Scholars and Rogues » energy

The Weekly Carboholic: independent statisticians reject recent global cooling claims in blind analysis

Brian Angliss — Thu, 12 Nov 2009 15:00:59 +0000

Climate disruption deniers have been claiming for years now that the global temperature has been cooling down, even though the temperature data clearly shows that it isn’t. Scientists and statisticians have pointed out that, mathematically speaking, the recent reduced warming trend is well within the noise, or put another way, it’s weather, not climate.

A new report by the Associated Press reveals what many of us knew already – the denier’s claims don’t hold water, statistically speaking. The report is intriguing because the AP provided their data to four independent statisticians without telling them what it was, and all four found that the slower warming of the past decade was statistically insignificant with respect to the actual data.

In a blind test, the AP gave temperature data to four independent statisticians and asked them to look for trends, without telling them what the numbers represented. The experts found no true temperature declines over time.

“If you look at the data and sort of cherry-pick a micro-trend within a bigger trend, that technique is particularly suspect,” said John Grego, a professor of statistics at the University of South Carolina.

Furthermore, the data that the AP sent to the statistician came from two different sources – the National Climate Data Center (NCDC), run by NOAA, and the satellite data preferred by climate disruption deniers that is generated by scientists John Christy and Roy Spencer from the University of Alabama in Huntsville. In both cases, the statisticians found no statistically significant trends over the last ten years.

Statisticians who analyzed the data found a distinct decades-long upward trend in the numbers, but could not find a significant drop in the past 10 years in either data set. The ups and downs during the last decade repeat random variability in data as far back as 1880.

Saying there’s a downward trend since 1998 is not scientifically legitimate, said David Peterson, a retired Duke University statistics professor and one of those analyzing the numbers.

Identifying a downward trend is a case of “people coming at the data with preconceived notions,” said Peterson, author of the book “Why Did They Do That? An Introduction to Forensic Decision Analysis.” (emphasis mine)

The AP interviewed Don Easterbrook, who claimed that “We started the cooling trend after 1998. You’re going to get a different line depending on which year you choose.” According to one of the statisticians, the fact that you have to choose 1998 as your starting point in order to observe a (statistically insignificant) cooling trend is part of the problem.

Grego produced three charts to show how choosing a starting date can alter perceptions. Using the skeptics’ satellite data beginning in 1998, there is a “mild downward trend,” he said. But doing that is “deceptive.”

The trend disappears if the analysis starts in 1997. And it trends upward if you begin in 1999, he said.

This is what’s referred to in statistics as “endpoint sensitivity,” and it’s the main reason that climate disruption deniers like Easterbrook can appear and sound so reasonable when they’re actually misusing or misunderstanding the data.

———-

Melting glaciers releasing pollutants from decades ago

A study published in the journal Environmental Science & Technology has revealed a new and troubling aspect to climate disruption – as glaciers melt, they are releasing persistent organic pollutants like DDT, PCBs, other pesticides, and synthetic musks (chemicals that mask body odor).

The scientists studied the annual sediment layers in a high alpine lake in Switzerland and found that there the annual flux of pollutants varied consistently across all the studied pollutants – the fluxes started low in the 1950s, peaked in the 1960s and 70s, dropped off again in the 1980s, and then rose to a new peak in the late 1990s. But in the case of all the pollutants except for musks, the production of the pollutants ceased by 1986 at the latest, and the musks have been in constant production globally since the late 1980s. The image at right illustrates these peaks for the various pollutants the scientists studied.

According to the study, the first peak corresponds closely to when the production of the various pollutants peaked, either in Switzerland or in continental Europe. That peak likely is a result of airborne delivery of the pollutant, either by way of dust or precipitation depositing the pollution in the lake and surrounding land directly. But since there has been no production (or constant production) of the pollutants in decades, it’s extremely unlikely that dust or rain/snow is responsible for the second peak.

In addition, the authors compare the results from the high alpine, glacial melt-fed lake to several other lower altitude lakes. The comparison shows that the low altitude lakes do not show the same spike in pollutants in the late 1990s that the alpine lake does, but they do show similar dust/precipitation driven spikes in the 1950s, 60s, and 70s.

As a result, the authors’ hypothesized that glacial ice had been accumulating pollutants since the 1960s and 70s and then started releasing those pollutants into the lake as the pollution-laden ice melted. And given the strength of their data, they’re almost certainly correct.

The ramifications of this are significant. Other studies have found recent increases in pollutants around the world even though the production of those pollutants stopped decades ago. Pesticides have been discovered in alpine lakes in the Italian Alps and the Canadian Rockies, and Antarctic penguins have been found to have old DDT in their bodies. If this result holds for other glacially-fed lakes around the world (and there’s no reason to believe that the results won’t hold), then the dangerous pollutants that environmentalists thought had largely been phased out will return and could cause similar ecological damage as they caused decades ago (DDT-thinned eggshells, fishing limitations due to PCBs, etc.). And all as a result of glacier melt that has been caused or enhanced by climate disruption-driven warming. And the results of the study point out that the pollutants present in the studied lake are not likely to be everything that the glacier holds:

The burden of pollutants in Lake Oberaar sediment due to glacier melting is already in the same range as the earlier accumulation from direct atmospheric input. The undiminished increase of the fluxes of many organohalogens into the sediment of Lake Oberaar does not yet prefigure an exhaust of the glacial inventory of these contaminants.

In other words, the environmental toll of these pollutants isn’t over yet by a long shot.

———-

IEA: climate treaty necessary to keep energy prices low

There are many reasons to address climate disruption, ranging from saving species to reducing U.S. dependence on foreign oil to reducing the chance of catastrophic drought. The economy is usually not considered to be one of the reasons, especially by those who have a vested interest in maintaining their own profits at the expense of the environment and global climate. However, there are those who say that addressing climate change is critical to maintaining a healthy future economy. According to a new Reuters article, we can now add to that small but growing list the International Energy Administration (IEA).

Reuters interviewed Fatih Birol, author of the International Energy Agency’s World Energy Outlook, and he said that the world needed to work towards a carbon dioxide (CO₂) concentration of no higher than 450 ppm in order to keep energy costs from skyrocketing by 2030. According to Birol’s estimates, Europe alone would see energy prices increase by 300% over the average of what Europe paid over the last 30 years, from $160 billion per year to $500 billion.

Birol’s also estimates that oil prices will reach $100 per barrel by 2015 and $190 per barrel by 2030. Given that there is evidence that the high oil prices of 2008 were part of what caused the global recession, this should make the U.S. and other oil dependent countries nervous. And the global oversupply of natural gas that is keeping prices low in the U.S. this year won’t last – Birol estimates that the demand for natural gas by 2030 will far outstrip supply.

The Guardian is reporting that an anonymous IEA whistleblower is claiming that US pressure has been applied to redefine the point at which peak oil occurs. If this is true and can be verified, then peak oil is probably much closer than previously expected and Birol’s estimates are very likely optimistic. Similarly, Reuters doesn’t discuss whether Birol has any coal estimates or not, but the USGS has pointed out that the U.S. could be approaching “peak coal” as well, after which the price of energy would skyrocket.

Diversifying energy out of carbon-based fossil fuels makes sense from an environmental perspsective, from a climate disruption perspective, from a green jobs perspective, and from an economic perspective. All that remains is for the world’s governments to accept that it makes sense from a political perspective as well.

———-

Floating cities as a response to sea level rise

Some ideas are just too cool and deserve mention just because they’re cool. According to the NYTimes blog Green Inc., the Dutch are designing floating cities to replace or augment land-based cities as the global sea level rises over the next few centuries. The floating cities would be connected to each other and to the mainland via floating highways and rail lines. According to the article, the designers plan to use the ocean to help moderate the cities’ temperatures in much the same way as ground source heat pump does – pump cold water up from the depths beneath the city in order to cool it efficiently.

In case you’re not convinced that concrete can be made to float, there are floating bridges across Lake Washington in Seattle – the glacially-carved lake is far too deep to drive pilings into the lake bed to support the bridge, so it floats instead.

