Half-mile wide asteroid close approach on Wednesday

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Credit: VIRTUAL TELESCOPE [click to enlarge]

Dr Roy Spencer discusses today’s asteroid approach, the closest for 13 years.

An asteroid capable of destroying Washington D.C. and New York City at the same time will be making its closest approach to Earth on April 19.

At a half-mile wide, it will have over 30,000 times as much mass as the 2013 meteor which exploded over Russia in 2013.

The current asteroid, called “2014 JO25“, is traveling at the unimaginably fast speed of 75,000 mph. It has been estimated that an asteroid of this size is capable of wiping out an area the size of New England, and causing global cooling from the dust that would be lofted into the stratosphere.

“2014 JO25” will be the closest approach asteroid of this size in the last 13 years.

Good News, Bad News

The good news is that even at closest approach, the asteroid — about the size of the Rock of Gibraltar — will safely pass by about 4.6 times as far away from Earth as the moon.

The bad news is that this asteroid was only discovered in 2014, and even if it was on a collision course with Earth, there probably would not have been enough time to mount a mission to hit it with a nuclear-weapon tipped rocket. This is why NASA has been surveying the skies, discovering new asteroids on a routine basis.

While most of these are small, the relatively recent discovery of Wednesday’s asteroid suggests we will not have much time to respond if we discover one on a collision course with Earth. I suspect we will eventually have a rocket designed and ready for an intercept, just in case.

Continued here.

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April 18, 2017 at 09:09PM

South Australia’s Ridiculous Wind Power Push Driving Business to Bankruptcy: Power Prices Triple (Again)

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*** In Australia’s so-called wind power capital, South Australia, its hapless Labor government is crowing about having reached its ludicrous 50% renewable energy target. However, the cost of that vanity project is crippling what remains of South Australia’s productive enterprise. In our recent post – Economic Carnage: SA’s Rocketing Power Prices Crippling Miners, Bakers & […]

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April 18, 2017 at 09:00PM

U.S. Energy Secretary Says Coal Retirements Threaten To Destabilize The Grid

via The Global Warming Policy Forum (GWPF)
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Renewables have “destroyed jobs” and diminished energy diversity, Rick Perry claims.

Department of Energy (DOE) Secretary Rick Perry ordered a review (PDF) of electricity markets and reliability late last week, saying that “certain policies” have hindered the development and use of baseload energy sources like coal. Although Perry never mentions renewable energy explicitly in his letter, he references “significant changes within the electrical system.” That seems to be a direct allusion to the record amount of renewable capacity that has been added to the grid in recent years.

The Obama administration had supported initiatives to increase renewable energy on the US grid given the urgency of climate change and with a mind to mitigate the health problems that come with pollution related to coal burning and mining. Although wind and solar power are intermittent resources (meaning they only produce power when there’s wind and sun), government agencies including the DOE have funded research (PDF) to improve renewable energy efficiency and energy storage. The idea has been that adding renewable energy to the grid makes it more resilient, because power generation doesn’t rely on shipments of natural gas, coal, or oil. It also decreases the grid’s reliance on large fossil fuel-burning facilities and allows more distributed energy generation.

The Trump administration, on the other hand, has been openly critical of climate change science, with the president even falsely claiming that climate change is a hoax made up by China. In March, the president killed the Clean Power Plan and ordered agencies to ignore climate change. Perry, too, spent most of his early career rejecting climate change science, but during his January Senate confirmation hearing the former Texas governor said he now accepts science showing that the Earth is warming. Still, Perry has remained coy about whether he believes that climate change is caused by humans (which scientific evidence has been unambiguous about).

Of course, Perry’s history isn’t purely boosting fossil fuels. He also led a massive expansion of renewable wind power during his time as governor of Texas. But the Trump administration that Perry works for has promised to bring back coal jobs, something that industry analysts and even coal industry executives have been skeptical of due to the fact that coal’s struggles stem from competition with the low price of natural gas. In addition, coal mining has become increasingly automated, meaning fewer workers are needed to produce the same amount of coal. Utilities have opted for other forms of power generation for many years now. The Energy Information Administration (EIA), a statistical branch of the DOE, notes that most of the coal-burning facilities operating in the US today were built before 1990—making them ripe for retirement and replacement with something more modern.

Perry has requested that the review of electricity markets and reliability be completed within the next 60 days.

In his letter, the secretary admitted that Americans currently “utilize heating, air conditioning, computers, and appliances with few disruptions.” But he wrote that “grid experts have expressed concerns about the erosion of critical baseload resources,” naming specifically coal, natural gas, nuclear, and hydroelectric power.

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April 18, 2017 at 08:49PM

White House Postpones Meeting on Paris Climate Accord

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President Donald Trump’s most senior advisers postponed a meeting Tuesday during which they had hoped to bridge the administration’s divide over whether the U.S. should leave or remain in the Paris climate change agreement.

The fate of the agreement, backed by nearly 200 nations in 2015, has become a major symbolic policy question for a president who has dismissed human-caused climate change as a hoax and promised to revive the U.S. coal industry. The agreement also stands as one of former President Barack Obama’s most significant accomplishments on combating global warming.

A White House aide said the meeting was being rescheduled because several Trump advisers were traveling with the president to Wisconsin on Tuesday. White House spokeswoman Sarah Sanders told reporters that the meeting will be rescheduled in the “couple of weeks.”

Sanders said the meeting was not canceled as a result of discord over the Paris deal among Trump’s advisers.

But several of Trump’s most senior advisers are deeply divided on whether the United States should stay in the agreement, despite broad consensus in the administration for rolling back the Obama administration regulations aimed at achieving sharp reductions in U.S. greenhouse gas output.

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April 18, 2017 at 07:37PM