Aurora Over Mount Chocorua

(Hey, that rhymes, get it?)

From my friend Jim D, a retired chemistry professor from Linfield College in Oregon who moved back east with his wife right across Lake Winnipesaukee from where I used to live!

I once saw the aurora from Gilford, but it was like a white glimmering sheet and nothing like this at all. 

What a gorgeous high-res picture.

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PS: I once hiked to the top of Mt Chocoura.

PPS: I tried again another time, this time on a second date with a woman, but we left too late in the afternoon and terminated the hike just before the really rocky, steep part to the top. She was a slow hiker, and we tried to take a shortcut trail to get back to the car. We ended up deep in some woods trying to grope our way back to the car. As the sun fell on that November night, I kept telling her, with more and more urgency, that we needed to hurry up. But she just couldn't. I was able to somehow follow the trail by starlight (we didn't have a flashlight) and got us out of the woods and on to a road that led back to my car. In my memory it is actually a special moment -- I was feeling that I somehow knew how the dark, not visible trail before us would go, as it twisted and turned around trees and humps and creeks and rocks. I almost felt like I had done enough hiking and backpacking by then -- 1900 miles on the Appalachian Trail, plus dozens of other trails -- that I could intuit where the trail would go based just on the terrain. And I did. It was kind of unnatural and, if I believed in it, a bit supernatural. I don't believe in the supernatural -- I just feel like my instincts kicked in when I really needed them, when I had started to think we were really going to be lost out there in the New Hampshire woods in November as it was getting quite cold.

But we made it out. I kissed her in joy, kind of awkwardly, we drove out the long dirt road to a place and ate pizza, and I never tried to see her again. Too slow. I have to admit that evening scared me more than almost any hike I'd ever been on. Although there was another one in the Superstition Mountains in Arizona in January....

Good times! Seems like all I have left anymore are memories. 

As with most things, Kevin McCarthy is confused:

I heard the President gave a big speech about economics. Do you know what would be good economics for America?

Energy independence! pic.twitter.com/H636CddAA8

— Kevin McCarthy (@SpeakerMcCarthy) June 30, 2023

Under Biden, the US is now a net exporter of oil:

Data: 

US Weekly Product Supplied

Red State - Blue State Murder Gap

In the US, the murder rate in states that voted for Trump is 40% about higher than states that voted for Biden, and the gap is increasing:

from

“The Two-Decade Red State Murder Problem,” Third Way, Jan 27 2023.

via David Firestone in the New York Times, who writes:

The gap is growing, and it is visible even in the rural areas of Trump states.

But this didn’t come up when a Trump ally, Representative Jim Jordan of Ohio, held a hearing in New York in April to blast Manhattan’s prosecutor for being lax on crime, even though rates for all seven major crime categories are higher in Ohio than in New York City. Nor does House Speaker Kevin McCarthy — who tweets about Democratic “lawlessness” — talk about the per capita homicide rate in Bakersfield, Calif., which he represents, which has been the highest in California for years and is higher than New York City’s.

Why is this relevant? Because increasingly I've been seeing conservatives writing that some cities are going downhill -- crime, police issues, drugs, homelessness, decay -- because they have mayors who are Democrats. (And, the subtle allusion is, because many of these mayors are black.)

I'm not implying these mayors are perfect. Just that they're far from singularly responsible for the problems in big cities. In most cases it's state legislatures and governors who determine gun laws (which are increasingly lax, especially in the south, which may be partly or mostly responsible for the murder gap), or money for the homeless or medical care or rehabilitation programs, etc. 

Then there are the policies of neighboring states. Chicago, for example, has some of the strictest gun laws, but most of the guns used in homicides there come from out of state: 

In 2017, a report commissioned by former Mayor Rahm Emanuel analyzed four years of gun tracing data and found 60% of illegally used or possessed firearms recovered in Chicago come from out of state. Indiana was the primary source for approximately one in five such guns. In 95% of cases, the person with the gun was not the initial purchaser.

As always, the situations with respect to crime are far more complicated than the juvenile bullet points that get throw out as soon as the discussion begins.

"people in a country side feeling the effects of global warming"

"people wilting on a hot day in a city"

I asked Bing Image Creator to create a picture using the text in the title of this post. These were the best two:

Took about a minute, once I figured out how to use Bing Image Creator, which itself took about five minutes.  

It wouldn't let me use "suffering" or "heat stroke," so I had to go with "wilting."

Landlines Lost

Here's an interesting graphic from the Washington Post about the evolution of how people make and receive phone calls.

I went wireless-only when I moved to Oregon in early 2006. I thought I was behind the curve, but I guess not. 

Solar Eclipse on Mars

Taken by NASA's rover Perseverance as the moon Phobos passes in front of the Sun, on April 2, 2022. The eclipse lasted 40 seconds. 

Phobos orbits Mars at a distance of 6,000 km above the Martian surface.

