solar panels; avoided costs of paying electricity bills can be in the hundreds of dollars per year.
Rooftop solar does have other benefits. Advocates say that it can help lower other costs — solar panels on a home don’t require long-distance, large power lines to carry energy from a faraway desert solar farm to major cities. (The nation’s slow build-out of power lines is one of the major factors holding back a transition to clean energy; it can also take a long time to connect solar farms to the larger electricity system.)
Panels on the roofs of big box stores or suburban homes also save space; they won’t interfere with prairie ecosystems or endangered species. Large-scale wind and solar farms can take 10 times the space of coal and gas-fired power plants — although some developers have experimented with combining solar farms with grazing cattle or growing crops.
“These installations benefit everyone by taking strain off the grid,” Abigail Ross Hopper, the president and CEO of the Solar Energy Industries Association, said in an email. “We need massive increases in solar deployment at all scales in order to decarbonize the grid.”
“This is clearly an apples to oranges comparison,” said Amy Heart, senior vice president of public policy at Sunrun, a home solar and battery storage company. Heart says that half of all the systems Sunrun is currently installing include battery storage, alleviating the problem of solar all being generated at the same time.
Callaway says that it depends on what people value: cleaning up the grid cheaply or saving land. “Some people prefer to leave open space open,” he said. “If that is the value, then rooftop solar makes sense.”
Rooftop solar in the United States also costs more than in other places around the world. In other countries, rooftop solar and large solar farms cost approximately the same amount per watt. In America, high costs for advertising and the sheer difference of American homes ramp up costs.
“We have local counties and cities that have their own building codes,” said Joachim Seel, a policy researcher at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. “There are local permitting procedures and inspections.” Even the variety of American homes — ranch houses, townhouses, multistory colonials — can drive up costs compared to other countries. “I don’t think there’s an easy way around it,” he added.
Heart says that the United States has 40,000 jurisdictions and red tape that solar providers have to go through — much more than in other countries. “We make it so complicated,” she said.
Researchers say that part of the issue is that many states and utilities provide very lucrative deals for users of rooftop solar — often compensating owners of home panels more than the value of their solar to the grid. In states like California and Arizona, Jenkins said, in the middle of the day homeowners might get 20 cents back for each kilowatt-hour they send to the grid. But for a grid already flooded with solar, the value of that extra energy is close to zero.
The result is that richer homeowners who can afford solar get cheap electricity bills — while poorer residents see higher bills to compensate. In California alone, researchers at UC Berkeley and the California Public Advocates Office estimated that rooftop solar will add between $4 billion and $6.5 billion to customers’ bills in 2024. One solution is to match the tax breaks and benefits of rooftop solar more closely to the value it actually adds to the electricity grid.
Some groups dispute that this cost-shift is taking place. The California Solar and Storage Association argues that solar has helped avoid peak middle-of-the-day demand in the state — and that most of the growth in electric bills has come from high utility spending. Utilities say that they need higher rates to protect their infrastructure from wildfire and other climate extremes.
“The utilities view rooftop solar as competition — it directly conflicts with their business model,” del Chiaro said. “We see it as very convenient scapegoating.”
Few scientists or researchers want to abandon home solar panels entirely. Research has shown that solar panels are contagious — the best way to predict whether a household will install them is whether their neighbors already have. Taking individual steps to change your lifestyle can also encourage people to take other steps: installing climate-friendly heat pumps, buying electric cars and eating less meat.
“Having your own solar system on your own rooftop — I think for many people it helps them think about energy consumption and energy efficiency in general, and take ownership of that,” Seel said. “From that perspective, it’s important.”
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Planet-warming pollution is growing at the fastest rate in history, scientists say
Most of the growth comes from people burning coal, oil and gas, the report said.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2024/10/28/wmo-report-record-greenhouse-gases/
(https://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-apps/imrs.php?src=https://arc-anglerfish-washpost-prod-washpost.s3.amazonaws.com/public/M4I4V22SKZBD7J5CGKZSARNQSU_size-normalized.jpg&w=767)
Planet-warming pollution in Earth’s atmosphere last year hit the highest levels in human history, scientists announced Monday — a worrying indicator of the world’s failure to curb climate change as global temperatures are on track to hit yet another record high.
