Vertical farm under construction in southeast Calgary with $2.73-million grant from Alberta government

'We use height and stack technology to be able to optimize output. And from that, we're able to reduce water consumption'

Author of the article: Stephanie Babych
Publishing date: Nov 29, 2021 • 

L-R, Rick Christiaanse, chief executive officer, Invest Alberta, Doug Schweitzer, Minister of Jobs, Economy and Innovation, Jeff McKinnon, senior vice-president of network development, GoodLeaf Farms and Nate Horner, Minister of Agriculture, Forestry and Rural Economic Development announced GoodLeaf Farms will be coming to Calgary through the Investment and Growth Fund at SAIT Taste Market in Calgary on Monday, November 29, 2021. PHOTO BY DARREN MAKOWICHUK/POSTMEDIA
Article content

A vertical farm that’s under construction in southeast Calgary has been selected as the first project to receive financial support from the Alberta government’s new investment and growth fund.

Advertisement

STORY CONTINUES BELOW

Ontario-based company GoodLeaf Farms is building its biggest indoor farm in Calgary’s southeast after receiving a $2.73-million grant from the provincial government to locate its next facility in Alberta. The money comes from the new $10-million Investment and Growth Fund, meant to attract companies to the province.

GoodLeaf Farms’ Calgary facility will be a 74,000-square-foot indoor farm within the city in the industrial area along 108 Avenue S.E., and will provide 70 full-time positions once it’s up and running.

The farm in Calgary will be the company’s first in western Canada after opening facilities in Nova Scotia and Ontario. The company uses vertical farming technology to produce leafy-green lettuce products year-round

“From the outside, it looks like a standard warehouse industrial space,” Jeff McKinnon, the senior vice-president of network development with GoodLeaf Farms, said at a press conference Monday.

“We use height and stack technology to be able to optimize output. And from that, we’re able to reduce water consumption.”

A vertical farm uses about 95 per cent less water than traditional agriculture and produces roughly 50 times the output capacity due to LED lighting, water management, airflow and automation, McKinnon explained.

“Our model is immune to weather events and weather patterns, which allows us to grow the safe and clean product in an indoor environment. And we’re able to eliminate the use of any chemicals,” he said.

Fully grown Spicy Mustard plants await packaging at GoodLeaf Farms. The indoor vertical farming operation uses LED lights in its 45,000-square-foot grow room to produce fresh, leafy greens including Pea Shoots, Asian Blend, Baby and Micro Arugula, Baby Kale and Spicy Mustard. Photo taken in Guelph, Ont. on July 21, 2021. 

PHOTO BY GLENN LOWSON PHOTO/NATIONAL POST

McKinnon said the company considered a couple of other western provinces before landing on Alberta. They settled on Calgary because of the open market access to western Canada and the proximity of research institutions that can help improve their business model.

When asked by reporters, McKinnon said he wouldn’t disclose capital investment overall in the early stages of the project. He said the funding from the province is a “small component” to their capital cost.

Minister of Agriculture, Forestry and Rural Economic Development Nate Horner said GoodLeaf Farms’ facility will be an important step towards providing local alternatives in produce aisles.

“Alberta’s recovery plan is about getting people back to work, building infrastructure and diversifying the provincial economy,” said Horner. “We will be looking at the agri-food sector to help lead that recovery and growth, and this project contributes to our progress.”

Minister of Jobs, Economy and Innovation Doug Schweitzer said they’ve approved three other projects under the new fund that could attract up to $845.8 million in investment and bring nearly 2,000 new jobs to the province.

“We made sure to get the best possible strategies going forward for Alberta to diversify our economy, create jobs and create value for taxpayers,” said Schweitzer, though the other projects won’t be announced until they’re finalized.

The funds will be given to selected companies once they reach a number of milestones such as wage levels, size of the capital investment and jobs created.

TOUTING IT AS A WINNER, UCP PICKS HYDROPONIC PEA SHOOT PRODUCER FOR OPTIMISTIC JOBS ANNOUNCEMENT

GOODLEAF’S ARCHITECTURAL ILLUSTRATION OF ITS PLANNED CALGARY “VERTICAL FARM” (IMAGE: GOODLEAF FARMS).

Alberta Politics

DAVID CLIMENHAGA
POSTED ON NOVEMBER 30, 2021

Desperate times call for desperate measures, and Alberta’s United Conservative Government has been reduced to doing what market fundamentalists like Jason Kenney usually vow they’ll never contemplate: picking winners and losers.

Or, the way these things often seem to turn out, picking winners and discovering later that they’re actually losers.


Doug Schweitzer, the UCP’s minister of jobs and stuff (Photo: David J. Climenhaga).

The UCP announced yesterday it had picked a producer that promises to provide a peck of pea shoots and the like at an indoor farm in southeast Calgary. Many details are murky.

In addition to pea shoots, GoodLeaf Farms says it grows radishes, arugula, micro broccoli, baby spinach, and kale at its indoor farm in Guelph, Ont.

“The country’s largest commercial vertical farming company will build a 74,000-square-foot indoor farm in the city, after receiving a $2.73-million incentive to locate to Alberta,” the Kenney Government’s press release proudly proclaimed yesterday. “The company will create 50 jobs during construction and 70 permanent jobs upon start-up.”

The “incentive” to GoodLeaf comes out of a new “Investment and Growth Fund” set up by the government with a rather insignificant $10 million. The fund’s job, says the presser, will be “attracting well-established companies to Alberta.”

The brainiacs behind this effort to pick winners will find that $10 million won’t go very far to create jobs in the numbers the UCP is going to need to build up credibility with voters, but in the mean time they can spin up some optimistic press releases and give the impression of being busy.

