17/08/2021

(AU SMH) UN’s ‘Code Red’ Climate Warning A Burning Issue For Australia’s Fire Risk

Sydney Morning Herald - Mike Foley

A landmark United Nations climate report mapped out with unprecedented certainty the nature of the dangerous bushfire future which will confront this country, according to the two Australian lead authors who were among the 234 contributing scientists.

Global warming will intensify the decline of southern Australia’s crucial winter rainfall and increase the number of extremes heat events. This combination will drive greater risks of extreme fire with more hot, dry, windy weather said Australian National University Climate Change Institute Professor Mark Howden.

Fires sweeps through the Snowy Mountains region in January 2020. Credit: Alex Ellinghausen

“The conditions that generate fire weather are likely to increase in both frequency and intensity,” Professor Howden said.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, released last week, showed with greater confidence than ever before that the world is “very unlikely to avoid 1.5 or 2 degrees of warming under the current trajectory of greenhouse emissions”, Professor Howden said.

Extreme weather
Humans’ fingerprints on climate change are becoming clearer
UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said the report was “a code red for humanity”. While the world has on average warmed by 1.1 degrees due to human-induced climate change, Australia’s landmass has heated by 1.4 degrees due to regional weather conditions affecting the continent.

It was “increasingly clear climate change has played a significant role in extreme heat events in many regions” such as Australia’s 2019/20 Black Summer bushfires, a heat dome in the United States and the fires burning in southern Europe, Professor Howden said.

A joint study by the Bureau of Meteorology and CSIRO found southern Australia had already lost significant seasonal rainfall. Winter rainfall has reduced by 11 per cent in the south-east, and winter rainfall is down 20 per cent in south-west Western Australia since 1970, compared to the previous 70 years.

Bushfires
‘Where the rubber hits the road’: Australia’s bushfire recovery effort heats up
While summers with above-average rainfall will become more likely because for each degree increase in air temperature the atmosphere can hold seven per cent more moisture, extra rain won’t wet the landscape and reduce fire risk, Professor Howden said.

Winter rain in southern Australia evaporates less than in summer, which soaks into the soil and stays in the landscape for longer to reduce aridity when hotter weather hits, he said.

“We’re losing our useful rainfall (in winter) and gaining not very helpful rainfall in summer. That summer rainfall is inherently very variable and it’s not particularly useful in terms of changing the moisture profile in the landscape because most of what rain does fall evaporates fairly quickly in summer,” Professor Howden said.

“Those wetter years generate large amounts of fuel and then in the dry years, that will form as (forest) litter, and it will become extremely dry and very flammable, so that variability can actually drive the in predisposing factors for really big fires.”

With the world tracking for 2 degrees of warming or more, the other Australian IPCC lead author, Professor of Climate Change, Roshanka Ranasinghe, said in that scenario there are dozens of what’s known as climate impact drivers that will play out.

Professor Ranasinghe, from the IHE Delft Institute for Water Education, said “we have high confidence that 11″ of those scenarios will hit Australia such as rising temperatures and extreme heat.

Meanwhile, a study by CSIRO and Bushfire Co-operative Research Centre has found a uniquely dangerous weather system that spews hot, dry air from the interior across eastern Australia like a fire hose could occur up to four times more often by 2100 if greenhouse emissions continue unchecked.

The system occurs when a low-pressure system races northwards from the Southern Ocean and collides with a high-pressure system on the NSW coast. The two systems rotate around each other and suck hot, dry air from inland Australia out towards the coast, resulting in high and dry westerly winds that can run for days.

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(NYT) For Many, Hydrogen Is The Fuel Of The Future. New Research Raises Doubts.

New York Times - Hiroko Tabuchi

Industry has been promoting hydrogen as a reliable, next-generation fuel to power cars, heat homes and generate electricity. It may, in fact, be worse for the climate than previously thought.

Credit...Philip Cheung for The New York Times

It is seen by many as the clean energy of the future. Billions of dollars from the bipartisan infrastructure bill have been teed up to fund it.

But a new peer-reviewed study on the climate effects of hydrogen, the most abundant substance in the universe, casts doubt on its role in tackling the greenhouse gas emissions that are the driver of catastrophic global warming.

