This story was originally published by Grist and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

Johnny Appleseed’s heart was in the right place when he walked all over the early United States planting fruit trees. Ecologically, though, he had room for improvement: To create truly dynamic ecosystems that host a lot of biodiversity, benefit local people, and produce lots of different foods, a forest needs a wide variety of species. Left on their own, some deforested areas can rebound surprisingly fast with minimal help from humans, sequestering loads of atmospheric carbon as they grow.

New research from an international team of scientists, recently published in the journal Nature, finds that 830,000 square miles of deforested land in humid tropical regions—an area larger than Mexico—could regrow naturally if left on its own. Five countries—Brazil, China, Colombia, Indonesia, and Mexico—account for 52 percent of the estimated potential regrowth. According to the researchers, that would boost biodiversity, improve water quality and availability, and suck up 23.4 gigatons of carbon over the next three decades. 

“A rainforest can spring up in one to three years—it can be brushy and hard to walk through,” said Matthew Fagan, a conservation scientist and geographer at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County and a coauthor of the paper. “In five years, you can have a completely closed canopy that’s 20 feet high. I have walked in rainforests 80 feet high that are 10 to 15 years old. It just blows your mind.” 

That sort of regrowth isn’t a given, though. First of all, humans would have to stop using the land for intensive agriculture—think big yields thanks to fertilizers and other chemicals—or raising hoards of cattle, the sheer weight of which compacts the soil and makes it hard for new plants to take root. Cows, of course, also tend to nosh on young plants. 

“Unless or until we can match that natural complexity, we’re always going to be a step behind what nature is doing.”

Secondly, it helps for tropical soil to have a high carbon content to nourish plants. “Organic carbon, as any person who loves composting knows, really helps the soil to be nutritious and bulk itself up in terms of its ability to hold water,” Fagan said. “We found that places with soils like that are much more likely to have forests pop up.”

And it’s also beneficial for a degraded area to be near a standing tropical forest. That way, birds can fly across the area, pooping out seeds they have eaten in the forest. And once those plants get established, other tree-dwelling animal species like monkeys can feast on their fruits and spread seeds, too. This initiates a self-reinforcing cycle of biodiversity, resulting in one of those 80-foot-tall forests that’s only a decade old. 

The more biodiversity, the more a forest can withstand shocks. If one species disappears because of disease, for instance, another similar one might fill the void. That’s why planting a bunch of the same species of tree—à la Johnny Appleseed— pales in comparison to a diverse rainforest that comes back naturally. 

“When you have that biodiversity in the system, it tends to be more functional in an ecological sense, and it tends to be more robust,” said Peter Roopnarine, a paleoecologist at the California Academy of Sciences, who studies the impact of the climate on ecosystems but wasn’t involved in the new paper. “Unless or until we can match that natural complexity, we’re always going to be a step behind what nature is doing.”

Governments and nonprofits can now use the data gathered from this research to identify places to prioritize for cost-effective restoration, according to Brooke Williams, a research fellow at the University of Queensland and the paper’s lead author. “Importantly, our dataset doesn’t inform on where should and should not be restored,” she said, because that’s a question best left to local governments.

One community, for instance, might rely on a crop that requires open spaces to grow. But if the locals can thrive with a regrown tropical forest—by, say, earning money from tourism and growing crops like coffee and cocoa within the canopy, a practice known as agroforestry—their government might pay them to leave the area alone. 

Susan Cook-Patton, senior forest restoration scientist at the Nature Conservancy, said that more than 1,500 species have been used in agroforestry worldwide. “There’s a lot of fruit trees, for example, that people use, and trees that provide medicinal services,” Cook-Patton said. “Are there ways that we can help shift the agricultural production towards more trees and boost the carbon value, the biodiversity value, and livelihoods of the people living there?”

The tricky bit here is that the world is warming and droughts are worsening, so a naturally regrowing forest may soon find itself in different circumstances. “We know the climate conditions are going to change, but there’s still uncertainty with some of that change, uncertainty in our climate projection models,” Roopnarine said.

So while a forest is very much stationary, reforestation is, in a sense, a moving target for environmental groups and governments. A global goal known as the Bonn Challenge aims to restore 1.3 million square miles of degraded and deforested land by 2030. So far, more than 70 governments and organizations from 60 countries, including the United States, have signed on to contribute 810,000 square miles toward that target.