Now, $2.73 million may seem like a lot to pay for 70 speculative, largely unskilled jobs that don’t actually exist yet in a business that may or may not be able to put down roots on the Prairies, but when you’re as anxious to prove you can create employment as Mr. Kenney and the UCP are, any old plan will probably do.

If it happens, the Calgary operation will more than double the size of the company’s current workforce, mostly in Ontario and Nova Scotia, judging from its corporate page on Linked-In. The company is privately held, so details about its revenue, operations, and relationships with sister companies are not particularly easy to come by.


Agriculture Minister Nate Horner (Photo: United Conservative Party Caucus).

But for sure it’s a better bet than the $1.3 billion Mr. Kenney sank into TC Energy, the former TransCanada Pipelines, to build that Keystone XL Pipeline to the Texas Gulf, the project U.S. President Joe Biden famously killed on his first day in office.

Readers may have thought the government was promising a lot more than 70 jobs. Indeed, the headline on the news release said, “Nearly 2,000 jobs created through investment in Alberta.” Turns out, however, that’s a rather speculative estimate based on four projects that will be financed by the investment fund, three of which will remain a secret until new press releases are approved. One might even say it’s fanciful.

“The Investment and Growth Fund helped to close this investment in a competitive global market,” Jobs Minister Doug Schweitzer bragged in yesterday’s news release.

Well, sort of. GoodLeaf said last February in a news release it would be using some of the $65 million McCain Foods Ltd. had invested in it to open an operation somewhere in Western Canada, which suggests its ambitions were more regional than planetary.

Naturally, yesterday’s news release also quoted Alberta’s new agriculture minister, Nate Horner, saying, in language that reminded me of my days as the Calgary Herald’s agriculture reporter back in the 1980s, “we will be looking to the agri-food sector to help lead Alberta’s economic recovery plan and spur growth, and this innovative project is a step in the right direction.”


NDP Economic Development Critic Deron Bilous (Photo: David J. Climenhaga).

That’ll be a tall order, even for an indoor food factory with some serious funding from McCain’s, if this is supposed to replace the jobs lost in the fossil fuel industry on Mr. Kenney’s watch.

Of course, this is not to say that the winner the UCP has picked will end up turning out like Newfoundland’s notorious hydroponic indoor cucumber grow-op in the 1980s – fondly remembered on the Rock as Premier Peckford’s Pickle Palace for the $13 million the province sank into the doomed operation dreamed up by the late Philip Sprung of Calgary.

But it will face some of the same competitive pressures as did the Mount Pearl pickle palace, which the CBC reported was undone when greenhouse-grown cukes from outside the province inundated the place and the expensive hydroponic cucumbers had to be sold off for half the cost of production. Cattle ended up eating the surplus.

As the Globe and Mail explained in its report on the McCain’s investment last spring, vertical farms compete with conventional horizontal ones, which are located outside in fields or in greenhouses, “where the awesome power of sunlight is free.”

What’s more, since some jurisdictions (no names) generate electricity principally from fossil fuels, this also increases the carbon footprint of vertical farms, the Globe added, noting that “water and fertilizer efficiencies touted by vertical farming enthusiasts are overstated … as are the savings from reduced transportation costs.”

On the other hand, GoodLeaf said in a news release yesterday that could produce fresh veggies locally in the winter, which might be an advantage if current supply-line problems persist. The company said it expects to produce more than a million pounds of leafy greens each year in Calgary.

Opposition NDP Economic Development Critic Deron Bilous observed yesterday that “it’s still not clear how the UCP’s new fund brought this company to Alberta, the application process, or how they were selected.”

“The government couldn’t even provide basic details such as how much capital investment or which other jurisdictions were being considered by the company,” he said.

“If the UCP was actually creating the right conditions to attract investment – or if their corporate tax cut was working as promised – this fund shouldn’t be needed. Based on today’s announcement, this looks like a slush fund for the UCP to give away more money to profitable corporations in backroom deals.”

The UCP needs to shine some light on how this fund works before they hand out any more cash, Mr. Bilous concluded.

Science at the cusp: NASA rocket to study mysterious area above the North Pole

by Anna Blaustein, NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center

The vapor tracer ampule doors are open on the CREX-2 payload during testing at the 

Andøya Space Center. Credit: NASA

Strange things happen in Earth's atmosphere at high latitudes. Around local noon, when the Sun is at its highest point, a funnel-shaped gap in our planet's magnetic field passes overhead. Earth's magnetic field shields us from the solar wind, the stream of charged particles spewing off the Sun. The gap in that field, called the polar cusp, allows the solar wind a direct line of access to Earth's atmosphere.

Radio and GPS signals behave strangely when they travel through this part of the sky. In the last 20 years, scientists and spacecraft operators noticed something else unusual as spacecraft pass through this region: They slow down.

"At around 250 miles above Earth, spacecraft feel more drag, sort of like they've hit a speed bump," said Mark Conde, a physicist at the University of Alaska Fairbanks and the principal investigator for NASA's Cusp Region Experiment-2, or CREX-2, sounding rocket mission. That's because the air in the cusp is noticeably denser than air elsewhere in the spacecrafts' orbits around Earth. But no one knows why, or how. By understanding the forces at play in the cusp, scientists hope to better anticipate changes in spacecraft trajectories. The launch window for CREX-2, which launches from Andenes, Norway, opens at 4 a.m. EST (10 a.m. CET) on Dec. 1, 2021.

CREX-2 first aimed to learn more about the dynamics in the cusp in 2019, but although all systems were ready for launch, the mission never got off the ground. There was little solar activity at the time, and as a result, space weather conditions weren't right for the mission during the initial launch window. The COVID-19 pandemic further postponed its flight. Now, after a nearly two-year delay, CREX-2 is once again preparing to fly in hopes of answering questions about the cusp. The team is optimistic; the Sun is in a more active stage of its natural cycle this time around, increasing the chances that space weather conditions will be favorable for their mission to study an unusually dense region of the atmosphere.

