Friday, August 31, 2018

We start to feel the effects of Fed tightening

Not yet in the USA, but across the developing world, the rise in US interest rates is starting to have a serious negative effect:

Argentina has hiked interest rates to 60% as it takes dramatic steps to restore confidence in its plunging currency,in the latest sign of turmoil among emerging market economies this year.

The Argentine central bank raised the cost of borrowing by 15 percentage points on Thursday in an attempt to shore up the peso, which has plummeted in value. The central bank said it would keep rates unchanged at 60% until at least December.

The peso dropped amid intense trading on foreign exchanges, falling by more than 10%, despite the bank’s rate move, in the most severe drop for the currency since it was floated in 2015. $1 (77p) is now worth about more than 39 pesos, having been worth about 18 pesos at the start of the year.

Paul Greer of the City fund manager Fidelity said countries across emerging markets were being targeted by investors due to their economic problems, including high levels of debt and imports. “There are no easy answers for Argentina to its current woes,” he said.

Elsewhere on Thursday, the Turkish lira fell by more than 4% against the dollar amid increasing concerns over economic crises in developing nations. So far this year the Indian rupee and the South African rand have also come under pressure as concerns grow that the countries will struggle to pay their dollar-denominated debts following a rise in US interest rates. The rand fell a further 3% against the dollar on Thursday.

[Read more here]

Look at the plunge in the Argentinian Peso (note a rise shows more and more national units needed to buy 1 US$, which is to say means a fall in the value of the national currency)  Chart thanks to the people at Trading Economics:



source: tradingeconomics.com

And look at the Turkish Lira:


source: tradingeconomics.com

Note: I think the charts update live, so I'm not sure exactly what picture you will see when you read this post. Prolly worse than the images I'm posting now.  

This is the stuff of deep recessions.  And we're already seeing slowdowns elsewhere, as I talk about here.

I should be able to post or to link to a piece on the US recession in 2019/20 shortly.  But all the evidence from around the world is that growth is slowing and that vulnerable economies are heading into recession already.

Thursday, August 30, 2018

Entrepôt regions slowing fast

As you might expect, Austria is strongly correlated with the pan-Europe PMI (purchasing manager indices).  Austria is located in the heart of Europe, and the inheritor of the central role that Vienna played in the Austro-Hungarian empire and in Mittel Europa.  Vienna is a classic entrepôt city like Hong Kong, connecting Germany to Hungary and Slovenia, Czechia to Italy, Germany to Croatia, Slovakia to Switzerland, and so on.  Vienna is just 20 - 40 kilometres from the Czech, Slovak and Hungarian borders.  Actually, even though I knew all this, I was still surprised at how good the correlation was.  Anyway, the advantage of the Austrian PMI is that it is released a few days before the final estimate of the Europe PMI, so it gives us an early guide to the rest of Europe.

Austria is definitely slowing, a sign that its entrepôt trade is slowing and that Europe as a whole is doing likewise.  And the "flash" pan-Europe PMI for August confirms this.




That other famous entrepôt city,  Hong Kong,  is also slowing fast--and in fact has gone negative.  I have followed activity in Hong Kong for decades because as Austria is to Europe, it is to China and more broadly, the world.  Entrepôt cities are sensitive to conditions in their regions.  That both Hong Kong and Austria are weakening is significant.  Hong Kong's slowdown is a clear indication that China has slowed, probably quite abruptly.



Wednesday, August 29, 2018

Distracted



I haven't posted much over the last few days.  Apologies--I've been very distracted with stuff that's happening in my life.  I'm trying to fit various things together, without much success.  I had to set up my databases, I had to write and amend programs--which is terribly time consuming.  There was my birthday (good) plus some medical issues (bad).  Anyway, I'll do my best to be back soon with something more substantial than this!

Saturday, August 25, 2018

Still a bit of US growth left

Regional Fed Surveys so far fell in August on average.  But there is a 3 month lag with economic activity.  So Growth likely still strong (yoy) in Q3.  And anyway, the fall so far is small.  More Fed rate hikes inevitable.

Picture next year is much less sanguine.  Fiscal stimulus from tax curs will fade, impact of Fed tightening will intensify.  I expect an end 2019 recession.


Monday, August 20, 2018

Shit-life syndrome

(Source)



In the anglosphere, where neo-liberalism has found its most enthusiastic acolytes, life expectancy is declining.  This is especially true of the US and the UK:


Britain and America are in the midst of a barely reported public health crisis. They are experiencing not merely a slowdown in [the rise in] life expectancy, which in many other rich countries is continuing to lengthen, but the start of an alarming increase in death rates across all our populations, men and women alike. We are needlessly allowing our people to die early.

In Britain, life expectancy, which increased steadily for a century, slowed dramatically between 2010 and 2016. The rate of increase dropped by 90% for women and 76% for men, to 82.8 years and 79.1 years respectively. Now, death rates among older people have so much increased over the last two years – with expectations that this will continue – that two major insurance companies, Aviva and Legal and General, are releasing hundreds of millions of pounds they had been holding as reserves to pay annuities to pay to shareholders instead. Society, once again, affecting the citadels of high finance.

