Author Topic: Environmental issues  (Read 134879 times)


DougMacG

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Environmental issues, Minimg
« Reply #351 on: March 22, 2021, 02:19:12 PM »
Does anyone remember Kevin McHale from back when tall white guys could play good basketball?  Or remember the "Iron Range" of Minnesota.  Minnesota Mining and Manufacturing (3M) made a name for themselves some time ago when they invented sandpaper.  The Great Lakes allowed the transport of MN iron to Pittsburgh steel plants.   Democrats have been trying to ban all that ever since.  McHale narrates the following 30 second commercial in support of his home town economy, link below.  [Same home town Bob Zimmerman left 100 million albums ago.  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bob_Dylan]

Interestingly, Minnesota's 8th congressional district (northern MN) flipped recently from forever blue to red, redder and very bright red, which has made the entire state more competitive.  Why? 

Like liberals everywhere, MN libs want their iphones, Teslas, catalytic convers, wind turbines, ebikes and so on, but they want them made out of thin air, not from digging rare earth elements out of the ground anywhere near home.  The economy of the 'iron range' relies on mining.  Take away industry and all young people, all workers eventually leave, which is a common problem in small town America.   The ground in question is loaded with treasures but when you ban the extraction here, it happens in China or Africa instead, under far worse conditions with far more environmental damage. 

John Hinderaker who heads up MN based Center for the American Experiment has been attacking liberal lunacy in MN with research, advocacy and putting the information out there on billboards and commercials.  Spend 30 seconds and see their latest product:
https://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2021/03/the-harm-done-by-environmentalists.php
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NUd3SYeuPC4&t=30s

We also need to transition from just talking amongst ourselves to reachout.


« Last Edit: March 22, 2021, 02:27:05 PM by DougMacG »

G M

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Re: Environmental issues, Minimg
« Reply #352 on: March 22, 2021, 02:36:13 PM »
The problem is, many on the left have a serious inability to grasp cause and effect.


Does anyone remember Kevin McHale from back when tall white guys could play good basketball?  Or remember the "Iron Range" of Minnesota.  Minnesota Mining and Manufacturing (3M) made a name for themselves some time ago when they invented sandpaper.  The Great Lakes allowed the transport of MN iron to Pittsburgh steel plants.   Democrats have been trying to ban all that ever since.  McHale narrates the following 30 second commercial in support of his home town economy, link below.  [Same home town Bob Zimmerman left 100 million albums ago.  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bob_Dylan]

Interestingly, Minnesota's 8th congressional district (northern MN) flipped recently from forever blue to red, redder and very bright red, which has made the entire state more competitive.  Why? 

Like liberals everywhere, MN libs want their iphones, Teslas, catalytic convers, wind turbines, ebikes and so on, but they want them made out of thin air, not from digging rare earth elements out of the ground anywhere near home.  The economy of the 'iron range' relies on mining.  Take away industry and all young people, all workers eventually leave, which is a common problem in small town America.   The ground in question is loaded with treasures but when you ban the extraction here, it happens in China or Africa instead, under far worse conditions with far more environmental damage. 

John Hinderaker who heads up MN based Center for the American Experiment has been attacking liberal lunacy in MN with research, advocacy and putting the information out there on billboards and commercials.  Spend 30 seconds and see their latest product:
https://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2021/03/the-harm-done-by-environmentalists.php
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NUd3SYeuPC4&t=30s

We also need to transition from just talking amongst ourselves to reachout.

G M

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Re: CA Waterboard on keeping trash out of the waterways
« Reply #353 on: March 31, 2021, 11:14:18 PM »
https://media.gab.com/system/media_attachments/files/070/352/138/original/02d725d625a8738f.png



https://www.bostonherald.com/2020/03/22/adriana-cohen-bay-states-plastic-bag-ban-dangerous-amid-covid-19-pandemic/amp/



https://www.waterboards.ca.gov/publications_forms/publications/factsheets/docs/trash_fs.pdf?fbclid=IwAR2sO49UXQ2XigDh8sX9TYXk9Ftr4DL5CfAXWERyKb8cQPYeNBDprxRmCuc


http://ace.mu.nu/archives/covid%2020210104%2001.jpg





Keeping the waterways clean is a good thing. Trying to ban everything that might be used to litter isn’t the correct approach. I would be willing to bet that a lot of the “vibrant diversity” California welcomes is disposing of trash in the same ways commonly done back in their sh*thole countries. But that truth is unpalatable, so virtue signaling via plastic bag and drinking straw bans will have to suffice.

Crafty_Dog

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WSJ: Biden's end run of Congress and the Constitution
« Reply #354 on: April 23, 2021, 03:32:08 AM »
READ FOR COMPREHENSION




Was President Biden trying to impress China’s Xi Jinping at Thursday’s climate pep rally by committing to reduce U.S. greenhouse gas emissions by half below 2005 levels by 2030? His pledge tees up sweeping new government controls over the economy of the kind you might see in one of Mr. Xi’s five-year plans. Mr. Biden now has a 10-year version of central economic planning.

Mr. Biden’s virtual world summit was intended to coax China and other emerging countries to make more aggressive emissions reductions. The U.S. accounts for less than 15% of global CO2 emissions, Mr. Biden told world leaders. Emissions in the U.S. and Europe have been falling since 2005 as natural gas and renewables have replaced coal power.

But rising emissions from China have swamped these declines. At the Paris climate summit in 2015, China committed only to begin reducing emissions in 2030, and it has continued to build coal plants and expand industrial production. China’s CO2 emissions increased by more between 2015 and 2018 than the U.K.’s total emissions in 2018 (see nearby chart).

All of the CO2 commitments made in Paris, including Barack Obama’s to reduce U.S. emissions by 26% to 28%, would reduce the Earth’s temperature increase by a mere 0.17 degree Celsius by 2100—not even close to the 1.5 degrees that is supposedly needed to head off doomsday. Yet Mr. Biden now wants to double down on Mr. Obama’s futile climate gesture.


What would the U.S. have to do to achieve Mr. Biden’s new emissions pledge? Start with some perspective. The Obama regulatory fusillade got the U.S. only about halfway to his Paris pledge—and most of the reductions during his Presidency were from natural gas displacing coal in power due to market forces.

Amid last year’s Covid-19 lockdowns, greenhouse gas emissions fell to about 21% below 2005 levels. In other words, even with the economy shut down and a large share of the population stuck at home, the U.S. was less than halfway to Mr. Biden’s goal.


Some green groups have done their own back-of-the envelope analysis of what it would take to achieve Mr. Biden’s 10-year plan. Take a recent Environmental Defense Fund (EDF) report that argues for a “strong whole-of-government approach.” This includes eliminating new gas-powered cars by 2035, presumably by ramping up corporate average fuel economy (Cafe) standards. Mr. Biden has also proposed sweetening federal tax credits for buying electric cars—currently $7,500—but soon consumers will have no choice but to buy them when their gas vehicles expire.

The Biden goal will require the electric grid to be totally rebuilt in 10 years. According to the Natural Resources Defense Council, the U.S. will also have to double its share of carbon-free power to 80% from 40% today—half of which is now provided by nuclear—to have any hope of achieving Mr. Biden’s pledge.

All coal plants would have to shut down, and natural gas plants would be phased into obsolescence. Wind and solar energy would have to increase six to seven fold. The Obama Clean Power Plan, which the Supreme Court blocked in 2016, looks modest by comparison. It sought to reduce CO2 power emissions by 32%. Most homes would also have to be electrified. So if you like your gas stove, you won’t be able to keep it. Farmers would also have to adopt “climate-smart agriculture and forestry,” EDF says.