While the density of Earth's atmosphere decreases rapidly with height, it stays consistent horizontally. That is, at any given altitude, the atmosphere is roughly the same density around globe.

This aspect of the mission requires complicated logistics. "It's quite a big chess game," Conde said. The team needs to see these tracers from several vantage points to get a comprehensive understanding of the wind patterns. Scientists, some of them graduate students, will be stationed throughout Scandinavia to photograph the tracers over the course of 20-30 minutes. One student will document them from a plane flying from Reykjavík, Iceland, and others will capture the glows from two sites on the Norwegian island of Svalbard.

There are some "Goldilocks" conditions necessary for launch. The cusp is only present around local noon, but the sky needs to be dark for the tracers' glow to be visible. That's why CREX-2 will launch in mid-winter, when there's very little sunlight at these extreme northern latitudes.

Colorful clouds formed by the release of vapor tracers from two rockets allow scientists to

 measure winds. Credit: NASA/Lee Wingfield

"We're threading a needle," Conde said. "We get about an hour or two each day when conditions are suitable to do the experiment." And, at least two of the stations need a clear view of the tracers for sufficient data collection. The 2019 launch window was open for 17 days, not one of which was suitable for CREX-2 to fly.

"The rocket business is a high-stakes game," Conde said. "You'll spend two or three years developing a payload, but ultimately, it all comes down to choosing when to press the button to capture the science you want." Sometimes, that moment doesn't arrive. Conde and the CREX-2 team are eager for another opportunity to launch. "Honestly, it feels amazing," Conde said. "To finally be trying again—I'm not quite sure I have the words for it."

Except in the cusp, where 250 miles overhead, there's a pocket of air roughly one and a half times denser than other air at that altitude. "You can't just increase the mass in a region by a factor of 1.5 and do nothing else, or the sky will fall," Conde said. Something invisible supports that extra mass, and the CREX-2 mission aims to figure out exactly what it is.

The mission is designed to measure the numerous factors that could potentially explain how the cusp's dense air stays suspended. Then, Conde said, scientists can "try and sort out which one is doing the work."

One possibility involves electric and magnetic effects in the ionosphere, the layer of Earth's upper atmosphere that is ionized by the Sun, meaning it contains electrically charged particles. Electrodynamics could support the denser air indirectly, or it may cause heating that generates vertical winds to keep the dense air aloft. CREX-2 has an array of instruments designed to measure these effects.

Another explanation might be that air in the entire vertical column of the cusp is denser than its surroundings. Stacked atop heavier air, the dense air 250 miles high would remain buoyant. But having a column of heavier air should also produce horizontal or even vortex-like winds, which CREX-2 is designed to look for.

And it will do so in style. The rocket will eject 20 soda can-sized canisters, each with its own small rocket motor, in four directions. The canisters are timed to rupture at different altitudes. When they burst, they'll release vapor tracers—particles often found in firework displays which glow by scattering sunlight or upon exposure to oxygen—in a three-dimensional grid in the sky. The wind will paint the sky with these glowing clouds, revealing how air moves in this unusual section of the atmosphere.

---

Explore further

NASA rockets study why tech goes haywire near poles

---

Provided by NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center 

Hummingbird suspends operations at Yanfolila gold mine in Mali due to unrest

Vladimir Basov  

Monday November 29, 2021 11:40

(Kitco News) - West Africa-focused gold mining company Hummingbird Resources (AIM: HUM) announced today that it has suspended its Yanfolila mine in Mali due to unrest.

In a statement, the company said that in recent days there has been unrest and illegal road blocks in the region and that this activity has impacted its ability to safely continue operations at the mine and as such Yanfolila is temporarily offline until conditions allow.

Hummingbird added that the situation on site remains calm and orderly with all employees and contractors safe and accounted for. Once conditions allow, a full assessment of plant and equipment will be carried out and any potential impacts will be evaluated, the company noted.

"The current illegal action is from a small minority and not representative of the communities where the company operates, and is damaging for all concerned. Given the unrest includes illegal activities such as public order and blocking of public access roads, the company has elevated the disruption to the national Government, who are in the process of working through the situation and resolving it. It is anticipated that the company should be in a position to return to normal operations shortly," the company pointed out.

Importantly, Hummingbird said that this interruption to operations is impacting production and whilst it is currently difficult to evaluate the full impact at this time, the company advises that the full year production will be below the bottom end of the 2021 guidance range.

Hummingbird Resources currently has two core gold projects, the operational Yanfolila gold mine in Mali, and the Kouroussa gold mine in Guinea, which will more than double current gold production when in production, scheduled for first gold pour end of Q2 2023.

Further, the company has a controlling interest in the Dugbe gold project in Liberia that is being developed by Pasofino Gold Limited through an earn-in agreement.

By Vladimir Basov

For Kitco News

‘For us, it is not a solution’: Enel CEO skeptical over the use of carbon capture

PUBLISHED THU, NOV 25 202110:09 AM EST
Anmar Frangoul

KEY POINTS

“There is a rule of thumb here: if a technology doesn’t really pick up in five years ... you better drop it,” Starace says.

The CEO was speaking after Enel published a strategic plan for 2022-24 and laid out its aims for the years ahead.

The CEO of multinational Italian energy firm Enel has expressed doubt on the usefulness of carbon capture and storage, suggesting the technology is not a climate solution.

“We have tried and tried — and when I say ‘we’, I mean the electricity industry,” Francesco Starace told CNBC’s Karen Tso on Wednesday.

