Tag: environment

White House issues new orders to streamline federal broadband regulations

8:52 am

As part of its effort to eliminate the red tape imposed by Biden during his term as president, the White House last week issued new orders to streamline the federal broadband regulations as well as cancel those Biden restrictions.

This Trump executive order cancels a number of Biden executive orders that imposed net neutrality, DEI, climate change, and other requirements that added paperwork and cost money and time. Most important of all for rocket companies, this new order aims to streamline the environmental review process on new projects, a process that was expanded exponentially during Biden but had been growing out-of-control for decades, and appeared during Biden to destroy many rocket startups.

Of course, because this executive order was issued by Trump, it will likely be blocked by a federal judge, because only Democratic Party presidential executive orders are allowed in America now.

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Scientists release the first year’s data from the Pace orbiter

10:07 am

Pace global data, August 2024
Click for original movie.

Launched in early 2024, the Pace orbiter was designed to track the evolution of the leaves of trees globally throughout the entire year. NASA has now released the data from the first twelve months, showing the seasonal changes of trees as the Earth rotates the Sun and the seasons change globally.

The map to the right is a screen capture from one of many videos showing these changes. The green indicates the global spread of tree cover in the middle of August in the northern hemisphere as well as in the equatorial regions of South America and Africa. Other movies focusing on North America, South America, Europe, India, etc, can be viewed here.

PACE measurements have allowed NASA scientists and visualizers to show a complete year of global vegetation data using three pigments: chlorophyll, anthocyanins, and carotenoids. That multicolor imagery tells a clearer story about the health of land vegetation by detecting the smallest of variations in leaf colors.

…Anthocyanins are the red pigments in leaves, while carotenoids are the yellow pigments – both of which we see when autumn changes the colors of trees. Plants use these pigments to protect themselves from fluctuations in the weather, adapting to the environment through chemical changes in their leaves. For example, leaves can turn more yellow when they have too much sunlight but not enough of the other necessities, like water and nutrients. If they didn’t adjust their color, it would damage the mechanisms they have to perform photosynthesis.

In the visualization, the data is highlighted in bright colors: magenta represents anthocyanins, green represents chlorophyll, and cyan represents carotenoids. The brighter the colors are, the more leaves there are in that area. The movement of these colors across the land areas show the seasonal changes over time.

You can read the full paper describing the first year’s data here.

The Trump budget presently funds Pace for two more years of observations, at about $26 million per year. This is an obvious example of a satellite whose life should be extended for as long as possible. This long term data would likely confirm other data that indicates the increase in CO2 in the atmosphere is greening the Earth, helping plant life that provides us oxygen to breath and food to eat.

To do so, however, other cuts in NASA will have to be found to pay for that extension. I once again wonder about the half a billion NASA spends for its “Mission Enabling Services”, which covers NASA’s human resources division, public relations department, and its equal opportunity division, as well as other more useful departments. Surely some money from these bureaucratic divisions could be found to finance this actual useful research.

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Sunspot update: The Sun confounds the predictions again!

11:27 am

It is time for my monthly update of the Sun’s ongoing sunspot activity, using the update that NOAA posts each month to its own graph of sunspot activity but annotated by me with extra information to illustrate the larger scientific context.

The activity in May was shocking in that it completely contradicted all expectations by everyone in the solar science community, with the Sun’s sunspot count changing in a way that was somewhat unprecedented. The graph below makes this very clear:

» Read more

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Supreme Court unanimously rules the federal government’s regulatory overuse of environmental impact statements is wrong

12:34 pm

In a ruling that will have wide-ranging impacts across multiple industries, including rocketry, the Supreme Court yesterday ruled 8-0 that the mission creep expansion of federal government’s regulatory use of environmental impact statements (EIS) to hinder all new construction projects is incorrect and must stop.

The case involved a planned railroad in Utah, that had gotten all its permits for construction, including approval of its environmental impact statement, but was then stymied by lawsuits by political activist groups that claimed the impact statement, issued under the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA), had not considered the impact of the industries the railroads would serve, including impacts far from the railroad’s location itself.

This is a perfect example of the broad expansion of NEPA that has been imposed in the last two decades by federal bureaucracy working hand-in-glove with these leftist political groups.

The Supreme Court, including all of the Democratic Party appointees, said enough!

