OT: So things are getting pretty bad out west...
Firstly, our thoughts are with all of you dealing with this right now. I've been there myself, as our second child was born while we were evacuated from our San Diego home in 2007. It's scary stuff.
Secondly, there doesn't seem to be any hint of rain in the forecast until Tuesday. If 500K are under one of the three evacuation levels now, how high will that number be by the end of the weekend?
Lastly, does anyone really think this won't get worse every year from here on out in the PNW?
September 11th, 2020 at 4:58 PM ^
Reporting from Portland, I can confirm the smoke conditions are awful out here.
Climate change sucks. The native forest vegetation in the PNW is not adapted to the new climate.
September 11th, 2020 at 6:24 PM ^
"Wildfires have been part of the Pacific Northwest for centuries."
https://www.fs.fed.us/pnw/sciencef/scifi46.pdf (2002 in case you didn't click)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_wildfires (go back to 1825)
https://magazine.wsu.edu/web-extra/map-historic-wildfires-of-the-pacific-northwest/
https://www.oregonlive.com/wildfires/2017/09/the_worst_wildfires_in_oregon.html
TL;DR - none of this is new, none of this is unprecedented - but that is all you will hear/read.
September 11th, 2020 at 6:43 PM ^
3,600,000 acres of California’s 33,000,000 acres of forest have already burned this year and fire season has a ways to go. Forest fires are a way of life when you have forests. No one is disputing that. It’s the amount of burning that is taking place along the entire US west coast that seems unprecedented as were the temperatures a few days ago.
September 11th, 2020 at 7:08 PM ^
For boliver and other climate deniers, the insurance industry has spent hundreds of millions of dollars on studying the climate change risks posed to their portfolios. Other industries have done the same. This is in addition to the public funded science.
Here is one example from MunichRe:
https://www.munichre.com/en/risks/climate-change-a-challenge-for-humanity.html
“Climate change, predominantly the result of human activity, is real and has a major influence on weather-related natural disasters.”
Feel free to read their summary of the climate change impacts on wildfire. Then you can deny that too.
September 12th, 2020 at 9:39 AM ^
Climate change, predominantly the result of human activity, is real and has a major influence on weather-related natural disasters.
I believe this. The question is what should we/are willing to do about it? The two obvious choices seem to be limiting car emissions and/or limiting human population, right? I'm not sure there is a good way to do either of those.
September 12th, 2020 at 1:07 PM ^
Car emissions are only one part of the problem but the technology exists today to greatly reduce (not eliminate) greenhouse gas emissions. We can today significantly decarbonize both power generation and transportation, there are some sectors like cement where we don’t currently have viable commercially available options,
September 12th, 2020 at 3:19 PM ^
Power generation and industry are much bigger pieces of the equation than personal automobile choices. Also, personal automobiles are only as good as their power source. Plugging in an electric car at night when your home is powered by coal isn't making the dent that we want it to. Green energy (wind, solar, hydro, nuclear) has to be rapidly deployed. We also need to figure out what to do about livestock, since cow gas is a huge source of emissions. There's some evidence that feeding them seaweed can actually make a significant dent.
September 12th, 2020 at 6:15 PM ^
In 2018, transportation emissions represented 28% of US GHG emissions, the power sector 27%, industry 22%, commercial/residential 12% and agriculture 10%.
https://www.epa.gov/ghgemissions/sources-greenhouse-gas-emissions
Light duty vehicles make up 59% percent of transportation emissions.
Therefore it will be pretty tough to get the ghg reductions we need without tackling personal automobile choices. Luckily the automotive industry is stepping up and providing an increasing variety of options with increasing performance. With regards to power generation, Coal use has decreased significantly over time and is continuing to do so. It is pretty well accepted that this trend will continue, so electricity for electric cars will continue to decrease.
https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/electricity/electricity-in-the-us.php
September 11th, 2020 at 7:45 PM ^
did you bother to lookup the history of wildfires in the PNW? No? This is not unprecedented and the downvotes show that no one else bothered to look up actual data about the issue.
Spoiler alert - not new. And these are NOT unprecedented fires.
But...that is inconvenient truth to the Climate Change police.
September 11th, 2020 at 8:45 PM ^
Logged in to upvote this.
