Comin' Up Fast

This piece says straight out that it'll take 40 years to stop the increase in CO2, even if we could slow our emissions dramatically starting right now.

And if we got those emissions down close to zero by the end of this century, it'll take another 200 years for CO2 to drop below 400ppm again.

Seems like it's getting harder not to shrug and say, "We're fucked anyway - why bother."

But here's the thing: It's not unreasonable for me to do something good now, so as to make things better for people two centuries after I'm dead.

I'll never sit in the shade of an oak tree I plant today, and I don't need my magnificent foresight acknowledged by someone who will.

A lab on a Hawaii volcano is capturing ominous signals about the planet’s health

Carbon dioxide is accumulating in the atmosphere faster than ever.

Hawaii’s Mauna Loa’s Observatory just captured an ominous sign about the pace of global warming.

Atmospheric levels of planet-warming carbon dioxide aren’t just on their way to yet another record high this year — they’re rising faster than ever, according to the latest in a 66-year-long series of observations.

Carbon dioxide levels were 4.7 parts per million higher in March than they were a year earlier, the largest annual leap ever measured at the National Oceanic Atmospheric Administration laboratory atop a volcano on Hawaii’s Big Island. And from January through April, CO2 concentrations increased faster than they have in the first four months of any other year. Data from Mauna Loa is used to create the Keeling Curve, a chart that daily plots global atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration, tracked by Scripps Institution of Oceanography at the University of California at San Diego.

For decades, CO2 concentrations at Mauna Loa in the month of May have broken previous records. But the recent acceleration in atmospheric CO2, surpassing a record-setting increase observed in 2016, is perhaps a more ominous signal of failing efforts to reduce global greenhouse gas emissions and the damage they cause to Earth’s climate.

“Not only is CO2 still rising in the atmosphere — it’s increasing faster and faster,” said Arlyn Andrews, a climate scientist at NOAA’s Global Monitoring Laboratory in Boulder, Colo.

A historically strong El Niño climate pattern that developed last year is a big reason for the spike. But the weather pattern only punctuated an existing trend in which global carbon emissions are rising even as U.S. emissions have declined and the growth in global emissions has slowed.

The spike is “not surprising,” said Ralph Keeling, director of the CO2 Program at Scripps Institution, “because we’re also burning more fossil fuel than ever.”

Why carbon dioxide levels keep rising

Carbon dioxide levels naturally ebb and flow throughout each year. At Mauna Loa, they peak in April and May and then decline until August and September. This follows the growth cycle of northern hemisphere plants: growing — and sequestering away carbon — during the summer months and releasing it during fall and winter as they die and decompose.

Once CO2 makes it into the atmosphere, it stays there for hundreds of years, acting as a blanket trapping heat. That blanket has been steadily thickening ever since humans turned materials that were once dense stores of carbon — oil and coal, primarily — into fuel to burn.

That means the Keeling Curve reaches new heights each May, forming a new peak in a sawtooth-like pattern.

The Keeling Curve, a diagram of atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations,
shows a spike each May as northern hemisphere plants grow -
yet the trend overall is upward.
(Scripps Institute of Oceanography)

The chart originated when Charles David Keeling, Ralph Keeling’s father, started recording atmospheric concentrations of CO2 atop the Mauna Loa volcano in the late 1950s. It was the first effort to measure the planet-warming gas on a continuing basis and helped alert scientists to the reality of the intensified greenhouse effect, global warming and its impact on the planet.

Each annual maximum has raised new alarm about the curve’s unceasing upward trend — nearing 427 parts per million in the most recent readings, which is more than 50 percent above preindustrial levels and the highest in at least 4.3 million years, according to NOAA. Atmospheric CO2 levels first surpassed 400 parts per million in 2014. Scientists said in 2016 that levels were unlikely to drop below that threshold again during the lifetime of even the youngest generations.

Since that year, carbon dioxide emissions tied to fossil fuel consumption have increased 5 percent globally, according to Scripps.

Why annual increases vary

The increase in carbon dioxide from year to year is not precisely consistent. One factor that tends to cause levels to rise especially quickly: the El Niño climate pattern.

El Niño is linked to warmer-than-average surface waters along the equator in the eastern and central Pacific. That warmth affects weather patterns around the world, triggering extreme heat, floods and droughts.

The droughts in particular contribute to higher-than-normal spikes in atmospheric carbon dioxide, Keeling said.

Tropical forests serve as reliable stores of carbon because they don’t go through the same seasonal decay as plant life at higher latitudes. But El Niño-linked droughts in tropical areas including Indonesia and northern South America mean less carbon storage within plants, Keeling said. Land-based ecosystems around the world tend to give off more carbon dioxide during El Niño because of the changes in precipitation and temperature the weather pattern brings, Andrews added.

That can allow CO2 concentrations to rise especially quickly on the tail end of El Niño events — such as the current one, which NOAA scientists said Thursday is likely to end this month.

The increase observed at Mauna Loa over the past year is some five times larger than the average annual increases seen in the 1960s, and about twice as large as in the 2010s, according to NOAA data.

A record surge in early 2016 was also at the end of a historically strong El Niño.

Why carbon matters

It will take some four decades to stop the annual growth in CO2 concentrations, even if all emissions began declining now, Andrews said. Because Earth’s carbon cycle is so far out of its natural equilibrium, plants, soils and oceans would give off stores of extra CO2 in response to any reduction in humans’ emissions, she said.

And for CO2 concentrations to fall back below 400 parts per million, it would take more than two centuries even if emissions dropped close to zero by the end of this century, she added.

In the natural carbon cycle, the element passes through air, soil and water, and plants and animals, eventually making its way into deep ocean sediments and fossils deep underground. Carbon’s movement throughout Earth systems helps regulate our planet’s temperatures — unlike on Venus, for instance, where CO2 accounts for most of the atmosphere, making that planet’s surface hellishly hot.

But human emissions of CO2 throw that system out of balance. It’s like adding more and more trash to a dump, Andrews said. Even if each load of trash gets smaller, “it’s still piling up.”

Short-N-Sweet

We're fouling the nest.

Information/Perception Conflict

This may be part of the problem:

10 cars buried, no injuries after avalanche hits Berthoud Pass as storm continues to pound Colorado mountains

Coldest below-zero temperatures recorded in Colorado over MLK Day weekend

Climate report projects continued warming and declining streamflows for Colorado (see story below)

Maybe it's mostly a problem with headline writers or editors who have to be at least as interested in getting clicks-n-eyeballs as they are in getting people well-informed.

And that may be because of the mandates coming down from the C-Suites of a near-totally corporatized media cartel.

And yes, I get it - you can't very well tell people what they need to know if you can't get their attention, and nothing works at all if you don't sell something to fund your endeavors. But c'mon, this thing that looks for all the world like sensationalist WWE-style manufactured-conflict. Is this shit really the best we can do?