***
Unlike Mr. Xi, the U.S. President doesn’t have legal authority to decree sweeping emissions reductions across the economy. But liberals argue that Section 115 of the Clean Air Act, titled “International Air Pollution,” allows the Environmental Protection Agency to regulate emissions that “may reasonably be anticipated to endanger public health or welfare in a foreign country.” The catch is that EPA can only do so if there is regulatory “reciprocity” among other nations.

Mr. Biden is essentially doing an end-run around the Constitution, which requires approval by two-thirds of the Senate for the President to enter a treaty. The emissions reductions that foreign leaders pledged on Thursday aren’t legally binding, but Mr. Biden intends to use regulation to bind Americans.


Businesses will be conscripted as foot soldiers in the progressive war on fossil fuels. Mercenaries like Google, Apple and Microsoft have already enlisted. America’s founders believed that the Constitution’s separation of powers would safeguard individual liberty, but this assumes Congress guards its power.

Mr. Biden will face no resistance to his regulatory overreach from Democrats in Congress. They will happily finance his 10-year plan to remake the economy, starting with his $2.3 trillion much-more-than-infrastructure proposal that is the Green New Deal in disguise.


DougMacG

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Re: EPA going after HFCs
« Reply #356 on: May 03, 2021, 02:08:51 PM »
https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2021/may/3/epa-propose-phasing-out-greenhouse-gases-used-refr/?utm_source=Boomtrain&utm_medium=subscriber&utm_campaign=newsalert&utm_content=newsalert&utm_term=newsalert&bt_ee=eAIihd4E%2F%2BRfYBULPBzspZAcU9RdcbCH%2F5gxpZvzhWWgzxaPJZ63RHoLA%2FSaIub8&bt_ts=1620049352651

That's okay with me, IF:
a) If the science behind it is real, and
b) if the cost of the change is bearable.

https://ec.europa.eu/clima/policies/f-gas/alternatives_en

One of the main alternatives (R32) is also an HFC but cleaner.

I'm not aware of any way to dispose of a refrigerator in the US without having to pay a fee for someone to capture the refrigerant.

It would be a shame of HFC alternatives were less efficient causing AC etc. to run more using more electricity and emitting more greenhouse gases.

Too bad that driving a far Left political agenda is the main skill of the people we need to trust at EPA today.  Not like when my cousin was hired as Director, PhD Math, Stanford.  They did real analytics back then.

« Last Edit: May 03, 2021, 02:43:28 PM by DougMacG »


ccp

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Re: Environmental issues
« Reply #358 on: May 05, 2021, 07:24:24 AM »
not mentioned oddly is whether the increase is in F or C scale
but doing quick search
implies it is in F scale

DougMacG

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Re: Environmental issues
« Reply #359 on: May 05, 2021, 08:33:23 PM »
not mentioned oddly is whether the increase is in F or C scale
but doing quick search
implies it is in F scale

If it's an F scale it would have one flat.    :wink:

Yes it is F scale, one degree Fahrenheit, not a scale scientists use, no doubt within the margin of error in a very imperfect series of measurements.  What does Nassim Taleb call it, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fooled_by_Randomness

The AP story quotes Michael Mann, inventor of the fully discredited hockey stick graph, exposed in climategate, suing Mark Steyn. 
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2021/03/30/update-on-michael-mann-v-mark-steyn-litigation/ 
Hard to get at the truth that way.  He's still altering temps from 100 years ago to fit his narrative.  Source:  Steyn motion.


Crafty_Dog

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Larry and Amanda vs OR Dept of Fish and Wildlife
« Reply #361 on: September 12, 2021, 03:57:51 PM »
Nate Ellertson
August 30, 2019  ·

Oregon ranchers, Larry and Amanda Anderson received a letter by the Oregon Department of Fish & Wildlife asking for permission to survey their land in order to track a nearly endangered species. The letter requested use of the landowners’ creek to document the amphibian life represented, specifically the foothill yellow-legged frog which is noted to have recently declined in population. I love this response.

"Dear Mr. Niemela:

Thank you for your inquiry regarding accessing our property to survey for the yellow-legged frog. We may be able to help you out with this matter.

We have divided our 2.26 acres into 75 equal survey units with a draw tag for each unit. Application fees are only $8.00 per unit after you purchase the “Frog Survey License” ($120.00 resident / $180.00 Non-Resident).

You will also need to obtain a “Frog Habitat” parking permit ($10.00 per vehicle). You will also need an “Invasive Species” stamp ($15.00 for the first vehicle and $5.00 for each add’l vehicle) You will also want to register at the Check Station to have your vehicle inspected for non-native plant life prior to entering our property. There is also a Day Use fee, $5.00 per vehicle.

If you are successful in the Draw you will be notified two weeks in advance so you can make necessary plans and purchase your “Creek Habitat” stamp. ($18.00 Resident / $140.00 Non-Resident). Survey units open between 8am and 3pm but you cannot commence survey until 9am and must cease all survey activity by 1pm.
Survey Gear can only include a net with a 2″ diameter made of 100% organic cotton netting with no longer than an 18″ handle, non-weighted and no deeper than 6′ from net frame to bottom of net. Handles can only be made of BPA-free plastics or wooden handles. After 1pm you can use a net with a 3″ diameter if you purchase the “Frog Net Endorsement” ($75.00 Resident / $250 Non-Resident). Any frogs captured that are released will need to be released with an approved release device back into the environment unharmed.

As of June 1, we are offering draw tags for our “Premium Survey” units and application is again only $8.00 per application. However, all fees can be waived if you can verify Native Indian Tribal rights and status.

You will also need to provide evidence of successful completion of “Frog Surveys and You” comprehensive course on frog identification, safe handling practices, and self-defense strategies for frog attacks. This course is offered online through an accredited program for a nominal fee of $750.00.

Please let us know if we can be of assistance to you. Otherwise, we decline your access to our property but appreciate your inquiry.

Sincerely,
Larry & Amanda Anderson"


Crafty_Dog

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WSJ: Reality interrupts
« Reply #363 on: February 08, 2022, 09:44:32 AM »
https://www.wsj.com/articles/climate-change-global-warming-computer-model-11642191155?st=5eotefamj84zvvz&reflink=desktopwebshare_permalink

Inside the Cheyenne supercomputer, which runs climate models for the National Center for Atmospheric Research.
















By Robert Lee Hotz 

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 | Photographs by Theo Stroomer for The Wall Street Journal
Feb. 6, 2022 10:10 am ET




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BOULDER, Colo.—For almost five years, an international consortium of scientists was chasing clouds, determined to solve a problem that bedeviled climate-change forecasts for a generation: How do these wisps of water vapor affect global warming?

They reworked 2.1 million lines of supercomputer code used to explore the future of climate change, adding more-intricate equations for clouds and hundreds of other improvements. They tested the equations, debugged them and tested again.

The scientists would find that even the best tools at hand can’t model climates with the sureness the world needs as rising temperatures impact almost every region.

When they ran the updated simulation in 2018, the conclusion jolted them: Earth’s atmosphere was much more sensitive to greenhouse gases than decades of previous models had predicted, and future temperatures could be much higher than feared—perhaps even beyond hope of practical remedy.

“We thought this was really strange,” said Gokhan Danabasoglu, chief scientist for the climate-model project at the Mesa Laboratory in Boulder at the National Center for Atmospheric Research, or NCAR. “If that number was correct, that was really bad news.”

At least 20 older, simpler global-climate models disagreed with the new one at NCAR, an open-source model called the Community Earth System Model 2, or CESM2, funded mainly by the U.S. National Science Foundation and arguably the world’s most influential climate program. Then, one by one, a dozen climate-modeling groups around the world produced similar forecasts. “It was not just us,” Dr. Danabasoglu said.

