Global warming, climate change, all these things are just a dream come true for politicians. I deal with evidence and not with frightening computer models because the seeker after truth does not put his faith in any consensus. The road to the truth is long and hard, but this is the road we must follow. People who describe the unprecedented comfort and ease of modern life as a climate disaster, in my opinion have no idea what a real problem is.
“A few days ago, a recent Washington Post article highlighted the growing chorus of scientists who increasingly view climate change as an emergency. I count myself among them. What has shifted my perspective? …” (- Andrew Dessler, last month)
“The worst-case scenarios of climate change are truly terrible, but even middle-of-the-road scenarios portend environmental change without precedent for human society.” (- Andrew Dessler, 2012)
So professor/activist Andrew Desslernow believes we are in a climate emergency? I think not. He has been alarming for many years, if not for decades. Dessler has been exaggerating for so long that he now wants a “it’s-real-this-time” do-over. Buyer beware.
A First Impression
The Andy Dessler I met for lunch on Monday, January 18, 2010, in College Station told the table (Gerald North presiding) that humans would be living underground because of anthropogenic global warming.
Twelve years ago, Dessler opined to the readers of the Houston Chronicle that Texas’s “hellish summer of 2011” would be the new normal. “Get used to it,” he said. “The weather of the 21st century will be very much like the hot and dry weather of 2011.” Another outlier finally happened in 2023, but for reasons that scientists are still trying to ascertain since the “greenhouse signal” is less about Texas summer afternoons than Siberian winter nights.
So when was the climate not in red alert? Dessler opened his text Introduction to Modern Climate Change (2012) with this paragraph:
Future generations may well view climate change as the defining issue of our time. The worst-case scenarios of climate change are truly terrible, but even middle-of-the-road scenarios portend environmental change without precedent for human society.
Deep Fried Alarmism
In 2019, Andy tweeted on “climate dystopia”:
If “some humans survive” is the only thing we care about, then climate change is a non-issue. I think it’s certain that “some” humans will survive almost any climate change. They may be living short, hard lives of poverty, but they’ll be alive.
Future humans, as they live in a climate dystopia: “I thought he cared about the environment”.
I find the path we’re on now — the rich world survives (if lucky), but abandons everyone else — to be morally problematic.
In public, the alarmist’s alarmist tones it down just a bit (don’t want to lose the audience, just discomfort them). But not that much. Also in 2019, Dessler editorialized in the Houston Chronicle: “With continued fossil fuel use, we might see warming over the current century sufficient to literally remake the Earth’s environment and our place within it.”
You get the story. Dessler’s alarm is old vinegar in a new bottle. In view of the historical record, his readers should be cautious.
Conclusion
Andrew Dessler’s substack posts are polite these days. But here is what this hot-tempered professor (even out of step with many of his colleagues), really thinks and says when folks are not looking:
Hey assholes. We’ve been telling you for decades that this was going to happen if we didn’t reduce greenhouse gas emissions. You didn’t listen and now it’s all happening. We hope you’re happy. Enjoy the heatwaves, intense rainfall, sea level rise, ocean acidification, and many other things, you fucking morons.
What an embarrassment … to Texas A&M, the science profession, and himself.
There’s no real argument in favour of offshore wind power, and plenty of serious arguments against. Start with the absolutely staggering cost, which has major proponents demanding even greater subsidies from taxpayers and/or higher prices in the guaranteed power contracts they ink with governments. With governments increasingly refusing to play ball, proponents are simply dropping their grand offshore projects.
The knock-on effect for wind turbine manufacturers such as Siemens is little short of catastrophic: Siemens Energy shares plummeted 40% last week, slashing 3 billion euros ($3.16 billion) off its market value, after Siemens revealed it was demanding billions in government backed guarantees from the German government. In short, things have never looked worse.
Then there is the mounting opposition to offshore wind, coming from sensible energy advocates, situated onshore. As to which, here’s a story from the Great Lakes Advocate about plans to spear hundreds of these things off the New South Wales coast.