In its majority opinion, authored by Justice Brett Kavanaugh, the Court clarified that under NEPA the STB “did not need to evaluate potential environmental impacts of the separate upstream and downstream projects.” The Court concluded that the “proper judicial approach for NEPA cases is straightforward: Courts should review an agency’s EIS to check that it addresses the environmental effects of the project at hand. The EIS need not address the effects of separate projects.”

This statement “is particularly significant for infrastructure projects, such as pipelines or transmission lines, and should help reduce NEPA’s burdens (at least at the margins),” wrote Jonathan Adler, a law professor at the Case Western Reserve University School of Law, in The Volokh Conspiracy. “The opinion will also likely hamper any future efforts, perhaps by Democratic administrations, to expand or restore more fulsome (and burdensome) NEPA requirements.”

The article notes (and confirms) what I have been writing now for the past five years in connection with the FAA’s demand that rocket companies require new impact statements every time they revise their operations, even when those changes are relatively minor.

This point could reduce one of the largest delays caused by NEPA: litigation. Since its passage in 1969, NEPA has been weaponized by environmental groups to stunt disfavored projects—which has disproportionately impacted clean energy projects. On average, these challenges delay a permitted project’s start time by 4.2 years, according to The Breakthrough Institute.

The increased threat of litigation has forced federal agencies to better cover their bases, leading to longer and more expensive environmental reviews. With courts deferring more to agency decisions, litigation could be settled more quickly.

This ruling is an excellent move in the right direction, but no one should assume it will be followed honestly by the next Democrat who sits in the White House. Just as Biden expanded red tape by simple forcing the FAA to slow-walk its launch licensing process, future presidents could do the same.

Nor should be expect the lawsuits by these luddite leftists to cease. They will find other legal challenges and will push those instead.

The real solution is to reduce the bureaucracy’s size entirely, so there won’t be paper-pushers for these petty dictators to utilize for their authoritarian purposes. Eliminating or simplifying these environmental regulations would help as well, giving the activists fewer handles on which to hang their lawsuits.

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Fish & Wildlife has expanded its regulatory rule to every tree in much of the U.S.

11:35 am

Areas now subject to regulation if you intend to cut down any trees
The blue and green areas are now subject to
Fish & Wildlife regulation if you intend to cut
down any trees

Apparently in a bid to give itself more power over every proposed building project in the United States, the Fish & Wildlife Service in October 2024 (just before the election) wildly expanded its regulatory rules for protecting endangered bats.

According to the new rules, Fish & Wildlife now considers the removal of any trees at such projects to be a risk to the endangered species, because those trees “may” have been used as roosts and would therefore threaten the species ability to survive if removed.

No matter that there may be thousands of other trees nearby, including many acres of forest. If you are building anything that involves cutting down any trees, you will be subjected to Fish & Wildlife supervision that could block construction. And the area this new rule covers includes almost the entire eastern and northern parts of the United States, as shown on the maps to the right, taken from the new regulation guidelines [pdf].

Long time reader Jack O’Leary informed me of this new power grab. He also sent me information about one particular project in Massachusetts involving the installation of a well and pump station in a forested area southeast of Boston, far from any bat hibernacula. The only impact this project might have on any bats is the removal of some trees, though the project is located in a forested area with hundreds of acres of trees all around (as shown clearly on the satellite view on Google maps).

Yet Fish & Wildlife makes it clear in its letter [pdf] to the project that its “Endangered Species Act requirements are not complete.” Fish & Wildlife admits that the project will pose no direct threat to the endangered bats, but the very act of cutting down a few trees “may affect” the bats, so therefore government regulatory supervision is required.
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Sunspot update: Activity rises slightly in April

1:06 pm

It is the start of the month, so it is of course time for my monthly report on sunspot activity, based on the update that NOAA posts each month to its own graph of sunspots activity. As I have done since the start of Behind the Black in 2010, I take that graph each month and annotate it with extra information to illustrate the larger scientific context.

Sunspot activity in April did nothing to tell us anything about the Sun’s future activity. It rose slightly, but not by enough to suggest that the prediction put forth last month by NOAA scientists that the ramp down to solar minimum has begun is wrong.
» Read more

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FAA okays increase in SpaceX launches from Vandenberg from 36 to 50 per year

11:44 am

The FAA today approved an environmental reassessment at Vandenberg Space Force Base that permits SpaceX to increase its annual launches there from 36 to 50.

The reassessment determined (not surprisingly) that there was “no significant impact” on the environment caused by the increased number of launches.