Note that it doesn't cover the entire Sun, unlike solar eclipses on Earth. That's because the exact coverage of our Moon over the Sun is an extremely rare thing for a planet to have -- a moon that's just the right size and distance to the angle made by the diameter and its distance almost exactly matches the same angle to its sun. It's quite uncanny, and won't last forever as the Moon is moving away from the Earth by 3.8 cm/year. The last total solar eclipse on Earth will be in about 600 million years.

So in fact, we live in a very special time and place, when and where we have total solar eclipses. Might be enough of a reason for aliens to consider us a tourist attraction.

--

Here's a video, via Mashable:

 

Global Heat Wave May Be Ending

Link: https://twitter.com/hausfath/status/1672085759694893058

Oregon County Sues Oil Companies for 2021 Heat Dome

Multnomah County in Oregon is suing several fossil fuel companies for causing the monster heat wave in Oregon in June 2021.

Multnomah County is the county that includes Portland, Oregon.

That's not all:

The county also seeks an estimated $50 billion for an abatement fund to study, plan and upgrade public health services and infrastructure to help “weatherproof” the county during future extreme heat events. 

The video accompanying the story says more than two dozen cities, counties and states have filed similar lawsuits. 

Given that the oil companies, like Exxon, did know of the warming potential of their fuels, I think lawsuits like this are justified, just as were the lawsuits against tobacco companies. With enough of them the fossil fuel companies may well settle by some kind of similar multiple hundred-billion dollar type of payment. And they'll be getting off easy.

Record Sea Surface Temperatures

This tweet made me want to look at the latest sea surface temperatures at the U of Maine's Climate Reanalyzer, and they're something else:

Extra atmospheric water vapor in the stratosphere from volcano Tongo?

In the study, published in Geophysical Research Letters, Millán and his colleagues estimate that the Tonga eruption sent around 146 teragrams (1 teragram equals a trillion grams) of water vapor into Earth’s stratosphere – equal to 10% of the water already present in that atmospheric layer. 

The study says it could be there for awhile:

It may take several years for the H2O plume to dissipate. This eruption could impact climate not through surface cooling due to sulfate aerosols, but rather through surface warming due to the radiative forcing from the excess stratospheric H2O.

For the North Atlantic Brian McNoldy wrote the other day that the latest SST for the North Atlantic was a record high anomaly, 3.87 standard deviations above the mean (a 1-in-18,650 occurrence)

Climate Pacts Have Done Essentially Nothing

From William Ripple, a professor of ecology at Oregon State University. There is just too much money to be made in fossil fuels (~ $100T?).

This doesn't prove climate pacts and accords and conferences have done nothing -- we'd need to see the same curve but without them. But it's not encouraging in the least. 

Cormac McCarthy Has Died

The writer Cormac McCarthy has died. But not before this bit of pessimism, from a 1992 interview with the New York Times:

McCarthy wrote All the Pretty Horses, which is a fabulous novel if you can adjust to his clipped, acerbic writing style that wonderfully sets the tone for the story and its location. 

He also wrote Blood Meridian, which is now near the top of my reading list. I hear it's extremely violent, so much so that some people have stopped reading it out of revulsion and disgust. Today the NY Times called it "a bad dream of a Western." And he wrote the books on which two popular movies were based: The Road and No Country For Old Men, neither full of lollipops and rose petals. The former is set in an apocalyptic western Pennsylvania, not far from where I grew up, which some people consider the northernmost edge of Appalachia, one of McCarthy's two favorite locales (the other being the American southwest). He himself grew up in eastern Tennessee, of which he said, "We were considered rich because all the people around us were living in one- or two-room shacks."

He started college studying physics and engineering. After the Air Force he got serious about writing:

After marrying fellow student Lee Holleman in 1961, McCarthy "moved to a shack with no heat and running water in the foothills of the Smoky Mountains outside of Knoxville". There, the couple had a son, Cullen, in 1962. When writer James Agee's childhood home was being demolished in Knoxville that year, McCarthy used the site's bricks to build fireplaces inside his Sevier County shack. While Lee cared for the baby and tended to the chores of the house, Cormac asked her to get a day job so he could focus on his novel writing. Dismayed with the situation, she moved to Wyoming, where she filed for divorce and landed her first job teaching.

Here's an interesting picture of him when he was young, about 40:

Classic '70s look. 

People Without Shame

People without any semblance of shame will be the downfall of this country. --

--

David Appell, freelance science writer

e: david.appell@gmail.com
w: http://www.davidappell.com

p: +1 503-975-5614

m: Keizer, Oregon, USA

Canadian Wildfires & Climate Change?

Not much of a trend:

Source: Canadian Broadcasting 5/25/2023. Corporation, https://www.cbc.ca/news/climate/canada-wildfire-data-change-1.6854186

Fossil Fuel Use in US: No Progress

No progress in 15 years.

The CO2 emissions from fossil fuel energy production won't follow the same curve because the mixture of fuels -- coal, natural gas, oil -- has changed. I'll try to dig that up.