The main stumbling block: Most hydrogen used today is extracted from natural gas in a process that requires a lot of energy and emits vast amounts of carbon dioxide. Producing natural gas also releases methane, a particularly potent greenhouse gas.

And while the natural gas industry has proposed capturing that carbon dioxide — creating what it promotes as emissions-free, “blue” hydrogen — even that fuel still emits more across its entire supply chain than simply burning natural gas, according to the paper, published Thursday in the Energy Science & Engineering journal by researchers from Cornell and Stanford Universities.

“To call it a zero-emissions fuel is totally wrong,” said Robert W. Howarth, a biogeochemist and ecosystem scientist at Cornell and the study’s lead author. “What we found is that it’s not even a low-emissions fuel, either.”

To arrive at their conclusion, Dr. Howarth and Mark Z. Jacobson, a professor of civil and environmental engineering at Stanford and director of its Atmosphere/Energy program, examined the life cycle greenhouse gas emissions of blue hydrogen. They accounted for both carbon dioxide emissions and the methane that leaks from wells and other equipment during natural gas production.

The researchers assumed that 3.5 percent of the gas drilled from the ground leaks into the atmosphere, an assumption that draws on mounting research that has found that drilling for natural gas emits far more methane than previously known.

They also took into account the natural gas required to power the carbon capture technology. In all, they found that the greenhouse gas footprint of blue hydrogen was more than 20 percent greater than burning natural gas or coal for heat. (Running the analysis at a far lower gas leak rate of 1.54 percent only reduced emissions slightly, and emissions from blue hydrogen still remained higher than from simply burning natural gas.)

Such findings could alter the calculus for hydrogen. Over the past few years, the natural gas industry has begun heavily promoting hydrogen as a reliable, next-generation fuel to be used to power cars, heat homes and burn in power plants.

In the United States, Europe and elsewhere, the industry has also pointed to hydrogen as justification for continuing to build gas infrastructure like pipelines, saying that pipes that carry natural gas could in the future carry a cleaner blend of natural gas and hydrogen.

A Royal Dutch Shell hydrogen production plant in Wesseling, Germany. Credit...Friedemann Vogel/EPA, via Shutterstock
While many experts agree that hydrogen could eventually play a role in energy storage or powering certain types of transportation — such as aircraft or long-haul trucks, where switching to battery-electric power may be challenging — there is an emerging consensus that a wider hydrogen economy that relies on natural gas could be damaging to the climate. (At current costs, it would also be very expensive.)

The latest study added to the evidence, said Drew Shindell, a professor of earth science at Duke University. Dr. Shindell was the lead author of a United Nations report published this year that found that slashing emissions of methane, the main component of natural gas, is far more vital in tackling global warming than previously thought. In a new report published this week, the U.N. warned that essentially all of the rise in global average temperatures since the 19th century has been driven by the burning of fossil fuels.

The hydrogen study showed that “the potential to keep using fossil fuels with something extra added on as a potential climate solution is neither fully accounting for emissions, nor making realistic assumptions” about future costs, he said in an email.

The Hydrogen Council, an industry group founded in 2017 that includes BP, Shell, and other big oil and gas companies, did not provide immediate comment. A McKinsey & Company report co-authored with industry estimated that the hydrogen economy could generate $140 billion in annual revenue by 2030 and support 700,000 jobs. The study also projected that hydrogen could meet 14 percent of total American energy demand by 2050. BP declined to comment.

In Washington, the latest bipartisan infrastructure package devotes $8 billion to creating regional hydrogen hubs, a provision originally introduced as part of a separate bill by Senator Joe Manchin, a Democrat from West Virginia, a major natural gas producing region. Among companies that lobbied for investment in hydrogen were NextEra Energy, which has proposed a solar-powered hydrogen pilot plant in Florida.

Some other Democrats, like Representative Jamie Raskin of Maryland, have pushed back against the idea, calling it an “empty promise.” Environmental groups have also criticized the spending. “It’s not a climate action,” said Jim Walsh, a senior energy policy analyst at Food & Water Watch, a Washington-based nonprofit group. “It’s this is a fossil fuel subsidy with Congress acting like they’re doing something on climate, while propping up the next chapter of the fossil fuel industry.”

