Anthropogenic Global Warming ... how hot is it ?

[Shiftless2]

Another win for the "know-nothing brigade"

Trump to repeal EPA finding that greenhouse gases threaten public health​

Joey GarrisonDinah Voyles Pulver

The Trump administration is preparing to rescind an Obama-era scientific finding that has served as the legal underpinning for federal regulations targeting greenhouse gases for more than a decade.

In a major blow to federal efforts to combat climate change, the Environmental Protection Agency will take action on Feb. 12 to repeal what's known as the "endangerment finding," White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said at a Feb. 10 briefing with reporters.

The EPA's endangerment finding, signed in 2009 during the Obama administration, says current and projected concentrations of six key greenhouses gases in the atmosphere "threaten the public health and welfare of current and future generations." A related EPA finding, signed in tandem, singles out ....

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[sear]

" Trump to repeal EPA finding" #541​

"Repeal" refers to legislative reversal, not unilateral executive contradiction.
"Finding" is the result of investigative process. Political opposition can reverse policy. It does not revise the rules of logic that produced the finding.

 

[Shiftless2]

"Repeal" refers to legislative reversal, not unilateral executive contradiction.
"Finding" is the result of investigative process. Political opposition can reverse policy. It does not revise the rules of logic that produced the finding.

Agreed - while he can get the EPA to retract the relevant papers and change their official position he can't "repeal" the results.

 

[sear]

Trump directs military to strike new deals with coal-fired power plants: ‘Going to be buying a lot of coal’​

President touts 'more reliable power and stronger and more resilient grid power' while criticizing wind energy as 'crazy windmills'​

By Jasmine Baehr Fox News Published February 11, 2026 7:19pm EST

Trump says coal ‘critical to our national security,’ orders military to buy more​

President Donald Trump on Wednesday announced an executive order directing the Department of War to pursue new agreements with coal plants to ensure a "more reliable" electric grid. (Pool)
"That’s why I'm also pleased to announce that, in just a moment, I will sign an executive order that directs the Department of War to work directly with coal plants on the new power purchasing agreements, ensuring that we have more reliable power and stronger and more resilient grid power," Trump said.
"And we're going to be buying a lot of coal through the military now, and it's going to be less expensive and actually much more effective than what we have been using for many, many years."

Trump directs military to strike new deals with coal-fired power plants: ‘Going to be buying a lot of coal’

Trump signed an executive order Wednesday directing the Department of War to purchase coal power for military installations, calling coal "essential" to national security.

www.foxnews.com

 

[Shiftless2]

The Royal Gazette is Bermuda's daily newspaper and it's unusual for them to post an article that's this long so obviously they thought it's important.

Why is an article in a Bermudian paper important to the US and the rest of the world? Simple - Bermuda is the third largest insurance and reinsurance center in the world (after New York and London) and if natural disasters continue to increase in frequency or magnitude, insurance is going to become much more expensive and harder to obtain.

Companies will be forced to: (i) increase premiums probably substantially, (ii) curtail writings, or (iii) withdraw entirely from certain areas. And since those Bermuda companies provide reinsurance to those companies insuring US properties their actions will directly affect Americans.

=======================================​

The insurance crisis is about to get even worse​

Mark Gongloff

The Trump Administration will soon make it the official policy of the US government that greenhouse gases don’t endanger Americans’ wellbeing and therefore don’t need federal regulation. Insurance companies, meanwhile, live in a parallel universe where greenhouse gases are heating the atmosphere and intensifying natural disasters, harming human health, destroying property and raising insurance costs.

The US government’s universe is an increasingly lonely fantasy world. You’re trapped in the real one.

The oxymoronically named Environmental Protection Agency will this week formally renounce its 2009 “endangerment finding”, which gives it regulatory power over emissions from cars, power plants, factories and more. This move, which the climate-change deniers running the White House call a “total victory”, is for now mostly symbolic.

But what it symbolises is still troubling: a government putting outdated ideology and corporate profits above the health and financial welfare of the people it governs. In the process, it’s stoking the flames of dual insurance crises that are harming growing numbers of Americans and putting trillions of dollars at risk.

For what it’s worth, it’s also illegal. The Supreme Court ruled in 2007 that the 1963 Clean Air Act required the EPA to regulate planet-heating emissions, a sentiment Congress endorsed in the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act and didn’t try to undo in the One Big Beautiful Bill Act. Environmental groups have vowed to subject the EPA to years of legal brawling before its vision can become reality.

Nor does it make much practical difference. Under administrator Lee Zeldin, the EPA has .....

