Saturday Open Thread
0 out of 10 based on 0 rating
via JoNova
January 20, 2023 at 10:37PM
Month: January 2023
It’s been said that if you don’t like the weather, just wait a bit. 2023 has started off wet and windy in the west, and warm in the east… but that’s all about to change.
California seems to always need rain, but this is getting ridiculous. In the first two and a half weeks of January, downtown San Francisco has picked up nearly 9″ of rain. That’s over 3 times the normal amount! This is now their second wettest January in the past 23 years… and February is still more than a week away. It’s a similar situation in downtown Sacramento, as they have picked up over 7 inches of rain so far this month… which is also over three times their normal amount.
Southern California has been just as wet. In downtown Los Angeles, over 8 inches of rain has already fallen this month, which is 4 times the normal amount. Santa Barbara has picked up nearly 8 inches of rain as well, while San Diego has received four times their normal rainfall so far.
All of this rain has been great news for the state’s reservoirs, which were exceptionally low just a few months ago. Lake Oroville is California’s second largest reservoir, and has risen over 130 feet since Thanksgiving. The state’s largest reservoir, Shasta Lake, is up more than 60 feet since November.
While it’s been wet in the west lately, it’s been warm in the east. Boston, Massachusetts and Portland, Maine have both had only about one-third of their normal snowfall to date. And the folks in New York City are still waiting for their first few flakes of the season! The parade of Pacific storms has flooded the eastern half of the country with relatively mild temperatures since Christmas. There was a major arctic outbreak in the middle of December, but high pressure over eastern Canada has prevented any additional cold blasts in the U.S. recently.
But as Bob Dylan once said: the times, they are a changin’. Long range computer models, like the GFS, are forecasting a large ridge of high pressure to develop over the west coast, and dry them out through the end of January. And while the west will dry out, the higher amplitude flow will continue to keep much of the northeast mild. The Ohio Valley should be wet.
This is a wintertime pattern that the west coast has seen all too often lately; high pressure sends the storm track northward, and the drought continues. But long range models are offering some hope this time around.
There is nice agreement among the models that the developing west coast ridge of high pressure will retrograde westward into the central Pacific by the end of the month, allowing stormy weather to return to the west coast by early February. The Madden-Julian Oscillation will move into Phase 3, which can be wet for California… except the circulation pattern in the Pacific won’t support that this time around.
For the past three weeks, the jet stream has been very zonal across the Pacific: no major north or south oscillations, which has lead to atmospheric river after atmospheric river pounding California. With strong high pressure developing in the eastern Pacific, the wet zonal flow across the entire Pacific shouldn’t return. So, while the west will break out of the dry weather and see a return of soggy conditions by early February… it shouldn’t be the deluge of rain and snow that they’ve had to begin the year.
via Watts Up With That?
January 20, 2023 at 08:09PM
This week in 1906 there was a record heatwave in the US and Australia. Both countries’ governments have worked hard to erase it.
via Real Climate Science
January 20, 2023 at 06:01PM
Are we heading toward an all-renewable energy future, spearheaded by wind and solar? Or are those energy sources wholly inadequate for the task? Mark Mills, Senior Fellow at the Manhattan Institute and author of The Cloud Revolution, compares the energy dream to the energy reality. How Much Energy Will the World Need?
Video Transcript
We’re headed toward an exciting all-renewable energy future. Wind and solar will power the world of tomorrow.
And tomorrow isn’t far off!……..
…It’s time to wake up.
You’re having a dream.
Here’s the reality.
Oil, natural gas, and coal provide 84% of all the world’s energy. That’s down just two percentage points from twenty years ago.
And oil still powers nearly 97% of all global transportation.
Contrary to headlines claiming that we’re rapidly transitioning away from fossil fuels, it’s just not happening. Two decades and five trillion dollars of governments “investing” in green energy and we’ve barely moved the needle.
This was supposed to be easy. Why is it so hard?
In a word: rocks.
To get the same amount of energy from solar and wind that we now get from fossil fuels, we’re going to have to massively increase mining.
By more than 1000%.
This isn’t speculation. This is physics.
Copper, iron ore, silicon, nickel, chromium, zinc, cobalt, lithium, graphite, and rare earth metals like neodymium. We need them all.
And then those metals and materials have to be turned into motors, turbine blades, solar panels, batteries, and hundreds of other industrial components. That also takes lots of energy, which requires even more mining.
As a World Bank study put it, these green “technologies … are in fact significantly more material intensive” than our current energy mix. That may be the understatement of the century: raw materials account for 50-70% of the costs to manufacture both solar panels and batteries.
Until now it hasn’t really mattered that much because wind and solar still account for only a few percentage points of the global energy supply. They’re an applause line for environmentalists—not a major energy player. And it’s unlikely they will be in the foreseeable future.
But for the sake of argument, let’s say we sharply ramp up mining. Where would these new mines be located?
Well, for one, China.
That country is today the single largest source for most of our critical energy materials. The United States is not only a minor player but is dependent on imports for 100% of 17 critical minerals. Do we want to give China more political and economic leverage? Europe has made itself dependent on Russia for 40% of its natural gas. How well has that worked out?
Ironically, we have all the minerals we need right here in North America.
But good luck trying to get them out of the ground.
Proposals to build mines in the United States and, increasingly almost everywhere else, meet fierce opposition if not outright bans. To give just one example, in 2022 the Biden Administration canceled a proposed copper and nickel mine in northern Minnesota. This was after years of delays, navigating a maze of environmental regulations.
Yes, the same environmentalists and green-leaning politicians who tout all the benefits of electric cars are the same people who make mining the materials essential to build those cars—like copper and nickel—all but impossible.
Try to square that circle.
So far, we’ve only talked about today’s energy needs. What about tomorrow’s?
Future energy demand will be far greater than today’s. That’s been true for the entire history of civilization. The future will not only have more people but also more innovations. And entrepreneurs have always been better at inventing new ways to use energy than to produce it.
It’s obvious but worth stating: Before the invention of automobiles, airplanes, pharmaceuticals, or computers, there was no energy needed to power them.
And as more people become more prosperous, they’ll want the things others already have—from better medical care to vacations to cars.
In America, there are about 80 cars for every 100 citizens. In most of the world, it’s about five per hundred citizens.
Over 80% of air travel is for personal purposes. That’s two billion barrels of oil a year.
Hospitals use 250% more energy per square foot than an average commercial building.
And the global information infrastructure—the Cloud— already uses twice as much electricity as the entire country of Japan, the world’s third-largest economy. The massive data centers at the heart of the Cloud alone consume almost 10 times more electricity than the world’s 10 million electric cars.
E-commerce has taken off and is propelling record growth in warehouses, increasingly filled with energy-hungry robots. America’s truck freight index more than doubled in the past decade to deliver the goods to and from those warehouses.
These are today’s known trends. While we can’t predict the future, we can predict there’ll be more innovation—in robotics, drones, quantum computing, biotechnology. And new industries not yet imagined.
All of it will require more energy—a lot more.
Fossil fuels, nuclear energy, and yes, renewables will be required.
But if you think we can get it all from wind and solar, dream on.
I’m Mark Mills, senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, for Prager University.
via Science Matters
January 20, 2023 at 04:22PM