Jack Brouwer, director of the National Fuel Cell Research Center at the University of California, Irvine, said that hydrogen would ultimately need to be made using renewable energy to produce what the industry calls green hydrogen, which uses renewable energy to split water into its constituent parts, hydrogen and oxygen. That, he said, would eliminate the fossil and the methane leaks.

Hydrogen made from fossil fuels could still act as a transition fuel but would ultimately be “a small contributor to the overall sustainable hydrogen economy,” he said. “First we use blue, then we make it all green,” he said.

Today, very little hydrogen is green, because the process involved — electrolyzing water to separate hydrogen atoms from oxygen — is hugely energy intensive. In most places, there simply isn’t enough renewable energy to produce vast amounts of green hydrogen. (Although if the world does start to produce excess renewable energy, converting it to hydrogen would be one way to store it.)

Credit...Eric Gay/Associated Press
For the foreseeable future, most hydrogen fuel will very likely be made from natural gas through an energy-intensive and polluting method called the steam reforming process, which uses steam, high heat and pressure to break down the methane into hydrogen and carbon dioxide.

Blue hydrogen uses the same process but applies carbon capture and storage technology, which involves capturing carbon dioxide before it is released into the atmosphere and then pumping it underground in an effort to lock it away. But that still doesn’t account for the natural gas that generates the hydrogen, powers the steam reforming process and runs the CO2 capture. “Those are substantial,” Dr. Howarth of Cornell said.

Amy Townsend-Small, an associate professor in environmental science at the University of Cincinnati and an expert on methane emissions, said more scientists were starting to examine some of the industry claims around hydrogen, in the same way they had scrutinized the climate effects of natural gas production. “I think this research is going drive the conversation forward,” she said.

Plans to produce and use hydrogen are moving ahead. National Grid, together with Stony Brook University and New York State, is studying integrating hydrogen into its existing gas infrastructure, though the project seeks to produce hydrogen using renewable energy.

Entergy believed hydrogen was “part of creating a long-term carbon-free future,” complementing renewables like wind or solar, which generate power only intermittently, said Jerry Nappi, a spokesman for the utility. “Hydrogen is an important technology that will allow utilities to adopt much greater levels of renewables,” he said.

National Grid referred to its net zero plan, which says hydrogen will play a major role in the next few decades and that producing hydrogen from renewable energy was the linchpin.

New York State was “exploring all technologies” including hydrogen in support of its climate goals, said Kate T. Muller, a spokeswoman for the state’s Energy Research and Development Authority. Still, its researchers would “review and consider the blue hydrogen paper,” she said.

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16/08/2021

(AU The Guardian) Think Morrison Was Wrong About Electric Cars And Weekends? Wait Till You Hear Him On Emissions

The Guardian - 

When it comes to facing up to the reality of combatting climate change, the Coalition has utterly failed

‘Scott Morrison did specifically link electrical vehicles to weekend destruction.’ Photograph: James Ross/AAP

The day after the IPCC released its sixth report on climate change, the prime minister told parliament he hadn’t said what we all heard him say.

On Tuesday, Chris Bowen asked Scott Morrison about the IPCC report and, if he was in favour of “more technology” to combat climate change, “why did the prime minister claim that electric vehicles would end the weekend?”

Morrison fobbed the question off to Angus Taylor but not before replying “the claim made by the questioner is false”.

Well now.

It took those listening less time than it took Taylor to get to the dispatch box to produce evidence that the claim made by the questioner was true.
Morrison claims Australia will make our Paris target cuts of 26% 'in a canter' despite all evidence to the contrary
In April 2019, Morrison told reporters that, “Bill Shorten wants to end the weekend when it comes to his policy on electric vehicles, where you’ve got Australians who love being out there in their four-wheel-drives.”

Now maybe he could wriggle out by saying he didn’t say electrical vehicles would end the weekend but Shorten’s policy on electrical vehicles would – this was Morrison’s own explanation made after question time.

But are we so base that we should hold the prime minister of Australia to such a pathetic standard?

Because Morrison did specifically link electrical vehicles to weekend destruction.

‘No place to hide’: pressure on Australia to end support for new fossil fuel projects after IPCC report.  Read more

He said (and you can watch the video just to check) that “the cheapest car you can currently buy, as an electric vehicle … is about $45,000 to $50,000.

