Scientists unravel history of climate change upheaval on the Great Barrier Reef
Natural fluctuations in reef health
FOR the first time ever, a group of Australian scientists have unravelled the history of climate change upheaval on the Great Barrier Reef over the past 8000 years.
A team led by University of Queensland graduate Dr Marcos Salas-Saavedra analysed rare earth elements in drilled reef cores, unveiling a deep history of wild weather.
“Eight thousand years ago, extreme run-off from an intense Indian-Australian summer monsoon affected water quality in the southern offshore Reef,” Dr Salas-Saavedra said.
“Water in the GBR was much dirtier, and poor water quality is known to be a major cause of reef decline around the world. “But 1,000 years later, monsoonal rains eased and the water quality greatly improved.
“We noticed water quality declined during times of dampened El Nino Southern Oscillation frequency, which may have led to more La Niña-dominated wet climates in Queensland at those times – just like the weather we have seen this year in Queensland.”
But as El Nino-dominated weather patterns became established, he said the southern Great Barrier Reef water quality improved to give us the beautiful Reef we know and love.
The new data allows researchers to understand for the first time what water quality was like on the Great Barrier Reef over an extended period.
UQ Professor Gregory Webb said the study provides a new and independent source of palaeoclimate data, not only for the Great Barrier Reef, but potentially for reefs around the globe.
“Knowing more about how the Great Barrier Reef responded to past environmental changes is essential to help inform us how reefs can be better managed in the future,” Professor Webb said.
“We have created a toolkit to understand subtle differences in water quality – even in offshore reefs – and it can be applied over much longer time frames where reef core material is available.
“Importantly, this type of analysis enables us to examine how ancient water quality may have impacted coral growth rates, overall reef growth rates, and any shifts in reef ecology at the same time.”
He said knowing more about how the Great Barrier Reef responded to past environmental changes was essential, helping to inform how it could be better managed in the future.
Reef cores were recovered from Heron and One Tree reefs by UQ’s Dorothy Hill Research Vessel, before Professor Jianxin Zhao dated and analysed the cores at UQ’s Radiogenic Isotope Facility.
The analysis focused on rare earth elements preserved in microbialites – rocks made by microbes – that have been growing throughout the Great Barrier Reef’s history.
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To maximize renewable energy, we’ll need a new technology: renewable storage
The German word Dunkelflaute means “dark doldrums.” It chills the hearts of renewable-energy engineers, who use it to refer to the lulls when solar panels and wind turbines are thwarted by clouds, night, or still air. On a bright, cloudless day, a solar farm can generate prodigious amounts of electricity; when it’s gusty, wind turbines whoosh neighborhoods to life. But at night solar cells do little, and in calm air turbines sit useless. These renewable energy sources stop renewing until the weather, or the planet, turns.
The dark doldrums make it difficult for an electrical grid to rely totally on renewable energy. Power companies need to plan not just for individual storms or windless nights but for Dunkelflaute that stretch for days or longer. Last year, Europe experienced a weeks-long “wind drought,” and in 2006 Hawaii endured six weeks of consecutive rainy days. On a smaller scale, factories, data centers, and remote communities that want to go all-renewable need to fill the gaps. Germany is decommissioning its nuclear power plants and working hard to embrace renewables, but, because of the problem of “intermittency” in its renewable power supply, it remains dependent on fossil fuels—including imported Russian gas.
The obvious solution is batteries. The most widespread variety is called lithium-ion, or Li-ion, after the chemical process that makes it work. Such batteries power everything from mobile phones to electric vehicles; they are relatively inexpensive to make and getting cheaper. But typical models exhaust their stored energy after only three or four hours of maximum output, and—as every iphone owner knows— their capacity dwindles, little by little, with each recharge. It is expensive to collect enough batteries to cover longer discharges. And batteries can catch fire—sites in South Korea have ignited dozens of times in the past few years.
Venkat Srinivasan, a scientist who directs the Argonne Collaborative Center for Energy Storage Science (AC- CESS), at the Argonne National Laboratory, in Illinois, told me that one of the biggest problems with Li-ion batteries is their supply chain. The batteries depend on lithium and cobalt. In 2020, some seventy per cent of the world’s cobalt came from the Democratic Republic of the Congo. “Unless we have diversity, we’re going to be in trouble,” Srinivasan said. Any disruption to the supply chain can strongly affect prices and availability. Moreover, a lot of water and energy are required for mining the metals, which can cause environmental damage, and some co-balt-mining operations involve child labor. Experts doubt that Li-ion prices will drop more than thirty per cent below their current levels without significant technological advancements—a drop that is still too small, according to the Department of Energy. We need to expand our capacity; by one estimate, we’ll require at least a hundred times more storage by 2040 if we want to shift largely to renewables and avoid climate catastrophe. We may somehow find clean and reliable ways to mine, distribute, and recycle the ingredients for Li-ion batteries. And yet that seems unlikely. Although we usually think about renewable energy in terms of its sources, such as wind turbines and solar panels, that’s only half the picture. Ideally, we’d pair renewable energy with renewable storage.
