Month: August 2021

In this series, we explore the weird and wonderful world of astronomy jargon! Hold on to your magnet hats, because today’s topic is magnetars!

Let’s start with neutron stars. These are the residual nuclei of giant stars that consist almost exclusively of pure neutrons. But there are also some electrons and protons swimming around, and they will be equally important. Neutron stars are incredibly strange: they have many times the mass of the Sun, crammed together in a volume the size of Manhattan. That’s a lot of density. Neutron stars could rightly be called the largest atomic nuclei in the universe.

Now back to those electrons and protons. Neutrons themselves are electrically neutral and don’t really do much in this story other than supply most of the neutron star’s mass. But electrons and protons are electrically charged, which is important when I tell you that some neutron stars spin insanely fast. We’re talking up to ten thousand rpm – that’s faster than your kitchen mixer (please do not make smoothies with a rotating neutron star).

Those electrical charges swirling around at this speed can create some really enormous magnetic fields. And now we come to the magnetars: the name we give to super-rotating, super-magnetized neutron stars. Magnetars have by far the strongest magnetic fields in the universe. The field of a typical magnetar is over a trillion (yes, with a “t”) stronger than that of the earth. And sometimes these even reach into the quadrillion.

That’s many millions.

This magnetic field is strong enough to break you – literally rupture your molecular bonds – from a distance of about a thousand miles.

It’s good that they are rare. Magnets make up only a small percentage of all neutron stars. It is believed that only newborn neutron stars can maintain the necessary spins to propel them. So far, astronomers have cataloged only 24 of these beasts.

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Guest contribution by Eric Worrall

Following his warnings about the “last chance” in 2015, 2015 and 2020, Michael Mann wants us to understand that COP26 really is our last chance to tackle the climate crisis.

Climate researchers around the world are warning of the global risk of heat

The landmark IPCC report will be the most comprehensive assessment yet as governments prepare for the crucial UN talks in November

Fiona Harvey environmental correspondent
Mon 09.08.2021 03.00 AEST

The fires, floods, and extreme weather events around the world over the past few months are just a taste of what to expect if global warming takes hold, scientists say as the world’s leading authority on climate change prepares, before an imminent one and warn of serious threat to climate change the global climate system.

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Michael Mann, respected professor of atmospheric science at Pennsylvania State University, said this is the last IPCC assessment that can make a real difference politically before we go above 1.5 ° C and the ambitions of the Paris Agreement.

“Climate change is now leading to increased weather extremes like the one we saw this summer – droughts, heat waves, forest fires, floods, super storms,” ​​he said. “The effects of climate change are no longer subtle. We see them play out in real time in the form of these unprecedented extreme weather disasters. “

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Read more: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2021/aug/08/worlds-climate-scientists-to-issue-stark-warning-over-global-heating-threat

This is a continuation of Michael Mann’s last Chance Warning in 2015;

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klimaretter.info: Professor Mann, a new climate agreement is to be concluded in Paris in December. Isn’t it already too late for that? Is it still physically possible to limit global warming to a maximum of two degrees Celsius?

Michael Mann: Yes of course! Admittedly, Paris is probably the last chance to initiate the necessary emission reductions – if we had started 15 years ago, the necessary change in the energy system could have been more gentle. The earth has warmed up by around one degree since the beginning of industrialization, another half a degree is already safe. So it is clear that there is little room for maneuver.

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Read more: http://www.klimaretter.info/forschung/ Background/19986-qparis-ist-die-wahrlik-letzt-chanceq

Mann’s warning of the 2016 election;

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“This will be a crucial presidency in terms of our ability to avert a climate catastrophe,” said Michael Mann, professor of meteorology and director of the Earth System Science Center at Penn State University, whose “hockey stick” graphic warned of soaring emissions and temperatures .

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Read more: https://www.usnews.com/news/the-report/articles/2015/08/14/the-2016-election-is-critical-for-stopping-climate-change

I wonder if man will issue the COP27’s final climate warning? He seems to be enjoying it.

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The only known life in the universe lives on a medium-sized rocky planet orbiting a medium-sized yellow star. That makes our planet a little unusual. While small rocky planets are common in the galaxy, yellow stars are not. Smaller red dwarf stars are much more typical and make up about 75% of the stars in the Milky Way. Because of this, most of the potentially habitable exoplanets that we have discovered orbit red dwarfs.

If everything is in balance, then one would expect that dwarf red planets would be the most likely to harbor life. But not all things are created equal. Red dwarfs can be much more active than sun-like yellow stars. They can emit enormous solar flares and powerful X-rays. And since red dwarfs are much cooler than the sun, planets must orbit them very closely to be potentially habitable. All of this paints a bleak picture for life on dwarf red planets. A red dwarf would likely erode the atmospheres of nearby planets and destroy any life these worlds could harbor. But a new study finds that things may not be as bad as we thought.

