Month: February 2017

Your Roundup of Climate and Energy News for the week ending February 24, 2017 follows.  Please forward the URL to anyone you think might be interested.

On Wednesday, the Center for Media and Democracy released over 7,500 pages of emails from EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt’s time as Oklahoma Attorney General after that office turned them over to a state court in Oklahoma.  They revealed several instances of close coordination between his former office and oil interests in Oklahoma.  Both The Washington Post and The New York Times also covered the story.  In addition, there are contradictions between Pruitt’s Senate testimony and statements in an interview with the Wall Street Journalafter his swearing in that have caused some to sense a “bait and switch.”  Mike Catanzaro was recently appointed as President Donald Trump’s top energy aide.  Writing on Desmog, Steve Horn reviews his history and writings on climate and energy.  President Trump is expected to sign an executive order calling for the repeal of the Clean Power Plan.  But as explained by Brad Plumer on Vox, “… crafting a new rule will take many months, if not years, and Pruitt will face a slew of procedural and legal hurdles in trying to undo Obama’s plan.”

Scott Pruitt’s appointment, along with the activities of Rep. Lamar Smith (R, TX), chair of the House Science, Space, and Technology Committee, has some climate scientists concerned about future harassment.  Thus, it is encouraging that the National Academy of Sciences has called for continuing support of the U.S. Global Change Research Program following a new review of their activities.  Nevertheless, the League of Conservation Voters (LCV) has just reported that the 114^th Congress was the most polarized on environmental issues in the 46-year history of the LCV scorecard, which does not bode well for environmental votes in the new Congress.  It is within this atmosphere that the March for Science is being planned for April 22, Earth Day, on the Mall in Washington, D.C.  Although the planned march has drawn criticism and concern from some, Rush Holt, chief executive of AAAS, has emphasized that the march is “for science rather than against anyone.”

Climate

New research, published in the journal Science Advances, has asserted that six marine “hotspots” of exceptional biodiversity are being impacted negatively by warming sea temperatures, weakening ocean currents, and industrial fishing, putting them at risk of losing many of their species.

The flooding in California this week has been attributed to the arrival of “atmospheric rivers” from the Pacific.  With respect to the effect of climate change on those “rivers”, UCLA climate scientist Daniel Swain has said “There is now quite a bit of evidence that future droughts here will be warmer and more intense, yet will be interrupted by increasingly powerful ‘atmospheric river’ storms capable of causing destructive flooding.”  Further east, the flow of the Colorado River has dropped more than 19% during the drought gripping the river basin since 2000.  A study published in the journal Water Resources Research has concluded that about one-third of the decline is due to a warming atmosphere induced by climate change.  How people in the Colorado River basin deal with the problem is an important indicator of how we will adapt to climate change.  Zack Colman visited southeastern Nevada to see how they are coping with the changes.

The U.S. Geological Survey has just announced that the record warm February temperatures in the U.S. are another symptom of climate change.  One bit of evidence of the link to climate change is that there were many more record daily high temperatures than record lows – 5,294 versus 84 through Feb. 20.  This has prompted Robinson Meyer of The Atlantic to ask “Is It Okay to Enjoy the Warm Winters of Climate Change?”.  If you are interested in the psychology of climate change, Yale Climate Connections has provided a list of books and reports on the subject.

It is summer in Australia, really summer, with temperatures in Sydney reaching 117°F.  As has happened elsewhere, this has reduced the number of people who deny human-caused climate change.  According to Simon Bullock, senior campaigner on climate change at Friends of the Earth, “Sadly, people are now seeing and experiencing climate change in their own lives.  No amount of media misinformation from climate deniers can alter that.”  Another place where people are “experiencing climate change in their own lives” is La Paz, Bolivia, a high-altitude city whose water previously came from glaciers.  Now that the glaciers are gone, they face severe challenges.  Leslie Kaufman described how the city is coping.

The U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) has issued a new report, “The Future of Food and Agriculture: Trends and Challenges,” in which they warn that countries must undertake “major transformations” in the way they grow and distribute food if future widespread starvation is to be avoided.  Some of the challenges are increasing population, the shifting of diets from grain to meat-based, groundwater depletion, and climate change.  Meanwhile, the U.N. has issued an urgent plea for funds to help avert starvation in Nigeria, Somalia, South Sudan and Yemen.

