29/12/2017

From America's Hurricanes To Portugal's Fires, ABC Weather Looks Back At 2017's Deadly Extremes

ABC News - Kate Doyle | Ben Deacon

A helicopter dumps water on a burning house in the Anaheim Hills during October's California fires. (AP: Jeff Gritchen/The Orange County Register)
Cyclones, bushfires and heatwaves are typically Australian natural disasters, but in 2017 devastating fires, record heat, hurricanes and typhoons — what we call cyclones — struck around the world.
Here are a few of the events that caught our attention this year.

Cyclone Debbie
It was the cyclone that just kept on going.
Debbie made landfall near Airlie Beach as a category 4 system on March 28 with wind gusts of 263 kilometres per hour recorded at Hamilton Island, the highest gust ever recorded in the Queensland digital climate archive, and its initial impact was ferocious.
The 24-hour rainfall total for Queensland. (Supplied: BOM)
But what set Debbie apart from the average cyclone was the trail of drenching rain it left as its remnants made their way down the Queensland coast and across the New South Wales border.
In an historic move, Queensland Premier Annastacia Palaszczuk closed all schools south of Agnes Water, north of Bundaberg, and east of Nanango in the South Burnett region, including Brisbane and the Gold Coast.


SES workers rescue a man from floodwaters in Lismore (ABC News)

The flooding did not stop at the border as far south in Lismore, NSW, 324.8 millimetres fell in 18 hours, leading to the highest river levels since 1974 and waist-high flooding in the CBD when the town's levee breached.
Media reports attributed nine deaths to Tropical Cyclone Debbie in Australia.
Debbie did not just leave it at that, as New Zealand's North Island was drenched when the tail end of the system made its way across the Tasman a week after it first made landfall in Queensland.
Thousands of homes were evacuated there as well.

Pakistan record heat
In May, there was a major heat event which affected most of the Persian Gulf but seemed to go largely under the radar in western media.
The town of Turbat in south-west Pakistan recorded 54.0 degrees Celsius, equal to the maximum temperature recorded in Mitrabah, Kuwait in July last year.
Be prepared for the heat
Neither of the temperatures have been officially confirmed by the World Meteorological Organisation, but if it turns out to be legitimate it will be a new Asian record.
These record high temperatures stir up debate around the global highest recorded temperature.
The current record of 56.7C taken in Death Valley, USA, in 1913 is viewed with scepticism because of dubious equipment.
Likewise the eastern hemisphere record of 55.0 recorded in Kebili, Tunisia, is also questionable due to inconsistencies in previous temperature recording practices.
So it could well be that the hottest temperature directly recorded on Earth happened this year.
Australia's official hottest temperature was recorded at Oodnadatta in 1960 at 50.7 degrees Celsius.
A man is rescued from floodwaters in Houston. (AP: David J Phillip)
US hurricane cluster
Harvey, Irma, Jose, Katia, and Maria — the US was battered by hurricane after hurricane this year.
Of these, Harvey, Irma and Maria did the most damage.
Harvey led the pack as the first major hurricane to hit the mainland US in almost a decade when it stalled over Houston and led to widespread, devastating flooding.
Hurricane Irma, even stronger than Harvey, battered the Caribbean before travelling across Cuba, to make landfall in Florida.


Three hurricanes threatening land simultaneously in the Western Atlantic Basin.

What made Irma special meteorologically was the length of time it maintained extremely high wind speeds, more than 297km/h for 37 hours, far and away the highest ever recorded.
Maria's biggest impact was on Puerto Rico, where US media reports suggest the death toll was at least 48 people.
As of early December, around one million people on the island were still without power, more than two months after the hurricane ripped through on September 20.

East Africa drought
UN data suggests there are more than 15.2 million people who remain severely food insecure on the horn of Africa as of December 8.
Some parts received decent rain in October and November this year but it will take time for those benefits to trickle through, especially when coupled with other conflicts.
For other areas, this will be the fourth consecutive year the rains have failed.
Somaliland's drought has seen some families lose up to 90 per cent of their livestock. (ABC News: Sally Sara)
As with many of the other events on this list, the question of whether climate change is to blame has been raised and, as with many other events, the answers are complicated.
Extreme cyclones, hurricanes and typhoons are expected to be less common because of climate change, but could be worse when they do hit because of their increased capacity to dump more rain and rising oceans.
Likewise, extreme fires are expected to be worsened by higher temperatures and longer fire seasons.
With the East African drought though, the role of climate change is not definitive.