Sequestering 23.4 gigatons of carbon over three decades may not sound like much in the context of humanity’s 37 gigatons of emissions every year. But these are just the forests in tropical regions. Protecting temperate forests and sea grasses would capture still more carbon, in addition to newfangled techniques like growing cyanobacteria. “This is one tool in a toolbox—it is not a silver bullet,” Fagan said. “It’s one of 40 bullets needed to fight climate change. But we need to use all available options.” 

This story was originally published by Grist and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

Johnny Appleseed’s heart was in the right place when he walked all over the early United States planting fruit trees. Ecologically, though, he had room for improvement: To create truly dynamic ecosystems that host a lot of biodiversity, benefit local people, and produce lots of different foods, a forest needs a wide variety of species. Left on their own, some deforested areas can rebound surprisingly fast with minimal help from humans, sequestering loads of atmospheric carbon as they grow.

New research from an international team of scientists, recently published in the journal Nature, finds that 830,000 square miles of deforested land in humid tropical regions—an area larger than Mexico—could regrow naturally if left on its own. Five countries—Brazil, China, Colombia, Indonesia, and Mexico—account for 52 percent of the estimated potential regrowth. According to the researchers, that would boost biodiversity, improve water quality and availability, and suck up 23.4 gigatons of carbon over the next three decades. 

“A rainforest can spring up in one to three years—it can be brushy and hard to walk through,” said Matthew Fagan, a conservation scientist and geographer at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County and a coauthor of the paper. “In five years, you can have a completely closed canopy that’s 20 feet high. I have walked in rainforests 80 feet high that are 10 to 15 years old. It just blows your mind.” 

That sort of regrowth isn’t a given, though. First of all, humans would have to stop using the land for intensive agriculture—think big yields thanks to fertilizers and other chemicals—or raising hoards of cattle, the sheer weight of which compacts the soil and makes it hard for new plants to take root. Cows, of course, also tend to nosh on young plants. 

“Unless or until we can match that natural complexity, we’re always going to be a step behind what nature is doing.”

Secondly, it helps for tropical soil to have a high carbon content to nourish plants. “Organic carbon, as any person who loves composting knows, really helps the soil to be nutritious and bulk itself up in terms of its ability to hold water,” Fagan said. “We found that places with soils like that are much more likely to have forests pop up.”

And it’s also beneficial for a degraded area to be near a standing tropical forest. That way, birds can fly across the area, pooping out seeds they have eaten in the forest. And once those plants get established, other tree-dwelling animal species like monkeys can feast on their fruits and spread seeds, too. This initiates a self-reinforcing cycle of biodiversity, resulting in one of those 80-foot-tall forests that’s only a decade old. 

The more biodiversity, the more a forest can withstand shocks. If one species disappears because of disease, for instance, another similar one might fill the void. That’s why planting a bunch of the same species of tree—à la Johnny Appleseed— pales in comparison to a diverse rainforest that comes back naturally. 

“When you have that biodiversity in the system, it tends to be more functional in an ecological sense, and it tends to be more robust,” said Peter Roopnarine, a paleoecologist at the California Academy of Sciences, who studies the impact of the climate on ecosystems but wasn’t involved in the new paper. “Unless or until we can match that natural complexity, we’re always going to be a step behind what nature is doing.”

Governments and nonprofits can now use the data gathered from this research to identify places to prioritize for cost-effective restoration, according to Brooke Williams, a research fellow at the University of Queensland and the paper’s lead author. “Importantly, our dataset doesn’t inform on where should and should not be restored,” she said, because that’s a question best left to local governments.

One community, for instance, might rely on a crop that requires open spaces to grow. But if the locals can thrive with a regrown tropical forest—by, say, earning money from tourism and growing crops like coffee and cocoa within the canopy, a practice known as agroforestry—their government might pay them to leave the area alone. 

Susan Cook-Patton, senior forest restoration scientist at the Nature Conservancy, said that more than 1,500 species have been used in agroforestry worldwide. “There’s a lot of fruit trees, for example, that people use, and trees that provide medicinal services,” Cook-Patton said. “Are there ways that we can help shift the agricultural production towards more trees and boost the carbon value, the biodiversity value, and livelihoods of the people living there?”

The tricky bit here is that the world is warming and droughts are worsening, so a naturally regrowing forest may soon find itself in different circumstances. “We know the climate conditions are going to change, but there’s still uncertainty with some of that change, uncertainty in our climate projection models,” Roopnarine said.