In October, almost 200 countries signed the Kigali Amendment as an update to the Montreal Protocol, agreeing to reduce their reliance on hydrofluorocarbons in refrigeration and air conditioning because of their strong global warming potential.  After considering thousands of options, scientists have narrowed the list of candidate replacements to 27, all of which have problems, according to a new paper in Nature Communications.

A 2013 World Bank report ranked Boston as the eighth most vulnerable major city in the world to property damage from rising seas, among 136 studied, with much of the waterfront only a foot above sea level during high tide.  Consequently, studies are underway to determine the most feasible way to protect the city from future sea level rise, including building a large sea barrier.

Energy

The burning of biomass in large power plants to generate electricity was back in the news this week with the release of a report by the UK’s Chatham House asserting “Although most renewable energy policy frameworks treat biomass as though it is carbon-neutral at the point of combustion, in reality this cannot be assumed, as biomass emits more carbon per unit of energy than most fossil fuels.”  Jocelyn Timperley of Carbon Brief has examined the main arguments of the report and concluded that “The debate over biomass [burning]is unlikely to be resolved soon.”

Two lobbying groups representing auto manufacturers, the Alliance of Automobile Manufacturers and the Association of Automobile Manufacturers, sent letters to EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt, urging him to roll back the 2025 fuel economy standards established by the Obama administration.  Environmentalists objected.  Nevertheless, at about the same time, Royal Dutch Shell Plc announced that it will build seven fueling stations for hydrogen cars in California through a partnership with Toyota Motor Corp.

A 4.6 MW, community-based project in Red Lake Falls, MN will be the country’s first commercial integrated solar-wind hybrid power generation facility.  It will use two 2.3 MW wind turbines and 1 MW of solar panels.  The wind turbines will provide peak energy in winter and the solar panels will provide peak energy in summer.  On the topic of renewable energy, there is a very interesting editorial in the British magazine The Economist dealing with the impacts of renewable energy on the conventional electricity industry.  It provides some important insights into why some electricity providers are fighting renewable energy.

The U.S. started exporting liquefied natural gas last year and is increasingly piping more natural gas to Mexico while importing less gas via pipeline from Canada.  According to the Energy Department, the U.S. will likely become a net exporter of gas next year and a net exporter of total fossil energy products shortly after 2020.

Economics is the main cause of the closing of coal-fired power plants, and as long as natural gas continues to be cheap, that is likely to continue.  Thus, it is not surprising that President Trump’s election hasn’t slowed the pace of closings for those plants.  A case in point is the Navajo Generating Station that I wrote about last week.  Writing in the Los Angeles Times, Evan Halper characterized its closure as the first major test of “Trump’s vision for a coal industry resurgence.”

Computing technology can contribute to the success of wind energy installations by adding smart intelligence to machines, helping them operate more efficiently, and alerting developers about needed maintenance.

Your Roundup of Climate and Energy News for the week ending February 17, 2017 follows.  Please forward the URL to anyone you think might be interested.

Dr. Will Happer, an emeritus professor of physics at Princeton University, is being considered for the position of science adviser or director of the Office of Science and Technology Policy in the Trump Administration.  Andrew Revkin has an interesting and enlightening interview with him at ProPublica.  On Friday, the Senate confirmed Scott Pruitt as Administrator of EPA by a vote of 52 to 46.  According to a report from the Congressional Research Service, a complicated legal battle would await the Trump administration if it tried to withdraw from the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change, the treaty under which the Paris Climate Agreement lies.  Finally, let’s hope Jason Samenow (and the rest of us) doesn’t regret his article in The Washington Post entitled “NASA is defiantly communicating climate change science despite Trump’s doubts.”

Climate

Preliminary data from the U.S. National Snow and Ice Data Center have shown that sea ice around Antarctica has shrunk to the smallest annual extent on record.  The smallest annual extent is typically reached in mid to late February during summer in the southern hemisphere.  This year, sea ice extent contracted to 883,015 square miles on Feb. 13, which is slightly smaller than the previous low of 884,173 square miles recorded on Feb. 27, 1997.  Satellite records date back to 1979.  In 2005 ice loss from the glaciers on the Queen Elizabeth Islands of Canada was almost equally split between calving glaciers and surface melt.  By 2015, however, 90% was due to surface melting.  In fact, according to a study just published in Environmental Research Letters, surface melt increased from 3 gigatons a year to 30 gigatons a year over that period because of warming air temperatures.

