Most recent 40 articles: Arstechnica
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It could well be a blockbuster hurricane season, and that’s not a good thing - Arstechnica (Apr 4) |
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Apr 4 · Although not quite literally, the Atlantic Ocean is on fire right now.
The Atlantic hurricane season does not begin for another eight weeks, but we are deep in the heart of hurricane season prediction season.
On Thursday, the most influential of these forecasts was issued by Phil Klotzbach, a hurricane scientist at Colorado State University. To put a fine point on it, Klotzbach and his team foresee an exceptionally busy season in the Atlantic basin, which encompasses the Atlantic Ocean, Caribbean Sea, and Gulf of Mexico.
"We anticipate that the 2024 Atlantic basin hurricane season will be extremely active," Klotzbach wrote in his forecast discussion.
The ... Read more ...
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NASA launches a billion-dollar Earth science mission Trump tried to cancel - Arstechnica (Feb 8) |
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Feb 8 · “It has been a long, strange trip," says the top scientist on NASA's PACE mission.
NASA's latest mission dedicated to observing Earth's oceans and atmosphere from space rocketed into orbit from Florida early Thursday on a SpaceX launch vehicle.
This mission will study phytoplankton, microscopic plants fundamental to the marine food chain, and tiny particles called aerosols that play a key role in cloud formation. These two constituents in the ocean and the atmosphere are important to scientists' understanding of climate change. The mission's acronym, PACE, stands for Plankton, Aerosol, Cloud, ocean Ecosystem.
Nestled in the nose cone of a Falcon 9 rocket, the PACE ... Read more ...
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Synthetic gasoline promises neutral emissions—but the math doesn’t work - Arstechnica (May 05, 2023) |
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May 05, 2023 · E-fuels sound like a panacea, but there's not enough spare electricity to make them.
Synthetic fuel promises to put gasoline back in our future. Motorsport will be using it in 2026, and European Union law is using it as a stay of execution for the combustion engine. Advertising promises that a future without fossil fuels doesn't need to be one without gasoline. But burning petrochemicals, wherever they come from, is still burning petrochemicals, and synthetic fuels come at a cost their supporters aren't talking about.
We live in perilous times. The annual Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report has become blunter with every edition. The sixth, published this ... Read more ...
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All the ways the most common bit of climate misinformation is wrong - Arstechnica (Mar 15, 2023) |
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Mar 15, 2023 · We've looked at natural cycles and causes. None of them can produce this warming.
It starts as a reasonable question: If the Earth's climate changed before humans existed, how can we be so sure the current change is due to us and not something natural?
To answer that question, we need to understand what caused the natural changes of the past. Fortunately, science has a good handle on the causes of Earth’s natural climate changes going back hundreds of millions of years. Some were cyclical; others were gradual shifts or abrupt events, but none explain our changing climate today.
A zombie claim
With energy policy and elections in the news, the claim by some ... Read more ...
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As natural gas shortage looms, Alaska utilities and advocates feud over renewable power bill - Alaska Beacon - Arstechnica (Sep 21, 2022) |
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Sep 21, 2022 · It's often cheaper to build and run solar than to buy gas for an existing plant.
This week, the US Department of Energy's Berkeley Lab released its annual analysis of solar energy in the US. It found that nearly half the generating capacity was installed in the US during 2021 and is poised to dominate future installs. That's in part because costs have dropped by more than 75 percent since 2010; it's now often cheaper to build and operate a solar plant than it is to simply buy fuel for an existing natural gas plant.
The analysis was performed before the passage of the Inflation Reduction Act, which contains many incentives and tax breaks that should expand solar's ... Read more ...
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Professor Corey Bradshaw explains the unfolding “Extinction Cascades” on Nature Bats Last. - Arstechnica (Jul 21, 2022) |
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Jul 21, 2022 · A very misleading article on marine life has been getting a lot of attention.
Update 8:52 am EST, 7/21: Howard Dryden reached out to me to express his dismay at having been misquoted by the Sunday Post, which should have reported a "90% reduction in marine plankton in the Equatorial Atlantic, not the whole Atlantic."
"The issue is that the findings are accurate and what is stated in the report are true. We are the first to identify the huge concentration of PCC, and the drop in Plankton. We are working with some academic institutes to prepare a formal peer reviewed report, but this takes time and I was so depressed by the results and the fact that we did not see a single ... Read more ...
