https://fortune.com/2023/11/08/panama-canal-congestion-record-4-million-skip-line/ A shipper has paid nearly $4 million to jump to the front of the line at the congested Panama Canal waterway, a record high. Japan’s Eneos Group paid $3.975 million in an auction Wednesday to secure the crossing, bidding documents show. That comes on top of the regular transit fees companies pay, which can be hundreds of thousands of dollars more... ...A queue of ships waiting to use the canal has been growing in recent months amid a deep drought. To manage the situation, the canal’s managing authority has announced increasingly drastic restrictions for the depleted thoroughfare. The Panama Canal Authority also holds auctions for those wishing to jump to the front of the line.
https://fortune.com/2023/11/27/panama-canal-backed-up-water-shortage-ships-reroute/ Panama Canal is so backed up and ‘unreliable’ that ships are detouring thousands of miles to avoid costly delays The Panama Canal has become so backlogged that the world’s largest operator of chemical tankers has decided to reroute its fleet to the Suez Canal. London-based Stolt-Nielsen, which has a tanker division with 166 ships, is charging customers additional costs for the longer route, it said in an email. A bottleneck at the Panama Canal due to low water levels has prompted shippers to divert to Suez, the Cape of Good Hope, or even through the Strait of Magellan off the tip of South America. “Stolt Tankers has found that the service through the Panama Canal has become increasingly unreliable in recent months,” the company said in an email. “Our customers need reassurance that their cargo will arrive on time to avoid negatively impacting their supply chains, therefore we have been rerouting our ships via the Suez Canal.” The Panama Canal Authority, which normally handles about 36 ships a day, announced on Oct. 30 that it will gradually reduce the number of vessels to 18 a day by Feb. 1 to conserve water heading into the dry season. Panama had the driest October on record due to a drought caused by the El Niño weather phenomenon, the authority said. It’s unlikely that the canal will be able to increase traffic until the rainy season starts in mid-2024, according to experts. Some ships have had to wait as long as 20 days to get through the canal this year. Stolt said other shippers are “taking a similar approach” to deal with the backlog at the canal.
More data coming in from Canada: A pyroCb (pyrocumulonimbus) is a fire-generated thunderstorm that results from extreme surface wildfire activity. This year, Canada had a record 142 such events and there were only 12 in other countries. The Canadian number also dwarfs previous global totals.
Like to eat crawfish but hate paying twice the price or more? Get used to it. Here are excerpts from a report by the LSU crawfish expert: The drought and heat during the summer and fall caused very high mortality of the carryover crawfish and brood stock. Those are the crawfish that the farmers should be catching in December, January, and February. I don’t see the catch picking anytime soon, especially considering the freezing temperatures expected thru January. Some farmers still have not put out traps mainly because test traps show no sign of crawfish. I’ve dip netted in quite a few ponds and have found very few juvenile crawfish. The ones I do see were likely released from their mother’s tail since the big rain event the region had on December 1, 2023. Given the cold water temperature in January, their growth will be slow and not reach harvest size until late March or April. But even when these crawfish are big enough to catch, there is not a large population of them. The catch may pick up for a short while in April and May but will not be sustainable for the entire spring. The spring crop will be a fraction of what is normally caught. As mentioned in the LSU Drought Impact Report that came out right after Thanksgiving, there were over 45,000 acres that could not flood up due to a lack of water or canal water being too salty. Another 45,000+ acres, though flooded, will not produce any crawfish. The remaining balance will see a significant reduction in total catch. These were the predictions in November. From what I’ve seen since then, the situation is even worse now. I realize I am painting a pretty dismal picture of the 2024 crawfish crop. But this is what I’m seeing. Another issue is that farmers will have to stock their fields in May and June to prepare for next year. I am concerned that brood stock will be hard to come by and will be expensive. It will probably result in less acres being harvested in the 2025 season.
We need new ratings for hurricanes. Hurricanes are becoming so strong due to the climate crisis that the classification of them should be expanded to include a “category 6” storm, furthering the scale from the standard 1 to 5, according to a new study. Over the past decade, five storms would have been classed at this new category 6 strength, researchers said, which would include all hurricanes with sustained winds of 192mph or more. Such mega-hurricanes are becoming more likely due to global heating, studies have found, due to the warming of the oceans and atmosphere. ... “There haven’t been any in the Atlantic or the Gulf of Mexico yet but they have conditions conducive to a category 6, it’s just luck that there hasn’t been one yet,” said Wehner. “I hope it won’t happen, but it’s just a roll of the dice. We know that these storms have already gotten more intense, and will continue to do so.” While the total number of hurricanes is not rising due to the climate crisis, researchers have found that the intensity of major storms has notably increased during the four-decade satellite record of hurricanes. A super-heated ocean is providing extra energy to rapidly intensify hurricanes, aided by a warmer, moisture-laden atmosphere. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2...w-category-needed-study-says?CMP=share_btn_tw
There's a great counterpoint to this: If you make a Cat 6, there will be a subsection that thinks Cat 5s aren't the worst and will not evacuate.
