Global Warming - Right & Wrong

JohnInCarolina

The reality of what we're up against:

https://www.reuters.com/sustainability/boards-policy-regulation/global-energy-co2-emissions-reached-record-high-last-year-report-says-2025-06-25/

The real concern is that we are just moving too slowly.  As a species, we can't seem to turn the fossil fuels cruise liner around fast enough.

JohnInCarolina

Link to full article (and a reminder that removepaywalls.com continues to work well):

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2025/06/30/climate/china-clean-energy-power.html

JohnInCarolina

Legume

The dumbest sh!t coming from the dumbest people elected by dumbest people. It's just embarrassing how badly people got scammed.

Edith

As heatwaves become more intense with climate change, scientists are racing to understand how extreme heat changes the way our brains work.

When Jake was five months old, he had his first tonic-clonic seizure, his little body stiffening and then jerking rapidly. "It was extremely hot, he had overheated and we witnessed what we thought would be the scariest thing we would ever see," says his mother, Stephanie Smith. "Unfortunately, it wasn't."

Seizures began to crop up often in hot weather. As soon as the stifling, humid days of summer would arrive, the family would resort to all kinds of cooling methods and a fierce battle to keep the seizures at bay would ensue.

https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20250731-how-heatwaves-affect-our-brains

Buckwoody Egger

https://www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/an-interview-with-the-national-weather-services-former-director-of-feels-like

just in case— this is a satire humor site 

Gulfcoastguy

https://insideevs.com/news/768661/ev-charger-funding-nevi-unblocked/

Let’s see if states follow through.

JohnInCarolina

Gulfcoastguy said:

https://insideevs.com/news/768661/ev-charger-funding-nevi-unblocked/

Let’s see if states follow through.

Interesting change of heart from the feds.  My skeptical side says there must be some Trump donor who has a vested interest in contributing to the construction of these charging networks.   

Gulfcoastguy

From another article a judge was the one who made the actual decision.

JohnInCarolina

Gulfcoastguy said:

From another article a judge was the one who made the actual decision.

This crew hasn't shown much interest in respecting the decisions made by judges, unless they're from the Supreme Court.  

Gulfcoastguy

https://cleantechnica.com/2025/08/12/us-unlocks-frozen-ev-charging-funds/

For another viewpoint. I basically believe that the authors viewpoint on the contract changes is correct if not exactly for the reasons stated. Having managed federal contracts with DBI clauses I can tell you that they can be a real PITA. Frequently there are no disadvantaged businesses to perform subcontracts on highly technical projects. It particularly reminds me of one certain project that is best left undiscussed. 

The requirement for building chargers in disadvantaged areas was several years later in NEVI.
It reminds me of a boss that used to “randomly “ drop by my project at 9:15 every other Tuesday. He was determined to find something wrong. So I would leave something very minor for him to discover and lead him right by it. I called it “selling wolf tickets “.  It was something so minor that he would have looked ridiculous writing it up but by gosh he found something wrong. Then I would have peace for the next 2 weeks to solve real problems.

Botch

Gulfcoastguy said:

https://cleantechnica.com/2025/08/12/us-unlocks-frozen-ev-charging-funds/

It reminds me of a boss that used to “randomly “ drop by my project at 9:15 every other Tuesday. He was determined to find something wrong. So I would leave something very minor for him to discover and lead him right by it. I called it “selling wolf tickets “.  It was something so minor that he would have looked ridiculous writing it up but by gosh he found something wrong. Then I would have peace for the next 2 weeks to solve real problems.

OMGWTFBBQ, I had the exact same boss, except he (a LtCol) was a wordsmith.  At the time I was the OIC for the Tech Engineering Flight at the 321st ICBM Missile Wing at GFAFB.  I had to write a LOT of performance reports for the NCOs working for me, and he would constantly send them back to me with "corrections", in red ink.  His constant edits finally triggered me, and I set up a computer spreadsheet, to keep track of his edits; his ultimate record was changing "that" to "which", and then back to "that", fifteen times, FIFTEEN times, FIFTEEN times, FIFTEEN TIMES, before the performance report was allowed to advance up the chain.  I blew up, and had a screaming match with him in his office (my immediate supervisor, a Major, was not present).  
Needless to say, I was not promoted to Major the next year.  End of that career.  Of the four of us senior Capts, only two were (one was a good officer but did not have a Master's degree, supposedly a requirement) and the other was a kiss-ass who had an Article 15 in his record.  Those were the two who got promoted.  ****.  
Bla-bla-bla, shut up Botch. Sorry about the rant, but I feel a bit lighter now.  G'night.  

