Going to Hell in a Bucket

“I may be going to hell in a bucket babe, but at least I’m enjoying the ride.” – Grateful Dead, 1983

Since the beginning of the Trump Administration, information about climate change has slowly disappeared from the web sites of the EPA and other government agencies. Trump pulled us out of the Paris Agreement to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. The Department of Interior has aggressively pursued a policy of opening up lands from the Alaska to the Rio Grande as well as our coasts to more oil and gas drilling. The Energy Department is doing everything it can to prop up the dying coal industry.

Now comes an Environmental Impact Statement (EIS) from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) regarding the proposed freezing of fuel efficiency standards for cars and trucks as of 2020.

The EIS paints a damning picture of the impacts to the planet if we continue on our current course of not reigning in CO2, methane, and particulate aerosol emissions. As of today, the EIS states, impacts will be “irreversible on a multi-century to millennial time scale . . . Surface temperatures will remain approximately constant at elevated levels for many centuries after a complete cessation of net anthropogenic CO2 emissions. Because of the long time scales of heat transfer from the ocean surface to depth, ocean warming will continue for centuries.”

The report projects that surface temperatures are projected to rise about 4 degrees C by 2100, which would result in the drowning of coastal cities, the rendering of large portions of South Asia and the Middle East uninhabitable, drastically increasing the frequency of extreme weather events, and so on.

It’s a jaw-droppingly pessimistic analysis. What is even more jaw dropping is that the EIS then concludes that maintaining President Obama’s planned increased fuel standards will not make a significant dent to the basically dire forecast, so therefore there is no reason to implement them.

In other words – why bother?

As Bill McKibben of Middlebury College wrote the other day in the Guardian: “You might as well argue that because you’re going to die eventually, there’s no reason not to smoke a carton of cigarettes a day.”

This proposal dovetails nicely with the administration’s plans to abandon regulations to reign in methane leaks from oil and gas production and transport, to weaken emissions regulations on coal-fired power plants, and to drop rules to limit leaks and discharge of refrigerants, which are far more powerful greenhouse gases than CO2 or methane.

As an aside, weakening coal plant emissions standards will result in over 1000 increased deaths per year from respiratory illness, using EPA’s own estimates. Another aside - the number of extreme weather events causing $1 billion or more in economic losses has increased 400% in the last 40 years.

Why is the administration taking this course? Because regulations cost businesses money. 

What the administration willfully ignores are the mountains of financial data which clearly demonstrate that the economic damage from climate change will be measured in the trillions of dollars between now and the end of the century.

Why do you think most major insurance companies want to us to reign in emissions? Because it will cost them money. Funny how that works.

I have stated in this column several times over the last couple of years that many of the consequences of increased CO2 emissions are baked in, no matter what we do, because CO2’s residence time in the atmosphere is measured in centuries. I have also said that we owe it to our children to not make it worse.

The Trump administration thinks otherwise. Why bother?

The Wild Texas Wind

If you are like most people, as long as you can plug something into the wall and turn it on, you don’t care much where the power comes from. But getting that power to your home or business is a complex process, which consists of all the power plants, transmission lines, and substations that go right to your electric meter, and everything else in between, aka, “the grid.”

Power is transmitted through the grid via alternating current (AC). If you don’t remember (or never had) high school physics, AC power reverses direction many times a second. In our country, that’s a frequency of 60 times a second. If the frequency changes too often and quickly, the grid becomes unstable and could crash. It’s analogous to water sloshing in a bucket. Slosh too much and you can’t keep the water in place.

Unlike other commodities, electricity, for the time being, cannot be stored in the quantities needed to meet fluctuating grid demand, although that issue is being addressed with rapidly developing technology. Power generators and utilities have to make sure that supply and demand are in balance at all times.

The grid in our country is not one big electric distribution system, it is actually three. The Eastern, Western and Texas Interconnections. These systems operate independently from each other.

So where am I going with all this?

One criticism I have gotten about my advocacy of large scale solar and wind is that because the wind doesn’t always blow and the sun doesn’t always shine, large scale alternative energy is not practical. The grid cannot handle the fluctuations. Critics tell me that above 11%, the grid will crash.

Is that assertion true? Actually – no. One of our grids routinely gets about 20% of its power from alternative sources. Which one? Texas. Texas the oil state is also Texas the wind state.

During 2017, 18% of the electricity provided to the Texas grid came from wind power. At times, wind was providing up to 45% of the grid’s power for hours at a time - and surprise, the grid did not crash.

According to a former official at the Oversight & Enforcement Division of the Texas Public Utility Commission, with whom I spoke earlier in the year, Texas manages wind power contributions to the grid with no significant issues. Wind will contribute more to their grid than coal by 2019.

There are still challenges getting wind and solar power integrated into the grid on a sustained basis, including development of sophisticated weather forecasting tools which can be used to predict how much wind and solar energy will be available at a given location, but these tools are being developed and prototyped right now.

In addition, according to the Department of Energy’s National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) the Eastern Interconnection could accommodate up to 30% renewable energy with appropriate operating procedures.

Scaling up the technologies to add even more alternative energy to the grid is going to take time and investment, but there is no reason the US cannot accomplish this task, as long as there is the will to do it.

We are already switching to other sources of energy. Natural gas is filling this gap right now, slowly replacing aging and expensive coal and nuclear power generation facilities with gas turbine generators that can quickly increase or decrease contributions to the grid as needed.

As grid-scale battery storage technology continues to scale up, wind and solar power will be able to charge storage systems, eventually replacing many gas-fired plants which now handle local or regional grid fluctuations. Because natural gas is currently very inexpensive, the switchover will probably be driven by state mandates to decrease emissions.

Many states, Massachusetts among them, are now mandating ever increasing amounts of renewable energy to their power portfolio. Boston’s goal is 100% clean-energy sourced electricity by 2050. These mandates themselves will drive utilities to come up with plans to manage integration of alternative energy. Texas has already been taking this path and its grid operators and generators have responded.

