Climate

[Rideback]

Salton Sea is really a remarkable resource:

https://www.kcet.org/news-community/as- ... he-details

[mister_coffee]

The lithium resources abroad are being challenged, there was recently a huge discovery on our east coast. And the Salton Sea is looking promising for producing an alternative to lithium.
...

I think there are a lot of pathways to producing enough lithium for batteries:

https://pv-magazine-usa.com/2022/01/12/ ... potential/

Seawater mining is another promising pathway, though likely quite a ways off in the future:

https://cen.acs.org/materials/inorganic ... eds/99/i36

Probably a bigger challenge is going to be finding enough rare earth elements for the magnets high-efficiency electric motors. Although we probably only need those in very tiny quantities per motor.

[realoldtimer]

Here's a link to a lengthy, but very informative article on the issues Alaska is facing with permafrost melting beneath their fett, houses, pipelines, .....

https://grist.org/science/alaska-permaf ... te-change/

[Rideback]

The lithium resources abroad are being challenged, there was recently a huge discovery on our east coast. And the Salton Sea is looking promising for producing an alternative to lithium.

Rural areas will always be a challenge but I'd add that except for those who 'go to town' at the drop of a hat rather than group together their town trips. For those who have the luxury of working at home, not having to drive kids to school or work in town there's the opportunity to limit travel.

That said, I would bet that the majority of the people who live in the Methow are not heavy polluters, that they live a pretty light lifestyle on the environment. We're not the problem. Our wildfires are. We've come a long way in the last 20 years in mitigating the 'human caused' wildfires, but simultaneously there's a larger population living here now, more tourists and the days of precip have dwindled and the days over 90 degrees have increased.

Then there's the global issue that is also impacting us. Siberia hit 100 last summer!
https://www.sciencenews.org/article/cli ... ia-context

[PAL]

Some of the books and articles say otherwise to full replacement of regular vehicles to EV's. Now, I agree, rail would be great. Look how many trucks could be off the roads traveling long distances. There would still need to be distribution hubs, like there are, but perhaps they would be shorter.
Many people are concerned about emissions. But we also need to look at reduction. Reduce our love affair with the car. Reduce flying. Reduce traveling. Stay home and dig a garden. (Well, those living in cities in apartments can't very well, but cities more and more are providing ground for this kind of thing.) Stop having babies. What about rural areas? How to get around? We definitely need transportation here. Maybe some kind of car sharing.
This is my fantasy, as that is what it is until something drastic happens.
Please investigate the mining practices to make batteries. As long as it's in a 3rd World country, and we don't see it, it seems to be fine. And thats been the way of alot of things.
Feedlots, enough said right there about methane.
I am reading a "fiction" book called, "Fifty Degrees Below" by Kim Stanley Robinson written back in '07. It's the most technical fiction book I've ever read about the climate. It's requiring the UN and the whole world to act on climate change. It's set into the future, but it doesn't say how far. I think the agencies it mentions are in existance right now.
So yes, alot can be done, is being done, but people do not want to face it that the weather is changing, there will be shortages of water and food, mass migrations of people. We tra la la along.

[Rideback]

Nuclear power is becoming more and more problematic. Too many of the existing plants are located too close to the ocean, because they use it for cooling, but because of the double whammy of ocean levels rising and warming there is a growing awareness, look at the problems in France, that nuclear plants shouldn't be an option.

The Country's infrastructure is screaming for attention. We need rail lines set up for the faster trains, for service within the states. Likewise cities need to have upgraded mass transit dealt with, more EV charging stations, more of the govt fleet need to go electric, hydrogren needs to be implemented. Marine traffic is a huge source of CO2, Maersk and others are starting to build an electric fleet as well as new standards are being set to clean the hulls of the monster ships and apply new treatments so that the algae growth won't slow them down so much. The Germans have created a booming industry by outfitting whole fleets now with Sky Sails that add speed and cut power needs of ships. There's much that is being done.

[Fun CH]

His past last year where he wrote about the mega heat wave that hit the west left out the underlying elements of how it was created and dealt only with the weather aspect of it. I remember he argued that it wasn't impacted by climate change and then he went forward to address it only in terms of weather. That post is probably archived, but it is a technique of his.

this post says it better than me.

https://www.realclimate.org/index.php/a ... -heatwave/

Dr.Mass agrees that these extreme weather events are related to climate change and would not be so extreme without a warming planet.

He just says the events themselves are not out of normal weather events.

The extreme weather event would have happened anyway but just not as extreme without the contribution of global climate change. So instead of a record high in Seattle of 108°, without GCC that event still would occur but with a record high of 106° with the 2 degrees difference being attributed to the warming planetary climate.