We already have more than seven decades of empirical data at spaceports in both Florida and California that rocket launches do no harm to the environment, and in fact act to significantly protect wildlife and natural resources because they require the creation of large regions where no development can take place.

The real question should be this: Why is the federal government wasting taxpayer money on these reports? They are utterly unnecessary, and only serve to hinder the freedom of Americans while spending their taxes on make work that accomplishes nothing.

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Trump cuts apparently shutting down NASA’s climate office in New York

9:45 am

Schmidt's data tampering, as documented in 2017
Schmidt’s data tampering, as documented in 2016.

As part of the Trump administration’s aggressive effort to trim the federal budget as well as shift the research focus at the federal government’s many science agencies, on April 24, 2025 it revealed that it has canceled the building lease for the Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) in New York that has existed since 1961 and in 2016 and 2017 was found to be tampering with past climate data with no explanation, lowering past temperature numbers while raising more recent ones in order to make the data fit the as-yet unproven theory that human activity is causing global warming.

Those “adjustments” have never been justified in any way. Nor has Gavin Schmidt, the man who heads GISS, ever done anything to correct them. Moreover, when his office was accused of this tampering in 2016 he not only refused to fix or justify the changes, he responded by claiming “planetary warming does not care about the election.” In the years since it has been his office that annually declares each year “the hottest on record,” using these tampered numbers to do so and demonstrating that he has been acting not as a real researcher but as a political operative of the global warming crowd.

Though the office lease is being canceled, GISS has not been shut down, as of now.

While NASA is terminating the lease on the GISS offices, it is not closing the institute itself. Lystrup said in the email that it will help employees move “to remote work agreements in the short-term as the agency seeks a new, permanent space for the team.”

I suspect this statement is merely designed by Trump officials to dampen the screams of opposition against its actions. It is very likely GISS is going away, and most of its employees will have to find new jobs.

The hope is that new scientists can be hired to review these tampered numbers and get them fixed so that climate research in the future can proceed with reliable data.

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Trump cuts to NOAA include major shake-up on how it gathers weather data

9:26 am

According to the budget data that was leaked anonymous last week, the Trump administration is proposing a major restructuring of NOAA’s satellite operations, shifting from building geosynchronous weather/climate satellites in partnership with NASA to focusing on buying weather data from commercial smallsats.

The plan would initially reduce NOAA’s program by two-thirds.

The document suggests NOAA’s National Environmental Satellite, Data and Information Service (NESDIS) “immediately cancel all major instrument and spacecraft contracts on the GeoXO program,” saying the projected costs are “unstainable, lack support of Congress, and are out of step with international peers.”

GeoXO is a $19.6 billion program that includes six satellites and ground infrastructure to significantly enhance NOAA’s ability to monitor weather, map lightning, and track ocean and atmospheric conditions over decades. To maintain observations from geostationary orbit at the conclusion of the Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellite (GOES)-R Series, the White House memo calls on NOAA to “immediately institute a major overhaul to lower lifecycle costs by 50 percent” with annual costs below $500 million, while remaining on schedule to launch the first satellite in 2032.

Rather than expanding the geostationary constellation to include satellites over the East, West and Central United States, the proposal includes only East and West satellites like the GOES-R Series. OMB also recommends an immediate end to NOAA relying on NASA to help it acquire weather satellites.

Maybe the most controversial recommendation calls for NOAA to focus on gathering daily weather data while ending its monitoring of long term ocean and atmospheric climate trends.

The shift from NOAA-built satellites to purchasing weather data from commercially launched and built satellites makes great sense, and is the most likely part of this plan to get implemented. Similarly, ending NOAA’s reliance on NASA will help streamline the fat from both agencies.

Whether the Trump administration can force an end to NOAA’s climate gathering operations is less clear. The politics suggest this will be difficult. The realities however suggest that a major house-cleaning in this area is in order, as there is ample evidence that the scientists running this work have been playing games with the data, manipulating it in order to support their theories of human-caused global warming.

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Sunspot update: NOAA scientists try to hide how wrong they have gotten things

12:00 pm

My monthly sunspot update today will have less to do with the Sun’s sunspot activity itself — which continues to show a very very slow decline from a peak in August 2024 — and more to do with more games-playing by NOAA solar scientists to fool the public into believing they know more than they do.