Keeping the grid in balance has always been a matter of monitoring constantly changing demand. If grid operators could not manage this process, we would have blackouts all the time. They handle sudden power losses – such as transmission line failure or a sudden power plant shut downs without missing a beat, so they already have the know how to handle varying supply.

The idea that it is impossible to integrate large-scale wind and solar into the grid does not pass the laugh test, because Texas already does it.

Fire or Flood

Last summer my wife and I were hiking in the Italian Alps near the French border where we met two scientists, an Irish biologist named Chris Allen and an American geologist Allen West, who were there for two very different reasons.

Chris Allen was looking for traces of dung left by Hannibal’s elephants, to prove that the Carthaginian conqueror had come this way in 202 BC on his way to Rome. Allen West was looking for traces of “cosmogenic dust” in an effort to prove that the Earth was thrown back into an ice age by a comet.

I thought their quests were esoteric to say the least (actually Allen West sounded a few cards shy of a full deck), but both were very serious. Sure enough, Chris Allen was the subject of an extensive article in the September 2017 issue of Smithsonian about Hannibal and Allen West was one of the an authors of a major paper about the comet hypothesis in the Journal of Geology.

I don’t know much about Hadrian’s elephants, but I am familiar with the sudden change in climate that occurred when the Earth was coming out of the last ice age 12,800 years ago. Temperatures were almost as warm as today, but in the space of less than 30 years, the Northern Hemisphere cooled by about 10 degrees F, enough to push it back to ice age conditions for about 1,200 years. Glaciologists call this interval the “Younger Dryas”.

But did a comet cause this event?

After overwhelming evidence indicated that an asteroid impact contributed to the extinction of the dinosaurs 66 million years ago, scientists have wondered whether other major geologic events also had extraterrestrial causes. So far, the answer has been no, but it doesn’t stop some people from continuing the search.

An impact cause for the Younger Dryas has actually been kicking around for decades and was the subject of a PBS Nova episode back in 2009. Some researchers, like West, are convinced it happened. Most others aren’t.

We do know that when the continental ice sheets that covered North America 15,000 years ago started to melt, vast fresh water lakes formed, held in place by ice dams. In fact, such a lake once covered Westborough.

The “conventional” explanation is that as when the ice dams in northern and eastern Canada finally gave way, fresh water rapidly flowed into the Arctic and North Atlantic Oceans, eventually shutting down the Gulf Stream and the source of energy which kept the northern Atlantic warm. This idea was recently bolstered by evidence published last July, based on cores collected from the Arctic Ocean north of Canada.

The comet proponents think that the Earth was repeatedly bombarded with fragments of a large disintegrating comet over a short time period. These fragments exploded in the air, like the meteor over Russia in 2013, setting off massive wild fires throughout the northern hemisphere, creating enough dust and soot to cool the atmosphere, triggering the return to cold conditions.

The late Carl Sagan made popular the phrase “Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.” Although West’s paper contain a substantial amount of data, the interpretation of that data still remains suspect and the thesis has major critics, according to a recent article in Science News.

Today, the Gulf Stream is again slowing down, as freshwater from the melting Greenland ice sheet flows into the Northern Atlantic. No one thinks we are about to retreat into another Ice Age given the level of CO2 in the atmosphere but the Arctic climate is clearly in a state of flux.

In fact, the summer Arctic ice pack volume is a whopping 75% lower than it was just 40 years ago. Current predictions are for the Arctic to be ice free in the summer by 2040.

The big lesson from the Younger Dryas is that the Earth’s climate is capable of tipping into a new state, warmer or colder, in a couple of decades if something throws it out of balance.

Given what is happening in the Arctic right now, things are clearly out of balance. Food for thought as record-setting heat waves and wildfires throughout the world are again in the news this summer.

Can 21 Children do What No One Else Can? Maybe

As the Federal Government dithers and ignores the overwhelming evidence and consensus that humans are altering the climate through the use of fossil fuels, municipalities and states throughout the US have taken to the courts, suing fossil fuel producers including Exxon, Shell, and Chevron, seeking damages to pay for mitigation they will be or are being burdened with as the impacts of climate change continue.

Coastal cities up and down the West Coast, from Seattle to San Francisco as well as Boulder, CO, New York City and the State of Rhode Island have filed lawsuits.

The basic arguments in all these filings is that the oil companies knew for decades that their products were causing climate change, yet they actively worked to obfuscate the issue by "orchestrat[ing] a campaign of deception and denial regarding climate change" and thus externalize the environmental costs of their products.

The problem is that several of these lawsuits have been dismissed including those filed by San Francisco, Oakland, and New York, not because the judges did not think the problem is real, but they reasoned that climate change mitigation is a problem to be addressed by Congress and the President, not the courts.

But there is one lawsuit, filed in 2015, that is still going on, and is going to go to trial this fall, despite the best efforts of the Trump Administration to quash it. The defendant is the Federal Government and the plaintiffs are 21 young people, ranging from 11 to 22, who are suing the Federal Government with the goal of forcing the government to address climate change, because they will be irrevocably harmed if nothing is done. The plaintiffs are represented by a non-profit called Our Children’s Trust.

I should note that the suit started under the Obama administration and they too, fought the suit. In fact, the fossil fuel industry, in the guise of the American Petroleum Institute (API) and National Association of Manufacturers (NAM), volunteered to become defendants, in order to bring their legal weight to bear against the plaintiffs.

On July 30^th, the US Supreme Court rejected the Administration’s last gasp request for a stay, and the trial will go forward.

The premise of the suit, Juliana v. US, is that the US Government knew for decades that “burning fossil fuels would destabilize the climate system” but continued to support the fossil fuel industry, ignoring recommended policies and plans of its own agencies and experts to address the issue. This assertion is not in doubt. Reports to the President going back as far as 1965 warned about impending global warming caused by fossil fuel use.