Gulfcoastguy

My boss was somewhere between you in me in height, bald headed with a goatee, and liked to wear turtlenecks. I used to say that he wore them to hide the circumcision scar. Also known as the D with ears.

Gulfcoastguy

And the official government statement.

https://www.transportation.gov/briefing-room/president-trumps-transportation-secretary-sean-p-duffy-unveils-revised-nevi-guidance

JohnInCarolina

JFC

JohnInCarolina

Gulfcoastguy

https://insideevs.com/news/769797/ev-b

JohnInCarolina

Gulfcoastguy

It's a long video but Katrina's 20th anniversary is August 29th.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M4cMXBmiLRo

JohnInCarolina

Botch

Really interesting story on PBS Newshour tonight, about a place in SoCal called Paradise Valley, where they've been squatting on much of the water rights to the Colorado River, since the early 1900's.  The area provides much of the veggies and fruit for the US during the winter months, but they are also providing more and more alfalfa for Asia and the Middle East (think I posted a similar story about Saudi Arabia buying up a lot of the ground-water rights in AZ for the same purpose); that bulky material is then shipped by air to feed cattle on the other side of the planet, to raise beef locally.  
 
With the amount of snowpack in the Rockies dwindling now due to Global Warming, many questions are being raised about the logic of pushing so much of this dwindling water supply to a hot, arid desert in SoCal where water loss via evaporation/inefficiencies (Paradise Valley is below sea level, so no pumping/piping is required but the open canals are very inefficient/lossy).  
 
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/california-farms-face-pressure-to-boost-efficiency-as-water-supply-declines
 
This was the right thread to post this in, I think.  I can't help but wonder (and it'd make a great college thesis) what the monetary, and the carbon-footprint, cost comparison would look like between:
a)  delivering a pound of wagyu beef to a saudi refrigerator, by raising a cow on Montana grasslands, butchering it there, and flying the "pound of flesh" halfway across the world, versus
b)  Losing a bunch of snowpack water to a very inefficient irrigation system, harvesting that alfalfa with petro-fueled machinery, packing this bulky material onto an airliner and flying it to the middle east, feeding cattle there with the half-dried-out feed, plus obtaining water for the cows, then butchering and delivery.  
Things that make you go "Hmmm"... 

Gulfcoastguy

I could look up a link but to summarize Iran is about out of water.

Gulfcoastguy

US nuclear power news.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=iy-e1d6N85c&pp=ugUEEgJlbg%3D%3D

Botch

HCR, a week ago:
 

Economist Paul Krugman probably didn’t have the Erie Canal in mind today when he wrote about the rise of renewable energy, but he could have. The themes are similar.

In his newsletter, Krugman noted that renewables have grown explosively in the past decade, spurred by what he calls a virtuous circle of falling costs and increasing production. That circle is the result of subsidies that made renewable energy a going concern in the face of fossil fuels. Today, he points out, reports like that of Vice President **** Cheney’s 2001 energy policy task force warning that renewable energy would play a trivial role in the nation’s energy future would be funny if the Trump administration weren’t echoing them.

In fact, as Krugman notes, solar and wind are unstoppable. They produced 15% of the world’s electricity in 2024 and account for 63% of the growth in electricity production since 2019. Green energy will continue to grow even if U.S. policy tries to wrench us back to burning coal, “with important geopolitical implications,” Krugman writes. “China is racing ahead.”

Krugman notes that it was originally Alexander Hamilton who called for government investment in new technologies to enable the economy of the infant United States of America to grow and compete with other nations. But Hamilton was not the only one thinking along those lines.