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[Rigby5]

I am oddly ambivalent because although coal produces twice the CO2 of natural gas, we have only about 50 years of natural gas, and over 500 years worth of coal?

 

[sear]

"I am oddly ambivalent because although coal produces twice the CO2 of natural gas, we have only about 50 years of natural gas, and over 500 years worth of coal?" R5 #546

I'm not sure where that fits in the "keep your powder dry" planetary husbandry protocol.
I'm grateful we had enough fossil fuel to enable us to bridge from fire at the mouth of the cave, to completing the conversion to renewable energy (or whatever replaces it). Do we get a depletion $bonus?

Why not save a little for later?

 

[Rigby5]

I'm not sure where that fits in the "keep your powder dry" planetary husbandry protocol.
I'm grateful we had enough fossil fuel to enable us to bridge from fire at the mouth of the cave, to completing the conversion to renewable energy (or whatever replaces it). Do we get a depletion $bonus?

Why not save a little for later?

I remember when I saw the movie "China Syndrome" with Jane Fonda and Jack Lemon, and had such strong feelings against nuclear power.
Now that I know how much worse fossil fuel is, I vastly prefer nuclear power, and am embarrassed by my previous rush to judgement.
But it still makes me a little more hesitant.
For example, geothermal will cool off the earth eventually, causing the loss of our ionosphere.
Tidal energy will eventually slow the earth's rotation.

 

[sear]

"I remember when I saw the movie "China Syndrome" with Jane Fonda and Jack Lemon, and had such strong feelings against nuclear power.
Now that I know how much worse fossil fuel is, I vastly prefer nuclear power, and am embarrassed by my previous rush to judgement." R5 #548

Nope.
That sir is revisionist self-criticism.

iirc around the time China Syndrome hit the big screen, Three Mile Island hit the front page.
That nuclear waste would be a radioactive albatross around the necks of one hundred human generations, a full millennium, was no secret.
That atmospheric Carbon was worse wasn't as clear, at that time.

It's a new millennium.
Opposition to commercial electric power isn't directly the issue. What matters is that plans are made, actions taken, compliance insured, that nuclear waste mitigation measures are applied as long as the waste is toxic.

"But it still makes me a little more hesitant.
For example, geothermal will cool off the earth eventually, causing the loss of our ionosphere.
Tidal energy will eventually slow the earth's rotation." R5 #548

Astrophysicists have reached consensus that our sun will turn red giant, and subsume Earth's orbit. "So don't buy any green bananas."
I don't know the timelines for the scenarios you cite. But it's based on a static model. But projections over the time periods involved in the geothermal & tidal scenarios don't apply to such static premise.
That doesn't excuse Trump stoking coal. INEXCUSABLE !
The generations that will suffer most severely for Trump's caprice have not yet been born.

 

[Rigby5]

Nope.
That sir is revisionist self-criticism.

iirc around the time China Syndrome hit the big screen, Three Mile Island hit the front page.
That nuclear waste would be a radioactive albatross around the necks of one hundred human generations, a full millennium, was no secret.
That atmospheric Carbon was worse wasn't as clear, at that time.

It's a new millennium.
Opposition to commercial electric power isn't directly the issue. What matters is that plans are made, actions taken, compliance insured, that nuclear waste mitigation measures are applied as long as the waste is toxic.


Astrophysicists have reached consensus that our sun will turn red giant, and subsume Earth's orbit. "So don't buy any green bananas."
I don't know the timelines for the scenarios you cite. But it's based on a static model. But projections over the time periods involved in the geothermal & tidal scenarios don't apply to such static premise.
That doesn't excuse Trump stoking coal. INEXCUSABLE !
The generations that will suffer most severely for Trump's caprice have not yet been born.

I thought along similar lines, but then I began to understand that all radioactive material in the earth actually came from stellar nuclear fusion billions of years ago.
That means nuclear reactors actually do not create "nuclear waste", but instead they cause the already existing nuclear material to decay in reactors that actually reduced their radioactivity. So nuclear reactors actually are a net positive in using up radioactive waste instead of creating it.
By speeding up decay, they release heat.
If we ever get fusion working, that will be different in that it will increase radioactive wastes.

 

[sear]

"I thought along similar lines, but then I began to understand that all radioactive material in the earth actually came from stellar nuclear fusion billions of years ago.
That means nuclear reactors actually do not create "nuclear waste", but instead they cause the already existing nuclear material to decay in reactors that actually reduced their radioactivity. So nuclear reactors actually are a net positive in using up radioactive waste instead of creating it." R5 #550

Wild guess?
I'm not a nucular physician, but I suspect if your suggestion is accurate, the problem is that by mining & refining we concentrate the toxic properties, so that after we extract a little energy, what's left over is a long-term problem, even if global gamma radiation is reduced.

