Stephan: If you ever thought you might like to visit the Outer Banks of North Carolina, now is the time. It is a lovely trip; I have made it several times. Sadly, however, the Outer Banks are doomed by climate change and searise. Consistent with Schwartz' Law of Climate Change, reality will be worse than the predictions, and it will happen sooner than anticipated.
North Carolina Highway 12 Credit: News Observer
N.C. 12: The end of the road
North Carolina Highway 12 is a stark example of our battle with sea level rise and climate change. A two-lane road that runs the length of the Outer Banks, N..C. 12 is crucial to the region’s economy and is a lifeline for residents. But sections of the road are repeatedly flooded or washed away by storms that are growing more intense. The state has spent hundreds of millions of dollars trying to save Highway 12. This series looks at how the road came to be, how it changed the lives of the people who use it, and what the future might bring. New stories will be added throughout the week.
Laya Barley doesn’t know what she will do this fall if a hurricane blows into the Outer Banks.
Barley is from Buxton, the kind of small town where she knows the middle names of each of the 54 students she graduated from high school alongside this spring, as well as where their grandparents sit during basketball games.
Stephan: For me, one of the major takeaways graphically demonstrated from the pandemic and climate change, is that the Republican Party has become a cult of willful ignorance, and a cult lacking in morality or honorable ethics. It is not possible to espouse the Republican political positions and be an ethical person. Here is a good presentation of this argument.
Residents are silhouetted as they watch the Blue Ridge Fire burning in Yorba Linda, Calif., in October 2020. Credit: Ringo Chiu/Reuters
If you want to know why the United States is in such big trouble, look at the findings of a new Gallup poll. The percentage of Republicans expressing a “great deal” or “quite a lot” of confidence in science has plummeted from 72 percent in 1975 to just 45 percent today. (By contrast, the number of Democrats with confidence in science has grown from 67 percent to 79 percent.)
This is not some fringe movement we are discussing. This is a party that until the last election controlled both the White House and the Senate and that could easily recapture Congress next year. Think about what it means that a majority of one of the two major parties has lost confidence in science — essentially the same as losing confidence in logical, fact-based decision-making. The alternative is to embrace superstition, misinformation and conspiracy-mongering — and that’s just what Republicans have done.
Stephan: Ron De Santis is the Republican governor of Florida, a potential 2024 Republican presidential candidate, and a mass murderer. Oh, he isn't shooting people in alleyways; it's actually much worse than that. He is sabotaging medical science in every way he can concerning Covid-19 management, and with a legislature of morons, he is also doing what he can to keep American society linked to fossil fuels and, thus, is guaranteeing that the impact of climate change on the state he governs is going to be very severe. So severe a large part of the state will probably become submerged.
But the thing I want my readers to keep in mind is that De Santis and all the other corrupt morons in the Florida State Legislature are in office because the willfully ignorant frightened people of Florida voted these people into office. Hope you are enjoying your choices people of Florida. A large number of you are going to die and have your lives destroyed by these Republicans, and you have no one to blame but yourselves.
In January, Tampa was set to become the 12th city in Florida to set a climate goal to transition to 100 percent clean energy. But that was before the natural gas industry and Republican state lawmakers got involved.
Tampa City Councilman Joseph Citro had worked for months with environmental groups and local businesses ona non-binding resolution — more of a North Star for the city than a mandatory policy. As part of its clean energy goal, the resolution supported a ban on new fossil fuel infrastructure including pipelines, compressor stations, and power plants.
No state-level policies in Florida require reducing planet-heating emissions, and some federal and state lawmakers deny the science of human-caused climate change. So it’s been up to cities and towns to do what they can, like buying electric school buses and powering municipal buildings with renewable energy. Increasingly, local governments are ramping up their ambitions.
Stephan: Here is some good news about noncarbon, non-nuclear energy generation, it is growing dramatically, and solar, wind, and hydro are now the second-largest source of power in the entire nation. We are still way behind China, but in spite of corrupt politicians in both parties who owe allegiance to carbon energy and who try to block the development of noncarbon energy we are still making progress exiting the carbon power era.
The Energy Information Administration, the primary authority in the federal government on energy numbers, concludes that renewables, primarily hydro, wind and solar, rose to become 21% of electricity generation in the U.S. in 2020.
This is the first time on record that renewables were the second-largest generator of electricity in the U.S.
Renewables overall increased 9% between 2019 and 2020. About half of U.S. clean energy now comes from solar and wind, and the other half from hydroelectric power.
Wind generation increased by 14%.
Solar rocketed up even more, with utility-scale solar projects of 1 megawatt or more growing by 26%.
Small-scale solar such as rooftop installations like the one we have increased by 19%.
The Clean Power Association says that America put in 26 gigawatts of renewables electricity plants in 2020 — 80% more than in 2019 — bringing total US renewables capacity to 170 gigawatts.
In the US, some 78% of all new electricity generation was from wind and solar, which are clearly the future of the American grid.
American renewables beat out coal, now only 19%, and nuclear, at 20%. Coal is dirty and expensive, […]
Stephan: This article suggests we are on the verge of a major breakthrough with computers and, thus, the internet, and the way we can communicate. Are you old enough to remember the world before personal computers, say before 1977? Now think about the world of quantum computer when radically more computer power is available to every individual.
Credit: Samuel Velasco/Quanta Magazine
In a preprint posted online Thursday night, researchers at Google in collaboration with physicists at Stanford, Princeton and other universities say that they have used Google’s quantum computer to demonstrate a genuine “time crystal.” In addition, a separate research group claimed earlier this month to have created a time crystal in a diamond.
A novel phase of matter that physicists have strived to realize for many years, a time crystal is an object whose parts move in a regular, repeating cycle, sustaining this constant change without burning any energy.
“The consequence is amazing: You evade the second law of thermodynamics,” said Roderich Moessner, director of the Max Planck Institute for the Physics of Complex Systems in Dresden, Germany, and a co-author on the Google paper. That’s the law that says disorder always increases.
Time crystals are also the first objects to spontaneously break “time-translation symmetry,” the usual rule that a stable object will remain the same throughout time. A time crystal is both stable and ever-changing, with special moments […]