As a result of the failure to take action, the US Government has “. . . violated and continue to violate Plaintiffs’ fundamental constitutional rights to freedom from deprivation of life, liberty, and property; Plaintiffs’ constitutional rights to equal protection; Plaintiffs’ unenumerated inherent and inalienable natural rights; and Plaintiffs’ rights as beneficiaries of the federal public trust.”

In broad strokes, the Plaintiffs allege that their 5^th Amendment rights to due process and equal protection; as well as 9^th Amendment rights under the public trust doctrine are being violated by willful government inaction on a problem the US Government knew full well was happening.

What do the Plaintiffs hope to have happen should they win?

“Order Defendants to prepare and implement an enforceable national remedial plan to phase out fossil fuel emissions and draw down excess atmospheric CO2 so as to stabilize the climate system and protect the vital resources on which Plaintiffs now and in the future will depend.”

Wow.

Here is an interesting tidbit, a year ago, both the API and NAM requested, and were granted, permission to withdraw from the suit. They did not give reasons, but most observers think they did not want to be subject to discovery, which would surely provide damning evidence about their long history of purposely misleading the public regarding climate change. I also suspect they knew that if the case went forward, they were going to lose. I suspect the Trump Administration knows that as well.

“Facts are stubborn things; and whatever may be our wishes, our inclinations, or the dictates of our passions, they cannot alter the state of facts and evidence.” - John Adams, 2^nd President of the Unite States

Wise man, that Mr. Adams.

Resilience

Resilience: an ability to recover from or adjust easily to misfortune or change – Merriam Webster Dictionary

Adaptation: the process of changing to suit different conditions – Oxford Dictionary

I hear the words resilience and adaptation bandied about a lot.  Along the coast, it can mean elevating homes and streets, upgrading coastal infrastructure, and building seawalls.

But what about Westborough? Do we need to be resilient?  We do. Fortunately, rising sea level isn’t an issue for us.

Let’s start with the early July heat wave, which affected a large portion of North America, caused by a large stagnant high pressure system. Temperature records were broken in many places.

Was THIS heat wave “caused” by global warming? No single weather event can be pinned on global warming. What scientists have been saying for many years is that our changing climate has made such events more likely, which is supported by weather records and charts freely available from NOAA. Bottom line – we will see more frequent heat waves.

During the last heat wave, residents received reverse 911 messages that the Senior Center was opened as a cooling center, a godsend for the great many of us who don’t have air conditioning in Westborough. In the 17 years I have lived here, I don’t recall the town having to take this measure until recently. Maybe someone can tell me if I am wrong.

As temperatures have increased, so have extreme weather events. A warmer atmosphere holds more moisture, so in the temperate Northeastern US, we can expect more intense storms (in summer AND winter). According to the U.S. Global Change Research Program, the amount of precipitation falling “as the heaviest of 1% of all daily events” has increased 71% in the Northeast since 1958.

The latest FEMA flood maps show that the impact of 100-year or 500-year flood events in Westborough would not be significant. Downtown Westborough is adjacent to Cedar Swamp, which has a huge capacity to store runoff. Since the town does a very good job of maintaining its drainage infrastructure, we have made ourselves more resilient to such storm events.

The town also manages its water system in the face of droughts, like we had in 2016. We do not over pump our wells and we take care of Sandra Pond. The town repaired the Sandra Pond dams so they better withstand major storms. The town took down a lot of trees, but state dam regulations required it. Again, foresight and good management make the town more resilient.

Another step would be to fix the culverts under the railroad that crosses Cedar Swamp, which were designed to allow water to drain south into the Sudbury River but they collapsed or were blocked decades ago. When one major culvert at the Transflow rail yard off Flanders Road was fixed a decade ago, water levels in the eastern portion of Cedar Swamp dropped several feet. If the culverts closer to town were fixed, downtown Westborough would be much better protected.

Of course getting the railroad to repair them is another matter. It’s expensive because the rails need to be kept open while the repairs are performed.

Insect-borne diseases are another issue we have now that we did not have to worry about when I was a kid in the 1970s. Anyone even spending time on their lawn in Westborough, let alone the woods, should routinely check for ticks.

Ticks are tough creatures and are surviving our warmer winters. According to the Tufts University Lahey Clinic, ticks are a major vector not only of Lyme disease, which is debilitating enough, but Babesiosis (causes anemia), Tularemia, and Rocky Mountain Spotted Fever, both of which can be fatal.

Massachusetts already deals with Mosquito-borne diseases such as West Nile virus and to a lesser extent, Eastern Equine Encephalitis. The Asian Tiger mosquito is a vector for Dengue and Chikungunya. This species is steadily migrating northward from the Deep South. It’s already found as far north as southeastern Connecticut.

I know this all sounds scary, but everything I discussed is a recognized issue documented in the Massachusetts State Hazard Mitigation and Climate Adaptation Plan (resilientma.com).

Regardless of whether you think humans are causing the climate to change, the fact is that it IS changing and quickly.

The trends are pretty clear, which is why we have to be resilient.

The Tide's They are a Changin'

(apologies to Bob Dylan)

Sea levels are rising. That’s nothing new.

They rose over 400 feet at the end of the last glacial epoch over 10,000 years ago. Over the last 2,000 years, sea levels increased about 1.5 feet, or about 0.00025 mm per year. A really small number. Over the last two decades though, the rate increased to 3.2 mm per year, about 1,300 times faster than it was just a century ago. 

Still these numbers seem really, really tiny and you are tempted to say, so what?

Well, overall, U.S. sea level has risen about 0.7 feet since 1920. During this same interval, coastal tidal flooding frequency has gone from 1 or 2 a year to 20 per year. It’s double what it was just 30 years ago. That’s what.

Sea levels are actually increasing faster along the east coast of the US than elsewhere. The reasons include a slowing Gulf Stream, which causes water to pile up along the eastern seaboard; thermal expansion of warming waters, and changes in the distribution of gravity around the planet due to melting ice sheets which alone may add about a foot to east coast sea level rise by 2100.

This information comes not from a science fiction movie, but from a detailed 2017 report produced by NOAA (NOAA Technical Report NOS CO-OPS 083).  It’s a no kidding, here’s what’s gonna happen folks, report.