Portugal fires
Portugal suffered two major rounds of deadly fires this year, one in June and one in October.
The July fires led to 62 deaths and the October fires killed more than 40 people.
The July fires took place during a heatwave when there were several days in a row above 40C.
The October fires were whipped up by the passing of Hurricane Ophelia.
The unusually placed storm was in the area thanks its formation much further north east than a normal Atlantic hurricane, combined with a run-in with the mid-latitude jet stream. It made a beeline for Ireland rather than taking the typical route and heading for the Americas.


Rare fire devil on camera in Portugal (ABC News)

As with the Californian fires later in the year, there has been speculation that introduced eucalypts contributed to the rapid spread of these fires.

South Asia floods
It was reported that more than 1,300 people died in the flooding that hit India, Bangladesh and Nepal in mid-August this year.
UNICEF estimated that 31 million had been affected by the floods associated with a strong monsoon.
At the height of the storms, Bangladesh received as much rain in two hours as it would in a week of a typical monsoon.
Tens of thousands of schools have been inundated or damaged, making it impossible for children to continue their education. (AP: Rajanish Kakade)
California fires
Wildfires whipped by powerful winds have swept through northern California. (AP: Jeff Gritchen/The Orange County Register)
These fires were not just significant because Ellen DeGeneres and Paris Hilton's homes were evacuated, the fires in early October led to tens of thousands of people being forced to flee their homes and more than 40 people lost their lives.
Entire suburbs were reduced to rubble.
An aerial photo of the devastation left behind from wildfires north of San Francisco. (Reuters: California Highway Patrol)
Firefighters faced the impossible task of fighting 14 fires at once in gusts of up to 120km/h with low relative humidity.
The fires were fanned by what are known as the 'Diablo' winds in Northern California.
Like their more well-known Southern Californian counterpart, the Santa Ana winds, they come from over the continent bringing hot dry conditions.
Diablo winds are traditionally associated with wildfires, especially in autumn.

Victoria storms
Although many in Melbourne were underwhelmed by the much-publicised December storms, there was no denying the rainfall totals in north-east Victoria were record-breaking.
Echuca, Euroa and Eildon all recorded their highest daily rainfall totals on record.

Rainfall Totals
Record breaking rainfall totals recorded in the 24 hours to 9 am December 21 2017
The storm set off debate surrounding natural disaster messaging in Australia and is a timely reminder to be prepared heading into the traditional summer disaster period.
The Sevens and Castle creeks in flood around Euroa. (ABC News: Stephanie Anderson)
Philippines typhoon and landslides
On December 16, Tropical Storm Kia-tak — known locally as Urduja — made landfall in the Philippines.
Severe flooding and landsides were triggered when two months of rain fell in 48 hours.
Less than two weeks later, Typhoon Tembin — also known as Typhoon Vinta — hit the Philippines.
So far, more than 250 people are confirmed dead as a result of the storm.


Landslides kill 32 in storm-hit Philippine province (ABC News)

Central Australian floods
Technically during the dying days of 2016, but close enough that we thought it warranted a mention, the flooding rains that hit central Australia on Christmas night were described as a once in a half-century storm by the Bureau of Meteorology.


Uluru's temporary waterfall (ABC News)

In Kintore 61.4mm fell between 8:00pm and 9:00pm alone, and 232mm fell in the 24 hours after 9:00am on Christmas Day.
The widespread flooding closed the Uluru-Kata Tjuta National Park and several locations were cut off for weeks.

Links
Posted by at No comments :
Labels: ,

2017: The Year In Extreme Weather

The Conversation - 

Trees and power lines in Puerto Rico, damaged by Hurricane Maria in September. REUTERS/Alvin Baez
Overall 2017 will be the warmest non-El Niño year on record globally, and over the past 12 months we have seen plenty of extreme weather, both here in Australia and across the world.
Here I’ll round up some of this year’s wild weather, and look forward to 2018 to see what’s around the corner.

