Silicon Investor - The Environmentalist Thread

[Wharf Rat] Protect data, not people.

Wharf Rat — 6/18/2026 12:03:27 PM

[Ron] Trump's Department of Justice wants to protect a big southern Data Center from a...

Ron — 6/18/2026 11:56:56 AM

Trump's Department of Justice wants to protect a big southern Data Center from an air pollution lawsuit
nytimes.com

[Wharf Rat] Asked google for an update.... As of mid-2026, political scientist Roger Pielk...

Wharf Rat — 6/11/2026 1:20:00 PM

Asked google for an update....

As of mid-2026, political scientist Roger Pielke Jr. is currently ahead in the wager.
While the bet will not officially conclude until December 31, 2030, the historical weather data compiled so far favors Pielke’s prediction over Donald Boudreaux’s.
The breakdown of the current standings indicates several factors keeping Pielke in the lead:

1. The Baseline Target vs. Current Reality
To win the bet, Boudreaux needs the 2011–2030 average of U.S. deaths from hurricanes, floods, and tornadoes to drop below the 1991–2010 historical baseline. That 20-year baseline averaged roughly 308 deaths per year. [ 1]

The 2010s Deficit: Data from NOAA's National Centers for Environmental Information (NCEI) shows that during the 2010–2019 decade, severe weather events caused an average of 523 deaths per year.
The 2020s Surge: The trend has not let up in the 2020s. From 2020 through 2024, the annual average sat at 504 deaths per year. [ 1]

2. Why Pielke is Leading
Because the math relies on a strict 20-year average of raw, absolute deaths rather than a per-capita rate, Pielke's core hypothesis has proven correct so far. Even though modern meteorology, cell phone alerts, and better infrastructure have drastically reduced the percentage of the population killed by major storms, the massive influx of people moving into disaster-prone regions (like coastal Florida, Texas, and the Southern tornado alley) has increased overall exposure. [ 1]

3. What Boudreaux Needs to Win
With only a few years remaining in the bet, Boudreaux is facing a severe mathematical deficit due to high-casualty years like 2011 (catastrophic tornado outbreaks) and severe recent hurricane seasons. For the final 20-year average to drop below 308, the U.S. would essentially need a historic, unprecedented multi-year streak of near-zero fatalities from hurricanes, tornadoes, and floods between now and 2030. [ 1, 2, 3]

AI can make mistakes, so double-check responses

[Wharf Rat] [graphic]

Wharf Rat — 6/4/2026 5:21:54 PM

[Ron] Why many scientists believe Earth is going through a sixth major extinction even...

Ron — 6/4/2026 4:32:40 PM

Why many scientists believe Earth is going through a sixth major extinction event
spacedaily.com

[Ron] A big environmental case comes before the Supreme Court Supreme Court conside...

Ron — 4/28/2026 9:02:01 AM

A big environmental case comes before the Supreme Court
Supreme Court considers blocking lawsuits alleging weed killer causes cancer (Roundup)
dnyuz.com

[Ron] The Supreme Court on Friday sided with oil giant Chevron, ruling that it can...

Ron — 4/17/2026 12:50:35 PM

The Supreme Court on Friday sided with oil giant Chevron, ruling that it can fight an environmental damage lawsuit in federal court — a decision that could affect the outcomes of nearly a dozen other lawsuits that make similar allegations about the oil and gas industry.

The unanimous decision puts into question a $745 million state court judgment against Chevron to help restore coastal wetlands in Louisiana that were damaged as far back as World War II. Chevron had asked the Supreme Court to order the case moved to federal court.

washingtonpost.com

[Ron] [bluesky] Trump wants to push Buffalo off public grazing lands - because they a...

Ron — 4/9/2026 1:06:26 PM

[bluesky]

Trump wants to push Buffalo off public grazing lands - because they are considered conservation, rather than corporate profit www.motherjones.com/politics/202...
— James Aura (@jamesaura.bsky.social) 2026-04-09T17:04:57.915Z

[/bluesky]

[Ron] Going to see this documentary next month: The Lake: an environmental nuclear b...

Ron — 3/25/2026 3:45:12 PM

Going to see this documentary next month:

The Lake: an environmental nuclear bomb (The Great Salt Lake)

thelakedoc.com

[Ron] [bluesky] One of the world's most invasive plants confronts bureaucracy at the ...

Ron — 3/21/2026 10:37:20 AM

[bluesky]

One of the world's most invasive plants confronts bureaucracy at the US-Mexican border undark.org/2026/03/16/a...?
— James Aura (@jamesaura.bsky.social) 2026-03-21T14:36:03.181Z

[/bluesky]

[Ron] Teddy Roosevelt’s Family Urges G.O.P. to Protect Public Lands nytimes.com

Ron — 2/20/2026 8:14:19 AM

[Ron] Trump order pushes glyphosate production; Roundup chemical hated by many Trump s...

Ron — 2/19/2026 8:33:28 AM

Trump order pushes glyphosate production; Roundup chemical hated by many Trump supporters
cnbc.com

[Bonefish] Thought you were talking about the latest rain

Bonefish — 12/29/2025 10:44:08 PM

[Wharf Rat] Not a problem.

Wharf Rat — 12/29/2025 10:25:14 PM

[Bonefish] . Wrong thread. Sorry

Bonefish — 12/29/2025 10:17:13 PM

[gg cox] Succinctly. youtube.com

gg cox — 12/18/2025 9:00:22 AM

[Ron] The most important numbers you've never heard of: The high price of scrapping ...

Ron — 2/5/2025 1:14:37 PM

The most important numbers you've never heard of:
The high price of scrapping the social cost of carbon
On climate policy, the new administration is entitled to recalculate this metric — but it cannot act arbitrarily.

wapo.st

[gg cox] threads.net@the.bear.in.the.woods/post/DEawg4IvHk9?xmt=AQGzla1OV9RFaRVFabeVZxG3R...

gg cox — 1/5/2025 10:19:56 AM

threads.net@the.bear.in.the.woods/post/DEawg4IvHk9?xmt=AQGzla1OV9RFaRVFabeVZxG3Rm1K8EPd4nrwUSnzYaQ1DA

.

.https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/science/bill-nye-seattles-science-guy-awarded-presidential-medal-of-freedom/

[gg cox] Helper raven,, threads.net@tomas.torregrosa.1962/post/DC5Jnu3vsFY?xmt=AQGzziFZ...

gg cox — 11/28/2024 2:05:38 PM

Helper raven,,

threads.net@tomas.torregrosa.1962/post/DC5Jnu3vsFY?xmt=AQGzziFZ60r-csKq93iGE2vNyRLgKvaDt1gUipV5aKy3wg

Click and hold on the last part of the link,,,. then…select ” open in threads “

[Ron] [X] Decades ago, Kris Hansen showed 3M that its PFAS chemicals were in people's...

Ron — 10/19/2024 12:42:24 PM

[X]

Decades ago, Kris Hansen showed 3M that its PFAS chemicals were in people's bodies. Her bosses halted her work. As the EPA now forces the removal of the chemicals from drinking water, she wrestles with the secrets that 3M kept from her and the world.https://t.co/rN27nsKkFL
— ProPublica (@propublica) October 19, 2024

[/X]

[Wharf Rat] [X] Breaking News! Code UFB!!! The preliminary global surface temperature for ...

Wharf Rat — 7/24/2024 1:15:21 AM

[X]

Breaking News!
Code UFB!!!