Source: US Energy Information Agency (annual data) 

The Coming El Nino

The IRI at Columbia University is out with their latest monthly ENSO prediction, and the average predicts a strong El Nino beginning around August:

Anything above 1.5°C is considered a "strong" El Nino. The 2015-2016 El Nino SST anomaly peaked at 2.6°C, and the 1997-1998 peaked at 2.4°C. 

(An "El Nino" has a SST anomaly of 0.5-1.0°C, "moderate" El Nino is 1.0-1.5°C, and "strong" El Nino is > 1.5°C.) There have to be five consecutive months where the index is in a category before it earns one of these labels. 

(This is from the same page as above.)

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James Hansen said in his email newsletter that he has a paper coming out the concludes 'the present greenhouse gas forcing is 70% of the forcing that made Earth’s temperature in the Early Eocene Climatic Optimum at least +13°C relative to preindustrial temperature.'

The Eocene is the period after the PETM, from 59 million years ago (Ma) to 49 Ma. Here's more on the Early Eocene Climate Optimum. I don't know much more than this at present....

Have a nice weekend.

Florida Road After Beachfront Erosion

Looks like something from Planet of the Apes.... Hey, maybe that movie was set after global warming had destroyed mankind, and sea level rise was why the Statue of Liberty was destroyed.... (Yes, I know Charleton Heston said "they blew it up," but how would he have known exactly what happened?)

(From a newspaper I've lost the link to.)

FBI Public Service Announcement

America 2023. Jesus F... Christ.

This is an actual ad from the FBI. pic.twitter.com/JNr5rCF392

— Adam Parkhomenko (@AdamParkhomenko) May 9, 2023

Global SST at record high

The record high for global average sea surface temperature (SST) is about 0.2°C.

The orange line is 2022.

Same for the North Atlantic:

Plots from University of Maine's Climate Reanalyzer.

Here's an interesting article from today that goes into more detail:

Earth in hot water? Worries over sudden ocean warming spike, Seth Borenstein, Associated Press, 4-27-23

Good News, But Not Entirely

"Mike Lindell’s firm told to pay $5 million in ‘Prove Mike Wrong’ election-fraud challenge," Chris Dehghanpoor, Emma Brown and Jon Swaine, Washington Post, 4/20/23.

Lindell has done a huge amount of damage to America, and I hope the history books say that.

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“The G.O.P. is a working-class populist party that has no interest in nurturing highly educated bobo boom towns. The G.O.P. does everything it can to repel those people — and the Tesla they drove in on.” 

- David Brooks, "Why People are Fleeing Blue Cities for Red States," NY Times, 4/13/23.

All people seem to care about anymore is their own pocketbook.

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Someone from the Washington Policy Center wrote a blog post:

"Washington’s gas prices have increased between 35 and 52 cents per gallon since CO2 tax," Todd Myers, 4/17/23.

"Depending on the comparison, Washington’s gas prices have increased between 35 and 52 cents more than neighboring states since the state launched a tax on CO2 emissions at the beginning of the year."

Yeah, that's the point! Making fossil fuels more expensive incentivizes individuals to switch to noncarbon sources of fuel.

But I do agree with his second point:

"Despite the clear data, state politicians and agency staff refuse to acknowledge the cost of the increases and aren’t helping residents deal with the impact of the costs."

The poor (and middle class, today) can't just go out and buy an electric car to avoid the carbon tax. What's a new electric car cost, at least $25,000? That's beyond the means of a lot of people. 

Personally, I can't afford an electric car, new or used, right now. Probably never a new one.

So all the poor and middle class can do is suffer the carbon tax. If they drive the US average of about 12,000 mi/yr, and their car gets the US average of about 25 mi/gal, they buy 480 gal/yr of gasoline. If Todd's lower limit of an additional 35 cents/gal (at a minimum) is accurate, that's an extra $168/yr they're paying in carbon taxes. $14/month.

That's not trivial if you're poor. $168 would cover about two months of electricity. (Personally, my average electricity bill over the last 12 months is $87/month.)

The problem is that these Washington legislators want to keep the carbon tax money for themselves, to use as they desire.

A much better way to use it, if you're really serious about halting climate change, is as James Hansen started advocating for long ago: refund all carbon taxes back on an equal per capita basis. 

The poor would actually make money under this plan. Their refunds, since their use if average, would cover their up-front carbon fee costs. But those who use "too much" gasoline would pay more, and most of that would go back to the poor.

This plan would help alleviate poverty.

It should be relatively easy to return all money collected (minus a few percent for administrative costs) to households, it seems to me. They can return tax returns. But of course, there are people who are homeless, sharing a car, etc and how do you handle these situations? But it's not rocket science.

But politicians really don't care about the poor. Of course.

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This March was the 2nd-warmest in its records, going back to 1880, according to NASA GISS. The 4th-warmest of any month. That's weird, considering we've just come out of the La Nina -- the third La Nina in consecutive years.

(Graph via Tropical Tidbits.)

So we're not even in an El Nino yet -- which many are predicting for later this year -- and already temperatures have soared out of the La Nina zone. (The GISS global anomaly this past November was "only" 0.73°C [baseline: 1951-1980].)

A new El Nino is likely to get very interesting. 

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