“You can imagine, we tried hard in the past 10 years — maybe more, 15 years — because if we had a reliable and economically interesting solution, why would we go and shut down all these coal plants [when] we could decarbonize the system?”

The European Commission, the EU’s executive arm, has described carbon capture and storage as a suite of technologies focused on “capturing, transporting, and storing CO2 emitted from power plants and industrial facilities.”

The idea is to stop CO2 “reaching the atmosphere, by storing it in suitable underground geological formations.”

The Commission has said the utilization of carbon capture and storage is “important” when it comes to helping lower greenhouse gas emissions. This view is based on the contention that a substantial proportion of both industry and power generation will still be reliant on fossil fuels in the years ahead.

Enel’s Starace, however, seemed skeptical about carbon capture’s potential.

“The fact is, it doesn’t work, it hasn’t worked for us so far,” he said. “And there is a rule of thumb here: If a technology doesn’t really pick up in five years — and here we’re talking about more than five, we’re talking about 15, at least — you better drop it.”

There are other climate solutions, Starace said. “Basically, stop emitting carbon,” he said.

“I’m not saying it’s not worth trying again but we’re not going to do it. Maybe other industries can try harder and succeed. For us, it is not a solution.”

Carbon capture technology is often held up as a source of hope in reducing global greenhouse gas emissions, featuring prominently in countries’ climate plans as well as the net-zero strategies of some of the world’s largest oil and gas companies.

Proponents of these technologies believe they can play an important and diverse role in meeting global energy and climate goals.

Climate researchers, campaigners and environmental advocacy groups, however, have long argued that carbon capture and storage technologies prolong the world’s fossil fuel dependency and distract from a much-needed pivot to renewable alternatives.
Plans to increase shareholder dividends

Starace was speaking after Enel published a strategic plan for 2022-24 and laid out its aims for the years ahead. Among other things, Enel will make direct investments of 170 billion euros ($190.7 billion) by 2030.

Direct investments in renewable energy assets that Enel will own are set to hit 70 billion euros. Consolidated installed renewable capacity, or capacity that is directly owned by Enel, is expected to reach 129 gigawatts by 2030.

In addition, Enel, which is headquartered in Rome, said it had brought forward its net-zero commitment — a goal which relates to both direct and indirect emissions — to 2040, having previously been 2050.

On the fossil fuel front, the group wants to exit coal generation by the year 2027, with its exit from gas generation taking place by 2040.

Enel also said that, between 2021 and 2024, shareholders were “expected to receive a fixed Dividend Per Share … that is planned to increase by 13%, up to 0.43 euros/share.”

During his interview with CNBC, Starace was asked about Enel’s higher dividend forecast and the wider debate about how one could be invested in so-called “sin stocks” — in this instance, big polluters within the energy space — and still get good returns, particularly on the dividend side of things.

“It’s all about risk rewards,” he said. “And at the end of the day, I don’t see anything wrong with an increasingly risky business [being] … forced to increase dividends if you want to attract investors.”

“What we’re trying to say is there is a breaking point, there is a point in which the risk becomes unbearable no matter what dividends you want to distribute, and that is approaching,” he said.

“So in our case, what you need to do is get out of this risk, get out of the carbon footprint and also make sure that when you put the word ‘net’ in front of zero, this ‘net’ doesn’t become some kind of a trick around which you don’t decarbonize, really, your operations.”

“We’re saying we’re going to be zero carbon, which means we’re not going to emit carbon and we will, therefore [not] … need to plant trees to offset that carbon.”

Starace acknowledged, however, that trees would be required over the next centuries to remove carbon left in the atmosphere due to historic emissions.

—CNBC’s Sam Meredith contributed to this article.

It hasn't been a lake for a century. An atmospheric river just made it one again

By Jennifer Gray, CNN meteorologist

Tue November 30, 2021

(CNN)Another atmospheric river will be streaming into western Washington and parts of British Columbia, Canada, this week.

While back-to-back-to-back systems for the region seem a bit like a broken record lately, the phenomenon is truly significant.

Rivers in the sky have led to landslides blocking roads, rivers inundating towns, and in one case, returning an old lake bed back into a lake.

British Columbia typically sees atmospheric river events in the month of November, just as the Pacific Northwest does. The problem for both regions this year has been the consistency of the systems, with no breaks for drying in between.

"The first atmospheric river event hit us hard on November 13 to 16, and it dumped a lot, 150-300 mm (roughly 6 to 11 inches), of precipitation in less than 48 hours," Johnson Zhong, a meteorologist for Environment Canada said.

There has also been rain on top of fresh snow, which has exacerbated flooding.

Enter your email to sign up for CNN's "Meanwhile in China" Newsletter.

close dialog

Stay updated on extreme weather

Sign up for email alerts from CNN meteorologists and reporters in the field.

By subscribing you agree to our

privacy policy.

"There was up to 30-50 cm (1-1.5 feet) of fresh snow at 1500-2500 meters (5,000-8,000 feet) high," he observed. "One of our atmospheric river events rained much higher than 2500 meters, so that rain melted the snow and helped create the flooding."

One of the areas seeing the greatest amount of flooding was the Sumas area, about 50 miles east of Vancouver.

"One hundred years ago there was a Sumas lake. Then they pumped the water out to make good farmland. It has been farmland for the last 100 years, and now it's a lake again," Zhong explained.

He added more than half of the egg and dairy supply for Vancouver come from that farmland, which has hit the region exceptionally hard.

The unprecedented amount of rain has created major flooding, washing out bridges and roads, completely cutting off many other small Canadian towns to the rest of the world.

Merritt, British Columbia, is one of those towns.

"Merritt is a town of 7,000 people and is totally flooded," Zhong said. "That town is in an area that doesn't get a lot of rain. But with the combination of rain and snowmelt, the entire town flooded. The water and sewage system went down, and the entire town had to be evacuated."

