Tuesday, August 23, 2022
Ancient El Niños reveals limits to future climate projections
The climate pattern El Niño varies over time to such a degree that scientists will have difficulty detecting signs that it is getting stronger with global warming.
That's the conclusion of a study led by scientists at The University of Texas at Austin that analyzed 9,000 years of Earth's history. The scientists drew on climate data contained within ancient corals and used one of the world's most powerful supercomputers to conduct their research.
The study of the past, which was recently published in Science Advances, was motivated by the need to get a clearer picture of how climate change may affect El Niño in the future.
El Niño is the warm phase of the El Niño Southern Oscillation, a climate phenomenon that sets the stage every few years for weather patterns worldwide. Strong El Niño events, such as the ones in 1997 and 2015 that brought wildfires to the rainforests of Borneo in Asia and caused widespread bleaching to the world's coral reefs, happened about once a decade.
Computer models, however, are unclear about whether El Niño events will become weaker or stronger as the world warms due to climate change.
"Much of the world's temperature and rainfall are influenced by what happens in the tropical Pacific Ocean where El Niño starts," said the study's lead author, Allison Lawman, who began the research as a Ph.D. project at the UT Jackson School of Geosciences and is now a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Colorado Boulder. "The difference in rainfall between greater or fewer strong El Niño events is going to be a critical question for infrastructure and resource planners."
A 500-year simulation of El Niño intensity from the study period. Although the data appears chaotic, finding how these patterns change during periods of past climate change could hold the key to future climate projections, according to climate researchers at University of Texas Institute for Geophysics. Credit: Allison Lawman
Lawman and her collaborators used the Lonestar5 supercomputer at UT's Texas Advanced Computing Center to run a series of climate simulations of a period in Earth's history before human influences, when the main source of climate change came from a tilt in the planet's orbit. The simulations were verified using a coral emulator Lawman had previously developed to compare them with climate records from ancient corals.
They found that although the occurrence of strong El Niño events intensified over time, the change was small compared with El Niño's highly variable nature.
"It's like trying to listen to soft music next to a jackhammer," said study co-author Jud Partin, a research scientist at the University of Texas Institute for Geophysics.
To achieve this, Partin, Lawman and the study's other authors call for further investigations into even earlier times in Earth's history, such as the last ice age, to see how El Niño responded to more intense changes in climate forces.
"Scientists need to keep pushing the limits of models and look at geological intervals deeper in time that could offer clues on how sensitive El Niño is to changes in climate," said co-author Pedro DiNezio, an associate professor at University of Colorado Boulder. "Because if there's another big El Niño, it's going to be very hard to attribute it to a warming climate or to El Niño's own internal variations."
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Closed for good because of the cost of living crisis: From pubs and shops to swimming pools – how firms across Britain could shut because of soaring bills
Small businesses in particular have been unable to cope with the soaring cost of energy and food bills - and are now calling for immediate government intervention.
It comes as inflations hit double figures for the first time in 40 years, the highest it's been since 1982, at 10.1 per cent.
Now, an estimated 45 million people will struggle to pay energy bills this winter with predicted rises in price cap.
The new study, by the University of York, shows that 18 million families will be left trying to make ends meet after further predicted rises in the energy price cap in October and January.
Martin McTague, the national chair of the Federation of Small Businesses, has warned that the 'toxic cocktail' of rising taxes, energy costs, inflation and shrinking economic growth means 'action is needed right now'.
'The cost of living crisis can't be solved without addressing the cost of doing business crisis,' he said.
Yorkshire restaurant boss, Marco Di Rienzo has been forced to close his business after five years because of a £2,000 monthly bill.
The upmarket Italian restaurant, Santoni, on Airedale Road, Keighley remains popular, but with the worsening cost of living crisis and rising prices in general, Mr Di Rienzo has been left with no choice.
'The main factor is what's coming ahead,' he told Yorkshire Live. 'I think there is a tough year or two ahead....with higher food prices, gas and electricity.'
With his business facing rising gas and electric bills of up to 40%, the monthly bill would be rising from roughly £1,200 a month in the summer to £1,800, he said.
Winter monthly bills would be closer to £2,000.
Food bills for the restaurant are also reaching crippling levels, says Mr Di Rienzo. Since March, a 20-litre drum of vegetable oil had risen from about £20 to £42.
Imported Italian mozzarella cheese had also gone up from £6 per kilo to more than £7 and San Marzano tomatoes had gone up from around £8.70 to £11.20 per kilo.
The owner of a tea room in Derbyshire also has fears her business may close unless she gets more support to cope with soaring energy bills.
Clare Ransom said the electricity bill for Railway Tea Rooms, in Belper, Derbyshire, had increased by 254 per cent to £415 a month.
The prices of some food items had also increased drastically, she said.
Ms Ransom said she was worried she could lose her home if she was forced to shut down her business.
She told BBC Derby: '[The electricity bill] has gone up 254%, which is ridiculous, and that's just the electric - I've not had the gas increase yet.
'I physically cannot afford to pay £415 a month just for my electric.' 'I'm extremely worried and I just don't know how I'm going to carry on. 'I'm scared I'm going to lose my house in the end because of it all.'
Ms Ransom said the government 'needs to do something to help us', adding the lack of support has been a 'disgrace'.
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Britain’s Dumbest Energy Policy
A Conservative plan to cap household bills backfires spectacularly.
