Will My Electric Boat Electrocute Me?: Shark Edition – Heatmap
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Donald, we’ve been over this.
Former President Trump wants to know: Would you rather be electrocuted or eaten by a shark?
On Sunday, during a rally in Las Vegas, the Republican nominee floated the question for what is at least the second time this campaign season (an odd choice, perhaps, given that Nevada is hardly shark territory, and therefore his supporters there are unlikely to have given the question much thought).
Trump’s fear of sharks is well documented at this point, and I myself have given that question a fair bit of thought, as well. Personally, I’d choose electrocution because of its merciful speed, but unfortunately for both me and Trump, “electrocution” isn’t a realistic option in the scenario he went on to describe. According to Trump, an unidentified “they” want to make boats all-electric, which — according to the representative of a “boat company” Trump spoke to in “South Carolina” — would require a battery so heavy that “it can’t float.”
As Trump goes on:
Can you believe nobody ever asked this question?! “By the way, a lot of shark attacks lately, you notice that?,” Trump briefly digressed before returning to his main point:
Luckily for Trump, I answered his question last year. And, as the former president ought to be reassured, while all-electric boats are still in their relative infancy (and no mysterious “they” is trying to make them all-electric, anyway), boats more generally have been using batteries for over a century.
Furthermore, marine architects actually design their boats with the understanding that they may get wet. It’s true! The electric boat manufacturers I spoke with for my article told me that their designs typically meet a waterproofing standard similar to what is required for submarines, and that the high-voltage batteries on board are kept in puncture-resistant shells to prevent exposure even if the boat were to get incredibly mangled.
While electric shock is a danger in water, electric shock drowning is usually caused by faulty wiring at a dock or a marina. However, this overwhelmingly happens in lakes and rivers; saltwater, where most sharks live, is a better conductor of electricity than human bodies, so it will go around a swimmer to ground unless they grab something that is electrified, such as a dock ladder or a boat propeller.
All this is a long way of saying: If your boat — electric or otherwise — is sinking, electrocution might not even be an option for a swift, toothless death. You’ll have to deal with the shark 10 yards away, whether you’d rather or not.
And for that, I can offer no reassurances. After all, as a “very smart” person recently observed, there have indeed been a lot of shark attacks lately.
Jeva Lange
Jeva is a founding staff writer at Heatmap. Her writing has also appeared in The Week, where she formerly served as executive editor and culture critic, as well as in The New York Daily News, Vice, and Gothamist, among others. Jeva lives in New York City.
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New research finally sheds some light on what the heck is happening.
If hurricanes, wildfires, heat, and floods are the Big Four of extreme weather in America, then tornadoes are perhaps the equivalent of the National Bowling League.
That’s not for lack of fatalities — tornadoes kill more people annually than hurricanes, per the 30-year average — nor for their lack of star power (see: The Wizard of Oz, Sharknado, Twister, and my most highly anticipated movie of the year, Twisters). But when it comes to the study of extreme weather, robust, detailed data on tornadic supercells has been described as “largely absent,” at least compared to the scholarship on their more popular meteorological counterparts.
This absence of data (as well as the complexity and unpredictability of the storms) has been a problem not just when it comes to forecasting tornadoes, but also in understanding how or even if they’re being affected by climate change. After at least 26 people were killed across eight states over Memorial Day weekend, this knowledge gap has felt especially urgent and worrisome.
But a new analysis of research recently published by the American Meteorological Society’s Journal of Applied Meteorology and Climatology might at last shed some much-needed light on how tornadoes have changed in the last half-century. (The research has passed peer review but is not yet in its final published form.) According to the paper’s authors — Timothy Coleman of the University of Alabama in Huntsville; Richard Thompson of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration Storm Prediction Center in Norman, Oklahoma; and Gregory Forbes, formerly of the Weather Channel — between 1951 and 2020, “tornadogenesis events” have trended both eastward and “away from the warm season, especially the summer, and toward the cold season.”