The first floating proof-of-concept residences in a Rotterdam residential neighborhood are expected to be available in 2010.

———-

American Physical Society rejects changes to climate change statement

Earlier this year, a small group of American Physical Society (APS) members requested that the APS change it’s official statement on climate change. This statement reads:

Emissions of greenhouse gases from human activities are changing the atmosphere in ways that affect the Earth’s climate. Greenhouse gases include carbon dioxide as well as methane, nitrous oxide and other gases. They are emitted from fossil fuel combustion and a range of industrial and agricultural processes.

The evidence is incontrovertible: Global warming is occurring. If no mitigating actions are taken, significant disruptions in the Earth’s physical and ecological systems, social systems, security and human health are likely to occur. We must reduce emissions of greenhouse gases beginning now.

Because the complexity of the climate makes accurate prediction difficult, the APS urges an enhanced effort to understand the effects of human activity on the Earth’s climate, and to provide the technological options for meeting the climate challenge in the near and longer terms. The APS also urges governments, universities, national laboratories and its membership to support policies and actions that will reduce the emission of greenhouse gases.

A committee was appointed by the Council earlier this year to determine if the latest science justified any changes to the statement. According to the official APS press release, the committee recommended that no changes be made, and on November 8, the Council of the American Physical Society “overwhelmingly” rejected the proposed changes to the 2007 statement on climate change.

Appointed by APS President Cherry Murray and chaired by MIT Physicist Daniel Kleppner, the committee examined the statement during the past four months. Dr. Kleppner’s committee reached its conclusion based upon a serious review of existing compilations of scientific research. APS members were also given an opportunity to advise the Council on the matter. On Nov. 8, the Council voted, accepting the committee’s recommendation to reject the proposed statement and refer the original statement to POPA for review.

The APS has over 47,000 members, of which only 206 appear to have signed the petition to the APS Council. That’s about 0.4% of the APS membership. According to the 2009 “Six Americas” study by the Yale Project on Climate Change and the George Mason University Center for Climate Change Communications, fully 18% of Americans are either doubtful or dismissive of climate disruption. If those numbers applied to the 47,000 members of the APS, we could expect almost 8500 signatories to the APS petition.

There are three possible interpretations of this difference:

Physicists may be less willing to sign online petitions for whatever reason(s).
Physicists may actually be more knowledgeable of the science and mathematics than the average American (or less easily swayed by denial industry-manufactured FUD) and thus they accept the overwhelming scientific data to date.
Both 1 & 2

My best guess is that it’s probably option #3. But even so, I doubt that reticence to sign petitions accounts for a 45x difference from physicists to the general population.

Image credits:
Geophysical Research Letters
Environmental Science & Technology
Delft University, via Green Inc

The Weekly Carboholic: Tipping points will be difficult to identify

Brian Angliss — Wed, 14 Oct 2009 11:30:29 +0000

Is the Earth’s climate approaching a critical transition, aka a “tipping point,” beyond which major and largely unpredictable climate changes are guaranteed to occur? At this point, scientists do not know the answer to that question. A study published in the journal Nature aims to explain the mathematics of critical transitions beyond just the Earth’s climate and in the process, determine if there are early-warning signals that indicate when a complex system is about to undergo a critical transition.

According to the paper, every complex system, whether it be climate, asthma attacks and epileptic seizures, or systemic crashes in financial markets, exhibits the same basic precursor signs of a tipping point, at least mathematically speaking. All complex systems exhibit one or more of the following early-warning signs: they can take longer to recover from small perturbations and become less random over time (”critical slowing” in the paper), they can bounce dramatically between the old and new states (”flickering”) before finally settling in the new state, or they can develop patterns that gradually change before suddenly disappearing into a new state (”spatial patterns”).

With regard to climate, reconstructions have identified the hallmarks of “critical slowing” in multiple climate transitions:

In a recent analysis, a significant increase in autocorrelation was found in each of eight examples of abrupt climate change analyzed.

And the authors reference one other paper which suggests that recent climate variability is an example of “flickering” that signals a transition to a significantly colder global climate.

The problem, however, is that not all critical transitions show each early-warning sign – some transitions might show more than one while others show one this time and another next time. The result is clearly state in the paper:

[D]etection of the patterns in real data is challenging and may lead to false positive results as well as false negatives.

In other words, not all fast transitions are “critical transitions,” not all critical transitions will be detected, and sometimes a critical transition will not occur even though there were signs of one approaching.

In essence, the science of critical transitions is still very young, and as such, projections of tipping points should be very carefully analyzed, whether they be toward a new glacial period or a sudden melt of all the Arctic sea ice.

For news of a few politicians expecting a “social tipping point” on climate disruption soon, please read this piece by my colleague Wendy Redal.

Thanks to Ubertramp for pointing this paper out to me and to Dr. Scheffer for providing a review copy of the paper.

———-

U.S. Chamber of Commerce President complains about environmentalists

Over the last several weeks, three utilities, Nike, and now Apple have resigned from or otherwise reduced their participation in the United States Chamber of Commerce (USCOC), a business lobbying group that represents millions of U.S. businesses. As a result, the USCOC President and CEO, Tom Donohue, held an hour-long press conference to defend the USCOC’s decision to oppose EPA regulation of greenhouse gases (GHGs).

According to the Greenwire report on the event (linked above), Donahue claimed that an “orchestrated pressure campaign” by environmentalists was responsible for the recent defections. However, National Resources Defense Council climate campaign director Peter Altman disagrees. From the article:

“It’s nice of Donohue to give the environmental movement credit for being able to convince Fortune 500 companies what group they should be a part of,” Altman said. “But it’s a red herring. These companies are making the decision on their own.”

Furthermore, San Francisco venture capitalist Nancy Floyd was quoted as saying “This issue (climate change regulation and/or legislation) has really divided the business community. The divide is not really along traditional players versus technology players; it is across the board.”

To date, the USCOC has not changed its position with respect to EPA regulation of GHGs or chosen to get behind either the Waxman-Markey ACES act or the new Kerry-Boxer draft legislation in the Senate. However, two Silicon Valley business organizations ran an advertisement in the San Jose Mercury News and the Congress Daily saying, in part:

As our European and Asian competitors move forward to build the next generation of clean energy technology, the U.S. Chamber seems mired in false debates over settled science and a 20th Century approach to energy. It’s time for the “voice of business” to move forward, embrace a market-based cap on carbon pollution, and help lead a new century of American prosperity. (emphasis original)

The two Silicon Valley organizations are the Silicon Valley Leadership Group (SVLG) and Joint Venture Silicon Valley Network (JVSV). A brief scan of the membership of SVLG turns up a veritable who’s who of tech companies, as well as some banking, health, and energy companies: Adobe Systems, Apple Computer, AT&T, Bank of America, Chevron Energy Solutions, Citibank, Dell, eBay, Google, Hewlett-Packard, IBM, Intel, Kaiser Permanente, Lockheed Martin, McAfee, Microsoft, NASDAQ, Netflix, Oracle, Palm, Roche, Seagate, Sun Industries, Symantec, and Yahoo!. And those are just the ones that most people would recognize – the list is even more impressive for someone who works in technology like I do – nearly all of the major U.S. electronics manufacturing companies have a presence in the SVLG.

Perhaps even more impressive, however, is that the JVSV signed on. The Directors include the mayor of San Jose, a product manager for Google, the Chancellor of the University of California – Santa Cruz, a senior VP at Bank of America, the CEO of Cypress Envirosystems, a California State Senator, to name just a few. The private companies who invest in JVSV are just as impressive as those involved in the SVLG: Cisco, National Semiconductor, Mitsubishi, PG&E, the San Jose Chamber of Commerce, and McKinsey & Company.

The JVSV represents business, labor, universities, city and state government, and non-profits, all of whom are involved in charting the future of the most visionary, profitable, and productive companies and region in the entire country. And they just told the U.S. Chamber of Commerce that they were “dinosaurs.”

Perhaps this advertisement points will convince the USCOC to change its approach to climate legislation and regulation – or perhaps the USCOC will become irrelevant as the companies with vision abandon it and the USCOC’s positions become equivalent to those of the American Coalition for Clean Coal Electricity.