An axiom of engineers is that any problem can be solved with the proper application of money. Of course, there’s the flip side. Is the solution worth the cost? Boston recently decided the answer is no.

A study released last month recommended that the city NOT build a flood protection barrier at the outer edge of Boston Harbor. The barrier, which would have been closed to protect the city from storm surges caused by Nor’easters or hurricanes, would have cost over $10 billion and taken about 30 years to build.

The reason for not building the barrier was not because the study’s authors thought sea levels are not rising - they do - but because they thought it wouldn’t be cost effective and not help with the sorts of day-to-day nuisance flooding that Boston and other cities are now coping with.

Another big issue with the barrier was that it could very well be obsolete by the time it was completed. If we could slow or reverse greenhouse gas emissions quickly, sea level rise may be limited, so the barrier would be a waste. On the other (and more likely) hand, if trends continue as they are, the barrier might be ineffective by the time it was completed.

Last, if Boston built a barrier, any deflected storm surge would just go somewhere else, like Beverly, Cohasset, Manchester, or Scituate, for example. I imagine that the legal battles alone could prevent the first load of concrete from even being poured for 30 years.

Instead of a barrier, Boston has decided to address this issue using strategies right along the coast line, detailed in a plan called Climate Ready Boston, which, if implemented, would protect critical infrastructure and housing in low lying areas using a variety of strategies, including local berms and floodwalls. In East Boston, protecting against a 100 year flood (1% chance in a given year) combined with 21 inches of sea level rise by 2050 would prevent $1.3 billion in losses . . . from just one flood.

Boston is taking the issue of sea level rise very seriously. In the year ending April 30th, the city experienced 22 days of tidal flooding, breaking the record set in 2009. During last January’s Nor’easter, the city had the highest tide ever recorded, which flooded downtown streets. The city expects these types of floods will be the norm in coming years.

Boston is not the only city trying to cope with this issue. In Miami, Florida, and Norfolk, Virginia (home to the US Navy’s largest base), residents now routinely wade through knee deep water during peak high tides. They weren’t 20 years ago.

NOAA is projecting that this year the frequency of such events will be even higher as we head into another El Nino year. The last one ended barely 2 years ago.

There is old saying which goes, you can’t hold back the tide. It’s truer than ever these days.

When the Volcano Blows

“I don’t know where I’m-a gonna go, when the volcano blows.” -Jimmy Buffet

You may have heard about the newest eruption of a volcano in Hawaii last week. Actually, that volcano, Kilauea, has been slowly oozing lava for the last 30 years, but lately, the crater has been throwing out fountains of lava, ash, and poisonous gases.

On any given day, almost two dozen volcanoes are actively erupting, but most don’t make the news.  Many of these are located along the Pacific “Ring of Fire,” which stretches from the tip of South America up through Alaska and down the eastern coast of the Pacific to New Zealand. These volcanoes are the result of ocean crust being recycled into the mantle where it melts into magma that rises to the surface.

Other volcanoes, like Hawaii, are the result of columns of magma which rise from deep in the Earth’s mantle, which erupt through the thin ocean crust, creating new islands.

But these are only the ones on land. There is a continuous chain of volcanoes, 40,000 miles long, that snakes through the deepest parts of all the oceans of the Earth, which creates new crust and pushes the continents around the planet at a rate equivalent to the speed of your fingernail growth.

Volcanic eruptions can have a profound affect o the Earth’s climate. In fact, at least 4 of the 5 mass extinctions of life during the last 550 million years can be traced to volcanism, but not like anything ever witnessed by humans. These eruptions lasted hundreds of thousands to a million years, covering millions of square miles in a thick layer of basalt, and discharging enough sulfur and carbon dioxide to really mess with climate. One such eruption, in Siberia about 250 million years ago, coincided with “The Great Dying”, when 95% of all life on Earth went extinct.

Much smaller eruptions can have a shorter, but noticeable effect on climate. In 1991, Mt. Pinatubo in the Philippines erupted explosively, sending 20 million tons of sulfur dioxide into the high atmosphere where it created a haze of sulfuric acid. This haze reflected sunlight and dropped global average temperatures by almost 1 degree F over the next two years.

Temperatures bounced back quickly as the haze dissipated and have continued their inexorable rise today’s record levels.

When one examines the temperature records since the late 1800's, the increase in global temperatures has not been consistent with the increase in atmospheric CO2. In fact, temperatures decreased significantly from the 1950's to the 1970's.

This decline coincides with overall post-war increases in industrial production and coal-fired power generation. A byproduct of burning coal was the release of sulfur dioxide into the atmosphere, which, no surprise, resulted in a lot of sulfuric acid haze in the stratosphere.

Then in 1970, President Nixon signed the Clean Air Act.

Before the Clean Air Act (and similar legislation in Europe) sulfur emissions from power plants and vehicles caused significant air pollution, leading to acid rain, which caused widespread damage to the environment too numerous to list here. One of the requirements of the act was to decrease power plant and vehicle sulfur dioxide emissions.

Once sulfur emissions started to decline, acid rain decreased sharply throughout the industrialized world.  In addition, temperatures again started to increase and did so quite rapidly, a purely unintended consequence of the act.

So what is the lesson here? If you don’t think humans can change the climate, you’d be wrong. The history of human sulfur dioxide emissions proves it.

One of the proposed “solutions” to global warming is injecting sulfur dioxide into the stratosphere. This proposal is being taken seriously, especially by conservative think tanks who call themselves climate change skeptics. Oh the irony.

History shows that we would have to continuously inject sulfur at high altitudes to cool the Earth and we would have to burn fuel to do so, adding CO2 to the air as well. The moment we stopped, temperatures would soar. Then there is acid rain and its devastating ecological impacts including ozone depletion. The uneven application of this “solution” could cause massive droughts in areas that depend on annual monsoons. Who would manage this process is another question fraught with geopolitical peril.

