11 September 2017, The Conversation, Fake news and god’s wrath: extreme hurricane politics in the US. The devastating scenes of destruction and flooding in the Bahamas and the southern states of the US have captivated the world for many weeks now. Hurricanes Harvey and Irma, with Hurricane Jose soon to follow, have stolen headlines around the world, as they break records and provide a deluge of spectacle and image: the main ingredients for tabloid reporting. As far as the fatalities they have caused – now into the hundreds – they have not been as dangerous as the under-reported monsoons that devastated India, Nepal and Bangladesh a few weeks ago, with death tolls into the thousands. But, in the oligopolised world of the news wires of AFP, Reuters and AP, threats to developed nations push well ahead of tragedy in the third world, an imperialist bias that reflects the global hierarchy of nation-states as defined by news services. But is also true that hurricanes (typhoons and cyclones) command more attention because they have a strong visual identity. Unlike monsoonal rains, they are also endowed with a personality. Read More here
Monthly Archives: September 2017
7 September 2017, The Guardian, The unprecedented drought that’s crippling Montana and North Dakota. hen Rick Kirn planted his 1,000 acres of spring wheat in May, there were no signs of a weather calamity on the horizon. Three months later, when he should have been harvesting and getting ready to sell his wheat, Kirn was staring out across vast cracked, gray, empty fields dotted with weeds and little patches of stunted wheat. “It’s a total loss for me,” said Kirn, who operates a small family wheat farm on the Fort Peck Reservation, an area of north-eastern Montana that lies right in the heart of the extreme climatic episode. “There’s nothing to harvest.” Kirn’s story is typical across the high plains in Montana and the Dakotas this summer, where one of the country’s most important wheat growing regions is in the grips of a crippling drought that came on with hardly any warning and, experts say, is without precedent. While much of the country’s attention in recent weeks has been on the hurricanes striking southern Texas and the Caribbean, a so-called “flash drought”, an unpredictable, sudden event brought on by sustained high temperatures and little rain, has seized a swathe of the country and left farmers with little remedy. Across Montana’s northern border and east into North Dakota, farms are turning out less wheat than last year, much of it poorer quality than normal. Read More here
6 September 2017, IOL Motoring The hydrogen vs battery car debate is far from over. London – With hybrid and full electric cars now becoming mainstream, it may seem as though the early debate between hydrogen and battery power is over. But batteries have considerable drawbacks. They’re heavy, they’re expensive, they require the extensive use of rare earth metals, and the production of lithium-ion batteries is itself an energy-intensive process that creates considerable emissions. Despite the progress made in EV technology, most car companies are predicting it will be a long time before batteries become dramatically cheaper or lighter than they are today. Speaking to investors last year, Stefan Juraschek, vice president of electric-powertrain development at BMW, said the car maker needed to “walk through the valley of tears” of funding highly costly research and development in order to make significant progress on battery power. Electric cars require energy straight out of the mains, which could come from power plants that are not using renewable technology. In Tesla’s home state of California, 60% of electricity was provided by coal and gas power stations in 2015, while only 14% came from wind and solar. China is investing more in renewables than any other nation yet derived roughly 72% of its electricity from coal power in 2014. In a hydrogen fuel cell car (FCEV), electric motors power the wheels but the energy is supplied through a chemical reaction between hydrogen and oxygen in the fuel cell. Unlike the rare and heavy components needed to build a battery, hydrogen is the most abundant and lightest element in the known universe although it is worth noting that hydrogen drivetrains also require rare materials. Read More here
5 September 2017, Reuters, ANALYSIS-Hurricane Harvey’s aftermath could see pioneering climate lawsuits. After disasters in the United States like Hurricane Harvey, lawyers get busy with lawsuits seeking to apportion blame and claim damages. This time, a new kind of litigation is likely to appear, they say – relating to climate change. That’s because rapid scientific advances are making it possible to precisely measure what portion of a disaster such as Harvey can be attributed to the planet’s changing climate. Such evidence could well feed negligence claims as some victims of the hurricane may seek to fault authorities or companies for failing to plan for such events, according to several lawyers interviewed by the Thomson Reuters Foundation. “As extreme weather events and related damages and other impacts increase in severity … courts will increasingly be called upon to seek redress for damages suffered,” said Lindene Patton, a risk-management lawyer with the Earth & Water Group, a Washington-based specialty law firm.Hurricane Harvey last week brought unprecedented destruction as incessant rain and winds of up to 130 miles per hour caused catastrophic damage, making large swathes of Texas and Louisiana uninhabitable for weeks or months. Images of soldiers and police in helicopters and special high-water trucks rescuing Texans stranded by floodwater brought back painful memories of the devastation wrought by Hurricane Katrina in Louisiana a decade ago. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has rejected a contention by scientists and the U.N.’s World Meteorological Organization that the historic rainfall from Harvey was linked to climate change. Still, the dramatic scenes rekindled questions about the extent to which climate change can be blamed for such a monster hurricane, beyond broad predictions that global warming will increase the frequency of freak weather events. This time around, scientists are increasingly confident they can come up with answers.Their tool is a new science, known as event attribution, which determines what proportion of a specific extreme weather event can be blamed on climate change. Read More here