So while a forest is very much stationary, reforestation is, in a sense, a moving target for environmental groups and governments. A global goal known as the Bonn Challenge aims to restore 1.3 million square miles of degraded and deforested land by 2030. So far, more than 70 governments and organizations from 60 countries, including the United States, have signed on to contribute 810,000 square miles toward that target.

Sequestering 23.4 gigatons of carbon over three decades may not sound like much in the context of humanity’s 37 gigatons of emissions every year. But these are just the forests in tropical regions. Protecting temperate forests and sea grasses would capture still more carbon, in addition to newfangled techniques like growing cyanobacteria. “This is one tool in a toolbox—it is not a silver bullet,” Fagan said. “It’s one of 40 bullets needed to fight climate change. But we need to use all available options.” 

This story was originally published by Grist and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

Less than two weeks after Hurricane Helene tore through the Southeastern United States, killing more than 200 people and causing perhaps hundreds of billions of dollars in property and economic damage, Hurricane Milton has spun up in the Gulf of Mexico and taken aim at Florida. On Monday, Milton reached Category 5 status with winds reaching as high as 180 mph, and it’s expected to cause widespread flooding with torrential rainfall and a towering storm surge when it makes landfall, likely around Tampa Bay on Wednesday.

How Milton got to this point is even more remarkable. A hurricane undergoes “rapid intensification” if its sustained wind speeds jump by at least 35 miles per hour within 24 hours. Helene did that before making landfall in the Big Bend region of Florida’s west coast. But Milton’s intensification has been nothing short of explosive: Wind speeds skyrocketed by 90 mph in 24 hours—at one point managing a 70-mph leap in just 13 hours—leaving meteorologists and researchers stunned. 

“The storm barely formed on October 5, and on October 7, it is a Cat 5 hurricane. That is very impressive.”

It’s one of the fastest intensification events scientists have ever observed in the Atlantic. Even sophisticated hurricane models didn’t see it coming. “This is definitely extraordinary,” said Karthik Balaguru, a climate scientist who studies hurricanes at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory. “The storm barely formed on October 5, and on October 7, it is a Cat 5 hurricane. That is very impressive.”

Like Helene before it, Milton formed under the perfect conditions for rapid intensification. A hurricane’s fuel is high ocean temperatures, and the Gulf of Mexico has been a warm bath in recent months, with temperatures over 80 degrees Fahrenheit, well above average figures. “Sea surface temperatures in this area are near record, if not record-breaking,” said Daniel Gilford, who studies hurricanes at Climate Central, a nonprofit research organization. “It’s a little bit difficult to say, actually.” 

That’s because of an unfortunate irony: Hurricane Helene devastated Asheville, North Carolina, where the National Centers for Environmental Information stores data on ocean temperatures. “The sea surface temperature data that we rely on to make our day-to-day climate attribution calculations is actually unavailable to us,” said Gilford. “It’s been down for about 11 days now because of Hurricane Helene.” 

Losing access to that data is making it harder to calculate how much climate change has contributed to Milton’s intensification. But Gilford can say with confidence that the sea surface temperatures in the Gulf of Mexico were made at least 100 times more likely because of climate change, and that’s a conservative estimate.

Hurricanes also like high humidity, which Milton has plenty of. And low wind shear—winds moving at different speeds at various heights in the atmosphere—meant Milton could organize and spin up nicely. “There’s nothing to impede the storm from the atmospheric standpoint,” Balaguru said. 

In this case, the storm surge has nowhere to go but inland. It could be especially dangerous in Tampa Bay, which acts like an overflowing bowl. 

Milton’s extreme intensification has the fingerprints of climate change all over it. For one, as the atmosphere warms, so too do the oceans, providing vast pools of fuel for hurricanes. Scientists are also finding that changes in atmospheric patterns have been decreasing wind shear in coastal regions. A difference in temperature between the land and sea also creates circulation patterns that boost the amount of humidity in the atmosphere. 

So with higher humidity, warmer oceans, and weaker wind shear, hurricanes have everything they need to rapidly intensify into monsters. Indeed, scientists are finding a dramatic increase in the number of rapid intensification events close to shore in recent years. That makes hurricanes all the more dangerous: A coastal community might be preparing to ride out a Category 1 storm only for an unsurvivable Category 5 to suddenly come ashore.