The preliminary global surface temperature for July 22 just came in at 17.15°C, obliterating the previous record set just yesterday of 17.09°C. pic.twitter.com/neE3htPGHe
— Prof. Eliot Jacobson (@EliotJacobson) July 24, 2024

[/X]

[Snowshoe] Why saline lakes are the canary in the coal mine for the world’s water resources...

Snowshoe — 7/15/2024 7:14:01 AM

Why saline lakes are the canary in the coal mine for the world’s water resources
theconversation.com

Published: July 11, 2024 9:46pm EDT

The rapid response of saline lakes to the changing conditions makes these lakes suitable candidates for reliably reflecting the regional, and potentially global, status of water resources, and revealing crucial changes in the water balance. Unsurprisingly, many of the world’s saline lakes are shrinking rapidly, a major warning about the sustainability of regional water resources.

[Ron] Data Centers Are Driving a Return to Coal For Power CHARLES TOWN, W.Va. — ...

Ron — 5/26/2024 11:16:05 AM

Data Centers Are Driving a Return to Coal For Power

CHARLES TOWN, W.Va. — A helicopter hovers over the Gee family farm, the noisy rattle echoing inside their home in this rural part of West Virginia. It’s holding surveyors who are eyeing space for yet another power line next to the property — a line that will take electricity generated from coal plants in the state to address a drain on power driven by the world’s internet hub in Northern Virginia 35 miles away.

There, massive data centers with computers processing nearly 70 percent of global digital traffic are gobbling up electricity at a rate officials overseeing the power grid say is unsustainable unless two things happen: Several hundred miles of new transmission lines must be built, slicing through neighborhoods and farms in Virginia and three neighboring states. And antiquated coal-powered electricity plants that had been scheduled to go offline will need to keep running to fuel the increasing need for more power, undermining clean energy goals.

“It’s not right,” said Mary Gee, whose property already abuts two power lines that serve as conduits for electricity flowing towardthe biggest concentration of data centers — in Loudoun County, home to what’s known as Data Center Alley.“These power lines? They’re not for me and my family. I didn’t vote on this. And the data centers? That’s not in West Virginia. That’s a whole different state.”

The $5.2 billion effort has fueled a backlash against data centers through the region, prompting officials in Virginia to begin studying the deeper impacts of an industry they’ve long cultivated for the hundreds of millions of dollars in tax revenue it brings to their communities.

Critics say it will force residents near the coal plants to continue living with toxic pollution, ironically to help a state — Virginia — that has fully embraced clean energy. And utility ratepayers in the affected areas will be forced to pay for the plan in the form of higher bills, those critics say.

But PJM Interconnection, the regional grid operator, says the plan is necessary to maintain grid reliability amid a wave of fossil fuel plant closures in recent years, prompted by the nation’s transition to cleaner power.

With not enough of those green energy facilities connected to the grid yet, enough coal and natural gas energy to power 32 million homes is expected to be lost by 2030 at a time when the demand from the growing data center industry, electric vehicles and other new technology is on the rise, PJM says.

“The system is in a major transition right now, and it’s going to continue to evolve,” Ken Seiler, PJM’s senior vice president in charge of planning, said in a December stakeholders’ meeting about the effort to buy time for green energy to catch up. “And we’ll look for opportunities to do everything we can to keep the lights on as it goes through this transition.”

Data centers that house thousands of computer servers and the cooling equipment needed for them to runhave been multiplying in Northern Virginia since the late 1990s, spreading from the industry’s historic base in Loudoun County to neighboring Prince William County and, recently, across the Potomac River into Maryland. There are nearly 300 data centers now in Virginia.

With Amazon Web Services pursuing a $35 billion data center expansion in Virginia, rural portions of the state are the industry’s newest target for development.

The growth means big revenue for the localities that host the football-field-size buildings. Loudoun collects $600 million in annual taxes on the computer equipment inside the buildings, making it easier to fund schools and other services. Prince William, the second-largest market, collects $100 million per year.

But data centers also consume massive amounts of energy.

One data center can require 50 times the electricity of a typical office building, according to the U.S.Department of Energy. Multiple-building data center complexes, which have become the norm, require as much as 14 to 20 times that amount.

The demand has strained utility companies, to the point where Dominion Energy in Virginia briefly warned in 2022 that it may not be able to keepup with the pace of the industry’s growth.

The utility — which has since accelerated plans for new power lines and substations to boost its electrical output — predicts that by 2035 the industry in Virginia will require 11,000 megawatts, nearly quadruple what it needed in 2022, or enough to power 8.8 million homes.

Thesmaller Northern Virginia Electric Cooperative recently told PJM that the more than 50 data centers it serves account for 59 percent of its energy demand. It expects to need to serve about 110 more data centers by July 2028.

Meanwhile, the amount of energy available is not growing quickly enough to meet that future demand. Coal plants have scaled down production or shut down altogether as the market transitions to green energy, hastened by laws in Maryland and Virginia mandating net-zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2045 and, for several other states in the region, by 2050.

Dominion is developing a 2,600-megawatt wind farm off Virginia Beach — the largest such project in U.S. waters — and the company recently gained state approval to build four solar projects.

But those projects won’t be ready in timeto absorb the projected gap in available energy.Opponents of PJM’s plan say it wouldn’t be necessary if more green energy had been connected to the grid faster, pointing to projects that were caught up in bureaucratic delays for five years or longer before they were connected.

A PJM spokesperson said the organization has recently sped up its approval process and is encouraging utility companies and federal and state officials to better incorporate renewable energy.

About 40,000 megawatts of green energy projects have been cleared for construction but are not being built because of issues related to financing or siting, the PJM spokesperson said.

Once more renewable energy is available, some of the power lines being built to address the energy gap may no longer be needed as the coal plants ultimately shut down, clean energy advocates say — though utility companies contend the extra capacity brought by the lines will always be useful.

“Their planning is just about maintaining the status quo,” Tom Rutigliano, a senior advocate for clean energy at the Natural Resources Defense Council, said about PJM. “They do nothing proactive about really trying to get a handle on the future and get ready for it.”

‘Holding on tight’ to coal The smoke from two coal plants near West Virginia’s border with Pennsylvania billows over the city of Morgantown, adding a brownish tint to the air.

Nearby sits the 502 Junction substation, connected to those plants and a third one about 43 miles away via existing power lines, which will serve as a terminus for a western prong of the PJM plan for new linesthat will extend to another substation in Frederick, Md., then south into Northern Virginia.

The owner of one of the Morgantown-area plants, Longview LLC, recently emerged from bankruptcy. After a restructuring, the facility is fully functioning, utilizing a solar farm to supplement its coal energy output.

The other two plants belong to the Ohio-based FirstEnergy Corp. utility, which had plans to significantly scale down operations there to meet a company goal of reducing its greenhouse gas emissions by nearly a third over the next six years.

The FirstEnergy plants are among the state’s worst polluters, said Jim Kotcon, a West Virginia University plant pathology professor who oversees conservation efforts at the Sierra Club’s West Virginia chapter.

The Harrison plant pumped out a combined 12 million tons of coal pollutants like sulfur and nitrous oxides in 2023, more than any other fossil fuel plant in the state, according to Environmental Protection Agency data. The Fort Martin plant, which has been operating since the late 1960s, emitted the state’s highest levels of nitrous oxides in 2023, at 5,240 tons.

After PJM tapped the company to build a 36-mile-long portion of the planned power lines for $392 million, FirstEnergy announced in February that the company is abandoning a 2030 goal to significantly cut greenhouse gas emissions because the two plants are crucial to maintaining grid reliability.