British Columbia has suffered a great deal since the summer months.

They endured a relentless heatwave that gripped the entire region and killed nearly 600 people.

They also experienced wildfires that completely wiped the town of Lytton off the map.

Fresh burn scars from the wildfires are also making the flooding and mudslide potential worse, Zhong pointed out.

Mudslides and landslides are a major concern for both British Columbia and Washington.

"Persistent rainfall over the last few weeks has dramatically increased soil moisture to high levels across western Washington," the National Weather Service (NWS) office in Seattle reported. "Heavy rainfall of an additional 1 to 3 inches in the mountains and up to 1.5 inches in the lowlands has fallen over the last 24 hours. Therefore, the increased threat of landslides will continue through today despite the heaviest rainfall coming to an end."

In the Seattle area, which is soaked as well, they hope all the rain doesn't come at once.

Seattle is experiencing its wettest fall on record. The Seattle-Tacoma airport has recorded 18.91 inches of rain for September through November, and more is on the way.

By Tuesday, the month could end as one of the top wettest Novembers on record. With an additional 2 to 3 inches of rain expected to fall, more flooding is Inevitable.

"The big factor that will affect the scope of expected impacts will be how much of a break we receive in areas where river flooding continues today," the NWS in Seattle emphasized.

The Nooksack and Skagit Rivers, north of Seattle, are still rising and have yet to crest, so more rainfall on top of already rising rivers could create major flooding issues for nearby towns.

"It remains unclear how rivers in these areas will respond to additional rainfall over the next 2 days," NWS Seattle added.

Climate Impact on atmospheric rivers

The next atmospheric river event is expected to arrive in the Pacific Northwest and British Columbia early this week, bringing even more flooding rain to the region.

Marty Ralph, director of the Center for Western Weather and Water Extremes at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in San Diego, said the climate crisis may be intensifying atmospheric rivers in the West.

"Warmer atmospheric temperatures, in general, will mean the freezing levels are higher than they've been in the past," Ralph told CNN. "But while storms vary, even without climate change and some can be extra warm, just by natural situation, it's clear the background warming should increase the [freezing] levels."

Ralph explained a higher freezing level, the altitude at which rain transitions to snow, can be dangerous with a wet landscape and full rivers.

"This makes for extra potential potency to the impact," he said. "The rivers are already high again, so this one's going to pack a wallop."

Warmer air can also hold more water vapor, which fuels atmospheric rivers. Ralph noted as the atmosphere gets warmer due to climate change, the intensity of storms will likely increase and become more hazardous.

"As a scientist, my role is to help raise awareness that the situation is looking to be like a strong to extreme [atmospheric river], and the implications of that are for additional heavy rain and — given the situation on land — flooding," he said. "People should really look to their normal weather information provider for hazardous situations for specific guidance on what to do, because it seems to me that this is a pretty serious situation."

'I'd never seen anything like it': Fallstreak hole dazzles Winnipeg cloud watchers

Mason DePatie
CTV News Winnipeg Videojournalist
Updated Nov. 29, 2021 1:24 p.m. MST


WINNIPEG -

A unique cloud formation amazed many Winnipeggers Sunday morning.

Sky gazers in the northeast part of the city were treated to a weather phenomenon called a fallstreak hole, which looks like a large hole has been punched through a cloud.

Source: Cindy Gauthier


"I saw this round thing in the sky, and I'm looking up wondering, what is that? I'd never seen anything like it and I took a picture of it," recalled Linda Parkes, who pulled over on the side of the highway to see the hole.

"It actually kind of reminded me of, I don't know, is that the hole for the mothership to come get us?"

Source: George Kunyckyj

According to Environment Canada, a fallstreak hole is the result of part of the cloud turning to ice.

"You have a bank of cloud, super-cooled liquid droplets that then encounter ice nuclei. Ice crystals form using up the cloud droplets from the sky, and you're left with this hole," said Environment Canada's Natalie Hasell.

Hassel said fallstreak holes commonly form as a result of an aircraft passing through the cloud.

Source: Perry Poulsen

"So you have an aircraft taking off or landing, and it will travel through the cloudbank. In the exhaust, the stuff that is left over when the fuel is burnt is projected out, we have some water in there, and the particles that come of fuel exhaust tend to ice nuclei," she said.

Source: Kim Contreras

Those who saw the hole believe it's a good reminder to enjoy Manitoba's always-changing weather.

"Pull over to the side of the road, take it in, take those pictures," said Parkes. "I think they are priceless."

Environment Canada is reminding people to watch where they're going while weather watching and to never stare at the sun.

Several viewers submit photos of a Fallstreak hole or a hole punch cloud, spotted over Manitoba on Sunday. Photo by Myles Spence.

Strong Winds Power Electric Fields in the Upper Atmosphere, NASA’s ICON Finds


What happens on Earth doesn’t stay on Earth.

Using observations from NASA’s ICON mission, scientists presented the first direct measurements of Earth’s long-theorized dynamo on the edge of space: a wind-driven electrical generator that spans the globe 60-plus miles above our heads. The dynamo churns in the ionosphere, the electrically charged boundary between Earth and space. It’s powered by tidal winds in the upper atmosphere that are faster than most hurricanes and rise from the lower atmosphere, creating an electrical environment that can affect satellites and technology on Earth.

The new work, published today in Nature Geoscience, improves our understanding of the ionosphere, which helps scientists better predict space weather and protect our technology from its effects.

Launched in 2019, ICON, short for Ionospheric Connection Explorer, is a mission to untangle how Earth’s weather interacts with the weather in space. Radio and GPS signals zip through the ionosphere, which is home to auroras and the International Space Station. Empty pockets or dense swells of electrically charged particles can disrupt these signals.