In general, a warmer atmosphere can hold more moisture, so hurricanes have more moisture to wring out as rain. A recent study found that climate change caused Helene to dump 50 percent more rainfall in parts of Georgia and the Carolinas. Gilford expects climate change to also boost the rainfall that Milton dumps on Florida.

Like Helene did in Big Bend, Milton is expected to bulldoze ashore a storm surge of perhaps 15 feet along Florida’s west coast. That’s in part a consequence of the gentle slope from the coast out into the Gulf of Mexico: If the water were deeper, the storm surge could flow into the depths. But in this case, the storm surge has nowhere to go but inland. The surge in Tampa Bay could be especially dangerous, since it acts like an overflowing bowl. 

As a result, the National Weather Service is warning that Milton could be the worst storm to hit the Tampa area in more than a century. Milton might not just be an immediate emergency for Florida—it could well be a harbinger of the supercharged hurricanes to come. 

This story was originally published by Grist and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

Less than two weeks after Hurricane Helene tore through the Southeastern United States, killing more than 200 people and causing perhaps hundreds of billions of dollars in property and economic damage, Hurricane Milton has spun up in the Gulf of Mexico and taken aim at Florida. On Monday, Milton reached Category 5 status with winds reaching as high as 180 mph, and it’s expected to cause widespread flooding with torrential rainfall and a towering storm surge when it makes landfall, likely around Tampa Bay on Wednesday.

How Milton got to this point is even more remarkable. A hurricane undergoes “rapid intensification” if its sustained wind speeds jump by at least 35 miles per hour within 24 hours. Helene did that before making landfall in the Big Bend region of Florida’s west coast. But Milton’s intensification has been nothing short of explosive: Wind speeds skyrocketed by 90 mph in 24 hours—at one point managing a 70-mph leap in just 13 hours—leaving meteorologists and researchers stunned. 

“The storm barely formed on October 5, and on October 7, it is a Cat 5 hurricane. That is very impressive.”

It’s one of the fastest intensification events scientists have ever observed in the Atlantic. Even sophisticated hurricane models didn’t see it coming. “This is definitely extraordinary,” said Karthik Balaguru, a climate scientist who studies hurricanes at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory. “The storm barely formed on October 5, and on October 7, it is a Cat 5 hurricane. That is very impressive.”

Like Helene before it, Milton formed under the perfect conditions for rapid intensification. A hurricane’s fuel is high ocean temperatures, and the Gulf of Mexico has been a warm bath in recent months, with temperatures over 80 degrees Fahrenheit, well above average figures. “Sea surface temperatures in this area are near record, if not record-breaking,” said Daniel Gilford, who studies hurricanes at Climate Central, a nonprofit research organization. “It’s a little bit difficult to say, actually.” 

That’s because of an unfortunate irony: Hurricane Helene devastated Asheville, North Carolina, where the National Centers for Environmental Information stores data on ocean temperatures. “The sea surface temperature data that we rely on to make our day-to-day climate attribution calculations is actually unavailable to us,” said Gilford. “It’s been down for about 11 days now because of Hurricane Helene.” 

Losing access to that data is making it harder to calculate how much climate change has contributed to Milton’s intensification. But Gilford can say with confidence that the sea surface temperatures in the Gulf of Mexico were made at least 100 times more likely because of climate change, and that’s a conservative estimate.

Hurricanes also like high humidity, which Milton has plenty of. And low wind shear—winds moving at different speeds at various heights in the atmosphere—meant Milton could organize and spin up nicely. “There’s nothing to impede the storm from the atmospheric standpoint,” Balaguru said. 

In this case, the storm surge has nowhere to go but inland. It could be especially dangerous in Tampa Bay, which acts like an overflowing bowl. 

Milton’s extreme intensification has the fingerprints of climate change all over it. For one, as the atmosphere warms, so too do the oceans, providing vast pools of fuel for hurricanes. Scientists are also finding that changes in atmospheric patterns have been decreasing wind shear in coastal regions. A difference in temperature between the land and sea also creates circulation patterns that boost the amount of humidity in the atmosphere. 

So with higher humidity, warmer oceans, and weaker wind shear, hurricanes have everything they need to rapidly intensify into monsters. Indeed, scientists are finding a dramatic increase in the number of rapid intensification events close to shore in recent years. That makes hurricanes all the more dangerous: A coastal community might be preparing to ride out a Category 1 storm only for an unsurvivable Category 5 to suddenly come ashore.