Below is my annotated version of NOAA’s monthly graph showing the amount of sunspot activity on the Earth-facing hemisphere of the Sun. This graph is significantly different from the graph that NOAA’s scientists have issued for the past few years, with all the changes designed to make it seem as if these scientists’ predictions are on the money, when they have been entirely wrong now for two solar cycles in a row.
» Read more

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Scientists issue new map of land below Antarctica’s icecap

1:18 pm

Map of Antarctica's estimated land mass
Click for original image.

Using decades of data and more advanced computer software, scientists have now compiled the most detailed map of the land and shorelines hidden below Antarctica’s massive icecap.

The map to the right, reduced to post here, shows that bedrock terrain generally in hues of green to brown, with lower elevations comparable to the ocean in hues of blue. The actual shoreline is however impossible to determine, since without the pressure of the icecap on top, the continent would rise, while the ocean itself would also rise with the addition of all that water.

You can read the science paper here.. From the press release:

Known as Bedmap3, it incorporates more than six decades of survey data acquired by planes, satellites, ships and even dog-drawn sleds. … The map gives us a clear view of the white continent as if its 27 million cubic km of ice have been removed, revealing the hidden locations of the tallest mountains and the deepest canyons.

One notable revision to the map is the place understood to have the thickest overlying ice. Earlier surveys put this in the Astrolabe Basin, in Adélie Land. However, data reinterpretation reveals it is in an unnamed canyon at 76.052°S, 118.378°E in Wilkes Land. The ice here is 4,757 m thick, or more than 15 times the height of the Shard, the UK’s tallest skyscraper.

The paper describes at length the large uncertainties that exist in this data. As thorough as they tried to be, we must remember that Antarctica is very large with a very hostile environment. Much of it has never been visited by any humans. Getting an accurate picture of the thickness of the ice at all points is presently impossible. This is basically an excellent summary of our best guess.

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Sunspot update: Sunspot activity remains high but stable

3:02 pm

The uncertainty of science Time for my monthly update on our Sun’s sunspot cycle, based on NOAA’s monthly graph of the sunspot activity on the Earth-facing hemisphere of the Sun, but annotated by me with additional information.

The graph below shows that the number of sunspots in February continued the trend during this solar maximum of being significantly higher than the consensus prediction by a panel of NOAA solar scientists, as indicated by the red curve. At the same time, the count in February was well below the high point during the summer of 2024. Instead, though it went up slightly in February it remains at about the same level we have seen since September.
» Read more

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Sunspot update: Sunspot activity continued its decline in January

11:58 am

Another month has passed, meaning it is time for another update on the Sun’s sunspot cycle, based on NOAA’s monthly graph tracking that activity but annotated by me with additional information.

In January the decline in sunspot activity on the hemisphere facing Earth since August 2024 continued, with the number of sunspots dropping to a level not seen since May 2023, when the Sun’s was ramping up from solar minimum to solar maximum.
» Read more

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FAA cancels one of three public meetings on the Starship/Superheavy environmental reassessment

9:38 am

The FAA today announced that it has canceled one of three meetings that it plans to hold in the Brownsville region next week to obtain public feedback on SpaceX’s request to increase its Starship/Superheavy launch rate at Boca Chica to 25 launches per year.

The FAA was scheduled to hold in-person public meetings on January 7th and 9th, 2025. However, due to the designation of January 9, 2025 as a National Day of Mourning to honor the late former President Jimmy Carter, the January 9th meetings are now cancelled.

The meeting schedule is now as follows:

  • In-person meeting: Tuesday, January 7, 2025; 1:00 PM–3:00 PM & 5:30 PM–7:30 PM CDT at the Texas Southmost College, Jacob Brown Auditorium, 600 International Boulevard, Brownsville, TX 78520
  • Virtual on-line meeting: Monday, January 13, 2025; 5:30 PM–7:30 PM CDT Registration Link here. Dial-in phone number: 888-788-0099 (Toll Free), Webinar ID: 879 9253 6128, Passcode: 900729

As I noted in November when the new environmental reassessment and these meetings were announced, it is practically certain that the fringe anti-Musk activists groups SaveRGV, Sierra Club, the Friends of Wildlife Corridor, and the fake Indian Carrizo/Comecrudo Nation of Texas (which never existed in Texas) are organizing to be there in force, demanding SpaceX’s Boca Chica operations be shut down.