We already have one kind of renewable energy storage: more than ninety per cent of the world’s energy-storage capacity is in reservoirs, as part of a remarkable but unsung technology called pumped-storage hydropower. Among other things, “pumped hydro” is used to smooth out spikes in electricity demand. Motors pump water uphill from a river or a reservoir to a higher reservoir; when the water is released downhill, it spins a turbine, generating power again. A pumped-hydro installation is like a giant, permanent battery, charged when water is pumped uphill and depleted as it flows down. The facilities can be awe-inspiring: the Bath County Pumped Storage Station, in Virginia, consists of two sprawling lakes, about a quarter of a mile apart in elevation, among tree-covered slopes; at times of high demand, thirteen million gallons of water can flow every minute through the system, which supplies power to hundreds of thousands of homes. Some countries are expanding their use of pumped hydro, but the construction of new facilities in the United States peaked decades ago. The right geography is hard to find, permits are difficult to obtain, and construction is slow and expensive. The hunt is on for new approaches to energy storage.
https://blendle.com/i/the-new-yorker/potential-energy/bnl-newyorker-20220425-6216c2f8f20
***************************************************Bill Gates Predicts ‘Next Pandemic’ Will Be Caused by Climate Change, Proposes WHO Expansion
Billionaire Bill Gates has predicted a 50 percent chance that another pandemic will occur in the next 20 years due to “climate change.”
Gates made his predictions in an interview with Spanish publication elDiario.es, during a one-day trip he made to Spain on May 26.
“The human population is growing, and we are invading more and more ecosystems. That is why I calculate that there is a 50 percent chance that we will have a pandemic of natural origin in the next 20 years, as a consequence of climate change,” Gates said, noting that the pandemic could be a type of coronavirus, a type of flu, or “something else.”
“It could be a virus made by man, by a bioterrorist who designed it and intentionally circulated it. That is a very scary scenario because they could try to spread it in different places at once,” he said.
Gates suggested that “greater investment” was needed in international anti-virus efforts with an expansion of the World Health Organization (WHO).
“What I am proposing would require a 25 percent increase in the WHO budget, and with that, we would have a team of about 3,000 people with different profiles. I call it the Global Epidemic Response and Mobilization (GERM) Team,” Gates said.
The former richest person in the world heads the organization that puts the most amount of private funds into global health issues, The Gates Foundation. The foundation spent $1.79 billion on global health initiatives in 2020 and financed about 10 percent of WHO’s operating costs in 2020-21.
Gates’ comments echoed his proposal in his book, “How to Prevent the Next Pandemic,” published in April. He proposed annual funding of $1 billion to operate GERM as a global surveillance pact to monitor pandemic threats.
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Energy crisis causing inflation problem for Americans, national security threat
Macro Trends Advisors LLC founding partner Mitch Roschelle weighed in on soaring gas prices on Monday, arguing that "we have to unlock our energy."
"Right now Saudi Arabia is exporting $1 billion a day of profit on their oil so it’s not just inflation, it’s the national security threat that this poses," he told Fox News.
Roschelle provided the insight on "Fox & Friends" on Monday as inflation sits near 40-year highs and gas prices hit a fresh record.
The national average for a gallon of gas on Sunday was $4.61, slightly higher than the week before and 44 cents higher compared to the month before, according to AAA.
"The reality is, they’re [the Biden administration is] doing very little, and Americans are getting fed up," Roschelle argued.
In a series of orders aimed at combating climate change, President Biden cancelled the Keystone XL oil pipeline project on his first day in office and temporarily suspended the issuance of oil and gas permits on federal lands and waters.
The administration resumed the new leasing last month following court challenges against the ban. The administration is appealing a ruling in which Judge James Cain, a Trump appointee, struck down the ban.
The White House has blamed Russian President Vladimir Putin for the record-high gas prices in the U.S., even coining the surge as the "#PutinPriceHike" and vowing that President Biden will do everything he can to shield Americans from "pain at the pump."
Biden, last month, announced that the Environmental Protection Agency will allow the sale of E15 gasoline – gasoline that uses a 15% ethanol blend – across the country this summer. In addition, Biden has moved to release 1 million barrels of oil per day from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve for the next 6 months. The president is also calling on Congress to make companies pay fees on idled oil wells and non-producing acres of federal lands, aiming to incentivize new production.
Critics, though, have claimed that Biden's actions on energy policy have created a "supply problem" in the market.
Gas prices hit fresh record over Memorial Day weekend Video
Speaking from Tokyo on Monday, President Biden said, "When it comes to the gas prices, we are going through an incredible transition that is taking place that God willing, when it is over, we’ll be stronger and the world will be stronger and less reliant on fossil fuels."
"One thing I’ve observed studying 50 years of business and failures in different kinds of administrations, when you have long-term solutions to short-term problems, that never works – and that’s exactly what this administration is doing," Roschelle argued in response.
"Yes, everybody can drive an energy-efficient car and have energy-efficient appliances in the house, but if you can’t get that energy-efficient washer and dryer, what good is it? It does not keep your electric bills down."
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My other blogs. Main ones below
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM )
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)
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Jim Hansen and his twin
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