Scientists who study the atmosphere and space weather have long included Earth’s dynamo in their models because they knew it had important effects. But with little information, they had to make some assumptions about how it works. Data from ICON is the first concrete observation of winds fueling the dynamo, eventually influencing space weather, to feed into those models


“ICON’s first year in space has shown predicting these winds is key to improving our ability to predict what happens in the ionosphere,” said Thomas Immel, ICON principal investigator at University of California, Berkeley, and lead author of the new study.

This data visualization shows the ICON spacecraft in orbit around Earth. The green arrows show the strong, high-altitude winds—known as atmospheric tides—detected by ICON’s MIGHTI wind imager. These winds are not uniform and can be altered by changes in the lower-altitude atmosphere. This, in turn, changes the particle motion high in the ionosphere. Changes in plasma at 370 miles above Earth’s surface was also detected by ICON as shown in red. Magnetic field lines are shown in magenta and turn yellow as measurements of winds detected by MIGHTI (green arrows) influence the direction of plasma (red arrows).
Credits: NASA's Scientific Visualization Studio/William T. Bridgman

Download this video in HD formats from NASA Goddard's Scientific Visualization Studio

Earth's sky-high generator

The ionosphere is like a sloshing sea of electrically charged particles, created by the Sun and intermixed with the neutral upper atmosphere. Sandwiched between Earth and space, the ionosphere responds to changes from both the Sun above and Earth below. How much influence comes from each side is what researchers are interested in figuring out. Studying a year of ICON data, the researchers found much of the change they observed originated in the lower atmosphere.

Generators work by repeatedly moving an electricity-carrying conductor — like a copper wire — through a magnetic field. Filled with electrically charged gases called plasma, the ionosphere acts like a wire, or rather, a tangled mess of wires: Electricity flows right through. Like the dynamo in Earth’s core, the dynamo in the atmosphere produces electromagnetic fields from motion.

Strong winds in the thermosphere, a layer of the upper atmosphere known for its high temperatures, push current-carrying plasma in the ionosphere across invisible magnetic field lines that arc around Earth like an onion. The wind tends to push on chunky, positively charged particles more than small, negatively charged electrons. “You get pluses moving differently than minuses,” said co-author Brian Harding, a physicist at University of California, Berkeley. “That’s an electric current.”

In the ionosphere, high-altitude winds tend to push on chunky, charged particles more than small, negatively charged electrons. This separation between ions and electrons creates an electric field in the dynamo region, near the bottom of the ionosphere.
Credits: NASA’s Conceptual Animation Lab
Download this animation from NASA Goddard's Scientific Visualization Studio

In most generators, these components are bound tightly so they stay put and act predictably. But the ionosphere is free to move however it likes. “The current generates its own magnetic field, which fights Earth’s magnetic field as it’s passing through,” Immel said. “So you end up with a wire trying to get away from you. It’s a messy generator.”

Following the whims of the ionosphere is key to predicting space weather’s potential impacts. Depending on which way the wind blows, plasma in the ionosphere shoots out into space or plummets toward Earth. This behavior results from the tug-of-war between the ionosphere and Earth’s electromagnetic fields.

The dynamo, which lies at the lower end of the ionosphere, has remained a mystery for so long because it’s difficult to observe. Too high for scientific balloons and too low for satellites, it has eluded many of the tools researchers have to study near-Earth space. ICON is uniquely equipped to investigate this part of the ionosphere from above by taking advantage of the upper atmosphere’s natural glow to detect the motion of plasma.

ICON simultaneously observes powerful winds and migrating plasma. “This was the first time we could tell how much the wind contributes to the ionosphere’s behavior, without any assumptions,” said Astrid Maute, another study co-author and ICON scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado.

Only in the past decade or so, Immel said, have scientists realized just how much those rising winds vary. “The upper atmosphere wasn’t expected to change rapidly,” he said. “But it does, day to day. We’re finding this is all due to changes driven up from the lower atmosphere.”
Wind power

Familiar are the winds that skim the surface of Earth, from gentle breezes to bracing gusts that blow one way and then the other.

High-altitude winds are a different beast. From 60 to 95 miles above the ground, in the lower thermosphere, winds can blast in the same direction at the same speed — around 250 mph — for a few hours at a time before suddenly reversing direction. (By comparison, winds in the strongest Category 5 hurricanes tear at 157 mph or more.)

These dramatic shifts are the result of waves of air, called tides, born at Earth’s surface when the lower atmosphere heats up during the day then cools down at night. They surge through the sky daily, carrying changes from below.

Daily cycles of cloud formation put energy into the atmosphere that, in turn, create a daily cycle of heating and cooling. The heating and cooling pushes wind patterns out and towards regions where clouds are forming. These winds eventually form an atmospheric tide that propagates up through the atmosphere.
Credits: NASA’s Conceptual Animation Lab
Download this animation from NASA Goddard's Scientific Visualization Studio

The farther the atmosphere stretches away from the surface, the thinner it becomes and the less turbulence there is to disrupt these motions. That means small tides generated near the surface can grow much larger when they reach the upper atmosphere. “Changes in the winds up there are mostly controlled by what happens below,” Harding said.

ICON’s new wind measurements help scientists understand these tidal patterns that span the globe and their effects.

Atmospheric tides created by rainforests form a tidal pattern with three main peaks that span across the globe. These move around Earth as it rotates.
Credits: NASA’s Conceptual Animation Lab
Download this animation from NASA Goddard's Scientific Visualization Studio

Tides ripple up through the sky, building in strength and growing before gusting through the ionosphere. The electric dynamo whirs in response.