If the rest of the public, which is the vast majority of the Brownsville community, does not show up to counter these fringe activists, it will make it much easier for the bureaucrats who hate Musk at the FAA to take action against SpaceX. It is essential that the business community at least make an appearance, as the arrival of SpaceX has brought billions of dollars and tens of thousands of jobs to Brownsville.

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Sunspot update: Is this sunspot maximum over, or will it become another doubled peaked maximum?

12:43 pm

Well, after almost fifteen years it had to happen at last. In preparing to do my monthly sunspot update today, which I had done every month since I started Behind the Black in 2010, I discovered that I had completely forgotten to do the update in December. Sorry about that.

No matter, the changes from month-to-month are not often significant, and fortunately that turned out to be the case in November and December of 2024. Since my last update at the beginning of November 2024, sunspot activity on the Earth-facing hemisphere of the Sun has been relatively stable, based on NOAA’s monthly graph tracking that activity. In November the activity dropped slightly, only to recover a small amount in December.
» Read more

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A review of the last half century of major ice calving events in Antarctica detects no trend

11:58 am

47-year trend of large iceberg calving events in Antarctica
Click for original image.

The uncertainty of science: A review by scientists of major ice calving events in Antarctica that have occurred in the last 47 years has detected absolutely no trend either up or down, despite decades of predictions that human caused global warming would cause huge sections of the icecap to break off and catastrophically change the Earth’s climate.

The graph to the right comes from figure 4 of the paper, and illustrates the lack of trend. Note how the actual observations, the blue dots, show no increase in large calving events. From the abstract:

We use 47 years of iceberg size from satellite observations. Our analysis reveals no upward trend in the surface area of the largest annual iceberg over this time frame. This finding suggests that extreme calving events such as the recent 2017 Larsen C iceberg, A68, are statistically unexceptional and that extreme calving events are not necessarily a consequence of climate change.

The researchers of course genuflect to human-caused global warming in their conclusion by stating that the shrinkage predicted in the Antarctic ice cap (but not yet seen in any significant amount) could instead be occurring due to an increase in small calving events.

The lack of an upward trend in annual maximum iceberg area could be attributed to an overall increase in the number of smaller calving events, which may inhibit the development of extremely large calving events. As such, small calving events pose the greatest threat to the current stability of Antarctic ice shelves.

Since there is no detailed or reliable data of the number of smaller calving events, this hypothesis is entirely made up, and carries no weight. It is simply a fantasy created to maintain the fiction of global warming. A more open-minded look at these results would say that the larger events provide an excellent guide to the overall trend, and that the icecap simply isn’t shrinking as predicted.

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Gophers dropped near Mt St. Helens for one day cause a gigantic bloom of plant life 40 years later

12:02 pm

In 1982, two years after the Mt. St. Helens volcanic eruption, scientists decided to do an experiment: They dropped six gophers into one meter square enclosures near the eruption with the hope the animals’ digging for one day would bring good soil close enough to the surface to encourage the return of plant life.

The results forty-plus years later:

Six years after their trip, there were over 40,000 plants thriving where the gophers had gotten to work, while the surrounding land remained, for the most part, barren. Studying the area over 40 years later, the team found they had left one hell of a legacy. “Plots with historic gopher activity harbored more diverse bacterial and fungal communities than the surrounding old-growth forests,” the team explained. “We also found more diverse fungal communities in these long-term lupine gopher plots than in forests that were historically clearcut, prior to the 1980 eruption, nearby at Bear Meadow.”

“In the 1980s, we were just testing the short-term reaction,” Allen added. “Who would have predicted you could toss a gopher in for a day and see a residual effect 40 years later?”

You can read the published paper here. It appears the gophers’ action activated the microbiological life in the soil, which in turn made it easier for plant life to return.

The potential benefits of this research is gigantic, especially in areas that have been devastated by any number of natural and man made disasters.

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Flights into Brownsville sold out prior to SpaceX’s sixth test flight of Starship/Superheavy

8:57 am

If anyone thinks the anti-Musk activists groups that have been using lawfare to try to shut down SpaceX’s Boca Chica facility have any local support, this story should put a quash on that. According to the airport director for the Brownsville-South Padre Island Airport, all flights sold out leading up to the sixth test flight of Starship/Superheavy.

Airport director Angel Ramos told Channel 5 News he’s noticed traffic increases whenever SpaceX does a flight test. “People are excited,” Ramos said. “They’re wearing SpaceX hats and SpaceX shirts [when they come] in to the airport.”