This is intriguing for several reasons. For one thing, it means more and more tornadoes are forming outside Tornado Alley (which runs north-south through the Great Plains) and in densely populated southeastern and midwestern states like Arkansas, Tennessee, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, and southwest Kentucky. We truly aren’t in Kansas anymore.
While spring is traditionally thought of as “tornado season” by those with storm cellars in their backyards, the authors of the paper also point to a rise in tornadoes during the “cold season,” defined as September through February. Such a shift in seasonality could potentially increase the destruction and disruption of tornadoes that catch people off guard over the holidays or simply unawares. The analysis indicates that the frequency of winter tornadoes has increased by a staggering 102% from 1951 to 2020, further underscoring the potential dangers of the changing seasonal patterns.
While the “causes of any geographic and seasonal shifts in tornado activity” were not within the scope of the analysis, the authors did offer a handful of insights. Some studies have suggested that decreasing sea ice might reduce summer tornadoes, and that the Pacific decadal oscillation and the Atlantic multidecadal oscillation could also play a role. Another researcher used numerical models to determine that “tornado environments may be less favorable in spring by the late 21st century” due to climate change. These conditions, in some part or combination, could potentially result in a reversal of the changes observed in the paper “in future years.”
For now, though, the analysis found the most significant decrease in annual tornadoes in eastern Kansas through Oklahoma and northern Texas, while the most significant increase was in southern Mississippi. The authors even offered a bit of real estate advice: avoid Jackson, Mississippi, which saw one of the greatest increases in tornadoes of any city in the United States, and exhale if you’ve recently purchased property in Cleburne, Texas, which saw one of the greatest decreases.
Much of avoiding disaster and tragedy comes down simply to being prepared, though. That, of course, requires knowing who should be making such preparations and when. While there is still much left to understand about tornadoes, the new analysis offers a better picture than what we had before.
But it’s still up to agencies to get the word out — and to Hollywood. The Twister sequel is reportedly set in Oklahoma.
These can really do it all — almost.
Before and for the first year or so after the Inflation Reduction Act, clean energy in the United States was largely developed under the aegis of two tax credits: the Production Tax Credit, which primarily useful for wind power, and the Investment Tax Credit, which is primarily used for solar power. (The actual eligibility for each tax credit for each technology has changed various times over the years, but that’s the gist.)
Starting in 2025, however, and lasting (absent any change in the law) through at least 2032, that tax credit regime will be made “technology neutral.” Goodbye, existing credits with their limited applicability. Hello, new tax credits that apply to “any clean energy facility that achieves net-zero greenhouse gas emissions,” according to a release issued Wednesday by the Treasury Department.
“For too long, the U.S. solar and wind markets have been hampered by uncertainty due to the on-again-off-again nature of key tax credits,” Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen said on a call with reporters. “Periods of indecision and the credits being repeatedly allowed to elect to lapse made it too difficult for companies to plan and invest in clean energy projects.”
About that “at least”: The tax credits only start to phase out when Treasury determines that electricity-related greenhouse gas emissions have been reduced 75% from their 2022 levels or in 2032, whichever comes later, making this the rare tax code provision with an outcome-based timeline.
In preparation for the new Clean Electricity Production Credit and Clean Electricity Investment Credit, a.k.a. sections 45Y and 48E of the U.S. tax code, to go into effect, Treasury proposed guidance outlining what would qualify for the tax credits and soliciting comments on forms of power generation whose true carbon abatement potentials are more in doubt. The notice and subsequent publication in the Federal Register kicks off a 60-day public comment period, after which Treasury and the Internal Revenue Service will write the final rules.
The new list of eligible technologies includes “hydropower, marine and hydrokinetic, nuclear fission and fusion, geothermal,” along with “certain types of waste energy recovery property” as among the technologies that will be “categorically” eligible for the new tax credits. The point here isn’t to create more exclusivity, but rather to “provide clarity and certainty to developers,” Treasury said in the release. Yellen added that, “for the first time, these incentives are tied explicitly to electricity generation with zero emissions instead of specific technologies.”