Trends in the US are more serious and foretell what is likely to happen in Britain without an urgent change in course. Death rates of people in midlife (between 25 and 64) are increasing across the racial and ethnic divide. It has long been known that the mortality rates of midlife American black and Hispanic people have been worse than the non-Hispanic white population, but last week the British Medical Journal published an important study re-examining the trends for all racial groups between 1999 and 2016 .

The malaises that have plagued the black population are extending to the non-Hispanic, midlife white population. As the report states: “All cause mortality increased… among non-Hispanic whites.” Why? “Drug overdoses were the leading cause of increased mortality in midlife, but mortality also increased for alcohol-related conditions, suicides and organ diseases involving multiple body systems” (notably liver, heart diseases and cancers).

US doctors coined a phrase for this condition: “shit-life syndrome”. Poor working-age Americans of all races are locked in a cycle of poverty and neglect, amid wider affluence. They are ill educated and ill trained. The jobs available are drudge work paying the minimum wage, with minimal or no job security. They are trapped in poor neighbourhoods where the prospect of owning a home is a distant dream. There is little social housing, scant income support and contingent access to healthcare. Finding meaning in life is close to impossible; the struggle to survive commands all intellectual and emotional resources. Yet turn on the TV or visit a middle-class shopping mall and a very different and unattainable world presents itself. Knowing that you are valueless, you resort to drugs, antidepressants and booze. You eat junk food and watch your ill-treated body balloon. It is not just poverty, but growing relative poverty in an era of rising inequality, with all its psychological side-effects, that is the killer.

[Read more here]

Nearly all indicators of inequality show American income disparities have increased since the late 1970s. The magnitude of change in inequality is sensitive to the particular income measure we use, but essentially all measures imply that income gaps are bigger today than they were three decades ago.

Statisticians analyzing the most comprehensive income measures find that much of the jump in inequality was due to gains at the very top of the distribution. More than three-quarters of the relative income gains enjoyed by Americans in the top fifth of the income distribution were obtained by people in the top 1% of the distribution.

As many observers have noted, the United States has exceptionally wide inequality for a high-income country. It also has relatively low average life expectancy. Among 34 countries in the Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), the U.S. ranks 27th in life expectancy at birth. If we limit our comparison to the 21 large OECD countries with high incomes, America ranks dead last. This lowly rank is especially surprising because average income in the U.S. is about 40% higher than it is on average in other OECD countries, and real health spending per person is about 150% higher than it is in the other countries. Of course, wide income disparities in the U.S. mean that low-income Americans have lower incomes than people in comparable positions in the income distributions of many other rich countries.

A recent study of American life expectancy uncovered trends that may be partly traceable to increased income inequality. S. Jay Olshansky and his colleagues found evidence that white men and women who lack high school diplomas have seen a noticeable drop in life expectancy over the past three decades. These groups have struggled as job prospects for less educated workers have dried up. Their declining economic position may be worsening their chances of living a long life.

An older study of changes in life expectancy used Social Security records to determine the relationship between workers’ position in the wage distribution and their mortality rates. Hilary Waldron, a Social Security Administration researcher, estimated mortality rates of white men born between 1912 and 1941 who had earnings between ages 45 and 55. She divided these men according to their average position in the earnings distribution when they were between 45 and 55, and she then determined the effects of their income position on their mortality rates between ages 60 and 89. Between ages 60 and 80 men with a worse earnings position had a higher mortality rate. More disturbingly, the mortality differential between low-earnings and high-earnings men increased substantially over time. The mortality rates of both low-earnings and high-earnings men improved during the period Waldron examined. However, improvements in life span overwhelmingly favored the men at the top of the earnings distribution. Men born in 1912 who had earnings in the top half of the wage distribution lived 1.2 years longer than men born in the same year who had earnings in the bottom half of the earnings distribution. For men born in 1941 the difference in life expectancy soared. Better paid men in the younger birth cohort can expect to live 5.8 years longer than men born in the same year who are in the bottom half of the wage distribution.

[Read more here]

Neo-liberalism has led to an extraordinary increase in inequality and a simultaneous decline in life expectancy.  Meanwhile, it appears that rising inequality reduces overall economic growth.  Why then do we still embrace it when it has clearly failed?  Why is it still the orthodoxy?

Coastal property bubble

If you want to have a seaside property, you want it to be as close as possible to the water, right?  Only problem is, unless you build on top of a cliff, you are vulnerable to rising sea levels.  Not just "nuisance flooding" but storm surges and erosion. And this is starting to affect property values.

From ThinkProgress:

Home buyers are starting to incorporate climate risk into the price of property in areas facing warming-driven extreme weather disasters, new research finds. And that’s bad news for the trillion-dollar coastal property bubble.

“Homes in areas most exposed to flood and hurricane risk were worth less last year, on average, than a decade earlier,” according to analysis released Monday by Bloomberg News. Also, the price of homes at lowest risk for wildfires “far outpaced those with the greatest risk.”

The analysis by property data firm Attom Data Solutions, looked at home prices in some 3,400 U.S. cities. The firm examined five risk groups ranging from “very low” to “very high” for various extreme climate events.

Their analysis of home prices versus flood risk reveals that from 2007 to 2017, homes at “high” or “very high” risk of extreme flooding saw a 4.8 to 5.6 percent drop in price, while homes at the lowest risk saw an 8.4 to 9.6 percent rise.

