Archives par mot-clé : USA

Thanks to Shale, U.S. CO2 Emissions Continued to Decline in 2016

by Nicole Jacobs, October 3, 2017 in ClimateChangeDispatch


The report, which bases its CO2 emissions estimates off International Energy Agency (IEA) and BP data through 2016, found the global CO2 levels essentially remained flat in 2015 and 2016. As BP noted earlier this year, the global trend is “well below the 10-year average growth of 1.6% and a third consecutive year of below-average growth” and that “during 2014-16, average emissions growth has been the lowest over any three-year period since 1981-83.”

Catastrophic’ sea level rise in the past may have drowned corals in Hawaii

by University of Sydney, September 28, 2017 in WUWT


Recent findings suggest that episodes of very rapid sea-level rise of about 20m in less than 500 years occurred in the last deglaciation, caused by periods of catastrophic ice-sheet collapse as the Earth warmed after the last ice age about 20,000 years ago.

Lead author, PhD candidate at the University of Sydney, Kelsey Sanborn, has shown this sea-level rise event was associated with “drowning” or death of coral reefs in Hawaii.

See also here

‘Game-Changing’ new research on prolific Permian Basin estimates 60 billion to 70 billion barrels remain, IHS Markit says

by PennEnergy Editorial Staff, September 25, 2017


Energy researchers at IHS Markit have completed the first, three-year phase of a massive Permian Basin research project that models and interprets the giant basin’s key geologic characteristics to better estimate its remaining hydrocarbon potential, and initial results indicate the giant basin still holds an estimated 60 billion to 70 billion barrels of technically recoverable resources.
To conduct this new analysis, researchers used the IHS Markit historical well and production database that includes more than 440,000 Permian Basin wells, and a new proprietary software tool that, for the first time, enables them to leverage interpreted formation ‘tops’ data to identify accurate formations for completion intervals on hundreds of thousands of wells

Puerto Rico’s Hurricane History

by P.  Homewood, September 22, 2017 in NotaLotofPeopleKnowThat


As Hurricane Maria heads north as a Cat 3 storm, much is being made of the fact that it is the strongest hurricane to hit Puerto Rico since 1928. The implication is that Maria must have been exceptionally strong.

But the reality is that Puerto Rico is little more than a speck in the vastness of the Atlantic Ocean. The odds of the eye of a major hurricane, often just 10 or 20 miles wide, making a direct hit on Puerto Rico are probably hundreds to one, given that there are thousands of miles of ocean through which hurricanes can commonly travel.

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Are the glaciers in Glacier National Park growing? Lysander Spooner University investigates climate claims

by Lysander Spooner University, September 2017


(…) Upon our return to the Hotel after visiting the Glacier, we noticed that our brand-new photos appear to show that the Grinnell Glacier has grown slightly from the 2008 images that are displayed on the Hotel walls. There has been no reporting of this in any newspaper or broadcast that we know of. (In fact, all news coverage reports the precise opposite.) The smaller Gem Glacier—which is visible from the valley miles below—also appears to be slightly larger than it is shown in 2008 pictures on display.

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Texas Major Hurricane Intensity Not Related to Gulf Water Temperatures

by Ph.D.  Roy Spencer, August 29th, 2017 in GlobalWarming


As the Houston flood disaster is unfolding, there is considerable debate about whether Hurricane Harvey was influenced by “global warming”. While such an issue matters little to the people of Houston, it does matter for our future infrastructure planning and energy policy.

Let’s review the two basic reasons why the Houston area is experiencing what now looks like a new record amount of total rainfall, at least for a 2-3 day period over an area of tens of thousands of square miles.

Natural Gas Looks Hurricane-Proof, for Now

by Nathaniel Bullard, September 1, 2017 in BloombergView


Since 2005, the U.S. has added more than 120,000 gas wells, mainly in Texas, Pennsylvania, Oklahoma and Colorado. In 2015, there were 555,000 in total.

Those onshore wells have not just made up for declining offshore production, they have handily exceeded it. Offshore gas is now only 4 percent of total U.S. withdrawals. Texas, Pennsylvania, Oklahoma and Colorado are 53 percent of all production.

Texas Major Hurricane Intensity Not Related to Gulf Water Temperatures

by Ph.D. Roy Spencer, August 29, 2017 in GlobalWarming


As the Houston flood disaster is unfolding, there is considerable debate about whether Hurricane Harvey was influenced by “global warming”. While such an issue matters little to the people of Houston, it does matter for our future infrastructure planning and energy policy.