Dr Gillespie recently joined close to 2000 people, and addressed an anti-wind farm rally in Port Stephens Great Lakes Advocate 22 October 2023
Wind farms are not the solution for retiring baseload generators, Member for Lyne, David Gillespie says.
Sharing his opposition to a proposed offshore windfarm in Port Stephens, Dr Gillespie said they would increase grid instability, destroy the environment and result in an increase in electricity costs.
He said this trillion dollar-plus energy plan was something the country could not afford.
Dr Gillespie recently joined close to 2000 people, and addressed an anti-wind farm rally in Port Stephens.
“I can assure all of the people who have expressed their concerns about this project that I am absolutely opposed to this development which will have a significant negative impact on our region and the people of Australia,” Dr Gillespie said.
Both locally and in many locations where these developments have been proposed, communities continue to oppose them for many good and practical reasons, and it is extremely disappointing the lack of consultation in the preparation of these projects, he said.
He said the Port Stephens project would pose a serious navigational risk for local and international shipping and boating, as well as the wind farms during storms and tempest.
The feasibility studies and the eventual project would detrimentally impact whale and dolphin (cetacean) acoustics, migration and pod behaviour, while marine bird life would suffer like they have on land-based wind farms, he said.
Dr Gillespie said there would be enormous financial cost on the multi-million dollar local commercial fishing industry, commercial freighters, blue water and the tourism economy.
“On land, the significant environmental and aesthetic impact will be felt with the connecting, high-voltage grid, which is likely to travel through the pristine Great Lakes and Myall Coast native bush, environmental and agricultural land.
“This will have a very significant cost, which electricity payers will subsidise through higher grid and electricity prices.
“The whole proposal is outrageously uneconomic and relies on subsidies via Large Scale Renewable Energy Certificates, which you pay on your rising electricity bills.”
He said new baseload replacement power was urgently required to create 28,000 kilometres of new power lines through the countryside.
The landscape would resemble an industrial park of wind turbines and solar panels.
“This trillion dollar-plus energy plan is something we simply cannot afford.”
Dr Gillespie said existing power stations should be maintained until they can be replaced by new zero-emission nuclear technology.
As coal-fired power plants are retired, they could be replaced at those sites with modern modular nuclear power plants which can be plugged into the existing grid which will avoid the economic an environmental mess the federal government will create if they continue to pursue their 100 per cent renewable agenda, Dr Gillespie said.
“I will be continuing to raise this matter in parliament and do all I can to stop it and I am encouraging everyone in the community to hold all federal and state Labor ministers and MPs, Greens and Independents to account for their failure to listen and apply simple commonsense.” Great Lakes Advocate
Electric vehicles (EVs) are a poster child for the so-called green transition. Even in some of the world’s poorest economies, an unquestioning embrace of all things “green” on the part of political elites powers a push for the adoption of electric vehicles.
Africa — considered to be the least developed continent — is inundated with a plethora of programs and voices fervently promoting EVs as its nations struggle with a gazillion existential issues stemming from the cruel fact that nearly half the population lives in poverty.
EV advocates lobby for subsidies to manufacturers, retailers, and purchasers of electric vehicles with no apparent consideration of the continent’s extremely poor access to electricity. Neither is there acknowledgement that a majority of Africans cannot afford conventional cars let alone pricey battery-powered ones.
No Country for Fancy Toys
A report from World Bank’s Energy Sector Management Assistance Programme (ESMAP) states that “the power system infrastructure [in developing countries] especially continues to provide defective services and is vulnerable to external shock.”
“Grids, on both transmission and distribution levels, are, in many cases, unreliable because of inadequate capacity, lack of maintenance and reinforcement, and a host of other operational issues,” the report said.
The upshot is grids in a majority of African nations are not able to support EV adoption. It is estimated that sub-Sahara Africa experiences nine power outages every month, each lasting for more than five hours. This is hardly service sufficiently adequate to make EVs reliable for daily transportation.
Reuters notes that even Africa’s most developed economy, South Africa, is “facing its worst power crisis on record, with a persistent electricity shortfall necessitating daily scheduled rolling blackouts — known locally as loadshedding — of up to 10 hours, for the past 18 months.” It’s ironic that the home country of the world’s largest EV car company owner (Elon Musk) has a decrepit power supply system.