Ramos said flights were sold out between Sunday and Tuesday, and 700 people have been arriving daily at the airport since Sunday. “There is no launch that happens that we don’t see lots of people coming in and out of the airport, and now that they continue to be more frequent and more successful, people are paying more interest and actually coming days before,” Ramos said.

The story was reported by the local ABC television affiliate, and reflects the very positive impact SpaceX is having on the local community that is recognized quite clearly by everyone who lives there. The Brownsville area had been economically depressed for decades. Now the economy is booming, all because of SpaceX.

The public wants SpaceX there. The nay-sayers represent practically no one. That many local news organizations not only don’t report these facts when they cover the lawfare of these activists but instead often frame their stories as if the opposition is general throughout the region is shameful and an indication of the bankrupt nature of these press outlets.

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SpaceX scraps its land swap offer to Texas

10:11 am

SpaceX has decided to scrap its land swap offer to Texas, whereby the company would have given the state 477 acres of wildlife land it owns elsewhere in exchange for ownership of 43 acres of state park land adjacent to its Boca Chica facility.

In a Sept. 26 letter seen by Bloomberg News, SpaceX Vice President Sheila McCorkle told the Texas Parks and Wildlife Department that the company “is no longer interested in pursuing the specific arrangement.”

In exchange for SpaceX getting the 43 acres, the company would have given the state some 477 acres of its land near Laguna Atascosa National Wildlife Refuge, around 10 miles away. The land could have given Texans access for hiking, camping and other recreational purposes, the Texas Parks and Wildlife Commission said. In March, the commission approved the deal.

Environmental activists worry their fight’s not over with SpaceX and Musk, who has achieved newfound political power through his close ties to President-elect Donald Trump. “We’re concerned that he has something bigger and more disruptive to the beach and to the wildlife in mind,” Bekah Hinojosa, a representative from the South Texas Environmental Justice Network, an advocacy group, said in an interview. [emphasis mine]

The blind opposition of these leftist activists to Musk and anything he does has merely caused them to cut off their nose to spite their face. SpaceX’s proposal would have given the public a much larger wildlife area that was also far enough away from Boca Chica to allow its use all the time. Now the state is stuck with 43 acres of state park land that is going to be useless whenever Starship/Superheavy launches.

The lawsuits against this swap claimed it violated the Texas constitution. My guess is that SpaceX decided it wasn’t worth fighting this battle. Or maybe it is now playing hardball in negotiations. These activists do not have the support of the local community, which wants SpaceX’s operations to be successful. By scrapping the plan now SpaceX might be acting to force the Texas legislature to change the law to make the land swap legally acceptable.

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Major court decision could invalidate many federal environmental regulations

1:54 pm

In what could be a major legal ruling [pdf], a two-judge decision this week in the DC Circuit Court ruled that the White House Council on Environmental Quality (CEQ), which has for years imposed environmental rules on other federal agencies based on the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA), does not have the statutory authority to do so, thus invalidating every regulation so imposed.

All three members of the three-judge panel agreed that the Agencies acted arbitrarily and capriciously in [in this particular case]. However, before reaching that conclusion, the majority analyzed whether the CEQ regulations the Agencies followed in adopting the plan were valid, an argument not raised by any of the parties. The majority held, sua sponte, that because there is no statute stating or suggesting that US Congress has empowered the CEQ to issue rules binding on other agencies, the CEQ has no lawful authority to promulgate such regulations.

…Although this decision does not explicitly vacate any action taken by the CEQ, it does establish a precedent that CEQ rules lack statutory authorization, and therefore that other agency actions taken under the CEQ framework are at risk of being vacated. If this decision is not overturned by the full appellate court sitting en banc or by the US Supreme Court, it has the potential to completely change the landscape of NEPA review.

The case is complicated, partly because the Byzantine nature of the federal bureaucracy and the many agencies involved. (It is almost as if these agencies created that complexity to confuse and protect themselves.)

The heart of the decision is that CEQ was apparently first created as an “advisory” body to help other federal agencies follow the intent of NEPA in their own rule-making, but instead soon became a “regulatory” body whose rulings other agencies were required to follow. As that authority was never given it by Congress, CEQ exceeded its authority by making its rulings mandatory.

This court decision will likely leave many agencies on their own in establishing environmental regulations, based on NEPA. However, even that regulatory ability faces limitations, based on the Supreme Court’s recent Chevron decision, which said that government agencies do not have right to promulgate new regulations that are not specifically described in congressional law.