More than 2,200 scientists from over 300 universities and federal labs use the Cheyenne supercomputer to study climate change, severe weather, air quality and wildfires.

Copyright ©2022 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved. 87990cbe856818d5eddac44c7b1cdeb8




 

The scientists soon concluded their new calculations had been thrown off kilter by the physics of clouds in a warming world, which may amplify or damp climate change. “The old way is just wrong, we know that,” said Andrew Gettelman, a physicist at NCAR who specializes in clouds and helped develop the CESM2 model. “I think our higher sensitivity is wrong too. It’s probably a consequence of other things we did by making clouds better and more realistic. You solve one problem and create another.”

Since then the CESM2 scientists have been reworking their climate-change algorithms using a deluge of new information about the effects of rising temperatures to better understand the physics at work. They have abandoned their most extreme calculations of climate sensitivity, but their more recent projections of future global warming are still dire—and still in flux.

As world leaders consider how to limit greenhouse gases, they depend heavily on what computer climate models predict. But as algorithms and the computer they run on become more powerful—able to crunch far more data and do better simulations—that very complexity has left climate scientists grappling with mismatches among competing computer models.

While vital to calculating ways to survive a warming world, climate models are hitting a wall. They are running up against the complexity of the physics involved; the limits of scientific computing; uncertainties around the nuances of climate behavior; and the challenge of keeping pace with rising levels of carbon dioxide, methane and other greenhouse gases. Despite significant improvements, the new models are still too imprecise to be taken at face value, which means climate-change projections still require judgment calls.

 

“We have a situation where the models are behaving strangely,” said Gavin Schmidt, director of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration’s Goddard Institute for Space Sciences, a leading center for climate modeling. “We have a conundrum.”

Policy tools

The United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change collates the latest climate data drawn from thousands of scientific papers and dozens of climate models, including the CESM2 model, to set an international standard for evaluating the impacts of climate change. That provides policy makers in 195 countries with the most up-to-date scientific consensus related to global warming. Its next major advisory report, which will serve as a basis for international negotiations, is expected later this year.

For climate modelers, the difference in projections amounts to a few degrees of average temperature change in response to levels of carbon dioxide added to the atmosphere in years ahead. A few degrees will be more than enough, most scientists say, to worsen storms, intensify rainfall, boost sea-level rise—and cause more-extreme heat waves, droughts and other temperature-related consequences such as crop failures and the spread of infectious diseases.

Climate models put the planet in a digital test tube. When world leaders in 1992 met in Rio de Janeiro to negotiate the first comprehensive global climate treaty, there were only four rudimentary models that could generate global-warming projections for treaty negotiators.

In November 2021, as leaders met in Glasgow to negotiate limits on greenhouse gases under the auspices of the 2015 Paris Accords, there were more than 100 major global climate-change models produced by 49 different research groups, reflecting an influx of people into the field. During the treaty meeting, U.N. experts presented climate-model projections of future global-warming scenarios, including data from the CESM2 model.







“We’ve made these models into a tool to indicate what could happen to the world,” said Gerald Meehl, a senior scientist at the NCAR Mesa Laboratory. “This is information that policy makers can’t get any other way.”

The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences in October awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics to scientists whose work laid the foundation for computer simulations of global climate change.

Skeptics have scoffed at climate models for decades, saying they overstate the hazards of carbon dioxide. But a growing body of research shows many climate models have been uncannily accurate. For one recent study, scientists at NASA, the Breakthrough Institute in Berkeley, Calif., and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology evaluated 17 models used between 1970 and 2007 and found most predicted climate shifts were “indistinguishable from what actually occurred.”

Climate scientist Zeke Hausfather at the Breakthrough Institute, an environmental-research group, who led the analysis, said: “The fact that these early models got the future right should give us confidence.”

Still, models remain prone to technical glitches and hampered by an incomplete understanding of the variables that control how our planet responds to heat-trapping gases. There are still unanswered climate questions about the subtle interplay of land, oceans and the atmosphere. Oceans may be warming faster than previous models predicted. The effect of airborne dust, soot, grit and aerosols is still hard to pin down.




In its guidance to governments last year, the U.N. climate-change panel for the first time played down the most extreme forecasts.

Before making new climate predictions for policy makers, an independent group of scientists used a technique called “hind-casting,” testing how well the models reproduced changes that occurred during the 20th century and earlier. Only models that re-created past climate behavior accurately were deemed acceptable.

 

“We’ve made these models into a tool to indicate what could happen to the world,” said Gerald Meehl, a senior scientist at the NCAR Mesa Laboratory. “This is information that policy makers can’t get any other way.”

The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences in October awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics to scientists whose work laid the foundation for computer simulations of global climate change.

Skeptics have scoffed at climate models for decades, saying they overstate the hazards of carbon dioxide. But a growing body of research shows many climate models have been uncannily accurate. For one recent study, scientists at NASA, the Breakthrough Institute in Berkeley, Calif., and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology evaluated 17 models used between 1970 and 2007 and found most predicted climate shifts were “indistinguishable from what actually occurred.”

Climate scientist Zeke Hausfather at the Breakthrough Institute, an environmental-research group, who led the analysis, said: “The fact that these early models got the future right should give us confidence.”

Still, models remain prone to technical glitches and hampered by an incomplete understanding of the variables that control how our planet responds to heat-trapping gases. There are still unanswered climate questions about the subtle interplay of land, oceans and the atmosphere. Oceans may be warming faster than previous models predicted. The effect of airborne dust, soot, grit and aerosols is still hard to pin down.




In its guidance to governments last year, the U.N. climate-change panel for the first time played down the most extreme forecasts.

Before making new climate predictions for policy makers, an independent group of scientists used a technique called “hind-casting,” testing how well the models reproduced changes that occurred during the 20th century and earlier. Only models that re-created past climate behavior accurately were deemed acceptable.

 

In the process, the NCAR-consortium scientists checked whether the advanced models could reproduce the climate during the last Ice Age, 21,000 years ago, when carbon-dioxide levels and temperatures were much lower than today. CESM2 and other new models projected temperatures much colder than the geologic evidence indicated. University of Michigan scientists then tested the new models against the climate 50 million years ago when greenhouse-gas levels and temperatures were much higher than today. The new models projected higher temperatures than evidence suggested.

While accurate across almost all other climate factors, the new models seemed overly sensitive to changing carbon-dioxide levels and, for the past several years, scientists have been meticulously fine-tuning them to narrow the uncertainties.

Computing clouds

Then there is the cloud conundrum.

Because clouds can both reflect solar radiation into space and trap heat from Earth’s surface, they are among the biggest challenges for scientists honing climate models.

At any given time, clouds cover more than two-thirds of the planet. Their impact on climate depends on how reflective they are, how high they rise and whether it is day or night. They can accelerate warming or cool it down. They operate at a scale as broad as the ocean, as small as a hair’s width. Their behavior can be affected, studies show, by factors ranging from cosmic rays to ocean microbes, which emit sulfur particles that become the nuclei of water droplets or ice crystals.

 

“If you don’t get clouds right, everything is out of whack.” said Tapio Schneider, an atmospheric scientist at the California Institute of Technology and the Climate Modeling Alliance, which is developing an experimental model. “Clouds are crucially important for regulating Earth’s energy balance.”

Older models, which rely on simpler methods to model clouds’ effects, for decades asserted that doubling the atmosphere’s carbon dioxide over preindustrial levels would warm the world between 2.7 and 8 degrees Fahrenheit (1.5 and 4.5 degrees Celsius).