Britain’s ruling Conservatives have imposed some awful energy policies in recent years, but their cap on household energy bills deserves a special mention. The scheme has been an economic loser, and now it’s becoming a political loser in ways that illustrate the dangers when parties of the right play socialism lite.
That cap is supposed to limit household costs for electricity and natural gas, which most British homes use for hot water and central heating. It’s set twice a year by the industry regulator based on prevailing global energy prices. At the last adjustment, which took effect in April, households saw their energy bills shoot up some 54%, and the October rise is likely to be about as big.
The cap traces back to 2015, when Ed Miliband, the Labour candidate for Prime Minister, proposed a limit on energy bills. He lost that election, but his energy idea resurfaced in 2017 when Tory Prime Minister Theresa May embarked on a campaign to position the Conservatives as a kinder, gentler party. The effort didn’t work politically. In that year’s snap election she lost the majority her predecessor David Cameron had won when he defeated Mr. Miliband in 2015. But the price-cap notion lived on and she implemented it in 2019.
Big mistake. The cap has exacerbated economic havoc in Britain’s energy market. As global gas and other commodity prices started to rise in 2021, energy retailers found it impossible to pass to consumers the prices retailers were paying for the energy they were supplying. This has contributed to a wave of bankruptcies, some of which have stuck taxpayers with the cost of supplying households whose energy company went bust.
Meanwhile, since it only raises prices at a lag rather than limiting them, the cap leaves households frighteningly exposed to recent movements in global gas prices and the high-price consequences of Britain’s domestic energy policies—and leaves the Tories exposed to voters’ wrath. And now here comes the Labour Party to argue for making the cap a real cap by freezing it at its current level instead of allowing the next rise due in October.
This is terrible policy that would shift the burden of rising energy costs to taxpayers, who would have to make up the gap between energy companies’ revenues under the cap and their costs on the global market. But who are the Tories to disagree? They’re the wizards who created the cap, and they now will have to either risk bankrupting Britain’s utilities or explain to voters why the “cap” isn’t really a cap.
None of this has anything to do with increasing the supply of energy, which should have been the Conservative policy. Instead the party has resisted shale-gas fracking and pursued the costly fantasy of net-zero carbon emissions. Voters don’t seem to care about Tory green ambitions, but they definitely blame the Tories for soaring energy costs.
The moral: Even half-hearted energy price controls are political losers for conservative parties. More energy supply or bust.
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Inflation Reduction Act could threaten U.S. power systems
From California to Texas to New England, America’s power grid reliability is in alarming shape. And there’s a common thread: The nation is taking apart its existing energy infrastructure far faster than it’s building reliable replacement generation.
This is most apparent in the Democrats’ sweeping new climate and health care bill, the Inflation Reduction Act. The legislation is full of ambitious energy provisions. But it appears that the bill is likely to make America’s chaotic energy transition even worse.
The legislation contains plenty of tax credits to accelerate the deployment of weather-dependent wind and solar power. The problem for America’s power grid, however, is that the rapid addition of these intermittent energy sources is making grid management exponentially more difficult. That’s particularly true when wind and solar are replacing the on-demand power currently provided by coal, natural gas and even nuclear power.
Renewable advocates believe a massive expansion of the nation’s electricity transmission capacity, along with the development of grid-scale battery storage, is the solution. Their thinking is that batteries can help with storing excess solar power for night-time use — or provide backup capacity when the weather doesn’t cooperate. They also envision that transmission corridors can easily move power to regions experiencing electricity deficits. That sounds great. But even with significant incentives to encourage new energy storage, the required grid-scale batteries to make this possible are still in their infancy. And the siting and building of new electricity transmission infrastructure is proving difficult as well.
Utilities and grid operators are currently approving some large-scale transmission projects. But getting them into service is now a remarkably tall order. At present, it can take a decade to gain the federal, state and local government approvals needed for new, long-distance power lines. And high-voltage interstate transmission lines inevitably run into a variety of objections, including the permitting challenges of erecting wires through private and public lands, and the reluctance of local authorities to forfeit control or submit to greater federal oversight.
Consider the case of just one transmission line proposed to connect part of Texas to the Southeast. The Southern Cross transmission line, a 400-mile, $2 billion project, is on track to begin construction in 2023, with the hope of entering service in 2026. Should the line actually be completed, it will have taken 17 years from inception to finish. This tells us that building the transmission systems needed for widespread renewable systems is unlikely to happen at the speed and scale required.
There’s still another problem, however. As America’s baseload power plants are being pushed off the grid, replacement infrastructure simply isn’t coming online in time. The problem is serious enough that grid reliability experts are raising alarms.
The North American Electricity Reliability Corporation, which oversees the reliability of the nation’s power supply, recently warned that the pace of America’s grid transformation is now “out of sync with the underlying realities and the physics of the system.” In fact, NERC says that seven different regions of the United States face elevated risks of power outages during extreme weather or spiking demand.
The Inflation Reduction Act’s enormous incentives for wind and solar are likely to exacerbate this trend. The bill’s market-altering subsidies are joining a flurry of regulations that the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency is proposing to accelerate coal plant closures. That means the nation’s current grid problems could turn into an unabated crisis.
Washington needs to do a critical rethink right now — while the nation still has significant baseload power plant capacity. The U.S. needs its longstanding power plants — particularly its remaining coal fleet — as a reliability hedge against the uncertainty and myriad challenges of ramping up renewable energy
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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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