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Battered by freeze, U.S. refineries try to rebound before next chill

NEW YORK (Reuters) – Major U.S. East Coast refineries were still working to restore operations on Monday, several days after severe cold weather triggered unit outages and drove up home heating oil futures on fears of tight supplies. The refineries, which account for more than two-thirds of production in the region, got a brief reprieve from the burst of cold weather on Sunday, but another front with sub-zero temperatures is expected to sweep through late on Monday. New York futures for ultra-low sulfur diesel (ULSD) – used for heating in much of the Northeast – extended Friday’s sharp gains in early trading, rising by another 4 percent on expectations of increased demand and supply worries. Monroe Energy, a subsidiary of Delta Airlines Inc, restarted the fluid catalytic catcracker at its 185,000-barrel-per-day refinery in Trainer, Pennsylvania, on Sunday, a spokesman said. But a source said on Monday that the main […]

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Frozen U.S. East Coast Makes Diesel Trade From Europe Profitable

(Bloomberg) — Freezing temperatures in North America have made it profitable to ship diesel and heating oil from Europe to the U.S. East Coast, according to Energy Aspects Ltd., KBC Energy Economics and FGE. This window of opportunity, also known as arbitrage, will last until the cold weather subsides, analysts from the three consultants said Monday. Temperatures will probably remain below normal levels in the U.S. and Canada for the next two weeks, BNP Paribas SA said in a report. “The whole thing will be short lived,” Ehsan Ul-Haq, senior analyst at KBC, said by phone from Walton-on-Thames, England. “Whenever temperatures start rising, we will see less and less demand,” for European fuels. Northwest Europe currently has a surplus of diesel and heating oil, with independently held stocks of the fuel at the highest in at least seven years, according to researcher PJK International BV. Cold weather has hindered […]

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Prominent climate change denier funded by Koch brothers, energy companies: reports

Harvard-Smithsonian researcher Willie Soon, who has denied that climate change is caused by human activity, took more than $1 million in funding from the energy industry, newly released documents show. (Screenshot) A prominent climate change denier and researcher quietly took more than $1.2 million in payouts from the energy industry, including the Koch brothers and other oil lobbyists, for the past 14 years, newly released documents have  shown . Wei-Hock "Willie" Soon, a researcher at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, accumulated a total of $1.25 million from Exxon Mobile, the American Petroleum Institute, Southern Company, and a Koch brothers foundation, according to documents obtained by Greenpeace through Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) filings. For years, Soon’s work has been a go-to source for politicians angling to block climate change legislation, such as Sen. James Inhofe (R-OK), who has called climate change a hoax. Soon has also testified before the […]

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Polar vortex to unleash record-breaking cold in eastern U.S. on Thursday, Friday

The coldest outbreak of the season is pushing south into the eastern United States this week. Temperatures will be running as low as 30 to 40 degrees below normal across the Ohio Valley and Mid-Atlantic on Friday morning. Thursday night’s departure from normal temperatures is shown above in Celsius. (tropicaltidbits.com) The coldest air of the season is surging south this week, leading up to what could be historic cold for parts of the eastern United States. Thursday and Friday’s polar outbreak could set all-time February low records from Tennessee to Virginia. With a fresh coat of snow, Washington has the potential to dip below zero for the first time since 1994 . All of this is courtesy of a plume of not just Arctic, but  Siberian air that has been trudging across the North Pole and into North America over the past week. With the cold plume already washing over the […]

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Brazil faces water disaster; scientists warned it was coming

Brazil faces water disaster; scientists warned it was coming thumbnail Brazil’s largest city is facing a water shortage this year unlike it has seen in decades — a potential disaster scientists have warned about as far back as the 1980s. The metropolitan area of Sao Paulo, the world’s 12th-largest metro population at more than 20 million, is served by two main natural water systems — the Cantareira and Alto Tiete reservoir networks, which barely have any water in them, The Guardian reported this week . The Cantareira is only 5 percent full, and the Tiete is at less than 15 percent of capacity. This is an issue that water conservation advocates and scientists have warned about for decades. The Brazilian government has undertaken moderate efforts over the last 25 years to improve the drought conditions but they have had a limited impact. Experts say the drought could be catastrophic, […]