A new paper, published Wednesday in the journal Nature by scientists from the GEOMAR Helmholtz Centre for Ocean Research in Germany, found a decline of more than 2% in ocean oxygen content worldwide between 1960 and 2010.  Because oxygen is not evenly distributed in Earth’s oceans, the 2% overall decline means there is a much larger decline in some regions than in others.  The study attributes less than 15% of the oxygen loss to warmer ocean temperatures, which create lower solubility.  The rest was attributed to other factors, such as a lack of mixing.

At the end of last week, a powerful low-pressure storm system in the northern Atlantic helped carry warm air up to the Arctic, sending temperatures at the North Pole more than 36°F above the 1979-2000 average.  It was the third such warming event this winter, whereas 50 to 60 years ago, such events only occurred once or twice a decade.  In addition, record warmth was being recorded in the central U.S.and Australia.

Peter Sinclair has released an interesting new video in which he examines the ability of models to forecast what will happen as the climate changes.  It was featured by Yale Climate Connections on Wednesday.  Also, if you missed his video “Standing Up for Science” you can see it here.  Sinclair recently received a Friend of the Planet award from the National Center for Science Education, as did the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication.

Geoff Summerhayes, from the Australian Prudential Regulation Authority (APRA), Australia’s financial regulator, has warned that climate change poses a material risk to the entire financial system, and has urged companies to start adapting.  Summerhayes said “Some climate risks are distinctly ‘financial’ in nature. Many of these risks are foreseeable, material and actionable now.”  Meanwhile, managers of 16 funds with assets totaling more than $2.8 trillion called for the G20 economies to phase out fossil fuel subsidies within the next three yearsto avert a catastrophe.  On the other hand, writing on Yale Environment 360, Mark Gunther examines the question “Why Won’t American Business Push for Action on Climate?”.

At the single-day Climate and Health Meeting in Atlanta on Thursday, the main theme was that climate change is poised to unleash an unprecedented, global public health crisis, although the participants left a little room for hope.  You can watch a recording of the meeting here.

In a meta-analysis of 130 studies reported between 1990 and 2015, scientists found that 47% of mammals and 24.4% of birds on the International Union for the Conservation of Nature’s red list of threatened species are negatively impacted by climate change – a total of about 700 species.  The analysis was published in the journal Nature Climate Change.

Energy

The members of the EU Parliament narrowly approved an overhaul of the EU emissions trading scheme in hopes of balancing greater cuts in greenhouse gases with protection for energy-intensive industries.  Environmental organizations denounced the legislation for not going far enough in strengthening the cuts.  The legislation will now enter negotiations between the European parliament, commission, and council, which represents member states.  Here in the U.S., Charles Komanoff of the Carbon Tax Center had an essay in The Nation about the carbon tax proposal put forth last week by the Climate Leadership Council.  Central to any carbon tax is the social cost of carbon.  Carbon Brief walks you through what it is, how it is calculated, and why it is so important.  Meanwhile, a coalition of conservative groups, including American Energy Alliance, Heritage Action for America, and Americans for Tax Reform, is asking for a meeting with high-level White House officials to rebut last week’s meeting and presentation by members of the Climate Leadership Council.  It appears, however, that members of the coalition are out of step with almost half of Trump voters.

In advance of their upcoming U.S. Solar Market Insight 2016 Year in Review report, set to be released on March 9, GTM Research and the Solar Energy Industries Association (SEIA) announced that the U.S. solar industry installed 14,626 MW of solar photovoltaics in 2016.  This is a 95% increase over the amount installed in 2015.  Nevertheless, U.S. renewable energy capacity still lags way behind that of the EU and China.  For example, of the 24,500 MW of new electrical generating capacity built across the EU in 2016, 21,100 MW – or 86% – was from wind, solar, biomass and hydro.

On Monday, the utilities that own the coal-fired Navajo Generating Station in Arizona decided to decommission the plant at the end of their lease agreement with the Navajo Nation in December 2019.  This is decades earlier than expected and is the result of low natural gas prices.  On the subject of coal, President Trump on Thursday signed legislation ending the Office of Surface Mining’s Stream Protection Rule, a regulation to protect waterways from coal mining waste.  Federal regulators said the rule would have protected about 6,000 miles of streams and 52,000 acres of forests over two decades.  Warren Cornwall presented an analysis of what the rule’s demise will mean.