In other words, Chevron says that the bureaucracy cannot make things up, based on its own vague opinions.

The trend of all these court rulings appears aimed at limiting the power of the federal bureaucracy. It will however take some time to determine how much that power is limited, as lawsuits begin to percolate through the courts. If there are lot of lawsuits (which does appear to be happening) we should therefore expect that power to be limited significanly.

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Sunspot update: in October solar activity increased after September’s crash

3:35 pm

Time for this month’s sunspot update. As I have done every month since I started this website in 2010, I am posting NOAA’s most recent update of its monthly graph tracking the number of sunspots on the Sun’s Earth-facing hemisphere, adding some additional details to provide context.

In October, following a crash in activity in September, the Sun showed a slight increase the number of sunspots. The increase did not match the drop from the month before, but it brought the activity back up to the level seen during the summer.
» Read more

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Nearly four dozen anti-SpaceX activists organize to flood public meeting

9:29 am

At a public meeting of the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality (TCEQ) on October 17, 2024 nearly four dozen anti-SpaceX activists apparently arrived en masse in order to overwhelm the public comment period with negative opinions about the company and its operation at Boca Chica.

The report at the link, from the San Antonio Express-News, is (as usual for a propaganda press outlet) decidedly in favor of these activists, and makes it sound as if these forty-plus individuals, apparently led by the activist group SaveRGV that has mounted most of the legal challenges to SpaceX, represent the opinions of the public at large.

What really happened here is that the Brownsville public has better things to do, like building businesses and making money, much of which now only exists because of SpaceX and that operation at Boca Chica. Thus, the only ones with time or desire to organize to show up at these kinds of meetings are these kinds of activists.

It might pay however for some of the more business-oriented organizations in Brownsville to make sure they are in the game at the next public meeting, scheduled for November 14, 2024 [pdf]. This would not be hard to do, and it would certainly help balance the scales, which at present are decidedly been warped by this small minority of protesters.

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EPA to NASA: We intend to regulate how you dispose ISS, and that’s only the start

12:47 pm

The FAA to SpaceX
The EPA and its supporters to the American space industry:
“Nice industry you got here. Sure would be a shame if
something happened to it.”

It appears the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and a number of activist groups are now lobbying for the right to regulate whether anything in orbit can be de-orbited into the oceans, beginning with how NASA plans to dispose of the International Space Station (ISS) when the station is de-orbited into the ocean sometime before 2030.

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is evaluating how the disposal of the International Space Station into the ocean will need to be regulated but has not shared the details of any specific concerns or aspects of regulation. “EPA’s Office of Water is coordinating with the Office of General Counsel on this complex issue. The agency does not have a timeline for this evaluation,” EPA spokeswoman Dominique Joseph told SpaceNews.

“Sixty-six years of space activities has resulted in tens of thousands of tons of space debris crashing into the oceans,” said Ewan Wright, a Ph.D. candidate at the University of British Columbia and a junior fellow of the Outer Space Institute, an interdisciplinary group of experts working on emerging space sustainability issues.

While Wright is later quoted as saying that disposal in the ocean is “the least worst option,” the article at the link includes quotes from several other academics, all claiming that such an option must be stopped at all costs, because it threatens to “cause great damage” to the ocean. These “experts” make this claim by comparing ISS’s de-orbit with the dumping of old ammunition from World War I as well as plastic forks now.
» Read more

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Sunspot update: Sunspot activity crashes in September

3:56 pm

As it is the start of the month, it is time another monthly sunspot update, in which I provide some context and analysis to NOAA’s most recent update of its monthly graph tracking the number of sunspots on the Sun’s Earth-facing hemisphere.

After several months in which the number of sunspots rose considerably each month, in September the sunspot count crashed, dropping precipitously to levels closer to the various predictions of solar scientists, but still far above what they had all expected at this time of the solar maximum.

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Sunspot update: The Sun continues to boom!

12:02 pm

It is time for my monthly sunspot update, taking NOAA’s most recent update of its monthly graph tracking the number of sunspots on the Sun’s Earth-facing hemisphere and adding my own analysis as well as some additional details to provide the larger context.

During August the Sun continued to confound the experts, with the number of sunspots not only greater than July’s high count. the August count exceeded the numbers from December 2001 (215.5 vs 213.4), the last time the Sun was this active.