Let’s review the two basic reasons why the Houston area is experiencing what now looks like a new record amount of total rainfall, at least for a 2-3 day period over an area of tens of thousands of square miles.

Water Intrusion in the Chesapeake Bay Region: Is It Caused by Climate-Induced Sea Level Rise?

by Roger H. Bezdek, August 2017 in SciRes


Our findings indicate that the water intrusion problems in the region are due not to “sea level rise”, but primarily to land subsidence due to groundwater depletion and, to a lesser extent, subsidence from glacial isostatic adjustment. We conclude that water intrusion will thus continue even if sea levels decline. These findings are critical because the water intrusion problems in the Chesapeake Bay—and elsewhere—cannot be successfully solved unless their causes are correctly identified and appropriate remedies are devised.

Quantifying the causes of the recent decrease in US CO2 emissions

by Roger Andrews, August 23, 2017 in Energy Matters (blog)


Between 2007 and 2015 total annual US CO2 emissions decreased by 740 million tons (12%). An updated analysis shows that 35% of this decrease was caused by natural gas replacing coal in electricity generation, 30% by lower fuel consumption in the transportation sector, 28% by renewables replacing

Gilmer: We Should View The Permian Basin As A Permanent Resource

by David Blackmon, August 17, 2017 in Forbes


“We should view the Permian Basin as a permanent resource,” he says, “The Permian is best viewed as a near infinite resource – we will never produce the last drop of economic oil from the Basin.”

No one disputes that the resource in the Permian is huge, but ‘infinite’ is a big word.  I asked him to expand on that concept.

See also here

New York Times Shifts Towards Extreme Climate Fraud

by Tony Heller, July 29, 2017 in DeplorableClimateScinceBlog


The New York Times said yesterday that heatwaves in the past were “virtually unheard of in the 1950s”, temperatures approaching 130 degrees didn’t used to occur, and summer temperatures have shifted towards more extreme heat.

(…) Every single claim in the article is patently false, and the exact opposite of reality. The authors intentionally started their study in a cold period, after the extreme heat of the 1930’s.

U.S. becomes global fossil energy giant feeding hungry world energy markets

by WUWT, July 25, 2017


U.S. evolves into coal, gas and oil global energy giant supplying world’s hungry energy markets

David Middleton’s excellent WUWT article addressing the resurgence of the American coal industry as well as the growing role of U.S. natural gas production in creating global gas export markets hits the nail on the head in demonstrating how dominant the U.S. has become in producing and supplying global energy markets at home and abroad with growing demands for fossil fuels.

The IEA agency clearly recognizes the U.S. as the global driver of a huge transformation of the world’s natural gas energy markets.

US Has Produced More Oil Than Saudi Arabia For 4 Straight Years

by Andrew Follett, July 7, 2017


Saudi Arabia has lagged the U.S. in oil production for the last four years, according to federal data compiled by University of Michigan economist Mark Perry.

Perry created a chart Saturday showing just how far behind Saudi oil production has trailed U.S. production. Rising U.S. production combined with OPEC policies drove crude oil prices down to new lows. Monday, a barrel of oil costs $46.26, while the same barrel would have sold for $109.04 in June 2014.

Study: California once had 150 straight years of stormy, wet, weather

by Vanderbilt University, from WUWT, June 20, 2017

Wet and stormy weather lashed California coast… 8,200 years ago

First high resolution evidence of California climate response to Holocene 8.2 ka event

The weather report for California 8,200 years ago was exceptionally wet and stormy.

That is the conclusion of a paleoclimate study that analyzed stalagmite records from White Moon Cave in the Santa Cruz Mountains published online Jun. 20 in Scientific Reports.

The Golden State’s 150-year stretch of unusually wet weather appears to have been marked by particularly intense winter storms and coincides with a climate anomaly in Greenland ice cores first detected in 1997. Before this “8.2 ka event” was discovered scientists thought the world’s climate had been unusually stable during the Holocene, the geological epoch that covers the last 11,700 years of Earth’s history.


 

To Put America First Is to Put Our Planet’s Climate First

by Prof. Dr. Istvan Marko et al., June 16, 2017


On June 2, 2017, in a Letter regarding US withdrawal from Paris climate agreementaddressed to the MIT community, Professor Rafael Reif, president of MIT, criticized President Trump’s decision to exit the Paris Climate Accords. In this refutation, we propose to clarify the scientific understanding of the Earth’s climate and to dispel the expensively fostered popular delusion that man-made global warming will be dangerous and that, therefore, the Paris Agreement would be beneficial.