The Ugandan military playing security guards for a China-controlled oil project… I think explaining human rights over there will have to start from zero - and may have to be backed with “or else” statements - if there exists an institution in a suitable position to issue them. :o

1 C more temperature -> air can hold 7% more water vapour

…but the peaks of fringe events are quite a bit taller than +1 C. Raising the average by 1 C raises the peaks considerably more.

Summary:

But then, in the geologically abrupt space of only a few decades, this great river of ice all but halted. In the two centuries since, it has moved less than 35 feet a year. According to the leading theory, the layer of water underneath it thinned, perhaps by draining into the underside of another glacier. Having lost its lubrication, the glacier slowed down and sank toward the bedrock below.

/…/

“The beauty of this idea is that you can start small,” Tulaczyk told me. “You can pick a puny glacier somewhere that doesn’t matter to global sea level.” This summer, Martin Truffer, a glaciologist at the University of Alaska at Fairbanks, will travel to the Juneau Icefield in Alaska to look for a small slab of ice that could be used in a pilot test. If it stops moving, Tulaczyk told me he wants to try to secure permission from Greenland’s Inuit political leaders to drain a larger glacier; he has his eye on one at the country’s northeastern edge, which discharges five gigatons of ice into the Arctic Ocean every year. Only if that worked would he move on to pilots in Antarctica.

It’s not wild at all. :) The plan makes sense from a physical perspective, but should not be implemented lightly because:

• it’s extremely hard work and extremely expensive to drain water from beneath an extremely large glacier
• it doesn’t stop warming, it just puts a brake on ice loss / sea level rise

Interestingly, warfare also has the effect of:

• causing houses to be abandoned, necessitating houses elsewhere while the abandoned ones likely get bombed

• decreasing the number of future consumers, whose future footprint would depend on future behaviour patterns (hard to predict)

• changing future land use patterns, either due to unexploded ordnance or straight out chemical contamination (there are places in France that are still off limits to economic activity, because World War I contaminated the soil with toxic chemicals), here in Estonia there are still forests from which you don’t want trees in your sawmill because they contain shrapnel and bullets from World War II

I have the feeling that calculating the climate impact of actual war is a difficult job.

But they could calculate the tonnage of spent fuel and energy, that would be easier.

Well, a heat wave cannot last forever. And in terms of cold storage - it’s +30 C over here currently already for a week, it has been 1.5 months since the last snowfall - and the last pile of snow on the local airport is still melting. Darkened, not recognizable as the substance it used to be, but existing, without people making the slightest effort to protect it. :)

what the hell are we going to do?

In the very long term, stop climate change.

In the long term - dig in and design heat shelters, most likely. Because it’s cooler underground and heat waves will pass. When a bad one comes, people would stop working and find shelter from it. One can even accumulate cold in a thermal store during cool periods and distribute the cooling effect to premises during heat waves.

In the short term - those who can (there will be an equality and access problem) and those who must (who cannot stop working) would install air conditioners and similar stuff.

I don’t even want to imagine 50 C. In sauna, it’s dry and you manage 30 minutes by sweating. But living in a sauna sounds bloody awful.

Also, almost anyone with a med / bio background will say - emergency rooms will be full at 50 C, and morgues will be crowded a few days after the event. :(

True, but toppling over can leave them intact. One of my foolish neigbours didn’t anchor his panel carriers properly and thought a thick fir hedge would protect them enough. A storm from unexpected direction threw four panel carriers (9 panels each) face down and severed the cables, so everything had to be disconnected and there was a safety risk (but not during night). I helped with the recovery work and not a single panel was broken.

…and that is why I no longer mount any solar panels horizontally. Not a chance in hell of withstanding that, and one of such storms hit within 150 kilometers last year. Within 30 years, I bet I’ll experience this effect.

Meanwhile, vertical panels can be up-armored (e.g. wooden beam running on top) to withstand such events.

I think the EU Commission has done a fairly good job of listing the pros and contras of small modular reactors:

https://energy.ec.europa.eu/topics/nuclear-energy/small-modular-reactors/small-modular-reactors-explained_en

They have some advantages over conventional (large) reactors in the following areas:

• if they are serially manufactured without design chances, manufacturing is more efficient than big unique projects
• you can choose a site with less cooling water
• you can choose a site where a fossil-burning plant used to be (grid elements for a power plant are present) but a renewable power plant may not be feasible
• some of them can be safer, due to a higher ratio of coolant per fuel, and a lower need for active cooling*

Explanation: even a shut down NPP needs cooling, but bigger ones need non-trivial amounts of energy, for example the 5700 MW plant in Zaporizhya in the middle of a war zone needs about 50 MW of power just to safely stay offline, which is why people have been fairly concerned about it. For comparison, a 300 MW micro-reactor brought to its lowest possible power level might be safe without external energy, or a minimal amount of external energy (which could be supplied by an off-the-shelf diesel generator available to every rescue department).