Drought and flooding rains… again
It feels as if Australia has had all manner of extreme weather events in 2017. We had severe heat at both the start and end of the year. Casting our minds back to last summer, both Sydney and Brisbane experienced their hottest summers on record, while parts of inland New South Wales and Queensland endured extended periods of very high temperatures.
Sydney sweltered last summer. Joel Carrett/AAP
More recently Australia had an unusually dry June and its warmest winter daytime temperatures on record. The record winter warmth was made substantially more likely by human-caused climate change.
The end of the year brought more than its fair share of extreme weather, especially in the southeast. Tasmania had by far its warmest November on record, beating the previous statewide record by more than half a degree. Melbourne had a topsy-turvy November with temperatures not hitting the 20℃ mark until the 9th, but a record 12 days above 30℃ after that.
November was rounded off by warnings for very severe weather that was forecast to strike Victoria. Melbourne missed the worst of the rains, although it still had a very wet weekend on December 2-3. Meanwhile, northern parts of the state were deluged, with many places recording two or three times the December average rainfall in just a couple of days.
Euroa in northern Victoria copped a drenching. AAP Image/Brendan McCarthy
Hurricane after hurricane after hurricane…
Elsewhere in the world there was plenty more headline-worthy weather.
The Atlantic Ocean had a particularly active hurricane season, with several intense systems. Hurricane Harvey struck Texas and its slow trajectory resulted in record-breaking rainfall over Houston and neighbouring areas.
Then Hurricanes Irma and Maria, both of which reached the strongest Category 5 status, brought severe weather to the Caribbean and southeastern United States just a couple of weeks apart. Island nations and territories in the region are still recovering from the devastation.
Road to ruin: Houston’s Interstate Highway 45 was submerged by Hurricane Harvey. REUTERS/Richard Carson
Around the same time, the Indian subcontinent experienced a particularly wet monsoon season. Flooding in India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, and Nepal killed more than 1,000 people and affected tens of millions more.
Other parts of the world experienced their own severe weather events. Whether it was summer heat in Europe or wildfires in California, 2017 dished up plenty of extremes.
In many cases, especially for heat extremes, we can rapidly identify a human influence and show that climate change is increasing the frequency and intensity of such events.
For other weather types, like the very active hurricane season and other extreme rain or drought events, it is harder (but not always impossible) to work out whether it bears the fingerprint of climate change.

What’s in store for 2018?
The main problem when trying to offer an outlook is that extreme weather is hard to predict, even on the scale of days or weeks in advance, let alone months.
For Australia, with a weak La Niña in the Pacific, there are few clear indications of what the rest of the summer’s weather will bring. There is a suggestion that we can expect a slightly wetter than average start to the year in parts of the southeast, along with warmer than average conditions for Victoria and Tasmania. Beyond that it is anyone’s guess.
The La Niña is also likely to mean that 2018 won’t be a record hot year for the globe. But it’s a safe bet that despite the La Niña, 2018 will still end up among the warmest years on record, alongside every other year this century. Rising global average temperatures, along with our understanding of the effect of greenhouse gas emissions, are one of our clearest lines of evidence for human-caused climate change.
So it’s hard to say much about what extreme weather we’ll experience in 2018, other than to say that there’s likely to be plenty more weather news to wrap up in a year’s time.

Links
Posted by at No comments :
Labels:

28/12/2017

Climate Change Cases Predicted To Make A Legal Splash In 2018

Reuters - Sophie Hares | Sebastien Malo



 NEW YORK / TEPIC, MEXICO: A clutch of high-profile legal cases over responsibility for the effects of climate change will be fought out in courtrooms next year as claims stack up against both governments and some of the world’s biggest oil and energy companies.
Lawsuits in the United States brought by young activists and several Californian cities are most likely to make waves, but legal action by a Peruvian farmer in Germany and Greenpeace in Norway could also cause ripples, said lawyers and academics.
“There is a trend towards more litigation around climate change, and probably the lack of political action in the United States may increase that trend,” said Sophie Marjanac, a London-based lawyer at non-profit environmental law group ClientEarth. “Where there’s an abdication of leadership on climate action, I think the courts will have a greater role to play," she told the Thomson Reuters Foundation.
Lawyers and campaigners are closely watching the looming legal battles they say could set the stage for fresh claims against major oil and industrial companies and pressure governments to ramp up action on climate change.