The scientists analyzed the first year of ICON data, and found high-altitude winds strongly influence the ionosphere. “We traced the pattern of how the ionosphere moves, and there was a clear wave-like structure,” Harding said. Changes in the wind, he explained, directly corresponded to the dance of plasma 370 miles above Earth’s surface.

At 60-95 miles above the ground, winds associated with atmospheric tides (white arrows) move ions and separate them from electrons, forming an electric field (blue line) in the dynamo region. The electric field permeates through the upper atmosphere and pushes plasma (pink) upwards and downwards like a fountain.
Credits: NASA’s Conceptual Animation Lab
Download this animation from NASA Goddard's Scientific Visualization Studio

“Half of the motion of the plasma can be attributed to the winds that we observe right there on that same magnetic field line,” Immel said. “That tells you it’s an important observation to make if you want to predict what plasma is doing.”

ICON's first year of observations coincided with solar minimum, the quiet phase of the Sun’s 11-year activity cycle. During this time, the Sun’s behavior was a low, constant hum. “We know the Sun’s not doing much, but we saw a lot of variability from below, and then remarkable changes in the ionosphere,” Immel said. That told the researchers they could rule out the Sun as the main influence.

As the Sun ramps up to its active phase, scientists will be able to study more complex changes and interactions between space and Earth’s atmosphere.

Immel said he is excited to have this confirmation of long-held ionosphere theories. “We found half of what causes the ionosphere to behave as it does right there in the data,” he said. “This is what we wanted to know.”


Still, Maute said, “This leaves room to explore what else is contributing to the ionosphere’s behavior."

Additional resources:
Dynamo infographic
Dynamo animation

By Lina Tran
NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md.

Global temperatures warmer now than in past 10,000 years, solving climate mystery

NOVEMBER 29, 2021
by Study Finds


NEW BRUNSWICK, N.J. — Contrary to recent research, the annual global temperature today is the warmest it’s been in 10,000 years. New studies suggest this may solve a key mystery in the world of climate change.

The long-standing mystery is called the “Holocene temperature conundrum” which refers to the disagreement between the expected global warming from increasing greenhouse gases and retreating ice sheets, and the cooling shown through reconstruction. Scientists say their findings will challenge long-held views on the temperature history in the Holocene era which began about 12,000 years ago.

“Our reconstruction shows that the first half of the Holocene was colder than in industrial times due to the cooling effects of remnant ice sheets from the previous glacial period, contrary to previous reconstructions of global temperatures,” says study author Dr. Samantha Bova, of Rutgers University, in a statement. “The late Holocene warming was indeed caused by the increase in greenhouse gases, as predicted by climate models, and that eliminates any doubts about the key role of carbon dioxide in global warming.”

Scientists used fossils from foraminifers, or single-celled organisms that live at the ocean surface, to reconstruct the temperature histories of the two most recent warm intervals on Earth. This includes the Last Interglacial period from 128,000 to 115,000 years ago and the Holocene.

To get the fossils, the team collected a core of bottom sediments near the mouth of the Sepik River off northern Papua New Guinea. This was during the university-led Expedition 363 of the International Ocean Discovery Program. Scientists were able to recreate the temperature history of the western Pacific warm pool, which closely tracks changes in global temperatures.

How temperature evolved during the Last Interglacial and Holocene eras is controversial. Some data suggest that the average annual global temperature during modern times is lower than during the Holocene’s early warm period, which was followed by global cooling. Meanwhile, climate models strongly suggest that global temperatures have risen throughout the past 10,000 years. Skeptics claim that climate model predictions of future warming must be wrong.


“The apparent discrepancy between climate models and data has cast doubts among skeptics about the role of greenhouse gases in climate change during the Holocene and possibly in the future. We found that post-industrial warming has indeed accelerated the long and steady trend of warming throughout the past 10,000 years. Our study also underscores the importance of seasonal changes, specifically Northern Hemisphere summers, in driving many climate systems, “ says Dr. Bova.

“Our method can, for the first time, use seasonal temperatures to come up with annual averages,” adds Professor Yair Rosenthal, also of Rutgers University.

The findings were published in the journal Nature.

SWNS writer Laura Sharman contributed to this report.

Germany jails Iraqi jihadist for life for Yazidi genocide

German courts have already convicted five women for crimes against humanity related to the Yazidis committed in territories held by IS (AFP/Arne Dedert)]]]]]]

Issued on: 30/11/2021

Frankfurt (AFP) – A Frankfurt court on Tuesday handed a life sentence to an Iraqi man who joined the Islamic State group for genocide against the Yazidi minority, in the first verdict worldwide to use the label.

Taha Al-Jumailly, 29, was found guilty of genocide, crimes against humanity resulting in death, war crimes, aiding and abetting war crimes and bodily harm resulting in death after joining IS in 2013.

Proceedings were suspended as the defendant passed out in court when the verdict was read out.

The Yazidis, a Kurdish-speaking group hailing from northern Iraq, have for years been persecuted by IS militants who have killed hundreds of men, raped women and forcibly recruited children as fighters.

In May, UN special investigators reported that they had collected "clear and convincing evidence" of genocide by IS against the Yazidis.

"This is a historical moment for the Yazidi community," Natia Navrouzov, a lawyer and member of the NGO Yazda, which gathers evidence of crimes committed by IS against the Yazidis, told AFP ahead of the verdict.

"It is the first time in Yazidi history that a perpetrator stands in a court of law for genocide charges," she said.

Prosecutors say Al-Jumailly and his now ex-wife, a German woman named Jennifer Wenisch, "purchased" a Yazidi woman and child as household "slaves" while living in then IS-occupied Mosul in 2015.

They later moved to Fallujah, where Al-Jumailly is accused of chaining the five-year-old girl to a window outdoors in heat rising to 50 degrees Celsius (122 Fahrenheit) as a punishment for wetting her mattress, leading her to die of thirst.