[Read more here]


Sunday, August 19, 2018

The Queen has her say


The 1/3rd each solution

Let's consider a simple thought experiment to see how we can run a grid using a lot of renewables: 1/3rd wind, 1/3rd solar and 1/3rd gas.

The chart below is a diagram of the way demand moves (more or less) every day.  Demand is shown the the pink line, solar supply by the yellow, and wind by the blue.  The vertical axis is demand or supply, the horizontal axis the time of day, starting at midnight.  These curves are schematic and don't represent actual data (how did you guess?)

Starting at midnight, wind produces more than demand.  In the absence of storage (we'll come back to that) wind output will have to be curtailed, because otherwise  the grid would burn out.  But then demand starts picking up as people get up, put on kettles and heating, run showers, iron their shirts, etc.  Now, solar is starting to pick up but the sun is still low in the sky, so there might not be enough supply.  The gas turbines need to be turned on.  Later in the morning, once again there is too much supply.  Solar will have to be curtailed.  At midday (ignoring daylight saving time) insolation peaks, and the supply of solar power to the grid starts to decline.  But demand doesn't peak until later.  Without rooftop solar (which is often netted out from official electricity demand data) demand peaks between 2 and 4 p.m., even as solar supply is diminishing.  So gas is needed to cover the shortfall.  By 11 at night, demand has fallen enough that wind can now supply it.


Source: me



Some points:


  • If you assume away storage of whatever kind, then there is waste.  During parts of the day, output from renewables has to be curtailed (which reduces wind and solar farm revenue) but then during other parts of the day, gas has to be burnt.  If we could store the power from the surplus periods to release in the deficit periods, less gas would be needed.  To cover the afternoon peak, 4 hours of storage would suffice.  This is called "time shifting" supply.  
  • The schematic (despite my poor artistic ability) represents relatively smooth supply changes.  How smooth depends on how broad spread (geographically) the grid is.  Your rooftop solar panels might not get sunlight when a cloud passes over your house, but for the grid as a whole, your drop off in supply is a blip, compensated for by all the other solar panels.  All the same, grid-wide, there will be short periods when supply drops or is excessive.  Storage will be better for these small fluctuations than gas, but gas combined with curtailment could still be used.  It just less efficient: storage works when supply is too high as well as when it is too low.  Gas only works when it is too low.  For these smaller fluctuations one hour of storage should be enough.
  • As the cost of storage falls, using batteries for time shifting supply for the afternoon peak, instead of gas peaker plants, will become progressively more attractive.
  • A 1/3rd wind, 1/3rd solar and 1/3rd gas model is what the US electricity market is currently transitioning to.   That will reduce CO2 emissions from power generation by 80%.  However, "fugitive emissions" (=leaks) of methane skew that calculation.  Over 20 years, methane is 100 times as potent a greenhouse gas as CO2.  If leakage is more than 3% of the gas burnt, then total effective CO2 emissions from a 1/3rd each model would be higher than from a 100% coal model--though, of course, coal still needs gas peaker plants, and mining coal produces lots of fugitive methane emissions.
  • But the 1/3rd model is still superior, because as battery costs fall, it will be relatively easy to replace gas with storage.  Even with current battery costs, it now makes sense to have 1 hour of storage to back up renewables.  This will cover short duration fluctuations in renewable supply.  In 5 years' time, it will make financial sense to have 4 hours of storage, and gas peaker plants will then be reserved for exceptional supply or demand issues and for emergencies.
  • Four hours of storage with a mixed wind/solar grid won't cover longer-term fluctuations in supply--for example winter vs summer with solar.  For that we'll need seasonal storage.  For now, gas will do.  Later on we can make synthetic natural gas for this purpose, using the Sabatier process.
  • You don't have to accept that batteries are going to get ultra cheap.  Even without batteries, the 1/3rd each model will cut emissions, especially after 10 years, which is about how long it takes for methane to decay into CO2.  
  • This is why grids everywhere are moving to some variant of the 1/3rd each model.  It's why gas is still seen as a "bridge" fuel.  From an investment perspective, the key question is how rapidly storage costs fall.  If they fall very fast, even gas peaker plants will become stranded assets.

Oklahoma isn't working

After years of tax cuts, Oklahoma is barely functioning. 

From The Guardian:


A teacher panhandles on a roadside to buy supplies for her third-grade classroom. Entire school districts resort to four-day school weeks. Nearly one in four children struggle with hunger. 

A city overpass crumbles and swarms of earthquakes shake the region – the underground disposal of oil and gas industry wastes have caused the tremors. Wildfires burn out of control: cuts to state forestry services mean that out-of-state firefighting crews must be called in.

A paralyzed and mentally ill veteran is left on the floor of a county jail. Guards watch for days until the prisoner dies. A death row inmate violently convulses on the gurney as prison officials experiment with an untested cocktail for execution.

Do these snapshots of Oklahoma show a failing state?

Added up, the facts evoke a social breakdown across the board. Not only does Oklahoma lead the country in cuts to education, it’s also number one in rates of female incarceration, places second in male incarceration, and also leads in school expulsion rates. One in 12 Oklahomans have a felony conviction.