R5:
Which is more radioactive?
A pound of nuclear fuel? Or the waste it generates / becomes when removed from service?
Seems to me that's information basic enough for an informed voter to know. I do not know.
And the time I spent groping about the Internet for details was time wasted. Are they keeping this secret? Do we have to study Hanford?

 

[Rigby5]

Wild guess?
I'm not a nucular physician, but I suspect if your suggestion is accurate, the problem is that by mining & refining we concentrate the toxic properties, so that after we extract a little energy, what's left over is a long-term problem, even if global gamma radiation is reduced.

R5:
Which is more radioactive?
A pound of nuclear fuel? Or the waste it generates / becomes when removed from service?
Seems to me that's information basic enough for an informed voter to know. I do not know.
And the time I spent groping about the Internet for details was time wasted. Are they keeping this secret? Do we have to study Hanford?

Good question.
Over all, the fissile material is decayed by being used in the reactor.
But in the reactor, the decay process is accelerated.
So the amount of radiation given off could be increased, even though then it will get used up faster.

But I am not too worried about the nuclear wastes because if we bury it near the reactor, no one should be surprised by it.

 

[Shiftless2]

Trump's repeal of climate rule opens a 'new front' for litigation​

Story by Jan Wolfe

The Trump administration's repeal of an Obama-era scientific finding that greenhouse gases pose a public health threat could open up a new pathway for filing lawsuits against power-plant operators and other companies.

Legal experts said the policy reversal could lead to a surge in lawsuits known as "public nuisance" actions, a pathway that had been blocked following a 2011 Supreme Court ruling that regulation of greenhouse gas emissions should be left in the hands of the Environmental Protection Agency instead of the courts.

Now that the EPA has abandoned that regulatory effort, the legal shield created by the 2011 decision will likely unravel, legal experts said.

"This may be another classic case where overreach by the Trump administration comes ....

MORE>

 

[sear]

"I am not too worried about the nuclear wastes because if we bury it near the reactor, no one should be surprised by it." R5 #552

RED !
R5,
Holy %$#@!@ cow !
Research the Hannaford, Washington nightmare.
Radioactive waste was dumped on site for years. That radioactivity has now contaminated the groundwater, and is migrating toward the Missouri River.
If / when it gets there, TITANIC trouble.
The Missouri helps drain:
Alberta
Saskatchewan
Montana
the Dakota's
and ...
is all flows into the Gulf of Trump.

Japan / Fukushima have already done their share to insure our seafood glows in the dark.

Reductio ad absurdum:
The master plan was to store U.S.' nuclear waste under Yucca Mountain.
Congress splurged a lot of $cash on that dead-end before contending with the fact that if radioactive leakage contamination reached the aquifer,
it would have exposed much of the continent. That's the Ogallala Aquifer, reportedly the largest in North America.
https://19january2021snapshot.epa.gov/radiation/what-yucca-mountain-repository_.html

The corroborated expert opinion I've read on it indicates there's no permanent nuclear waste dump in the U.S.,
and that even the nuclear waste generated by building the bombs the U.S. dropped on Japan in WWII has not been permanently stored.

It's not merely a rhetorical annoyance.
It wouldn't take a MIRV ICBM salvo from Russia to inflict nuclear ruin on the U.S.
Drunken malefactors with simple Tim McVeigh grade explosives could make a dreadful mess by attacking any of our numerous in situ nuclear dumps dotting the nation.
There are too many of these sites to adequately defend. At best they are guarded with the perfunctory minimum, a wire fence with a sign on it. That's tantamount to an invitation to the bad guys.

 

[Rigby5]

RED !
R5,
Holy %$#@!@ cow !
Research the Hannaford, Washington nightmare.
Radioactive waste was dumped on site for years. That radioactivity has now contaminated the groundwater, and is migrating toward the Missouri River.
If / when it gets there, TITANIC trouble.
The Missouri helps drain:
Alberta
Saskatchewan
Montana
the Dakota's
and ...
is all flows into the Gulf of Trump.

Japan / Fukushima have already done their share to insure our seafood glows in the dark.

Reductio ad absurdum:
The master plan was to store U.S.' nuclear waste under Yucca Mountain.
Congress splurged a lot of $cash on that dead-end before contending with the fact that if radioactive leakage contamination reached the aquifer,
it would have exposed much of the continent. That's the Ogallala Aquifer, reportedly the largest in North America.
https://19january2021snapshot.epa.gov/radiation/what-yucca-mountain-repository_.html

The corroborated expert opinion I've read on it indicates there's no permanent nuclear waste dump in the U.S.,
and that even the nuclear waste generated by building the bombs the U.S. dropped on Japan in WWII has not been permanently stored.