New models account for clouds’ physics in greater detail. CESM2 predicted that a doubling of carbon dioxide would cause warming of 9.5 degrees Fahrenheit (5.3 degrees Celsius)—almost a third higher than the previous version of their model, the consortium scientists said.

In an independent assessment of 39 global-climate models last year, scientists found that 13 of the new models produced significantly higher estimates of the global temperatures caused by rising atmospheric levels of carbon dioxide than the older computer models—scientists called them the “wolf pack.” Weighed against historical evidence of temperature changes, those estimates were deemed unrealistic.

By adding far-more-detailed equations to simulate clouds, the scientists might have introduced small errors that could make their models less accurate than the blunt-force cloud assumptions of older models, according to a study by NCAR scientists published in January 2021.




Taking the uncertainties into account, the U.N.’s climate-change panel narrowed its estimate of climate sensitivity to a range between 4.5 and 7.2 degrees Fahrenheit (2.5 to 4 degrees Celsius) in its most recent report for policy makers last August. That suggests global warming could still be high enough to challenge goals set by the 2015 Paris climate agreement, scientists on the panel said.

Dr. Gettelman, who helped develop CESM2, and his colleagues in their initial upgrade added better ways to model polar ice caps and how carbon and nitrogen cycle through the environment. To make the ocean more realistic, they added wind-driven waves. They fine-tuned the physics in its algorithms and made its vintage Fortran code more efficient.

 

It is hard to know just where the complexity of clouds waylaid them, said Dr. Danabasoglu. “With so many lines of code and so much physics, things can happen,” he said. “Emotionally, we had so much invested in getting the best model we can put together.”

Even the simplest diagnostic test is challenging. The model divides Earth into a virtual grid of 64,800 cubes, each 100 kilometers on a side, stacked in 72 layers. For each projection, the computer must calculate 4.6 million data points every 30 minutes. To test an upgrade or correction, researchers typically let the model run for 300 years of simulated computer time.

In their initial analysis, scientists discovered a flaw in how CESM2 modeled the way moisture interacts with soot, dust or sea-spray particles that allow water vapor to condense into cloud droplets. It took a team of 10 climate experts almost 5 months to track it down to a flaw in their data and correct it, the scientists said.

Through field experiments, they next learned that bright low-level clouds off Antarctica’s coast were neither ice crystals nor cloud drops, as models assumed, but a supercooled liquid that affected how clouds cooled the surface.

Since releasing the open-source software in 2018, the NCAR scientists have updated the CESM2 model five times, with more improvements in development. “We are still digging,” said Jean-Francois Lamarque, director of NCAR’s climate and global dynamics laboratory, who was the project’s former chief scientist. “It is going to take quite a few years.”

 

Moreover, clouds are changing in response to rising global temperatures in ways that may make warming worse—just as older climate models had predicted—according to a satellite-data analysis by scientists at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in San Diego. Since the 1980s, the scientists said, the world has become cloudier toward the poles and less cloudy in the midlatitudes. Thunderclouds have also grown taller.

As ocean temperatures have risen in recent years, fewer bright, reflective low-lying clouds have formed over broad areas of open seas, according to a new study published in September by researchers at California’s Big Bear Solar Observatory and New York University. That means more of the sun’s heat is being trapped in the atmosphere, where it gives rising temperatures a boost—a process that appears to be accelerating, the researchers said.

Strained supercomputers

The NCAR scientists in Boulder would like to delve more deeply into the behavior of clouds, ice sheets and aerosols, but they already are straining their five-year-old Cheyenne supercomputer, according to NCAR officials. A climate model able to capture the subtle effects of individual cloud systems, storms, regional wildfires and ocean currents at a more detailed scale would require a thousand times more computer power, they said.

“There is this balance between building in all the complexity we know and being able to run the model for hundreds of years multiple times,” said Andrew Wood, an NCAR scientist who works on the CESM2 model. “The more complex a model is, the slower it runs.”

 

esearchers now are under pressure to make reliable local forecasts of future climate changes so that municipal managers and regional planners can protect heavily populated locales from more extreme flooding, drought or wildfires. That means the next generation of climate models need to link rising temperatures on a global scale to changing conditions in a local forest, watershed, grassland or agricultural zone, said Jacquelyn Shuman, a forest ecologist at NCAR who is researching how to model the impact of climate change on regional wildfires.

“Computer models that contain both large-scale and small-scale models allow you to really do experiments that you can’t do in the real world,” she said. “You can really ramp up the temperature, dial down the precipitation or completely change the amount of fire or lightning strikes that an area is seeing, so you can really diagnose how it all works together. That’s the next step. It would be very computationally expensive.”

The NCAR scientists are installing a new $40 million supercomputer named Derecho, built by Hewlett Packard Enterprise designed to run climate-change calculations at three times the speed of their current machine. Once it becomes operational this year, it is expected to rank among the world’s top 25 or so fastest supercomputers, NCAR officials said.

The U.S. Energy Department is developing a supercomputer for climate research and other applications that the department says is 10 times faster than its most powerful machine, able to perform a billion-billion calculations a second. Other groups are harnessing artificial intelligence and machine learning to better capture the micro-physics of clouds.

“I think the climate models are the best tool we have to understand the future, even though they are far from perfect,” said Dr. Gettelman. “I’m not worried that the new models might be wrong. What scares me is that they might be right.”

 
« Last Edit: February 08, 2022, 12:24:09 PM by Crafty_Dog »


Crafty_Dog

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Tucker: Its an emergency!
« Reply #365 on: July 20, 2022, 10:31:44 PM »
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j_Z8k1IAwgY

Let's put our energy grid under Chinese control , , ,
« Last Edit: July 21, 2022, 08:58:24 AM by Crafty_Dog »

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Re: 10"?
« Reply #372 on: August 31, 2022, 09:46:53 AM »
G M:
https://apnews.com/article/bd45c372caf118ec99964ea547880cd0
The AP stripped the date from the article, but it was from 1989.
https://www.westernjournal.com/flashback-1989-un-disaster-global-warming/
-------

I noticed the absence of the year the 10.8" would happen by.

"Greenland’s ice loss has been contributing about 0.04 inches (1 millimeter) per year to global sea level rise over the past decade."

So he is predicting out 250 years, straight line?  Let's all check back in then for accuracy.
------------------------------
"Brown told the AP that temperatures could rise by 7 degrees in 30 years."

1989 to 2019 equals 30 years.
Actually he said 1-7 degrees.  How's that for nailing it with specificity!
Instead we have one degree warming in the industrial age, less than half a degree in 50 years, and extended periods where variability exceeded warming.

Earth System Science Center (ESSC) at the University of Alabama/Huntsville:
https://www.nsstc.uah.edu/climate/
---------------------------
As both sides say, how much it warmed depends on which years in the cycles one chooses.
« Last Edit: August 31, 2022, 10:11:45 AM by DougMacG »

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podesta again
« Reply #373 on: September 05, 2022, 03:43:09 PM »

Crafty_Dog

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Re: Environmental issues
« Reply #374 on: September 05, 2022, 04:20:47 PM »
"On the NPR Politics Podcast this week, Zaidi said the administration is counting on the investments and incentives in the new law to boost manufacturing and deployment of clean energy to the point where developments cannot be rolled back by the next administration to come into office.

"No one's going back and taking solar panels and wind turbines out of the ground and replacing it with dirty energy," Zaidi said."


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Re: Environmental issues
« Reply #376 on: September 27, 2022, 08:26:02 AM »
Very glad to see people working on this!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

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Re: Environmental issues
« Reply #378 on: November 20, 2022, 08:56:28 AM »
".The Cloud contributes to global warming "

thanks for the article

very interesting

first time  I am made aware of this.

the big tech libs have an even larger carbon foot print then we knew

what say you Bill Gates ?