Those experiencing blackouts at least have some access to electrical service. There are many others who have none.
According to the International Energy Agency, “The number of people without electricity (in sub-Saharan Africa) is almost back to historic highs, increasing from 580 million in 2019 to reach 600 million in 2022.” In the Central African Republic, only 6% of the entire population had access to electricity.
As of 2022, less than half of the population in the region had access to electricity. IEA’s data suggests that 660 million globally are projected to remain without electricity in 2030, “of which 85% or about 560 million people will be in Sub-Saharan Africa.”
In other words, we are dealing with a population that is yet to have electricity for basic lighting and appliances. Moreover, the situation will not improve substantially any time soon.
Sub-Saharan Africa’s poverty is another major barrier to the region’s widespread adoption of electric vehicles. The cost of even electric bikes is generally higher than that of their gasoline-powered counterparts. For many prospective buyers, this is a major deterrent.
Even if we are to assume that buyers will save money on fuel, most Sub-Saharan Africans simply cannot afford the upfront costs of electric vehicles. For most people in this region, internal combustion engines are a more practical option due to their relative affordability, superior availability of spare parts and ease of refuelling.
In Sub-Saharan Africa, the push for electric vehicles is a diversion from the region’s more urgent problems. First among these is the people’s well documented poverty followed by related challenges such as inadequate electrification, unreliable power service, and the urgent need to address basic sanitation, nutrition, freshwater access, conventional mobility and economic development.
With General Motors and Ford Motor Co. cutting back EV production because of slow sales in the U.S. — the richest country on Earth — the promotion of EVs to Africans looks all the more ridiculous.
Originally first published at Real Clear Energy on November 05, 2023
Vijay Jayaraj is a Research Associate at the CO2 Coalition, Arlington, Virginia. He holds a master’s degree in environmental sciences from the University of East Anglia, UK.
This week on “Climate Change Roundtable,” host Anthony Watts and panelists Linnea Lueken and H. Sterling Burnett will discuss the the big white elephant in the climate room: urban heat islands (UHI), a significant but often overlooked topic in climate science. This phenomenon has been known for decades, yet climate advocates often dismiss it as either insignificant or claim to adjust for it when, in reality, they do not.
Joining us will be Dr. Roy Spencer from the University of Alabama in Huntsville. He will talk about his new UHI dataset, which not only demonstrates the strong effect in the United States but also in other parts of the world. He has discovered some remarkable findings that we’ll illustrate with maps.
Tune in to Climate Change Roundtable #87 for a discussion on URBAN HEAT ISLAND EFFECT – Dramatic New Findings! We’ll also cover the week’s crazy climate news and take your questions.
“Climate Change Roundtable” is live every Friday at 12 PM CT/1 PM ET. Be sure to join the live show and leave your questions for our panelists. If you want to ensure your question is addressed, submit it as a super chat, and we guarantee we will cover it.
Governor Newsom directives increase California’s dependency on foreign crude oil to support the State’s international and military airports, and shipping terminals.
Governor Newsom directives increase California’s dependency on foreign crude oil to support the State’s international and military airports, and shipping terminals.
Ronald Steinis an engineer, senior policy advisor on energy literacy for the Heartland Institute and CFACT, and co-author of the Pulitzer Prize nominated book “Clean Energy Exploitations.”
Historically, California has been successfully reducing in-state oil production over the decades and has increased crude oil imports from foreign countries from 5 percent in 1992 to more than 75 percent today to meet the California consumption demand.
California has more than 140 airports with huge fuel demands of more than 13 billion gallons of aviation fuel per year that includes these major airports:
9 International airports
41 Military airports
In addition, California has three of the largest shipping ports in America, with #1 Los Angeles. #2 Long Beach, and #7 Oakland. Ships arriving and departing from the shipping ports up and down the coast from San Diego to San Francisco require massive amounts of lower grade bunker fuels.