The planets of Trappist-1 orbit their star very closely. Photo credit: NASA / JPL-Caltech

The team used data from the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS). While the main objective of the TESS mission is to study exoplanets traversing their stars, the TESS survey also provides data on star eruptions. So the team went looking for the stellar torches of the Red Dwarfs. From this they could determine the latitude of solar flares on the star. They found that the distribution of the flares on red dwarfs is very different from that of our sun.

Solar flares generally occur within the equatorial region. Because of this, the energy and particles of these flares can hit planets in the inner solar system. This last happened in 1859 with the Carrington Event. But the earth’s strong magnetic field protects us well. If such an event occurred today, it would disrupt our electronic infrastructure, but it would not threaten earthly life as a whole. If the earth orbited the sun much closer than Mercury, such a flare would be much more dangerous.

It was widely believed that red dwarfs also emit flares from their equatorial regions, but this new study found that the largest flares tend to appear near the poles of the star. The red dwarfs they observed all appeared above the 60th parallel. Their sample size was small so they couldn’t rule this out as a coincidence, but if further observations support the trend, that’s good news for red dwarf planets. This means that most of the flares are deflected out of the orbital plane and potentially habitable worlds are spared from an apocalypse.

Relation: Ilin, Ekaterina, et al. “Huge white light flares on fully convective stars occur at high latitudes.” Monthly Announcements from the Royal Astronomical Society 2021.

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Guest essay by Eric Worrall

Mainstream media is waking up that despite billions invested in renewable energy, oil and coal use are surging.

Forget About Peak Oil – We Haven’t Even Reached Peak Coal Yet

David Blackmon
Senior Contributor Energy
Aug 2, 2021,09:18am EDT

Despite all the heavy dissemination of narratives and talking points about a “climate emergency” and the “energy transition” during 2021, the ongoing economic recovery from the COVID-19 pandemic proves that the world still heavily relies on fossil fuels to provide its constantly growing energy needs. Indeed, as the pushers of Peak Oil demand theory try in vain to revive their own always-wrong narrative, it now appears that the world has yet to even meet the peak of demand for the least environmentally friendly fuel of all, coal.

This is especially true in China, India and much of Asia, where thousands of coal-fired power plants have seen record usage levels in the face of a major heat wave this summer. Bloomberg reported last week that China’s enormous demand for coal this summer has caused commodity prices to spike to the highest level seen in 2 months, briefly climbing above 900 yuan/ton (roughly $139.31 at current exchange rates) on Friday. 

The global futures price for coal set a new record high in May as supplies ran low. Australian coal – China’s main international supplier – hit $150 per ton in July, the highest level seen since 2008. The demand is so high in China that it has even led to implementation of electricity rationing in some parts of the country as supplies run short.

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This spike in coal demand and usage is far from limited to Asia. The Wall Street Journal reported in early July that coal-fired power usage was also spiking in European countries like Germany and France, both of which spent years loudly boasting of their plans to eliminate coal from their energy profiles. 

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In the meantime, the United States has been able to cut its own carbon emissions to levels not achieved since the early 1990s mainly by replacing retiring coal-fired power plants with power provided by natural gas. Thanks to the Shale revolution, which is enabled by hydraulic fracturing – “fracking” – the U.S. possesses such enormously abundant supplies of natural gas that it has been able to develop a robust business sector for the export of liquefied natural gas (LNG). The country now ranks among the three top exporters of LNG, along with Qatar and Australia. 

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Read more: https://www.forbes.com/sites/davidblackmon/2021/08/02/forget-about-peak-oilwe-havent-even-reached-peak-coal-yet/

Just to add to the fun, talking about peak oil and peak coal as if they are different targets is fundamentally wrong.

As the NAZIs proved in WW2, when they lost access to good oil fields, you can run an economy on coal liquefaction technologies, well proven technologies for converting coal into oil.

The only holdup is liquefied coal is more expensive than conventional oil, it doesn’t become economical until oil prices exceed $100 ($145 / barrel according to one estimate I saw). Though China runs a significant volume of coal liquefaction plants, those plants are likely more for high value added chemical synthesis than fuel oil.

The threat of cheaper coal liquefaction technologies is likely the real reason OPEC tries to keep oil prices low. OPEC are terrified of “demand destruction”, the possibility that high oil prices will stimulate a switchover to EVs, or more investment in developing non-OPEC oil resources, but they are also concerned it will stimulate research into cutting the cost of coal liquefaction. A coal liquefaction research breakthrough could permanently cap OPEC’s conventional oil at an uncomfortably low price.

So the reality is, there is zero chance we shall see peak oil supply in our lifetime, or even our grandchildren’s lifetime, not only because there are vast reserves of oil, but because there are centuries worth of coal reserves just sitting in the ground waiting to be mined. We shall all have a plentiful supply of oil at an affordable price, for as long as we need it.

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