———-

Barrels instead of bottles

According to the NYTimes Green Inc. blog, a number of wineries are foregoing bottles and are instead shipping their wine in barrels. As a result, the wineries are saving money on reduced packaging and are dramatically lowering their carbon footprint due to shipping and bottle manufacturing.

As a beneficial side effect, the wine lasts longer in barrels than it does in bottles.

This is hardly the first time that companies have pushed for reduced packaging – Wal*Mart was one of the first, but it’s hardly the only company working this angle. Still, anything that makes wine cheaper to drink for myself and my family is all good for me – even if that means I have to buy nearly a case at a time.

———-

Ocean acidification to turn parts of the Arctic Ocean corrosive by 2018

Scientists researching ocean acidification in the Svalbard Archipelago north of Norway have made a surprising and awful discovery – the Arctic ocean is acidifying so fast that 10% it will become corrosive within the next 10 years and the entire Arctic will become corrosive by 2100. The Guardian newspaper reported last week on a presentation by French oceanographer Jean-Pierre Gattuso that revealed the terrible news. From the article:

“This is extremely worrying. We knew that the seas were getting more acidic and this would disrupt the ability of shellfish – like mussels – to grow their shells. But now we realise the situation is much worse. The water will become so acidic it will actually dissolve the shells of living shellfish.”

According to the article, the problem is that shellfish form the base of a massive food chain for herring, salmon, and several species of whales. In addition, walruses and seals subsist on shellfish and fish, and polar bears and other top predators feed on the seals and walruses, as well as on fish. So if the bottom of the food chain is disrupted by corrosive seawater, then the entire ecology of the Arctic could be disrupted. And the only way to prevent this is to dramatically and immediately cut carbon dioxide (CO₂) emissions.

If you enjoy salmon or king crab legs, or even if you just enjoy the show Deadliest Catch, you might want to consider enjoying them sooner – there may not be a “later.”

———-

El Niño and its relationship to ocean heat content

Back in October, 2008, I pointed out in comments to another Carboholic that La Niña years were cold because the ocean absorbed heat from the atmosphere and that El Niño years were hot because the ocean emitted stored heat back into the atmosphere. This comes from the physics of thermodynamics, specifically the fact that energy moves from hot areas to cold areas, and not the other way around.

I recently came across this same basic information presented in a different form by the Climate Prediction Center’s El Niño/Southern Oscillation (ENSO) Diagnostic Discussion page and the weekly ENSO updates contained therein:

The basin-wide equatorial upper ocean (0-300 m) heat content is greatest prior to and during the early stages of a Pacific warm (El Niño) episode (compare top 2 panels) and least prior to and during the early stages of a cold (La Niña) episode. (emphasis original), from page 9

In other words, the ocean heat content is lowest at the start of La Niña because after that, the La Niña is absorbing heat from the atmosphere and cooling it. Similarly, the ocean heat content is highest at the start of El Niño because after it starts, El Niño is emitting heat from the ocean back into the atmosphere and heating it.

Image credits:
AFP: Antara News Agency
U.S. Chamber of Commerce
DeLoach Vineyards
Russ Hopcroft, via Australian Antarctic Division
National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, National Weather Service, Climate Prediction Center

The Weekly Carboholic: Climate disruption will disrupt volcanism too

Brian Angliss — Wed, 23 Sep 2009 11:30:58 +0000

Nature News reported last week that vulcanologists have concluded that climate disruption will increase the number of volcanic eruptions. According to the article, the reason is that climate disruption is expected to reduce the amount of ice present atop volcanoes and thus reduce the amount of material keeping volcanoes from erupting.

But there is definitely some evidence that less ice means more dramatic eruptions. “As thick ice is getting thinner, there may be an increase in the explosivity of eruptions,” says Hugh Tuffen from Lancaster University, UK.

As strange as this sounds, it’s well grounded in geologic sciences. For example, a paper published in 1999 found that there was a correlation between the eruptions of Pavlof Volcano on the Alaska Peninsula and the season (see the image above). Specifically, as a result of weather patterns in the region, the ocean gets slightly thicker in November, and the added weight is believed to be compressing the magma chamber that feeds Pavlof. As a result, small periodic eruptions at Pavlof tend to happen in November. And another paper in 2004 found that volcanoes tend to erupt globally during changes in the earth’s crust as a result of the water cycle – seasonal variations in ground and seawater. This paper studied a much larger number of volcanoes and found that volcanoes in different regions of the world respond to different changes, but the bulk of volcanic eruptions seemed to show some seasonal variation.

Other studies have found that there was an increase in volcanism as a direct result of climate change. This paper from 1999 found that there was a strong correlation (the chance of the correlation occurring by chance was less than 0.2%) between interglacial periods (like we’re in now) and increased volcanic activity in eastern California as a result of a number of possible factors, one of which is increased geologic stresses due to the weight of ice and glacial lakes.

What this means is that, as the Nature News article says, we can expect that disruption of the climate will in turn drive disruptions in how volcanoes erupt. Unfortunately, there’s very little data at this point about how climate will affect volcanism, and no modeling at all – the latest climate models all model how the climate responds to volcanism, but none of them presently model how volcanism will respond to the climate.

“The IPCC [Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change] hasn’t addressed these kinds of hazard,” [Bill McGuire from the Aon Benfield UCL Hazard Research Centre at University College London] says. “You have a better chance of coping with any kind of hazard if you know it’s happening,” he adds. “Climate change is not just the atmosphere and hydrosphere; it’s the geosphere as well.”

———-

EPA Office of the Inspector General finds standard gases not so standard after all

Organizations that do pollutant monitoring rely on standard gases to ensure that their equipment functions properly. Each standard gas represents a specific amount of pollutant in a given volume of gas, measured in parts per million (ppm), parts per billion (ppb), or some other convenient measurement for the pollutant in question. The standard gas is then injected into monitoring equipment in order to calibrate the equipment to a known amount of pollutant. From that known amount, the equipment can then track how much pollutant is present in the test environment, either more or less than the calibrated level(s). But this process only works if the standard gases have very close to the amount of the pollutant that the gas is supposed to have.

For example, if a calibration gas used by a utility was certified to contain 100 parts per million (ppm) of SO₂, but only contained 96 ppm, the system operator would unknowingly calibrate the CEMS to read 96 ppm as 100 ppm. This would result in the CEMS overestimating emissions.

Last week, the EPA’s Office of the Inspector General found that approximately 11% of the standard gases for blends of SO₂, CO₂, and nitrous oxide (NO) they had purchased and had independently tested were different from the stated amount of gas by 3% or more when the acceptable range was within 2% of the stated amount. And in an example of the seemingly universal rule of “you get what you pay for,” all the failures were from vendors selling inexpensive standard gases, while all of the expensive gases were acceptable.

This is a severe problem because of the sheer number of things that standard gases are used for. The OIG report points out that accurate measurements are vital for the over $5.1 billion SO₂ trading market that has been responsible for a dramatic reduction in acid rain. Accuracy of measurements is similarly important for the $350 million NO_X trading market. And as for CO₂, the World Bank estimated that the global carbon market was $64 billion in 2007. And metropolitan areas are monitored by the EPA for air quality and are fined or forced to make changes to local utilities or transportation as a result of those air quality measurements – if the measurements are incorrect, then the EPA could be giving some cities a passing grade who actually fail air quality, or failing cities that should actually pass.

The OIG’s recommendation, which the EPA office responsible for standard gases agreed with, was for the EPA to implement a quality control process, something that the EPA does not currently have in place.

———-

Driest years in Pacific Northwest drier than expected

Climate models are always being improved with new understanding of how climate works (especially in two key areas, cloud and aerosol dynamics). But regional climate modeling is particularly difficult for two reasons: climate models are so processor intensive that they cannot yet model the Earth with high horizontal and vertical resolution, and scientists do not know all the regional changes that drive regional climate away from the global average. Put simply, scientists don’t know everything and can’t model in enough detail for accurate regional climate predictions.

