The Edwards & Sanborn Solar and Energy Storage Project in Kern County, California became the largest solar farm in the country when it went online last month. 2023 has come and gone, and while some progress has been made in reducing greenhouse gas emissions, this past year was the warmest globally on record by a wide margin.  And it was just announced that we started this year with the warmest January globally on record.  So what are world leaders doing to make it possible to reduce the temperature trend sooner rather than later?   Well, December saw the 28th Co ..read more

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Every few years or so, you’ll hear or read in the news that the Earth is entering what is called an El Niño event.  What exactly does that mean, and how are El Niño events like the one in its early stages now linked to global climate? In the eastern tropical Pacific Ocean, warm surface water is normally blown westward by the trade winds, allowing colder water to rise up to the surface.  Periodically this motion and the corresponding upwelling get stronger.  But equally periodically the motion and upwelling get suppressed, and the eastern Pacific gets unusually warm.  The ..read more

  The Sun, still high up in the sky over Long Island on June 7, 2023, taken on my phone without any sort of filters or adjustments. Over the past month, the northeastern United States has experienced a series of very large haze events due to forest fires in eastern Canada.  Since haze is an example of an aerosol, and aerosols have been my primary research focus, I figured that now would be a good time to talk about how aerosols affect the climate picture in general, and how climate change influences these haze events. The simple definition of an aerosol is that it's anything suspen ..read more

Every so often, I spot an unfamiliar word or phrase in the jargon of climate science.  One such term that caught my attention this past week is “climate niche.”  To the best of my present awareness, the term first appeared in a 2019 paper written by an international team headed by Chi Xu and published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.  The abstract of this paper begins with the rather ominous phrase “All species have an environmental niche, and despite technological advances, humans are unlikely to be an exception.”  The scientists involved in this study d ..read more

OK, so I haven’t been anywhere near as diligent with these blog posts as I had originally intended.  Life, work, play, husbanding, and parenting take up a lot of time.  Who knew?  Oh yeah, and there was that whole pandemic thing.  But my biggest fan — i.e., my daughter — asked me to start it back up.  And who am I to refuse a request like that?   To be fair, she is perfectly entitled to an honest explanation of what is going on in the world.  Parents have long made a point of complaining about having to clean up their children’s messes, but where it matters ..read more

  A solar farm with battery storage in Gannawarra, Australia (click here for the article). In my opinion, one of the most useful tools for understanding what it will take to make the necessary transition from carbon-intensive to non-emitting fuels is the annual report of the levelized cost of energy issued by the financial firm Lazard.  I discussed the 2020 version of the report in a previous blog post, and now I’m going to talk about the report that was issued in October 2021.  There weren’t any dramatic changes in cost this past year, which I suppose can be looked at as glass ..read more

In the late 1950s, a scientist named Charles Keeling placed instruments designed to monitor the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere at research sites that were chosen for the relative cleanness of their air.  The first was on the summit of Mauna Loa in Hawaii, and the second was in Antarctica.  As the fifties segued into the sixties, two patterns emerged from the resulting data.  The first is the natural annual cycle.  Carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere peak every May.  As spring advances in the Northern Hemisphere, the global increase in photosynthesis (d ..read more

  Harbour Air's electric airplane (from www.harbourair.com) Where coverage of reducing the amount of carbon dioxide in our atmosphere is concerned, the big headlines often go to big names backing big solutions. Artificially sucking carbon out of the air, and covering the entire the entire sky in a shroud of sun-reflecting aerosols, have garnered quite a lot of press for technologies that don’t really exist yet.  But plenty of people are looking at practical ways to eliminate emissions from the most challenging sources, instead of accepting that their emissions must continue indefinit ..read more

   The French TGV is an all-electric high-speed rail (photo from http://e-sushi.fr/tag/tgv-sncf).  Will we see something similar in this country?  And will it even come to Long Island? Last month, Long Island’s newspaper Newsday published an article about a proposed $105 billion project to bring high-speed rail to Long Island.  The rail would connect New York City to Boston by first traveling across Long Island and then crossing back to the mainland via a tunnel underneath the Long Island Sound. Zipping along for large stretches at speeds up to 200 mph, a train leavin ..read more