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Electric cars are doomed if fast charger reliability doesn't get better - Arstechnica (Jul 13, 2022) |
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Jul 13, 2022 · If every driver has a horror story about charging, adoption is going to stall.
In many regards, electric vehicles are clearly better than the internal combustion engine-powered relatives they will eventually replace. They're quieter, they rattle and vibrate less, they accelerate faster, and they're much more efficient because they can recover energy under braking. And their batteries should last for the life of the car as well as a gasoline engine does. But I'm increasingly convinced that EV adoption is going to run into real problems if we can't get a handle on charger reliability.
Even the biggest EV enthusiasts can't ignore the fact that it takes a lot longer to ... Read more ...
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Weathering climate change may be easier for birds with big brains - Arstechnica (Feb 14, 2022) |
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Feb 14, 2022 · Brain size is associated with some species shrinking more slowly than others.
Many bird species are slowly but surely getting smaller. One study from 2019 looked at more than 70,000 North American migratory birds across 52 species that met untimely ends by flying into Chicago buildings from 1978 to 2016. It suggests that birds in this diverse set had consistently grown smaller as the summers had grown hotter through climate change over the past 40 years.
While this shrinking was observed across these migratory species, new research suggests that birds with bigger brains - relative to their body size - aren’t shrinking like their smaller-brained kin. The research posits ... Read more ...
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What will it take to end deforestation by 2030? - Arstechnica (Dec 04, 2021) |
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Dec 04, 2021 · The world has lost a third of its forest since the last ice age, and an estimated 15 percent of global greenhouse gases still come from deforestation and forest degradation. Now a new pledge made at the COP26 climate conference in Glasgow last month hopes to change this stark picture. Read more ...
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Natural gas customers in Texas get stuck with $3 - Arstechnica (Nov 12, 2021) |
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Nov 12, 2021 · State oil and gas regulator will allow exemptions from winterization mandates.
Texans will be paying for the effects of last February’s cold snap for decades to come, as the state’s oil and gas regulator approved a plan for natural gas utilities to recover $3.4 billion in debt they incurred during the storm.
The regulator, the Railroad Commission, is allowing utilities to issue bonds to cover the debt. As a result, ratepayers could see an increase in their bills for the next 30 years.
The shortfall caused a cascade of effects throughout the state. Many wells run on electricity, but the state lost half its generating capacity. Many natural gas-fired power plants had ... Read more ...
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Fossil fuels doomed in New York as regulator blocks new gas power plants - Arstechnica (Oct 29, 2021) |
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Oct 29, 2021 · New York took an aggressive stance toward fossil fuels this week, effectively killing the development of new fossil fuel power plants in the state. The Department of Environmental Conservation denied permits for two proposed natural gas power plants, saying they were incompatible with the state's climate law, which calls for an end to fossil fuel-generated electricity by 2040. Read more ...
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Nuclear power's reliability is dropping as extreme weather increases - Arstechnica (Jul 24, 2021) |
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Jul 24, 2021 · With extreme weather causing power failures in California and Texas, it's increasingly clear that the existing power infrastructure isn't designed for these new conditions. Past research has shown that nuclear power plants are no exception, with rising temperatures creating cooling problems for them. Read more ...
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Pure nonsense: debunking the latest attack on renewable energy - Arstechnica (Mar 01, 2021) |
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Mar 01, 2021 · What a terrible anti-renewable-power video reveals about the US energy market.
Our editor-in-chief obviously hates me. That's the only conclusion I could reach after he asked me to watch an abysmal attack video targeting renewable energy - a video produced by a notorious source of right-wing misinformation.
But despite its bizarre mishmash of irrelevancies and misdirection, the video has been widely shared on social media. Perhaps you've seen it, or maybe you just to want to be ready when a family member brings it up in an argument. What, if anything, is true in this farrago of bad faith?
Yes, it’s awful
The video is hosted by "Prager University." My only ... Read more ...
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Blaming a wiggly jet stream on climate change? Not so fast - Arstechnica (Feb 22, 2021) |
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Feb 22, 2021 · The hypothesis is easy to understand, but it’s far from a consensus.