Calling the decision “arbitrary, capricious, and contrary to law,” the Standing Rock and Cheyenne River Sioux tribes filed a motion on Tuesday asking the court to reverse an easement for the Dakota Access pipeline that the Army Corps of Engineers granted.  That easement lifted the final hurdle for the project’s completion.  According to Patrick A. Parenteau, a professor at Vermont Law School, “The strongest possible argument is that the Trump administration, with no change in facts, no change in conditions, reversed the government’s position.”  Still, legal experts considered the motion to be a longshot.  Meanwhile, TransCanada Corp filed an application with Nebraska authorities on Thursday to route its Keystone XL pipeline through the state.

As required by an agreement with the UN, on Tuesday the EPA issued its draft report, Inventory of U.S. Greenhouse Gas Emissions and Sinks: 1990 – 2015.  It will be available for public comment until March 17, allowing the final report to be released April 15, 2017.  In 2015, greenhouse gas emissions were the lowest they have been since 1992.  Unfortunately, emissions of hydrofluorocarbons, which are potent greenhouse gases, are rising.  Since much of our greenhouse gas emissions come from the oil and gas industry, understanding where the wells are in the U.S. is instructive.  Luckily, Tim Meko and Laris Karklis have presented maps showing where it all comes from.

Wind power was in the news this week.  On Sunday, the Southwest Power Pool (which coordinates the flow of electricity on the high voltage power lines from Montana and North Dakota to New Mexico, Texas and Louisiana) met more than 50% of its electrical demand from windfor a brief period.  This was the first time on any North American power grid.  On the other side of the world, in an effort to save its oil reserves for sale, Saudi Arabia plans to install almost 10 GW of wind and solar energy by 2023.

On Tuesday, Toshiba projected a $6.3 billion write-down for its nuclear power business and said it wanted to sell it.  Toshiba’s exit from the business of building nuclear power plants undermines new research and development on advanced reactor designs and likely spells the end of any nuclear construction in the U.S. for the foreseeable future.  It also delays completion of the new units at the V.C. Summer Nuclear Station in South Carolina until the end of 2020.

Your Roundup of Climate and Energy News for the week ending February 10, 2017 follows.  Please forward the URL to anyone you think might be interested.

Scott Pruitt is drawing up plans to repeal climate rules, cut staffing, close offices, and permanently weaken the regulatory authority of the EPA, which he has been nominated to lead.  As a result, on Monday almost 500 former EPA employees sent an open letter to Senate Majority Leader McConnell explaining why they oppose making Pruitt administrator of the agency.  The New York Times‘ Coral Davenport explored how Pruitt might go about his task, using interviews with senior former EPA officials.  In addition, Eric Roston at Bloomberg, examined how EPA’s history and structure might limit Pruitt’s actions.  If you are too young to remember what the U.S. was like before the EPA, then you may want to read this introduction to Documerica.

According to Politico, George David Banks, a former George W. Bush climate aide, is expected to join the National Security Council as an adviser to President Trump on international energy and environmental issues.  He would work with the State Department to help shape the approach to climate change negotiations, including whether the U.S. should remain committed to the Paris Climate Accord.  And according to E&E News, Mike Catanzaro, an energy lobbyist who’s worked on environmental issues in the executive branch and both chambers of Congress, is expected to become special assistant to the president for energy and environmental issues in the National Economic Council.

Climate

You may recall that in 2015 Thomas R. Karl of NOAA and eight coauthors (seven of whom were from NOAA) published a paper in the journal Science correcting the sea surface temperature record to bring older measurements taken in ship engine rooms into line with more recent measurements taken with buoys and other modern techniques.  The paper received a lot of press because the impact of the corrections was to eliminate the “global warming hiatus” that apparently occurred during the first 15 years of the 21^st century.  This caused outrage on the part of those who question whether climate change is occurring.  Now the paper is back under the microscopebecause of an article published over the weekend in the British paper The Mail on Sunday.  E&E News, the Associated Press, and The Guardian had good coverage of the events while Carbon Brief presented a guest post by climate scientist Zeke Hausfather, who fact-checked the article that appeared in the Mail on Sunday.  The bottom line: the science is sound, but some NOAA data handling protocols may have been breached.  There were two good posts on RealClimate related to this incident.  One was about living in a time of fake news and “alternative facts.”  The other presented NASA climate scientist Gavin Schmidt’s views on the challenges of science communication in a politicized world.