Anyway, we've evolved a "system" where the Wacky Leftie Greenies are having to slug it out with the Wingnut Dirty Fuels Gang on the battlefield of public opinion instead of everybody acknowledging that the basic science is in, and the people who know about this stuff pretty much have their arms around the damned thing - so we need to be talking about what we have to be doing now, and not whether there's reason to be doing things.

Fake lord have mercy.

Climate report projects continued warming and declining streamflows for Colorado

Scientists predict with high confidence that Colorado’s future spring runoff will come earlier; soil moisture will be lower; heat waves, droughts and wildfires will be more frequent and intense; and a thirstier atmosphere will continue to rob rivers of their flows — changes that are all driven by higher temperatures caused by humans burning fossil fuels.

These findings are according to the third Climate Change in Colorado Assessment report, produced by scientists at the Colorado Climate Center at Colorado State University and released Monday. Commissioned by the Colorado Water Conservation Board, the report’s findings have implications for the state’s water managers. Borrowing a phrase from climate scientist Brad Udall, climate change is water change — which has become a common maxim for those water managers.

The report focuses on 2050 as a planning horizon and projects what conditions will be like at that time. According to the report, by 2050, the statewide annual temperatures are projected to warm by 2.5 to 5.5 degrees Fahrenheit compared with a late-20th-century baseline and 1 to 4 degrees compared with today. Colorado temperatures have already risen by 2.3 degrees since 1980. By 2050, the average year is likely to be as warm as the hottest years on record through 2022.

This warming, which scientists are very confident will come to pass, will drive the other water system changes that Colorado can expect to see. As temperatures rise and streamflows decline, water supply will decrease.

According to the report, by 2050 there will be an annual reduction of 5-30% in streamflow volume; a 5-30% reduction of April 1 snow-water equivalent (a measure of how much water is in the snowpack) and an 8-17% increase in evaporative demand (a measure of how “thirsty” the atmosphere is). A hotter, drier atmosphere can fuel dry soils and wildfire risk. Peak snowpack, which usually occurs in April, is also predicted to shift earlier by a few days to several weeks.

“Streamflows are primarily driven by snowpack that melts in the spring,” said Becky Bolinger, CSU research scientist, assistant state climatologist and lead author of the report. “When you are warming your temperatures, you are first changing the timing of when that snowpack will melt. And because we’re losing more to the atmosphere, that means we have less to run off in our rivers and be available for us later.”

Scientists are less certain about whether precipitation will increase or decrease in the future. Dry conditions have persisted across the state over the past two decades, with four of the five driest years occurring since 2000. Most climate models project an increase in winter precipitation, but they suggest the potential for large decreases in summer precipitation. But even if precipitation stays the same, streamflows will dwindle because of increased temperatures.

Planning for less water

 
CWCB officials hope water managers across the state will use the report to help plan for a future with less water. Many entities have already shifted to developing programs that support climate adaptation and resilience.

“I think we can say with confidence that it is more likely that we will have water shortages in the future,” said Emily Adid, CWCB senior climate adaptation specialist. “I think this report is evidence of that and can help local planners and people on the ground plan for those reductions in streamflow.”

Denver Water is one of those water providers that will use the report’s findings in its planning. The utility, which is the oldest and largest in the state, provides water to 1.5 million people and helped to fund the report. Denver Water has been preparing for a future with a less-reliable water supply through conservation and efficiency measures, reservoir expansion projects and wildfire mitigation.

“Projected future streamflows is a huge challenge for the water resources industry,” said Taylor Winchell, Denver Water’s senior planner and climate adaptation specialist. “The same amount of precipitation in the future means less steamflow because temperatures will continue to warm. … All this leads to this concept of uncertainty. We really need to plan for a variety of ways the future can happen essentially.”

Another finding of the report is that temperatures have warmed more in the fall than other seasons, with a 3.1 degrees Fahrenheit increase statewide since 1980, a trend that is expected to continue. Although it’s hard to pinpoint the exact cause of fall warming, Bolinger said it may have to do with the summer monsoons pattern, which can bring moisture with near-daily thunderstorms, but which have been weaker in recent years. That precipitation is critical, she said.

“First, you’re keeping the temperatures from getting too hot because you’re clouding over and getting storms,” Bolinger said. “And generally, with higher humidity, you’re going to have less evaporative loss from the soil. What we’ve been seeing in recent years is that we’re not getting that moisture in the late summer and into the fall.”

Less moisture and higher temperatures in the fall also leads to lower soil moisture and kicks off a vicious cycle of decreased water supplies. The dry soil gets locked in under the winter’s snowpack, and when spring melting begins, the water must first replenish the soils before feeding rivers and streams. This is what occurred in the upper Colorado River basin in 2021 when a near-normal snowpack translated to just 31% of normal runoff and the second-worst inflow ever into Lake Powell.

Some water-use sectors already experience shortages, especially those with junior water rights. Initiatives set up to support the environment and recreation are also at risk with shortages. And those shortages are likely to get worse in the future. In addition to grant programs, one of the ways CWCB aims to help these water users adapt is with a future avoided cost explorer (FACE) tool, which is outlined in the 2023 Water Plan. This modeling tool can help water managers figure out the costs of addressing — or failing to address — hazards such as wildfires, droughts and floods.

According to the report, extreme climate-driven events such as heat waves, droughts and wildfires are expected to be more frequent and intense.

“That gives you a little bit of perspective to say, ‘Well, what if I invest to mitigate this now, how can I lessen the potential impact in the future?,’” said Russ Sands, chief of CWCB’s water supply planning section. “I’m not trying to scare people; what we’re trying to do is motivate change and help them invest early.”

Despite the near-certainty of continued warming and resulting changes to the water system, Bolinger said there is a bright spot. Since the last time that a Climate Change in Colorado report was issued, in 2014, the world has begun to take action on reducing fossil fuel use and has shifted away from the worst-case scenario. Earlier projections were based on a “business as usual” assumption, with no climate mitigation.

“We do have things that have been put into place internationally like the Paris Accord,” Bolinger said. “We are more along the lines of a middle-case scenario. As long as we continue to take the actions that have been planned out, we are going to follow that middle scenario, which does show warming, but it’s not as bad.”

Hottest One Yet

2023 was world's hottest year on record, EU scientists confirm

BRUSSELS, Jan 9 (Reuters) - Last year was the planet's hottest on record by a substantial margin and likely the world's warmest in the last 100,000 years, the European Union's Copernicus Climate Change Service (C3S) said on Tuesday.

Scientists had widely expected the milestone, after climate records were repeatedly broken. Since June, every month has been the world's hottest on record compared with the corresponding month in previous years.