Rosa Brooks of Georgetown University Law Center wrote in an essay that states begin to fail when the contract between citizens and public institutions breaks down. States “lose control over the means of violence, and cannot create peace or stability for their populations or control their territories. They cannot ensure economic growth or any reasonable distribution of social goods.”

It may be hard to believe, but entry-level employees with a high school diploma at the popular convenience store QuikTrip make more than teachers in Oklahoma.

[Read more here]


Oklahoma taxpayers are fed up.

Riding high on the oil boom of the late 2000s, the state followed the Kansas model and slashed taxes. But the promised prosperity never came. In many cases, it was just the opposite.

Around 20 percent of Oklahoma's schools now hold classes just four days a week. Last year, Highway Patrol officers were given a mileage limit because the state couldn't afford to put gas in their tanks. Medicaid provider rates have been cut to the point that rural nursing homes and hospitals are closing, and the prisons are so full that the director of corrections says they're on the brink of a crisis.

[Read more here]


Neo-liberalism isn't working.  Time for a re-think.

Solar helps Japan cope with record heat

(Source)


From Nikkei Asian Review:

As temperatures soared to record highs across Japan this summer and people scrambled to beat the heat, power companies turned to solar power to weather the surge in air conditioner usage.

After the March 2011 earthquake and tsunami, which forced the shutdown of all nuclear power plants -- most of which are still offline -- the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry had asked the country to conserve electricity during hot summer months.

But thanks to the rise of solar power, the government has refrained from issuing the requests since 2016, with Trade Minister Hiroshige Seko saying on July 24 that special energy-saving efforts were currently unnecessary.

Utilities usually release their summer power demand forecasts before hot weather arrives. In May, they predicted the hottest summer in a decade, but said they would likely have a 3% supply capacity over expected demand -- the minimum reserve needed to ensure stable supplies.

A representative of Tokyo Electric Power Co. Holdings, or Tepco, said that during times of peak demand, the company can obtain nearly 10 million kilowatts of solar power, or about 20% of total power needed. A substantial portion of this is provided by companies and households equipped with solar panels, which sell their surplus power to the utility.

Before the 2011 earthquake and subsequent Fukushima Daiichi disaster, nearly 30% of Tepco's annual electricity output was nuclear-derived. Now, despite operating no nuclear plants and having suspended operation at two oil-fired power plants, the utility seems to be doing fine.

"It is safe to say that Tepco's strategy hinges on solar power," a company executive said.


[Read more here]

Saturday, August 18, 2018

CO2-infused cement

Let's suppose one happy day we get to the point where 100% of electricity is generated from renewables, and 100% of the land transport fleet is electric.  That would still leave cement production, iron and steel production, sea transport, air transport and forest clearing and burning as emission sources.

Cement is a key problem, because the very process of manufacturing cement produces CO2.  Limestone (CaCO3) is heated to drive off the CO2 which leaves cement.  But the CO2 driven off adds to the level of CO2 in the air.

Cement production, according to the video below, produces 7% of global CO2 emissions.  The Cement Industry Federation reckons it's 5%.  Either way, it's significant.

So this new technique may be a major advance:

 


Hat tip to Climate Denial Crock of the Week

A battery which lasts 400 years?

Source: Upworthy


There is a ferment of new discoveries, inventions, cost declines and efficiency increases in batteries.  Technology often advances rapidly when it is needed because scientists and technicians and engineers do more research in areas where there is great need and opportunity.

From Upworthy:

There’s an old saying that luck happens when preparation meets opportunity.

There’s no better example of that than a 2016 discovery at the University of California, Irvine, by doctoral student Mya Le Thai. After playing around in the lab, she made a discovery that could lead to a rechargeable battery that could last up to 400 years. That means longer-lasting laptops and smartphones and fewer lithium ion batteries piling up in landfills.

A team of researchers at UCI had been experimenting with nanowires for potential use in batteries, but found that over time the thin, fragile wires would break down and crack after too many charging cycles. A charge cycle is when a battery goes from completely full to completely empty and back to full again.

But one day, on a whim, Thai coated a set of gold nanowires in manganese dioxide and a Plexiglas-like electrolyte gel.

“She started to cycle these gel capacitors, and that’s when we got the surprise,” said Reginald Penner, chair of the university’s chemistry department. “She said, ‘this thing has been cycling 10,000 cycles and it’s still going.’ She came back a few days later and said ‘it’s been cycling for 30,000 cycles.’ That kept going on for a month.”

This discovery is mind-blowing because the average laptop battery lasts 300 to 500 charge cycles. The nanobattery developed at UCI made it though 200,000 cycles in three months. That would extend the life of the average laptop battery by about 400 years. The rest of the device would have probably gone kaput decades before the battery, but the implications for a battery that that lasts hundreds of years are pretty startling.

400 years is prolly unnecessary!  But 20 or 30 would be amazingly useful.  It would cut the cost of storage for EVs and the grid by two thirds.  Of course, this has yet to make its way out of the laboratory into commercial production.  But you may be certain that battery manufacturers are aware of this and other discoveries and will be utilising them to improve battery life, charge rates and costs.

Friday, August 17, 2018

Hottest ever 3 months in Europe too

From Robert Rohde:

The last three months have been the warmest May to July observed in Europe since at least 1850.

This was a heat wave on top of long-term warming.