Robert McSweeney at Carbon Brief reported on two new papers that appeared in scientific journals this week.  One, published in Current Biology, concerns African penguins.  Warming sea surface temperatures and overfishing have made food scarce in the usual feeding areas for the penguins.  Unfortunately, young penguins instinctually head north and west for food, while the fish are shifting south and east, setting up an “ecological trap” for the penguins.  The other, published in Nature, concerns the impact of changes in ocean circulation patterns on the amount of CO₂ they take up.  It found that weakening circulation patterns since 2000 have resulted in an increase in CO₂uptake, but the authors caution that there is no guarantee this will continue in the future.

Towns and cities in the mid-Atlantic region could see more than 160 high tide floods every year by 2045, according to a paper published in the journal PLOS One.  That’s up from once-a-month flooding in the region now.  In addition, high tide floods along southeastern shorelines are expected to strike more than 100 times a year.

A new paper, published in Nature Ecology & Evolution, used satellite data and climate change projections for the middle of this century to estimate how climate change will impact the frequency of large wildfires.  The study suggests that there will be a 35% increase in the days with high danger of large fires across the world, with some regions seeing even larger increases, such as the western states of the U.S., southeastern Australia, the Mediterranean region, and southern Africa.  In addition, a paper in the journal Nature suggested that a warming climate will fundamentally change the chemistry of mountain soils by shifting the balance of nutrients, visibly disrupting fragile, high-elevation ecosystems of grasses, flowers, and trees within decades.  That, in turn, will substantially alter the way these sensitive ecosystems function.

Authors of a new book entitled Climate Change and the Health of Nations: Famines, Fevers, and the Fate of Populations examined the history of climate and human health and concluded that “The main general conclusion to be made about climatic impacts on health and survival during the Holocene is this: whether in the Arctic, temperate regions, or the tropics, the climatic comfort zone that sustains food and water supplies, stability of ecosystems, and other basic needs is confined within a narrow range of temperatures and a particular pattern of seasonal rainfall.”  That does not bode well for life in the Anthropocene.

Energy

Members of the Climate Leadership Council met Wednesday with White House officials to discuss the idea of imposing a national carbon tax, rather than using federal regulations, to address climate change.  The plan appears to be patterned after the Carbon Fee and Dividend proposal of Citizens’ Climate Lobby.  It comprises four elements: a gradually increasing carbon tax, carbon dividends for all Americans, border carbon adjustments, and significant regulatory rollback.  In an op-ed in The New York Times, members of the Council stated “…an ideal climate policy would reduce carbon emissions, limit regulatory intrusion, promote economic growth, help working class Americans and prove durable when the political winds change.  We have laid out such a plan…”  Nevertheless, the proposal by the group of elder statesmen in the Republican Party “is already meeting entrenched opposition from within their own party.”  Brad Plumer of Vox has an analysis of the carbon tax proposal.  In his article, he states “Every few years, various economists and wonks will try to sell the Republican Party on a carbon tax as a conservative solution to climate change.  And so far, these campaigns have attracted public support from … exactly zero elected Republicans in Washington.”  While this may be technically correct, it apparently ignores the 12 Republican members of the bipartisan Climate Solutions Caucus, which is exploring policy options for addressing climate change.  Finally, opposition from most Republicans should come as no surprise since the energy industry spent $160 million on federal candidates during the last election cycle, with 80% of it going to Republicans.  In addition, it spends $300 million a year lobbying Congress, deploying three lobbyists per member.

On Wednesday the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers granted the developer of the Dakota Access pipeline formal permission to lay pipe under a Missouri River reservoir in North Dakota and the developer has resumed work.  Phillip Ellis, a spokesperson for Earthjustice, an environmental law firm representing the Standing Rock Sioux tribe, stated that they will file litigation against the Army Corps within days, but legal experts have said the tribe faces long odds in convincing any court to halt work on the pipeline.  Also on Wednesday, former interior secretary Sally Jewell said that the Corps of Engineers was “reneging” on its commitment to other federal agencies and tribal leaders to conduct a thorough environmental review of the pipeline.