" That’s the cheapest car Bill Shorten wants to make available to you to buy in the future, and I’ll tell you what, it’s not going to tow your trailer.

"It’s not going to tow your boat. It’s not going to get you out to your favourite camping spot with your family”.

That claim was incorrect. Electric vehicles in 2019 could already tow your boat or trailer, and the ALP’s policy related to cars in 2030, by which time I think we can say the technology will have advanced.

But of course, not only was he wrong about the power of electric vehicles, he was also wrong about the policy – which was that by 2030 the ALP aimed for half of new car sales to be electric vehicles, not that you would not be able to buy or own a combustion engine SUV.

It was a mistake about a policy that involved a mistake about electric vehicles and this week, to complete the trifecta, he tried to pretend he didn’t mean what we all heard him say.

Not surprisingly this was about climate change – a topic where truth and reality departed the Coalition party room decades ago.

Scott Morrison walks back ‘end the weekend’ rhetoric on electric vehicles.  Read more

It fits perfectly with his claims that Australia will make our Paris target emissions cuts of 26% “in a canter” despite all evidence to the contrary.

But while misleading the public is bad (if, alas, taken as a given now), worse is that this claim ignores the fact that a 26% cut remains inadequate.

The IPCC report this week outlined two scenarios for reducing emissions that have a chance of preventing temperatures from rising by more than 2C above pre-industrial averages.

To remain below a 2C rise we need to cut 2020 emissions by 13% by 2030, and to prevent temperatures rising by more than 1.5C we need a 43% cut.



Australia’s current target of a 26% cut from 2005 levels translates to just an 11% cut over the next decade.

That’s bad enough; the real problem is we’re only on target to cut them by 7%.

We are failing to do even the inadequate.

But how can we expect otherwise?

We have a government led by a man not only unwilling to face up to the reality of what needs to be done, but who cannot even be honest about his own statements that were made precisely to undermine efforts to do what needs to be done.

To combat climate change, you first need to be honest about the issue with the public.

Scott Morrison has utterly failed in this regard.

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(USA NPR) Computer Models Of Civilization Offer Routes To Ending Global Warming

NPR - 

Electrical workers check solar panels at a photovoltaic power station built in a fishpond in Haian in China's eastern Jiangsu province. STR/AFP via Getty Images








As the world's top climate scientists released a report full of warnings this week, they kept insisting that the world still has a chance to avoid the worst effects of climate change.

"It is still possible to forestall most of the dire impacts, but it really requires unprecedented, transformational change," said Ko Barrett, vice chair of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. "The idea that there still is a pathway forward, I think, is a point that should give us some hope."

That hopeful pathway, in which dangerous changes to the world's climate eventually stop, is the product of giant computer simulations of the world economy.

They're called integrated assessment models. There are half a dozen major versions of them: four developed in Europe, one in Japan, and one in the U.S., at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory.

"What we mostly are doing, is trying to explore what is needed to meet the Paris goals." says Detlef van Vuuren, at the Netherlands Environmental Assessment Agency, which developed one of the models.

How to cut greenhouse gas emissions to zero in 40 years

World leaders agreed in Paris to limit global warming to less than 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit). The planet has already warmed about 1 degree Celsius, compared to pre-industrial levels.

Meeting that goal will mean cutting net greenhouse gas emissions to zero within about 40 years. It would require profound changes; so profound, it's not immediately clear that it's even possible.

That's why van Vuuren and his colleagues turned to their computer models for help. "How is it possible to go to zero emissions?" he says. "That's for transport, that's for housing, that's for electricity."

Each of these models starts with data about current sources of greenhouse emissions. They include cars and buses, auto rickshaws, airplanes, power plants, home furnaces and rice paddies. The models also include assumptions about international trade, prices, and the costs of new technologies.

Then the scientists force their virtual worlds to change course, by introducing limits on greenhouse emissions. The models then try to satisfy that requirement in the most cost-effective way, as long as it's technologically feasible and doesn't run up against limits like the supply of land or other natural resources.

The good news is that the models found a way to meet that target, at least in scenarios where world governments were inclined to cooperate in meeting their Paris commitments. In fact, according to Keywan Riahi, at the International Institute for Applied Systems, in Austria, they found multiple paths to zero carbon.

"The models tell us that there are, first of all, alternative pathways possible; that there are choices available to the decision-maker," he says.