However, if the recent rate of warming continues, then by 2040 a typical summer in Europe might be just as warm as 2018 has been.






The second chart from Robert Rohde is amazing.  Note it's not the temperature anomaly, it's actual temperature, averaged, with a 7 year moving average fitted.  The seven year moving average reduces year to year random fluctuations, which obscure the underlying signal. 

At first, for 150 years, temps move sideways, with up and down cycles round an apparently stationary mean.  Then from 1900 onwards, the mean starts to rise.  There is, on other words, a modest long-term uptrend.  From 1980 onwards, the uptrend becomes much steeper.

Robert Rohde is with Berkeley Earth

Hottest ever 3 months

From ThinkProgress:

For the three-month period of May to July, the entire contiguous United States (CONUS) “ranked hottest on record,” as the National Weather Service in Los Angeles, California tweeted out Wednesday, adding that “records go back to 1895.”

That map comes from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) report, “Assessing the U.S. Climate in July 2018,” released last week.

But NOAA didn’t mention the May-June-July heat record in its report, and that left it to the NWS in Los Angeles to point out the sea of red across the contiguous U.S.

NOAA did point out that in California in particular, “July was off the charts: The state saw its hottest July and hottest month on record with an average temperature of 79.7 degrees F.”

No wonder the state has been ravaged by deadly, record-smashing wildfires this summer.


This wasn't the average for the US.  It was every single region.  Every single one was at an all-time record.  Do you know how unlikely that is?

When are we going to act? 

100% green electricity in California

It's been obvious for a while now that there will be a pincer movement crushing fossil fuels.  The one half of the pincer is the steady decline in the cost of renewables, storage and EVs, and the ongoing technological advances which underpin these cost declines.  The other is the ever increasing awareness of the steady rise in global temperatures. It's become impossible to deny that global warming is real.  

That pincer movement has begun.  California is likely to target 100% green electricity by 2045.  Because of rapid cost declines in renewables, it's likely to get there early.

Wind turbines lining the Altamont Pass near Livermore in 2013.
Kevin de León’s Senate Bill 100 would mandate 100 percent carbon-free electricity by 2045.CreditNoah Berger/Associated Press


From The New York Times:

California has been a leader in trying to counter the forces contributing to climate change, from its stringent standards for auto emissions to its mandate that 50 percent of the state’s electricity come from carbon-free sources by 2030.

Now, with climate concerns magnified by extreme summer temperatures and catastrophic wildfires, lawmakers are considering a move that would go further: a proposal to mandate 100 percent carbon-free electricity by 2045.

The bill’s sponsor, State Senator Kevin de León, says that with the Trump administration’s efforts to bolster electricity generated from fossil fuels, California and other states must chart their own course on energy policy. And, partly owing to recent events, he thinks the bill can pass within three weeks.

“Because of the fires, because of the extreme drought, because of the anti-environmental edicts coming from this president, there’s a huge ground swell of support,” Mr. de León said of his proposal, designated Senate Bill 100.

[Read more here]

California is the world's 5th or 6th largest economy.  It has conclusively demonstrated that strong economic growth is possible even as carbon emissions fall.  If California can do it, the rest of the world can too.  By 2045 or before, electricity generation in California will be 100% green, and so will transport.  It's a path the rest of the world will follow.

Crazy how nature does that ....

The Flat Earth Society still exists. Fortunately, unlike the case with climate denialism, they have no influence over policy or debate.  But climate denialists are in the same camp: the science haters.



Climate change is obvious in today’s California


Even — or especially — among those who agree human-caused global warming is happening, the footnote has been the understanding that no individual weather event or catastrophe is caused by the overall temperature rise.

Until this summer in the Northern Hemisphere.

It’s not just hot here in California, where it’s always hot in July, August and September. It’s not just Death Valley, where German tourists always flock to feel the heat they (formerly) couldn’t at home.

It was hovering around 90 degrees Fahrenheit at the Arctic Circle in Norway and Sweden last week. In July, the hottest temperature ever recorded in Scotland was hit — 92 degrees in a village near Glasgow. It was 106 in Japan, also that nation’s highest ever.

And while it’s often in the triple digits in the air here, the Pacific Ocean had never in 102 years of daily water-temperature readings seen the Pacific Ocean hit 78 degrees at the pier in La Jolla where the Scripps Institute is — until this summer. Rising ocean temperatures are another feature of global warming, and will radically alter our formerly famous Mediterranean climate insofar as night-time air temperatures go. Unlike most of the rest of the country, when California has a 95-degree summer day, it’s never been unusual for the outdoors temp to cool to the mid-50s by late evening. Felt anything like the upper 50s lately? Up and down California, last month saw the highest minimum temperature statewide of any month since 1895, rising to 64.9, from the redwood forest to the Coachella Valley, Ron Lin and Javier Panzar report in the Los Angeles Times.

And so, yes, to answer many Californians’ understandable question, climate change is contributing to the unprecedented wildfire seasons we are seeing this year and last. Global warming is without a doubt a culprit in the suddenly year-round fire danger we face throughout our state. The higher temperatures mean dried-out trees, forest undergrowth and grasslands. Those plants burn more easily when a spark of any kind ignites them — mostly, of course, also man-made sparks, but now with drier kindling to deal with. And the snowmelt and river levels are lower, too, because of climate change.