JULIANA V UNITED STATES
With US President Donald Trump and his cabinet members named as defendants, the Juliana v United States case brought by 21 young activists from Oregon is set to be one of the most closely followed in 2018.
In the federal case, scheduled for trial in February, the plaintiffs hope to establish that the government’s climate change policies have failed to protect their constitutional right to live in a habitable environment. The case remains locked in legal limbo, however, as the government tries to block it from proceeding.
Lawyers and academics say Juliana builds on the groundbreaking Urgenda case brought by hundreds of Dutch citizens in 2015, which saw the government ordered by a district court to accelerate reductions of greenhouse gas emissions. However, that outcome is now being appealed, with a decision likely early next year.
Elsewhere, a January judgment is expected in a case brought by Greenpeace Nordic and environmental group Nature and Youth against Norway, which they claim has breached its pledge to combat climate change by granting oil and gas exploration rights.

HISTORY REPEATING?
Some lawyers and researchers say claims seeking specific damages from energy and industrial companies for actions that may have contributed to climate change could have a bigger impact than constitutional cases.
A successful ruling against a heavyweight corporate could potentially unleash a wave of similar claims, say case watchers, who reference long-running fights against tobacco, asbestos and pesticide manufacturers over harm to human health.
At least seven Californian cities and counties have brought lawsuits against major fossil fuel companies. San Francisco and Oakland are seeking billions of dollars to help protect against rising sea levels they blame on climate change. “Why should taxpayers and impacted communities alone bear the growing costs of climate impacts when fossil fuel companies have played an outsized role in making the problem worse?” said Peter Frumhoff, director of science and policy at the Union of Concerned Scientists, after Santa Cruz city and county both filed lawsuits this month.
Tracy Hester, a lecturer at the University of Houston Law Center, said such claims could “redefine the rules of the game”. “They’re essentially not trying to bring a global claim that’s going to lock up all these issues in one court... they’re different in that they’re seeking damages,” he said.
Trump’s move to pull out of the Paris climate change accord and roll back environmental regulations means campaigners are increasingly resorting to litigation, as they did under former President George W. Bush, said case watchers.

MITIGATION NOT LITIGATION
While climate-related suits are not new, scientific advances could bolster plaintiffs as they try to pin responsibility for climate change on particular polluters.
A German court has agreed to hear evidence in a case brought by Peruvian farmer SaŴl Luciano Lliuya against RWE AG, asking the power giant to pay to reinforce a lake above his village dangerously swollen by glacial melt he says is caused by global warming the company contributed to. Yet, while there has been a steady rise in cases seeking to hold corporations and governments to account, few make it to court and legal action is largely limited to richer countries.
Despite a few exceptions—including a farmer who successfully sued Pakistan’s government in 2015—mitigating rather than litigating against climate change is favoured in poorer countries where legal success is less likely, according to Cosmin Corendea, a legal expert at the United Nations University in Bonn.
But the knock-on effect of rulings on companies and governments could eventually be felt around the world, including in countries already struggling with climate change impacts. “The decision of the court echoes,” said Corendea. “It’s important in climate change litigation to have this kind of momentum.”

Links
Posted by at No comments :
Labels:

The 10 Most Important U.S. Climate Stories In 2017

Climate Central - 

Following a year of weather extremes, disasters and policy clashes, we asked our readers to help us pick out the most important climate stories from the U.S. in 2017. Here's what you said.

HURRICANES
This was a brutal year for hurricanes in the U.S. A trifecta of storms (Harvey, Irma and Maria) battered Florida, the Gulf Coast and Puerto Rico, causing deaths and widespread destruction, driving many from their homes. Climate change is fueling hurricanes by increasing their rainfall, wind speeds, and storm surges. Our World Weather Attribution team was among the groups of scientists that found climate change increased the amount of flooding rainfall from Harvey.