The overview of the Commission mentions:

SMRs have passive (inherent) safety systems, with a simpler design, a reactor core with lower core power and larger fractions of coolant. These altogether increase significantly the time allowed for operators to react in case of incidents or accidents.

I don’t think they will offer economical advantages over renewable power. Some amont of SMRs might however be called for to have a long-term steerable component in the power grid.

I noticed a journalist mention (hopefully based on good sources) that this months’s storm was estimated to be 4-5 times weaker than the 1859 storm.

NASA, in their article mentions the recent storm as a G5 level geomagnetic storm caused by an X8.7 level solar flare.

X is the strongest class of solar flares and G is the strongest class of geomagnetic storms, but this was definitely not a record - an X20 flare has been observed once, but as I understand, the ejected particles didn’t hit Earth.

Where I live (latitude 59), a short electrical grid event occurred during the display of auroras. Something tripped and something immediately switched over to replace it, most people didn’t notice anything, but some had to restart various heat pumps and similar devices. Then again, in Europe, the power grid has relatively short lines and many transformers between them, which makes it comparatively less vulnerable.

Regarding transformers: it’s easier to let a power grid trip offline (and transformers are designed to behave so instead of being overpowered) rather than to keep operating despite a Carrington level solar storm and suffer failure on all longer east-west connections.

Also, I don’t think they used capacitors to protect their high voltage lines back in 1921, because the article Overvoltage Protection of Series Capacitor Banks notes:

“Their first application dates back to 1928 when GE installed such a bank – rated 1.2 MVar – at the Ballston Spa Substation on the 33 kV grid of New York Power and Light. Since then, series capacitor banks have been installed on systems across the globe.”

Also, failure on north-south connections isn’t nearly as likely, so a considerable part of the transformer “population” would be spared from impact.

Thus, while a single strong solar storm within the limit charted out in 1859 would be an extreme inconvenience and strong economic setback, it seems unlikely to end civilization.

A long period of severe solar storms could also result in ozone depletion in the atmosphere and become another extreme inconvenience - through increased UV exposure. However, most forms of life have seen such things in their evolutionary past, and humans have the ability to wear glasses, clothes and apply sun screen.

“The City is evaluating the chemical compounds in the spray to determine if they are a hazard either inhaled in aerosol form by humans and animals, or landing on the ground or in the bay.”

If it comes from the bay, I think it’s safe to assume it can go into the bay. :)

As for the rest, I think it’s OK for them to evaluate - and they are likely to reach the concusion that spraying seawater into the air is what the sea does on its own, and humans are pretty well adapted to reasonable amounts, so the instruction will be:

• “spray it from the leeward side, it’s polite that way”
• “don’t put your face in front of the working sprayer”
• “don’t use the sprayer during algal blooms”

It might interest people that the soon-to-be previous biggest thermal energy store is also located in Finland, under the island of Mustikkamaa in the capital city of Helsinki. The city heating company Helsingin Energia “charges” the store by pumping heat out of sewage in summer. I think it was about 10 gigawatt-hours and it’s not pressurized, so water can only reach 90 C over there.

(A side note: if you allow water at 140 C to boil in a controlled manner, you get steam, which can also produce electrical power, although probably in a suboptimal manner.)

Finnish bedrock seems more suitable than average rock for such ventures (which I would call “artificial geothermal energy”) - granite is a poor thermal conductor and a reliable rock for making caverns.

I hope it goes well. :)

Copying out the noteworthy bits.

Claim:

the UAE’s National Center for Meteorology told CNBC it had not seeded any clouds before the storm struck on Tuesday

Verifiable with a bit of FlightRadar searching:

seeding operations tend to take place in the east of the country, far from more populated areas like Dubai. This is largely because of restrictions on air traffic, and means it was unlikely that any seeding particles were still active by the time the storms reached Dubai.

Verifiable with a weather map:

perhaps the best evidence that cloud seeding wasn’t involved in these floods is the fact that it rained all over the region. Oman didn’t do any cloud seeding, but it was even more badly affected by flooding, with a number of casualties.