Enter a new paper by two U.S. Forest Service scientists who have studied annual streamflow in the Pacific Northwest. They set out to determine if the annual streamflow (the amount of water flowing out of a watershed in a year) of the driest years was different than the annual streamflow of the average year or the wettest years. They used a statistical technique called “linear quantile regression” to detect any difference from the average change detected in other studies by use of another statistical technique known as “least-square regression.”

The scientists found that there was a greater reduction in annual streamflow in the driest years than the mean trend had detected. Climate models had previously predicted that there would be little overall change in the annual streamflow because the same amount of water would flow through watersheds, but at different times of the year. Instead, this study discovered that, while this was true for average and wet years, dry years were significantly dryer (in a statistical sense) as a result of changes in climate since 1949.

As a result, the authors expect that changes in water management throughout the Pacific Northwest may be necessary. The design of water storage reservoirs may need to change in order to hold multiple years worth of water. Reduced annual streamflow will have a significant impact on aquatic life living in streams that run much lower during dry years than they have in the past, and reduced streamflow will serve as a positive feedback with increased air temperature to increase the stream temperatures and possibly cause even greater reductions in fish populations. And while overall drying across multiple years already stresses forests, individual dry years can kill off large swaths of forest, lead to more forest fires, and slow the growth of surviving trees.

One of the more interesting points the authors made was that the dry years appear to be tightly correlated with El Niño/Southern Oscillation (ENSO) variation from year-to-year and with a yearly trend, but the correlation was significantly weaker when they included the cooling trend in the Pacific Decadal Oscillation. While the authors take pains to point out that this doesn’t conclusively say that the PDO isn’t affecting dry year annual streamflow, they do “favor” a model that doesn’t include the PDO as a driver of the annual streamflow. And they call for more analyses to better identify the causes of the observed dry year changes.

More sophisticated analyses considering other indices, temporal lags, and temporal autocorrelation of indices would likely elucidate more information and provide greater certainty, but this rough analysis presents interesting insights.”

I couldn’t agree more.

Thanks to the paper’s primary author, Dr. Luce, for providing a review copy of his paper.

———-

Northeast Passage opened this year for commercial shipping

Historically, Russia’s Arctic coast has been too iced-in for commercial vessels, most of which are designed for hauling their cargo in ice-free waters. But this year, according to a NYTimes article, two German vessels, the Beluga Fraternity and Beluga Foresight, steamed north from South Korea and transited the Northeast Passage, also known as the Northern Sea Route. This route was largely ice free this year, and the two ice-hardened specialty cargo vessels took advantage of the clear waters to cut thousands of miles off the southern route via the Suez Canal. According to the article, while the Beluga vessels were escorted by at least one nuclear powered Russian icebreaker the entire time, the icebreakers were not needed this year.

For the moment, the article points out that the Northeast Passage isn’t expected to be open regularly enough for large just-in-time (JIT) shippers like Maersk to use – schedule accuracy is more important to JIT shippers than fuel savings. But if the Arctic sea ice continues to thin and open up the shipping channel during late August and early September, then specialty shippers like Beluga could start making use of the shorter route in order to get their cargo to its destination cheaper and faster.

———-

12% of the merchant marine fleet is idled

According to an investigative report in the UK’s Daily Mail, there is a massive fleet of idled shipping vessels anchored off the coast of Singapore and southern Malaysia. These ships, and others taken out of service around the world, represent 12% of the the entire global merchant marine fleet, sitting idle. And yet shipyards are continuing to build enough new cargo vessels to increase the total number of vessels by 12% next year.

But according to the report, there are no new ship orders for after 2011, and shipping experts expect that the number of vessels idled by the recession will rise to 25% of the merchant marine fleet in the next two years.

Does this mean that the government’s claims that the recession is over are false? Maybe. I’ve read some discussion that the recent small recovery is a result of companies having to rebuild some inventory after having finally sold off the inventory they had stockpiled before the start of the recession. But that’s a one-time event, and restocking inventory isn’t going to do much for the economy as a whole. What all these ships represent is a lack of advance purchases, either due to a general unavailability of credit or due to companies not expecting enough growth to justify re-expanding their global supply line. In either case, it’s not good news for the global economy in general. Remember – 90% of all goods are shipped on vessels like this, so a 12% reduction shipping merchant marine shipping capacity could mean as much as an 11% reduction in overall international trade – in the last year.

However, this reduction in shipping is good news for global carbon emissions and reduced marine pollution. Oceanic shipping is estimated to produce between 3 and 5% of the world’s carbon emissions, so a 12% reduction in vessels will mean a reduction of between 0.3 and 0.6% of total carbon emissions this year. That represents a reduction in total emissions of at least 100 million metric tons off CO₂. That savings represents more than Romania’s entire national emissions (98 million metric tons in 2006).

And, fortunately or not, depending on your particular perspective, the longer the economy stays depressed, the slower carbon emissions will rebound to previous levels, giving human civilization an opportunity to clean up its energy production technologies some in the interim.

———-

Recycling used plastic into fuel

Nearly all plastic is made from either natural gas or petroleum feedstock. Most plastic is recyclable in some way, either by turning one bottle into another, or by turning bottles into clothing or by turning packing material into park benches. But this is simply reshaping the plastic. Now a company in Maryland has figured out how to turn plastic back into a fuel feedstock that can be blended with diesel or gasoline.

According to Green Inc article, the cost is about $10 per barrel, and the Maryland plant is large enough to convert one ton of plastic into between three and five barrels of oil. However, Environ estimates that nearly 50 million tons of plastic waste are created every year, so a plant that can only convert 6,000 tons per year is a drop in the proverbial bucket. Converting all of that waste back into fuel would take about 10,000 similarly sized conversion plants. Or a bunch of much larger plants. And the process itself is energy intensive – each barrel of fuel represents enough electricity to power 2-3 residences for a day.

So this isn’t a solution to the global plastic problem. And it certainly doesn’t help the U.S.’ oil addiction. But if it can be scaled up, then maybe it’s a step in the right direction. After all, there are more environmental problems than just climate disruption – clean water, air pollution, hazardous waste, and yes, even plastics.

———-

US Chamber of Commerce and car dealer industry group fight California emissions waiver

According to the NYTimes Wheels blog last week, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the National Automobile Dealers Association have asked the EPA to review a waiver it granted to the state of California in June. The waiver allows California to regulate vehicle emissions CO₂ independently and more tightly than national standards. A spokesman for the NADA, Sheldon Gilbert, was quoted in the Wheels blog as saying “That’s a fair description” when asked if the filing was a precursor to a court case.

Clearly, the EPA believes that it’s in accordance with the Clean Air Act, as does the California Air Resources Board, and the Center for Auto Safety’s Safe Climate Campaign. However, the president of Clean Air Watch, Frank O’Donnell, believes that this is just the beginning of carbon emissions lawsuits. He’s probably correct, even though there have been a few lawsuits already relating to climate. But with the courts now involved, it’s fair to say that Arctic communities will be suing energy companies, developing nations will be suing developed nations, and it’s all going to get a lot uglier before things improve. And at least one major insurer/reinsurer believes that a wave of litigation is inevitable.

———-

Slowing population growth more effective than renewables at slowing GHG emissions

There are few taboo subjects when it comes to climate disruption. Environmentalists and activists regularly discuss pollution, energy consumption, the benefits of eating local and seasonal, drinking reclaimed water, even composting human waste. But one thing that is generally considered off-limits is population growth. Given that human reproduction is considered a taboo subject by a large percentage of cultures and religions, this is perhaps unsurprising. But no discussion of humanity’s impact on climate could possibly be complete without occasionally discussing how the mere existence of more people creates climate pressure, taboo subject or not.

A new study by the London School of Economics and commissioned by the British group Optimum Population Trust (OPT) found that reducing the number of people on the planet via voluntary family planning and contraception was pretty cost effective. According to the study, it’s cheaper than all current CO₂ reduction technologies except for geothermal and sugar cane-derived ethanol (see the table above).