SEA-LEVEL RISE SCIENCE
Sea-level rise projections got worse for U.S. coastal communities. New research factoring in the projected effects of warming on Antarctic ice outlined new scenarios for Gulf Coast and East Coast cities, where more than 10 feet of sea-level rise is possible in places this century. Sea-level rise could be kept to less than two feet if we aggressively curb our greenhouse gas emissions, reducing risks and impacts.



 U.S. GOVERNMENT
The Trump administration worked to reverse climate protections this year, seeking to replace the Clean Power Plan and eventually withdraw from the Paris Agreement. The administration has been removing the phrase “climate change” from government websites and it greenlighted construction of the Keystone XL oil pipeline. All the while, hundreds of thousands of people marched for science and the climate, and states and cities and nations abroad vowed to fight harder to slow global warming.

TESLA
2017 was the year of Tesla co-founder Elon Musk. From a battery factory in Nevada, to South Australia where his batteries are helping a wind farm provide reliable power, to a new energy grid in hurricane-ravaged Puerto Rico, Tesla has taken the lead in producing batteries for energy storage and to power electric cars. And it has developed new all-electric semi trucks and solar shingles!

WILDFIRES
California is battling its largest wildfire on record right now, but this wildfire season wasn’t just bad for the Golden State. Wildfires burned more than 9.5 million acres across the U.S., destroying neighborhoods and releasing dangerous smoke pollution. The Western wildfire season is 105 days longer than it was 45 years ago as climate change fuels more and bigger blazes.



THIRD HOTTEST YEAR ON RECORD
2017 is likely to be the third-hottest year on record for the U.S., behind 2016 and 2012. This record heat is particularly astounding considering the absence of an El Niño, which usually boosts global temperatures. If the final data matches expectations, five of the 10 hottest years on record will have come since 2006.

SOCIAL INJUSTICE OF CLIMATE CHANGE
The homes of Americans were destroyed or threatened by extreme weather and rising seas, with the poor hit the hardest. Hundreds of thousands of people had to flee Puerto Rico after Hurricane Maria devastated the island, relocating to Florida and other areas. Thousands more in New Jersey and Louisiana are hoping for federal help as they grapple with the ongoing effects of flooding linked to rising seas and climate change-fueled storms.

SOLAR ENERGY SHINES
Production of clean energy climbed as prices continued to come down. In March, 10 percent of all electricity generated in the U.S. came from wind and solar, with help from Texas (America’s number 1 wind provider) and California (the largest solar producer). Bloomberg New Energy Finance concluded in the summer that solar energy can now be as cheap as power from new coal plants in the U.S.

TRANSPORTATION POLLUTION
Your car is contributing to the biggest source of U.S. emissions. Transportation recently overtook electricity generation as the biggest source of greenhouse gases from the U.S., as coal power plants were retired and replaced with renewables and natural gas facilities.

HEAT WAVES
It may be winter right now, but don’t forget about extreme heat, which is the number one weather-related killer. Climate change made a February heat wave across much of the eastern U.S. three times more likely. In June, another heat wave in the Southwest prevented planes in Arizona from taking off. Danger days are surging from Power, Montana to New York City, and a dramatic rise in dangerous heat and humidity will continue in the summertime.

Links
Posted by at No comments :
Labels:

Climate Change Is Going To Drive Thousands Of Refugees To Cooler Countries

Futurism - Lou Del Bello

By the end of the century, climate change may drive 660,000 additional asylum seekers per year toward Europe. Growing mass migration is only one of the social and environmental consequences of increasing temperatures.
Creative Commons
Climate Threat Multiplier
Climate change doesn’t just warm the air and melt glaciers. It acts as a “threat multiplier,” playing on the vulnerabilities of ecosystems and communities in ways that we are yet to fully understand.
Migration is a case in point: the way it’s changing, and is projected to change in the future, highlights how the impacts of climate change on one place spill over to other parts of the world. A new study in Science finds that as crops fail in agricultural regions of the world, more people will seek asylum in Europe in the coming decades. If the current warming trends were to continue, the research predicts that by 2100 Europe will receive around 660,000 extra applicants each year.
The authors analyzed the relation between localized changes in weather and the number of asylum applications by that country’s migrants between 2000 and 2014, discovering that when temperatures in the source country changed from a moderate average of 20° C (68° F), applications increased.
They modeled future migration patterns by comparing present trends against the global warming scenarios set out by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). They found that under a pathway where the concentration of greenhouse gases does not significantly decrease, and global temperatures increase by 4.8° C (8.6° F), asylum applications are likely to rise by 188 percent by the end of the century.