Concentrations of carbon dioxide — the most important driver of global warming — are now growing faster than at any time since our species evolved, according to the World Meteorological Organization’s annual Greenhouse Gas Bulletin. The increase can be traced back to stubbornly high rates of fossil fuel consumption, the report said, as well as ecosystems that are becoming more likely to produce emissions and potentially less capable of absorbing excess carbon.
Levels of the potent greenhouse gases methane and nitrous oxide also hit all-time highs in 2023, the WMO said. The total heat-trapping potential of the atmosphere is now 51.5 percent higher than in 1990, when United Nations scientists first warned the world was on track for catastrophic climate change.
This should set alarm bells ringing among decision makers,” WMO Secretary General Celeste Saulo said in a statement. “Every part per million and every fraction of a degree temperature increase has a real impact on our lives and our planet.”
For the past 14 months, global temperatures have been at least 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) higher than preindustrial levels, according to Europe’s top climate agency. In a report last week, U.N. researchers said nations must cut greenhouse house emissions to 42 percent below 2019 levels to avoid permanently exceeding that threshold and triggering the most dangerous consequences of global warming.
But Monday’s Greenhouse Gas Bulletin shows the world is nowhere near achieving that target.
Drawing on data from hundreds of measurement stations spread across more than 80 countries and all the world’s ocean basins, the report found that atmospheric levels of heat-trapping gases have grown at an accelerating rate in the past decade.
The concentration of carbon dioxide in Earth’s atmosphere last year exceeded 420 parts per million — a level not seen since the Pliocene Epoch more than 3 million years ago. At that time, global temperatures were 2 to 3 degrees Celsius (3.6 to 5.4 degrees Fahrenheit) warmer, sea levels were 30 to 60 feet higher, and Homo sapiens did not yet exist.
Most of the recent growth comes from people burning coal, oil and gas, the report said. But the WMO researchers also found worrying evidence that human-driven warming has caused natural systems to release more greenhouse gases and may be hurting the Earth’s ability to absorb what people emit.
The hike in carbon dioxide concentrations last year coincided with the largest-observed spike in carbon monoxide — a related gas that is produced when trees burn, the scientists said. Global carbon emissions from forest fires were 16 percent above average during the 2023-2024 fire season, as Australia endured a historic drought and Canada saw a record 37 million acres of forest go up in flames.
Surging levels of methane may also be traced to degraded ecosystems, data suggests. Chemical analysis of the gas, which traps 28 times more heat than carbon dioxide over a 100-year time frame, suggests that it is increasingly coming from microbial activity, rather than fossil fuel burning. Though some of that increase can be attributed to bacteria living in landfills and the guts of cows, researchers worry it is also being produced by warming tropical wetlands and thawing Arctic permafrost.
Meanwhile, the net amount of carbon taken up by ecosystems last year was about 28 percent lower than in 2021 and 2022, according to data from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Global Monitoring Laboratory. This decline may be in part because of 2023’s record-high temperatures, which are known to stress plants and cut into ecosystems’ ability to serve as a carbon sink.
The more the world continues to warm, the researchers said, the more natural carbon sinks will weaken, and the harder it will be to achieve the world’s climate goals.
“We face a potential vicious cycle,” WMO Deputy Secretary General Ko Barrett said in a statement. “These climate feedbacks are critical concerns to human society.”
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Scientists may have figured out why a potent greenhouse gas is rising. The answer is scary.
Methane emissions spiked starting in 2020. Scientists say they have found the culprit.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2024/11/04/methane-emissions-microbes-climate-change/
Almost two decades ago, the atmosphere’s levels of methane — a dangerous greenhouse gas that is over 80 times more potent than carbon dioxide in the short term — started to climb. And climb.
Methane concentrations, which had been stable for years, soared by 5 or 6 parts per billion every year from 2007 onward. Then, in 2020, the growth rate nearly doubled.