The news has sent FirstEnergy’s stock price up by 4 percent, to about $37 a share this week, and was greeted with jubilation by West Virginia’s coal industry.

washingtonpost.com

[Wharf Rat] Death Valley [X] Due to excessive rainfall in California, a temporary lake is ...

Wharf Rat — 2/22/2024 4:23:16 PM

Death Valley

[X]

Due to excessive rainfall in California, a temporary lake is giving folks a rare chance to do some kayaking in the driest place in the U.S. 🚣 https://t.co/Rt17SHAuMx pic.twitter.com/9lVvYrxmWk
— AccuWeather (@accuweather) February 22, 2024

[/X]

[Wharf Rat] [X] To this point all heard the discussion about the emergency measures we are ...

Wharf Rat — 2/16/2024 2:53:44 PM

[X]

To this point all heard the discussion about the emergency measures we are planing to save habitat, now we are back ⬆️ 2°C global temperature in ERA5 dataset? No? Me too! https://t.co/V6TbqrxZyI pic.twitter.com/uLRdWZ4tA8
— Thomas Reis (@peakaustria) February 16, 2024

[/X][X]

Um. Hello? Media? Politicians? Celebrities? Oprah?

The latest global temperature that was just posted by Copernicus (data from Feb. 9) was 2.03°C above the 1850-1900 pre-industrial baseline. pic.twitter.com/sjdlxmRtXU
— Prof. Eliot Jacobson (@EliotJacobson) February 16, 2024

[/X]

[Wharf Rat] BREAKING: Michael Mann Wins Defamation Case - DeSmog Victory over climate den...

Wharf Rat — 2/8/2024 9:22:29 PM

BREAKING: Michael Mann Wins Defamation Case - DeSmog

Victory over climate deniers sends a strong message in defense of climate science and scientists.

By Diane Bernard and Adam M. Lowenstein
onFeb 8, 2024 @ 14:04 PST

Professor Michael E. Mann's lawyer called attacks on the scientist "vile." Credit: Julian Meehan/Flickr (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)

In a victory for climate scientists, jurors in Michael Mann’s defamation case against Rand Simberg and Mark Steyn awarded Mann $1 million in punitive damages for defamatory comments made in 2012.

In a unanimous decision, jurors agreed that both Simberg and Steyn defamed Mann in blog posts that compared Mann to convicted sex offender Jerry Sandusky, former assistant coach of football at Penn State University. They announced that Simberg will pay $1,000 in punitive damages and Steyn will pay the larger $1 million.

Standing in front of the courthouse smiling with his legal team after the verdict was read, Mann told DeSmog that he trusted the jury to see through the “smoke and mirrors” that the defense used during the trial.

“One million dollars in punitive damages makes a statement,” he said in an exclusive interview. “This is about the defense of science against scurrilous attacks, and dishonest efforts to undermine scientists who are just trying to do our job.”

Mann also noted that the trial was about defamatory statements made in an effort to discredit scientists “whose findings might prove inconvenient to certain ideologically driven individuals and outlets.”

“It’s about the integrity of the science and making sure that bad actors aren’t allowed to make false and defamatory statements about scientists in their effort to advance an agenda,” he added.

Peter Fontaine, one of Mann’s lawyers, told DeSmog he was “thrilled with the outcome.”

Climate Science on TrialMann sued Simberg and Steyn for defamation, but the trial proved to be about much more than statements that harmed the scientist’s reputation — the entire field and validity of climate science was under scrutiny.

In closing arguments, Mann’s lawyer John Williams compared the climate deniers in this case to election deniers overall. “Why do Trumpers continue to deny that he won the election?” he asked the jury. “Because they truly believe what they say or because they want to further their agenda?”

He asked the jury to consider the same question about Steyn and Simberg, the two climate deniers found guilty of defaming Mann: Did they believe what they wrote was the truth, or did they just want to push their agenda?

Mann has “been attacked in all the ways that a climate scientist can be attacked,” Lauren Kurtz, the executive director of the Climate Science Legal Defense Fund, told DeSmog. “He’s been remarkably public about what’s happened to him, [and] willing to fight back in ways that other scientists haven’t necessarily wanted to take on.”

These attacks, however, take their toll, and Mann’s lawyers expressed hope that this case could help protect other climate scientists from abuse and harassment.

“Michael Mann is tired of being attacked,” Williams told the jury. “You have the opportunity to serve as an example to prevent others from acting in a similar way” to Simberg and Steyn.

An underlying current throughout this trial has been that climate denialism, like what the two defendants practice, isn’t really about the science. It’s more about politics and policy that drives organizations and individuals to “attack the science and confuse the public,” as Michael Mann wrote in his 2016 book, “The Madhouse Effect: How Climate Change Denial Is Threatening Our Planet, Destroying Our Politics, and Driving Us Crazy,” co-written with cartoonist Tom Toles.

In fact, as the jury heard when Williams cross-examined Simberg on Tuesday, Simberg hadn’t even read Mann and his coauthor’s two reports on the hockey stick graphs before writing his infamous 2012 blog post accusing Mann of scientific misconduct.

The Roots of DenialismIn both “The Madhouse Effect” and his 2021 book, “ The New Climate War: Fighting to Take Back Our Planet,” Mann focuses on the tactics the fossil fuel industry has used for decades to delay climate action. These have included spending millions of dollars recruiting “contrarian scientists” and lobbyists to participate in a massive public disinformation campaign, “aimed at discrediting the science of human-caused climate change, “including the hockey stick curve itself.”

These tactics have developed into to what Robert Brulle, a sociologist and visiting professor at Brown University’s Institute at Brown for Environment Society, describes as the climate change “countermovement”: a broad, ever-evolving industrial and ideological campaign against climate action.

One technique deployed by the countermovement “to undermine the science of climate change,” Brulle writes, has been to “attack the veracity of climate science, as well as high-profile climate scientists.”

Brulle’s finding about the continually evolving face of climate denial were echoed last month in a new report from the nonprofit Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH), which studies abuse and harassment on the internet and social media.

“Old” denialist tactics focused on simply denying the existence of human-caused climate change, but what CCDH calls “new climate denial” uses “attacks on climate science and scientists,” to create doubt and uncertainty about their research findings.

New denial has been on full display throughout this trial.

One of the defense’s expert witnesses, University of Pennsylvania statistician Abraham Wyner, focused on raising doubts about climate science, spending hours on the witness stand explaining why he thought that Mann and his colleagues used manipulative techniques to produce their infamous “hockey stick” graph of rising global temperatures.

Meanwhile, other witnesses seemed more intent on challenging Mann’s character.

Judith A. Curry, a climatologist and former university professor, was asked by defense attorney Victoria Weatherford about the many times she testified before Congress on climate issues. Curry began describing a hearing during which she and Mann were both testifying, calling Mann’s remarks to Congress “mostly self-promotion.”

Curry told the jury that she has a “small climate footprint,” unlike the “jet-setting celebrities calling me a climate denier.” (In his closing argument, Steyn made a similar spurious argument about Mann, asserting that “the only communities he cares about [are] celebrities, climate scientists, and politicians.”)

Weatherford repeatedly asked Curry and other witnesses about the “tenor of the [climate] debate” in the late 2000s and early 2010s, when hackers published countless stolen emails of scientists, including Mann’s. The release of the hacked emails was designed to make climate scientists appear to be conspiring to exaggerate the evidence about global warming.

But in the trial, these questions about “tenor” around the time of so-called “ Climategate” seemed designed to legitimize attacks on Mann.

Mann’s reputation as a colleague, Curry said, is that “he has violated the norms of science and codes of professional conduct repeatedly.” Mann was a “bully,” Curry later said.