What this announcement does not clarify, however, is what to do about energy sources that involve combustion, such as biomass or harnessing methane emitted from landfills. Here is where the Treasury Department is asking for help from outside — many of the questions included in the proposed rulemaking are devoted to figuring out exactly how these forms of energy might or might not be made zero-emission.
Many environmental groups are skeptical of any combustion-based energy sources, and Treasury said that generation methods which “rely on combustion or gasification to produce electricity” will have to “undergo a lifecycle greenhouse gas analysis to demonstrate net-zero emissions.”
Don’t look at the number of forecasted storms and panic. But don’t get complacent, either.
When is an announcement less an announcement than a confirmation?
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s 2024 hurricane season outlook, issued Thursday morning, might be one such case. For the past several weeks, hurricane agencies around the country have been warning of an extremely active, potentially historic season due to a confluence of factors including the record-warm water in the Atlantic Main Development Region and the likely start of a La Niña, which will make the wind conditions more favorable to Atlantic storm formation. With the Atlantic Hurricane Season set to start a week from Saturday, on June 1, NOAA has at last issued its own warning: There is an 85% chance of an above-average season, with eight to 13 hurricanes and four to seven of those expected to be “major” Category 3 or greater storms.
With an estimate of up to 25 total named storms for the whole season, NOAA’s outlook marks the greatest number of named storms ever predicted by the agency at this point in May. (For those also invested in hurricane nomenclature, the 22nd storm of the season would get its name from a new, supplemental list that starts over with “Adria”). Still, it’s not exactly newsat this point that we’re in for a whopper of a season. And hurricane experts will be the first to tell you that a “busy” year doesn’t mean anything in terms of how you should think about preparedness: All it takes is one nearby storm to make it a “busy” year for you. By the same token, it’s theoretically possible (albeit highly unlikely) for there to be 25 named storms this year, none of which make landfall.
More interesting, then, is how the government is talking about these storms with the public. Yes, it is still putting a number on how many “major” storms there could be with sustained winds of 111 miles per hour or more — a headline-making tendency that irritates many of the hurricane experts I spoke with earlier this spring. However, Ken Graham, the director of NOAA’s National Weather Service, also stressed the limited utility of such a claim on Thursday. “The Saffir-Simpson scale measures the wind, but it’s actually the other impacts — it’s the water” that people should be worried about, he said.
While in the popular imagination hurricanes are coastal phenomena that kill people with high winds and waves, 90% of hurricane fatalities result from water, and most of those (57%) are freshwater deaths from heavy rainfall — sometimes hundreds of miles inland. Graham pointed to 2018’s Hurricane Florence as an example, when people drowned in parts of the Carolinas far from the ocean after rivers flooded and jumped their banks. Similarly, it is not always traditional “hurricane areas” like Florida or Texas where these storms have effects: The remnants of Hurricane Ida killed 13 people in New York City in 2021 when the storm broke the city’s record for single-hour rainfall. (Water damage and flooding are also part of what drives the insurance crisis in the Southeast, although NOAA and other agencies’ worrisome predictions for this year aren’t directly linked to 2024 premiums.)
To account for nontraditional ways of thinking about hurricane impacts, NOAA is launching an experimental “forecast cone” this year to warn of effects outside a hurricane’s immediate path. But messaging and graphics can only go so far, and time is of the essence. “Every Category 5 storm that made landfall in the United States in the last 100 years was a tropical storm or less three days prior,” Graham said. “The big ones are fast.” And they certainly don’t care about our timelines, our May outlooks, or how our cones of uncertainty appear on TV.
I’m sympathetic to NOAA’s messaging bind, though. Outlooks like the one issued Thursday make eye-catching headlines, which in turn helps to raise awareness that the time to prepare is now. (No, seriously.) But given the rapid intensification of hurricanes and those warm Atlantic waters that act like Mario mega mushrooms for cyclones, it’s perhaps more useful to think of the season as the main event rather than weigh the odds of whether one of the year’s 20-or-so-named storms will break in your specific direction.
Still. That doesn’t change the fact that 25 is a big number for the upper end of predicted Atlantic storms and that 2024 is tracking to be a historic year. “Everything has to come together to get a forecast like this,” Graham said.