"This has been a very exceptional year, climate-wise... in a league of its own, even when compared to other very warm years," C3S Director Carlo Buontempo said.

C3S confirmed 2023 as the hottest year in global temperature records going back to 1850. When checked against paleoclimatic data records from sources such as tree rings and air bubbles in glaciers, Buontempo said it was "very likely" the warmest year in the last 100,000 years.

On average, in 2023 the planet was 1.48 degrees Celsius warmer than in the 1850-1900 pre-industrial period, when humans began burning fossil fuels on an industrial scale, pumping carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.

Countries agreed in the 2015 Paris Agreement to try to prevent global warming surpassing 1.5C (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit), to avoid its most severe consequences.

The world has not breached that target - which refers to an average global temperature of 1.5C over decades - but C3S said that temperatures had exceeded the level on nearly half of the days of 2023 set "a dire precedent".

Professor of Climate Change at Newcastle University Hayley Fowler said the record-breaking year underlined the need to act "extremely urgently" to reduce emissions.

"The speed of change in the political world and the will to actually reduce greenhouse gas emissions is not matching the speed of change of extreme weather and warming," she said.

Despite the proliferation of governments' and companies' climate targets, CO2 emissions remain stubbornly high. The world's CO2 emissions from burning coal, oil and gas hit record levels in 2023.

Last year, the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere rose to the highest level recorded, of 419 parts per million, C3S said.

It was also the first year in which every day was more than 1C hotter than pre-industrial times. For the first time, two days - both in November - were 2C warmer than in the pre-industrial period.

Last year was 0.17C hotter than 2016, the previous hottest year - smashing the record by a "remarkable" margin, Buontempo said.

Alongside human-caused climate change, in 2023 temperatures were boosted by the El Nino weather phenomenon, which warms the surface waters in the eastern Pacific Ocean and contributes to higher global temperatures.

What scientists do not know yet is whether 2023's extreme heat is a sign that global warming is accelerating.

"Whether there's been a phase shift or a tipping point, or it's an anomalously warm year, we need more time and more scientific studies to understand," C3S Deputy Director Samantha Burgess said.

Each fraction of temperature increase exacerbates destructive weather disasters. In 2023, the hotter planet aggravated deadly heatwaves from China to Europe, extreme rain which caused floods killing thousands of people in Libya and Canada's worst wildfire season on record.

"Comparable small changes in global temperatures have huge impacts on people and ecosystems," Friederike Otto, a climate scientist who co-leads the World Weather Attribution global research collaboration, said.

"Every tenth of a degree matters," she added.

The economic consequences of climate change are also escalating. The U.S. suffered at least 25 climate and weather disasters with damages exceeding $1 billion, while droughts ravaged soybean crops in Argentina and wheat in Spain.

These Fuckin' Guys

WaPo just can't figure it out. They have to spin everything into "...but it's bad news for Biden."

The Dirty Fuels Cartel has to be dismantled.

Its death grip on politics has to be broken.

HAS TO BE.

They know the reasons, and they know they're subject to the harsh realities of climate change, just like the rest of us. They don't get a pass - they're not exempt - they don't live off-planet somewhere - they're not passive observers whose only concern is to casually "report" on the violent destruction of their own home.

Lost in this muddied up slop they call "Analysis" is the very important fact that Biden and his merry band are working their asses off trying to do the things we have to get done if our kids and grandkids are going to have any kind of decent place to live. And they're having to do it while being countervailed at every turn by dog-ass Republicans - and against a freeloading press corps that won't even try to get it's head out of it ass.

Sick to fucking death of this Press Poodle behavior.

White House clean-energy spending boom puts Biden in the crosshairs

The rollout of a multibillion-dollar ‘green’ hydrogen plan may help the U.S. dominate the energy transition — and give critics another target

The Biden administration raised the stakes on its politically fraught bet on massive subsidies for nascent clean-energy technologies Friday, rolling out a plan for awarding billions of dollars in tax credits to the makers of ultrapowerful “green” hydrogen fuel.

Get a curated selection of 10 of our best stories in your inbox every weekend.
The fuel is made by splitting water molecules and may eventually power shipping vessels and factories. Under the proposal, which will be finalized next year, recipients of the subsidies would need to demonstrate that the huge amounts of energy needed to make their hydrogen are not coming from fossil fuels and that they have brought in enough new clean electricity to fully power their operations.

The lucrative government supports are the latest major climate incentive that the administration is putting into place through the Inflation Reduction Act, the historic spending package designed to give the United States a leg up in the energy transition and help the country dramatically curb greenhouse gas emissions.

The climate law was a major win for President Biden when it passed. But it leaves his administration navigating perilous terrain as it rushes to implement dozens of new government programs heading into an election year.

The incentives are funding projects that are risky by design, with the aim of rapidly scaling production of new innovations.

Some of the companies receiving funding are destined to fail. The program operates like an incubator for start-ups, funding a broad range of innovations in the hope that some will break through and disrupt entire industries.

Other innovations supported by the IRA include giant carbon vacuums meant to suck emissions from the sky, aviation fuels made out of cooking grease and corn ethanol, giant wind turbines, artificial-intelligence-driven power grid updates, and the massive scaling up of domestic production of battery-powered vehicles.

In the case of hydrogen, some of the world’s largest energy firms are angling for the subsidies, but whether the “electrolyzer” machinery used to make clean hydrogen can evolve quickly enough, and at a cost that makes the fuel competitive with other energy sources, is an open question.

“We’re focused on implementing the Inflation Reduction Act as quickly as possible and providing clear guidance to industry so that they can continue making historic investments and tackling the climate crisis using every tool in our tool belt,” said John Podesta, the president’s senior adviser for clean-energy innovation and implementation, on a call with reporters about green hydrogen Thursday.

Before the plan was even shared with the public, it was under attack. Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee Chair Joe Manchin III (D-W.Va.) earlier in the week called the administration’s approach to green hydrogen “horrible” because too many projects would not qualify for subsidies. He warned that lawsuits are coming. Republicans have been holding hearings and launching investigations aimed at framing the entire climate package as a slush fund for donors and friends of the White House.

Energy firms and industry groups are deeply divided on the White House approach, which administration officials stressed is still a work in progress and could change before the rules are final. Praise from companies that stood to benefit from the strict rules the administration is proposing was offset by warnings from the Fuel Cell and Hydrogen Energy Association and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce that the guidelines would stifle growth and push companies abroad.

The green hydrogen plans come after the inspector general at the Department of Energy, Teri Donaldson, warned Congress in October that the administration is ramping up energy subsidy programs at an unprecedented pace, making oversight a challenge.

“The current situation brings tremendous risk to the taxpayers,” Donaldson said. “There is no precedent in the department for this level and pace of financing. … Further, many of these programs are designed to promote innovation by financing projects not otherwise acceptable by private-equity investors — projects the markets do not view [as] acceptable.”