According to a report released on Tuesday by the solar advocacy group The Solar Foundation, jobs in the U.S. solar industry grew 25% last year to include more than 260,000 workers.  In addition, a new report released Wednesday by the Business Council for Sustainable Energy and Bloomberg New Energy Finance found that Americans spent less of their average annual household income on energy in 2016 than ever before. Furthermore, retail electricity prices fell 2.2% in real terms from 2015.

Wind, solar, biomass and hydro made up 86% of new power added to Europe’s electricity grids last year.  As a result, wind power now contributes 16.7% of Europe’s total power capacity.  In the U.S., during the last quarter of 2016 wind passed hydropower dams to become the largest source of renewable electricity, according to a new study by the American Wind Energy Association, making wind the fourth-largest energy source overall.  And in China, installed photovoltaic (PV) capacity more than doubled last year, rising to 77.42 GW with the addition of 34.54 GW over the course of the year.

California’s three largest utilities have filed proposals with the state’s public utilities commission that would allocate up to $1 billion in new spending to “accelerate widespread transportation electrification.”  The money would come from surcharges on utility bills submitted by all three companies to their subscribers.  The goal is to remove as many medium and heavy duty diesel powered vehicles from the roadways as possible.  Electric vehicle (EV) sales numbers in the U.S. for 2016 were recently released.  Following a 5% decline in sales from 2014 to 2015, U.S. EV sales increased by 37% in 2016.  More than half of all EV sales took place in California.

Recently The Guardian held a roundtable on the future of wind and solar power with participants from several organizations with an interest in energy.  The consensus was that the Trump Administration will have little impact on the prospects for renewable energy because the strength of the renewables sector is driven by decreasing costs and increasing interest among both the public and businesses.  Meanwhile, the nuclear power industry is having to revamp its arguments for government support in light of the views of the Trump Administration about climate change.

If Europe’s 300 coal-fired power plants run to the end of their natural lifespans, the EU nations will exceed their carbon budget for coal by 85%, according to a new report by Climate Analytics.  It says the EU would need to stop using coal for electricity generation by 2030 to meet its Paris climate pledges.

A new paper in the journal Science describes an almost science-fiction like way to increase the cooling of objects, thereby increasing their efficiency in cooling applications.  The technique applies “passive cooling”, which increases the rate of infrared radiation to space without the input of mechanical or electrical energy.  It is papers like this that give me hope that humankind can solve the climate change problem.

Your Roundup of Climate and Energy News for the week ending February 3, 2017 follows.  Please forward the URL to anyone you think might be interested.

In the face of a boycott by Democrats, on Thursday Republican members of the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works suspended their rules and approved the nomination of Scott Pruitt to head EPA.  The vote was 11-0 to send the nomination to the full Senate.  The Los Angeles Times has explained why a challenge to California’s unique authority to set rules for car and truck emissions would be hard for Pruitt to win if confirmed.  On Tuesday, the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee voted 17-6 to approve Rick Perry’s nomination to head DOE, sending it to the full Senate.  On Wednesday the Senate confirmed Rex Tillerson, former ExxonMobil CEO, as Secretary of State with a vote of 56-43.  Justin Gillis of The New York Times presented an interesting analysis of how the Republican position on climate change has changed subtly over time and how the appointment of Rex Tillerson and Rick Perry may actually give some cause for hope.  Neil Gorsuch is President Trump’s nominee for the Supreme Court.  His position on the Chevron rule may be very important to environmental cases coming before the court.  John Cushman has an explanation of why at Inside Climate News.  In response to statements by members of Congress, the President, and some nominees for leadership positions in the new administration, and actions by the transition team, scientists plan to hold a “Listen to Evidence” march in Washington, DC on Earth Day, Saturday, April 22.  Supporting events will be held around the country, as well as in other countries.  In addition, climate scientist Michael Mann expressed his views about recent events in an op-ed piece on The Hill.

Climate

Writing in The Washington Post, Jason Samenow of The Capital Weather Gang stated: “The Arctic is so warm and has been this warm for so long that scientists are struggling to explain it and are in disbelief.  The climate of the Arctic is known to oscillate wildly, but scientists say this warmth is so extreme that humans surely have their hands in it and may well be changing how it operates.”  One impact of the warmth is that the extent of Arctic sea ice is well below any previously recorded value for this time of year.