In a separate trial, Wenisch, 30, was sentenced to 10 years in jail in October for "crimes against humanity in the form of enslavement" and aiding and abetting the girl's killing by failing to offer help.

Identified only by her first name Nora, the child's mother testified in both Munich and Frankfurt about the torment visited on her child.

She also described being raped multiple times by IS jihadists after they invaded her village in the Sinjar mountains in northwestern Iraq in August 2014.

'Clear message'

The mother was represented by a team including London-based human rights lawyer Amal Clooney, who has been at the forefront of a campaign for IS crimes against the Yazidis to be recognised as genocide, along with former Yazidi slave and 2018 Nobel Peace Prize winner Nadia Murad.

Although Clooney did not travel to Munich or Frankfurt, she called Wenisch's conviction "a victory for everyone who believes in justice," adding that she hoped to see "a more concerted global effort to bring ISIS (another acronym for IS) to justice".

Murad has called on the UN Security Council to refer cases involving crimes against the Yazidis to the International Criminal Court or to create a specific tribunal for genocide committed against the community.

Germany, home to a large Yazidi community, is one of the few countries to have taken legal action over such abuses.

German courts have already handed down five convictions against women for crimes against humanity related to the Yazidis committed in territories held by IS.

Germany has charged several German and foreign nationals with war crimes and crimes against humanity carried out abroad, using the legal principle of universal jurisdiction which allows offences to be prosecuted even if they were committed in a foreign country.

The trial of Al-Jumailly "sends a clear message", according to Navrouzov.

"It doesn't matter where the crimes were committed and it doesn't matter where the perpetrators are, thanks to the universal jurisdiction, they can't hide and will still be put on trial."

© 2021 AFP

UK universities hit by strike action over pay and pensions


Latest round in bitter dispute will affect campuses across England, Scotland and Northern Ireland

Strikes will take place at the University of Manchester and Manchester Metropolitan and Salford universities, among others. 

Photograph: Adam Vaughan/Rex/Shutterstock

Richard Adams Education editor
Tue 30 Nov 2021 18.30 GMT

More than a million students will be hit by three days of strikes on campuses across England, Scotland and Northern Ireland starting on Wednesday, in the latest round of an increasingly bitter dispute in which university leaders have accused leftwingers within the University and College Union (UCU) of blocking progress over a possible deal.

Fifty-eight universities will be affected where staff backed a ballot on strike action called by the UCU, halting lectures and tuition at the country’s largest universities, including the Open University and University College London.

In Greater Manchester alone, more than 100,000 postgraduate and undergraduate students will have their studies disrupted, with strikes taking place at the University of Manchester, Manchester Metropolitan and Salford universities, as well as the Royal Northern College of Music.

The dispute is in part over the management and financing of the University Superannuation Scheme (USS), which provides pensions to the UK’s older universities as well as research institutes and academic thinktanks. The two sides are also battling over low pay and issues such as insecure fixed-term contracts used to employ an increasing number of teaching staff.

In a statement issued on the eve of the strike, Universities UK (UUK) – which represents the employers in the pensions talks – argued that the strike was supported by only a minority of staff, and that the UCU’s leadership was being attacked by leftwingers.

UUK, the umbrella body of universities in England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, said a potential deal over pensions had been undermined by the union’s own negotiators, whom it described as “members of the influential UCU Left faction”, saying that there was “a pattern of checks on the UCU leadership by UCU Left, who are affiliated with the Socialist Workers party”.

“With such divisions in UCU’s decision-making bodies, it is difficult to see how a negotiated settlement over USS could ever be possible,” UUK said in its statement.

In response, a UCU spokesperson said: “It is beyond disappointing that just as 50,000 university staff are set to walk out on strike UUK has decided to spend its time targeting individual UCU members.

“Instead of engaging in desperate 11th-hour deflection tactics intended to undermine the strikes, UUK should come clean about the true impact of its pension cuts. After witnessing this bizarre intervention from UUK, students and staff will quite rightly ask why vice-chancellors are allowing their representative body to run amok instead of negotiating positively to resolve yet another dispute in the sector.”

But vice-chancellors are showing no signs of compromising, with some angry at the union’s actions and the failure of negotiations. “I don’t care if it’s bloody, as long as the blood spills within the union,” said one vice-chancellor.

According to UUK, the revisions to pensions on retirement amounted to cuts of 10% and 18% required for the fund to remain financially sound. But the union says its own modelling – prepared by an independent firm – shows a typical lecturer on an annual wage of £39,000 would face a cut to their defined and guaranteed benefits of 35%, while a model published by the USS trustees shows an even deeper 41% cut in future benefits.

Jo Grady, the UCU’s general secretary, said: “Not only have UUK been wrongly criticising UCU’s own projections of the scale of their pension cuts, but they have also adopted wild underestimates of their own, which have been repeated by vice-chancellors at universities up and down the UK in communications to their staff.

“It is beyond a disgrace that senior managers in our universities have been attempting to persuade staff from acting to stop cuts to their retirement with information that is wrong and which emanated right from the top of UUK.”

UCU also said re-balloting on strike action would take place at 42 universities where the ballot failed by only narrow margins, and that strikes would continue into the new year.

While most of the universities involved voted to strike on both the pensions and pay ballots, others only meet the conditions on the pay ballot, while a handful including Imperial College London are striking solely over pensions.

University leaders and ministers have said the strike will bring further disruption to students who have missed months of in-person teaching and the use of facilities such as libraries because of the closure of campuses during the pandemic.

The National Union of Students and a number of campus student unions have supported the strike. A poll of students conducted by the NUS this month found that 73% backed UCU’s action while 9% opposed it.