Some songs are earworms - catchy whether you like them or not. (I won’t infect the rest of your day with an example.) Some explanations in science seem to be the earworm equivalent: inherently intuitive, making them stick readily in the mind. That’s obviously the case for the hypothesis that a warming Arctic leads to a wigglier jet stream, producing weather extremes in the mid-latitudes like the recent epic cold snap in the central US.
The cold arrived after the spinning “polar vortex” in the upper atmosphere above the Arctic was disturbed in January, unleashing its contents southward as the jet stream ... Read more ...
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With coal dying, Arizona utility offers $169 million deal with Navajo - Arstechnica (Nov 10, 2020) |
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Nov 10, 2020 · As three coal plants and mines wind down, a plan for what comes next.
The physics of climate change dictate that we must move on from fossil fuels to avoid expensive and deadly consequences, but that shift obviously comes with pain for communities and businesses tied to the fossil fuel industry. This may bring to mind coal-mining communities in places like Kentucky and West Virginia, but it’s also playing out across the Navajo and Hopi lands in Arizona and New Mexico.
There are several coal plants located in or near the Navajo Nation, fed by associated coal mines, and staffed by Navajo and Hopi workers - a major source of jobs. Of these, the Navajo Generating Station and ... Read more ...
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CO2 removal to halt warming soon would be a gargantuan undertaking - Arstechnica (Aug 28, 2020) |
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Aug 28, 2020 · Nothing is perfect, and the trade-offs could be large if poorly managed.
One of the options to help us get our balance of greenhouse gas emissions down faster is to actively remove some CO2 from the atmosphere. The idea is that it can be cheaper and easier to start CO2 removal while our energy systems are transitioning than to attempt to make that transition happen quickly enough to reach our climate goals. Obviously, there’s never a free lunch, and these ideas have attracted lots of scrutiny because of their side effects and feasibility.
Crops vs. BECCS
Three studies published this week examine some of the issues of negative emissions in detail. The first focuses ... Read more ...
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The latest generation of climate models is running hotter—here's why – Ars Technica - Arstechnica (Jan 09, 2020) |
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Jan 09, 2020 · It largely comes down to their simulation of mid-latitude clouds.
Ahead of every Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report, the world's climate modeling centers produce a central database of standardized simulations. Over the past year, an interesting trend has become apparent in the most recent round of this effort: the latest and greatest versions of these models are, on average, more sensitive to CO2, warming more in response to it than previous iterations. So what's behind that behavior, and what does it tell us about the real world?
Climate sensitivity is one of the most-discussed numbers in climate science. Its most common formulation is the amount of ... Read more ...
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Evaluating the risks of Africans opting for coal power - Arstechnica (Dec 10, 2019) |
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Dec 10, 2019 · Africa's current emissions are driven by transit, but coal could dominate.
In most developed economies, carbon emissions have flattened out or are trending downward. More efficient technology, a correspondingly lower demand, and an increasing reliance on renewable energy have been changing these countries' energy economies. But China provides a cautionary example of what could happen as other countries join those developed economies: a massive use of coal has caused China's carbon emissions to explode, turning it into the world's largest emitter. While it's possible that China has now started to control its fossil fuel use, having other countries follow China's lead could pose ... Read more ...
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The fall of coal and its pollution-linked deaths is boosting the economy - Arstechnica (Sep 11, 2019) |
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Sep 11, 2019 · Many economic activities create what are called "externalities": costs that aren't accounted for in their products but are paid for by society at large. Pollution is a major source of externalities, as it can lower the value of property, force people to spend money on medical costs, and even lead to early deaths.
Air pollution is estimated to have caused more than 100,000 early deaths in 2016. Most of these have come due to what are called fine particulates, which are small particles that can be readily inhaled and cause issues like stroke, heart disease, and lung ailments. So a group of researchers at Carnegie Mellon University decided to do an economic analysis of the issue ... Read more ...
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Alaskan permafrost warming experiment produces surprising results - Arstechnica (Jul 04, 2019) |
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Jul 04, 2019 · Unlike emissions, which we can control through actions like retiring a coal-burning power plant, humans can only indirectly change the behavior of these feedback - he sooner we halt warming, the smaller their emissions will be. Figuring out exactly how much (and how fast) those feedbacks will emit is a major challenge for climate science.
A striking new study led by César Plaza works on the first step of this challenge: measuring how much carbon is being lost from permafrost right now.