A study published Thursday in the Nature journal Scientific Reports has found that ocean acidification (caused by increased CO₂ levels) increases the potency of coral-killing seaweeds, allowing them to take over and kill off coral reefs.  The only effective way to address the problem is to reduce CO₂ emissions and the levels of CO₂ in the atmosphere.

Like California, which just went from extreme drought to intense rainfall, Peru is struggling to cope with heavy downpours and flooding as its drought has ended.  The precipitation has been fueled by unusually warm temperatures in the Pacific, which is odd since an El Niño period just ended last year.  Meanwhile, in Chile, which is still in a decade-long drought, the worst wildfires in the country’s history are raging across the central and southern regions of the country.

According to a recent survey by researchers from the University of New Hampshire, just 25% of people who voted for Donald Trump believe climate change is occurring and is caused by human activity, compared to 90% of Hillary Clinton voters.  Interestingly, 99% of people who voted in the election, but did not cast a vote for president, believe climate change is occurring and is human-caused.

Scientists gathered in Anchorage last week for the Alaska Marine Science Symposium reviewed new research probing the impacts of increasing water temperatures on marine ecosystems.  This article focused on Arctic cod, bird populations in the Bering Sea, and the impacts of toxic algal blooms on marine mammals.

Energy

Recently I have provided links to reports by BP and others stating that fossil fuel demand will continue to grow for the foreseeable future.  Now a new report by The Carbon Tracker Initiative and the Grantham Institute of Imperial College, London, challenges such conclusions.  Rather, their analysis suggests that the fossil fuel giants are vastly underestimating the disruptive power of solar panels and electric cars, which could cause coal and oil demand to peak by 2020.  Carbon Brief has provided two graphs that summarize the findings.  David Roberts at Vox agrees that we are probably underestimating how quickly electric cars will disrupt the oil market.  It is worth noting that the European Union is on track to meet its 2020 goal of getting 20% of its energy from renewable sources.

The owners of Arizona’s Navajo Generating Station, the largest coal-fired power plant in the West, announced in early January that low natural gas prices and the rising costs of generating electricity using coal make it too expensive to operate the plant.  A decision on the plant’s fate is expected this spring.

A new paper in Nature Climate Change uses “a nested structure of key indicators to track progress through time” toward the goals established by the Paris Climate Accord.  While many key indicators are consistent with emission levels required to meet temperature goals, the continued lack of large-scale carbon capture and storage is a major threat to their attainment.

On Monday, Honda and General Motors announced an $85 million collaboration in which, beginning in 2020, they will assemble hydrogen fuel cells for both companies at a Brownstown, Michigan, GM plant.  The fuel cells will be used in vehicles from both companies.  The big question is whether the needed hydrogen infrastructure will be available.

On Thursday, the Senate passed 54-45 a Congressional Review Act bill undoing the Interior Department’s Stream Protection Rule, a regulation requiring coal firms to clean up waste from mountaintop removal mining and prevent it from going into local waterways.  The House passed the bill 228-194 on Wednesday night.  Brad Plumer of Vox provided some history on the rule and why Republicans were intent on killing it.

Construction of Generation III+ nuclear reactors is being plagued by delays and cost overruns, causing former U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission official Lake Barrett to state: “The cost overrun situation is driven by a near-perfect storm of societal risk aversion to nuclear causing ultra-restrictive regulatory requirements, construction complexity, and lack of nuclear construction experience by the industry.”  This is not the situation globally, however.

According to a new paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, replacing traditional wood and coal-burning cook-stoves with cleaner technology could reduce global temperature by 0.08°C and save more than 10 million lives by 2050.

A new study by the University of Texas Energy Institute published in Nature Energy has found that if your house has solar panels, it is better to stay connected to the grid than to store energy in batteries for use when the sun isn’t shining.  That is because the energy loss associated with batteries results in 8 to 14% more energy use when energy is stored in them.  Despite those losses, as net metering is eliminated or scaled back in some states, battery storage is likely to find increased use.  In addition, electrical companies are increasingly turning to battery farms for energy storage.

One of the vicious cycles associated with global warming is that the warmer Earth gets, the greater the demand for air conditioning, which typically requires electricity to operate, causing more greenhouse gases to be emitted, driving the temperature even higher, etc.  There is another way, however, even though it is not yet in widespread use: solar thermal cooling.  If that sounds like an oxymoron, read this piece, or at least look at the excellent graphics.