The San Francisco Chronicle cites a report in which researchers at Columbia University and the University of Idaho showed that human-caused warming had dried out our forests so much that fire seasons throughout the West have expanded by an average of nine days every year since 2000.

So — now that the demonstrably real effects of climate change are affecting our California lives every day, what to do about it? It’s only human to lament the lost opportunities, the fact that responsible scientists warned us two decades ago that this would come to pass if we didn’t halt the rise in greenhouse-gas production. But humans have faced existential threats before, in the last century — from world wars, from nuclear weapons. Now is the time to not give into despair but to lobby our leaders, and governments around the world, telling them to stop sticking their heads in the (hot) sand, believe the science and begin a technical approach to reversing the real problem humans have brought to our planet.

[Read more here]


The pressure of politicians to act is building.  Worrying about global warming has gone from a fringe worry by tree-hugging hippies to a mainstream concern.  This northern hemisphere summer is a tipping point in that regard.  Even the Daily Mail, vanguard of the cretinous hostility to global warming and climate scienes, appears to have seen the light

Let us hope that this northern summer is not also a climate tipping point.

Thursday, August 16, 2018

The Microlino

I talked here about the gorgeous Nobe, from Estonia, and here about the elegant retro Luka from Czechia.  There's another wonderful electric bubble car, called the Microlino, this time from Switzerland.




[A]s quirky as the streets it is destined to drive along, the microlino – a small, electric city car first shown at the 2016 geneva motor show – has passed its last tests and is now legal across european roads. production starts in december 2018 with deliveries in switzerland thereafter, before entering into the german market in 2019.  [It was supposed to enter production mid-2018.  Musk isn't the only one who takes longer to realise his plans than he thought.]


Seating two.  Note the retro dashboard. 
But the electric motor will make this bubble car much, much quieter than the old Isetta.


[M]icrolino’s 2.4 meter-long, dual toned design is based upon a BMW ‘Isetta’ from 1956. the electrified concept aims to change personal mobility, bringing a max speed of 56 mph and 0 to 31 mph in 5 seconds. it also delivers two different ranges – 126km [78 miles] and 202km [125 miles] – depending whether the small or large battery is installed – 8kW/h and 14.4kW/h respectively.  [You can get such a long range from such a small battery because the car is so light]

[T]aking convenience to the next level, the two-seater car can be recharged at any conventional domestic power socket. furthermore, the front door design ensures that, when cross-parked in cities, the driver and passenger can exit and step straight on to the pavement.

[Read more here]


small, electric microlino car soon to be driving along european streets from designboom on Vimeo.

3rd warmest July on record

From Stefan Rahmstorf:

Just out: NASA global temperature for July. It was the 3rd warmest July on record after 2016 and 2017. Since July is the warmest month of the year, the past July was one of the warmest recorded months ever. Likely among the warmest months since the Eemian 120,000 years ago.



Note how after the last major El Niño in 1998, global temperatures fell back almost to where they were in 1997.  After the latest El Niño in 2016, global temperatures have hardly declined.  Terrifying.

Wind turbine tip erosion

Repairing a wind turbine blade.  (Source)


Who knew that was a problem?  I didn't.

Well, there's a solution, which is actually easier than repairing the turbine blade.

From State of Green:

Erosion to the tips of wind turbine blades affects the productivity and longevity of the turbines, costing billions globally. Putting a swimming cap on the tips to combat erosion is a unique solution that is rapidly growing in popularity.

In five days of average rotations, the outermost tip of a wind turbine blade covers a distance corresponding to Earth’s circumference. The speed of its rotation averages at 350 km/h, as it is simultaneously exposed to the elements in the form of sunlight, freezing temperatures and water. These elements degrade and abrade a turbine blade’s tip, cutting short both the productivity and longevity of turbines – something estimated to cost billions globally.

When news of the sector’s problems with erosion reached Danish subsupplier PolyTech‘s office in western Denmark, Director Mads Kirkegaard evaluated that the company had the requisite competencies to develop a product that could solve the issue, which it then set out to accomplish.

The solution ended up being a so-called soft shell made of polyurethane, and it was named Ever Lasting Leading Edge (ELLE). Put simply, it can be compared to a swim cap for turbine blade tips, Kirkegaard explains. ELLE is installed on blade tips and functions as an abrasion-resistant, shock-absorbing protective layer. The project’s development began 2012, and the company had a product to bring to market in 2016. Starting expenses were around DKK 100 million, Kirkegaard approximates. He characterizes the product’s development as “the most extensive development work the company has undergone to make a single product.”

[Read more here]

Wednesday, August 15, 2018

Did a 1912 article predict global warming?

Yes, it did.

From Snopes:

A newspaper clipping from 1912 that anticipates the global warming potential of burning coal is authentic and consistent with the history of climate science.

A 14 August 1912 article from a New Zealand newspaper contained a brief story about how burning coal might produce future warming by adding carbon dioxide to the atmosphere.

The furnaces of the world are now burning about 2,000,000,000 tons of coal a year. When this is burned, uniting with oxygen, it adds about 7,000,000,000 tons of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere yearly. This tends to make the air a more effective blanket for the earth and to raise its temperature. The effect may be considerable in a few centuries.