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Jeff Bezos on philanthropy
« Reply #379 on: November 20, 2022, 11:38:13 AM »
wants to give away most of his fortune over his lifetime

and states it is as hard as building Amazon:


https://nypost.com/2022/11/20/jeff-bezos-lauren-sanchez-reveal-space-travel-plans-as-they-praise-each-other-in-first-joint-interview/

love the part where it mentions one of his peeves is climate change

he should start on his second core business - his own cloud!

 :wink:

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Greta into lawfare now
« Reply #380 on: November 28, 2022, 08:30:46 AM »
https://www.breitbart.com/europe/2022/11/28/greta-thunberg-and-allies-sue-swedish-state-for-not-pushing-green-agenda-even-harder/

how are people to heat their homes?

electric vehicles still need coal and gas
for their power

its back to the colonial times
but this time one can't even have enough wood to burn

they are so crazy

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Romney for carbon tax
« Reply #381 on: December 11, 2022, 09:22:45 AM »
https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/lincolnbrown/2022/12/09/mitt-romney-comes-out-in-favor-of-a-carbon-tax-n1652281

I am starting to take climate seriously
and I think GOP should too

but not ANOTHER government boondoggle with taxation , regulation and more DC control over out lives......

I can't believe I ever voted for this guy.
To think he was the best of 2 choices at the time.

In my lifetime
Reagan was the only one I voted for enthusiastically
with regards to person AND policies
Trump I voted for policies enthusiastically - not the personality,

W I did to some extent but in retrospect he did not really represent me either.
Too DC swamp really.
« Last Edit: December 11, 2022, 09:25:55 AM by ccp »

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Re: Romney for carbon tax
« Reply #382 on: December 12, 2022, 05:15:07 AM »
https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/lincolnbrown/2022/12/09/mitt-romney-comes-out-in-favor-of-a-carbon-tax-n1652281

I am starting to take climate seriously
and I think GOP should too

but not ANOTHER government boondoggle with taxation , regulation and more DC control over out lives......

I can't believe I ever voted for this guy.
To think he was the best of 2 choices at the time.

In my lifetime
Reagan was the only one I voted for enthusiastically
with regards to person AND policies
Trump I voted for policies enthusiastically - not the personality,

W I did to some extent but in retrospect he did not really represent me either.
Too DC swamp really.

FYI to Mittens:
WE ARE ALREADY PAYING THE CARBON TAX

Look at your electric bill.  Look at the cost of government restricted gasoline and diesel.  Look at the inflation tax on EVERYTHING, marked by the 8.7% cost of living adjustments just this year all started with canceled sector energy projects canceled by government with money (trillions) spent on bullshit instead of real, usable, round the clock, energy.

We are already taxing the economy to the max.  We already know how to get carbon free, round the clock energy (nuclear).  And we're not doing it. 

Their answer to everything is kill the economy, not solve the problem.

Countries with shitty economies don't solve problems.  Funny how that works.

Does he want abundant, affordable carbon free energy or does he want another tax?  Sounds like the latter.

We found out Mitt wouldn't be a great President in the second debate with Candy Crowley and Barack Obama, a little too late to make a substitution.  I wish Utah would figure out he'll never make a great Senator either.

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Re: Environmental issues
« Reply #383 on: December 12, 2022, 06:39:10 AM »
"We found out Mitt wouldn't be a great President in the second debate with Candy Crowley "

you mean when Mitt threw a big FAT pitch to Obama

who hit it out of the park for a grandslam game winning home run

similar to the "you're no John Kennedy" line

funny how some people will not simply fade away into the sunset

we still have Chris Christie making noise  :roll:
what was his approval in NJ when he left the governorship with everyone thinking don't let the door hit him on the way out..... 20 something %?

 should not leave out rhino-saurus  John Kasich
another one that gets the eye roll from me whenever he shows up on CNN

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Re: Environmental issues
« Reply #384 on: December 12, 2022, 09:38:12 AM »
"we still have Chris Christie making noise "

...to run for President.  Like you say, his day came and went.  Like Biden's should have.

At least with Kasich on CNN (and Christie on ABC) you still have the off button.

Not so with Mitt Romney.  A Republican US Senator speaking Democratic talking points has the biggest amplifier possible.

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WSJ: Not so fast on BEV
« Reply #385 on: December 26, 2022, 09:45:01 AM »
Not So Fast on Electric Cars
Toyota’s CEO delivers a timely warning, and many states echo it.
Allysia Finley hedcutBy Allysia Finley


Dec. 25, 2022 6:20 pm ET

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image
A Tesla Model 3 at a charging station in Colonie, N.Y., Nov. 22.
PHOTO: PAUL HENNESSY/ZUMA PRESS

Toyota CEO Akio Toyoda recently caused the climate lobby to blow a fuse by speaking a truth about battery electric vehicles that his fellow auto executives dare not. “Just like the fully autonomous cars that we were all supposed to be driving by now,” Mr. Toyoda said in Thailand, “I think BEVs are just going to take longer to become mainstream than the media would like us to believe.” He added that a “silent majority” in the auto industry share his view, “but they think it’s the trend, so they can’t speak out loudly.”

The Biden administration seems to believe that millions of Americans will rush out to buy electric vehicles if only the government throws enough subsidies at them. Last year’s infrastructure bill included $7.5 billion in grants for states to expand their charging networks. But it’s a problem when even the states are warning the administration that electric vehicles aren’t ready to go mainstream.

Maine notes in a plan submitted to the Federal Highway Administration this summer that “cold temperatures will remain a top challenge” for adoption, since “cold weather reduces EV range and increases charging times.” When temperatures drop to 5 degrees Fahrenheit, the cars achieve only 54% of their quoted range. A vehicle that’s supposed to be able to go 250 miles between charges will make it only 135 miles on average. At 32 degrees—a typical winter day in much of the country—a Tesla Model 3 that in ideal conditions can go 282 miles between charges will make it only 173 miles.

Imagine if the 100 million Americans who took to the road over the holidays were driving electric cars. How many would have been stranded as temperatures plunged? There wouldn’t be enough tow trucks—or emergency medics—for people freezing in their cars.

The Transportation Department is requiring states to build charging stations every 50 miles along interstate highways and within a mile of off-ramps to reduce the likelihood of these scenarios. But most state electrical grids aren’t built to handle this many charging stations and will thus require expensive upgrades. Illinois, for one, warns of “challenges related to sufficient electric grid capacity, particularly in rural areas of the state.”

Charging stations in rural areas with little traffic are also unlikely to be profitable and could become “stranded assets,” as many states warn. Wyoming says out-of-state traffic from non-Tesla electric vehicles would have to increase 100-fold to cover charger costs under the administration’s rules. Tesla has already scoped out premier charging locations for its proprietary network. Good luck to competitors.

New Mexico warns that “poor station maintenance can lead to stations being perpetually broken and unusable, particularly in rural or hard to access locations. If an EV charging station is built in an area without electrical capacity and infrastructure to support its use, it will be unusable until the appropriate upgrades are installed.”

Arizona says “private businesses may build and operate a station if a grant pays for the first five years of operations and maintenance” but might abandon the project if it later proves unprofitable. Many other states echo this concern, noting that federal funds could result in stranded assets.

The administration aims to build 500,000 stations, but states will likely have to spend their own money to keep them running. Like other federal inducements, these grants may entice states to assume what could become huge financial liabilities.