In general, a warmer atmosphere can hold more moisture, so hurricanes have more moisture to wring out as rain. A recent study found that climate change caused Helene to dump 50 percent more rainfall in parts of Georgia and the Carolinas. Gilford expects climate change to also boost the rainfall that Milton dumps on Florida.

Like Helene did in Big Bend, Milton is expected to bulldoze ashore a storm surge of perhaps 15 feet along Florida’s west coast. That’s in part a consequence of the gentle slope from the coast out into the Gulf of Mexico: If the water were deeper, the storm surge could flow into the depths. But in this case, the storm surge has nowhere to go but inland. The surge in Tampa Bay could be especially dangerous, since it acts like an overflowing bowl. 

As a result, the National Weather Service is warning that Milton could be the worst storm to hit the Tampa area in more than a century. Milton might not just be an immediate emergency for Florida—it could well be a harbinger of the supercharged hurricanes to come. 

This story was originally published by Grist and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

The wheels on this bus do indeed go round and round. Its wipers swish. And its horn beeps. Hidden in its innards, though, is something special—a motor that doesn’t vroom but pairs with a burgeoning technology that could help the grid proliferate with renewable energy.

These new buses, developed by a company called Zum, ride clean and quiet because they’re fully electric. With them, California’s Oakland Unified School District just became the first major district in the United States to transition to 100 percent electrified buses.

The vehicles are now transporting 1,300 students to and from school, replacing diesel-chugging buses that pollute the kids’ lungs and the neighborhoods with particulate matter. Like in other American cities, Oakland’s underserved areas tend to be closer to freeways and industrial activity, so air quality in those areas is already terrible compared to the city’s richer parts.

Buses, garbage trucks, and other electric vehicles with defined routes can serve as reliable backup batteries during times of peak power demand.

Pollution from buses and other vehicles contributes to chronic asthma among students, which leads to chronic absenteeism. Since Oakland Unified only provides bus services for its special-need students, the problem of missing school for preventable health issues is particularly acute for them. “We have already seen the data—more kids riding the buses, that means more of our most vulnerable who are not missing school,” said Kyla Johnson-Trammell, superintendent of Oakland Unified School District, during a press conference Tuesday. “That, over time, means they’re having more learning and achievement goes up.”

What’s more, a core challenge of weaning our society off fossil fuels is that utilities will need to produce more electricity, not less of it. “In some places, you’re talking about doubling the amount of energy needed,” said Kevin Schneider, an expert in power systems at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, who isn’t involved in the Oakland project. 

Counterintuitively enough, the buses’ massive batteries aren’t straining the grid; they’re benefiting it. Like a growing number of consumer EV models, the buses are equipped with vehicle-to-grid technology, or V2G. That allows them to charge their batteries by plugging into the grid, but also send energy back to the grid if the electrical utility needs extra power. “School buses play a very important role in the community as a transportation provider, but now also as an energy provider,” said Vivek Garg, co-founder and chief operating officer of Zum.

And provide the buses must. Demand on the grid tends to spike in the late afternoon, when everyone is returning home and switching on appliances like air conditioners. Historically, utilities could just spin up more generation at a fossil fuel power plant to meet that demand. But as the grid is loaded with more renewable energy sources, intermittency becomes a challenge: You can’t crank up power in the system if the sun isn’t shining or the wind isn’t blowing.

“We’re still going to need more generation, more power lines, but energy storage is going to give us the flexibility.”

If every EV has V2G capability, that creates a distributed network of batteries for a utility to draw on when demand spikes. The nature of the school bus suits it perfectly for this, because it’s on a fixed schedule, making it a predictable resource for the utility. In the afternoon, Zum’s buses take kids home, then plug back into the grid. “They have more energy in each bus than they need to do their route, so there’s always an ample amount left over,” said Rudi Halbright, product manager of V2G integration at Pacific Gas and Electric Company, the utility that’s partnered with Zum and Oakland Unified for the new system.

As the night goes on and demand wanes, the buses charge again to be ready for their morning routes. Then during the day, they charge again, when there’s plentiful solar power on the grid. On weekends or holidays, the buses would be available all day as backup power for the grid. “Sure, they’re going to take a very large amount of charge,” said Kevin Schneider, an expert in power systems at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, who isn’t involved in the Oakland project. “But things like school buses don’t run that often, so they have a great potential to be a resource.”