While California is pursuing the elimination of crude oil production, China has no intentions of abandoning its economic, military, or strategic ambitions – all of which rely on crude oil. Asia is the region with the greatest number of future petroleum refineries. As of 2021, there were 88 new facilities in planning or under construction in Asia.
The California Air Quality Management District (AQMD) policies have the potential to further reduce in-state refinery capacity, so the State can be more dependent on Asia for the fuels and petrochemical demands of the State.
Shockingly, Newsom has yet to inform the citizens of the State, and the citizens of America, as to how he expects the States’ airports, military, and shipping ports to continue operating without the fuels for planes and ships.
Without the feedstock of crude oil to the California refineries to be processed into fuels to meet the demands of the 9 International Airports, 41 Military Airports, and 3 of the largest shipping ports in America, what is Governor Newsom’s’ explanation to all Americans as to how the 4th largest economy in California is not a security risk for the entire country?
With Governor Newsom having high expectations of being the Democratic nominee for the Presidency of the United States, maybe he can explain to those at the Democratic National Convention in August 2024, how California, under his leadership for 8 years, is now a national security risk with the following two subjects that he has led and campaigned for:
Importing more than 75 percent of the state’s demand for crude oil for current in-state refineries to refine into fuels for California’s 9 International airports, 41 Military airports, and 3 of the largest shipping terminals in America, and
Constantly reducing in-state refining capacity to refine fuels and petrochemicals for the materialistic demands of society.
Petrochemicals have been driving oil demand in recent years but that could all change if new restrictions come into place to curb the production of plastics and other products. With more than 6 billion on this planet making less than $10 a day that wish to join the industrial revolution, the global demand for petrochemicals has been gradually rising over the last two decades, as an increasing number of consumers spend on petrochemical-derived products.
With more in-state refinery closures imminent under Newsom’s watch, California can look toward Asia’s 88 new refineries for the manufactured fuels used by California’s 9 International airports, 41 Military airports, and 3 of the largest shipping terminals in America for manufactured oil derivatives that are the basis of most products in our materialistic society,
Even to the uneducated, such blatant dependency on foreign countries for crude oil and fuels to pass through three of the busiest shipping ports in America, all located on the coastline of the 4th largest economy in the world, California is a national security risk for the entire United States of America!
The world’s top management consultancy McKinsey & Company is using its position as a key advisor to the UN’s COP28 climate talks to push the interests of its big oil and gas clients, undermining efforts to end the use of the fossil fuels driving global warming, according to multiple sources and leaked documents. Behind closed doors, the US-based firm has proposed future energy scenarios to the agenda setters of the summit that are at odds with the climate goals it publicly espouses.
Top consultancy undermining climate change fight: whistleblowers
November 8, 2023 – 3:42AM
The world’s top management consultancy McKinsey & Company is using its position as a key advisor to the UN’s COP28 climate talks to push the interests of its big oil and gas clients, undermining efforts to end the use of the fossil fuels driving global warming, according to multiple sources and leaked documents.
Behind closed doors, the US-based firm has proposed future energy scenarios to the agenda setters of the summit that are at odds with the climate goals it publicly espouses, an AFP investigation has found.
An “energy transition narrative” drafted by the firm and obtained by AFP only reduces oil use by 50 percent by 2050, and calls for trillions in new oil and gas investment per year from now until then.
…
“But it was very clear from an early stage that McKinsey had a conflict of interest,” said a source who took part in COP28 presidency discussions.
“They would give advice at the highest levels that was not in the best interest of the COP president as the leader of a multilateral climate agreement, but in the best interest of the COP president as the CEO of one of the region’s biggest oil and gas companies.”
The earth is growing greener. Globally, more food is being grown today than ever. How does a so-called Green Agenda advocate for policies that would stop this? Much of the populated parts of the planet may be experiencing a climate optimum.
We are told every day how bad it is. Well, for most, it is not bad at all, it’s ideal. In fact, much of the populated parts of the planet may be experiencing a climate optimum.
A climate emergency is deception, distortion, and delusion. as I put in one of my previous blogs:
Check this headline out from one of the leaders of the meteo misinformation media:
So, how do you explain this?