Federal funds also come with many rules, including “buy America” procurement requirements, which demand that chargers consist of mostly U.S.-made components. New Jersey says these could “delay implementation by several years” since only a few manufacturers can currently meet them. New York also says it will be challenging to comply with the web of federal rules, including the National Environmental Policy Act, the Americans with Disabilities Act, the Uniform Relocation Assistance and Real Property Acquisition Policies Act of 1970, and a 1960 federal law that bars charging stations in rest areas.

Oh, and labor rules. The administration requires that electrical workers who install and maintain the stations be certified by the union-backed Electric Vehicle Infrastructure Training Program. New Mexico says much of the state lacks contractors that meet this mandate, which will reduce competition and increase costs.

Technical problems abound too. Virginia says fast-charging hardware “has a short track record” and is “prone to malfunctions.” Equipment “previously installed privately in Virginia has had a high failure rate shown in user comments and reports on social media,” and “even compatibility with credit card readers has been unexpectedly complicated.”

A study this spring led by University of California researchers found that more than a quarter of public direct-current fast-charging stations in the San Francisco Bay Area were unusable. Drivers will be playing roulette every time they head to a station. If all this weren’t disconcerting enough, Arizona warns cyber vulnerabilities could compromise customer financial transactions, charging infrastructure, electric vehicles and the grid.

Politicians and auto makers racing to eliminate the internal-combustion engine are bound to crash into technological, logistic and financial realities, as Mr. Toyoda warned. The casualties will be taxpayers, but the administration doesn’t seem to care.

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WSJ: Ozone layer begins to recover
« Reply #386 on: January 09, 2023, 12:39:39 PM »
Earth’s Ozone Layer Recovers as Airborne Chemicals Decline
U.N. finds thickening in atmospheric region, helping protect humans and slowing climate change

Scientists use specially designed weather balloons to measure the size and thickness of the ozone hole above the South Pole.
PHOTO: WILLIAM SKORSKI/NOAA
By Eric NiilerFollow
Updated Jan. 9, 2023 2:44 pm ET

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Airborne chemicals that destroy ozone are now declining for the first time, helping to repair the atmospheric layer that protects humans from the sun’s harmful ultraviolet rays, according to a new report by a U.N.-backed panel of scientists.

In a report released Monday by the United Nations Environment Program and the World Meteorological Organization, researchers found a significant thickening of the ozone layer, a region of the atmosphere from 9 to 18 miles high that absorbs ultraviolet rays and prevents them from reaching the Earth’s surface.

This layer has been fragile for decades as the result of chemicals used as refrigerants and propellants that destroy ozone, a compound made of three oxygen atoms. When these long-lasting chemicals mix with cold temperatures and meteorological conditions above Antarctica, the reaction creates an ozone hole over the region each spring that varies in size and depth each year.

What is the Ozone Layer?
The Ozone layer in the stratosphere blocks harmful solar radiation from getting to the surface of the Earth.

Sun

UV-A

UV-B

UV-C

Stratosphere

6-31 miles

above earth

Ozone-damaging elements have declined in the last 30 years and have allowed the Ozone layer to recover

Troposphere

0-6 miles

above earth

Earth

Note: Not to scale   Source: NASA
In the late 1990s, when ozone-depleting gases were at their peak, the ozone layer dipped to 4% below its pre-1980 levels. The new report states that the recovery is continuing but will still take many years.

The thickening of the ozone layer means more protection for humans and other life.

Excess UV rays can lead to skin cancer, cataracts and impaired immune-system function, according to health studies, while damaging the growth of crops and ocean phytoplankton.

The report found ozone-damaging chlorine declined 11.5% in the stratosphere between its peak in 1993 and 2020, while bromine declined 14.5% in the stratosphere between its peak in 1999 and 2020.

The scientists who wrote the study say their findings are a bit of good news for the planet.

“This is the basic measure of success,” said Dr. David Fahey, director of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s chemical-sciences laboratory in Boulder, Colo., and co-chair of the panel that wrote the study. “The abundance of all of the principal ozone-depleting gases and their emissions have peaked and now they are coming down.”

Ozone-depleting chemicals called chlorofluorocarbons, or CFCs, were banned in 1987 by the Montreal Protocol, an international treaty signed by all member states of the U.N. The Kigali Amendment, signed in 2016, banned a group of chemicals known as hydrofluorocarbons, or HFCs, which were used for many years as a substitute for CFCs, but don’t damage the ozone layer.


Instruments mounted to an ozonesonde weather balloon allow researchers to measure the thickness of the ozone layer and the concentration of chemicals that damage it.
PHOTO: PATRICK CULLIS/NOAA
The scientific assessment released Monday stated HFCs are also a planet-warming greenhouse gas and estimated that the HFC ban has eliminated the use of chemicals that otherwise would have resulted in as much as 0.5 degrees Celsius of warming by 2100.

In 2018, scientists detected a 25% spike in a banned ozone-depleting chemical, trichlorofluoromethane, or CFC-11. They pinpointed the problem to factories in northeastern China that were emitting CFC-11 in the production of foam insulation. After pressure from the international community, as well as the Chinese government, the emissions have now declined, said Paul Newman, chief scientist for earth sciences at the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center and a co-chair of the U.N. scientific assessment panel.

“We identified that these emissions were going up and now they’ve come down,” Dr. Newman said. “Actions taken by the Chinese government and other governments have had a positive impact. They have controlled these unexpected emissions and that is a good message.”

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The ozone layer is vulnerable to other threats as well. The Australian wildfires in 2019 and 2020 sent moist smoke particles into the stratosphere, where they sparked chemical reactions that ate away at the ozone layer, according to a study published in the journal Science. Although the ozone reduction was temporary, the researchers said large wildfires could pose a persistent threat to global ozone levels.

Despite the threats from wildfires and Chinese factory emissions, the ozone layer is now expected to recover to 1980 levels—before the appearance of the ozone hole—by around 2066 over the Antarctic, by 2045 over the Arctic and by 2040 for the rest of the world, the report stated.

A similar scientific assessment in 2018 showed improvement in the ozone layer in the mid-latitude regions of the Northern Hemisphere. In the 2022 assessment, released Monday, positive signs of recovery for the ozone layer are also being detected in the tropics and Southern Hemisphere’s mid-latitudes, according to Dr. Newman.

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Every September, the ozone layer thins to form an ozone hole above Antarctica. Forms of chlorine and bromine in the atmosphere, which are derived from various industrial refrigerants, solvents and propellants released from the 1960s to the 1980s, attach to high-altitude polar clouds each southern winter. These chemicals then begin to destroy the ozone layer as the sun rises at the end of Antarctica’s winter, according to NASA.

The ozone hole, which appears in the Southern Hemisphere each year in the austral spring, stopped growing from 2000 to 2010. Despite a large Antarctic ozone hole in 2020 and 2021, long-term measurements show a decline over time that indicate continued recovery, the report said.

Scientists measure the size and thickness of the ozone hole using specially designed weather balloons launched from Antarctica and several other locations around the world, as well as four orbiting satellites operated by NASA and NOAA.

The U.N. panel warned that attempts to cool the Earth by injecting sunlight-reflecting particles into the upper atmosphere could damage the ozone layer, although it stressed that more research into these so-called geoengineering proposals and their unintended effects is needed.

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WSJ: They really are coming for your gas stoves
« Reply #387 on: January 14, 2023, 01:45:34 PM »
The Coming Gas Stove Culture War
Don’t believe this week’s denials. Progressive Democrats really are coming for your kitchen appliances.
By The Editorial BoardFollow
Jan. 13, 2023 6:46 pm ET


A sign of the media times is how quickly our leading progressive organs rally to deny that Democrats are doing what Democrats really are doing. A classic example was this week’s flare up in the coming climate war over banning gas stoves.