He always says weather and climate are two different things. So when a politician says look it's record cold temperatures here in Florida so no golabal warming, he is talking about weather and not climate.

Major point being we better take action NOW to reduce greenhouse gases and preparing to deal with the real world consequences of our warming climate using better management practices such as Land Development and building codes, Powerline management, Forest management Etc. He also advocates for nuclear power.

He certainly is qualified to give his informed climate opinion because he is an atmospheric scientist, now let's see his peer reviewed paper on the subject.

[Rideback]

His past last year where he wrote about the mega heat wave that hit the west left out the underlying elements of how it was created and dealt only with the weather aspect of it. I remember he argued that it wasn't impacted by climate change and then he went forward to address it only in terms of weather. That post is probably archived, but it is a technique of his.

this post says it better than me.

https://www.realclimate.org/index.php/a ... -heatwave/

[mister_coffee]

I read Cliff Mass's post last year when we had the heatwave and was struck by how he handily moved the data around to engineer his own premise. He not only cherry picks but he then redesigns his arguments to leave out context when he talks about climate change. I now read his posts on the weather but don't bother with anything on climate.

I think it was more that he made a pretty common "reversion to the mean" fallacy in his arguments. It was a subtle thing, but he assumed that climate-related warming would be 100 percent uniformly distributed over time and not irregular and chaotic.

At one extreme if we had a +1F increase in daily high temperatures, that could happen when every day just had a daily high temperature +1F higher than the mean, or all days but one could have no change and one day would be +365F hotter than the mean. Those two scenarios are not equal.

[Fun CH]

I read Cliff Mass's post last year when we had the heatwave and was struck by how he handily moved the data around to engineer his own premise. He not only cherry picks but he then redesigns his arguments to leave out context when he talks about climate change. I now read his posts on the weather but don't bother with anything on climate.

Can you give an example of his cherry picking the data?

As pointed out his analysis is not peer reviewed. From my read, he wants us to take action to both mitigate our contributions to global climate change and take action in mitigating its impacts.

As an example, Dr. Mass has been a longtime proponent of power companies maintaining and shutting off their power lines during high winds. That is now being done in California.

He also points out that we're building homes in the wildland interface without sufficient building codes requiring the use of fire resistant building materials, techniques and creating defensible space. Long before I read his blog, I did exactly that beyond code requirements and those fire mitigation measures helped save our house during the Carlton complex fire

But generally I agree with you and don't read his political rants concerning topics other than his field of expertise.

[Rideback]

I read Cliff Mass's post last year when we had the heatwave and was struck by how he handily moved the data around to engineer his own premise. He not only cherry picks but he then redesigns his arguments to leave out context when he talks about climate change. I now read his posts on the weather but don't bother with anything on climate.

[PAL]

There are some people that say Cliff Mass is a climate change denier, but I don't think that is true at all.
Some great reads, The Last Winter, (starts in the Methow Valley)non-ficition. Points out the melting glaciers, lack of water, drought around the world. Goes to France and also looks at what theSwiss Alps are doing.
Another, "Antifragile" by Talib Nassim, "Deep Adaptation"(don't have the book in front of me for the author)
The problem is, can we change quick enough? I doubt it and agree with the last posting.
Hang on for the ride.

[Fun CH]

I came across this reply in the comment section of that Cliff Mass blog that gives a good summary of our current situation.

Personally I do not see the political will to solve this climate change crisis, even from POTUS.

Quote:

"I am in fact a professional data scientist. And a proud skeptic of pretty much everything that isn't backed up by rigorously collected and analyzed scientific evidence. Anti-vaccination, anti-GMOs, get rich quick schemes, fad diets, alternative medicine, trickle down economics, religion... you name it.

Man, I wish everyone were that way. But we're not. Millions of years of species-wide evolutionary adaptations (often conferring important survival benefits) require many years of individual study and practice to override our powerful gut instincts, and instead use a process to understand what is true. And even then, the best scientists very often make mistakes (FYI, the sign of a good scientist is one who conveys uncertainty and limitations [as CM often does], versus one who says they know something for a fact).

Maybe there were a few times in our nation's history, such as the space race, or I dunno, the pandemic(!), when we could have nudged the populace to a more rational mode of thinking, but those opportunities are long gone. I reckon more than half the country is anti-science in some way or another, and the corporate and political systems are experts at exploiting that ignorance for power and money.

I am currently convinced by the available evidence that climate change is very real and will visit difficult consequences upon all of us. I am equally convinced that we as a nation and/or species are not going sufficiently address it until it's either too late, or enough people freak out about it that even republicans won't stand in the way.