Different models, using different assumptions, arrive at contrasting visions of the future world. But they're all dramatically different from the situation today.

Some models show people responding to higher energy prices or government regulations by changing their lifestyle. They move to more energy-saving houses, and give up their cars in favor of a new and better kind of public transit. In addition to traditional bus lines, autonomous vehicles respond like Uber — taking people where they need to go.

Riahi likes this version best. "I'm convinced that a fundamental demand-side restructuring would also lead to a better quality of life," he says.

Other scenarios show people still using plenty of energy, which in turn requires a huge boost in production of clean electricity. It would mean 10 or 20 times more land covered with solar and wind farms, compared to now, plus more power plants burning wood or other biofuels, outfitted with equipment to capture and store the carbon dioxide that's released.
Politics and individuals' preferences could foil the models

Riahi is quick to point out that what happens in the models may not be feasible in real life. They don't account for political obstruction, for instance, or human preferences. People may just want to drive an expensive car, rather than take public transit, even when the models says that choice isn't economically rational.

But the models also can be far too pessimistic, in particular about technological innovation. Ten years ago, van Vuuren says, they never anticipated the rise of cheap solar power. "We have been in the extremely fortunate situation that the cost of renewables has declined rapidly in the past decade." This has made the task of reducing carbon emissions much easier.

For all their shortcomings, though, these models remain the primary way that scientists and policymakers figure out options for the future. They quantify tradeoffs and consequences that may not be clearly apparent. If countries want to turn trees or crops into fuel, for instance, it means less land for growing food or for natural forests. Also, the models make it clear that international cooperation is essential, with rich countries helping poorer countries to cut their emissions.

The results of the computer modeling are like fuzzy maps, pointing out routes that could help the world avoid disaster.

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(Business Insider) Astronauts Say They're Saddened To Watch The Climate Crisis From The Space Station: 'We Can See All Of Those Effects From Up Here'

Business Insider - Morgan McFall-Johnsen

NASA astronauts Megan McArthur and Mark Vande Hei speak with Insider from the International Space Station, August 11, 2021. NASA

Astronauts have a better view of Earth than anybody, but lately it's a discouraging one.

"We've been very saddened to see fires over huge sections of the Earth, not just the United States," NASA astronaut Megan McArthur told Insider on a recent call from the space station.

Wildfires are raging across the US, Canada, Greece, Turkey, Italy, Algeria, and Siberia.

McArthur's crewmate, French astronaut Thomas Pesquet, has posted photos of those blazes from above on Twitter.

Wildfires are one of the most visible hallmarks of the climate crisis. This summer, they've come alongside historic heat waves and the western US's worst drought in the 20-year history of the US Drought Monitor.

A new report from the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) warns that "fire weather" will probably increase by 2050 in North America, Central America, parts of South America, the Mediterranean, southern Africa, north Asia, Australia, and New Zealand. That means more days where conditions are warm, dry, and windy enough to trigger and sustain wildfires.

The amount of fuel available to burn in those places — dry vegetation — is also likely to increase as rising temperatures cause the air to absorb more moisture and bring about more droughts.

The IPCC report, released Monday, is the first part of the group's sixth assessment, which recruits hundreds of experts to analyze years of scientific research on climate change. Those experts determined that global temperatures will almost certainly rise at least 1.5 degrees Celsius above the preindustrial average by 2040.

That may sound small, but it brings about huge changes across the planet, including further melting of glaciers and polar ice caps. This contributes to sea-level rise, and water expands as it heats up, so it is virtually certain that oceans will continue rising through the end of this century. In the best case scenario, the IPCC authors said, oceans will rise by nearly a foot over the next 80 years.

But there is still time to prevent 2 degrees Celsius of warming and the even more catastrophic changes that would bring, the report said.

"Over many years, scientists around the world have been sounding this alarm bell," McArthur said. "This is a warning for the entire global community. It's going to take the entire global community to face this and to work through these challenges."

Astronauts can see the climate crisis unfolding across the planet
A photo of Hurricane Laura taken from the International Space Station on August 25, 2020. Chris Cassidy/NASA
Astronauts can see other signs of the changing climate, too: "Big tropical storms — those are always coming, and potentially the flooding that comes after them," McArthur said. "We can see all of those effects from up here."

