From the Cliff Mass Weather Blog

Cliff Mass

Horse Manure, Climate Change, and Nuclear Energy

The “Great Manure Crisis” of the late 19th century offers some serious lessons for those worried about the “existential threat” of global warming from CO2 emissions.   

A predicted crisis that never occurred because of new technology.

Just before the dawn of the 20th century, there was desperate talk about the huge accumulation of horse manure on the streets of major world cities.  Not only was rising levels of horse poop inhibiting travel, but it threatened to become a major health hazard.  For example, New York City had 150,000 horses, each producing 15-30 pounds of manure daily.  And yes, tens of thousands of gallons of urine.

Extrapolating the problem, not unlike current climate activists projecting the effects of global warming during the coming century, the Times of London in 1894 predicted: “in fifty years, every street in London would be buried under nine feet of manure.”  People were encouraged to travel less, avoid unnecessary trips, work at home, and collect the refuse their animals produced.   

Sounds familiar?

You can also imagine the stories in the Seattle Times (then known as the Seattle Daily Times) if some wealthy Seattle foundation had given them funds for a “Health Lab”:

This terrible poop crisis never happened.  Why?  

Because of a new transportation technology, powered by the internal combustion engine.  

A good lesson for us today: it is problematic to extrapolate problems into the future assuming technologies will remain static.

Today we have a new crisis dominating the media, global warming resulting from increasing greenhouse gases. 

Yes, CO2 and other greenhouse gas concentrations are increasing due to human emissions, and the earth is slowly warming as a result.    

But it is silly to simply extrapolate rising greenhouse gas concentrations into the future because energy production technology will profoundly change during the next decades….and I am not talking about solar or wind power.

Nuclear power, starting with fission, but rapidly displaced by fusion power, will provide essentially limitless clean energy.

The False Hope of Wind and Solar

There is a lot of talk about wind and solar being the solution to the global warming problem, but the truth is that they will only make a minor contribution for many reasons, with their intermittency (only available during the day and during windy periods), environmental impacts, and low energy density being significant problems.   

Furthermore, the demand for energy, and particularly electricity, is going up much faster than renewables can be installed.  Why?   Because billions of people are moving out of poverty and the huge energy demands of data centers.  To name only a few.

Consider the U.S.  energy consumption statistics (below).   Energy use has increased rapidly during the past decades with fossil fuels still dominating (but more gas and less coal).  Wind and solar are very small in comparison.

The U.S. is actually one of the most renewable-friendly nations.  Considering the whole world (below), fossil fuels are even more dominant.

Solar and wind are not mankind’s long-term energy solutions.  

Nuclear is.  Fission in the short term and fusion in the long term.  

Fission power is heavily used in some nations (such as in  France, where 70% of the electricity is from fission) and today about 9% of world energy is from fission.  No major safety issues and fission power is clean, with no air quality issues.   New designs of small modular fission reactors will make them much cheaper, more reliable, and make melt-downs impossible.

Major energy users, such as Amazon, are already committing to using such new technology fission reactors.

And there is fusion.   Fusion power is essentially limitless and does not produce nuclear waste.

The uninformed make jokes about fusion always being 20 years away.   They are wrong.  There are no theoretical reasons in the way of practical fusion reactors.  Dozens of private sector firms are working on prototypes, including Seattle’s Helion.   

Break-even fusion has already been achieved.

Microsoft has agreed to purchase fusion-generated power from Helion starting in 2028

Folks…this going to happen.  Even if delayed a decade or two, fusion power will completely change the world’s energy story in the same way the internal combustion engine ended the manure “crisis” over a century ago.

And one more thing.  With virtually unlimited energy from fusion, we can take CO2 out of the atmosphere, something called CO2 sequestration.  Several companies, such as Carbon Engineering of BC, are already working on prototypes.

So next time you hear end-of-the-world catastrophic predictions about global warming, think about horse waste.😀

Meanwhile “Great Rift” volcano in Ethiopia erupts after seismic swarm, leading to evacuations.

From Legal Insurrection

Posted by Leslie Eastman 

Whenever I write about climate change, I often note that volcanoes can have significant impacts on the global climate.

A new example has been recently revealed, as a ‘mystery volcano’ that erupted in 1831 and significantly cooled Earth’s climate has finally been identified as Zavaritskii on Simushir Island, part of the Kuril Islands archipelago between Russia and Japan.

