Lava, Lava ...

 The music's a little too much but the video's not as earth rules when it comes to volcanoes and lava flows.

Excellent ... to a fault :)

Courtesy of Aaron Bugai

What an excellent idea. Combine solar panels with crops as many crops get toasted if they get too much sun. This is a prime example of a great notion as all great concepts begin with people who didn't come with the idea stating "Why didn't I think of that.".

IN JACK'S SOLAR Garden in Boulder County, Colorado, owner Byron Kominek has covered 4 of his 24 acres with solar panels. The farm is growing a huge array of crops underneath them—carrots, kale, tomatoes, garlic, beets, radishes, lettuce, and more. It’s also been generating enough electricity to power 300 homes. “We decided to go about this in terms of needing to figure out how to make more money for land that we thought should be doing more,” Kominek says.

Rooftops are so 2020. If humanity’s going to stave off the worst of climate change, people will need to get creative about where they put solar panels. Now scientists are thinking about how to cover canals with them, reducing evaporation while generating power. Airports are filling up their open space with sun-eaters. And space doesn’t get much more open than on a farm: Why not stick a solar array in a field and plant crops underneath? It’s a new scientific (and literal) field known as agrivoltaics—agriculture plus photovoltaics—and it’s not as counterintuitive as it might seem. 

Yes, plants need sunlight, but some need less than others, and indeed get stressed by too many photons. Shading those crops means they will require less water, which rapidly evaporates in an open field. Plus, plants “sweat,” which cools the panels overhead and boosts their efficiency. 

A win, win for sure. 

Hellscape 101

Photo by Chris LeBoutillier on Unsplash

The hellscape of our own doing is gathering speed 24/7 while governments and businesses do nothing to derail the catastrophe being unleashed upon the world. Words cannot describe but nature is beginning to as civilization moves ever further into the Anthropocene. 

No one is entirely sure how this horrifying experiment will end but humans like defined goals and so, in the 2015 Paris climate agreement, nearly 200 countries agreed to limit the global temperature rise to “well below” 2C, with an aspirational goal to keep it to 1.5C. The latter target was fought for by smaller, poorer nations, aware that an existential threat of unlivable heatwaves, floods and drought hinged upon this ostensibly small increment. “The difference between 1.5C and 2C is a death sentence for the Maldives,” said Ibrahim Mohamed Solih, president of the country, to world leaders at the United Nations in September.

There is no huge chasm after a 1.49C rise, we are tumbling down a painful, worsening rocky slope rather than about to suddenly hit a sheer cliff edge – but by most standards the world’s governments are currently failing to avert a grim fate. “We are on a catastrophic path,” said António Guterres, secretary general of the UN. “We can either save our world or condemn humanity to a hellish future.”

The Grasshopper

A grasshopper spent the summer hopping about in the sun and singing to his heart's content. One day, an ant went hurrying by, looking very hot and weary.

"Why are you working on such a lovely day?" said the grasshopper.

"I'm collecting food for the winter," said the ant, "and I suggest you do the same." And off she went, helping the other ants to carry food to their store. The grasshopper carried on hopping and singing. When winter came the ground was covered with snow. The grasshopper had no food and was hungry. So he went to the ants and asked for food.

"What did you do all summer when we were working to collect our food?" said one of the ants.

"I was busy hopping and singing," said the grasshopper.

"Well," said the ant, "if you hop and sing all summer, and do no work, then you must starve in the winter."

Photo by Malcolm Lightbody on Unsplash 

When will we ever learn ...

Katoku beach and its village are wrestling with how to cope with increasingly damaging storms.Credit...Noriko Hayashi for The New York Times

When will we ever learn in terms of preserving nature instead of trying to rule over it, 

in this case, a pristine beach in Japan.

KATOKU, Japan — Standing on its mountain-fringed beach, there is no hint that the Japanese village of Katoku even exists. Its handful of houses hide behind a dune covered with morning glories and pandanus trees, the chitter of cicadas interrupted only by the cadence of waves and the call of an azure-winged jay.

In July, the beach became part of a new UNESCO World Heritage Site, a preserve of verdant peaks and mangrove forests in far southwestern Japan that is home to almost a dozen endangered species.

Two months later, the placid air was split by a new sound: the rumble of trucks and excavators preparing to strip away a large section of Katoku’s dune and bury inside of it a two-story-tall concrete wall meant to curb erosion.

The sea wall project demonstrates how not even the most precious ecological treasures can survive Japan’s construction obsession, which has long been its answer to the threat of natural disaster — and a vital source of economic stimulus and political capital, especially in rural areas.

“It became necessary to destroy the town to save it.”  - Peter Arnett/Vietnam

The seawall in front of Aminoko, a village near Katoku.Credit...Noriko Hayashi for The New York Times

St Catherine's by the sea

Sunset/rev XXX

Just Fishing

Dusk @ St Catherine's

St Catherine's - Early Evening

On the eve of destruction

Command & Control, the extraordinary book by Eric Schlosser, describing how lucky we have been regarding nukes given the incredible number of near misses we have had in the art of blowing ourselves up, resonates, in part, to the articulate Richard Rhodes piece On the Eve of Destruction discussing the ongoing insanity of an out of control tech capable of ending civilization as we know it.