September 11th, 2020 at 9:25 PM ^
What that chart doesn’t show is the environmentalists have continually blocked underbrush clearing and controlled burns in the region during the same period this leading to what is basically a pile of kindling. Correlation is not causation.
and what the hell does “with climate change” and “without climate change” mean? The climate is always changing.
we will get serious about global warming when we come up with a viable alternative energy source. California tried and now they’re forced to have rolling black outs cuz they’re too stupid to replace the power they took off the grid. The renewable energy isn’t enough to power the grid.
September 11th, 2020 at 9:38 PM ^
Environmentalists do not oppose controlled burns. What they oppose is logging.
September 12th, 2020 at 2:27 AM ^
thats great that they don't oppose controlled burns, but they're still not happening in California. Not nearly enough anyway.
But hey, any opportunity to make a Political point out of it instead of actually addressing the problem.
September 12th, 2020 at 2:43 AM ^
Carolina blue (and others) were the people that made a political point about controlled burns. The reason they aren't happening has a lot more to do with chronic under funding of the USDA and historic forest management decisions that discouraged fire of all types (not for environmental reasons, but out of a misguided mission to protect property and timber harvest).
September 12th, 2020 at 12:27 AM ^
Wind and solar are already cheaper in many places than fossil fuel. The cost of battery storage is dropping and multiple power companies are developing turbine projects to burn hydrogen created by eloctrolysis. We have the technology today to move entirely away from fossil fuels in the power sector. As an alternative to hydrogen power turbines, work continues to progress on Small modular reactors.
September 12th, 2020 at 1:37 AM ^
Hydrogen on a commercial volume comes from oil, not hydrolysis.
There are four main sources for the commercial production of hydrogen: natural gas, oil, coal, and electrolysis; which account for 48%, 30%, 18% and 4% of the world's hydrogen production respectively.
The excerpt is the first page that popped up on Google. It's not hard to find out that we're using fossil fuels to produce"green" hydrogen. If it seems too good to be true, it probably isn't. Green hydrogen is a pipe dream for now.
And small modular reactors are great. Unfortunately most people seem to be against nuclear because "it's not safe" and "produces to much toxic waste". Most people don't seem to know our reactors are 50+ year old technology and are second generation instead of remotely current technology.
September 12th, 2020 at 1:53 AM ^
There have been huge breakthroughs in more efficient hydrolysis in recent years. The primary research hasn't filtered down to industry yet, but it's just a matter of time.
September 12th, 2020 at 7:44 AM ^
I'm having a hard time finding articles on hydrolysis production of reasonable amount of hydrogen. Everything I'm finding is pie-in-the-sky we should use H2 as our first energy source crap ignoring that there's not environment viable means of production. Suggestions on what to look for? I'd be a big fan of hydrogen for electricity plants. If it's viable.
Not a fan of solar and wind. They're not baseload. And I have a hard time seeing batteries being the solution there until battery technology/price improves another 10x.
Edit: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-019-09988-z
Not sure the website will work. It's an article saying that the ideally dozed battery plants, at this point in time, will add approximately 21c per kWh. And that standardized generation rates appear to be around 6.7c.
I'm a fan of SMRs and molten salt reactors. Hopefully they get those figured out in a durable functional design.
September 12th, 2020 at 10:03 AM ^
There are multiple ways to address the intermittent nature of renewable energy. One is green hydrogen. While you don’t believe in it industry clearly does given the number of projects under development (as noted in my other replies to your posts).
With regards to energy storage:
“A study produced by the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and the Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI), found that the US already has 4.6GW of utility-scale hybrid resource capacity online, with a further 14.7GW in the “immediate development pipeline”.
Furthermore, in total a massive 69GW in total sit in the interconnection queues of various Regional Transmission Organisations (RTOs) and Independent System Operators (ISOs), the bulk transmission operators in the US tasked with ensuring reliability and affordability of electricity supply around the country. In those interconnection queues, around 4% of all wind projects proposed in the US are to be paired with batteries, while a much higher proportion of all proposed solar projects are in combination with batteries.’
Once again, industry clearly seems to be making a pretty big bet on energy storage technology.
Wind and solar are the dominant new generation technologies being built in the US today.
“According to the U.S. Energy Information Administration’s (EIA) latest inventory of electric generators, EIA expects 42 gigawatts (GW) of new capacity additions to start commercial operation in 2020. Solar and wind represent almost 32 GW, or 76%, of these additions. Wind accounts for the largest share of these additions at 44%, followed by solar and natural gas at 32% and 22%, respectively. The remaining 2% comes from hydroelectric generators and battery storage.“
https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=42495
September 12th, 2020 at 10:28 AM ^
Here's a literature review:
https://www.mdpi.com/2227-9717/8/2/248/htm
Looks like there's a annual publication rate of around 50 articles a year on hydrolysis.