Seems to me that the better course is to decrease CO2 emissions, not add a different kind of pollution to the atmosphere. Decreasing emissions is something we already know how to do.

What is lacking is the political will to do so. That, we can change . . . at the ballot box.

Should We Stay or Should We Go?

“If there’s a third world war we want to make sure there’s enough of a seed of human civilization somewhere else to bring it back and shorten the length of the dark ages” 

–  Elon Musk, founder of SpaceX, March 11, 2018, discussing the need to colonize Mars.

Let me start by saying that colonizing other planets has been a romantic staple of science fiction going back over a century, but it is still just that – fiction. I think the potential for an extraterrestrial colony to survive let alone become self-sustaining is very small, given the hazards. Putting a Tesla roadster into solar orbit is child’s play by comparison.

In the early 2000’s I read a book called “Rare Earth”, which argued that planets like ours were rare and that the circumstances which lead to the evolution of humans and the development of civilization were thus also rare. 

Then came the Kepler probe, launched in 2009, which subsequently discovered thousands of planets in a very small section of the sky. Astronomers now estimate that some 40 billion Earth-like planets may orbit the habitable zones of their stars, where water could exist as a liquid, 11 billion of which would be orbiting stars like our own. Our Earth may not be so rare.

Geologists have recently pushed back the origins of life on Earth to over 4 billion years ago, which would mean that life started on Earth very soon after the solar system formed and the planet cooled from its molten state. Although biologists have yet to create life de novo in the lab, they have determined that the biochemistry needed to form self-replicating organic molecules is pretty straightforward. Life may not be so rare.

Indeed, life may already exist elsewhere in our solar system, buried deep under the sands of Mars, which used to be an Earth-like planet, or in the vast oceans which underlie the ice-covered moons of Jupiter’s Europa and Saturn’s Enceladus. 

But how about complex life and self-aware beings that create civilizations? Why has SETI, the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence not heard any radio signals from other civilizations, despite listening for the last 50 years or so? 

Which brings us to the “Fermi Paradox”. The famous physicist’s postulate that if there are so many stars and so many planets, “Where is everybody?” Recent UFO videos notwithstanding, there is really no conclusive evidence that we have been visited by extraterrestrials and we sure haven’t heard from any.

Life may not be rare, but life like us may be because planet-sterilizing cosmic events are common or civilizations destroy themselves through ecological mismanagement and/or war.

Back to Mr. Musk and his concern that we may send ourselves the way of the dinosaurs, so we should therefore not confine ourselves to one planet.  Note that dinosaurs existed over 100 million years. We have been around for only 160 thousand.

Musk’s goal is to save humanity, but what about everything between honey bees and humpback whales? Aren’t these lifeforms worth preserving? Musk ignores the fact that humans evolved in an interdependent ecological web within a very thin shell of a biosphere which would be almost impossible to artificially replicate. Stepping outside that shell anywhere else means stepping into an environment that is actively trying to kill you.

Colonizing the Moon or Mars means burrowing into the subsurface or building sealed domes. I ask, why go to Mars to do that when we can bury ourselves on Earth if things go south? Heck, let’s just avoid the need to do so in the first place. The cheaper alternative is to avoid nuclear war and to preserve our biosphere. 

I close with the sage words of the late Carl Sagan, from his 1994 book, “Pale Blue Dot”, inspired by a view of Earth from the Voyager Probe, then 6.4 billion miles from Earth:

The Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand. . . There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we've ever known.

Published in the Westborough News, March 30th, 2018

Sound and Fury

I have written a lot of columns about the consequences of human-caused climate change, describing those both current and projected. My wife tells me my columns are getting depressing.

So this column is about the energy policy of our current Federal Government. It should not be surprising that the Trump administration is basically attempting to implement whatever the fossil fuel industry wishes.

First off is the Department of Interior’s recent decision to open up the entire US east and west coast’s outer continental shelves to oil and gas exploration because the administration wants to make America “energy dominant”.

We already produce almost as much oil as Saudi Arabia, due to fracking and sophisticated drilling technology, which allows energy companies to extract oil and gas from shale formations that have been ignored since the first oil well was drilled back in 1859.

Kinda makes us energy dominant already and thus a big player in the world’s energy markets.

Last year, the USGS estimated that one shale formation in West Texas’ Permian Basin contains 20 billion barrels of oil and 16 trillion cubic feet of natural gas. Not only that, but the 75,000 square mile Permian Basin already has the infrastructure in place to extract, transport, and refine these hydrocarbons.

In contrast, the USGS estimates that mostly likely the entire 1.56 MILLION square mile outer continental shelf from Canada to Florida contains only 1.4 billion barrels of oil. In addition, there is no infrastructure off the east coast. No pipelines, no platforms, no nothing.  In addition, wells might have to be drilled in waters up to 12,000 feet deep.

The Macondo well, you know, the one that blew out in the Gulf of Mexico in 2010, was in waters 5,000 feet deep. Coupled with the recension of regulations to make such deep-water drilling safer – What could possibly go wrong? But I digress.

Offshore oil exploration and production is expensive and oil prices have to be very high to make it worthwhile, like north of $100 per barrel. The price of oil has been anything but for the last decade, because the US is energy dominant . . . already. It’s currently $64 per barrel.

Along with laughably bad economics is the laughably rapid reversal of the new policy that took Florida off the table almost immediately to placate Governor (soon to be Republican Senate candidate) Scott (former offshore drilling advocate) because “Florida is unique and its coasts are heavily reliant on tourism as an economic driver”.

I think every governor up and down the east and west coasts could make the same argument and most assuredly they will when (not if) they sue the Interior Department. #WhatAboutUs?

Thus, I doubt we will see any drilling platforms off our coasts for a very, very long time.

Then there is the Department of Energy Federal Energy Regulatory Commission or FERC. The Secretary of Energy asked FERC to institute a policy of supporting coal power plants under the guise of energy resilience, because they can stockpile their sources in the event of an emergency. This policy would slow the retirement of uneconomic coal power plants, prop up the price of coal power, and jack up consumer electricity prices by billions of dollars. So much for free markets.

