Despite the Trump Administration’s best attempts to bury this report, you should read it.
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Category Archives: environment
Acres Burned to Date
Not a record year, yet.
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Stephen Moore: “When It Comes To Electric Power, Coal Is No. 1”
That’s a title of a July 28 piece in IBD. He writes:
According to the Energy Information Administration, which tracks energy use in production on a monthly basis, the single largest source of electric power for the first half of 2017 was…coal.
Acres Burned, through 29 December
Figure 1: Acres burned (blue, left scale) and total Federal firefighting expenditure in 2016 dollars (orange, right scale). 2017 observation is for acres burned through 29 December. Source: NIFC1, NFIC2, and author’s calculations.
But remember: “Global warming is a total, and very expensive, hoax!”!!!
Wildfires: Acres Burned to Date
Not a record year yet, but still devastating. The upward trend in acres burned is shown below.
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“We’re Doing a Great Job” in Puerto Rico
I just saw the President re-state this point in a press conference with the Governor of Puerto Rico. He also just said (if I heard it right) that the Federal response deserves a “10” score. Here are some key graphs.
Wildfires: Acres Burned, Suppression Costs
I received this message from USDA yesterday; it reminded me of some other adjustment costs of climate change.
U.S. Secretary of Agriculture Sonny Perdue today announced that wildland fire suppression costs for the fiscal year have exceeded $2 billion, making 2017 the most expensive year on record. Wildfires have ravaged states in the west, Pacific Northwest, and Northern Rockies regions of the United States this summer.
That’s just USDA; it doesn’t include Interior Department expenditures.
12 Month Global Temperature Anomaly, August July 2017
Corrected Source: NOAA, accessed 9/13/2017.
Update, 9/13, 8:15am Pacific: A common refrain is that it’s been hotter in the distant past. I think it’s important to remember that while there has always been variation in temperatures, a question is whether temperatures have changed so rapidly in such a short period of time in a time (post-dinosaur, e.g.). If adjustment costs are quadratic, well, the first derivative (gradient) matters. To that end, consider the following graph, and the movement over the most recent period.
Source: CC BY-SA 3.0, [link].
Notice the steep ascent up to 2004; the global land/sea anomaly in Figure 1 is nearly 0.4 c higher in 2016 than 2004 (12 month thru December)..
Killing the Messenger (on Climate)
From WaPo today:
The Trump administration has decided to disband the federal advisory panel for the National Climate Assessment, a group aimed at helping policymakers and private-sector officials incorporate the government’s climate analysis into long-term planning.
12-Month Global Temperature Anomaly, July 2017
Source: NOAA.