Future astronauts will probably observe even more of that. The IPCC report found that combinations of extreme events like heavy rainfall and hurricane-caused storm surge, paired with rising seas, will continue to make flooding more likely in coming decades.

Other satellites can also see signs of drought, like dried-up reservoirs across California.

"The other thing that we can see, of course, is the very thin lens of atmosphere," McArthur said. "That is what protects our Earth and everything on it. And we see how fragile that is, and we know how important it is."

The atmosphere glows above the southeastern African coast, as seen from the International Space Station. NASA
The burning of fossil fuels like coal and oil is drastically changing that thin atmosphere by filling it with heat-trapping gas.

In 2019, the concentration of carbon in the atmosphere was higher than at any time in at least 2 million years, according to the IPCC report. Concentrations of methane and nitrous oxide — more potent greenhouse gases than carbon dioxide — were higher than at any time in at least 800,000 years.

On August 4, 2021, an astronaut on the International Space Station shot a photo of the Dixie fire’s thick smoke plume. NASA/JSC

As those gases fill the atmosphere, they prevent more and more heat from the sun from bouncing back into space. That's what's causing global temperatures to rise and bringing about the extreme weather that astronauts are watching in horror.

"That is the place that we need to be able to live. So it's important that we take ownership of whatever we can do to help maintain it," NASA astronaut Mark Vande Hei told Insider.

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15/08/2021

(NOAA) It’s Official: July Was Earth’s Hottest Month On Record

National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration

A collage of typical climate and weather-related events: floods, heatwaves, drought, hurricanes, wildfires and loss of glacial ice.(NOAA)

July 2021 has earned the unenviable distinction as the world’s hottest month ever recorded, according to new global data released today by NOAA’s National Centers for Environmental Information.

“In this case, first place is the worst place to be,” said NOAA Administrator Rick Spinrad, Ph.D. “July is typically the world’s warmest month of the year, but July 2021 outdid itself as the hottest July and month ever recorded. This new record adds to the disturbing and disruptive path that climate change has set for the globe.”

July 2021 by the numbers
  • Around the globe: the combined land and ocean-surface temperature was 1.67 degrees F (0.93 of a degree C) above the 20th-century average of 60.4 degrees F (15.8 degrees C), making it the hottest July since records began 142 years ago.
    It was 0.02 of a degree F (0.01 of a degree C) higher than the previous record set in July 2016, which was then tied in 2019 and 2020.
  • The Northern Hemisphere: the land-surface only temperature was the highest ever recorded for July, at an unprecedented 2.77 degrees F (1.54 degrees C) above average, surpassing the previous record set in 2012.
  • Regional records: Asia had its hottest July on record, besting the previous record set in 2010; Europe had its second-hottest July on record—tying with July 2010 and trailing behind July 2018; and North America, South America, Africa and Oceania all had a top-10 warmest July.

Extreme heat and global climate change

 With last month’s data, it remains very likely that 2021 will rank among the world’s 10-warmest years on record, according to NCEI’s Global Annual Temperature Rankings Outlook.

Extreme heat detailed in NOAA’s monthly NCEI reports is also a reflection of the long-term changes outlined in a major report released this week by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

“Scientists from across the globe delivered the most up-to-date assessment of the ways in which the climate is changing,” Spinrad said in a statement.

“It is a sobering IPCC report that finds that human influence is, unequivocally, causing climate change, and it confirms the impacts are widespread and rapidly intensifying.”

A map of the world plotted with some of the most significant climate events that occurred during July 2021.



Other notable highlights from NOAA’s July global climate report
  • Sea ice coverage varied by hemisphere: The Arctic sea ice coverage (extent) for July 2021 was the fourth-smallest for July in the 43-year record, according to analysis by the National Snow and Ice Data Center.
    Only July 2012, 2019 and 2020 had a smaller sea ice extent. Antarctic sea ice extent was above average in July — the largest July sea ice extent since 2015 and the eighth highest on record.
  • The tropics were busier than average: In the Atlantic basin, the season’s earliest fifth-named storm, Elsa, formed on July 1. The Eastern North and Western Pacific basins each logged three named storms.
    Overall, global tropical cyclone activity this year so far (through July) has been above-normal for the number of named storms.
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