tingilinde

opposing trends

Susan Crawford on global warming and the ability of US cities to deal with damage and disaster.

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The acceleration of extreme climate and weather disasters in the United States has wrought a death toll thousands deep while inflicting billions in economic losses over the past four decades, and data show that Harris County sits at the epicenter of the devastation. . . .

A National Centers for Environmental Information (NCEI) study ranked Harris County as having the highest weather and climate hazard risk after considering its physical exposure to natural disasters, along with the vulnerability and resilience of its population and infrastructure, including homes, businesses, vehicles and crops.

It's not just Houston. Put yourself in a city CFO's shoes. You're trying to plan ahead to avoid building in floodplains, encourage flood mitigation, and generally keep people safer from chronic flooding, extreme weather, extreme heat, wildfires, and all the other harms predictably coming your city's way. Meanwhile, federal aid is evaporating, some of your property values are going down (affecting property tax revenues), insurance is exiting or becoming unaffordable for many (affecting property values), and now reliable federal tenants in your downtowns are pulling up stakes and leaving. Borrowing money may become sharply more expensive at the same time that construction costs—profoundly affected by tariffs as well as inflation generally—are climbing. All of this makes for a truly difficult job, the costs of which will end up on residents' shoulders one way or another.

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from la niña to ?

It arrived and then fizzled .. and now there's a neutral phase.

And NOAA's being torn apart by a  'businessman' who went bankrupt owning a casino.

 

 

 

on power outages

Probably more than you wanted to know, but very interesting.

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Modern civilization relies on electric power for almost everything, and even small disruptions to electric service are incredibly disruptive. Because of this, we demand a high level of reliability in electrical service. In 2023, the average US electricity customer was without power for only 366 minutes over the course of the year, equivalent to a service uptime of more than 99.9%. Other countries do even better: in 2021 the average German customer was without power for just over 12 minutes, an uptime of greater than 99.997%.

Because reliable electrical service is so important, I wanted to better understand trends in US power outages. I partnered with Poweroutage.us, a service that provides live and historical power outage data for the US going back to 2017, on a county-by-county and utility-by-utility level. Their API not only gives live outage counts, but the "shape" of outages reported by the utilities. Poweroutage.us tracks approximately 94% of US electrical customers, letting us take a close look at power outage trends in the US.

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last month's fire in south korea

Images from space of the 80 kilometer long burn.

 

 

living electrically

Tonka bean trees do well when they're hit by lightning

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Lightning is usually seen as a harbinger of destruction in forests, killing or damaging trees in their blasts. But in the lowland rainforests of Panama, one species of towering tropical tree may have evolved to use this force of nature to its advantage.

The tonka bean tree (Dipteryx oleifera) may actually benefit from being struck by lightning, according to a new study.

Scientists discovered that these trees not only survive these electrical encounters unscathed, but the lightning damages its competitors and the parasitic vines that cling to the tonka bean trees.

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another path to destroy capitalism

Trump is certainly help it too...

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The world is fast approaching temperature levels where insurers will no longer be able to offer cover for many climate risks, said Günther Thallinger, on the board of Allianz SE, one of the world’s biggest insurance companies. He said that without insurance, which is already being pulled in some places, many other financial services become unviable, from mortgages to investments.

Global carbon emissions are still rising and current policies will result in a rise in global temperature between 2.2C and 3.4C above pre-industrial levels. The damage at 3C will be so great that governments will be unable to provide financial bailouts and it will be impossible to adapt to many climate impacts, said Thallinger, who is also the chair of the German company’s investment board and was previously CEO of Allianz Investment Management.

A man cleans debris strewn inside a gas station
Extreme weather cost $2tn globally over past decade, report finds
Read more
The core business of the insurance industry is risk management and it has long taken the dangers of global heating very seriously. In recent reports, Aviva said extreme weather damages for the decade to 2023 hit $2tn, while GallagherRE said the figure was $400bn in 2024. Zurich said it was “essential” to hit net zero by 2050.

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christian leaders believe climate change is real

At least one survey shows most of them believe it -- but they're quiet about it.