A Biden appointee on the Consumer Product Safety Commission explicitly threatened to ban gas stoves based on dubious evidence of public-health harm. “This is a hidden hazard,” said commissioner Richard Trumka Jr. “Any option is on the table. Products that can’t be made safe can be banned.”


We and others criticized the idea, and the media response was to rush to blame conservatives for starting it all. “Right’s new fight: Gas stoves,” said Axios, which pushes hard for the climate alarmist agenda. The Washington Post assured its readers that “regulators have no plans to ban gas stoves, but Republicans are slamming the Consumer Product Safety Commission for announcing it will examine the health impacts of the appliances.”

But we didn’t make up Mr. Trumka’s quote. We and others responded to it. After withering public criticism, including by Democratic Sen. Joe Manchin, the CPSC Chairman denied any plan to ban, and the White House said President Biden also doesn’t want to ban gas stoves. But that’s cold comfort given that the climate left does want to ban them, and progressive cities and states are doing it.

Progressive cities such as Berkeley, San Francisco and New York City have already banned gas stoves and other appliances in new buildings. New York Gov. Kathy Hochul this week proposed a ban on gas equipment including stoves in new small buildings in 2025 and larger ones in 2028.

Come 2030, New Yorkers won’t be allowed to replace their gas stoves with new ones if they break down. “As you begin making a transition, everyone will have to switch out appliances,” a state official explained. This is how the left’s green-energy “transition” will work for all things. Come 2035, New Yorkers and Californians won’t be able to buy new gasoline-powered cars either.

The Biden Administration is also aiding and abetting the anti-gas stove cause. Last year it filed an amicus brief with the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals supporting a gas ban by Berkeley, Calif. The departments of Justice and Energy argued that cities and states should be able to exercise police powers to prohibit the use of “dangerous or unsafe items.” Why would the federal government weigh in on a local regulatory case, if not for ideological climate solidarity?

Progressives claim that gas stoves produce pollutants that are harmful to human health. But pollution comes from cooking with poor ventilation, not from natural gas. Electric range-tops have the “hidden hazard” of potential burns, to borrow Mr. Trumka’s words.

By the way, last week Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm retweeted a link to a study linking gas stoves to asthma: “We can and must FIX this,” she tweeted. “Through @POTUS’ Inflation Reduction Act, Americans will have greater access to Electric and Induction Cooktops.” The Inflation Reduction Act includes $840 rebates for electric stoves.

There really is a culture war coming over gas stoves, and everything else involving fossil fuels, because climate has become for the left a matter of core cultural identity. Progressives want to impose their values on the lifestyle of everyone else, including in the kitchen. If subsidies don’t work, coercion follows. When they can’t win the political debate, they resort to brute government force. They really are coming for your stove.


ccp

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Al Gore
« Reply #389 on: January 18, 2023, 03:59:54 PM »
flatulence breath
still at it:

https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2023/01/18/al-gore-wef-meltdown-boiling-the-oceans-rain-bombs-a-billion-climate-refugees/

in Devos with the rich powerful and self described beautiful ;
going to see Yo Yo Ma after his hot air diatribe

oh the elites

only they can save us from ourselves

God Bless them .   :roll:
« Last Edit: January 18, 2023, 04:12:49 PM by ccp »

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EVs and the coming bitch slap from reality
« Reply #390 on: January 20, 2023, 04:43:42 PM »
The False Promise of Electric Cars
By ANDREW STUTTAFORD
January 19, 2023 3:01 PM

Policy-makers should not push them harder than the market does

‘The more the state ‘plans,’” wrote Hayek, “the more difficult planning becomes for the individual.” This may resonate with the driver of an electric vehicle (EV) who has pulled up at a charging station in the middle of nowhere, only to find it broken.

In January last year, Carlos Tavares, the CEO of Stellantis, the world’s fifth-largest carmaker (it was formed by the merger of Fiat Chrysler and Peugeot), described electrification as “a technology chosen by politicians” and said it was “imposed” on the auto sector. By contrast, the triumph of the internal-combustion engine (ICE) over a century ago was organic. Human ingenuity and the power of markets led to a product that swept almost everything else off the road. EVs (which first had a moment around 1900) were not banned, and neither was the horse. In due course, ICE horseless carriages for the Astors were followed by the Model T and its kin. The automotive age had truly arrived.

The surge in demand for EVs (albeit from a low base) in Europe and the U.S. could be seen as evidence that, with the assistance of some taxpayer cash and nudges from government, EV technology could flourish without state interventions to either close down or hobble its wicked rival. But some policy-makers, faced with what they claim (and some may even believe) is a climate “crisis,” have clearly not been persuaded that EVs, for all their loudly touted wonders, should be relied on to overtake conventional autos. That has left coercion, and with it the opportunity to redesign much of everyday life in ways more in keeping with the standards of those who know best. The switch to EVs will lead, in the end, to a shrunken role for the car, a machine long resented by a certain type of authoritarian for the untidiness it creates, for the space it takes up, and for the autonomy it offers.

Bans on the sales of new ICE vehicles will be coming into force from 2035 in Europe and, with California having taken the lead, in parts of the United States. Europe’s ban will also cover hybrids, one of the better, less disruptive pathways to lower greenhouse-gas (GHG) emissions. But like many of the religious cults it resembles, climate fundamentalism is characterized by a perpetual quest for purity. Tainted by gasoline, the hybrid had to go. Japan is taking a different course. Its hybrids have done well, and their manufacturers argue that their technology has more to offer. Like, for instance, the chairman of India’s largest automaker, the Japanese tend to be skeptical that there is only one route to a more climate-friendly automotive future. Toyota, for example, sells a hydrogen-fuel-cell car. (BMW has also begun small-scale production of a hydrogen-fuel-cell SUV.) Hydrogen-fuel-cell vehicles have zero GHG tailpipe emissions and would be permitted under both European and Californian rules. Massive investments in EVs, though, will leave relatively little left over for hydrogen in Europe and the U.S.

Meanwhile, the West’s turn to EVs has given Chinese car manufacturers a chance to penetrate markets where they have never done well. EVs, basically a battery and a computer housed in a four-wheeled box, are fairly easy to make. They have eliminated much of the edge that the ICE had given long-established Western incumbents.

Using success in their home base as a launchpad, Chinese manufacturers were the source of some 5 percent of the new EVs sold in Western Europe last year. It doesn’t hurt that Chinese EVs typically cost €10,000 less than their European counterparts, although not all compete on price. Moreover, Chinese manufacturers account for perhaps 55 percent of global EV-battery production. (An EV’s lithium-ion battery accounts for 30–40 percent of the car’s value.) And China’s domination of the EV supply chain includes production of battery-cell components such as anodes and cathodes, and it processes up to 75 percent of metals (such as lithium, cobalt, manganese, graphite, nickel, and various rare earths) used in making batteries.

While China is the world’s largest producer of rare earths, many of the other minerals processed in the country come from elsewhere, a gap its companies have remedied by securing, one way or another, a good grip on their supply. It helps to be a major customer unbothered by environmental concerns or human rights, an area of comparative advantage that Chinese firms can also exploit in their EV-related businesses at home. That’s something that the ESG-investment community ought to remember more often than it does.

Battery factories are being built in the West, too. Billions are already committed to, and beginning to be spent on, their construction in the U.S. But it’s worth paying attention to Volkswagen’s warning that, unless contained, high energy costs will render such plants “unviable” in Europe. Building a battery plant is one thing, but getting hold of the raw materials it needs is quite another. Ideally, they should come from friendly or friendly-ish nations (expect a surge in resource nationalism) or even — the ghost of John Muir cocks an ear — from within our borders. New mines will be necessary but will take years to open. Environmentalist litigation, an appropriately paradoxical irritant, will doubtless contribute to the delay. The prices of a number of raw materials used in EV production have risen and could continue to rise. There have already been signs of supply squeezes (some due to dislocations arising out of Covid and the war in Ukraine). If these persist, would-be EV buyers may have to wait longer and pay more. Others may prefer to walk away.