However, this conclusion has met with significant criticism from groups opposed to family planning, contraception, and the like. The San Francisco Chronicle’s blog The Mommy Files has a post on this study, and they point out that a British anti-abortion group has attacked the study as concluding “that fewer children and more abortions means a better environment.” As the Mommy Files points out, the OPT actual study says nothing about more abortions creating a better environment. Instead, the study has the following things to say about abortion:

In addition, a reduction in unintended pregnancies (and hence, population growth) is shown to help with issues of hunger, civil conflict, water shortages, unsafe abortions, deforestation and agriculture.

Better access to contraception and sexual education, especially for girls and women, are excellent ways to reduce unintended pregnancies.

A Washington Post article on the same study also pointed out that there was an Oregon State University (OSU) study that came to basically the same conclusions, but went a different direction. Instead of estimating the monetary savings/cost of reducing CO₂, the OSU study estimated now much CO₂ a baby born in a given country would add to the atmosphere:

In the United States, each baby results in 1,644 tons of carbon dioxide, five times more than a baby in China and 91 times more than an infant in Bangladesh, according to the Oregon State study. That is because Americans live relatively long, and live in a country whose long car commutes, coal-burning power plants and cathedral ceilings give it some of the highest per-capita emissions in the world.

Just because the estimated costs are lower for reducing CO₂ emissions via family planning doesn’t mean that this will be enough to keep cumulative emissions from exceeding what many scientists consider “acceptable.” Recent science suggests that global warming should be kept “acceptable” (< 2 °C global temperature rise) if total cumulative emissions are kept below an additional 1,000 billion tons of CO₂ over what we’ve already emitted. The OPT study found that the cumulative emissions savings from 2010 to 2050 was 34 billion metric tons. In 2050, the difference between the worst case and the best case IPCC emissions scenario is about 500 billion tons of CO₂, with the best case staying below the 1,000 billion tons of CO₂ limit and the worst-case exceeding it by 250%. The 34 billion tons saved via population reductions from family planning represents only 6.8% of that difference, and actual emissions are worse than the IPCC wost-case scenario.

Reducing population will help solve so many problems beyond climate disruption that it’s difficult to argue against it from anything other than religious grounds. But as cheap as it could be, it won’t be enough. We’ll still need increased energy efficiency and more renewable energy and maybe nuclear power and to shut down coal plants wherever possible and to quickly transition away from petroleum-powered transportation.

Solving climate disruption isn’t multiple choice, it’s “all of the above”
Image credits:
Birkhäuser
EPA OIG
NYTimes
Daily Mail/Richard Jones/Sinopix
Optimum Population Trust

The Weekly Carboholic: EPA Office of the Inspector General recommends EPA enforce Clean Water Act

Brian Angliss — Wed, 09 Sep 2009 12:30:29 +0000

Last week, the New Orleans Times-Picayune reported that the EPA’s internal monitoring organization, the Office of the Inspector General, found that the EPA’s current approach to controlling excess nutrient deposition into the Gulf of Mexico by the Mississippi River was not working.

The OIG report described an EPA process that, after 10 years of recommending a set of procedures to the Mississippi drainage states, had resulted in the following:

the hypoxic zone in the Gulf of Mexico had become the second largest on record and the second largest dead zone in the world.

Further, the report found that, “[i]n the 11 years since EPA issued its strategy, half the States still had no numeric nutrient standards at the end of 2008.”

The states involved have claimed that the costs of creating their own numerical nutrient limits are onerous, and while the states could adopt the EPA standards, “many States viewed EPA’s criteria as overly protective.” And given that the largest sources of nutrients are agricultural states, the OIG report claimed that the political ramifications and costs to agribusiness were likely significant.

In 2001, the EPA published rules in the Federal Register which said that the EPA would force all states in the Mississippi River watershed would be forced to adhere to EPA standards if the states didn’t come up with their own standards by 2004. The OIG report found that “about one-third of the States did not have a nutrient criteria development plan or were not in the administrative phase of adopting standards.” Further, the report found that “States knew that EPA would not use its promulgation powers so the States were not pressured to accelerate progress” and that “EPA had not established measures to hold itself accountable for achieving the goals of its 1998 strategy” by a 2007 audit.

As a result of the findings of the report, the OIG recommended first and foremost that the EPA determine what waterways needed numeric nutritional standards to protect clean water downstream and that the nutritional standards be set according to the authority granted the EPA by the Clean Water Act. The EPA disagreed with these primary recommendations, claiming that:

“a strategic approach to leverage resources and existing authorities” for “waters of regional, local and multi-State value” is the best way to establish effective standards.

In response, the OIG report said “[h]istorically, EPA has said it would use its authority to set standards as a motivator and then failed to set standards…. These States have not yet set nutrient standards for themselves; consequently, it is EPA’s responsibility to act.”

———-

Climate change lobbyists grow by 31% leading up to ACES vote

According to a new article in the Center for Public Integrity’s “The Climate Change Lobby” series, there are now 1150 companies and organizations registered to lobby Congress on climate disruption legislation. This represented an increase of 31% in the total number of organizations lobbying Congress on this single issue.

The article guessed that at least $27 million was spent lobbying Congress leading up to the House vote on the American Climate and Energy Security Act (ACES).

———-

New information suggests climate change accelerating glacial erosion

What do you think erodes land faster – glaciers, rivers, or human farming? According to new data from various glaciated regions around the world, this is a trick question. Specifically, a paper recently published in the journal Nature Geoscience shows that all three erode land at approximately the same rate.

Previously, glaciers were believed to erode landscape at a rate faster than rivers. New information presented in the paper shows that this is not the case. In fact, the rate of erosion appears to change in proportion with the stability of the land that the river or glacier is eroding – in highly tectonically active areas like the Himalayas, glaciers and rivers both erode the land faster than in tectonically stable areas like Australia or the Oregon coast. In addition, erosion from glaciers and rivers appears to roughly match the rate of tectonic change – areas that are uplifting at a rate of 10 mm per year tend to see glacial and river erosion cut through the terrain at roughly the same rate.

There are a couple of other interesting observations described in the paper as well. For example, glacial erosion appears to increase as glaciers are retreating. The paper describes a number of possible mechanisms for this (namely increased flow of meltwater washing away sediment from the base of the glacier and glacial acceleration scraping off more terrain).

the time-dependent variability in glacial erosion rates we are seeing instead suggests that the erosional impact of glaciers is far greater during periods of warming at the end of a glacial cycle than when averaged over a full glaciation (~10⁵ – 10⁶ yrs). Several studies have recently documented a synchronous increase in retreat, ice loss and acceleration of many of the outlet glaciers in Greenland and Patagonia. Such synchronous ice loss and flow suggests that, contrary to previous conclusions, sediment yields and thus calculated erosion rates are more rapid during glacial retreat…

This suggests that glacial melt as a result of climate disruption will cause a significant amount of additional erosion to those areas that are presently deglaciating, namely Greenland, Alaska, Patagonia, and similar regions of the world.

In addition, the authors point out that lowland erosion from agriculture is approximately the same as the fastest glacial and river erosion, and much faster than river erosion in the tectonically stable lowlands would normally be.

[I]f we compare these erosion rates with rates from overland flow associated with conventional agricultural practices, as compiled previously, we see that farming erodes lowland agricultural fields at rates comparable to glaciers and rivers in the most tectonically active mountain belts (Fig. 3). In other words, the relatively recent advent of farming practices has accelerated erosion of many lowland basins at rates on a par with alpine erosion, rates that far exceed long-term rates not only of uplift but also of weathering and soil formation.

The image below is the aforementioned Figure 3.

Thanks to lead author Dr. Koppes for a copy of her paper for my review.

———-

Wind turbines mistaken for tornadoes

According to an Associate Press article, wind farms can be mistaken by Doppler radar as tornadoes. Specifically, the spinning blades at the top of a 200 foot tower look like the rapidly rotating winds of a powerful thunderstorm or a tornado. And in places like Texas, where there are lots of both wind turbines and tornadoes, turbines have generated erroneous tornado warnings.

As with all plans, the law of unintended consequences reigns supreme.