That resource ain’t free: Utilities pay owners of V2G vehicles to provide power to the grid. (Because V2G is so new, utilities are still experimenting with what this rate structure looks like.) Zum says that that revenue helps bring down the transportation costs of its buses to be on par with cheaper diesel-powered buses. Oakland Unified and other districts can get still more money from the EPA’s Clean School Bus Program, which is handing out $5 billion between 2022 and 2026 to make the switch.

The potential of V2G is that there are so many different kinds of electric vehicles (or vehicle types left to electrify). Garbage trucks run early in the day, while delivery trucks and city vehicles do more of a nine-to-five. Passenger vehicles are kind of all over the place, with some people taking them to work, while others sit in garages all day. Basically, lots of batteries—big and small—parked idle at different times to send power back to the grid.

All the while, fiercer heat waves will require more energy-hungry air conditioning to keep people healthy. (Though ideally, everyone would get a heat pump instead.) “We’re still going to need more generation, more power lines, but energy storage is going to give us the flexibility so we can deploy it quicker,” Schneider said. In the near future, you may get home on a sweltering day and still be able to switch on your AC—thanks to an electric school bus sitting in a lot. 

This story was originally published by Grist and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

The wheels on this bus do indeed go round and round. Its wipers swish. And its horn beeps. Hidden in its innards, though, is something special—a motor that doesn’t vroom but pairs with a burgeoning technology that could help the grid proliferate with renewable energy.

These new buses, developed by a company called Zum, ride clean and quiet because they’re fully electric. With them, California’s Oakland Unified School District just became the first major district in the United States to transition to 100 percent electrified buses.

The vehicles are now transporting 1,300 students to and from school, replacing diesel-chugging buses that pollute the kids’ lungs and the neighborhoods with particulate matter. Like in other American cities, Oakland’s underserved areas tend to be closer to freeways and industrial activity, so air quality in those areas is already terrible compared to the city’s richer parts.

Buses, garbage trucks, and other electric vehicles with defined routes can serve as reliable backup batteries during times of peak power demand.

Pollution from buses and other vehicles contributes to chronic asthma among students, which leads to chronic absenteeism. Since Oakland Unified only provides bus services for its special-need students, the problem of missing school for preventable health issues is particularly acute for them. “We have already seen the data—more kids riding the buses, that means more of our most vulnerable who are not missing school,” said Kyla Johnson-Trammell, superintendent of Oakland Unified School District, during a press conference Tuesday. “That, over time, means they’re having more learning and achievement goes up.”

What’s more, a core challenge of weaning our society off fossil fuels is that utilities will need to produce more electricity, not less of it. “In some places, you’re talking about doubling the amount of energy needed,” said Kevin Schneider, an expert in power systems at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, who isn’t involved in the Oakland project. 

Counterintuitively enough, the buses’ massive batteries aren’t straining the grid; they’re benefiting it. Like a growing number of consumer EV models, the buses are equipped with vehicle-to-grid technology, or V2G. That allows them to charge their batteries by plugging into the grid, but also send energy back to the grid if the electrical utility needs extra power. “School buses play a very important role in the community as a transportation provider, but now also as an energy provider,” said Vivek Garg, co-founder and chief operating officer of Zum.

And provide the buses must. Demand on the grid tends to spike in the late afternoon, when everyone is returning home and switching on appliances like air conditioners. Historically, utilities could just spin up more generation at a fossil fuel power plant to meet that demand. But as the grid is loaded with more renewable energy sources, intermittency becomes a challenge: You can’t crank up power in the system if the sun isn’t shining or the wind isn’t blowing.

“We’re still going to need more generation, more power lines, but energy storage is going to give us the flexibility.”

If every EV has V2G capability, that creates a distributed network of batteries for a utility to draw on when demand spikes. The nature of the school bus suits it perfectly for this, because it’s on a fixed schedule, making it a predictable resource for the utility. In the afternoon, Zum’s buses take kids home, then plug back into the grid. “They have more energy in each bus than they need to do their route, so there’s always an ample amount left over,” said Rudi Halbright, product manager of V2G integration at Pacific Gas and Electric Company, the utility that’s partnered with Zum and Oakland Unified for the new system.

As the night goes on and demand wanes, the buses charge again to be ready for their morning routes. Then during the day, they charge again, when there’s plentiful solar power on the grid. On weekends or holidays, the buses would be available all day as backup power for the grid. “Sure, they’re going to take a very large amount of charge,” said Kevin Schneider, an expert in power systems at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, who isn’t involved in the Oakland project. “But things like school buses don’t run that often, so they have a great potential to be a resource.”