Roger Pielke Jr., another witness for the defense, called Mann “thin skinned” and “quick to attack.”

Much of the defense testimony seemed designed to “victimiz[e] the victim,” Williams said in his closing argument. For those who oppose climate action, “Michael Mann has become a huge target.”

This strategy of “victimizing the victim” not only shifted days of trial away from Simberg and Steyn’s articles comparing Mann to Sandusky — it also gave the defense an opportunity to put the hockey stick chart, and climate science more broadly, on trial.

As most know today, Mann’s hockey stick graph, which he first created in 1998 with scientists Raymond Bradley and Malcolm Hughes, challenged the conventional wisdom at the time that climate change was a natural phenomenon. The graph proved that the rise of global warming was man-made from burning fossil fuels.

Steyn has said that Mann’s hockey stick graph, was “almost laughably fraudulent.” But the science behind the hockey stick graph has been continuously upheld as accurate, withstanding challenges from scientists around the globe over the past quarter century since it was originally published. It remains among key findings that prove burning oil, coal, and methane gas is the primary driver of the climate crisis.

In his closing arguments, Williams pointed out that Bradley, who testified for Mann, said of the graph, “They huffed and they puffed and couldn’t blow it down.”

“If the original hockey stick curve had indeed been wrong, we would know by now. If assertions of global warming were wrong, we would know by now,” Mann writes.

As the moment when the judge would send the case to the jury drew closer, Simberg’s lawyer, Weatherford, and Steyn, who represented himself, offered their closing arguments. Speaking directly to the jury, though glancing regularly at Mann and his lawyers, Weatherford repeatedly challenged Mann’s case and stated that “Rand [Simberg] was right” to question Mann’s scientific credibility.

Steyn, on the other hand, at times appeared more intent on bitterly attacking both the U.S. justice system — Steyn, who is Canadian, claimed that “in my country,” Mann’s case would have been thrown out — and Mann himself, calling the scientist a “vanity plaintiff” and a “humbug with no case.”

The judge gave Williams a few minutes to rebut the defense’s closing arguments. In a telling moment, the veteran lawyer urged the jury to consider how punitive damages could serve not just as punishment for Simberg and Steyn’s comments, but, more importantly — and perhaps more constructively — as a deterrent for others pursuing a climate denial strategy founded on baseless personal attacks against scientists who disagree with them.

Williams’s voice rose as he began to exclaim to the jury that “these attacks on climate scientists have to stop.” But his statement drew immediate objections from Weatherford and Steyn.

After a brief conference, Judge Irving sustained the objections, and ordered the jury to disregard Williams’s comments. “This case is not about climate science,” the judge admonished.

In a literal sense, the judge was correct: Defamation laws say nothing about climate change or climate science or climate scientists.

But it is also clear that, time and time again, Simberg and Steyn succeeded in shifting the focus of the trial away from their rhetoric that compared Mann to a convicted child molestor, and instead toward a strategy of questioning and undermining Mann’s conclusions about climate science.

Regardless of the jury’s verdict in Mann’s favor, this strategy of attacking scientists and putting science itself on trial looks set to continue.

In the end, Simberg and Steyn’s comparison of Mann to child molester Jerry Sandusky was not just inappropriate but also factually incorrect — and now a court found that it harmed his reputation. Looking back on recent history, the attacks on Mann could be compared with attacks on Anthony Fauci, the lead scientist in former President Donald Trump’s White House COVID-19 Response Team, who faced a barrage of vaccine skeptics and, in many ways, became a villain whose demonization served as a tool to undermine an entire movement.

Like Fauci, Mann is a truth teller in the face of denialism and misinformation.

Yet decades of denial, delay, and disinformation about climate change have made clear that simply letting facts speak for themselves — exposing the truth, and assuming that will be enough to spark action — is insufficient.

“We would like to live in a world in which the facts speak for themselves, but unfortunately that’s not always the case,” Kurtz, of the Climate Science Legal Defense Fund, told DeSmog.

As a result, Kurtz said, “It’s not surprising that scientists are doing more to fight back. Michael Mann, I think, is most prominent among those who are fighting back, but I think there are a lot of other scientists who have decided to become more public about what they’ve experienced or tried to be more assertive in the ways that they challenge some of these totally baseless accusations.”

The fact that Mann has continued to make his case and defend the integrity of climate science could have a galvanizing effect, Kurtz said.

“I’ve heard from scientists that it’s very heartening that Michael Mann is taking a stand against this.”

This article was updated on Thursday, February 8, 2024, at 8:06 pm ET with comment from Mann and Fontaine.

[Glenn Petersen] [X] Good morning with good news: Solar and wind were 92% of India's generation ...

Glenn Petersen — 12/22/2023 5:42:03 PM

[X]

Good morning with good news: Solar and wind were 92% of India's generation additions in 2022. It deployed as much solar in 2022 as the UK has ever built. Coal also was down 78%.

India's large wind & solar additions are vital climate action. Wonderful!https://t.co/0Os32ro6vQ pic.twitter.com/zPwRzovtJc
— John Raymond Hanger  (@johnrhanger) December 20, 2023

[/X]

[Wharf Rat] [X] Remember remember this November - Climate hell👇 46C in Argentina 46C in So...

Wharf Rat — 11/20/2023 10:13:11 PM

[X]

Remember remember this November - Climate hell👇
46C in Argentina
46C in South Africa
44.6C in Bolivia
43C in Brazil
43C in Paraguay
42C in Mexico
37C in Thailand
36C in Laos
33.2 in Spain pic.twitter.com/NWxHazHNw4
— Peter Dynes (@PGDynes) November 20, 2023

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[Wharf Rat] [X] So what was the worse thing that happened last week? ➡️📢 The world went ov...

Wharf Rat — 11/14/2023 9:15:12 PM

[X]

So what was the worse thing that happened last week? ➡️📢 The world went over 2C for the first time,
(as a variable, rather than trend line). https://t.co/0sZ1c3ZpZ5
— Roger Hallam (@RogerHallamCS21) November 13, 2023

[/X]

[Wharf Rat] [X] Global temperatures in October smashed the prior monthly record by 0.4C, an...

Wharf Rat — 11/4/2023 1:19:40 PM

[X]

Global temperatures in October smashed the prior monthly record by 0.4C, and were ~1.7C above preindustrial levels.

It wasn't quite as gobsmacking as September, but still comes in as the second most anomalous month in what has been an exceptionally hot year already. pic.twitter.com/uX69v0GoRl
— Zeke Hausfather (@hausfath) November 3, 2023

[/X][X]

"What’s the use of having developed a science well enough to make predictions if, in the end, all we’re willing to do is stand around and wait for them to come true.”

- F. Sherwood Rowland, Nobel prize-winning chemist and discovering of ozone depleting substances
— Zeke Hausfather (@hausfath) November 3, 2023

[/X][X]

In recent articles, @DrJamesEHansen has argued that warming will likely accelerate over the next few decades, reaching ~2.2C by 2050.

It turns out this is more or less exactly what the mean of the latest climate models (CMIP6) show in a current-policy-type scenario (SSP2-4.5). pic.twitter.com/mpjEsgeHDC
— Zeke Hausfather (@hausfath) November 2, 2023

[/X]

[Wharf Rat] [X] Not an Israeli or Putin bomb in sight Just another climate bomb from Big Oi...

Wharf Rat — 10/26/2023 10:09:57 PM

[X]

Not an Israeli or Putin bomb in sight
Just another climate bomb from Big Oil who plan a massive increase in fossil fuels in coming years https://t.co/EcVJdrdF5X
— GO GREEN (@ECOWARRIORSS) October 26, 2023

[/X]

#45742

[Glenn Petersen] h/t Ron Opinion: Is Europe’s Green Investment Plan the Future of Climate Policy...