The hydrogen bomb’s arbitrary destructiveness follows from its harnessing of light-element fusion. A fission weapon requires a certain critical mass of fissile material for its chain reaction to continue, limiting its yield as the heating mass expands and blows itself apart: the largest fission weapon the United States ever tested yielded about half a megaton. In contrast, a thermonuclear weapon, as its name implies, can be made arbitrarily large simply by adding more hydrogen fuel, like building a fire. The largest hydrogen bomb the United States ever tested yielded about fifteen megatons, or about one thousand Hiroshimas. The Soviet Union tested a weapon with a design yield of one hundred megatons that was modified to constrain its yield to only fifty-eight megatons so that it could be dropped by air over northern Siberia without presumably destroying the plane. The Hungarian émigré physicist Edward Teller once sketched out a weapon of a ten thousand megaton yield but realized that at around one hundred megatons the fireball from the explosion would be ten miles in diameter, which is approximately the thickness of the Earth’s troposphere. More than a hundred megatons and the blast would likely blow out into space rather than extending destruction on the ground.

And ... it's all about the money

In 2008 the Nuclear Threat Initiative, a nonprofit founded by former Georgia Senator Sam Nunn and media titan Ted Turner, released a study indicating that from 1940 to 1996, the United States spent at least $5.5 trillion (or $6.9 trillion in today’s dollars) on its nuclear weapons program. If you include the costs of cleaning up production wastes and disposing of surplus materials, that number increases to $5.8 trillion ($7.3 trillion). The bombs and warheads themselves cost only about 7 percent of that number; the remainder comprised the costs of delivery, command, control, communications and intelligence systems, as well as defense systems including air defense, missile defense, anti-submarine warfare, and civil defense. These expenditures constituted 29 percent of all U.S. military spending and almost 11 percent of all government spending from 1940 through 1996, exceeding all other categories of government spending except non-nuclear national defense and Social Security.

Divided equally among the entire U.S. population, $5.8 trillion equals slightly more than $17,000 per person. That’s one way to visualize the cost of building and maintaining our nuclear arsenal. Another way is to ask what that $5.8 trillion might have bought instead. Since the dollars come out of different baskets, the comparison is somewhat one of apples and oranges. But it’s a comparison President Dwight D. Eisenhower made in one of his first presidential addresses, twelve weeks into his presidency:

This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. The cost of one modern heavy bomber is this: a modern brick school in more than thirty cities. It is two electric power plants, each serving a town of sixty thousand population. It is two fine, fully equipped hospitals. It is some fifty miles of concrete pavement. We pay for a single fighter plane with a half million bushels of wheat. We pay for a single destroyer with new homes that could have housed more than eight thousand people.

 

Questions, questions in terms of why we need these weapons in the first place.

But what enemy or enemies are we defending ourselves against? Former Secretary of State Colin Powell, back in 1991 when he was chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, famously remarked, “I’m running out of demons. I’m running out of villains. I’m down to Castro and Kim Il Sung.” What are we down to today? An Iran with only a conventional military, increasingly crippled by sanctions and unwilling to engage? North Korea now protected by an arsenal of nuclear weapons—twenty or more, including its first hydrogen bomb—and holding Japan and South Korea hostage, to be sacrificed if we were so foolish as to attack? China, which has limited its nuclear arsenal to a posture of minimum deterrence since it first acquired a nuclear capability in 1964? What in heaven’s name is a trillion dollars in defense spending for?

Good question indeed.

3C & counting

Santa Monica Pier, California today contrasted with the project sea level rise with 3C warning. Composite Climate Central

Without action, the world's temperature will rise by 3C - 5.4 F by 2100. With luck, knowing how phase transitions are exponential and not linear, the heat index could be even higher.

Fifty major cities, mostly in Asia, and at least one large nation on every continent but Australia and Antarctica are at risk. Many small island nations are threatened with near total loss of their land.

The collection of images and videos produced by the non-profit Climate Central visualize future sea level rise if the world fails to meet emissions reduction targets. The images show what areas of the world can be saved and which could be lost, taking with them the heritage and history of these coastal communities.

Space Center Houston, present day

Space Center Houston, +1.5C

Space Center Houston, +3C

Santa Monica Pier, present day

Santa Monica Pier, +1.5C

Santa Monica Pier, +3C

The researchers applied different scenarios of warming to determine where communities are most vulnerable within the next 200 to 2,000 years.

“We’ve seen about a foot of sea level rise over the last century,” Strauss said. “Looking forward we’re talking about 10 feet rise in the best case scenario and 30 feet in the worst.” In a higher warming scenario of 4C, sea level could rise to cover land where 15% of the global population live.

Remember, Lovelock warned us, Exxon deceived us ... Houston, we have a problem.

It's all about stuff ...

The Port of Savannah in Georgia is the third-largest container port in the United States.

Credit Photograph by Erin Schaff

Look closely at this amazing photograph and one will see container ships lined up to offload stuff but cannot, due to supply chain problems. Now, consider what happens to the US economy when consumers cannot consume as the US economy, 85.7% driven by consumption, will face economic woes differing from every other industrialized country in the world. 