This article’s authenticity is supported by the fact it can be found in the digital archives of the National Library of New Zealand.

Further attesting to its authenticity (and perhaps its role as a bit of stock news used to fill space) is that an identical story had appeared in an Australian newspaper a month prior, in the 17 July 1912, issue of The Braidwood Dispatch and Mining Journal, as found in the digital archives of the National Library of Australia.

An even deeper dive reveals that the text of this news item has its origins in the March 1912 issue of Popular Mechanics, where it appeared as a caption in an article titled “Remarkable Weather of 1911: The Effect of the Combustion of Coal on the Climate — What Scientists Predict for the Future”

Some online commenters expressed skepticism over the notion that such a clear understanding of the mechanisms relating to greenhouse gases existed in 1912, or that anyone back then would have suggested humans could play a role in altering their concentration. In fact, the timing of these news clips is consistent with the historical record.

The first person to use the term “greenhouse gases” was a Swedish scientist named Svante Arrhenius in 1896. In a paper published that year, he made an early calculation of how much warmer the Earth was thanks to the energy-trapping nature of some of the gases in the atmosphere. Even at this early stage, he understood that humans had the potential to play a significant role in changing the concentration of at least one of those gases, carbon dioxide (carbonic acid back then)

[Read more here]

We've known about global warming for over 120 years.  You can excuse inaction then: global temperatures weren't rising fast and the alternative technologies to burning fossil fuels didn't exist.  But what is our excuse now?  Renewables are cheaper than coal and gas, and they get even cheaper each year.  The evidence of global warming is irrefutable.  Inaction is no longer an option.


Clean coal? No such thing!

From John  Pratt




The "National Electricity Market" (NEM) is the joint electricity grid of the eastern states in Australia.

Note that the emissions from gas represent direct emissions of CO2, not the hidden emissions (leaks from pipelines, etc) of methane.  Methane is about 100 times more warming than CO2 over 20 years.  All methane decays into CO2 in about 10 years, so if there is no increase in methane leaks then after those 10 years, there is no additional impact on global warming.  Unfortunately methane in the atmosphere is rising:

(Source)

What is thy bidding, my master?


Lord Cheeto blames environmentalism for California fires

Well what did you expect?  Honesty, logic or sense from our Donald?  How we laughed.

From Dana Nuccitelli at The Guardian:

Last week, 18 wildfires were burning at once in California, including its largest in history, destroying over 1,100 homes and forcing tens of thousands of residents to evacuate. The smoke made the air in the state’s Central Valley unhealthy to breathe for a record 15 consecutive days, as I can personally attest.

Donald Trump decided to use the opportunity to renew his war with California by nonsensically blaming the wildfires on environmental laws:

"California wildfires are being magnified & made so much worse by the bad environmental laws which aren’t allowing massive amounts of readily available water to be properly utilized. It is being diverted into the Pacific Ocean. Must also tree clear to stop fire from spreading! "

Climate change is making wildfires bigger.  Zeke Hausfather showed in an analysis for Carbon Brief that there’s a strong correlation between temperatures and the total area of forests burned in the western USA.

A 2016 study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences found that 75% of year-to-year variations in area burned by wildfires in the western US can be explained by fuel aridity (a combination of temperature and precipitation).


Source: The Guardian


Anthropogenic climate change accounted for ∼55% of observed increases in fuel aridity from 1979 to 2015 across western US forests … and doubled the cumulative forest fire area since 1984

July 2018 was the hottest month ever recorded in California. The past four years were the state’s four hottest, and 2018 is on pace to also finish in California’s top-five hottest years. Plus, California just recently emerged from its worst drought in over a millennium, which was likewise amplified by global warming and created plentiful wildfire fuel.

Source: The Guardian


[Read more here.  And by the way, it's worth subscribing, even for just $10 per month.  It's an excellent newspaper.]


Tuesday, August 14, 2018

Australia's electricity the costliest in the world? Rubbish!

I frequently encounter denialists who argue that Oz shouldn't do anything about climate change, because our electricity is the most expensive in the world.  That's twaddle.  Even if it were true, renewables are cheaper than coal and in Australia, because successive governments have cocked up the gas market, cheaper than gas too, so switching to renewables would cut electricity prices.

Note that Australia is way down the list.

From The Energy Council:

Average retail electricity prices by country

Percentage of average wage spent on daily electricity supply




➥PPP--Purchasing Power Parity--is a good way to compare different variables across countries.  My weights for world indicators (GDP, Industrial production, PMIs) are based on PPP GDP weights calculated by the World Bank.

SE Asia's lowest solar bid ever

Source: Tony Seba


The cost of solar PV has been plunging. In very sunny deserts, solar is now below 1.8 cents/kWh ($18/MWh).  Obviously, in non-desert places, even those in the low latitudes, rainfall reduces the output of solar which raises its cost.  And there is a learning curve, too.  It takes a while for all those involved to learn how to install solar, how to regulate it, how to integrate it into the grid.  Prolly Philippines solar will never be as cheap as solar in Mexico or Saudi Arabia, but this is not the end of the cost decline.

In a tender for 50 MW of solar, local PV module manufacturer and project developer, Solar Philippines submitted a bid of P2.34 (US$0.044) per kWh.

