Occasional Thoughts on Climate Change

[TheClimateChanger]

Morning thoughts:

 

[TheClimateChanger]

 

[TheClimateChanger]

Extreme volcanic venting in the north Pacific and all over the oceans! This is wild, you guys! 

[Typhoon Tip]

 

MHT 100R

BOS 99R

PVD 97R

CON 97R

BDL 96TR

 

[donsutherland1]

Glacial boulders at Franconia Notch State Park. The last boulder was split by the melting and refreezing of the ice. The boulders were deposited around 25,000 years ago as the ice sheet advanced south. 

[TheClimateChanger]

23 minutes ago, donsutherland1 said:

Glacial boulders at Franconia Notch State Park. The last boulder was split by the melting and refreezing of the ice. The boulders were deposited around 25,000 years ago as the ice sheet advanced south. 

Nice pics, and a good reminder that the climate is always changing... just usually a little slower than these days. I remarked recently on the irony of having the Great Lakes exist in a future hothouse earth, carved from that same ice just 14,000 years ago. 

[csnavywx]

On 7/29/2025 at 8:46 AM, nflwxman said:

Work in renewables and can confirm that this is the case. The 2025 numbers are even more compelling. For example, the average cost of an energy storage system dropped about 27% in the past year due to technology improvements (and a reduction in EV demand, unfortunately). Currently, battery systems are competitive with LNG Peaker plans in MISO (Midwest) where fossils were heavy entrenched incumbents. The reality is that PV + BESS make so much sense. The technology pair has no long-term extraction costs, can be recycled, and of course, no long-term combustion impacts. BESS is also the "swiss army knife" of grid technology and can respond to grid disturbances in milliseconds. Peaker plants, or even nuclear, can't do that.

The problem is adoption still isn't happening fast enough. This should have been 10 years ago.

 

Full disclosure as I'm long FSLR stock and ICLN etf shares as of a couple of months ago, but it's suffered on an important metric that doesn't ever seem to be discussed: profitability. For better or worse live and breathe in a market system, where component cost is only one part of the equation and the considerable firming costs get downplayed (esp. at high penetration, at low pen. they're negligible). There is no OPEC for RE and the oft cited negative power prices are a symptom of high volatility, something that's never good for bottom lines in a commodity space. If you rushed to buy in '21 during the initial wave of optimism without careful consideration of the downsides, you got rinsed for 70%+ of your investment.

The recent growth in PV+BESS is encouraging and I think the equity side has been pounded enough that it's a decent buy for LT positions, but we're going to have to spend a lot of cash upgrading the grid to handle this as well and that cost isn't going to be cheap, esp. at today's interest rates. If we're not honest about that up front, then well... the political backlash will be even worse than we've seen so far.

I agree this should have been 10 years ago -- I think rebound and network effects along with struggling profitability are going to result in it the transition moving slower than it otherwise could have. It still needs subsidies to fill the gap. Some companies are better than others, ofc.

[csnavywx]

A more in depth look at the issue available here (as a review of the book "The Price is Wrong"): https://repository.law.umich.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=14174&context=mlr

The book itself is a good read.

[WEATHER53]

Can I ask?  If poles have moved 3 feet; that seems  seems insignificant?   But  do we  know that?