Glenn Petersen — 10/11/2023 6:58:46 AM

h/t Ron

Opinion: Is Europe’s Green Investment Plan the Future of Climate Policy?

Faced with a choice between carbon pricing and green subsidies, the EU is opting to do both — on an immense scale.

BY PAUL HOCKENOS
Undark
03.01.2023

THE PASSAGE OF last year’s $369 billion Inflation Reduction Act, which despite its name is essentially a climate protection bill, was remarkable for its suddenness and sheer magnitude. In one stroke, it jacked global climate policy to another dimension, solidified the U.S. as a pacesetter on climate action, and showed the public sector’s willingness to undertake heavy lifting on a scale that had previously been inconceivable.

But the Inflation Reduction Act, or IRA, is also notable for its strategic approach. In the form of generous tax incentives, grants, and loan guarantees, it makes available hundreds of billions of dollars to directly subsidize American industry’s buildout of renewable energy sources, electrification, electric cars, hydrogen technology, and other green tech. Rather than capping and pricing carbon emissions to curb greenhouse gas emissions — and using that revenue to spur the economy’s green transformation — the U.S. is wagering that it can spend its way to a clean energy economy: that a big-enough carrot, in other words, will work as well or better than a stick. In that way, the IRA has “redefined the terms of the debate,” as Toby Couture, director of the Berlin-based consulting firm E3 Analytics, told me.

Now it appears the E.U. may be coming around to the American way of thinking. In January, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen proposed a Green Deal Investment Plan that could free up hundreds of billions of euros in public and private climate investments over the next decade. The plan would dramatically simplify regulations for net-zero products — that is, products that on a whole don’t put more carbon into the atmosphere — as well as enable tax breaks for green industries, improve access to critical raw materials, and allow more aid from E.U. member states to flow into clean tech and its deployment. The plan wouldn’t supplant the emissions pricing system that has been in place in Europe for nearly two decades, but rather complement it.

Still, the E.U. plan, taken together with the IRA, signals a critical ramping up of climate strategy. With these big-ticket, landmark climate measures, the Western heavyweights seem to be acknowledging a fundamental truth of climate policy today: The global economy as we know it will have to change to accommodate and expedite the low-carbon transformation, not the other way around.

That is not to say, of course, that subsidies and incentives are a panacea. One downside of investment-driven climate policy: It has a protectionist element. A key provision in the IRA, one that is sowing discord in the E.U. and beyond, stipulates that only companies in the U.S. or in countries with which the U.S. has a free trade agreement are eligible to receive certain incentives. (The E.U. is not included.) This looks like a clear case of old-fashioned, America-first industrial policy, and indeed some American legislators intended it thus — to decrease the country’s dependence on clean tech resources from China, which currently leads globally in clean energy investment and deployment. It is almost certainly also a contravention of World Trade Organization’s rules on trading without discrimination, which may have to be tweaked to accommodate it. So lush are the IRA’s incentives that the E.U. may fear that some European companies will relocate to the U.S., costing the continent jobs as well as its edge in green technology.

But carbon pricing policy can be protectionist too. Europe’s pricing scheme, for instance, now includes a Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism that, after it takes full effect in 2026, will tax trade goods entering the E.U. from countries that don’t penalize emissions. This policy is meant to level the playing field and earn the bloc more revenue for its disadvantaged industries – but this, too, could be called protectionism.

Perhaps the biggest critique of investment-driven climate policies like the IRA is that they don’t exert direct pressure on the fossil fuel industry and other emissions-intensive industries to change or shut down. Rather, the hope is that cheaper, subsidized clean technology will eventually prompt the ancien régime to limp away from the stage.

The school of thought in Europe has largely been that an effective emissions pricing system is fairer to smaller, less well-heeled countries, and better suited than subsidies to expedite progress toward the target of net-zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050. For the past 18 years, the continent has implemented a cap-and-trade system that prices emissions by the ton for the power, manufacturing, and airline industries. (A similar regime will also soon apply to road transport, maritime transport, and buildings.) And, indeed, the EU has slashed its emissions by 41 percent since 2005, compared with just a 15.5 percent drop in the U.S. over the same period.

From the start, however, there were kinks in Europe’s pricing system that shielded the big emitters, and most experts agree that the circuitous, complicated system has logged disappointing results so far. The extent to which carbon prices were responsible for the drop in total greenhouse gas emissions is debatable, and many economists chalk up the falling emissions at least partly to innovation and price supports that spurred important technology breakthroughs in renewable energy, electric mobility, and battery storage. Only as the price the per ton of carbon continues to rise — as it has significantly since 2021 — and policy loopholes are tightened will carbon pricing assume the muscle to push coal, gas, and oil out of the market, experts say.

Ultimately, the biggest lesson of the EU’s new Green Deal Investment Plan may be that it is possible — indeed necessary — for the carrot and the stick to work together: The former constitutes a more direct means of stimulating investment, the latter of slashing emissions.

To some extent, this is already happening on both sides of the Atlantic. Several states on both coasts of the U.S. have already implemented their own carbon pricing mechanisms, and Europeans have already doled out liberal shares of state aid in sectors like renewable energy production. But the scales of these efforts will have to grow even further to match the magnitude of the climate problem.

It is also imperative that these countries don’t allow protectionists instincts to escalate and ignite a full-fledged trade war across the Atlantic and beyond. Smaller EU states and those in the Global South cannot hope to keep up should a green subsidies race break out among the heavyweights.

But the EU and U.S. seem to be cognizant of those risks: They’ve developed a joint task force that is building exceptions for European companies into the IRA, and the Biden administration has already backpedaled on a provision that would have prevented European firms from benefitting from a commercial-vehicle tax credit.

With the Green Deal Investment Plan now on the table, the ball is in Europe’s court. This may be the bloc’s moment to match what the U.S. is envisioning for the IRA — or even surpass it if they are smarter and more strategic about how they target subsidies. The plan’s passage would announce a new age of whatever-it-takes, state-sponsored climate protection, the next logical step in finally taking climate breakdown seriously.

Paul Hockenos is a Berlin-based writer who covers energy and climate topics.

Is Europe’s Green Investment Plan the Future of Climate Policy? (undark.org)

[Wharf Rat] Wow; broke the record by so much that we need to do a pee test. Extreme Tempera...

Wharf Rat — 10/5/2023 6:11:44 PM

Wow; broke the record by so much that we need to do a pee test.

Extreme Temperature Diary- Thursday October 5th, 2023/Main Topic: What’s Up With the Mysterious U.S. Warm Hole? – Guy On Climate

Dear Diary. Global warming, or climate change if you prefer that nomenclature, has accelerated by leaps and bounds across the planet this year, yet once more the Midwest and other portions of the United States did not see much extreme heat over the summer:

We see this cool effect so far this year in record temperature data. The ratio of record daily high maxes to daily low mins so far for 2023 is just under 2 to 1 for the United States, while that from the planet as a whole is a much warmer approximate 7 to 2:

Daily Weather Records | Data Tools | Climate Data Online (CDO) | National Climatic Data Center (NCDC) (noaa.gov)

On a decadal scale, many contrarians still point to the 1930s as having higher and more numerous all-time record reports from the Plains that were experiencing the Dust Bowl, and they would be correct.

So, is there some divine force field protecting the U.S. from heat that much of Europe and the rest of the Mediterranean area has suffered this summer and recent prior summers? No. There is now a scientific reason for this “warm hole.” Apparently, it should continue for a few more years, but be warned. At some point it will disappear as the physics behind additional global warming start to dry out the Plains and Midwest.