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U.S. Droughts Will Be the Worst in 1,000 Years

U.S. Droughts Will Be the Worst in 1,000 Years thumbnail Several independent studies in recent years have predicted that the American Southwest and central Great Plains will experience extensive droughts in the second half of this century, and that advancing climate change will exacerbate those droughts . But a new analysis released today says the drying will be even more extreme than previously predicted—the worst in nearly 1,000 years. Some time between 2050 and 2100, extended drought conditions in both regions will become more severe than the megadroughts of the 12 th and 13 th centuries. Tree rings and other evidence indicate that those medieval dry periods exceeded anything seen since, across the land we know today as the continental U.S. The analysis “shows how exceptional future droughts will be,” says Benjamin Cook, a research scientist at the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York City and […]

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Pakistan Braces for Major Water Shortages

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan — Energy-starved Pakistanis, their economy battered by chronic fuel and electricity shortages, may soon have to contend with a new resource crisis: major water shortages, the Pakistani government warned this week. A combination of global climate change and local waste and mismanagement have led to an alarmingly rapid depletion of Pakistan ’s water supply, said the minister for water and energy, Khawaja Muhammad Asif. “Under the present situation, in the next six to seven years, Pakistan can be a water-starved country,” Mr. Asif said in an interview, echoing a warning that he first issued at a news conference in Lahore this week. The prospect of a major water crisis in Pakistan, even if several years distant, offers a stark reminder of a growing challenge in other poor and densely populated countries that are vulnerable to global climate change. In Pakistan, it poses a further challenge to Prime […]

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Today’s drought in the West is nothing compared to what may be coming

NASA forecasts megadroughts in U.S.(2:39) NASA forecasts megadroughts in U.S. (2:39) NASA scientists studied past droughts and climate models incorporating soil moisture data to estimate future drought risk. According to NASA’s study, "droughts in the U.S. Southwest and Central Plains during the last half of this century could be drier and longer than drought conditions seen in those regions in the last 1,000 years." (NASA Goddard via YouTube) The long and severe drought in the U.S. Southwest pales in comparison with what’s coming: a “megadrought” that will grip that region and the central plains later this century and probably stay there for decades, a new study says. Thirty-five years from now, if the current pace of climate change continues unabated, those areas of the country will experience a weather shift that will linger for as long as three decades, according to the study, released Thursday. Researchers from NASA and […]

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US ‘at risk of mega-drought future’

American society would need to find strategies to cope with droughts that lasted decades Related Stories The American south-west and central plains could be on course for super-droughts the like of which they have not witnessed in over a 1,000 years. Places like California are already facing very dry conditions, but these are quite gentle compared with some periods in the 12th and 13th Centuries. Scientists have now compared these earlier droughts with climate simulations for the coming decades. The study suggests events unprecedented in the last millennium may lie ahead. "These mega-droughts during the 1100s and 1200s persisted for 20, 30, 40, 50 years at a time, and they were droughts that no-one in the history of the United States has ever experienced," said Ben Cook from Nasa’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies. "The droughts that people do know about like the 1930s ‘dustbowl’ or the 1950s drought […]

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What the massive snowfall in Boston tells us about global warming

The snowfall in Boston lately is simply insane. The local bureau of the National Weather Service has tallied up the data and here’s how it looks — with all time records for snow within a 14-, 20-, and 30-day period: [Winter Climatology] Boston & Worcester breaking snowfall records, inching up to the snowiest winter ever pic.twitter.com/PGy87imCyo — NWS Boston (@NWSBoston) February 10, 2015 You could treat this as ordinary weather, or, you could think about it in a climate context. Counter-intuitive though it may sound, the fact remains that — as I have noted previously — some kinds of winter precipitation could indeed be more intense because we’re in a warming world. Consider, for instance, that sea surface temperatures off the coast of New England are flashing red , showing an extreme warm anomaly. That’s highly relevant — because warmer oceans have atmospheric consequences.  “Sea surface temperatures off the […]

Posted On : Published By : Tom Whipple