The deep disagreement in Washington over how the money should be deployed, together with a lack of public awareness of how these technologies work and why they are chosen, creates a familiar challenge for the White House. It is the same dynamic that turned massive clean-energy investment in the Obama administration into an albatross for Democrats, when a politically connected solar company called Solyndra went bankrupt after securing a $500 million loan guarantee from the administration.

“There were a lot of successes with that loan guarantee program, but when you have a failure like Solyndra out of the box, that is what people remember,” said David Hill, who was general counsel for the Department of Energy during the George W. Bush administration. “People still associate the program with that failed company.”

Republican lawmakers have been invoking the name Solyndra often lately, including as they launched an investigation into a loan guarantee of up to $3 billion to the solar firm Sunnova, which the lawmakers accuse of mistreating customers and exploiting its connection to a high-ranking Energy Department official.

“Solyndra is going to look like chump change compared to the amount of taxpayer money that will get wasted this time,” said Sen. John Barrasso (R-Wy.), who is helping lead GOP oversight of the spending.

Administration officials say Republicans are misrepresenting the way the program works and the extent to which taxpayers are exposed to losses. They note that the same loan guarantee program that was attacked during the Obama administration as wasteful was actually a financial success, resulting in no losses for taxpayers while helping generate tens of thousands of new jobs. The Energy Department official accused of self-dealing sent a detailed letter to Barrasso explaining that he does not make the final decisions on which projects get funded.

Sunnova, which declined an interview request, said in a statement that while the government loan guarantee is aimed at reassuring investors that they will be made whole, the company would be responsible for absorbing any losses using its own funds before taxpayer money would be at risk. “Unfortunately, we have become a political football in an environment where the renewable energy industry is increasingly caught in the crosshairs,” Sunnova chief executive William J. Berger said in the statement.

On a call with reporters, senior White House advisers rattled off statistics that highlight the hundreds of thousands of jobs they say the climate package will create, the projects that have already been launched as a result of the subsidies and the impact the climate law is having on drawing clean-energy investment away from China.

Podesta said some of the same Republicans attacking the incentives are also showing up at project ribbon-cuttings to claim credit for the factories and infrastructure they are funding.

“Sometimes we have to remind my friends on the other side of the aisle that you can keep harping on Solyndra, but you also have the success of companies like Tesla that took advantage of that program,” he said. “One of the things we need to do is just get out there and tell the story about both the level of investment and the quality of investment.”

But even some allies of the White House are worried about the challenges of controlling the narrative on a program that is so costly, controversial and confusing to the average voter. Paul Bledsoe, who worked on climate issues in the Clinton White House, said he worries that even with existing technologies like electric vehicles, the administration’s plans may be out of touch with consumer concerns about lack of charging stations and high costs. He is urging the administration to be more supportive of transition technologies such as plug-in hybrids, even if that means overall car emissions aren’t cut as quickly.

“The conversation around the Inflation Reduction Act is often focused on technologies that are years away from commercialization,” Bledsoe said. “They are at risk of leaving the consumer behind.”

Tornadoes

... in December.

At least 6 dead, 23 injured after tornadoes touch down near Nashville

Six people were killed and nearly two dozen injured after tornadoes touched down around Nashville on Saturday, according to local authorities, who feared the death toll could rise as rescue efforts continued late Saturday night.

The severe thunderstorms that spawned the tornadoes erupted ahead of an intense cold front that stretched from Michigan through western Tennessee and into eastern Texas. Ahead of the front, abnormally warm and humid air — as much as 20 degrees higher than average for this time of year — surged northward, helping to fuel the storms.

More than 75,000 customers were without power in Tennessee as of Saturday night. The hardest hit areas appeared to be Clarksville, Tenn., and the northern side of Nashville. A child and two adults were killed in Clarksville, the city’s mayor said, and the Nashville Emergency Operation Center reported three people were killed by severe storms there.

“This is devastating news and our hearts are broken for the families of those who lost loved ones,” said Clarksville Mayor Joe Pitts, who declared a state of emergency and enacted a 9 p.m. curfew for Saturday and Sunday night. “The city stands ready to help them in their time of grief.”

Rescue efforts were still underway in both areas Saturday night. Photos from the Clarksville Fire Rescue showed at least two homes with their front facades and roofs torn off, a tractor-trailer truck that had been flipped onto its side and rescue workers scouring neighborhoods for people trapped or injured. Northeast of Nashville, utility poles, trees and power lines were downed in the nearby city of Gallatin, while buildings were at least partially collapsed in parts of neighboring Hendersonville.

Tennessee Gov. Bill Lee (R) directed the public Saturday night to follow guidance from local and state officials. “We mourn the lives lost,” he said in a social media post.

Through 8:30 p.m. Eastern, the National Weather Service had received about 75 reports of severe weather from northern Louisiana to southern Kentucky. But most of the severe weather was concentrated in western and central Tennessee, including 15 reports of tornadoes. The NWS said that as of 10 p.m., the severe weather threat had ended for all of Middle Tennessee.

The same front is forecast to barge toward the East Coast on Sunday. Some severe storms could erupt in the Southeast and Mid-Atlantic but they are not predicted to be as widespread or violent as Saturday’s storms in the Tennessee Valley.

In the Northeast, the front is expected to trigger torrential rains Sunday night into Monday morning. Flood watches are in effect from northern Virginia to eastern Maine, including Washington, Philadelphia, New York and Boston, where 1 to 3 inches of rain are predicted.

And BTW - 

November wrapped up 6th-warmest autumn on record for U.S.

2023 Atlantic hurricane season ends as nation remains at 25 separate billion-dollar disasters so far this year

Last month wrapped up a remarkably warm meteorological autumn across the U.S., with the season ranking as the sixth-warmest autumn on record for the nation, according to scientists from NOAA’s National Centers for Environmental Information (NCEI).

A busy Atlantic hurricane season also came to a close, ranking fourth for the most-named storms in a year since 1950.

Below are highlights from NOAA’s U.S. climate report for November 2023:

Climate by the numbers

November 2023

The average November temperature across the contiguous U.S. was 44.4 degrees F (2.7 degrees above average), ranking as the 19th-warmest November in NOAA’s 129-year climate record.

November temperatures were above average across much of the U.S., while below-normal temperatures were observed in parts of the Northeast. No state in the contiguous U.S. saw its top-10 warmest or coldest November on record. However, Alaska saw its fourth-warmest November in the 99-year period of record for the state.

The nation’s average precipitation across the contiguous U.S was 1.38 inches (0.85 of an inch below average), ranking as the 12th-driest November on record. Indiana saw its third-driest November on record, while Illinois, Kentucky, Missouri and Wisconsin all saw a top-10 driest November. No state saw a top-10 wettest November.