———-

First deep water tethered wind turbine now operational

The BBC reports that the first tethered deep water wind turbine is now operational in the North Sea off the coast of Norway. The Carboholic first covered the Hywind deep water wind project back in June, when it had been installed but was still undergoing testing. But now the turbine is adding 2.3 MW to the Norwegian electric grid when it’s windy out 10 km in the North Sea.

According to the BBC article, part of the reason that the turbine was placed in the North Sea was because of the severity of winter storms. The idea was to test how well the turbine withstood potentially damaging winds and seas over a two year test period. In the video that accompanies the BBC article, Hywind asset manager Sjur Bratland estimates that it’ll be at least another 10 years until deep water floating wind turbine technologies are advanced enough to deploy widely. According to the BBC article, part of that would be the development of turbines that are smaller, lower to the water surface, and that produce more electricity per turbine, up to 6 MW.

———-

Rare earth metals and renewable energy

Two new articles in Reuters last week pointed to a known but little publicized problem with hybrid vehicles and wind turbines – the large scale use of rare earth metals in the motors, batteries, and generators used in hybrid vehicles and turbines.

The first article points out that the Prius uses 1 kg of the rare earth metal neodymium, 10-15 kg of lanthanum, and trace amounts of terbium and dysprosium. These are used in the electric motor as a lightweight alternative to iron magnets and in the high capacity nickel-metal hydride (NiMH) batteries. The problem is that the largest source of these elements is China, and the Chinese government is limiting exports specifically to ensure a supply of the rare earth metals to Chinese industry. As a result, Toyota and wind turbine manufacturers are looking to rare earth deposits in Canada, Vietnam, and a previously worked mine in California.

The second article is about the California mine. The mine used to be the largest source of rare earth metals in the world until Chinese mine production drove the price down so far that mining in California stopped being economical. According to the article, the mine not only has the largest known deposit of rare earth metals in the world, the ore has very little uranium or thorium, two elements that make extracting the rare earth metals more expensive. And with the development of a new extraction technology, the mining company expects to be able to start extracting 1,000 tons of refined rare earth metals from the mine per day by 2012. Just in time for the mine to fill in the expected gap left by Chinese export restrictions.

Given that the U.S. could possibly be trading a dependency on Middle East oil for a dependency on Chinese rare earth metals, a domestic source of elements critical to renewable energy would be a good thing to have.

Image credits:
Science Education Resource Center
Nature Geoscience
REUTERS/David Becker

Duke energy withdraws from ACCCE

Brian Angliss — Fri, 04 Sep 2009 17:25:15 +0000

On Wednesday, September 2, Duke Energy announced that they were withdrawing from membership in the American Coalition for Clean Coal Electricity (ACCCE), an industry group composed of utilities, mining companies, and other companies involved in the mining, transportation, and combustion of coal.

In response, the ACCCE issued a bland statement that didn’t even mention Duke by name. It says, in part:

ACCCE is a broad and diverse coalition, composed of more than 40 members, who are working to advance the public policy dialogue on critical issues relating to energy, environmental, and economic policies. From time to time, individual coalition members may have different perspectives with regard to important policy positions.

Coming on the heels of letters forged by Bonner & Associates on the ACCCE’s behalf, a few websites have suggested that Duke’s departure was related to those letters. S&R put this question to Duke Energy spokesman Tom Williams, who said that the letters were not the cause. Instead, the official Williams claimed that it became clear that a number of other ACCCE members had no intention to support addressing climate change. Williams also said that he had himself observed this in some of the steering committee meetings that he attended.

Williams went out of his way to point out that not all of the remaining ACCCE members were against making progress in addressing climate change, only that, as the official talking points claim, certain “influential member companies who will not support passing climate change legislation in 2009 or 2010.”

Duke Energy remains part of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the business group that recently called for a “Scopes trial” hearing on the EPA’s finding that greenhouse gas emissions cause climate change and that climate change is a threat to human health. When asked about Duke’s membership in the Chamber, Williams responded that the Chamber was “not a single-issue organization.”

According to Williams, Duke supports climate change legislation before Congress and is asking the Department of Energy for some funding to assist in commercialization of carbon capture technology on the scale of an large coal plant. Duke is currently constructing a large integrated gasification combined cycle (IGCC) coal plant in Indiana, and it’s this plant for which Duke is applying for federal financial assistance. According to Williams, Duke has also asked Indiana utilities regulators to allow Duke to pass some of the research and development costs for carbon sequestration on to Duke’s customers.

According to Duke’s official talking points, “coal must continue to be part of our nation’s power generation mix,” even though carbon capture and sequestration (CCS) technologies are, according to Williams, “clearly not” commercial yet.

Duke will now have to work on developing those technologies without the cover of the ACCCE.

The Weekly Carboholic: U.S. Chamber of Commerce files for EPA climate disruption trial (update #2)

Brian Angliss — Wed, 26 Aug 2009 12:30:49 +0000

Earlier this week, the LATimes reported that the U.S. Chamber of Commerce (hereafter “the Chamber”) has petitioned the EPA to hold a trial-like hearing on the science of climate disruption. According to the article, officials for the Chamber want to make it “‘the Scopes monkey trial of the 21st century.’”

EPA officials interviewed for the LATimes article are dismissive of the Chamber’s petition, referring to it in the article as “frivolous” and a “waste of time.” However, given that the Chamber has threatened to take the EPA to federal court to force them to hold this trial-like hearing, it’s unlikely that the Chamber considers their petition “frivolous.”

A ClimateWire article in the NYTimes clarifies the Chamber’s point and points out that the EPA’s public process has already been extensive:

EPA has hosted two public hearings and received more than 300,000 public comments on the matter already.

“They don’t have the science to support the endangerment finding,” Bill Kovacs, the chamber’s vice president for environment, regulatory and government affairs, said in an interview. “We can’t just take their word for it.”

This indicates that the Chamber’s chief complaint isn’t so much as that the science underlying anthropogenic climate disruption is wrong, but rather that the science supporting the EPA’s finding that climate disruption endangers human health is wrong. This same point was reported by the Wall Street Journal’s climate blog here.

The response from around the web has been rapid and fierce. Skeptic and denier sites claim that the EPA is cowardly for rejecting the proposed hearing and that, if the Obama Administration were really for change, they’d order the EPA to hold the hearing. Not all such sites think this style of hearing on the strengths or weaknesses of scientific hypotheses and theory is a good idea, however.

The Constitutional Accountability Center (CAC) is one of the many sites supporting the EPA’s position. They point out that the Chamber is making their appeal after the official public comment period on the endangerment finding has closed. During the official comment period, over 300,000 public comments were made on the proposed endangerment finding and two large and well attended public hearings were held, one in Seattle and the other in Arlington, Virginia. The CAC proposes that the main goal of the Chamber isn’t to actually “win,” but rather to delay the EPA’s action as long as possible, an opinion that Pete Altman, climate campaign director for the NRDC, shares at the NRDC’s Switchboard blog.

Ultimately, though, one of the most interesting points in all of this is the fact that the Chamber has equated their position with that of William Jennings Bryan, the once famed anti-evolutionist lawyer for the prosecution. While Bryan won trial and the conviction was overturned on a technicality, the Scopes trial represented the beginning of the end for creationism in the United States, whether due to the cynical reporting of H.L. Menken or the death of Bryan shortly after the conclusion of the trial. It took several more decades before anti-evolution laws were ultimately overturned by the Supreme Court, but it did happen.

On the other hand, perhaps the Chamber is hoping simply for the same kind of delay that the Scopes trial was able to produce – several more years or decades of no effective action against climate disruption. Or perhaps the Chamber is playing to a particular audience, namely the same people who look at the Scopes trial as a win for creationism or, in its more recent incarnation, intelligent design.

UPDATE: The Wonk Room has obtained a copy of the Chamber’s petition.

The petition, acquired by the Wonk Room, claims that scientific research demonstrates global warming has stopped, the oceans aren’t acidifying or warming, sea level isn’t rising, extreme weather events aren’t increasing, tropical diseases aren’t spreading, wildfires aren’t increasing — but even if the planet were getting warmer, then U.S. citizens will be healthier, air pollution will decrease, and U.S. agriculture will benefit.