Speaking with the BBC, lead author Wolfram Schlenker, of Columbia University, acknowledged the uncertainty that comes with such models: “We basically have to assume that the relationship we uncovered between 2000 and 2014 is going to remain unchanged for the next 80 years,” he said.
He explained that “there are many reasons for why it could go either way. We could start adapting to warmer temperatures, so the impacts would be less, but if you shock people every year with the same thing, it could be much worse. We could be under or overestimating the effects.”

Breaking Point
While our resilience as a species means we can adapt to a great deal of change — by upgrading our infrastructure or breeding heat-resistant crops, among other actions — we too eventually reach a breaking point. New research in Environmental Research Letters finds that by 2100, rising temperatures combined with increased humidity will make some areas of the world uninhabitable for humans.
Humans cool their bodies by sweating. As sweat evaporates off the skin, it disperses the excess heat; but in an air thick with moisture, this process is slowed down or halted altogether. Under these conditions, organs start to fail, eventually leading to death. Previous papers have identified this upper limit as a sustained temperature of 35° C (95° F).
The new study maps the areas of the planet most at risk to experience not only greater heat but also higher density of vapor in the air. Among the regions likely to be affected are the Amazon, western and central Africa, northern India, eastern China and the southeastern part of the United States.
“It’s not just about the heat, or the number of people. It’s about how many people are poor, how many are old, who has to go outside to work, who has air conditioning,” said study coauthor Alex de Sherbinin, of Columbia’s Center for International Earth Science Information Network, in a statement. He said that even if the weather does not lead to a sudden collapse of the affected human systems, working in farms or in non air conditioned environments may lead to chronic health problems such as kidney disease — another case of climate change as a threat multiplier. It is likely that over time, many will eventually seek a new home elsewhere.
Although the science is not conclusive, there is evidence that climate change-induced drought might have exacerbated the social unrest that led to some of the most brutal conflicts of this century, including the Syrian war. The science of extreme weather attribution is developing fast, but there is still a long way to go before we can identify with certainty the role played by climate change in any extreme event.
What scientists now know is that what happens in one particular part of the planet will most likely trigger a cascade of consequences that will be felt far away. These are not only environmental consequences, but also social, and will increasingly involve the movement of large numbers of people. As mass migration is already causing tensions all over the world, leaders will have to find new strategies to manage the growing nomad communities of the future.

Links
Posted by at No comments :
Labels:

27/12/2017

Tesla’s Enormous Battery In Australia, Just Weeks Old, Is Already Responding To Outages In ‘Record’ Time