Several different papers have been released that show improvements with different chemistries and different catalyst materials:
https://www.google.com/amp/s/phys.org/news/2019-09-electrolysis-breakthrough-hydrogen-conundrum.amp
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2020/03/200309130034.htm
It's likely that the most efficient chemistry hasn't been identified yet. But research appears to be moving in the right direction.
September 12th, 2020 at 2:34 AM ^
Apparently none of these guys got the memo. And apparently you should look just a little harder when you use google. (Comment is to Teldar)
The pipeline of electrolyzer projects destined to produce hydrogen from renewable energy has nearly tripled in just five months, according to Wood Mackenzie. The analyst firm has updated the green hydrogen figures it released in a report last October, following an avalanche of new project announcements.
In its first report, titled Green Hydrogen Production: Landscape, Projects and Costs, Wood Mackenzie Power & Renewables counted 3.2 gigawatts of planned electrolyzer capacity, a twelvefold increase over the cumulative installed capacity at the time. As of March 2020, that pipeline had increased to 8.2 gigawatts, or 31 times the cumulative installed capacity today.
https://www.greentechmedia.com/articles/read/mega-projects-help-double-green-hydrogen-pipeline-in-just-five-months
”In Utah, another key element being developed is advanced clean energy storage (ACES), which Magnum Development will be providing adjacent to Intermountain’s power plant.
The ACES project will use a combination of renewable power to produce and store hydrogen through electrolysis, with the hydrogen stored in an on-site underground salt dome, using technology that has been in operation for the past 30 years to supply hydrogen to refineries on the US’ Gulf Coast. This stored renewable hydrogen will provide power when wind and solar availability blinks.”
https://www.iea-coal.org/usa-power-station-switch-from-coal-to-hydrogen-sets-new-global-example/
Mississauga, Ontario, Canada – February 25, 2019 – Hydrogenics Corporation (NASDAQ: HYGS; TSX: HYG) (the “Company” or “Hydrogenics”), a leading developer and manufacturer of hydrogen generation and hydrogen fuel cell modules, today announced that it has received an award by Air Liquide Canada (“Air Liquide”) to design, build and install a 20 megawatt electrolyzer system for a hydrogen production facility located in Canada. The facility is expected to be in commercial operation by the end of 2020, with an output of just under 3,000 tons of hydrogen annually. The 20MW plant will use Hydrogenics’ advanced large-scale PEM electrolysis technology, offering the smallest footprint and highest power density in the industry. With best-in-class efficiency and cost-effectiveness, Hydrogenics has established itself as the market leader for multi-megawatt PEM electrolyzers to global customers, including Air Liquide. Both companies continue to see growing interest and opportunities for the deployment of large-scale electrolysis across the globe.
Today, Air Products, ACWA Power, and NEOM announced a new $5B green hydrogen facility that will be sited in NEOM, Saudi Arabia. The project will use 4 GW of renewable power from solar, wind and storage to produce 650 tons of carbon-free hydrogen per day using Halidor Topsoe’s ammonia technology, which allows it to be transported safely using existing technology, according to the company.
September 12th, 2020 at 9:00 AM ^
I wasnt looking for installations, I was looking for the technology that's made it viable.
September 12th, 2020 at 9:47 AM ^
I was responding to your quote:
‘It's not hard to find out that we're using fossil fuels to produce"green" hydrogen. If it seems too good to be true, it probably isn't. Green hydrogen is a pipe dream for now.” Given the number of projects in development (and the rapid growth in the number of those projects), it doesn’t appear to be a complete pipe dream.
September 12th, 2020 at 9:53 AM ^
Yeah, that's great if they can use wind/solar real time to produce hydrogen. I hadn't heard about the installations or the technology. I would guess it was only two years ago that I read an article about H2 production and that it was basically all still fossil fuels as there was no reasonable way to mass produce hydrogen other than by using fossil fuels.
So I was looking for insight into the technology. The amount of things I read about nuclear power and power infrastructure, I'm really surprised nothing came up in my feed about improved hydrolysis to produce H2.
As a matter of fact, I just read an article yesterday about a new electro-catalytic process to turn CO2 and H2O into ethanol quickly and efficiently. The hope in the article was that they would be able to do it right at CO2 producing power plants and the ethanol would be available for fueing whatever else was made for it.