But I want you to look at this:
This is the map of all the weather stations around the world
I would say it is likely 90% of the world population (probably more) live in this area, In addition, the areas that are not covered are the driest areas on the planet (some coldest) where the addition of water vapor (WV) if one simply looks at saturation mixing ratios correlates to more warming where it’s coldest and driest (and also almost perfectly aligned to the observed rise over the last 30 years). This points the finger directly at water vapor, which increases due to oceanic warming, which I can argue is driven by geothermal forcing in the decadal sense (obviously, if we are looking at longer stretches, it is the sun) and which is backed up by this interesting paper that seems to have been swept under the rug:
But you have heard me rant about all this for quite some time.
But referring to the map above with the saturation of global weather stations, how is that large an area of the planet and with the people living in that area, only .11F above average, anywhere close to an emergency?
Again, remember all this warming is the product of cumulative increases in Sea Surface Temperature (SST) and WV since 1990 and the onset of increased geothermal input.
The greatest of that warming has occurred in the areas where there are no weather stations, and it is the driest and coldest.
Again, the weather station map:
You can’t make this up as to how deceptive pushing the idea that it is getting worse for people is.
The Marxist ideology-driven green agenda is asking you to believe them and not your lying eyes. You have heard me refer to the warming that has spiked due to the volcanic input from last year (that ripped the band-aid off the scab of deception) and this El Nino coming on, all on top of the 30-year oceanic warming as our San Jacinto. It is the battlefield we want. There is no way man-made climate change could have caused this spike. But it’s also a Waterloo. Since the debunking of all this would stop the runaway train driven by a mixture of ideology, politics, and economics, which has become a fanatical religion, with the intent of getting the world under control … not of weather and climate, that’s impossible, but of a select group of elitists that embody perfectly what HL Mencken (a democrat btw) said years ago.
(note. Mencken has been accused of being a racist.) Notice his political affiliation. See Mark Levins’s outstanding new book (redundant, they all are), The Democratic Party Hates America. He outlines that part of all this since it has become apparent, so-called environmental justice and its implication to race is being linked to climate. What a stinking sewer they have turned the weather into, it’s unreal.)
Along with Orwellian ideas, spot on right. And this whole green agenda is exactly that.
Joe Bastardi is a pioneer in extreme weather and long-range forecasting.
He is the author of “The Climate Chronicles: Inconvenient Revelations You Won’t Hear From Al Gore — and Others” which you can purchase at the CFACT bookstore.
His new book The Weaponization of Weather in the Phony Climate war can be found here.
The Climate Change Committee uses a specific economic model to look at the effects of the planned energy transition. This is sensible; no one can even dream of what the economic effects of something are going to be without having some model of human behaviour to aid in logical thinking. The interesting question is whether the correct model is being used and whether, therefore, we gain useful results.
The answer here, in the grand and overall sense, is “no”. This is simply because, in the model being used, it is assumed, at the start, that government spending and government intervention will grow the economy. Therefore the result of the model calculations — showing that government intervention and spending will grow the economy — is not an interesting one. We have here petitio principii, or the logical fallacy of “begging the question”. We have assumed at the beginning the thing which we now claim to be our result.
If we assume that roses are red and then find that roses are red we have not exactly advanced human understanding by that finding.
The model, which comes from Cambridge Econometrics, includes in its underlying assumptions amusements such as this:
A particular feature of the UK economy is the high proportion of imports in the supply of oil and gas. As the economy transitions from ongoing spending on imported oil and gas in favour of low-carbon domestic investments, leakage from the UK economy is reduced and the implied economic multiplier increases, leading to increases in GDP and employment”
That treatment of imports as “leakage” is arguable, and adherents of most standard theories would argue with it. However, in terms of pure GDP accounting it is correct – imports are a deduction from GDP, while exports are an addition to it. We’d not support this in a general or useful sense as a truth, but in the accounting it works.