Many of these difficulties flow from the speed of this transition, a gift to China with potentially serious industrial, economic, and geopolitical consequences. Chinese competition in the EV arena (which will be more of a challenge in Europe) is the last thing Western carmakers need as they wrestle with a change that will upend not only their business model but also those of their suppliers. In Germany, in particular, it could trigger a crisis: Auto manufacturing is the backbone of its giant industrial sector. A fear of job losses is one reason the Biden administration wants to base as much as possible of the EV supply chain in the U.S. But the hugely expensive incentives (thank you, taxpayers!) to encourage that result could lead to a trade war with Europe, where some political figures are starting to realize that another self-inflicted climate-policy disaster is on the way.

And there’s more. The reckless pace at which vehicle electrification is being pushed through — a hallmark of central planning — will add to the pressure on electricity grids on both sides of the Atlantic, at a time when the grids are sinking deeper into the disorder brought on by their decarbonization. Europe’s energy miseries are no secret, but there have been signs of trouble here too, including grimly amusing requests to EV owners not to charge their cars during a couple of extremely hot days in Texas and California.

The reluctance — that obsession with purity again — to invest enough in “dirty” sources of electricity (a category that, in the more progressive U.S. states, includes natural gas) to tide us over for now, together with the lengthy delays that are bound to accompany any expansion of nuclear power even in states where it is not rejected outright, will increase our reliance on wind and solar, technologies still unable to play the role that policy-makers have assigned to them. Once the necessary equipment has been manufactured and installed, electricity generated by the wind and the sun may be GHG-emission-free. But the wind doesn’t always blow, and the sun doesn’t always shine, so the energy they produce isn’t as dependable as that generated by the technologies they’re inadequately replacing.

In addition, it will be extremely tricky, certainly in the U.S., to build enough charging stations in time to cope with demand if EVs sell at the rate their boosters expect. On the other hand, by reinforcing the anxiety about the range of EVs that’s now discouraging potential buyers (as it did in 1900), this problem may be partially self-correcting. But only partially. The median EV range (how far a fully charged EV can go without a recharge) in the U.S. is currently a little over 200 miles. That is, if the numbers can be trusted (not always) — and if it’s not too cold outside. This should suffice (if not necessarily psychologically) for drivers with their own garage or private driveway, who use their EVs only for quick trips or commuting (the average American driver drives 40 miles a day). Urban car owners with access only to the curbside will have a tough time. That won’t worry the city planners. They want those road hogs on public transport anyway. As for drivers traveling longer distances, read on.

Adding injury to insult: Public charging stations are not infrequently poorly maintained and out of order. Existing networks, such as Tesla’s, account for more than 140,000 chargers today. It won’t be easy to reach the total of 2 million chargers forecast to be needed by 2030. While the Biden administration has committed to allocating $5 billion to the states to create a “national network” of 500,000 public chargers nationwide by 2030, $5 billion will probably not — of course — be enough. That’s partly because of the administration’s stipulation that a certain (although still insufficient) number of the chargers must be “fast chargers.” These add some 90–120 miles of range in 30 minutes. (Compare the range that customers can get at the gas pump in a couple of minutes.) “Fast chargers” earned their misleading name by being less slow than far cheaper but almost infinitely indolent Level 2 chargers (10–20 miles of range in about an hour). These are suitable for home or office use or for a top-up while, say, on an errand, and not a lot else. It remains unclear who will be in a position to build and install the Biden chargers by 2030 (not least because of “Buy America” requirements).

Range anxiety does not seem to have been too much of an issue with existing EV owners, who have an estimated average household income of more than $100,000 a year. They needed it: The average new EV costs $66,000, over 40 percent more than the price of a new conventional car and a price level at which it would take the much-vaunted cost savings of EVs a long time to kick in, if ever. Based on some estimates, about 90 percent of EV owners own two cars or more, adding credibility to anecdata that they use ICE vehicles mainly for long-haul trips and EVs for driving locally.

Having had the patience to let market forces work would have been the best way of developing a cheaper EV (see the Model T). Instead, with time being, allegedly, of the essence as the climate clock ticks, governments are subsidizing buyers (and thus incentivizing manufacturers to keep prices up in the short term) while using varying degrees of bullying to force carmakers to produce cheap EVs — the latter an approach that made the Soviet refrigerator the marvel it was.

Meanwhile, auto companies are investing billions in EV production in the expectation that, whether compelled or otherwise, the demand will be there — a game of high stakes that they had little option other than to play. If, during a period of high capital expenditure, EV sales disappoint or ICE-vehicle sales drop off too soon (a recession could increase the chances of both), carmakers may find themselves in treacherous territory.

Making matters worse is that these billions — trailed and preceded by taxpayer money — are being invested in the development of a product that, at this point, is in some key respects inferior to what it is replacing, in ways that matter at several levels, ranging from the everyday to something grander. After all, EVs jeopardize the ability, so central to this country’s idea of itself, however mythologized, to just get up and go.

And all of this is for what?

In terms of GHG emissions, EVs are undoubtedly cleaner than conventional cars, but by less of a margin than is often understood. While an EV won’t release any tailpipe emissions (or indeed have a tailpipe), that should not be the end of the calculation. The fairest way to compare the two is to look at the emissions associated with each type of vehicle over its entire life cycle. That will include the emissions released to generate the electricity that powers an EV (which will vary from country to country; India is not the U.S.) and the emissions associated with the manufacture of the car and its components, including the mining of the metals used. According to the International Energy Agency, after adding in all these factors, a midsize traditional car is responsible for a bit more than twice as much emission as an EV. That’s not the most precise of comparisons, but it highlights another reason why the war against cars will not end with the end of the internal-combustion engine.

According to the EPA, in 2019 (the last pre-Covid year) transportation accounted for around 33 percent of U.S. GHG emissions. Some 58 percent of that was from cars and light-duty trucks. They were thus the source of about 19 percent of U.S. GHG emissions. The U.S. accounted for 11 percent of global GHG emissions that year. That means that cars and light trucks in the U.S. accounted for approximately 2 percent of global GHG emissions in 2019. They contributed even less in the EU. These are not the highest of numbers.

It would have made no material difference to the climate (and it would have been considerably less disruptive) if those governments that decided to ban the sale of new ICE vehicles from 2035 had refrained from taking that step until 2055, buying an extra 20 years in which electrification or any other replacement technology could have been put through its paces — and, if possible, improved — by a reasonably free market.

But that would not have done. The die had to be cast. There is a “race” to decarbonize, you see. Sadly, when it comes to cars, it’s one in which all the participants will lose.

DougMacG

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ccp

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Re: Environmental issues
« Reply #392 on: January 21, 2023, 06:39:15 AM »
Doug

you just crashed Algore's party

I recall some of the longest trains are coal carrying trains
some go for miles :


https://www.freightcourse.com/longest-freight-trains/

still waiting for them to be replaced by solar panels that cover whole states or windmills the encircle the entire world's coast line

and reach across all the interstate highways


Crafty_Dog

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« Last Edit: May 13, 2023, 05:26:23 PM by Crafty_Dog »


ccp

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« Last Edit: May 14, 2023, 04:59:27 PM by Crafty_Dog »

ccp

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Steve Moore Unions waking up to reality?
« Reply #397 on: May 16, 2023, 07:13:07 AM »