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“Because of leadership’s silence on the matter, rank-and-file Christians think most of their leaders do not believe, and feel hesitant to even discuss climate change with their fellow churchgoers,” said Sparkman, who completed the study with Stylianos Syropoulos, a postdoctoral researcher at BC and now an assistant professor at Arizona State University.

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a tip of the hat to Sukie

The assumption is church goers would follow their leaders if the leaders only spoke up.  I have serious doubts about that - at least for those on the right.

 

on the complexity of climate

On lower sulphur-dioxide levels. It's a bad pollutant, but reflects sunlight and encourages cloud formation.  But CO₂ emissions more than dominate.

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Given that there will be a lagged response from the climate to the shift to low-sulphur marine fuel, it is reasonable to expect less than half of the warming resulting from the 2020 regulations to have materialised by 2023, likely only in the hundredths of a degree globally.

This is unlikely to be sufficient to explain the spike in global sea surface temperature in recent weeks, which is around 0.2C above the prior record for this time of year.

Rather, there are a number of other factors likely contributing to current record-warm ocean temperatures. These include the end of a moderate La Niña event at the start of the year and a developing El Niño, a shift which tends to result in higher global temperatures.

Stratospheric water vapour from the 2022 eruption of the Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha’apai volcano and an unusual absence of dust from the Sahara Desert over the tropical North Atlantic may also be helping drive the ocean heatwave.

In summary, the primary driver of climate change remains CO2 emissions from fossil fuels. The shift to low-sulphur marine fuel triggered by clean air regulations may increase the warming we experience in the near future, but it will not change our long-term trajectory of around 2.6C of warming by the end of the century.

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an update on the huge Myanmar quake

From experts.

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After destructive events, there is an apparent tension between the need for immediate humanitarian assistance, and the desire to quickly understand what happened and what we can now learn about the Earth. However, these are not contradictory needs. Every large earthquake helps to fill in our understanding of the basic processes that create hazard. We think that the more that scientists and the general public can share a clearer vision of the realms of possibility, the more likely it is that we will actually use Earth’s greatest gift — the long periods of quiescence between damaging earthquakes — to improve our resilience and limit the impacts of future earthquakes globally.

In this post, we want to talk about some of the big-picture questions that earthquake scientists are considering right now. We also want to be clear about why these questions are important, for science and for society. Some of these questions will surely be answered within the coming days, and some may take much longer to address.

Here are a few of the big questions earthquake geologists and seismologists are thinking about right now:

            How long was the fault rupture?

            How fast did the rupture grow?

            What are the implications for damage?

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MEGA

Make Emissions Grow Again

The EPA vs the environment 

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Among this not so august company, the E.P.A.’s current administrator, Lee Zeldin, still stands out. In the two months since he was confirmed, Zeldin, a former Republican congressman from Long Island, has announced his intention to roll back dozens of environmental rules and to shrink his agency’s spending by two-thirds. Reportedly, he wants to eliminate the E.P.A.’s scientific-research arm, which employs more than a thousand people. In a two-minute video released earlier this month, Zeldin, wearing a green striped tie, seemed to go so far as to renounce the agency’s foundational purpose. The E.P.A., he said, would work to “lower the cost of living,” by making it cheaper to buy a car, heat a home, and run a business. Nowhere, the Times noted, “did he refer to protecting the environment or public health.” Zeldin’s assault on the E.P.A. is so broad that it could affect everything from arsenic pollution to zebra-mussel control. But the administrator has trained his heaviest ammunition on efforts to limit climate change.

The same day that Zeldin released his video, he published an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal in which he boasted of “driving a dagger through the heart” of climate regulation. To carry out this bloody deed, the E.P.A. is planning to rescind a set of Biden-era rules aimed at curbing CO2 emissions from power plants, unravel another set of rules aimed at curbing emissions from cars and trucks, and revise the way that the government assesses the damages of climate change. (This last move involves the so-called social cost of carbon.) Most gruesomely of all, the E.P.A. wants to revisit what’s known as the “endangerment finding.”

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