Getting Hot in Herre
Your dose of weird climate news for the week
Updates
Get your tickets for The Solar Panel, July 13 at Manny’s in SF! GAF Energy, Noria Energy, and Swift Solar will all be there, discussing recent trends in the solar industry. Networking from 6 - 7, and then panel discussion from 7 - 8.
NEW: EVs and Equity Panel
On Sept 6, meet us in downtown SF for a panel on Navigating an Equitable EV Transition, a panel produced in conjunction with the Berkeley Center for Law, Energy and the Environment.
California is preparing to go all EV by 2035. What will that look like for low-income residents and marginalized groups? How will super-commuters and apartment dwellers be impacted? Join representatives from state and local government, the automotive industry, and Berkeley CLEE’s Executive Director Louise Bedworth in a discussion about what we can do to make the transition equitable for all Californians.
This will be a free event with limited capacity. Register here.
Weird Climate News
It’s been a weird week! I got back from Germany on Sunday from a conference on EV batteries, and immediately came down with a cold, so I am going to keep today’s update quick, with some weird climate news! And then climb back in bed.
A massive heat wave is cooking the southern US, and will probably start moving west soon. And weird weather (including heat) is borking the airlines, causing massive delays. As we know from the IPCC report, climate change causes not just hotter weather on average, but also causes a higher rate of extreme weather events (something I’m working on a post about right now). So, expect to see more of this stuff. That said, here’s a silver lining: while Texas is busy passing legislation to make it harder to deploy renewable energy, the fact remains that Texas is being saved by renewables right now, with solar providing 20% of the state’s energy needs during the current heat wave. You can deny science for only so long, guys.
On the other hand, an even weirder development is a study published this week showing why the earth’s axis has been drifting. You read that right: The axis about which the earth spins has started to move. There are two reasons.
The first, published in 2013, is due to “accelerated melting of polar ice sheets and mountain glaciers and related sea level rise”, which is redistributing the weight of the water on the earth’s surface. But, as if that’s not weird enough, today we learned in the New York Times about a new study showing that there’s another cause.
As the population grows, and our need for groundwater for agriculture, mining, and drinking water grows, we are pumping water out of the ground and into the oceans. This is also causing a redistribution of the earth’s weight, leading to more drift of the earth’s axis.
Fortunately, it doesn’t seem like the axial drift is going to cause climate or weather problems on its own. But it’s a fascinating reminder that this planet is very fragile. I would not have thought it was possible for human activity to cause the earth’s rotational axis to deviate, outside of science fiction. But here we are, in the early stages of the 21st century, and we are starting to tilt the entire planet through concerted and coordinated effort. Imagine what we could do if we made a concerted and coordinated effort to unbork the planet instead! And that’s your weird climate news for the week!