Washington Post - Brian Fung

(Neoen/Tesla/hornsdalepowerreserve.com.au)
Less than a month after Tesla unveiled a new backup power system in South Australia, the world's largest lithium-ion battery is already being put to the test. And it appears to be far exceeding expectations: In the past three weeks alone, the Hornsdale Power Reserve has smoothed out at least two major energy outages, responding even more quickly than the coal-fired backups that were supposed to provide emergency power.
Tesla's battery last week kicked in just 0.14 seconds after one of Australia's biggest plants, the Loy Yang facility in the neighboring state of Victoria, suffered a sudden, unexplained drop in output, according to the International Business Times. And the week before that, another failure at Loy Yang prompted the Hornsdale battery to respond in as little as four seconds — or less, according to some estimates — beating other plants to the punch. State officials have called the response time “a record,” according to local media.
The effectiveness of Tesla's battery is being closely watched in a region that is in the grips of an energy crisis. The price of electricity is soaring in Australia, particularly in the state of South Australia, where a 2016 outage led 1.7 million residents to lose power in a blackout. Storms and heat waves have caused additional outages, and many Australians are bracing for more with the onset of summer in the Southern Hemisphere.
The Hornsdale battery system, which uses the same energy-storage tech found in Tesla's electric cars, is one of chief executive Elon Musk's newest projects. In March, Musk, who is known for setting high goals and only sometimes meeting them, vowed on Twitter to deliver a battery system for South Australia's struggling grid within 100 days or it would be free. By early July, the state had signed a deal with Tesla and the French-based energy company Neoen to produce the battery. And by Dec. 1, South Australia announced that it had switched on the Hornsdale battery.
Fed by wind turbines at the nearby Hornsdale wind farm, the battery stores excess energy that is produced when the demand for electricity isn't peaking. It can power up to 30,000 homes, though only for short periods — meaning that the battery must still be supported by traditional power plants in the event of a long outage.
A spokesman for Tesla didn't immediately respond to a request for comment.
Nonetheless, the Hornsdale reserve has already shown that it can provide what's known as “contingency” service — keeping the grid stable in a crisis and easing what would otherwise be a significant power failure. And, more important, the project is the biggest proof-of-concept yet that batteries such as Tesla's can help mitigate one of renewable energy's most persistent problems: how to use it when the sun isn't shining or the wind isn't blowing.
"When you think about energy storage, it's not a [power] generation resource," said Stephen Coughlin, the vice president of energy storage platforms at the Arlington-based AES Corporation, which is behind several battery projects in California, the Netherlands and several other countries. "What it's really doing is providing a much-needed injection of reliability and resiliency into the network overall."
Where it can take as much as 10 minutes to spin up a traditional turbine in a pinch, added Coughlin, it's not uncommon to see systems such as Tesla's intervene in fractions of a second.
This isn't Musk's only experiment with large-scale batteries. Last year, Tesla said it had equipped a small island in American Samoa with thousands of solar panels and batteries that could serve the area's 600 inhabitants, shifting them almost entirely off fossil fuels. In October, Musk responded to the hurricane crisis in Puerto Rico by offering to discuss building a solar grid for the island. Parts of Puerto Rico are still without power, months after Hurricane Maria ripped down power lines and other energy infrastructure.
An electric grid consisting of distributed solar panels, paired with a large battery, could prove transformative for some island economies, analysts say. Under normal circumstances, the price of imported fossil fuels can become a drain on local businesses. But the abundant sunshine at tropical latitudes makes solar energy extremely cost-efficient.
"[Big batteries] definitely can be a game changer for island or island-type economies," said Ravi Manghani, director of energy storage at GTM Research, a market analysis firm. "Hawaii, for instance, has one of the highest retail rates in the U.S. [for electricity], and that's because of the cost of shipping diesel or other fuel oils which currently are used by a lot of the existing facilities."
What's more, he added, spreading solar panels out across an island reduces the likelihood of the entire grid going down because of storms.
Other battery projects, including in the United States, have already helped manage spikes in demand. For example, a major 2015 gas leak near Los Angeles that kept some gas-fired plants from producing energy at peak times prompted Southern California Edison and San Diego Gas and Electric to announce energy storage projects that were completed earlier this year, according to Sam Wilkinson, an industry analyst at IHS.
In an April report, Wilkinson highlighted the rapid rise of China and Australia as energy storage leaders.
"For the first time Asia accounts for more than one third of the global pipeline" for energy storage, the report read. "This underscores the importance that China, Australia, South Korea and India are all predicted to have in the global market."

Links
Posted by at No comments :
Labels: , ,

Climate Change Is Happening Faster Than Expected, and It’s More Extreme

InsideClimate News - Bob Berwyn

New research suggests human-caused emissions will lead to bigger impacts on heat and extreme weather, and sooner than the IPCC warned just three years ago.


Scientists warned in 2017 that not enough has been done to protect millions of people from an expected increase in dangerous heat waves. Credit: Chris Hondros/Getty Images
In the past year, the scientific consensus shifted toward a grimmer and less uncertain picture of the risks posed by climate change.
When the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change issued its 5th Climate Assessment in 2014, it formally declared that observed warming was "extremely likely" to be mostly caused by human activity.
This year, a major scientific update from the United States Global Change Research Program put it more bluntly: "There is no convincing alternative explanation."
Other scientific authorities have issued similar assessments:
  • The Royal Society published a compendium of how the science has advanced, warning that it seems likelier that we've been underestimating the risks of warming than overestimating them.
     