———-

GRACE satellites show water use in India is unsustainable

According to a new study reported in the BBC, the Gravity Recovery And Climate Experiment (GRACE) satellite has detected a significant reduction in the amount of groundwater in India. According to the BBC, the study finds the reason for the falling groundwater level is overuse for irrigation. According to the Jet Propulsion Laboratory press release, the total loss from 2002 to 2008 was 108 cubic miles.

GRACE detected this change by monitoring the gravity of the Earth as it orbits. How much gravity affects one of the two paired satellites varies depending on how much mass is below the satellite. By very accurately monitoring the distance between the two satellites, scientists can detect the force of gravity and create a gravity map of the Earth. By monitoring changes in the Earth’s gravity over time, scientists can detect what parts of the Earth are gaining or losing mass. In the case of India, GRACE detected a loss in mass over land even though records showed that monsoon rains were relatively constant during the study period.

Since GRACE was launched in 2002, it has made a number of other important observations, two of which are critically important. The first was confirmation that Greenland is losing ice mass. Specifically, a paper confirmed that Greenland lost approximately 240 cubic kilometers of ice per year between April 2002 and November 2005. This was compared to 225 cubic km per year based on satellite radar.

The second observation was that, from 2002 to 2005, the Antarctica ice sheet lost approximately 150 cubic km of ice per year. Prior to GRACE, scientists didn’t know whether Antarctica was overall gaining or losing mass – there was widespread agreement that West Antarctica was losing mass, but no agreement over whether East Antarctica was gaining mass fast enough to compensate for the loss in the West – or if the East was also losing mass. What GRACE discovered was that the East was maintaining it’s overall mass while the West was losing mass.

So long as the two satellites continue operation, we can reasonably expect that more discoveries like the three mentioned above will continue to be made.

———-

Biofuel crops may become next invasive species

According to a ClimateWire story, scientists are becoming concerned about the potential for biofuel crops to become invasive weeds. The problem, as the article points out, is that the best cellulosic biofuel crops are going to need very little water, little to no fertilizer, and produce high yields. You know, like kudzu in the South or bindweed here along the front range.

Hey, here’s an idea – can kudzu or bindweed could be made into cellulosic biofuel feedstock? Kill two birds with one stone and all that.

———-

Is GM’s 230 MPG Volt claim real?

A couple of weeks ago, General Motors announced with great fanfare that the Chevy Volt was so energy efficient that it would get 230 MPG. According to the NYTimes, GM used an EPA-approved methodology, but the number itself hasn’t been verified or independently tested. According to an interview with Larry Nitz, GM’s executive director of hybrid powertrain engineering, at GM-volt.com, the EPA methodology is a baseline that is based on a statistical traffic study done in 2001 that measured how the typical vehicle will be used. Since the first 40 miles in a Volt uses no gasoline at all, it turns out that you’ll get 230 MPG if you drive precisely 51.1 miles. Any further than that and you’re gas mileage drops – at 80 miles, you’re down to 100 MPG.

Ultimately, though, figuring MPG for a mostly-electric vehicle is a challenge. If you never drive over 40 miles, you won’t consume any gasoline at all, and so you’re MPG is effectively infinite. But you’re still consuming energy. The difference is that the energy is coming from the electrical grid and whatever coal, natural gas, nuclear, or renewable generator is closest to you. For that reason, it’s probably more accurate, and certainly fairer, to compare the Volt’s overall energy consumption to the energy consumption of other vehicles.

Of course, given that GM has a vested interest in continuing to tout the MPG numbers, it’ll probably be third parties who perform those calculations and not GM.

For a more amusing take on the whole Volt MPG thing, check out satire site Smooth Operator.

———-

Tubular Rail aims to invert train and rail

Let’s perform a simple experiment. First, find a pen. Second, put it on the edge of the table and scoot it slowly off the edge. If you watch it closely as it starts to tip over, you’ll notice that it doesn’t start to tip until about it reaches about the middle. This is because the pen’s center of gravity is supported by the table until you reach approximately the pen’s center. But as soon as the pen’s center of gravity is unsupported, it starts to tip over and will eventually fall to the floor.

This fact – that a cantilevered beam doesn’t start to fall until it reaches it’s midpoint – is the basis behind a new form of train that the developers claim will cost 60% less than traditional rail. It’s called tubular rail, and its developers are at Tubular Rail, Inc. (TRI)

According to the website, it will cost less partly because components can be prefabricated, it has a lower footprint (and so would need fewer easements or use of eminent domain), and lower overall construction costs. And it’s a very interesting idea. The trains turn very gradually as they pass through the support tubes (that also provide power to the train cars) and since they’re suspended over roads and existing rail, they could be used pretty much everywhere.

The website is reasonably slick, but I couldn’t find any indication that their idea has any significant money behind TRI. And by “significant money” I mean enough money for TRI to develop their idea beyond the website stage and turn it into a demonstration project. Hopefully I’m wrong, since this technology could change the game for intermediate and long distance transportation around the country. If it lives up to the hype, that is.

———-

July global ocean temperature sets two records

The Associated Press has reported that the average global ocean sea surface temperature in July set a record for the hottest July since measurements started. The ocean was 0.5924 °Celsius over the previous record, set during the strong El Niño in 1998, of 0.5761. This is according to the National Climatic Data Center (NCDC) July 2009 highlights page. What the AP didn’t report, however, and neither did the NCDC, is that the preliminary data from July shows that July 2009 was the hottest sea surface temperature anomaly since recording started 130 years ago. Previously, the warmest month was December 1997 (0.5776 °C), as the 1998 El Niño was starting.

UPDATE: Skeptic Dr. Roy Spencer believes that he’s found a significant error in the NOAA SST dataset. He’s posted some data on his website that appears to show a warm bias to the NOAA data as compared to two different satellite datasets. It’s certainly possible that he’s correct, but it’s also possible that undetected errors/biases in the satellites are responsible. However, that there is an unknown error between the satellite and in-situ NOAA measurements appears to be pretty likely. I look forward to finding out the real story here when the source of the error(s) is discovered and corrected.

Additional information from the NCDC that bear mentioning is that, while the United States has been having an unusually cool summer (the 27^th coolest on record), the global land plus sea surface temperature anomaly for July was the 5^th warmest on record, the January through July 2009 period is tied for 6^th warmest on record with 2004, and this July was the 33^rd July in a row that was over the 20^th Century mean for combined land and sea surface temperature anomaly.

To put this into perspective, let’s do a few simple calculations. It takes a lot more energy to heat up a kilogram of water one °C than it does to heat up one kg of air – about 4.2 times as much energy, in fact. But a cubic meter of water has a LOT kg of mass than a cubic meter of air – about 854 times the mass of air at sea level.

So let’s take the volume of the lowest kilometer of atmosphere (roughly representing the land surface temperature region), multiply that by the mass of air at sea level, and then multiply that by the amount of energy it takes to increase that volume of air by 1 °C (aka “heat capacity”), and we get approximately 6.1×10²⁰ Joules (J). A really, really big number.

If we take just the top meter of the global ocean (roughly representing the sea surface temperature), multiply that volume by the mass of seawater, and multiply that number by seawater’s heat capaciy, we get about 1.6×10²³ J. An even bigger number.

Divide the energy in the top meter of the ocean by the energy in the lowest kilometer of atmosphere and you find that the ocean holds approximately 262 times more energy. And this is a conservative estimate, as I didn’t take into account the reduction in atmospheric pressure from sea level to 1 km in altitude, nor did I estimate the actual volume of the wave/wind mixed surface layer of the ocean, which is probably several meters to tens of meters deep. A real calculation would produce an ocean surface heat capacity that was much higher than my quick-and-dirty calculation.

Given that ocean covers more than 70% of the Earth’s surface and just how much more energy the ocean can store than the atmosphere, perhaps the most interesting point made by the NCDC was this, about this year’s El Niño:

El Niño persisted across the equatorial Pacific Ocean during July 2009. Related sea-surface temperature (SST) anomalies increased for the sixth consecutive month in this ENSO domain, where July SSTs were more than 0.5°C (0.9°F) above average. If El Niño conditions continue to mature, as now projected by NOAA, global temperatures are likely to exceed previous record highs.

