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Climate

What to Expect From La Niña

On shifting weather patterns, nuclear fusion, and forever chemicals

What to Expect From La Niña
Heatmap Illustration/Getty Images

Current conditions: California is getting a brief respite from the rain • Barcelona’s soccer club is reducing its water use as drought grips Spain • It will be chilly and windy in Las Vegas this weekend for Super Bowl LVIII.

THE TOP FIVE

1. Looming La Niña could make for more extreme weather

El Niño may be on the way out. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) yesterday issued a La Niña watch, saying there’s a 55% chance the weather pattern could emerge this summer. El Niño has contributed to above-average ocean temperatures and an intensification of extreme weather. La Niña typically cools the equatorial Pacific, but experts say it could bring stronger hurricanes, drought, and even trigger more tornadoes in the Midwest.

2. Famed climate scientist wins defamation suit

Climate scientist Michael Mann, most well-known for popularizing the “hockey stick” graph in 1998 that showed a spike in global temperatures, won a defamation lawsuit against two writers who were critical of his work. In 2012, Rand Simberg, a former adjunct scholar at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, compared Mann to convicted child abuser Jerry Sandusky, writing that “except for instead of molesting children, he has molested and tortured data.” Steyn piled on Simberg’s comments and called Mann’s research “fraudulent.” A jury found the statements were written with “maliciousness, spite, ill will, vengeance or deliberate intent to harm,” and awarded Mann more than $1 million in damages. “I hope this verdict sends a message that falsely attacking climate scientists is not protected speech,” Mann said.

3. Researchers set new nuclear fusion energy record

European scientists have set a new record for the amount of energy produced from nuclear fusion: Researchers working at the Joint European Torus (JET) facility in the U.K. – one of the most powerful fusion machines in the world – produced 69 megajoules of fusion energy for five seconds, surpassing the 2021 record of 59 megajoules. That’s “enough energy to boil about 70 kettles,” according to the Financial Timescalculation. While that might not seem like a lot, experts see it as a sign of progress toward harnessing the process that powers the sun for abundant clean energy. But that remains a long way off: The JET experiment used more energy than it produced, and “building a fusion power plant also has many engineering and materials challenges,” Aneeqa Khan, a research fellow in nuclear fusion at the University of Manchester, told CNN. This experiment is one of the last to be conducted at the JET facility, which is being decommissioned this year.

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  • 4. Insurance industry taps scientists to help measure growing wilfire risks

    The insurance industry is sponsoring research into how wildfires spread in urban areas, E&E News reported. The goal is to help insurers better gauge risk as wildfires fueled by a warming climate increasingly threaten buildings and cause billions in losses. Most of the costliest wildfires in U.S. history have struck in the last decade, and “global insured losses between 2011 and 2020 for wildfires alone were more than five times higher than losses in the previous three decades.” Not much modeling has been done around how fires jump from rural to urban areas, or about how different types of buildings withstand fires, and “the industry is working to get its arms around the issue so companies can more confidently do business in fire-prone areas — and incentivize homeowners to do what they can to draw down the risk.”

    5. Rapid PFAS detection method discovered

    Identifying “forever chemicals” lurking in our homes and the environment may soon get a lot easier. Chemists from the New Jersey Institute of Technology say they’ve found a way to detect traces of harmful PFAS in mere minutes. It could make it much easier for authorities to identify PFAS and clean them up. “The current testing methods are costly and time-consuming, taking hours for sample preparation and analysis in some cases," said Hao Chen, the study's corresponding author and NJIT chemistry professor. "What our study demonstrates is a much faster, sensitive and versatile method that can monitor our drinking water, land, and consumer products for contamination in minutes." The team used its rapid detection method to identify two kinds of PFAS in just 40mg of soil. The process took less than three minutes.

    THE KICKER

    California Academy of Sciences

    Ten African penguin chicks have hatched over the last 14 months at a San Francisco science museum, after four years with no new chicks.


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    Spotlight

    The Moss Landing Battery Backlash Has Spread Nationwide

    New York City may very well be the epicenter of this particular fight.

    Moss Landing.
    Heatmap Illustration/Getty Images, Library of Congress

    It’s official: the Moss Landing battery fire has galvanized a gigantic pipeline of opposition to energy storage systems across the country.

    As I’ve chronicled extensively throughout this year, Moss Landing was a technological outlier that used outdated battery technology. But the January incident played into existing fears and anxieties across the U.S. about the dangers of large battery fires generally, latent from years of e-scooters and cellphones ablaze from faulty lithium-ion tech. Concerned residents fighting projects in their backyards have successfully seized upon the fact that there’s no known way to quickly extinguish big fires at energy storage sites, and are winning particularly in wildfire-prone areas.

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    Hotspots

    The Race to Qualify for Renewable Tax Credits Is on in Wisconsin

    And more on the biggest conflicts around renewable energy projects in Kentucky, Ohio, and Maryland.

    The United States.
    Heatmap Illustration/Getty Images

    1. St. Croix County, Wisconsin - Solar opponents in this county see themselves as the front line in the fight over Trump’s “Big Beautiful” law and its repeal of Inflation Reduction Act tax credits.

    • Xcel’s Ten Mile Creek solar project doesn’t appear to have begun construction yet, and like many facilities it must begin that process by about this time next year or it will lose out on the renewable energy tax credits cut short by the new law. Ten Mile Creek has essentially become a proxy for the larger fight to build before time runs out to get these credits.
    • Xcel told county regulators last month that it hoped to file an application to the Wisconsin Public Services Commission by the end of this year. But critics of the project are now telling their allies they anticipate action sooner in order to make the new deadline for the tax credit — and are campaigning for the county to intervene if that occurs.
    • “Be on the lookout for Xcel to accelerate the PSC submittal,” Ryan Sherley, a member of the St. Croix Board of Supervisors, wrote on Facebook. “St. Croix County needs to legally intervene in the process to ensure the PSC properly hears the citizens and does not rush this along in order to obtain tax credits.”

    2. Barren County, Kentucky - How much wood could a Wood Duck solar farm chuck if it didn’t get approved in the first place? We may be about to find out.

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    Q&A

    All the Renewables Restrictions Fit to Print

    Talking local development moratoria with Heatmap’s own Charlie Clynes.

    The Q&A subject.
    Heatmap Illustration

    This week’s conversation is special: I chatted with Charlie Clynes, Heatmap Pro®’s very own in-house researcher. Charlie just released a herculean project tracking all of the nation’s county-level moratoria and restrictive ordinances attacking renewable energy. The conclusion? Essentially a fifth of the country is now either closed off to solar and wind entirely or much harder to build. I decided to chat with him about the work so you could hear about why it’s an important report you should most definitely read.

    The following chat was lightly edited for clarity. Let’s dive in.

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