September 12th, 2020 at 10:54 AM ^
It is hard to keep up on all of the promising technology to decarbonize our economy. It is moving incredibly rapidly. I personally would not have made the assertion about hydrogen six months ago, but the pace of credible commercial scale projects under development by multiple vendors, project developers and countries has been quite incredible.
You might want to be more cautious about asserting technologies are not viable if you are basing them on an article you read from a couple years ago, a quick google search and the belief that your twitter feed on a semi-related topic Is going to keep you current.
September 12th, 2020 at 2:57 AM ^
With regards to nuclear, you will note that I was much less bullish in my post on nuclear than hydrogen but there have been significant recent developments
The U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) has approved the design of a new kind of reactor, known as a small modular reactor (SMR). The design, from the Portland, Ore.–based company NuScale Power, is intended to speed construction, lower cost and improve safety over traditional nuclear reactors, which are typically many times larger.
NuScale’s first scheduled project is with Utah Associated Municipal Power Systems (UAMPS), a state-based organization that supplies wholesale electricity to small, community-owned utilities in surrounding states. NuScale plans to deliver its first reactor to the UAMPS project at the Idaho National Laboratory by 2027; it is scheduled to be operational by 2029. Another 11 reactors will round out the 720-MW project by 2030.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/first-u-s-small-nuclear-reactor-design-is-approved/
I would personally be more skeptical of nuclear than hydrogen not because of environmental concerns but because the industry has a long history of overpromising and under delivering, but there are some real advantages to these new designs over previous ones that could make costs more reasonable.
September 12th, 2020 at 9:37 AM ^
Worked in energy industry for 4 years. It's 100% possible to power everything with 100% solar.
The issue isn't with solar--it's Li-Ion battery technology--it isn't cheap enough yet, but it will be. It's also an issue with how centralized the grid is. The future of energy is distributed--almost everyone will produce some amount of energy, which will increase reliability bc the blackout risk can be contained at the node.
Batteries will solve for this as they become more powerful and cheaper. The first iPod held far fewer songs than the iPhone 10.
We need to stop thinking about NEW technology deployed using OLD strategies. Centralized power is inefficient and silly.
September 12th, 2020 at 2:19 PM ^
Not sure this is what was done in the chart above, but one way to tease out the impact of climate change is to actually look at the trends weather conditions conducive to fires:
California has experienced devastating autumn wildfires in recent years. These autumn wildfires have coincided with extreme fire weather conditions during periods of strong offshore winds coincident with unusually dry vegetation enabled by anomalously warm conditions and late onset of autumn precipitation. In this study, we quantify observed changes in the occurrence and magnitude of meteorological factors that enable extreme autumn wildfires in California, and use climate model simulations to ascertain whether these changes are attributable to human-caused climate change. We show that state-wide increases in autumn temperature (~1 °C) and decreases in autumn precipitation (~30%) over the past four decades have contributed to increases in aggregate fire weather indices (+20%). As a result, the observed frequency of autumn days with extreme (95th percentile) fire weather—which we show are preferentially associated with extreme autumn wildfires—has more than doubled in California since the early 1980s. We further find an increase in the climate model-estimated probability of these extreme autumn conditions since ~1950, including a long-term trend toward increased same-season co-occurrence of extreme fire weather conditions in northern and southern California. Our climate model analyses suggest that continued climate change will further amplify the number of days with extreme fire weather by the end of this century, though a pathway consistent with the UN Paris commitments would substantially curb that increase. Given the acute societal impacts of extreme autumn wildfires in recent years, our findings have critical relevance for ongoing efforts to manage wildfire risks in California and other regions.”
https://www.preventionweb.net/publications/view/71171
September 12th, 2020 at 2:20 PM ^
Doublepost
September 11th, 2020 at 8:04 PM ^
You are either delusional or full of BS. 3 of the largest forest fires in California history Occurred in the last month. The 4th was a couple of years ago.
September 11th, 2020 at 11:53 PM ^
Really? So who were all these observers of forest fires 200 years ago? What California University did they belong to? 500 years ago? 1000? 50,000? 1,000,000 years ago?
Forest fires are part of the ecosystem out West. It's hardly natures fault we humans moved in and decided to live in these forests.