Here are more details via Wired:

The Mysterious ‘Warming Hole’ in the Middle of the US | WIRED

The Mysterious ‘Warming Hole’ in the Middle of the USThe world is rapidly heating. So why has the central US been weirdly cool compared to the rest of the country?

MATT SIMON

SCIENCE

SEP 20, 2023 7:00 AM

PHOTOGRAPH: GETTY IMAGES

LAST MONTH, A strange atmospheric phenomenon spread over the central United States: a brutal, self-perpetuating “heat dome.” Hot air descended onto the region, sucking the moisture out of soils and plants, and raising ground temperatures higher and higher. On August 23, Chicago hit a heat index (temperature combined with humidity) of 116 degrees Fahrenheit.

Stranger still? This was really out of character for the central US. Unlike the western and eastern parts of the country, daytime summer temperatures haven’t really warmed here since the mid-20th century. Scientists call this a “warming hole”—a blip in the overall heating trend across the US. But that doesn’t mean global warming has somehow skipped the central US: In a weird twist, climate change may be partly responsible for this gap.

“There’s a significant population that lives and works in this part of the US that scratches its head and says, ‘What’s all this fuss about climate change?’” says Martin Hoerling, a climate scientist at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). “It’s very counterintuitive, because global warming has accelerated while the warming hole has continued.”

ILLUSTRATION: AMERICAN METEOROLOGICAL SOCIETY; doi.org

You can see the warming hole in the top map above, which shows maximum temperatures between May and August in the years 2001 to 2020, compared to the years 1957 to 2000. White areas show where there has been no change. Illinois, Missouri, and Arkansas are solid white. There are even some splotches of blue in parts of the Dakotas, Minnesota, and Iowa, where temperatures have actually fallen. Meanwhile, red signifies higher temperatures—and that covers basically the entirety of the American West.

Scientists have several theories for why this warming hole has persisted. Maybe aerosols in the region’s atmosphere reflect some of the sun’s energy back into space. Perhaps agricultural land, and its accompanying irrigation, water-cool the area. The landscape “sweats,” much like your body would.

In a new paper, Hoerling and his colleagues argue for something similar: Summertime precipitation across the central US has dramatically increased over the past two decades compared to the years 1957 to 2000, and that has boosted the amount of water on the landscape, acting as an evaporative cooler. In the bottom map of the trio above, the green spattered across the central US indicates up to a 30 percent rise in precipitation between the two time frames.

“There still potentially could be effects from agriculture, but we found this warming hole to be bigger than the agricultural change,” says climate scientist Zachary Labe of Princeton University and the NOAA, and coauthor of the new paper. “We think it’s more likely linked to some sort of atmospheric condition.”

It’s critical to remember that even though global temperatures have already increased 1.1 degrees Celsius above preindustrial levels, that’s an average. Some places are heating much faster than others. (The Arctic is warming up to four times faster than the rest of the planet.) All of that is happening on top of natural variability in Earth’s climate system. Some years are just warmer or cooler, or wetter or drier, than others. “I think it’s really important for people to understand that it’s not like every day is getting hotter,” says MIT atmospheric scientist Arlene Fiore, who wasn’t involved in the paper.

Labe and Hoerling’s new research finds that such natural variability, plus some climate change, could be behind the persistence of the warming hole. There’s been a tendency toward more low-pressure systems over the central US. “Low pressure is associated with stormy air conditions, so more rainfall, more cloud cover,” says Labe. “You can think of that as dampening the amount of warming that can be possible during a hot afternoon.”

For one thing, clouds shade an area and deflect some of the sun’s energy. Rain is also a kind of protective buffer for the landscape: When the sun comes out after a storm, it first evaporates the new precipitation, rather than immediately heating up the soil.

Interestingly enough, the conditions that contribute to the hole actually begin thousands of miles to the west, in the tropical Pacific. “Changing ocean surface temperatures, partly caused by global warming and partly caused by naturally occurring variability, are producing the downstream changes in atmospheric circulation over the US,” says Gerald Meehl, a senior scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research, who wasn’t involved in the new research. “This paper confirms earlier work that these changes in circulation are bringing this cooler and wetter weather into parts of the eastern US.”

Don’t expect the warming hole to last much longer, though. Summer heat waves will eventually get more frequent and intense in the central US, though at a pace somewhat slower than in other parts of the country, according to modeling done by the team. “We looked into the future and found [that] essentially by 2040, 2050 … the probability of Dust Bowl–like extreme temperatures will become very much more probable,” says Labe.

“That’s part of the warning of this paper,” adds Hoerling, “That this coolness is probably still rather transitory.”

The warming hole is weird, but not unexplainable. And it may be the exception to rising temperatures that proves the rule.

Matt Simon is a senior staff writer covering biology, robotics, and the environment. He’s the author, most recently, of A Poison Like No Other: How Microplastics Corrupted Our Planet and Our Bodies.

[Land Shark] Doom and gloom Steamy September caps record-shattering summer — and scientists ...

Land Shark — 10/5/2023 10:47:16 AM

Doom and gloom

Steamy September caps record-shattering summer — and scientists warn trend shows no sign of stopping
'No one has ever seen climate monitoring data like this,' EU climate expert says

[Wharf Rat] [X] BREAKING NEWS: @POTUS establishes new goals for salmon restoration in the C...

Wharf Rat — 9/27/2023 9:27:37 PM

[X]

BREAKING NEWS: @POTUS establishes new goals for salmon restoration in the Columbia River Basin. Great news for Pacific Northwest Tribes, wildlife, and communities!

Our statement: https://t.co/u3cMV4qt13
— Sierra Club (@SierraClub) September 27, 2023

[/X]

[Eric] Rooftop solar meets all of South Australia demand in major new milestone Giles ...

Eric — 9/24/2023 8:11:03 AM

Rooftop solar meets all of South Australia demand in major new milestone

Giles Parkinson24 September 2023

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The milestones continue to fall in Australia’s rapidly evolving electricity grid, with rooftop solar meeting all of South Australia’s native or underlying demand in the early afternoon on Saturday.

The milestone was noted by a number of energy analysts and date providers, including Watt Clarity and GPE NEMLog2, which provided the graph below and which said rooftop solar peaked at 101 per cent of state demand at 13.55pm on Saturday.

At the time, renewables contributed around 114 per cent of the state’s demand, exporting most of the excess while some went into storage, and a significant amount was curtailed due to negative prices. The new milestone beat the previous peak for rooftop solar of 99.2 per cent recorded a week earlier.

Such milestone are significant for a number of reasons. Firstly, because you don’t have to go too many years back to find people saying that such a milestone would be impossible without the lights going off. They didn’t.

Secondly, it underlines the fundamental shift in the way that grids are managed. It means the end of baseload, because variable renewables such as wind and solar make the business case for such technologies largely redundant. The focus is now on renewables and “firming” and “flexible” technologies to meet demand.

South Australia is ahead of other states in Australia and the world, at least for grids of its size. The last coal generator was shut in 2016, the remaining gas plants no longer operate in “baseload” mode, and battery storage – first introduced in 2017 – is now rapidly expanding.

Rooftop solar presents interesting challenges for the market operator to maintain security of the grid, because it leaves it with few levers to control. But the introduction of synchronous condensers and the growth of battery storage, plus the ability to “orchestrate” growing amounts of rooftop solar is making it more comfortable.

For now, it keeps two gas units running at low capacity to maintain grid security, but that need will be redundant once the new link to NSW is completed in a few years time.