Scientists were baffled — and concerned. Methane is the big question mark hanging over the world’s climate estimates; although it breaks down in the atmosphere much faster than carbon dioxide, it is so powerful that higher than expected methane levels could shift the world toward much higher temperatures.
But now, a study sheds light on what’s driving record methane emissions. The culprits, scientists believe, are microbes — the tiny organisms that live in cows’ stomachs, agricultural fields and wetlands. And that could mean a dangerous feedback loop — in which these emissions cause warming that releases even more greenhouse gases — is already underway.
“The changes that we saw in the last couple of years — and even since 2007 — are microbial,” said Sylvia Michel, lead author of the paper published last month in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science. “Wetlands, if they are getting warmer and wetter, maybe they’re producing more methane than they used to.”
It’s difficult for scientists to identify all the sources of methane in the world. It comes from leaking oil and gas operations, from cows belching, from landfills and marshes and from thawing permafrost in the Arctic. When methane emissions increase, finding the cause is like solving a complicated algebra problem with too many unknowns.
And it’s a problem that will determine the fate of the climate.
For a time, scientists thought that soaring methane emissions stemmed from the growth in the use of natural gas, which is largely methane. Leaks from drilling or from pipelines can leach the greenhouse gas into the atmosphere.
But the new paper points to microbes as the biggest source of the methane spike. Michel and her co-authors analyzed samples of methane, or CH4, from 22 sites around the globe at a Colorado laboratory. Then they measured the “heaviness” of that methane — specifically, how many of the molecules had a heavier isotope of carbon in them, known as C13.
Different sources of methane give off different carbon signatures. Methane produced by microbes — mostly tiny, single-celled organisms known as archaea, which live in cow stomachs, wetlands and agricultural fields — tends to be “lighter,” or have fewer C13 atoms. Methane from fossil fuels, on the other hand, is heavier, with more C13 atoms.
As the amount of methane has risen in the atmosphere over the past 15 years, it’s also gotten lighter and lighter. The scientists used a model to analyze those changes and found that only large increases in microbial emissions could explain both the rising methane and its changing weight.
“What’s key about their conclusion is that it wasn’t fossil or geological,” said Stanford University professor Rob Jackson, who was not involved in the study and is part of the Global Methane Budget, a project that tracks the sources and emissions of methane across the planet.
The research, however, doesn’t show how many of those emissions were natural or human-caused. While microbes in wetlands are largely natural, the tiny creatures can also pump out methane from reservoirs, agricultural lands and landfills.
Another recent study found that two-thirds of current methane emissions are caused by humans — from fossil fuels, rice cultivation, reservoirs and other sources.
“Methane forms biologically in warm, wet, low-oxygen environments,” Jackson said. “The wetlands of a rice paddy and the gut of the cow are all similar.”
But evidence is also emerging that natural wetlands may be responding to warming temperatures by pumping out more methane. Satellite data from recent years has shown global methane hot spots in the tropical wetlands of the Amazon and the Congo.
“Wetlands will emit more methane as temperatures warm,” Jackson said. “This may be the start of a reinforcing feedback, that higher temperatures release more methane from natural ecosystems.”
Michel says it’s too early to say whether this is the beginning of a vicious cycle. “Are these coming from human-caused changes in freshwater systems, or are they a kind of scary climate feedback?” she said. “I want to be careful about what we can and cannot say with this data.”
Researchers say it doesn’t mean that the world can just keep burning natural gas. If wetlands are releasing methane faster than ever, they argue, there should be an even greater push to curb methane from the sources humans can control, like cows, agriculture and fossil fuels.
Over 100 countries have pledged to reduce their methane emissions by 30 percent by 2030, compared with 2020 levels — but so far, that pledge has yet to see results. Instead, satellite measurements show concentrations are rising at a rate that is in line with the worst-case climate scenarios.
“You can turn a wrench in an oil and gas field to quench methane emissions,” Jackson said. “There’s no wrench for the Congo or the Amazon.”