They could manage those forests to keep the fires to a minimum, but a few sacred endangered spotted chicken squirrels or whatever are probably going to have to get the axe for it to happen. That's never going to happen in a place like California. They'd rather blather about climate change.
September 12th, 2020 at 9:32 AM ^
Do you always talk out of your ass?
September 14th, 2020 at 7:06 PM ^
Fits the left narrative but NONE of this is unusual.
The uncomfortable truth.
September 11th, 2020 at 6:46 PM ^
Sure, fire has been around forever. No question. But no historic fire season has seen fires flare up so quickly and over such a wide area across the Pacific Northwest all at once. There have been individual catastrophic fires - many driven by the same unusually strong and consistent east winds that were present earlier this week. But the entire spine of the Cascade Range was burning from Northern California up to British Columbia this week.
In Portland, the climate is no longer hospitable for Western Red Cedar trees, which historically formed 30+% of the canopy of the Western Hemlock forest ecosystem that predominates in the Willamette Valley. Cedars are drying out and dying off in bunches due to the hot, dry and longer summers that have become typical in NW. Sunny summers were the historic norm, but they typically lasted 3 or 4 months, tops. And they were often punctuated by cool, rainy periods. In recent decades, the entire PNW has seen the hot, dry period extend to 5 or 6 months, with fewer rain storms in the dry season. This kills trees and turns the underbrush into a tinderbox.
September 11th, 2020 at 7:00 PM ^
Don’t even bother arguing with the climate change deniers. They are either too dumb or liars. In either case you won’t convince them of anything.
September 11th, 2020 at 7:06 PM ^
Yep just bury their heads in the sand and pretend there is no climate change. In my lifetime I’ve seen a huge change in the climate and the future is actually scary if something doesn’t change
September 12th, 2020 at 2:35 AM ^
At what point did he deny climate change?
Sorry if you're not satisfied that he didn't jump to the same conclusion as you, when the reality is, there is more than one factor (arson, idiot gender reveal party, among some of the human causes), and we still don't have all the information. Mostly picking up the pieces right now.
September 12th, 2020 at 12:46 PM ^
You are conflating what starts the fires with what makes them so big and hard to control. Climate change doesn’t cause fires, it just makes it more likely they will get big because it exacerbates weather patterns more conducive to large fire growth.
September 12th, 2020 at 9:35 AM ^
Interesting that there seems to be an intersection where all the guys spouting ridiculous nonsense in the political topics seems to be the same ones posting nonsense here. Hmm... I wonder why that could be?
September 11th, 2020 at 7:15 PM ^
Um, Rush, while wildfires have been here forever, their size and frequency have increased nearly 20-fold in recent decades. The last five years have seen more wildfires than the the previous 50 years. There is literally no scientific dispute about this. Are you just trying to be contrarian asshole? Or are you really that ignorant,
September 11th, 2020 at 8:20 PM ^
One of the fires here in San Diego started because of a gender reveal party.
September 11th, 2020 at 9:18 PM ^
I heard that. So selfish and stupid to burn down a forest for the sake of producing a viral video.
Sadly, that's not the first time this has happened. A gender reveal stunt set off a fire in Oregon in 2017.
September 11th, 2020 at 9:42 PM ^
Whatever happened to just telling your friends and family that it is a boy or a girl. No, let us start a fucking forest fire. Wonder if the put the video on facebook???
/now get off my lawn
September 11th, 2020 at 10:07 PM ^
Exactly. What chaps my ass is they know better. But instead, we have fired/damage and displaced families.
idiots
September 11th, 2020 at 7:47 PM ^
I wonder if boliver46 is a member of the tribe that believes CA and OR are burning because of their ungodly liberal politics. (No straw people are being manufactured here. They really do exist.)
boliver46? What say you?
September 11th, 2020 at 10:20 PM ^
My god, you people are quite lost.
September 11th, 2020 at 10:31 PM ^
So is1 million double 500k? Because I’m prone to understand though basic math that Oregon’s current fire is twice as destructive already as those fires in the article: https://www.oregonlive.com/wildfires/2017/09/the_worst_wildfires_in_oregon.html
Thus, what’s your point? Nobody here said the PNW never had fires prior to global warming. They did say, however, that disasters are worse now (bigger and more recurrent).
September 11th, 2020 at 11:45 PM ^
It's always amazing to me how, to people like you, EVERY FUCKING SITUATION, every disaster, every challenge...is conveniently "normal" and requires absolutely no action or shouldering of responsibility.