Now, if I was running a cloud seeding programme and saw a mega-rainstorm coming, I would quickly consult with a person who knows about drainage and call off the flight, saying “we’ve got enough coming”. It doesn’t take superintelligence to make that decision, just a functioning meteorological office and a bit of sense.

…and the final conclusion:

Dubai is comically ill-equipped to deal with rainfall

(because they typically don’t get any)

Coincidentally, there’s a cheaper way too. :)

The ratings of existing power lines can be recalculated on an hourly basis according to outdoor temperature and wind.

That however, requires software and agility, which big companies seldom have… and it doesn’t help during a heat wave with no wind, of course.

Poleward winds, which previously made few inroads into the atmosphere above Antarctica, are now carrying more and more warm, moist air from lower latitudes – including Australia – deep into the continent, say scientists, and these have been blamed for the dramatic polar “heatwave” that hit Concordia. Exactly why these currents are now able to plunge so deep into the continent’s air space is not yet clear, however.

Even if they cannot explain the “how”, it seems beyond doubt that the process can happen repeatedly.

When it happens repeatedly, one should plan for faster Antarcic ice loss, since the excess heat of the rest of the planet can now increasingly reach and melt glaciers.

That has implications for coastal regions everywhere on the planet. Don’t build on the coast. Make plans for higher storm surges and sea level rise. And - needless to say - don’t add greenhouse gases to the atmosphere.

That was some interesting reading, thank you. :)

About the Little Ice Age - I feel like the article slightly mis-dates the period, placing it earlier than many sources suggest.

As a side note, human-amplified mechanisms have been proposed to the Little Ice Age, aside from natural ones - from the conquests of Genghis Khan and his successors, to the Black Death, to the smallpox epidemic that Europeans brought into Americas… but the likely trigger, I think, was this:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1257_Samalas_eruption

As for human societies taking different turns when facing difficulty - I would search for the cause in their world views, technologies and interactions. Europe had already put itself on a course to technical sophistication - techniques such as writing, number systems and methods of calculation enable a single ruler to boss around more people, and ever since the Egyptians, Mesopotamians and Chinese invented their versions, they had big bosses claiming divine mandate or origin.

Everywhere in Eurasia, people also rode and transported cargo - horses, camels and elephants were used to transport goods and fight wars. Their existence enabled the use of wagons and carts, which enabled winches and cranes, siege engines, windmills, sawmills and watermills, to the point of having technology to equip armies and fleets…

…and indeed, armies and fleets were a common problem everywhere in Eurasia. Some where Christian, some Islamic, some believed their own flavour of stories, but the elite having access to writing (without the common people having the same) enabled spread of ideology and top-down management.

Genghis Khan added a key component - an efficient postal system. This enabled remote control of and fast-moving armies, allowing to manage supply chains, give strategic input to distant generals and subsequently - conquer pretty much the known world.

He was not unique, though - Arab armies did a similar trick earlier, Europeans repeated the nasty trick later, enabled by technology from China (gunpowder, printing and compass)… the Ottoman empire grew between the two and took a bite of both, then Russia conquered Eurasia in reverse and Western kingdoms colonized the coasts of many seas.

Eurasia was a considerably more fast-paced, violent and top-down place indeed, and the pace and violence probably had a role in shaping the thought landscape.

“You have to go measure things in the real world, because nature surprises you,” Keith said at that conference in 2017.

He has continually stressed that the amount of material involved would represent a small fraction of the particulate pollution already emitted by planes, and that doing the same experiment for any other scientific purpose wouldn’t have raised an eyebrow.

I agree with that. It seems overblown that some folks were opposed to spreading two kilograms of limestone dust and measuring the result.

A single aerobatic flight of an ultralight aircraft with a smoke trail probably requires more pyrotechnical material, not to speak of fuel. Not to speak of a proper passenger or cargo flight. Not to speak of a satellite launch.

People already do the things anyway, only without properly understanding the results.

As for the argument that “then everyone will start experimenting” - well, that depends on the result of the previous expriment, does it not? And some do it anyway. China has a weather modification bureau, Saudi Arabia practises cloud seeding to increase chances of rainfall, etc.

The car is correctly represented, about 0.15 KWh / km is what one gets.

However, the positioning of the e-bike looks strange to me. I’ve looked at previous studies and the e-biker has always been first in efficiency - because the efficiency of a motor far exceeds the efficiency of human digestion and muscles, while weight and speed remain comparable to an ordinary cyclist.

I think someone has calculated food energy incorrectly, or assumed that e-bikes move faster than they do. :)