It sounds simple enough to measure, but measurements are complicated by the fact that permafrost sort of compacts as the ice within it melts. So if you measure, say, the amount of carbon ... Read more ...
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Renewable electricity beat out coal for the first time in April - Arstechnica (Jul 01, 2019) |
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Jul 01, 2019 · A remarkable thing happened in the US in April. For the first time ever, renewable electricity generation beat out coal-fired electricity generation on a national level, according to the Energy Information Agency (EIA). While renewable energy—including hydro, wind, solar, geothermal, and biomass—constituted 23 percent of the nation's power supply, coal-fired electricity only contributed 20 percent of our power supply.
In addition, people use less electricity in spring, as it's not cold enough to need a lot of heating and not warm enough to require lots of air conditioner use. Coal-fired power plant owners, expecting this low demand, often use spring and fall to take their ... Read more ...
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A 10-year-old natural gas plant in California gets the coal plant treatment - Arstechnica (Jun 27, 2019) |
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Jun 27, 2019 · Late last week, General Electric told a California regulator that it would close down a 10-year-old Southern California natural gas plant because it's no longer economically competitive in California's energy market.
GE told the California Energy Commission on Thursday that the natural gas plant is "not designed for the needs of the evolving California market, which requires fast-start capabilities to satisfy peak demand periods."
Currently, California has a lot of solar and wind power on its grid, but wind and solar power are intermittent, so if either energy source cuts out suddenly, another source of energy has to pick up the slack to meet demand. Batteries can do ... Read more ...
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This electric car just set a new record at the Nürburgring - Arstechnica (Jun 05, 2019) |
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Jun 05, 2019 · A few weeks ago, I visited the Nürburgring Nordschleife in Germany as Volkswagen began testing its ID R Pikes Peak electric car at the famous race track. The ID R Pikes Peak is part of VW's multibillion-dollar apology for all those diesel emissions—a tiny part compared to the fines, the chargers, and the new business strategy, but a part nonetheless. Its job is to imbue the coming onslaught of ID-branded electric vehicles with a halo—the exciting kind one gets from on-track derring-do.
And the derring rarely gets done as well as this. On Monday, racing driver Romain Dumas and the VW Motorsport team set a new electric record at the 12.9-mile (20.8km) track also known as ... Read more ...
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Wireless Carriers Under Fire For Hurricane Response - Arstechnica (May 24, 2019) |
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May 24, 2019 · After Hurricane Michael wreaked havoc on Florida last year, AT&T restored wireless service more quickly than Verizon because it relied on well-trained employees while Verizon instead used contractors that "did not have the proper credentials," according to a union that represents workers from both telecoms.
The Communications Workers of America (CWA) made the allegations yesterday in a filing with the Federal Communications Commission, which recently found that carriers' mistakes prolonged outages caused by the hurricane. Many customers had to go without cellular service for more than a week.It's not surprising for a union to argue that union workers are preferable to ... Read more ...
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People drop support for a carbon tax when getting less effective “nudges” - Arstechnica (May 15, 2019) |
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May 15, 2019 · "Nudge" policies have come in for a lot of positive attention. Small tweaks like changing the default on organ donation to opt in (still allowing people to opt out if they choose) seem to be effective at boosting pro-social behaviors. Nudges also work for things like saving for retirement or using less energy while still allowing people freedom of choice.
But nudges like these are "being used as a political expedient," wrote economists George Loewenstein and Peter Ubel in The New York Times in 2010. Nudges, they wrote, allow "policymakers to avoid painful but more effective solutions rooted in traditional economics." Now, Loewenstein has teamed up with colleagues David Hagmann ... Read more ...
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Who can convince those who reject climate science? Maybe their kids - Arstechnica (May 09, 2019) |
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May 09, 2019 · Front page layout Site theme Sign up or login to join the discussions!
Scott K. Johnson - May 8, 2019 7:23 pm UTC
There are significant generational differences when it comes to opinions on climate change in the US. Students are more open to learning about this scientific issue without getting snagged on the culture wars that have divided American opinions along political and cultural lines, which probably explains why younger people are less likely than their grandparents to claim that climate science is "a hoax." But can kids help us with that problem now, or will they have to wait decades for their turn behind the levers of power?