I appreciate that Cliff believes that "hype and exaggeration of its impacts only undermine the potential for effective action." But I think downplaying it is equally if not more undermining in this particular case. It soothes the hearts and minds of the very people who will continue to tell us that this is all no big deal, right up until the end."End quote

[Fun CH]

From the Washington Post: July '21

'The unprecedented episode was made at least 150 times as likely by rising temperatures, according to a rapid analysis
By all estimates, last week’s heat wave in the Pacific Northwest and British Columbia was essentially unprecedented. Seattle hit 108 degrees, Portland spiked to 116 and Canada broke its national temperature record three days in a row, hitting 121 degrees on June
This was not “just another heat wave,” Christopher Burt, an expert on world weather extremes, wrote in a Facebook message, but rather “the most anomalous extreme heat event ever observed on Earth since records began two centuries ago.

Here is another quote POV on that heat wave from atmospheric scientist Dr. Cliff Mass. I suggest reading the whole blog article, I only quoted the end.

https://cliffmass.blogspot.com/2021/07/ ... imate.html

July 21, 2021
Miscommunication in Recent Climate Attribution Studies

"The bottom line

Many of the climate attribution studies are resulting in headlines that are deceptive and result in people coming to incorrect conclusions about the relative roles of global warming and natural variability in current extreme weather. Scary headlines and apocalyptic attribution studies needlessly provoke fear. Furthermore, incorrect and hyped information results in poor decision-making.

Here in Washington State, several politicians fixate on climate change as the cause of current environmental events, while neglecting key actions needed to ensure we are adapted to the current climate (such as restoring our forests, dealing with problematic power infrastructure, improving water quality). And some media outlets (like a certain major newspaper in Seattle) are aiding such ineffective leaders by pushing an often uninformed and exaggerated climate-change narrative.

There is little doubt that the Earth is warming and that human emissions are a contributing factor, but many of the extreme events being blamed on global warming are predominantly the result of natural or other causes (such as changes in land use). If the Earth continues to warm, by the end of the century the impacts of global warming on extremes will increase substantially, something I have shown in my own research.

We need to worry about climate change and take steps in both mitigation (reduce greenhouse gas emissions) and adaptation. But hype and exaggeration of its impacts only undermine the potential for effective action."

[Rideback]

From the Washington Post: July '21

'The unprecedented episode was made at least 150 times as likely by rising temperatures, according to a rapid analysis
By all estimates, last week’s heat wave in the Pacific Northwest and British Columbia was essentially unprecedented. Seattle hit 108 degrees, Portland spiked to 116 and Canada broke its national temperature record three days in a row, hitting 121 degrees on June
This was not “just another heat wave,” Christopher Burt, an expert on world weather extremes, wrote in a Facebook message, but rather “the most anomalous extreme heat event ever observed on Earth since records began two centuries ago.

[Rideback]

Of course denial won't stop anything. We all pretty much fried last June when the record heat wave arrived, this winter when we had an extended period of super cold days or the rains that hit the west side in November and us to some extent and now the weird snows. For all of us there is a feeling of helplessness as things change and it seems there's nothing we can do about it. But that's another version of denial because every single that every individual does matters. Every choice counts, whether it's buying an EV, putting solar panels up all the way across to who you vote for. It's all about choices now that every month that we don't self correct we're stealing from not just the generations to come but from the species which are going extinct. I keep remembering the mule deer last year panting from the heat and the birds that died in my yard.

[PAL]

Yes, but I feel like I come across as a doom and gloomer, but the facts are real here. Well, it's scary for people and it's easier to deny as long as they aren't too impacted. But how many times have people here had to evacuate because of fires? It will become common place. I know now, every fire season, we prepare and I box up valuables when a fire starts getting close or even before.
The ecology of Elbow Coulee seems to be changing rapidly. Trees falling down, bare places, water where there used to be none, then no water. Exciting to watch. Out back of our place up Twisp River, same thing.

[Rideback]

CC is real, it is increasing intensity by the year now. Storms carry more winds that have longer duration, pack more rain in the clouds and the oceans are acidifying as well as rising. Today and every day the globe is experiencing droughts that are forcing people to leave their homes, migrate and become climate refugees. Wildfires are consuming lands throughout the states, across Canada, into Siberia and throughout Africa and S America. Ice caps in both the Arctic and Antarctic are deteriorating at a breathtaking rate. One doesn't have to wait to see the effects of climate change, it's here, it's now and it's deadly.

[PAL]

Skip the 1st ten minutes. This guy is good. Believe it or not. Clear and concise. I think I will be dead before any of this happens, but then again, look at this April!

https://www.youtube.com/embed/p2ePYyMvodU?autoplay=1