This eruption was one of the most powerful of the 19th century, releasing an enormous amount of sulfur dioxide into the stratosphere. The Earth-caused emissions resulted in a decrease of approximately one degree Celsius (1.8 degrees Fahrenheit) in the annual average temperatures of the Northern Hemisphere.

The challenge in locating the volcano was due to its remote location.

While the year of this historic eruption was known, the volcano’s location was not. Researchers recently solved that puzzle by sampling ice cores in Greenland, peering back in time through the cores’ layers to examine sulfur isotopes, grains of ash and tiny volcanic glass shards deposited between 1831 and 1834.

Using geochemistry, radioactive dating and computer modeling to map particles’ trajectories, the scientists linked the 1831 eruption to an island volcano in the northwest Pacific Ocean, they reported Monday in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

..Before the scientists’ findings, Zavaritskii’s last known eruption was in 800 BC.

“For many of Earth’s volcanoes, particularly those in remote areas, we have a very poor understanding of their eruptive history,” said lead study author Dr. William Hutchison, a principal research fellow in the School of Earth and Environmental Sciences at the University of St. Andrews in the United Kingdom.

“Zavaritskii is located on an extremely remote island between Japan and Russia. No one lives there and historical records are limited to a handful of diaries from ships that passed these islands every few years,” Hutchison told CNN in an email.

To find the volcano, researchers compared the chemistry of microscopic shards of ash extracted from ice cores drilled in Greenland with samples from the Zavaritskii caldera. They determined it was a perfect match.

“Finding the match took a long time and required extensive collaboration with colleagues from Japan and Russia, who sent us samples collected from these remote volcanoes decades ago,” Hutchison says.

“The moment in the lab when we analyzed the two ashes together, one from the volcano and one from the ice core, was a genuine eureka moment. I couldn’t believe the numbers were identical. After this, I spent a lot of time delving into the age and size of the eruption in Kuril records to truly convince myself that the match was real.”

Meanwhile, recent volcanic activity at Mount Dofan in Ethiopia has caused significant concern and prompted evacuations in the surrounding area.

Hundreds of people in a rural part of Ethiopia, 165km (100 miles) north-east of the capital, Addis Ababa, have been leaving their homes in panic as a nearby volcano has been showing signs of a possible eruption, a local chief told the BBC’s Afaan Oromoo service.

The smoke coming from Mount Dofan that began around 17:00 local time (14:00 GMT) on Thursday “has a fiery plume and it’s very high,” Sultan Kemil said.

In a video posted by the Ethiopian Geological Institute on its Facebook page steam and debris can be seen shooting out from the mountain.

In recent weeks, there have been more than a dozen seismic events around Awash Fentale – an earthquake-prone area of Ethiopia’s Afar region.

The seismic activity is part of the ongoing geological processes in the Great Rift Valley, where new oceanic crust is being generated.

Personally, I am looking forward to seeing how eco-activists connect the rifting to SUVs.

Opinion by Kip Hansen

“Verified is an initiative of the United Nations, to provide content that cuts through the noise to deliver life-saving information, fact-based advice and stories from the best of humanity. Led by the UN Department for Global Communications, the initiative invites the public to help counter the spread of false narratives across key global issues by sharing UN-verified, science-based content with their communities through articles, videos, and associated media. The initiative is a collaboration with Purpose, one of the world’s leading social impact organizations, and has been supported by a number of collaborators including Rockefeller Foundation, IKEA Foundation, Luminate, TikTok, and Fortescue.” 

If the idea of having climate change facts and stories “verified” by TikTok absolutely terrifies you, then you are in your right mind.  But it gets worse:  TikTok is helped in this by 5 certified left-leaning well-funded advocacy organizations specifically dedicated to making fighting “climate change” a priority.

Here’s an example of the fine work they are collectively doing: 

Please note that this page is aimed at kids….and kids are encouraged to share the quiz with their  friends because “ Quizzes Are More Fun With Friends” .

Just to get you started, here’s a look at the first question:

with the correct answer which has been verified by the United Nations and TikTok to be correct.

For those of you who just want to do the quick pop quiz, here it is – with the ‘verified’ answers upside down at the bottom:

# # # # #

Author’s Comment:

If I were speaking, I’d be speechless!  Unabashed propaganda, aimed at your kids.

I’d love to see your comments on the questions and the provided answers.

By the way, if you actually take the quiz online, each answer screen has a little justification at the bottom.  For question 1 it looks like this:

Wow! Is right….

Thanks for reading.

# # # # #