Seen below is a breakdown of the US economy.

Household consumption: 68.4%

Government consumption: 17.3%

Investment in fixed capital: 17.2%

Investment in inventories: 0.1%

Exports of goods and services: 12.1%

Imports of goods and services: −15%

By comparison, here's France's

agriculture: 1.7%

industry: 19.5%

services: 78.8%

With this in mind, see how global shipping becomes paralyzed as per the Port of Savannah, the 3rd largest port in the US.

SAVANNAH, Ga. — Like toy blocks hurled from the heavens, nearly 80,000 shipping containers are stacked in various configurations at the Port of Savannah — 50 percent more than usual.

The steel boxes are waiting for ships to carry them to their final destination, or for trucks to haul them to warehouses that are themselves stuffed to the rafters. Some 700 containers have been left at the port, on the banks of the Savannah River, by their owners for a month or more.

“They’re not coming to get their freight,” complained Griff Lynch, the executive director of the Georgia Ports Authority. “We’ve never had the yard as full as this.”

As he speaks, another vessel glides silently toward an open berth — the 1,207-foot-long Yang Ming Witness, its decks jammed with containers full of clothing, shoes, electronics and other stuff made in factories in Asia. Towering cranes soon pluck the thousands of boxes off the ship — more cargo that must be stashed somewhere.

Nearly 80,000 containers jam the port, 50 percent more than usual. Photograph by Erin Schaff

It's all about stuff ...

On a muggy afternoon in late September, Christmas suddenly felt close at hand. The containers stacked on the riverbanks were surely full of holiday decorations, baking sheets, gifts and other material for the greatest wave of consumption on earth.

Will they get to stores in time?

“That’s the question everyone is asking,” Mr. Lynch said. “I think that’s a very tough question.”

Yes indeed.

The lack therof ...

Electricity pylons and chimneys at the Tata Power Co. Trombay Thermal Power Station in Mumbai, India, on Wednesday, Oct. 6, 2021. Dhiraj Singh | Bloomberg | Getty Images

Seems India's also dealing with a coal shortage as well. Question, do you really think anything of significance will be done regarding global warming when two of the most populous countries in the world are dealing with an energy crisis. Not a chance as economies, as they presently are, are not sustainable as solar does not have the energy density of coal and the infrastructure's not in place to produce enough solar driven tech to give nations like China and India the power they need today to keep their economies going. From this writer's perspective, the oft repeated phrase, "you gotta have a really big catastrophe to force change as man does not like change in any way shape or fashion." applies. 

China is not the only Asian giant grappling with an energy crunch — India is also teetering on the edge of a power crisis.

Most of India’s coal-fired power plants have critically low levels of coal inventory at a time when the economy is picking up and fueling electricity demand.

Coal accounts for around 70% of India’s electricity generation.

A potential power crisis would likely have an immediate impact on India’s nascent economic whi is being led by industrial activity instead of services, according to Kunal Kundu, India economist at Societe Generale.

Government data showed that as of Oct. 6, 80% of India’s 135 coal-powered plants had less than 8 days of supplies left — more than half of those had stocks worth two days or fewer.

The lack thereof ...

Drip, Drip, Drip ...

 Hurricane Ida made the Major Deegan a river again. 

Photographer: Spencer Platt/Getty Images North America

Yours truly has videotaped and walked NYC for years as seen by the numerous NYC blurbs posted in this blog but this piece is not about the wonders of Gotham bu rather about the persistent weather related problems that will not go away in the city that never sleeps. In It won't take much, tropical storm Elsa flooded many subway stations and made roadways a mess. The pix above shows what a weakened hurricane Ida could do but this kind of event is just a prelude because by 2080, NYC will have a climate akin to Jonesboro, AK and, due to global warming, the city will become a much wetter place without question.

New York City saw it coming. In May, in the kind of clarifying document that invariably gets noticed when it’s too late, the city mapped out the sort of devastation that Hurricane Ida would bring just a few months later.

Ida put an exclamation point on realities that New York was already grappling with. Like other parts of the world, the report notes, the city is confronting not just calamitous extreme events like the inundations of Ida. It’s the drip, drip of “the chronic worsening of average conditions.”

The message of the New York City Stormwater Resiliency Plan is that, weatherwise, the scale of everything has changed. The city’s current infrastructure — its roads, subway tunnels, sewer systems, storm drains — is not built to withstand the climate-related ravages to come. As a result, the report states, capital investments “provide diminishing returns, as it becomes more and more challenging to treat the large volumes of stormwater released in extreme events.”

According to the New York City Panel on Climate Change, by the end of the 21st century, the city could experience as much as 25% more annual rainfall. The number of days marked by extreme rain would also markedly increase.

Remember ... Manhattan, situated between two rivers and all the power driving the city residing in the subways, gives one pause because ... with just a 6" water rise, NYC becomes toast as the pumps, which already run 24/7 to keep the East River and the Hudson under control, will not be able to keep essential systems dry in any way, shape or fashion. Something to think about don't you think?