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August 22, 2024
Data Center Electricity Use IV: Unrealistic Emissions Targets?
Large-scale, dynamic social and economic change is often more difficult, incremental, and slower than anticipated. Consider James Watt and Matthew Boulton in Birmingham in 1776, having invented and refined the double-acting steam engine. Watt patented the invention that year, a breakthrough that would ultimately become a hallmark of the British Industrial Revolution and propel its…
August 21, 2024
Billion Dollar Disasters: Not the Highest Standards
Last January, upon submission of my paper (since published) — Scientific integrity and U.S. “Billion Dollar Disasters” — I submitted a “request for correction” to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) under the agency’s policies for scientific integrity and information quality. Today, I heard back from NOAA and they largely agree with my concerns: “NOAA will…
August 19, 2024
What Did You Expect?
About 20,000 years ago, the world was in an ice age. The era is called the Last Glacial Maximum and had global sea levels more than 120 meters (~400 feet) lower than they are today, according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). There was no North Sea, English Channel, or Persian Gulf, and Australia…
August 9, 2024
Joe Biden is the “Drill, Baby, Drill” President
I would guess that we are going to hear the phrase “drill, baby, drill” a lot in the next three months. Here at THB, one goal is to ensure that whatever our politics or views on policy, that we work hard to share a common understanding (or at least a shared understanding of disagreement) of…
August 2, 2024
We’ll Always Have Paris
In 2015, countries around the world met in Paris at the 21st Conference of Parties to the U.N Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) where they agreed to limit global temperature increases well below 2 degrees Celsius by 2100. We now have 8 years of data on global emissions following the “landmark” Paris Agreement. Today, I evaluate…
August 2, 2024
Data Center Electricity Use III: Make or Buy?
The exponential growth of data centers, driven by the burgeoning demand for cloud services, AI computations, and big data analytics, has increased electricity consumption significantly. In the first two posts of this series, I discussed the increasing data center electricity use, its implications for the electric grid, and how those implications will differ over time…
July 29, 2024
It’s All About the Base(line)
This is Part 5 in the THB series — Climate Fueled Extreme Weather. You can find Part 1 here, Part 2 here, Part 3 here, and Part 4 here. Each can be read on their own, but I encourage you to start from the beginning as each installment draws on the ones before. If you have made it this…
July 25, 2024
Why Climate Misinformation Persists
In 2001, I participated in a roundtable discussion hosted at the headquarters of the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) with a group of U.S. Senators, the Secretary of Treasury, and about a half-dozen other researchers. The event was organized by Idaho Senator Larry Craig (R-ID) following the release of a short NAS report on climate to help…
July 22, 2024
We Don’t Need No Stinking Science
This is Part 4 in the THB series — Climate Fueled Extreme Weather. You can find Part 1 here Part 2 here and Part 3 here. Each can be read on their own, but I encourage you to start from the beginning as each installment draws on the ones before. Everyone knows that in recent years climate change has…
July 18, 2024
Regulation and Utility Performance
Last week’s outages in Houston due to Hurricane Beryl were agonizing and frustrating. The Category 1 hurricane made landfall on July 8 and maintained hurricane strength until it reached Houston, delivering 10-15 inches of rain in some areas and resulting in 2.7 million power outages in the region. Four days later, over one million customers were still without…