This proposal was a sop to the coal industry, nothing more.

To everyone’s surprise, FERC, whose members are dominated by Trump appointees by the way, rejected the proposal.

Did I mention that Republicans made sure the Tax bill passed late last year preserves tax breaks for wind and solar, the two most rapidly growing sources of electricity in the US? Iowa gets a third of its electricity from wind and to no one’s surprise, Senator Chuck Grassley (R – Iowa) made sure the provisions remained.

Of course, the oil and gas industries have long benefited from all sorts of tax breaks.

Regardless of incentives, the price of alternative energy continues to drop, making it competitive with fossil fuels, even when wind and solar tax incentives end in 2022.

These are examples of Trump administration energy policy proposals that are running into the headwinds of reality, both economic and political. They will end up being, as the Bard put it “. . . full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.”

Published in the Westborough News, January 19, 2018

And Now For Something Completely Different ...

I want to take a break from writing about our planet.

I have always been highly skeptical of UFOs, at least after my teenage years when my capacity for objectivity was less than stellar. Why, in this day and age when everyone and their cousin has megapixel cameras in their smartphone and surveillance cameras are ubiquitous is there so little in the way of credible evidence?

This brings me to an article published by the NY Times a couple of weeks ago. It’s a story about a secret program and included video images recorded in 2004. The videos were released by the Department of Defense last August.  The story was written by three prize-winning reporters.

We as a society barely batted an eyelash at this story, which recounts events which took place 13 years ago.

The videos show recordings by infrared tracking systems on a Navy F/A-18 Super Hornet which was following what the pilot described as a school-bus sized Tic-Tac shaped object. It had no wings, no visible means of propulsion and its maneuvering ability far exceeded that of any known aircraft. One video shows the object rotating like a spinning coin as it flew and another shows it dashing out of range at an acceleration rate like something out of Spielberg’s “Close Encounters of the Third Kind.”

The facts of the encounter are pretty startling. A couple of dozen objects were tracked by a guided missile cruiser’s sophisticated AEGIS radar. More than one Super Hornet took part in the encounter and thus at least four highly trained Navy officers saw the objects. One recording was made by an external targeting pod designed to track targets on land or the skies under all weather conditions and the other by a pilot’s internal targeting display.

A coworker who worked on AEGIS radars for years said this video had to be a hoax. Given what I have read so far, I disagree.

Any electronic system can provide false information. Eyewitnesses can lie, their memories can be inaccurate, or they can be under the influence. The likelihood that three different electronic systems and multiple human witnesses were all spoofed in this instance is highly improbable, especially when the eyewitnesses were highly trained combat pilots with many years’ experience in the cockpit who are not likely to be chewing peyote.

In science, multiple lines of evidence decrease the probability that an observed phenomenon is a one-off, the result of instrumental error, or human bias. In other words, I think this information is pretty credible.

So what were they looking at? It appears to be a honest-to-God Unidentified Flying Object. A UFO.

One of the pilots interviewed by the Washington Post, which I’d also consider another reputable news outlet, stated that it was “Something not from the Earth.”

Is the pilot right? Does this encounter mean we are being visited by aliens?

Not necessarily.

We don’t know where these objects came from, who was piloting them, what they are made of, or even if anything organic was aboard. For all we know, the UFOs are from the future, a parallel universe, Atlantis, let alone another solar system. They could be manmade. We don’t have sufficient information to even speculate and we may never, but gee whiz, it would be cool to find out.

What is clear is that the DOD no longer cares. According to the Times, the secret Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program which studied such incidents ended in 2012. I guess that whatever these things are, the DOD does not consider them a threat. It’s hard enough to deal with countries and organizations we know want to do us harm, let alone “foo fighters” that dance through the skies taunting mere humans flying $70 million high performance warplanes.

And in the hubbub of today’s information-overloaded world, this story isn’t even a blip on anyone’s radar screen except mine and the tin-foil-hat crowd, of which I am proudly NOT a member.

Woke up this morning with light in my eyes

And then realized it was still dark outside

It was a light coming down from the sky

I don't know who or why

Must be those strangers that come every night

Those saucer shaped lights put people uptight

Leave blue green footprints that glow in the dark

I hope they get home alright

Hey, Mr. Spaceman

Won't you please take me along

I won't do anything wrong

Hey, Mr. Spaceman

Won't you please take me along for a ride

- Roger McGuinn, the Byrds, 1966

Published in the Westborough News, January 5, 2018

2017 - The Year in Review

For the time being, you can search and download extensive weather and climate reports as well as raw data sets from the websites of NOAA and NASA and I emphasize: for the time being. Sadly, such information is no longer available from the EPA. I make no predictions about the availability of this information next December from any U.S. Government agency.

According to NASA, 2017 is predicted to be the second warmest year on record, exceeding 2015, when a “super” El Nino event was starting and right behind 2016, when this event was tapering off.  In the past, when the Pacific Ocean currents were no longer causing heat to be released into the atmosphere, global temperatures would usually drop, but not this time around.

During October, high temperature records were broken in all six New England states and eastern Canada.

According to the Weather Channel, NOAA’s data show that “Swaths of eastern Africa, eastern Asia, the adjacent Indian Ocean, the central and western Pacific Ocean, the Iberian Peninsula, eastern Asia, and eastern South America have had a record warm January-October 2017.”

In the Pacific Northwest, Seattle and Portland had record high temperatures: 104 and 107 degrees F, respectively. Southern Europe was gripped by hot spells, one of which was labelled “Lucifer”.  Hundreds of wild fires scorched Portugal and northern Spain in October alone, killing dozens.

Back in September, an article in the LA Times quoted an official of the National Interagency Fire Center who was stunned that the fire season had continued into September. As I write this, half way into December, large swaths of outlying Los Angeles are burning, despite the heavy snows of the previous winter and the break from the long lasting drought, creating a hellscape, pictures of which friends of mine from the LA area are posting on Facebook.