Meteorological autumn

It was an exceedingly warm meteorological autumn (September through November) across the contiguous U.S. The average autumn temperature was 56.1 degrees F (2.5 degrees above average), ranking as the sixth-warmest autumn on record.

New Mexico and Texas saw their third-warmest autumns on record, while Maine saw its fourth warmest. Arizona, Colorado, Massachusetts, Minnesota, Montana, Nebraska, New Hampshire, Vermont, Wisconsin and Wyoming all had their top-10 warmest autumn.

The total autumn precipitation across the U.S. was 5.66 inches (1.22 inches below average), which ranked as the 15th-driest autumn on record. Tennessee’s autumn ranked as third driest, with three additional states — Indiana, Kentucky and Mississippi — seeing their top-10 driest autumn. No state ranked in their top-10 wettest on record for the September–November period.

Year to date (January through November 2023)

With just one month to go in 2023, the YTD average temperature across the contiguous U.S. was 55.8 degrees F — 2.0 degrees above average — ranking as the 10th-warmest such YTD in the record.

Louisiana, Mississippi and Texas each ranked warmest on record, while Connecticut, Florida and Massachusetts each ranked second warmest for the January–November period.

The YTD precipitation total for the contiguous U.S. was 26.89 inches, 0.70 of an inch below average, ranking in the driest third of the historical record.

Louisiana and Maryland ranked seventh and eighth driest on record, respectively, for this YTD period. Meanwhile, Wyoming ranked seventh wettest on record, while Maine, Nevada, New Hampshire and Vermont all saw their top-10 wettest such YTD.

On Climate And Stuff

How fast do you have to buy EVs and heat pumps to avoid the worst effects of climate change?

Judging by the surging sales of green technology, U.S. households appear to be on the verge of a low-carbon future. Millions of Americans are buying electric vehicles, heat pumps and induction ranges.

But those numbers belie a starkly different present. Just about 3 percent of Americans, for example, reported owning an induction stove in 2022.

That’s close to the share of the U.S. population that owned a cellphone in the late 1980s, a few years after the first models came out. It took more than two decades for wireless technology to eclipse home landlines.

Time is tighter for the climate. To meet net-zero emissions targets, and avoid the worst effects of warming, most households will need to embrace a new suite of low-carbon technologies by 2050, says the electrification nonprofit Rewiring America.

To make it happen, they’re betting on the “S-curve.”

Virtually every major technology over the past two centuries has followed the same swooping S from virtual obscurity to near-ubiquitous adoption. Economists can now predict this basic shape with surprising accuracy, though the exact nature of the curve or slope change varies by product.

Some technologies that spread across the U.S. in the early 20th century took several decades to become ubiquitous.

But more recent innovations were adopted more quickly.

Experts say green technologies such as electric cars and rooftop solar panels could follow a similar pattern of rapid adoption even if they require you to spend tens of thousands of dollars upfront.

Not all new technologies make it big: Segway, Palm personal device, 3D television. But those that start ascending this curve tend to transform societies.

How fast Americans reach that point with green technologies is up to early adopters, about 15 to 20 percent of the population. They set the stage for this exponential growth by trying products before others do.

Take the thousands of die-hards who leased the first modern electric car, the EV1, released by General Motors in 1996. It had a 74-mile range at a time when drivers had virtually nowhere to charge except their garage.

“They are a special group of people that are willing to go through the pain of an early product,” says Carolina Milanesi, president of the technology research firm Creative Strategies, “and they take pride in that.”

Then mainstream customers, roughly 60 percent of the public, only embrace the technology once it matures into familiar, established products, well after its arrival, fueling years of sustained and exponential growth.

The final stage is dominated by “laggards,” those least willing to adopt the new technology, such as flip-phone owners in the age of smartphones.

How fast will you adopt the clean technologies needed to decarbonize America’s homes and driveways?

Rewiring America modeled the S-curve that products must follow to meet the Biden administration’s zero-emissions targets by 2050.

Americans are on track to meet those goals, but reaching higher levels of adoption will require overcoming barriers such as high costs and a limited number of available models.

“We have every reason to believe electrification technologies are following the same S-shaped curve that other technologies have followed in the past,” says Cora Wyent, Rewiring America’s director of research. “We haven’t missed the boat on any of them.”

The steepness of the slope depends on how many households have already adopted the technologies, and what percentage could reasonably adopt it by mid-century. The calculations assume Americans replace these technologies roughly every 15 years.

Here’s a look at where we are and where we need to be over the next couple of decades, and the role for early adopters.

Heat pump HVAC

(space heating and cooling)

Heat pumps are no longer reliant on early adopters despite being early in the cycle, suggesting Americans are well on track to meet net-zero goals by 2050. As far as clean technologies go, it’s the one most popular among Americans so far.

U.S. households installed 4 million new heat pumps last year, about half of new sales of residential heating systems, eclipsing gas furnaces for the first time.

Since several regions of the country have been installing them for years, 16 percent of U.S. homes already use electric heat pumps for space heating.

Heat pumps, in many parts of the country, are already cheaper to install and operate than fossil-fuel-powered furnaces, saving up to about $1,000 annually over conventional furnaces, while slashing emissions by several tons per year. Layer on generous new incentives from state, local and federal programs, and many units can pay for themselves over their lifetimes.

“Heat pumps make economic sense for many U.S. consumers,” says Erich Muehlegger, a professor of economics at the University of California at Davis. “The main driver is not people who want to be the first one on the block to own a heat pump, but someone who needs to replace something and sees heat pumps as a nice opportunity.”

The biggest barrier may be awareness: In a 2020 survey, the home electrification and insulation company Sealed found half of the respondents had no idea what heat pumps were.

Electric Vehicles

Electric cars are racing up the adoption curve. The United States has already surpassed the possible “tipping point” of around 5 to 10 percent of new sales, when researchers say growth accelerates.

Though most EV owners are still early adopters, early mainstream buyers are likely to switch to EVs in the coming years as the technology gets cheaper and more convenient.

In the first half of 2023, EVs accounted for 8 percent of all passenger vehicles sold in the United States, according to BloombergNEF, a clean-energy research group.

Still, the vast majority of the more than 280 million cars on U.S. roads run on fossil fuels, and just 4 percent are electric.

A skeptical public and spotty changes in infrastructure are acting as a drag. A Washington Post-University of Maryland poll found nearly half of adults say they still prefer owning a gas-powered car or truck. Only a third or so say EVs are better for day-to-day driving.

“As the EV market pushes into higher and higher levels of adoption, it bumps into groups that are going to have to make meaningful sacrifices,” says Muehlegger. “The technological adoption of EVs is not going to occur smoothly since it’s occurring at the same time all these other pieces of the transportation network are falling into place.”