That resource ain’t free: Utilities pay owners of V2G vehicles to provide power to the grid. (Because V2G is so new, utilities are still experimenting with what this rate structure looks like.) Zum says that that revenue helps bring down the transportation costs of its buses to be on par with cheaper diesel-powered buses. Oakland Unified and other districts can get still more money from the EPA’s Clean School Bus Program, which is handing out $5 billion between 2022 and 2026 to make the switch.

The potential of V2G is that there are so many different kinds of electric vehicles (or vehicle types left to electrify). Garbage trucks run early in the day, while delivery trucks and city vehicles do more of a nine-to-five. Passenger vehicles are kind of all over the place, with some people taking them to work, while others sit in garages all day. Basically, lots of batteries—big and small—parked idle at different times to send power back to the grid.

All the while, fiercer heat waves will require more energy-hungry air conditioning to keep people healthy. (Though ideally, everyone would get a heat pump instead.) “We’re still going to need more generation, more power lines, but energy storage is going to give us the flexibility so we can deploy it quicker,” Schneider said. In the near future, you may get home on a sweltering day and still be able to switch on your AC—thanks to an electric school bus sitting in a lot. 

This story was originally published by Grist and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

After unleashing widespread flooding and knocking out electricity for half of Puerto Rico, this season’s third hurricane, Ernesto, has turned north and is approaching Bermuda. In an average Atlantic season, the third hurricane doesn’t spin up until September 7, so Ernesto has arrived way, way early. As of August 9, this summer had already produced a third of the activity in a typical season— with nearly 90 percent of it remaining.

All that makes Ernesto, now a Category 2 hurricane, an ominous sign of what’s still to come in the next few months—and what to expect as the planet rapidly warms. “Being a little more than three weeks ahead of schedule for the third hurricane is pretty impressive,” said Brian McNoldy, a hurricane researcher at the University of Miami.

This spring, scientists predicted that the Atlantic Ocean would play host to an exceptionally active hurricane season, with five major hurricanes and 21 named storms, for one particularly good reason—the ocean is exceptionally warm, and is expected to stay that way. In July, the nursery for Atlantic hurricanes was running 2.8 degrees Fahrenheit higher than the long-term average. “Hurricanes are a lot like engines—they need some sort of fuel,” said Daniel Gilford, who studies hurricanes at Climate Central, a nonprofit research organization. “They need something to be able to accelerate and pick up wind speed, and the thing they use to do that largely is the ocean surface.”

As water evaporates off the ocean, buoyant clouds form, releasing heat and lowering atmospheric pressure. That sucks in air, creating winds and a vortex. Hurricanes also love high humidity because dry air can slow the speed of the updrafts that the storms need to grow big and strong. Hurricanes hate wind shear—winds moving at different speeds and directions at different altitudes. El Niño tends to encourage the proliferation of wind shear over the Atlantic, while La Niña tends to discourage it. Right now the conditions are “neutral,” as El Niño has faded and La Niña has yet to officially form.

So warm ocean temperatures aren’t the only ingredient to make a hurricane, but they’re certainly the fuel. As Ernesto was chugging across the Atlantic between West Africa and the Caribbean, it was encountering abnormally high ocean temperatures made at least 50 to 100 times more likely because of climate change, according to Climate Central’s analysis. (To be clear, this isn’t saying that Ernesto itself was more likely because of climate change—that will require further analysis.) More remarkable still, the group found that Hurricane Beryl, a Category 5 that slammed into Texas in early July, fed on ocean temperatures made 100 to 400 times more likely by climate change. “We also know that storms are moving slower, they are lasting longer, and these things we expect to be influenced by climate as well,” Gilford said.

High ocean temperatures also feed the “rapid intensification” of hurricanes, defined as a jump in sustained wind speeds of at least 35 mph in 24 hours. Hurricane Beryl did that on its way to Texas, shattering records for how quickly it developed into a monster storm. Rapid intensification makes hurricanes extra dangerous because a coastal city might be preparing for a Category 2 to make landfall, only for a Category 5 to suddenly appear. And the problem is only getting worse, as research has found a dramatic increase in the number of rapid intensification events close to shore.