A recent article in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences stated quite bluntly that “. . . human-caused climate change caused over half of the documented increases in fuel aridity since the 1970s and doubled the cumulative forest fire area since 1984. This analysis suggests that anthropogenic climate change will continue to chronically enhance the potential for western US forest fire activity” as long as there is fuel to burn.

The 2017 North Atlantic Hurricane season had 17 named storms. That is not a record but the total accumulated energy of these storms (a measurement based on sustained wind speed) was the highest ever. Four storms were Category 4 or above. Total damage was almost $370 Billion.

As an aside, most of Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands are still struggling with major infrastructure damage and lack of basic utilities. The Death toll in Puerto Rico due to the hurricanes and their aftermaths was estimated by the NY Times to be over 1,000.

Hurricane Harvey dumped record amounts of rain on Houston when the storm stalled over the region due to a weakened jet stream which could not push the storm out of the area.

The jet stream is weak due to a warming Arctic, which slows west-to-east winds and thus slows the movement of weather systems across the US and Europe. According to NOAA, a slow jet stream is increasing the incidence of extreme weather, be it heat waves, flooding and even heavy snow fall in winter. Remember that a warm atmosphere holds more moisture and snow can form as easily at 30 degrees as at 15 degrees.

As of November, the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is 405.14 parts per million. Detailed analysis of geologic data shows that the atmosphere has not had this level of CO2 since the end of the Miocene geologic epoch – about 5 million years ago, when sea level was 100 feet higher and  Megalodon sharks which prowled the oceans made the Great Whites seen off of Cape Cod look like guppies.

In other words, a very different planet from the one we inhabit today . . . for the time being.

Happy holidays.

Published in the Westborough News, 12/22/2017

The Air I Breathed as a Child

When I was a child in the early 1970s, growing up on Long Island, about 30 miles east of NY City, I remember going to the edge of an old sand quarry at sunset during the summers, where I could stare directly into the setting sun, because the air was so polluted. With binoculars, I could actually see sunspots.

Beyond the myriad human illnesses caused by air pollution such as asthma, emphysema, and coronary artery disease, consequences included acid rain, which devastated forests and lakes throughout the northeast.

Regulations resulting from the Clean Air Act of 1970 and equivalent legislation in Europe led to the long-term decline in various forms of air pollution. A cap and trade system put into effect in the US resulted in steadily decreasing sulfur power plant pollution.

I’ve asked myself, with all the improvements in air quality in the ensuing decades, is our air clean enough? Based on an article I read in a recent issue of Science News (09/30/2017, p 18-21), which summarizes the latest research, the answer is an unequivocal no. In fact, the list of modern human maladies connected to air pollution is increasing.

After filtering out other factors, scientists found that even when particulate pollutants (soot from vehicles, power plant, and factory emissions) remain below what are now considered maximum safe levels, death rates still correlate with increases of these substances in the air we breathe. Current estimates are that 200,000 people die each year just from particulate pollution and in the cities where pollution is higher, so is the death rate. The mechanism appears to be inflammation which extends beyond the lungs to other regions of the body, which leads to substantial increases in heart disease and stroke, just as cigarettes do.

Based on animal studies, inflammation from pollution is also a contributor to obesity. Indeed, population studies show that the closer people live to a major roadway, the heavier they were, especially children. Links to diabetes have also been found in both human and animal studies. Particulate pollution and ozone contribute to insulin insensitivity.

The latest studies are showing links between particulate pollution to an increased rate of brain aging, dementia, and Parkinson’s disease. Eighteen such studies have been published and although more work needs to be done, researchers are alarmed.

These observations are being made in a country where the levels of particulate and ozone pollution are already below regulatory standards in most cases. I shudder to think about what is happening in other countries without such controls, for example China and India.

Given what we have known for decades on top of current findings, we need to ask ourselves how much we are willing to sacrifice in terms of increased mortality and preventable illness in order to use our heavily polluting power sources like coal.

We want a certain lifestyle in this country, but are we still willing to pay for it in terms of lives lost?  Given the policies of the elected government in Washington, D.C., who are promoting coal instead of alternative energy that answer, sadly, appears to be yes.

However, even though EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt said without irony that “The war against coal is over,” after the Trump administration recently discarded Obama’s Clean Power Plan, all is not lost for those of us who want cleaner air.

Despite rescinding Obama’s moratorium on leasing more federal land for coal mining and rolling back regulations, the coal industry is still dying. Demand for coal is still declining, and several applications for leasing federal lands have either been cancelled or have gone without any takers.

142 existing coal plants partially or completely shut down since 2009. 81% of the over 200 proposed projects since 2000 have been cancelled, based on Sierra Club data. The reason – they lose money.

Most of coal’s decline can be traced to cheap natural gas, but increasingly the competition is coming from renewable energy, such as wind and solar. According to Bloomberg, solar is the cheapest form of new energy, especially in developing countries and it can compete even without government subsidies.

I wish that we had a government which accepts the science that burning coal is bad policy, bad for our health, and bad for our environment, but I happily accept that market forces are doing what reason and evidence cannot.

The “war on coal” may have been “won,” for the time being, but it’s a pyrrhic victory at best.

The coal industry is itself on life support and I don’t think even Federal intervention can save it.

I doubt the air in the US will ever return to the kind I breathed as a child, but the battle for cleaner air, unfortunately, still continues.

What if our underlying prosperity is ripped out from underneath us?

“What if our underlying prosperity is ripped out from underneath us?” - Paolo Bacigalupi, science fiction author

The people of Puerto Rico are having to answer this question as I write this column. Several days after Hurricane Maria ripped their island apart with sustained winds equivalent to an EF-3 tornado, they have no electricity, no communications, no food, and no potable water. Many don’t even have their own roofs over their heads any longer. 

Even though Puerto Rico is part of the United States, supplies have to be shipped in, then distributed by land over a road network clogged with downed trees. In the meantime, people are getting water from springs created by landslides triggered by the storm. Unless something changes, waterborne diseases may not be far behind.