A more likely scenario may be that regional, urban markets take off early, while areas with fewer charging stations and incentives lag.

Home solar panels

Five percent of U.S. homes have solar panels on their roofs, most of them in California.

Not all roofs are suitable for solar panels, and other options such as utility and community solar exist, so Rewiring America is targeting well under full adoption — 65 percent, or 80 million homes — by mid-century.

This will be a gradual transition that won’t fully pick up speed until later this decade. But with solar panel and battery prices set to fall, and as new incentives for building owners kick in, we will probably see a massive surge in installations.

Home solar installations have risen steadily, adding a record 6.4 gigawatts in 2022, enough to power about 1 million homes, according to data from the U.S. Energy Information Administration. A 2022 January Pew Research Center survey found 39 percent of homeowners had seriously considered installing solar panels in the past year.

Cooking

Most Americans already cook with electricity. That means fewer of them need to transition into a new, cleaner cooking technology, so Rewiring America is predicting a relatively flat S-curve.

About 39 percent still rely on gas and propane stoves. Induction stoves are the leading contender to electrify them, but so far they’re only in about 3 percent of households.

It will take a while for Americans to get to the 43 percent of homes Rewiring America estimates should make the switch by 2035 to meet climate goals. To get there, the nonprofit estimates an additional 1.8 million induction stoves above the current pace of sales in the next three years to keep the technology on track. By 2032, it estimates, sales must soar five times above the current trajectory.

The S-curve for induction stoves is relatively flat since so many homes already have electric stoves. It plateaus around 43 percent of homes by 2035, ensuring almost all homes switch out gas and propane well before mid-century.


Fortunately, induction stoves are having a moment. A record number of models are being rolled out by brands from GE to Viking at lower price points, although they remain more expensive on average.

Water heating

Just 1 percent of U.S. homes have installed heat pump water heaters, which deliver hot water with ultra-efficient heat pumps, making them one of the least-common climate technologies in U.S. homes.

Even well into next decade, only a sliver of households will have one, according to Rewiring America’s estimates. To meet climate goals, then, heat pump water heater sales will have to dramatically ramp up from 2030 to 2040.

Only about 140,000 units were sold last year, less than 2 percent of total water heater sales, according to the latest Environmental Protection Agency data.

Few homes have these appliances installed. Since heat pumps are much more efficient than both electric-resistance water heaters and natural gas, they are expected to fully displace all other kinds of water-heating technology.

Sales are growing fast, roughly doubling since 2017. Early adopters have the biggest role to play here, says Wyent. “Very few people know they exist,” she says. “They have the longest way to go. That’s an exciting place for early adopters to play a role.”

The biggest reason to switch is saving money. The appliances are as much as four times more efficient than comparable gas water heaters, saving one ton of CO2 annually on average, reports the nonprofit New Buildings Institute. The appliances cost about $117 annually to operate for a family of four compared to $200 for a gas water heater or $550 for electric resistance.

Gas-fired water heaters, now around half of all water heater sales, may have already begun their terminal decline.

Are we on track?

Early adopters may be driving growth of electrification technologies, but without a concerted effort behind them — incentives, tax credits, public education and workforce training for installation — the process will move too slowly.

Economics, policy and technology are finally pushing in the same direction. The Inflation Reduction Act and state and local incentives are expected to bring down the costs of climate technologies by about 40 percent, according to an analysis by market intelligence firm Sightline Climate. When it comes to clean-energy options, people have never had better products, lower prices or more generous incentives.

“Are we on track?” asks Doyne Farmer, director of the complexity economics program at the Institute for New Economic Thinking at the Oxford Martin School. “We’re more on track than people realize. … The thing about exponential [growth] is it’s small, it’s small, it’s small, and then suddenly it gets very big.”

In the early 1980s, AT&T asked consultants from McKinsey to estimate how many wireless customers it might have at the turn of the century, according to a report in the Economist.

Their answer — 900,000 subscribers — turned out to be the number of new customers joining mobile phone services every three days by 2020.

7 Things

Quick little roundup.

1) Abortion rights advocates won big victories in three states yesterday.

• In Ohio: Voters passed a constitutional amendment to guarantee abortion access, making it the latest state to take this step since Roe v. Wade was overturned last year.
• In Virginia: Democrats took control of the General Assembly, meaning they can stop Republicans, led by Gov. Glenn Youngkin, from introducing new abortion limits.
• In Kentucky: Voters reelected a Democratic governor who attacked his Republican opponent for supporting the deep-red state’s near-total ban on abortion.

2) Ivanka Trump will testify in her father’s New York civil fraud case today.

• The details: She is not a defendant in this case. But she will be the state’s last witness following testimony from her father, Donald Trump, and two of her brothers.
• In related news: The former president will skip a Republican primary debate in Miami tonight and host a rally nearby instead. The debate starts at 8 p.m. Eastern on NBC News.

3) Israel’s endgame in the Gaza Strip is unclear after a month of war.

• What to know: Israel’s prime minister said Monday that Israel would control Gaza’s postwar security for an “indefinite period,” which reportedly concerned U.S. officials.
• In the U.S.: The House voted yesterday to censure the only Palestinian American member of Congress, Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.), over her comments about the war.

4) The Supreme Court appears likely to allow gun bans for domestic abusers.

• What happened? Justices seemed to agree yesterday that a federal statute preventing people under domestic-violence protective orders from possessing guns is constitutional.
• Why it matters: This case is the first big test of the court’s ruling last year which requires judges to decide challenges to the Second Amendment by finding examples in history.

5) Northern Greenland’s ice sheets are rapidly retreating.

• What to know: The vast floating ice shelves have lost 35% of their total volume since 1978, according to new research.
• Why it’s worrying: The ice shelves hold back glaciers from flowing into the sea. If more are lost to warming oceans, it could lead to significant sea level rise.
• In related news: Last month was the planet’s warmest October on record.

6) Nintendo is making the Legend of Zelda into a live-action movie.

• The details: The creator of the wildly popular video game series, Shigeru Miyamoto, revealed yesterday that he’s working on the film but said it will “take time” to finish.
• It will be tricky to pull off: The series’ main character, Link, doesn’t speak out loud. And the innovative games are famous for letting players choose their own pathways.

7) Cats might be more affectionate and articulate than we thought.

• How we know: Researchers watched 150 hours of cat videos to learn more about how felines express themselves. They found that cats can make nearly 300 facial expressions.
• What’s your cat saying? When cats are happy, they typically move their ears and whiskers forward and outward. When unhappy, they flatten their ears and lick their lips.

This Winter

NCAR computer model predicts super El Niño for coming winter

There have only been three super El Niños since 1950. This winter could be the fourth.