In the early years of the American republic, trade was carried on largely by water, which was much easier to navigate than the nation’s few rough roads. In 1783, even before the end of the Revolutionary War, George Washington was contemplating how to open “the vast inland navigation of these United States” to trade. In 1785, after the war had ended, Washington became the head of a company created to develop a canal along the Potomac River that would link the eastern seaboard with the Ohio Valley, bypassing the waterfalls and currents that made navigation treacherous. But under the Articles of Confederation then in place, the country’s states were sovereign, and there was no system for managing the waterways that traversed them.

In 1785, representatives from Maryland and Virginia agreed on a plan for navigation on the Potomac and other local waterways, as well as for commerce regulations and debt collection. Virginia delegates then invited representatives from all the states to another meeting on commercial issues to take place in Annapolis, Maryland, on September 11, 1786. That second meeting called for a constitutional convention to discuss possible improvements to the Articles of Confederation.

Delegates met in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, in the summer of 1787. They produced the United States Constitution.

With a new, stronger government in place, lawmakers and business leaders turned back to the idea of investing in infrastructure to facilitate economic development. Lawmakers in New York worried that settlers in the western part of the state would move their produce north to Lake Ontario and the St. Lawrence River into Canada, breaking the region off from the United States. The vast lands around the Great Lakes would naturally follow.

New York legislators asked Congress to appropriate money to build a canal across the state from the Hudson River to Lake Erie (avoiding Lake Ontario to keep traders away from Montreal). But while Congress did pass creating a fund to construct roads and canals across the nation, President James Madison vetoed it, despite his previous support for internal improvements. His opposition helped to spur support within New York for the state to fund the project on its own.

And so in 1817, after legislators under Governor De Witt Clinton funded the project, workers broke ground on what would become the Erie Canal.

To build the canal, untrained engineers figured out how to cut through forest, swamps, and wilderness to carve a 363-mile path through the heart of New York state. Workers dug a 40-foot-wide, 4-foot-deep canal and built 83 locks to move barges and vessels through a rise of 568 feet from the Hudson River to Lake Erie. The project became the nation’s first engineering school, and those trained in it went on to other development projects.

Detractors warned that in Clinton’s “big ditch would be buried the treasure of the State, to be watered by the tears of posterity.” But after it was completed in 1825, the project paid for itself within a few years. Before the canal, shipping a ton of goods from Buffalo to New York City cost more than 19 cents a mile; once a trader could send goods by the canal, the price dropped to less than 3 cents a mile. By 1860 the cost had dropped to less than a penny.

The canal speeded up human travel, too: what had been a two-week trip from Albany to Buffalo in a crowded stagecoach became a five-day boat journey in relative comfort. As trade and travel increased, new towns sprang up along the canal: Syracuse, Rochester, Lockport.

The Erie Canal cemented the ties of the Great Lakes region to the United States. As goods moved east toward New York City and the Atlantic Ocean, people moved west along the canal and then across the Great Lakes. They spread the customs of New England and New York into Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Michigan, Wisconsin, Iowa, and Minnesota, bringing explosive growth that would, by the 1850s, clash with southerners moving north.

But in fall 1825, that cataclysm was a generation away, and New Yorkers marked the completion of the canal with celebrations, cannon fire, and a ceremony with Governor Clinton pouring a keg of water from Lake Erie into the Atlantic.

The festivities began on October 26, 1825, exactly 200 years before economist Krugman wrote about the importance of government support for renewable energy, demonstrating that the more things change, the more they stay the same.

fishlessman

arent we done with global warming.....seems like so turn of the century news.....

JohnInCarolina

Most Americans have no idea what China is doing with solar.  It’s truly remarkable.

fishlessman

AI has a heart warming take on climate change

Reversing climate change is a complex process that would take centuries, even if emissions stopped today

JohnInCarolina

fishlessman said:

AI has a heart warming take on climate change

Reversing climate change is a complex process that would take centuries, even if emissions stopped today

fishlessman

AI > SCIENTISTS

JohnInCarolina

fishlessman said:

AI > SCIENTISTS

Who do you think created AI in the first place?  Troll harder or smarter please.