This is just Puerto Rico. Other Caribbean islands are now uninhabitable or are very close to it. For the first time in 300 years, there is no one living on Barbuda. A third of the buildings on St. Martins were destroyed. The British Virgin Islands lost all their infrastructure. St. Martins lost a third of its buildings, and in the US Virgin Islands almost half the population is still without power. 

The devastation of four hurricanes which exceeded Category 4 over the last few weeks is mind boggling. Estimated losses now exceed a combined $480 billion. Although that represents only about 3% of the 2016 GDP of the US economy, it also means untold suffering for hundreds of thousands of people as well. 

A few years ago, I posted a blog on the Westborough Patch which I titled “A Dope Slap Moment” about Hurricane Sandy. I hoped that the devastation would act as a wakeup call about the realities of climate change. I was criticized by one commenter as “an environmental wacko.” 

At the time, I told that person that the effects of climate change would be obvious within 30 years. I was wrong. The effects are obvious now.

Because I am a data nerd, I plotted up the number of North Atlantic Category 4 hurricanes per decade along with the average global temperature change per decade since the 1860s. The numbers track each other very closely. The number of Category 4 storms per decade before 1900 was less than 5. Since 2000, the number of storms per decade has exceeded 10. So far this decade we have had 13 and we still have 3 years to go.

Brings to mind the words from that old Buffalo Springfield song, “There’s something happening here...”

If you are thinking of retiring to South Florida, you might want to reconsider.

Given these trends, one has to wonder how many people will just pack it in, leave the Caribbean and essentially become climate refugees. Most of these island’s economies are dependent on tourism, which I doubt will recover any time in the near future.

The head of FEMA said on September26th that "We do not have a culture of preparedness in this country," which is absolutely true. We do need to plan for disasters, but we also need to plan for change.

We can no longer assume that the way things were are the way things will be. We can no longer have a flood insurance program that requires people to rebuild on the location where their home flooded. We can no longer encourage developers to build subdivisions in flood plains formerly reserved for flood water storage. We can no longer assume that what used to be low probability events, like a 500-year storm, will not happen again next year, or even the next month. 

If we plan, we can mitigate the threats to our underlying prosperity. We can prepare. But first, we have to recognize there is in fact, a problem. 

These days, that’s a problem all by itself, especially when the President feels the need to explain to reporters that Puerto Rico “is an island sitting in the middle of an ocean.”

Thank you Captain Obvious.

Welcome to the Future

Many years ago, when I lived on the Gulf Coast, I went sailing with a friend near Galveston. During the late afternoon, we could watch the formation of thunderstorms over the water. The process literally looked as if the clouds were boiling up out of the Gulf of Mexico.

Actually, the explanation is not that farfetched. It is the energy of the warm Gulf waters that give these storms their energy, and can transform a disorganized group of thunderstorm cells into a Category 3 or 4 hurricane in a matter of a couple of days. This was the case with Katrina in 2005 and with Harvey this year.

Begs the question, are either of these hurricanes the result of climate change. Short answer is no. We have always had hurricanes, but a better question to ask is if the warmer waters of the oceans give these storms greater energy than they might have without it.

An analysis in a journal article estimates that since 1968, the additional heat stored in the shallowest depths of the oceans as our climate has warmed is roughly 200,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 joules. That is equivalent to 5 MILLION megatons of TNT. The biggest H-bomb ever detonated was “just” 50 megatons. 

Given that a single hurricane consumes about 12,500 megatons of energy or 200 times the electrical generation of the planet PER DAY, the answer to the question of whether global warming makes hurricanes stronger is, yes, most likely. There is energy to spare stored in the oceans that was not there a few decades ago.

The amount of rain pouring on Texas as I write this column is estimated at around 50 inches in some areas. That’s more than what we get up here in New England in an average year. 

One of the lessons of this storm is that living outside the 100-year flood plain is no guarantee of safety. The second lesson is that the lack of regional planning and unchecked urban sprawl which Houston represents made such flooding far, far worse. Keep that in mind the next time you want to curse the Planning Board or our storm water management regulations.

In the coming weeks, we will feel the effects of Harvey, as most of the refineries which supply gasoline to large parts of the US are located in the Houston area and may be shut down for weeks to repair damage, but that is the least of it.

According to an article just sent to me by a friend who is an insurance actuarial, less than one sixth of the households in the Houston area have flood insurance. Either people could not afford it or they live in areas formerly not thought to be subject to flooding. 

The economic effects of this storm will ripple through the economy in the years to come. Some areas are completely wiped out and this is just in the Corpus Christie and Rockport areas where the storm hit directly. The rains that have inundated the fourth largest city in America has left tens of thousands homeless already. What are many of these people going to do when insurance won’t cover the damage?

The post-Katrina history of New Orleans is instructive. There are vast swaths of the city that have never been rebuilt. The block I lived on up near the Lake Pontchartrain back in 1984 is still largely vacant 12 years later. 

A nightmare scenario for the region’s economy is that like New Orleans, many people will just walk away from their homes and their mortgages. They won’t rebuild because they can’t afford it, even with Federal disaster aid assistance. Insurance companies, seeing how vulnerable large areas of Houston are to flooding, will jack up insurance rates even for standard homeowners insurance, not only in Houston but all over southeast Texas, making home ownership an even harder proposition. 

Then there is the question of who will be willing to buy in these now vulnerable areas. Banks will be flooded (pun intended) with thousands of homes that may well be worthless, causing the real estate market to tank. 

This scenario was expected to play out in Florida before anywhere else, but Texas may well be the first poster child for this kind of real estate collapse. This doesn’t even begin to cover the suffering of the many less fortunate people who will be left homeless by this disaster, who also lost everything as well.

I fear that what we are seeing here is part of the New Normal. Storm events whose frequency and magnitude will forever change our expectations. We are fortunate that this disaster did not hit us, but do not think for a moment that we are invulnerable. 

Welcome to the future.

Published in the Westborough News, 09/01/2017