Open access notables
Publishing in the Journal of Hydrometeorology, Rasmus Wuff proposes a new hydrometeorological metric to help track changes in precipitation as we change our climate, precipitation intensity duration index or PID. As the title implies, The World’s Largest Point Rainfall Found Using the Precipitation Intensity Duration Index reveals a rather eye-popping statistic: in 2007 over the course of just 4 days, Réunion Island s Cratère Commerson was drenched with just shy of 5 meters of rainfall- 4.936 meters to be precise. This particular event isn t attributable to climate change, but might be considered as currently known upper brackets on the range of rainfall possibilities. Expanding this range doesn t seem sensible.
Open access notables
Among five items in this week s government/NGO section is Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory s annual report Utility-Scale Solar, 2023 Edition, chock-a-block with statistics and graphs quantifying an explosion of installed permanent energy sources. Photovoltaic deployment is accelerating and now outpacing wind as costs have rapidly plunged. Given the natural properties of wind and solar energy supplies, reserve power storage is very much in frame. Current battery storage capacity is about 22GWh, what a sizeable nuclear plant could deliver over the course of 10 hours or so. There s of course much more to be done but it s also true that we re only now beginning to seriously tackle the job of energy modernization.
Open access notables Net zero is only a distraction— we just have to end fossil fuel emissions. The latter is true but the former isn t, or not in the real world as it s likely to be in the immediate future. And just just doesn t enter into it; we don t have a simple problem on our hands. Net zero is afflicted by various carpetbaggers and the fossil fuel industry itself— plus plain old human nature in the form of wishful thinking. But fully eliminating hydrocarbon fuels and non-fuel CO2 emissions from key industrial processes spanning from agriculture through production of concrete and on to manufacture of steel is going to be a long process. Likely we ll never be able to eliminate GHG side-products from our culture. Quite arguably we re not going to stop eating and using concrete and steel, and equally it s arguable that if we want to keep global warming contained to survivable limits then it s better not to embrace a fantasy and instead maintain our grip on rea
Open access notables
At our roots Skeptical Science is about cognition of the results of climate science research in the minds of the entire human population. Ideally we d be perfectly communicating understanding of Earth s climate, and perfectly understood. We can only approximate that, but hopefully converging closer to perfection. With the passage of time and a lot of effort on the part of researchers working on how our species thinks, we can inch forward— if we pay attention. With that in mind, two papers in this week s trawl land very close to our home. Each sports results important to climate science communicators but differing in paths and challenges to practical applicability.