BOULDER, Colorado — The temperature of the ocean water in the tropical Pacific Ocean west of South America is already warmer than normal, which is a condition known as El Niño.

A new climate model developed at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) is predicting that warming will continue into December, becoming one of the warmest or strongest El Niños in history.

“It’s very much the case that the stronger the El Niño, the greater the impacts," said NCAR research scientist Steve Yeager.

He said when an El Niño warms to a wintertime average of more than 2 degrees Celsius above normal, it's often referred to as a super El Niño. That's not an official term but he said it's just becoming an acceptable description in the media, the public and also among scientists.

And there have only been three occurrences of super El Niños since 1950, when sea surface temperature records began.

The new NCAR prediction system shows that this winter’s El Niño could rival those other super El Niño seasons.

Which is important to know because he said strong El Niño conditions can result in some reliable weather patterns over the winter months. In particular, wetter than normal weather in the southwestern states and warmer than normal weather to the north.

But how does Colorado fit in?

“I personally wouldn’t want to make a prediction about what’s going to happen in Colorado, and I get asked that a lot," said Yeager. "Colorado’s kind of in between the zones where there are really strong impacts, so it could go either way.”

He said there just haven't been enough examples of super El Niños through history to establish a dependable connection to small areas like cities or states, but he said there is a high likelihood of weather patterns to develop similar to the ones in the 1997-98 super El Niño.

That season was marked by flooding in South America, extreme rainfall in Central Africa and one of Indonesia's worst droughts in history. And the Pacific basin saw 11 super typhoons, the most in history.

In Colorado, all three previous super El Niño seasons were colder and snowier than average on the Front Range. Denver got more than 70 inches of snow in Denver each season, which is well above the average of 56 inches. Statewide snowpack was slightly below average in 2016, but slightly above average in 1998. Traditional statewide snowpack was not recorded in 1983.

Yeager said the key to predicting winter weather patterns in the future will likely depend on accurately predicting the strength of each coming El Niño.

Which is something his new model has already shown in simulations. Yeager just completed a research project in which he had the NCAR model reforecast previous El Niños and La Niñas based on global climate conditions at the time. The graph below shows that the predictions made by the model marked by the orange line, captured the actual observations including the three super El Niños.

“That’s really exciting." said Yeager. It means that our science is kind of coming into fruition of being actionable. Of being useful to society, which is a very gratifying thing.”

And he said the next big thing in El Niño forecasting will be determining something he calls the flavor of conditions, which is basically which part of the ocean is warming the most. He said if only the central part of the El Niño ocean region is warmer than average it will have a much different impact than if just the eastern or western side of the El Niño region is warmer than average.

Climate Impact

Yeager said that climate change is impacting scientists’ ability to predict El Niños because the climate is warming so fast that modeling is having a hard time keeping pace with new normals almost every year.

"The warming climate is also affecting other ocean basins that impact weather patterns," he said. "For example, the Gulf of Mexico and much of the rest of the Atlantic is record warm, so it will be very interesting from a science perspective to see how those offset, diminish or enhance this winter's El Niño."

He also said that more moisture is getting added to the atmosphere as a result of climate warming, which is making extreme single events more frequent. That can dramatically alter averages, so it's kind of like trying to hit a moving target as a forecaster.

Otis

How Hurricane Otis stunned forecasters with its leap to a Category 5

Forecasters didn’t even anticipate Otis would become a hurricane. Then it broke all-time records.

When residents of Acapulco, Mexico, went to bed on Monday, Wednesday’s forecast called for gusty winds and some downpours. Otis, a run-of-the-mill tropical storm, was expected to only “gradually strengthen” en route to the coast. Instead, Otis intensified faster than any other eastern Pacific storm on record Tuesday and became the strongest hurricane to ever strike Mexico slamming Acapulco as a “potentially catastrophic Category 5.”

As winds catapulted to Category 5 strength Tuesday evening, shocked forecasters at the National Hurricane Center described the storm’s extreme intensification as a “nightmare scenario” and “extremely dangerous situation.” Nobody saw it coming — but with human-caused climate change warming the planet’s oceans, this situation could become more frequent.

On Monday night, most computer models only simulated Otis’s top winds reaching 60 mph (these forecasts increased some on Tuesday as the storm showed signs of rapidly gaining strength). Instead, Otis came ashore near Acapulco with 165 mph winds, surely catching most of the city of 1 million off guard.

On X, formerly Twitter, meteorologists described the forecast as “an almost incomprehensible miss,” “a fail of epic proportions” and “just a catastrophic failure.”

Hurricane warnings weren’t issued for southern Mexico’s western coast until 2 a.m. local time Tuesday, about 24 hours before landfall — and, even then, the forecast was for a Category 1. The 9 a.m. Hurricane Center forecast on Tuesday — about 15 hours before landfall — still called for a Category 1. Not until 3 p.m., less than 12 hours before landfall, did the forecast increase to a Category 4.

While hurricanes can surprise meteorologists, a wind forecast error of nearly 100 mph is highly unusual. But some climate scientists have warned that extreme rapid intensification, made more likely by the effects of human-caused climate change and warming oceans, will lead to more unpredictable storms.

In 2017, MIT hurricane scientist Kerry Emanuel published a paper titled “Will Global Warming Make Hurricane Forecasting More Difficult?” In it, he argued that instances of extreme rapid intensification could be up to 20 times more common by the end of the 21st century.

Otis careened from a tropical storm to Category 5 strength in 12 hours, and its peak winds increased 115 mph in 24 hours. That’s around a threshold that Emanuel wrote was “essentially nonexistent in the late twentieth-century climate” but increasingly probable in the current warming climate.

Just this week, a study documented substantial increases in rapidly intensifying Atlantic storms over the past several decades. “The increased likelihood for hurricanes to transition from weak storms into major hurricanes in 24 hours or less was particularly striking,” Andra Garner, the study’s author, told The Washington Post.

Strongest landfalling Pacific hurricane on record

Otis’s Category 5 landfall is a first for Mexico, as well as for the entire Pacific coastline of North or South America. While the west coast of Mexico regularly experiences hurricanes, and Otis is the fourth storm to make landfall in Mexico in a month, many of them exhibit a weakening trend before landfall. Otis strengthened up until the very last moment.

It appears that high-altitude winds relaxed more than originally intensified, offering Otis an undisturbed and untapped environment within which to intensify at breakneck pace. It took advantage of bathlike water temperatures around 88 degrees.

Otis’s entire formation came about as an “accident” of sorts; instead of beginning its life as a preexisting tropical wave, it instead was caused when northerly Gulf of Mexico winds were funneled through a gap in between mountain ranges on Mexico’s Isthmus of Tehuantepec. That created a spurt of winds that curled in on itself upon exiting into the Pacific, leading to a small lobe of spin, or vorticity, that began producing thunderstorms.