Luckily for Bermuda, Ernesto hasn’t rapidly intensified—though it’s come close this week—but it’s still a very dangerous Category 2. “The shear is potentially a little bit stronger than originally thought,” said Samantha Nebylitsa, who studies hurricanes at the University of Miami, and “dry air just has been really impeding the intensification. It’s just not letting up.” That could well weaken the storm into a Category 1 by the time it hits Bermuda.

The Atlantic is likely to continue providing more fuel as summer winds down. Because the ocean takes longer to heat up than the land, the peak of hurricane season isn’t until September. And the season doesn’t officially close until the end of November. “The best predictions suggest that we are maybe only about 15 or 20 percent the way through of the total activity we expect this year,” Gilford said. “There’s a lot more to come down the pipeline in 2024.”

This story was originally published by Grist and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

After unleashing widespread flooding and knocking out electricity for half of Puerto Rico, this season’s third hurricane, Ernesto, has turned north and is approaching Bermuda. In an average Atlantic season, the third hurricane doesn’t spin up until September 7, so Ernesto has arrived way, way early. As of August 9, this summer had already produced a third of the activity in a typical season— with nearly 90 percent of it remaining.

All that makes Ernesto, now a Category 2 hurricane, an ominous sign of what’s still to come in the next few months—and what to expect as the planet rapidly warms. “Being a little more than three weeks ahead of schedule for the third hurricane is pretty impressive,” said Brian McNoldy, a hurricane researcher at the University of Miami.

This spring, scientists predicted that the Atlantic Ocean would play host to an exceptionally active hurricane season, with five major hurricanes and 21 named storms, for one particularly good reason—the ocean is exceptionally warm, and is expected to stay that way. In July, the nursery for Atlantic hurricanes was running 2.8 degrees Fahrenheit higher than the long-term average. “Hurricanes are a lot like engines—they need some sort of fuel,” said Daniel Gilford, who studies hurricanes at Climate Central, a nonprofit research organization. “They need something to be able to accelerate and pick up wind speed, and the thing they use to do that largely is the ocean surface.”

As water evaporates off the ocean, buoyant clouds form, releasing heat and lowering atmospheric pressure. That sucks in air, creating winds and a vortex. Hurricanes also love high humidity because dry air can slow the speed of the updrafts that the storms need to grow big and strong. Hurricanes hate wind shear—winds moving at different speeds and directions at different altitudes. El Niño tends to encourage the proliferation of wind shear over the Atlantic, while La Niña tends to discourage it. Right now the conditions are “neutral,” as El Niño has faded and La Niña has yet to officially form.

So warm ocean temperatures aren’t the only ingredient to make a hurricane, but they’re certainly the fuel. As Ernesto was chugging across the Atlantic between West Africa and the Caribbean, it was encountering abnormally high ocean temperatures made at least 50 to 100 times more likely because of climate change, according to Climate Central’s analysis. (To be clear, this isn’t saying that Ernesto itself was more likely because of climate change—that will require further analysis.) More remarkable still, the group found that Hurricane Beryl, a Category 5 that slammed into Texas in early July, fed on ocean temperatures made 100 to 400 times more likely by climate change. “We also know that storms are moving slower, they are lasting longer, and these things we expect to be influenced by climate as well,” Gilford said.

High ocean temperatures also feed the “rapid intensification” of hurricanes, defined as a jump in sustained wind speeds of at least 35 mph in 24 hours. Hurricane Beryl did that on its way to Texas, shattering records for how quickly it developed into a monster storm. Rapid intensification makes hurricanes extra dangerous because a coastal city might be preparing for a Category 2 to make landfall, only for a Category 5 to suddenly appear. And the problem is only getting worse, as research has found a dramatic increase in the number of rapid intensification events close to shore.

Luckily for Bermuda, Ernesto hasn’t rapidly intensified—though it’s come close this week—but it’s still a very dangerous Category 2. “The shear is potentially a little bit stronger than originally thought,” said Samantha Nebylitsa, who studies hurricanes at the University of Miami, and “dry air just has been really impeding the intensification. It’s just not letting up.” That could well weaken the storm into a Category 1 by the time it hits Bermuda.

The Atlantic is likely to continue providing more fuel as summer winds down. Because the ocean takes longer to heat up than the land, the peak of hurricane season isn’t until September. And the season doesn’t officially close until the end of November. “The best predictions suggest that we are maybe only about 15 or 20 percent the way through of the total activity we expect this year,” Gilford said. “There’s a lot more to come down the pipeline in 2024.”