  • The American Meteorological Society issued its annual study of extreme weather events and said that many of those it studied this year would not have been possible without the influence of human-caused greenhouse gas emissions.
     
  • The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) said recent melting of the Arctic was not moderating and was more intense than at any time in recorded history.
While 2017 may not have hit a global temperature record, it is running in second or third place, and on the heels of records set in 2015 and 2016. Talk of some kind of "hiatus" seems as old as disco music.

'A Deadly Tragedy in the Making'
Some of the strongest warnings in the Royal Society update came from health researchers, who said there hasn't been nearly enough done to protect millions of vulnerable people worldwide from the expected increase in heat waves.
"It's a deadly tragedy in the making, all the worse because the same experts are saying such heat waves are eminently survivable with adequate resources to protect people," said climate researcher Eric Wolff, lead author of the Royal Society update.
Atmospheric scientist Kevin Trenberth of the National Center for Atmospheric Research said climate science has progressed in all directions since the IPCC report was published in 2014. He works with a group of scientists trying to update the IPCC reporting process to make it more fluid and meaningful in real time.


"The need to build resilience is clear and missing in action," Trenberth said. "The result is we suffer the consequences at costs of hundreds of billions of dollars."
One of the starkest conclusions of the Royal Society update is that up to 350 million people in places like Karachi, Kolkota, Lagos and Shanghai are likely to face deadly heat waves every year by 2050—even if nations are able to rein in greenhouse gas emissions enough to keep the average global temperature increase to 1.5 degrees Celsius, as per the Paris climate agreement.
There's also an increasing chance global warming will affect a key North Atlantic current that carries ocean heat from the tropics toward western Europe, according to a 2016 study. It shows the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Current weakening by 37 percent by 2100, which could have big effects on European climate and food production.

Melting Ice and Risks to Oceans and Ecosystems
The Royal Society report also notes:
  • An increasing risk that ocean acidification will rapidly and significantly alter many ecosystems and food webs;
     
  • A concern that crops grown in high-CO2 conditions could be less nutritious, leading to mineral deficiencies;
     
  • That the commonly accepted wet-areas-wetter and dry-areas-drier scenario has regional nuances with important implications for local water management and food production planning; and,
     
  • That scientists are finding more links between melting Arctic sea ice and weather extremes like heat waves, droughts and blizzards.
The U.S. Global Change Research Program, an interagency group whose work went through exhaustive peer review and emerged from the Trump administration's political review mostly unscathed, also cited several emerging conclusions that are much clearer today than five years ago.
Among them are changes in ocean ecosystems that go far beyond rising sea levels. Ocean acidification is increasing, as is oxygen loss, and scientists are more acutely aware than before of the severity of their impacts. In some U.S. coastal waters, these trends are "raising the risk of serious ecological and economic consequences," the report noted.


The most ominous of its chapters addressed the risks of surprises like "tipping points" or "compound extremes"—sucker punches, combination punches, and even knockout punches. "The more the climate changes, the greater the potential for these," it said.
"Uncertainty is not our friend here," said Penn State climate scientist Michael Mann. "We are seeing increases in extreme weather events that go well beyond what has been predicted or projected in the past. We're learning that there are factors we were not previously aware of that may be magnifying the impacts of human-caused climate change." Among those are "subtle mechanisms involving the behavior of the jet stream that may be involved in explaining the dramatic increase we've seen in floods, droughts, heat waves and wildfires," he said.
"Increasingly, the science suggests that many of the impacts are occurring earlier and with greater amplitude than was predicted," Mann said, after considering new research since the milestone of the IPCC's Fifth Assessment, which served as the scientific basis for the Paris Agreement.
"We have literally, in the space of a year, doubled our assessment of the potential sea level rise we could see by the end of this century. That is simply remarkable. And it is sobering," he said.
In general, there should be more monitoring of global warming impacts, but all those programs are threatened under the current administration, Mann said. "Continued funding to support research is critical," he said, "and here, again, we encounter a very unfavorable political environment where fossil fuel-beholden politicians that run the White House and Congress are doing everything they can to defund and suppress research on climate change science and impact assessments."

Links
Posted by at No comments :
Labels:
Subscribe to: Posts ( Atom )

Lethal Heating is a citizens' initiative