Well, OK. That means that if we issue more North Sea licences, or go fracking, then we will gain the same effect upon the economy. Even if all of that fracked gas is exported (it won’t be) so that domestic gas prices don’t fall (they would), we still gain that effect on GDP: imports are reduced, exports are increased, GDP rises.
This is not, therefore, a useful justification of a move to renewables, for an intensification of fossil fuel production leads to the same result.
We can also point out that this is a minor league version of what is wrong with the modelling as a whole. We wish to find out what are the economic effects of more renewables? Things that can be achieved by not just more renewables, but also by fewer, cannot be ascribed as “effects of renewables”. We can – and should – therefore reject the trade effects – fewer imports of oil and gas – argued here concerning renewables. Not because they won’t happen, but because they’re not caused by renewables. They’re an effect of more domestic energy production of any kind – nuclear would achieve the same result just as well and also in a carbon neutral manner.
Here’s another of Cambridge Econometrics’ views:
Of dynamic innovation, as low-carbon technologies are invested in at scale the costs fall significantly. The cost of renewable energy technologies has already fallen significantly beyond most expectations”
That’s also a lovely assumption. If we have more of something, with more investment, then the costs will fall. But that then also applies to – say – fracking or nuclear. France certainly built a nuclear fleet on a cost per reactor basis very much cheaper than other places did. They did this by building a fleet, not one power station at a time. But again, this is something which is true of many technologies; it is not something specific to renewables.
Then there’s this:
Moreover, given a likely continued slowdown in the UK economy because of Covid-19 and Brexit, there is more scope than ever for a green economic stimulus. During these times of higher unemployment and low interest rates, there is a strong economic rationale for the government to invest heavily to bring about the transition directly. This would lead to an even faster transition and stronger economic performance.”
Well, yes. Many an economic forecast has been brought low by MacMillan’s “Events, dear boy, events”. Such as the fact that, since the release of this analysis, the major British macroeconomic problem has been inflation due to excessive stimulation of the economy by government. So we might also want to park that justification to one side.
We don’t need to get down and dirty with their socioeconomic assumptions, with their predictions for which technologies will mature at what price. For these are not the things that drive their finding. They’re not even the things that drive the model. That trade effect, which we now know we shouldn’t use, is a heavy driver of the outcome.
We do, however, need to consider the base problem with the very nature of the analysis. No model, ever, encapsulates all that happens in reality. Every model is an abstraction of a few principles that we wish to examine. This must be true, for if it weren’t then we’d not be using a model, we’d be examining reality. What matters, therefore, is in the selection of the model. We need one that explores the effect of the specific action we wish to explore.
But that’s exactly what this research does not do. As above, we’ve a begging of the question instead.
What we want to know is whether government spending upon the renewables transition makes us richer or not. Therefore we need to use a model that is equivocal – or possibly even neutral – about the effect of government spending. Only if we start from the point that government spending is neutral can we then go on to ask whether government spending on windmills (or, to be less perjorative, the green transition) is beneficial. This is a piece of logic that should be obvious but sadly does need to be spelt out.
That’s because the model that is being used here assumes that government spending grows the economy. The results gained from the model do not, in fact, distinguish between spending upon green or upon anything else. The effect is purely driven by that original assumption: that more is better.
The details of the economic model being used are at E3ME (or here for the full gory detail). In this model – whether they’re right or wrong as assumptions – we find these two:
Markets are subject to frictions in both the short- and long-runs; prices do not automatically balance supply and demand.
There is usually spare capacity in the economy, including, for example, unemployed workers.
Both lead inexorably to the conclusion that government spending increases GDP. It’s simply what they mean. The conclusion is therefore baked in with the initial assumptions. It doesn’t matter what the spending is upon either; the stimulus still happens. So, government spending upon fracking has the same effect as government spending upon renewables. But the Cambridge Econometrics result is presented as if government spending upon renewables will – uniquely – expand GDP.
Which leaves us with just the one final observation. E3ME is a widely used model among EU types who would like to see more government control of investment activity – as the model creators themselves boast. Meanwhile, the model assumes that more government control of investment is a good idea, and thus gives results that suggest that…more government control of investment is a good idea. Funny the people who think that more government control of investment is a good idea like to use it, isn’t it?