A team of researchers led by ... Read more ...
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Limiting climate change could save the US a ton of money - Arstechnica (Apr 12, 2019) |
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Apr 12, 2019 · Despite what the world's least-interesting talking gecko would have you believe, no one likes handing over payments for car insurance. But there's one thing everyone likes even less: suddenly paying for expensive repairs not covered by your insurance.
Similarly, opponents of action on climate change like to complain about the costs of eliminating fossil fuel emissions. Typically, this implies that the alternative—ignoring climate change—is free. It is not.
A new study by Jeremy Martinich and Allison Crimmins of the US Environmental Protection Agency provides the most detailed estimate yet of the economic costs of climate change in the United States. They found that ... Read more ...
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Judge ends Arizona coal-mine owners' attempt to compel power customer to stay - Arstechnica (Apr 05, 2019) |
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Apr 05, 2019 · A federal judge in Arizona dismissed a lawsuit that sought to force the state's major water supplier to continue buying power from the Navajo Generating Station (NGS), a 2.25 gigawatt (GW) coal-fired power plant in Arizona.
NGS is the largest coal plant west of the Mississippi River. But in 2017, its owners decided they would close the plant by the end of 2019, as profits steadily eroded.
Meanwhile, Peabody Western Coal Company, which owns the Kayenta Mine that feeds coal to NGS, sought a buyer to take over NGS so that Peabody could keep Kayenta's biggest customer. But Peabody said it was having trouble finding a buyer after CAP's announcement that it would buy power ... Read more ...
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Thousands of years ago, a warm Arctic made mid-latitudes drier - Arstechnica (Apr 05, 2019) |
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Apr 05, 2019 · The thing about a global climate change is that it isn't as simple as shifting the temperatures everywhere by a set number of degrees. The temperature change isn't uniform around the globe, and these regional differences can drive considerable knock-on effects on weather patterns.
The Arctic, for example, will warm more than the equatorial region. For our current global warming venture, there will be consequences of this fact beyond the Arctic itself. One juicy hypothesis is that the greater Arctic warming affects the behavior of the polar jet stream, driving significant changes on extreme weather patterns in the mid-latitudes. This idea is the subject of ongoing research, as ... Read more ...
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Natural gas pipeline in Germany holds “green” methane; Austria has similar plans - Arstechnica (Apr 04, 2019) |
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Apr 04, 2019 · A Düsseldorf, Germany-based energy company called Uniper announced last week that it sent methane made from renewable hydrogen into the local natural gas pipeline.
The methanation plant in Falkenhagen that made the synthetic methane opened in May 2018 (PDF), and the plant's operators began testing the process to combine renewable hydrogen with carbon dioxide from a nearby bioethanol plant.
A big advantage of this methanation project is that it can leverage existing natural gas infrastructure, allowing vehicles, residences, and other customers to indirectly use renewable energy for fuel and heat.
The problem with methanation is generally cost. Uniper didn't state ... Read more ...
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Without federal help, local governments are trying to save coal - Arstechnica (Mar 13, 2019) |
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Mar 13, 2019 · As the Trump administration's attempts to save coal have stalled, a record number of coal plants were shut down or scheduled for shut down in 2018.
The federal government has floated extra compensation for coal and nuclear plants, it has tried to use federal wartime powers to mandate that coal plants stay open, and it has rolled back the Clean Power Plan in the hopes that fewer regulations would help coal power plants stay solvent. Still, though, coal plants close and threaten to close largely because coal is more expensive than natural gas and renewable energy, and it's more cost-effective for utilities and energy companies to retire old plants than to refurbish ... Read more ...
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King Coal isnt dea - es just been exiled from the US - Arstechnica (Dec 21, 2018) |
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Dec 21, 2018 · In the US, coal is decidedly on the decline despite the current administration's attempts to save it. US coal plant retirements doubled in 2018, and demand for coal dropped to the lowest level in more than three decades. But the International Energy Agency's (IEA) annual coal report (calledCoal 2018
China, too, "accounts for nearly half of the world's coal consumption," although the Chinese government has taken steps to control the growth of coal in recent years.
Despite the most recent two years reflecting growth in the coal market, the IEA says this growth is slowing and will become an aggregate decline by 2023. "Coal's contribution to the global energy mix is ... Read more ...
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