It's not merely a rhetorical annoyance.
It wouldn't take a MIRV ICBM salvo from Russia to inflict nuclear ruin on the U.S.
Drunken malefactors with simple Tim McVeigh grade explosives could make a dreadful mess by attacking any of our numerous in situ nuclear dumps dotting the nation.
There are too many of these sites to adequately defend. At best they are guarded with the perfunctory minimum, a wire fence with a sign on it. That's tantamount to an invitation to the bad guys.

Good point in that it seems they do not do dumps very well.
I believe nuclear reactor fuels are metals, so soluble by corrosive water.
I was just thinking of metal barrels in a concrete vault, but now that I think about it, that would need to be carefully done to prevent eventual destruction by water.

 

[Rigby5]

Trump's repeal of climate rule opens a 'new front' for litigation​

Story by Jan Wolfe

The Trump administration's repeal of an Obama-era scientific finding that greenhouse gases pose a public health threat could open up a new pathway for filing lawsuits against power-plant operators and other companies.

Legal experts said the policy reversal could lead to a surge in lawsuits known as "public nuisance" actions, a pathway that had been blocked following a 2011 Supreme Court ruling that regulation of greenhouse gas emissions should be left in the hands of the Environmental Protection Agency instead of the courts.

Now that the EPA has abandoned that regulatory effort, the legal shield created by the 2011 decision will likely unravel, legal experts said.

"This may be another classic case where overreach by the Trump administration comes ....

MORE>

The good part is that the electric rate in NM will likely go down since I think we currently are being fined for some old coal plants still in use.
The bad part is that they no longer will have incentive to subsidize solar credits any more.

 

[sear]

"Good point in that it seems they do not do dumps very well.
I believe nuclear reactor fuels are metals, so soluble by corrosive water.
I was just thinking of metal barrels in a concrete vault, but now that I think about it, that would need to be carefully done to prevent eventual destruction by water." R5 #555

One proposal included encapsulating radioactive waste in glass. BUT !
Today, Friday 13 Feb, 2026 there's already a huge backlog of nuclear waste, it would take decades.
And we still don't have a sensible place to store it.
France has dumped radioactive waste into the abyssal plain in steel drums. Is that not a ticking time-bomb?

 

[Rigby5]

One proposal included encapsulating radioactive waste in glass. BUT !
Today, Friday 13 Feb, 2026 there's already a huge backlog of nuclear waste, it would take decades.
And we still don't have a sensible place to store it.
France has dumped radioactive waste into the abyssal plain in steel drums. Is that not a ticking time-bomb?

Since Olduvai Gorge in Tanzania was such a cradle of new life forms, I wonder if there is a radioactive deposit nearby?
But the ocean would seem to be the single worst possible place to dump something if you do not want it to return.

 

[sear]

"Since Olduvai Gorge in Tanzania was such a cradle of new life forms, I wonder if there is a radioactive deposit nearby?" R5 #558

Is there any location on Earth's surface that is 100% radiation free? I gather the experts call it "background" radiation.
I'm not an expert in it, but I gather the goldilocks band for that is:
- enough radiation to induce variation within the DNA, without
- being so abundant it's lethal / detrimental.

"But the ocean would seem to be the single worst possible place to dump something if you do not want it to return." R5 #558

one "teaspoon [of ocean water] will contain millions of bacteria, and 10's of millions of viruses. ... when we try to culture the sea organisms only about a tenth of a percent of them have ever grown in the laboratory. ...
Every 200 miles, 85% of the organisms and sequences were unique to the region.
...each site differs from each other. But the diversity and the amount of organisms is extremely high everywhere. There's different ones that grow in the cold water of the North Atlantic, than in the South Atlantic. The Atlantic ocean is different than the Pacific ocean. ...The most important thing we found is these photo-receptors see the color of light in the region reflected by the sea water.
In the Sargasso Sea, it's a deep indigo blue. The photo-receptors, it's like having one eye, only see blue light. You get into coastal waters, say see green light reflected off the chlorophyll. And a single letter change in the genetic code changes one amino acid in this protein, that changes the wavelength of light that these receptors see." Craig Venter, from his Global Ocean Sampling Expedition

"But the ocean would seem to be the single worst possible place to dump something if you do not want it to return." R5 #558

Correct.