None of the predictions by anyone in the solar science community had predicted this level of activity.
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Sunspot update: In July the Sun produced the most sunspots in almost a quarter century

9:13 am

Every month since this website began fourteen years ago, when NOAA posts its update of its monthly graph tracking the number of sunspots on the Sun’s Earth-facing hemisphere, I post my own analysis, adding some details to provide the larger context.

Of all those updates — numbering about 168 — this month’s is possibly the most significant. Since around 2008, the Sun began a long period where it was unusually quiet, with the solar maximum that occurred in 2014 possibly the weakest in two hundred years. Before that weak maximum begun, half the solar science community predicted it would be a very powerful maximum, while half predicted a weak maximum. Both got it wrong, though the weak prediction was closer though still too high.

When it came time to predict the next solar maximum, expected around 2025, that same solar science community was once again in disagreement. Most approved a NOAA science panel prediction in April 2020 calling for another weak minimum, similar to the one in 2014. A few dissented, however, and instead predicted in June 2020 that the maximum would be one of the strongest ever. In April 2023 however those dissenters chickened out, and revised their prediction downward, still forecasting a peak higher than the NOAA prediction but no longer anywhere as intense.

Based on what happened on the Sun in July, they should have had more faith in their earlier prediction.
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More garbage science about wildfires and global warming from Nature

12:31 pm

Nature: the science journal that no longer does real science
The science journal which no longer
understands how real science is done

The once highly respected science journal Nature continues its descent into propaganda and bad science, all because it bows unskeptically before the altar of global warming and leftist science fantasies.

Today’s example is an article this week entitled “You’re not imagining it: extreme wildfires are now more common,” describing a new Nature paper that attempted to use satellite data to prove that the intensity of wildfires has increased in the past two decades.

For the current study, published in Nature Ecology and Evolution on 24 June, Cunningham and his colleagues scoured global satellite data for fire activity. They used infrared records to measure the energy intensity of nearly 31 million daily fire events over two decades, focusing on the most extreme ones — roughly 2,900 events. The researchers calculated that there was a 2.2-fold increase in the frequency of extreme events globally in 2003–23, and a 2.3-fold boost in the average intensity of the top 20 most intense fires each year.

We’re all gonna die! As is usual for these crap climate-related studies, the entire goal is to drum up some manufactured new crisis that justifies the claim that the climate is warming. This study is no different, as the article eagerly notes:

Although the study doesn’t directly connect the fire trend to global warming, Cunningham [the study’s lead author] says “there’s almost certainly a significant signal of climate change”. Research has shown that rising temperatures are drying out ecosystems — such as coniferous forests — that are naturally prone to fire. This provides fuel that can boost the fires’ size and longevity. The latest study also found that the energy intensity of the fires increased faster during the night-time over the past two decades than during the daytime, which aligns with evidence4 that rising night-time temperatures are contributing to fire risk.

Not surprisingly, the New York Times immediately jumped on the bandwagon with its own article that accepts the conclusions of this research with utter naivety.

What junk. First, Cunningham fails to note this minor fact mentioned in the abstract of his own paper:
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Sunspot update: In May the Sun went boom!

12:43 pm

As I have done at the start of every month since I begun this webpage back in 2010, I am posting NOAA’smonthly update of its graph tracking the number of sunspots on the Sun’s Earth-facing hemisphere, adding to it several additional details to provide some larger context.

While April had showed only a small uptick in sunspot activity, in May the sunspot activity on the Sun went boom, setting a new high for sunspots during this solar maximum as well as the highest sunspot count since September 2002. The sunspot count of 171.7 smashed the previous high of 160 this cycle, set in June 2023. This new high underlined was by the large solar flare on May 9th that sent the most powerful geomagnetic storm to hit the Earth’s magnetic field in many decades, producing spectacular auroras in many low latitudes.
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SpaceX launches European/Japanese climate satellite

11:44 pm

SpaceX today successfully launched a joint European/Japanese satellite designed to study the climate, its Falcon 9 rocket lifting off from Vandenberg in California.

The first stage completed its seventh flight, landing safely back at Vandenberg. This was also SpaceX’s second launch today, from opposite coasts.

The leaders in the 2024 launch race:

57 SpaceX
23 China
7 Russia
6 Rocket Lab

American private enterprise now leads the world combined in successful launches, 65 to 36, while SpaceX by itself leads the entire world, including other American companies, 57 to 44.

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