The main challenge then will be creating new demand in the middle of the day to soak up the still growing amounts of rooftop solar. This could come from storage, new industrial demand, shifting hot water services, and green hydrogen production.

The state is soon to announce the winning tenders of its hydrogen electrolyser and hydrogen power station in Whyalla, which could end up being a major “solar soak” in the middle of the day.

In Western Australia, which has no links to other grid, so cannot export excess capacity, the state government has commissioned a series of giant batteries contracted to the specific task of soaking up solar in the middle of the day and time shifting the output to the evening peak.

But even these contracts are only for a short period, because the state expects the growth of industrial electrification to also soak up solar in the middle of the day as green hydrogen production grows and other big industries such as refineries look to green energy to deliver zero carbon products to the international market.

The rooftop solar record wasn’t the only one to fall on the weekend.

According to GPE NEMLog2, other records to fall included record instantaneous battery charge in South Australia (334.7 MW earlier on Saturday at 10.30am), Victoria battery charge (390 MW), and record NEM-wide battery charge of 594.8 MW at 2.50pm (AEST) on Saturday.

In NSW, battery discharge hit a record 174.5 MW at 6.30pm on Saturday.

Other records included instantaneous wind output in Queensland (842MW), at the same time as a record amount of wind curtailment (854.7MW), and a record wind share (15.9 per cent).

Also in NSW, black coal output hit a record low of 2,073.0 MW at 13:55 hrs on Saturday, and coal and gas together hit a new record low of 2,073.2 MW at the same time.

reneweconomy.com.au

[Land Shark] Too nuts for this thread. Take your wacko conspiracy theories elsewhere. You nee...

Land Shark — 9/16/2023 9:23:50 AM

Too nuts for this thread. Take your wacko conspiracy theories elsewhere. You need therapy urgently

[teevee] and now you know why gov'ts will continue with the mRNA democide program as it i...

teevee — 9/15/2023 9:53:01 PM

and now you know why gov'ts will continue with the mRNA democide program as it is the only way they can achieve their CO2 emissions reductions targets.

[Land Shark] Something to read in your spare time, if you haven't already: IPCC AR6 Report 2...

Land Shark — 9/15/2023 4:55:48 PM

Something to read in your spare time, if you haven't already:

IPCC AR6 Report 2023

[Wharf Rat] [X] August 2023 shattered prior August records by ~0.3C, with temperatures at 1...

Wharf Rat — 9/14/2023 5:18:51 PM

[X]

August 2023 shattered prior August records by ~0.3C, with temperatures at 1.68C above the 1850-1900 period.

In our August update we find that 2023 as a whole is virtually certain to be the warmest year on record, with a roughly 50% chance of reaching 1.5C https://t.co/9waPeQWZhb pic.twitter.com/HvOUUrCQEi
— Zeke Hausfather (@hausfath) September 13, 2023

[/X]

45576

[Wharf Rat] Toxins from Marathon Refinery Fire Leaked 15 Hours Before Evacuation Called - De...

Wharf Rat — 9/7/2023 3:28:38 PM

Toxins from Marathon Refinery Fire Leaked 15 Hours Before Evacuation Called - DeSmog

Documents reveal air monitoring detected carcinogens from burning petroleum; residents with respiratory issues file lawsuit.

By Sara Sneath
onSep 7, 2023 @ 08:25 PDT

Fires at the Marathon Refinery between Reserve and Garyville, Louisiana, began Friday, August 25, and burned toxic chemicals all night before officials evacuated residents. Credit: Julie Dermansky

When St. John the Baptist Parish residents woke up on Friday, August 25, they saw a plume of black smoke above the Marathon Petroleum refinery between Reserve and Garyville, Louisiana. Marathon told residents and parish officials that the fire started that morning around two tanks storing naphtha — a type of partially refined petroleum used as an ingredient in gasoline.

But the naphtha leak actually began at 6:50 p.m. Thursday, August 24, 15 hours before residents in the area were evacuated, according to a report to the National Response Center, the federal point of contact for reporting all oil and chemical spills. The Louisiana State Police were notified about half an hour later.

Naphtha is a colorless flammable mixture distilled from crude oil to make solvents and gasoline. Exposure to this kind of hydrocarbon mixture can cause headache, dizziness, nausea, and vomiting, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

By 11:06 p.m., the Louisiana Department of Environmental Quality (LDEQ) was on the scene, according to documents reviewed by DeSmog, after being notified by Louisiana State Police. An initial air monitoring reading detected benzene, a known carcinogen, in the air, according to an LDEQ field interview document from the incident. Air monitor readings taken with a handheld gas monitor between 7:30 a.m. and 8 a.m. on Friday, August 25, detected additional volatile organic compounds, which can cause difficulty breathing, nausea, and damage to the central nervous system, according to an LDEQ air monitoring report.

Despite these dangerous leaks, no officials called for an evacuation for residents living within a two mile radius of the facility until 10:15 a.m. on Friday, during a press conference held by St. John the Baptist Parish President Jaclyn Hotard. Justin Lawrence, a human resources manager for Marathon, said at the press conference that the naphtha that leaked from the storage tanks caught fire around 7 a.m. Friday.

“Just tell the damn truth,” Anne Rolfes, founder of the environmental advocacy group Louisiana Bucket Brigade, told DeSmog. “This is what they do. They just fudge it all.”

When reached for comment, Marathon Petroleum and the Louisiana State Police had no response.

Attorneys with Wright and Gray, a law firm based in New Orleans, have filed a lawsuit against Marathon on behalf of residents who said they had respiratory and eye issues in response to the fire, attorney Daryl Gray told DeSmog.

CTEH ‘Never Finds Problems’CTEH, an environmental consulting firm companies hire to perform environmental testing during industrial disasters, was also at the fire that Friday morning. CTEH has been accused of downplaying the danger of chemical and oil spills, including the February train derailment in East Palestine, Ohio, the 2010 BP oil spill, the 2005 Murphy oil spill following Hurricane Katrina, and when Texaco (now Chevron) was accused of dumping 18.5 billion gallons of toxic wastewater for years into the Ecuadorian rainforest.

“They called in a company who has made a long practice of never finding any problems,” Rolfes said. “This company has never found a problem and never will. And that is why Marathon called them.”

Louisiana’s air monitoring efforts did not begin until about 1:12 a.m. Friday morning, about six hours after the naphtha leak began, according to Wilma Subra, a Louisiana-based environmental scientist and toxics expert, who reviewed the LDEQ reports for DeSmog. “They didn’t start the monitoring for a good little while,” she said.

The reports indicate that the Marathon refinery storage tank held about 67,000 barrels of naphtha when the leak occurred. The company attempted to transfer the refined petroleum out of the leaking storage tank and into an alternative tank. But LDEQ’s notes do not say how much of the product was transferred before it burned. “I didn’t think they wrote it up well enough so you could really understand,” Subra said.

The National Response Center notified the federal Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) of the refinery fire at on Friday August 25, at 9:45 a.m., according to Joseph Robledo with Region 6 of the EPA. The agency activated its emergency response protocols, and deployed a federal on-scene coordinator to the site to oversee the response and provide technical support, including emergency response air monitoring in downwind communities, Robledo reported. He said EPA monitored for volatile organic compounds, benzene, hydrogen sulfide, and fine particulate matter, or PM 2.5. All detections were below the action levels of 1 part per million for volatile organic compounds, including benzene, and 300 micrograms per cubic meter for PM 2.5, he added.