The Philippines-based solar company submitted an offer of P2.34 ($0.044) per kwh in a tender held by the country’s power utility, Meralco for 50 MW of solar power.

In a statement to pv magazine, company CEO, Leandro Leviste said the offer is currently the lowest bid for large-scale solar in Southeast Asia. The previous lowest offer was P2.99 ($0.056), which was submitted by the same company in a previous solar tender held by Meralco in 2017.

The Philippines recently moved from FITs to auctions for supporting the build out of large-scale solar. “While solar energy prices across Southeast Asia on average remain among the highest in the world, we hope these prices will lead the way towards solar prices across the region catching up with global standards,” Leviste  said.

[Read more here]

Once again, the Philippines isn't choosing solar to save the world.  Of course they care about global warming.  Global warming is making typhoons stronger, and that country was devastated by typhoon Haiyan in 2012.   They are installing solar because it's cheaper.

FYI, Manila's days of rainfall through the year:

Source: Weather Atlas

Worst moral victory ever

When denialists finally admit they were wrong.

A cartoon from Tim Eagan


Range anxiety

Lots of potential EV buyers worry about range anxiety  Most of the time, of course, we actually drive short-ish distances.  In the USA, for example, 95% of average car trips are shorter than 30 miles (48 kms).  So a battery allowing for 100 miles range would cover your daily commute plus a detour to pick up the kids and buy groceries, even without chargers.  You'd charge your car up overnight in your garage. 

Source: Energy.gov


If you are spending $40K or more on an EV, then yes, you do want a decent range.  And for that you'd prolly buy a Tesla, because Tesla has lots of battery grunt plus it has far and away the best supercharger network, not just Tesla superchargers but also "destination chargers" at hotels, motels, restaurants, etc.  But if what you mostly need is a small, cheap car to whizz around the city in, then a long range is not essential.  As battery costs fall, the number of different EV models will grow fast, and you may be sure that there will be some very cheap EVs available which will cater for 95% of your trips.  Like the charming Microlino for example.  And as the number of EVs on the road expands, the number of chargers will expand too.  Those driving small cheap EVs will just have to stop more often to recharge when they do travel long distance. 

Monday, August 13, 2018

The temperature upside

From JPratt:



If we cut CO2 and methane emissions over the next 20-30 years, then we will limit the rise in global temperature to 2.2 degrees (currently 1 degree, plus 30 years of 0.2 degrees per decade, plus thermal inertia adding another 0.6 degrees after that.)  If we do not, the possibility of strong positive feedbacks increases and we risk moving into the catastrophic warming part of this chart.  The 1 degree rise we have had to date has already produced severe side-effects.  2.2 degrees will create even more, and not in a linear but and exponential way.  And it just gets worse after that.

Global temperatures are rising by 0.2 degrees C per decade.  Every decade we delay makes the ultimate rise worse.

The answer to homelessness

Finnish social housing (Source)



Finland has the distinction of being the only European country where homelessness has decreased in recent years, and the rest of the world is starting to take notice.

Between 2008 and 2016, long-term homelessness in Finland was slashed by a staggering 35 per cent.

By contrast, homelessness in Australia rose 13.7 per cent over the five years to 2016, according to census data.

A decade ago, Finland decided to tackle chronic homelessness by providing permanent housing — individual apartments rather than temporary shelter accommodation — to rough sleepers and others in the grip of long-term homelessness. It’s success has been remarkable.

The model is known as Housing First.

One of Finland’s biggest advocates of Housing First is Juha Kaakinen, CEO of Y-Foundation, a social housing organisation which has provided more than 6000 homes to former rough sleepers, and 10,000 homes to low-income families and individuals.

“Housing is the foundation for solving other issues. That was the change in thinking,” Mr Kaakinen said.

“You don’t need to be ‘housing ready’, it’s not a reward after you’ve solved your issues. It’s the basis for solving them.”

The program has been both a social and economic success.

Providing a homeless person with permanent housing in a supported housing unit saves the government approximately €15,000 ($23,400) per person per year, according to an evaluation of the program by the Technical University of Tampere, with savings mainly coming from reduced use of health services and institutional care.

Germany at 42% renewables in H1/18

In the first half of 2018, 42% of Germany's electricity came from renewables including hydro. Another 13% came from nuclear, leaving 45% from fossil fuels.  About 8% of generation was exported.  Nuclear generation is to be shut down by 2022.


Also, electricity generated from hard coal output is falling faster than output from lignite (brown coal) generation, which is problematic because lignite produces 15-20% more CO2 emissions per kWh than hard coal

You can clearly see the rise in renewables in the chart below.  The problem is that if the annual increase in the renewables percentage remains at 3.4%, the rise in renewables will simply compensate for the decline in nuclear.  Although I think nuclear plants are far too expensive to be useful, existing one should be kept in operation.  Fukushima put paid to that.  So by 2022, the percentage of electricity generated by fossil fuels will not have fallen at all.



Germany takes its climate targets seriously, and it appears it is not on track to achieve its reasonably ambitious goals, which are much wider than just replacing fossil fuels in electricity generation:


After being a leader for two decades, Germany will make little progress on de-carbonising its economy for the next 3 years.

[Source of charts: Energy BrainBlog]