One of the reasons Otis was so difficult to forecast was its size. As a relatively compact storm, it was particularly sensitive to very localized environmental conditions and prone to rapid fluctuations in strength.

Although hurricane intensity forecasts have improved substantially in recent years, models still have a difficult time predicting rapid changes that can occur in smaller storms.

How does Otis compare to other storms?

Otis’s winds leaped 90 mph in 12 hours, a record for the eastern Pacific. However, its 24-hour intensification falls just shy of Hurricane Patricia in 2015; that storm’s peak winds leaped a record 120 mph in strength in 24 hours. It eventually made landfall as a 150 mph Category 4, weakening as it approached land. But it had become the strongest hurricane on record over the ocean with 215 mph winds.

Aside from Patricia, half a dozen other hurricanes made landfall on Mexico’s west coast as Category 4s since the 1960s.

It first became clear that Otis was undergoing extreme rapid intensification on Tuesday afternoon, when a Hurricane Hunter flight found staggeringly different conditions inside the storm within two consecutive passes through the eye. Within 80 minutes, the storm’s central air pressure dropped by 10 millibars. In other words, there was 1 percent less air in the middle of the storm. That may not sound like much, but it signaled an extreme “vacuum” effect within the storm, causing the winds near the ground to accelerate to dangerous levels.

Matt Lanza, a meteorologist who runs The Eyewall, a hurricane commentary website, wrote the forecast for Otis was unacceptable.

“Otis will be studied in the coming months and years to understand why it blew up so quickly, and so powerfully, in such a short period of time,” he said. “In moments like these, forecasters utterly failed the people of Southern Mexico. We must do better.”

Next Steps

Biden's not doing enough? He's not getting done what he said he was going to do?

1. He's not the king, fuckwad. He has to work around "conservative" obstruction
2. He knows what to do and how to do it
3. You'll vote for a 3rd party candidate? Try to act like you're not stoopid enough to risk putting Republicans back in power

Biden’s new Climate Corps will train thousands of young people

It comes after a similar program was dropped from the Inflation Reduction Act

President Biden on Wednesday announced an initiative to train more than 20,000 young people in skills crucial to combating climate change, such as installing solar panels, restoring coastal wetlands and retrofitting homes to be more energy-efficient.

10 steps you can take to lower your carbon footprint

The American Climate Corps comes as Biden seeks to win over young voters, a critical constituency, before next year’s presidential election. Polls show that climate change is a top concern for young people, who are more likely than older generations to face raging wildfires, stronger storms and rising seas in their lifetimes.

The initiative resembles a proposal that was included in an early version of Biden’s signature climate law, the Inflation Reduction Act. The Civilian Climate Corps was ultimately dropped from the final version of the legislation during private negotiations last summer between Senate Majority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) and Sen. Joe Manchin III (D-W.Va.).

Since then, many Democrats and climate activists have called on Biden to use his executive authority to resurrect the Civilian Climate Corps. In a TikTok video Monday that racked up more than 16,000 views, the Sunrise Movement, a youth-led climate group, declared that “Dark Brandon would pass a CCC” — a reference to a meme that Biden’s 2024 campaign has embraced.

Youth climate activists have criticized the Biden administration for approving new fossil fuel projects such as the Willow oil drilling project in Alaska, with the hashtag #StopWillow going viral this spring. They say the president must do more to curb America’s dependence on fossil fuels, the leading cause of global warming, to lock in their support.

“I can’t speak on behalf of every single youth voter, but if President Biden continues to take bold climate action like this, I think it could go a long way,” Varshini Prakash, co-founder and executive director of Sunrise Movement, said in an interview. “Young people need to see more policies like this from the administration in the lead-up to the election.”

How will the Climate Corps work?

As part of a recruitment push, the White House on Wednesday will launch a new website where Americans can sign up to learn more about the workforce training program. All participants in the program will be paid, administration officials said, although they declined to disclose specific salaries.

The officials, who are closely monitoring the United Auto Workers’ ongoing strike against Detroit’s Big Three automakers, emphasized the program would help young people secure high-quality jobs after their training is complete.

The administration “will specifically be focused on making sure that folks that are coming through this program have a pathway into good-paying union jobs,” White House National Climate Adviser Ali Zaidi said on a Tuesday call with reporters previewing the announcement. “We’re very keenly focused on that.”

Zaidi said the initiative could help train the next generation of electricians. The country faces a dire shortage of electricians, who are needed to install a host of climate-friendly technologies, including heat pumps, efficient air conditioners and electric car chargers.

Biden’s push to transition to electric vehicles has become a key sticking point for the striking autoworkers, who fear the shift to EVs will mean fewer jobs and lower pay. The new initiative demonstrates that “green jobs can be good jobs,” said Trevor Dolan, industry and workforce policy lead at Evergreen Action, a climate advocacy group.

The Civilian Climate Corps was dropped from the climate bill. Now what?

Where did the idea for the Climate Corps come from?

Biden is not the first president to envision such a program. In 1933, President Franklin D. Roosevelt established the Civilian Conservation Corps, which put more than 3 million young men to work planting trees, constructing trails and making improvements to the nation’s infrastructure. However, the New Deal-era plan limited leadership roles to White men, whereas “this climate corps will uplift and empower a diverse and inclusive workforce,” Prakash said.

Biden’s move bypasses gridlock on Capitol Hill, where Sen. Edward J. Markey (D-Mass.) and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) have introduced legislation to establish a Civilian Climate Corps that is unlikely to pass the Republican-controlled House. In recognition of this reality, Markey and Ocasio-Cortez sent a letter to the president on Monday urging him to take executive action.

“We must mobilize and train Americans to tackle the threats climate change poses to our communities by putting people to work on thousands of projects with one shared sense of purpose,” Markey said in a statement.

How much will the Climate Corps cost?

Democrats had proposed $30 billion in new funding for the Civilian Climate Corps that was included in the early version of the Inflation Reduction Act. In contrast, the new initiative will rely on existing funding sources, although administration officials declined to say how much money the program will receive or where these dollars will come from.

In the absence of federal action, eight states have established versions of climate corps programs, many of which are embedded in state governments and receive federal funding from AmeriCorps. The White House announced Wednesday that an additional five states — Arizona, Maryland, Minnesota, North Carolina and Utah — will move forward with climate corps programs that are funded through public-private partnerships, including AmeriCorps.

In California, which established the nation’s first climate corps program in 2020, participants have sought to divert food from landfills — a significant source of climate pollution — to residents who struggle with food insecurity. Meanwhile in Michigan, the program has partnered with Wayne State University to help Detroiters protect their homes from flooding, which has been exacerbated by rising global temperatures.

Civilian Climate Corps programs take off in states across the country