LDEQ, the Environmental Protection Agency and CTEH conducted air quality monitoring inside and outside the Mt. Airy Math and Science Magnet School, an elementary school in Garyville within a two-mile radius of the refinery that was evacuated during the refinery fire, one report indicates. “Normal ambient air conditions [were] observed,” according to the LDEQ report.

Subra expressed concern for the community members who may have been exposed overnight and early the next morning to toxins in the air from the chemical spill. “They didn’t get them out of there quick enough,” she said. “It was going on overnight. They let the kids go to school.”

[abuelita] that's pretty much it.

abuelita — 8/24/2023 7:30:41 PM

[Wharf Rat] [graphic]

Wharf Rat — 8/24/2023 4:29:24 PM

[abuelita] Canada's north burning .......Wildfire could reach Yellowknife's outskirts by we...

abuelita — 8/16/2023 5:00:24 PM

Canada's north burning .......Wildfire could reach Yellowknife's outskirts by weekend

cbc.ca

[Wharf Rat] Carl Sagan, 1985 [X] The greenhouse effect very eloquently described to US Con...

Wharf Rat — 8/16/2023 3:29:47 PM

Carl Sagan, 1985

[X]

The greenhouse effect very eloquently described to US Congress by Carl Sagan in 1985. https://t.co/wMygcuvNtJ
— Ed Hawkins (@ed_hawkins) August 16, 2023

[/X]

[Wharf Rat] [X] The latest ECMWF seasonal guidance indicates that El Niño will reach strong...

Wharf Rat — 8/7/2023 2:52:56 PM

[X]

The latest ECMWF seasonal guidance indicates that El Niño will reach strong levels in September 📈

100% of members indicate that a strong event (Niño 3.4 >1.5˚C) will continue through January 2024.

This is a slightly more aggressive forecast than what was issued last month... pic.twitter.com/v9PON1x9Yr
— Ben Noll (@BenNollWeather) August 7, 2023

[/X]

[king of the wild frontier] The Truth About Your Bacon siliconinvestor.com

king of the wild frontier — 8/7/2023 11:28:29 AM

[Wharf Rat] [X] 37C+ in the High Andes......in the middle of winter. A sign of awful thing...

Wharf Rat — 8/6/2023 4:40:33 PM

[X]

37C+ in the High Andes......in the middle of winter.

A sign of awful things to come.

Water supply will become a real problem here as winter heatwaves become ever more common.https://t.co/lJOsa2CsHo
— Bill McGuire (@ProfBillMcGuire) August 6, 2023

[/X]

[Wharf Rat] Warmer by 0.44C; that's a huge increase. [X] 🌎🌡📈🔥 The whole Northern Hemis...

Wharf Rat — 7/26/2023 5:58:29 PM

Warmer by 0.44C; that's a huge increase.

[X]

🌎🌡📈🔥
The whole Northern Hemisphere is +1.23°C warmer than average (1979-2000) and +0.44°C warmer than ever observed. pic.twitter.com/juKR35OHRP
— Leon Simons (@LeonSimons8) July 26, 2023

[/X]

[Land Shark] Antarctic sea ice levels dive in 'five-sigma event', as experts flag worsening c...

Land Shark — 7/25/2023 4:49:52 PM

Antarctic sea ice levels dive in 'five-sigma event', as experts flag worsening consequences for planet

The sea ice in the Antarctic is not rebounding during winter.

In short: Antarctic sea ice has usually been able to recover in winter. But this year, sea ice has not returned to expected levels during winterWhat's next? Experts say if the sea ice trend continues, it will accelerate the warming of the planetThis winter has confirmed what scientists had feared — the sea ice around Antarctica is in sharp decline, with experts now concerned it may not recover.

Earlier this year, scientists observed an all-time low in the amount of sea ice around the icy continent, following all-time lows in 2016, 2017 and 2022.

Usually, the ice has been able to recover in winter, when Antarctica is reliably dark and cold.

But this year is different. For the first time, the sea ice extent has been unable to substantially recover this winter, leaving scientists baffled.

'Five-sigma' event unfoldingPhysical oceanographer Edward Doddridge has been communicating with scientists and the community about the drastic changes happening around Antarctica.

He said vast regions of the Antarctic coastline were ice free for the first time in the observational record.

"To say unprecedented isn't strong enough," Dr Doddridge said.

"For those of you who are interested in statistics, this is a five-sigma event. So it's five standard deviations beyond the mean. Which means that if nothing had changed, we'd expect to see a winter like this about once every 7.5 million years.

"It's gobsmacking."

Edward Doddridge says of the ice returning next winter: "We can hope. I don't know that it will."(ABC News: Jordan Young)Sea ice is important for a number of reasons.

First, it helps regulate Earth's temperature through something called ice-albedo feedback, where the ice reflects the Sun's heat back into space, helping to regulate the temperature of the planet.

"If there's less ice, then the sunlight that hits the ocean's surface is absorbed instead of being reflected out into space," Dr Doddridge said.

"That accelerates the warming in that area, and that warmth then gets carried around to the rest of the world."

One expert says a further change in the balance could trigger a tipping point, and that "we might end up in a new state".(Supplied: Australian Antarctic Division)Second, the annual cycle of freeze and melt drives global currents that transport nutrient-rich water into the rest of the ocean, feeding ecosystems.

The ice is also a habitat for animals such as penguins and seals, and is essential for smaller creatures such as krill, which feed on the algae underneath the ice during winter.

One scientist says if the sea ice downward trend continues, it will be "difficult to reverse the trajectory".(Supplied: Australian Antarctic Division)Scientists are now scrambling to work out what is causing the dip. Is it natural variability? Or is climate change responsible?

Dr Doddridge said it was more likely the latter.

"There are people saying it could be natural variability," he said. "Absolutely we can't conclusively rule it out yet. But it's very unlikely."

"It is most definitely a window into the future.

"We know that this is what the world is going to look like as it warms.

"It may be that next winter it comes back. We can hope. I don't know that it will."

On top of that, scientists do not know where the change is coming from — the seas or the atmosphere.

Antarctica's icy pulse

Antarctica's sea ice is now reforming as the continent moves deeper into the austral winter, but it's currently the smallest it has ever been for this time of year on record.

Read more
Dr Doddridge believes it is due to changes in sea temperatures — but Petra Heil, a sea ice physicist from the Australian Antarctic Division, is of the opinion it is due to a combination of both changes in the atmosphere and warming seas.

"The whole system that we are looking at, we know it's strongly coupled," Dr Heil said.

"Any change in any of the components, even in a region far away or it might be close by in the region that you are studying, is coupled to the whole system.

"We know that there's a lot more energy at the moment in our weather systems, so they obviously can contribute extensively to moving the sea ice and also be bringing different thermodynamic regimes to the sea ice."

Sea ice physicist from the Australian Antarctic Division, Dr Petra Heil.(Australian Antarctic Program: Petra Heil)But Dr Heil agreed with Dr Doddridge that the root cause most likely originated from human activity.

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"The consensus statement at the moment would be that this is largely anthropogenic forces that have caused the ocean to warm, for the atmosphere to be highly disturbed and to affect the sea ice," she said.

Either way, she fears a further change in the balance could trigger a tipping point from where it's difficult to reverse the trajectory.

"We might end up in a new state," she said.

"That would be quite concerning to the sustainability of human conditions on Earth, I suspect.

"I think a lot of people have the time line too long out, saying this won't affect them. I'm pretty convinced that this is something my generation will experience."

EDITOR'S NOTE - July 24, 2023: The original version of this story said the sea ice level event occurred every 7.5 billion years. This has since been corrected to 7.5 million years.