Cleaning my desk and finding a lot of interesting stuff. Turns out that things go from interesting to trash and back to interesting over 12 years.
I really need to clean off my desk more often. I am not sure this has been on my desk buried since 2007, but it’s possible.
Also on my desk: in 1989, Fred Singer sent this document to my father trying to get his support for this piece on “misuse of environmental science”. He gave it to me 10-15 years ago. I need to scan that in.
A carbon cycle feedback means that warming temperatures cause the release of more carbon dioxide (or other GHGs) and that this in turn causes more warming.
A warming climate leads to more forest fires, which release carbon into the atmosphere, is a classic carbon cycle feedback.
The other oft-discussed carbon cycle feedback is warming temperatures thawing permafrost, which then decays and releases GHGs into the atmosphere, leading to more warming.
More on @ERCOT_ISO and the Texas grid. In a previous 🧵, we talked about how the supply of energy on the TX grid is very tight. This is not ERCOT's fault — it's a fault of the way the market is set up.
ERCOT makes seasonal forecasts in order to ensure that supply is sufficient for the demand. You can find them here: ercot.com/gridinfo/resou…
For the last winter, we can compare these forecasts to forecasts we make from a large ensemble of climate model runs and to reality. More info can be found in the preprint written by my grad student, Jangho Lee (eartharxiv.org/repository/vie…).
Why is Texas electricity both unreliable and expensive?
Let me tell you about some new research by my grad student, Jangho Lee.
A 🧵:
Using historical data we got from @ERCOT_ISO's web page, we developed a statistical model of electricity demand as a function of temperature and an inferred long-term trend of non-climate factors (e.g., population).
If we plug historical temperatures (ERA5) into the statistical model, we can reproduce almost exactly the historical power usage. This plot shows a comparison of seasonal maximum power:
In case you’re wondering why 2 feet of sea level rise over the coming century matters, it’s because it turns a 2–4 foot storm surge into a 4–6 foot storm surge. That will increase the damage exponentially.
Sea-level rise impacts are non-linear so that going from. 3 ft storm surge to a 5 ft storm surge could increase the damage by orders of magnitude. It depends on local thresholds.
Ugh. Either Pielke is an idiot or he's intentionally misreading what I said. The data support both hypotheses, so I won't speculate on which is correct.
What I'm saying is this: if you add 2 ft of SLR to a 2-4 foot storm surge, you get the damage of a 4-6 ft storm surge.