Nov. 6, 2023: (Spaceweather.com) During this past weekend’s strong G3-class geomagnetic storm, low-latitude auroras spread as far south as Texas and Arizona. Upon further review, most of those lights were not auroras at all. Everything red in this montage is an “SAR arc”:
Credits: Texas (Anita Oakley); Missouri (Dan Bush); New York (James Perez-Rogers); Arizona (Jeremy Perez)
“This was a new phenomenon to me,” says Jeremy Perez, who took the Arizona picture. “I had never heard of SARs before, but I kept shooting anyway.”
SAR arcs were discovered in 1956 at the beginning of the Space Age. Researchers didn’t know what they were and unwittingly gave them a misleading name: “Stable Auroral Red arcs” or SAR arcs. In fact, SAR arcs are neither stable nor auroras.
Auroras appear when charged particles rain down from space, hitting the atmosphere and causing it to glow. SAR arcs form differently. They are a sign of heat energy leaking into the upper atmosphere from Earth’s ring current system–a donut-shaped circuit carrying millions of amps around our planet.
An artist’s concept of Earth’s ring current, quiet (left) and active (right) [more]
“On Nov. 5th, the ring current was pumped up by hours of strong geomagnetic storming, with energy dissipating into these SAR arcs,” says Jeff Baumgardner of Boston University’s Center for Space Physics. “It was a global event. Our cameras registered SAR arc activity from Italy to New Zealand.”
Recent research has linked SAR arcs to another phenomenon that is not an aurora: STEVE. The mauve ribbon in the sky was not originally thought to have anything to do with Earth’s ring current. Yet in 2015, observers in New Zealand caught a bright red SAR arc transforming itself into STEVE like a caterpillar into a butterfly.
On Nov. 5th, Mark Savage may have witnessed the same metamorphosis over Northumberland, UK:
Visible to the naked eye, STEVE materialized from an overhanging red arc. “The entire process took about 10 minutes,” says Savage. This timescale roughly matches that of another SAR-to-STEVE transition observed over Canada in April 2022. Clearly, the two phenomena are linked, but researchers aren’t sure how.
“The connection is still elusive,” says Carlos Martinis, a leading researcher in the field at Boston University. “Sometimes SAR arcs evolve into STEVE–but not always. This is a very active field of research, involving citizen scientists and researchers.”
An incredible trend that you never hear about. In 2023 floods are far less of a threat to people and the economy than they were back in the 1940s when they were considered a major national problem.
Everything is getting worse, right? Flooding especially. NPR tells us that:
Heavier rainstorms driven by global warming are sending more water into residential neighborhoods from the Gulf Coast to New England to Appalachia to the Pacific Northwest.
Not only is the conventional wisdom on flooding wrong, data show that flood impacts as measured by direct economic losses have actually decreased by about 90% since 1940 as a proportion of U.S. GDP. The United States is in fact more resilient to flooding than it has ever been. The reduction in flood impacts is an incredible story of success sitting out in plain sight that is completely ignored, in favor of stories that instead tell us that down is up.
The figure below shows U.S. annual flood damage as a proportion of GDP. In 1940 flood losses amounted to a 2023 equivalent of about $50 billion per year, and in 2022 they totalled about $5 billion, a reduction of over 90%.¹
As Pielke notes, economic impacts, whether good or worse, tell us nothing about climate impacts. If you want to analyse them, you need to look at the actual weather and flooding data.
And according to the EPA, there is no evidence that climate change has made flooding worse in the USA. All we see is the usual mixed bag, including increased flooding magnitude in some areas, mainly the Northeast, and decreased magnitude in others.
Figure 1. Change in the Magnitude of River Flooding in the United States, 1965–2015:
This figure shows changes in the size of flooding events in rivers and streams in the United States between 1965 and 2015. Blue upward-pointing symbols show locations where floods have become larger; brown downward-pointing symbols show locations where floods have become smaller. The larger, solid-color symbols represent stations where the change was statistically significant.
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