For your information, the warming water trend is called “El Niño” because it historically peaks in December, which is why it’s named after the Spanish name of the Christ child.

Image credits:
NASA/Trent Schindler and Matt Rodell
Pacific Northwest Weed Management
Motor Trend
Tubular.com
SSEC

The greening of a high alpine lake

Brian Angliss — Fri, 31 Jul 2009 12:25:11 +0000

Earlier this week, for the first time in at least eight years, I revisited one of my favorite places on the Earth that I’ve yet experienced. It’s a snowmelt-filled, glacier-carved alpine lake just below treeline in Rocky Mountain National Park. It’s surrounded by tall cliffs and you have to scramble over boulders to get to it (something that my wife didn’t exactly appreciate when I tried to show it to her). Sure, it’s close to one of the favorite places for tourists in the park, but most of the time I don’t mind a few other people so long as they’re being polite and not too noisy, and the people eating lunch around the lake were generally OK.

This lake and I go way back, back to when I abandoned my Catholicism in favor of a neo-paganism of my own creation. It helped me find myself and a new spirituality in a period of my life when so many things were changing that it felt like the best I could do is hang on. And I feel that it was this lake that saved my life one very, very strange night in a strange town in central Pennsylvania.

I feel a spiritual connection to this lake, like I can feel its presence with me when I concentrate.

When I arrived at the lake, though, I discovered something that saddens me. Eight years ago the lake looked like liquid glass it was so pristine and clear. But yesterday it was green.

Algae hasn’t grown in my high alpine lake. The temperatures stay too cold and there’s not enough nutrients in the surrounding terrain for algae to grow thick enough to turn the water green. But Rocky Mountain National Park is one of the most heavily visited parks in the United States because it’s so close to Denver. In 2008, it was the 7th most visited park, with almost 2.8 million visitors. For comparison, the Grand Canyon and Yellowstone saw 4.4 million and 3.1 million visitors, respectively, in 2008. All those cars emit pollution that contains nitrogen oxides, and the rain washes all that extra nitrogen into the streams and lakes in and around the park.

But as polluting as all those cars are, they’re not the only source of nitrogen that the park has to deal with. Winds from the Denver metropolitan area sweep up into the park where rain and snow drop the nitrogen into the ecosystem.

All that nitrogen isn’t just turning alpine lakes green, it’s also changing the alpine tundra ecosystem, replacing native tundra plants with cold-tolerant grasses that previously couldn’t survive in the nitrogen poor soils above treeline.

But the extra nitrogen is only part of it. Something else that affects water quality in alpine lakes is warming temperatures, and the temperatures have been rising. This is especially true of winter temperatures. Greening alpine lakes isn’t the most obvious evidence of this change – that would be the large-scale killing of evergreen trees due to a pine beetle infestation.

Thankfully, the changes needed to clean up my high alpine lake are the very same changes that the global climate needs to address climate disruption. Less nitrogen pollution from industry and transportation. Fewer carbon emissions from all energy sources. Less ozone. Less sulfur dioxide. And conveniently enough, all of those things help not just alpine lakes, but also public health in general. Ozone triggers asthma attacks. Nitrogen oxides create choking smog. Sulfur dioxide makes acid rain. And lowered carbon emission, applied globally, will keep the health effects of climate disruption from becomming even worse (tropical diseases in temperate areas, fatal heat waves, more intense precipitation causing more deaths from injury, and so on).

I hope my lake will return to being liquid glass again, but it will take concerted action by people living along the Colorado Front Range. First and foremost it’ll take mass transit and the abandonment of coal, both for electricity and industry. At the moment, Denver is building a large mass transit system that will help greatly, but only if it’s finished, and finishing it will take more money than voters originally approved. But while the coal power plants that power the city are all old enough that they could be replaced, replacing the plants with cleaner sources of electricity will be much more expensive than upgrading without federal legislation enacting a price on carbon.

I’ve known about the transit and energy changes along the Front Range for at least a decade, and I’ve written about the science underlying the broader, global trends for years now. I’ve voted in support of the changes over at least six election cycles even though doing so occasionally put my employment at risk indirectly. But most of the time I was voting and writing on environmental and climate changes that were largely impersonal.

Earlier this week I discovered that it had become a bit more personal for me.

Planes, trains, or automobiles? Green transportation choices are not clear cut

Brian Angliss — Mon, 20 Jul 2009 12:30:57 +0000

When studies look at the amount of greenhouse gases emitted by transportation, the focus is nearly always on the emissions created in fuel combustion – gasoline and diesel for cars and trucks, bunker fuels for maritime vessels, jet fuel for aircraft, and so on. One excellent example of this kind of study is the Getting There Greener study by the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS). The UCS study shows that travel by bus emits the least carbon at all distances traveled and for one, two, or four travelers. Similarly, the study found that flying first class was almost always the worst option, with driving a typical SUV any appreciable distance coming in a close second.

But what most studies lack is a detailed analysis of the overall cradle-to-grave lifecycle of the transportation modes being compared. A new study by two University of California-Berkeley researchers has attempted to analyze the bulk of the lifecycle of multiple types of passenger vehicles, including fuel production, manufacturing and maintenance of the vehicles themselves, infrastructure construction and repair costs, all in addition to the basic fuel consumption. And the study also looks at three commonly regulated pollutants in addition to energy consumption and greenhouse gas (mostly carbon dioxide) emissions.

And the results are quite a bit different from purely fuel consumption-based analyses.

Transportation in the United States accounts for about 33% of all carbon dioxide (CO₂) emissions, about 75% of carbon monoxide, about 5% of sulfur dioxide (SO₂), and around 57% of nitrogen oxides (NO_x). In addition, transportation accounts for about 28% of all energy consumed in the United States. Therefore, understanding how best to improve the fuel efficiency and lower the emissions created by the transportation sectors is a natural approach to improving overall air quality and slowing climate disruption.

But fuel consumption is only one part of the equation, and not necessarily the most important part. Not all pollutants are emitted in large amounts by vehicles. SO₂, the compound responsible for acid rain, is largely produced by coal fired power plants. But what happens if, in the future, most vehicles are plug-in hybrid and electric vehicles? Fuel consumption will go down, but SO₂ emissions will likely rise dramatically if coal plants remain the dominant source of electricity, and those increased emissions could reasonably be applied to the transportation sector.

In an attempt to estimate the real greenhouse gas (GHG) and pollutant emissions, the Berkeley study chose three “typical” automobiles, four “typical” rail lines, urban buses, and three “typical” aircraft. For each of those typical vehicles, the researchers collected data on the mining and processing of raw materials, fabrication of components, the shipping of components to the assembly factory, electricity used in the assembly process, how much energy was consumed in maintaining the vehicles, how much fuel was burned in shipping replacement parts from factories to the maintenance facilities, the pollution created in making infrastructure like roads, train tracks, or airports, the lifespan of the infrastructure, transportation to and from central depots like airports, the GHGs emitted in building parking lots, how often roads needed to be repaired, the amount of time spent idling vs traveling, and so on. And, of course, the direct consumption of fuel in order to move the vehicle from one place to another. Only the decomissioning of the vehicle itself was left out of the analysis due to complexities created by the many varied ways that vehicles can be scrapped – turned to scrap metal, picked over for individual parts, left to rust in the Mojave desert, etc.

In all cases, though, the emissions of GHGs and pollutants due to the vehicle’s lifecycle significantly boosted the overall emissions, in one case by a factor of 8 (800%). And as a result, the usual “airplanes terrible, cars bad, trains OK, buses best” analysis result was turned around some.

First off, when it comes to overall energy consumption, the lowest energy consuming transportation method is urban diesel bus with peak ridership while the highest consumption is the very same bus with off-peak ridership. And as you might expect, the sedan, SUV, and pickup are all worse than all the aircraft and mass transit option. But there’s already an interesting data point – on a pure energy consumption basis, all three commercial aircraft (small, midsize, and large) consume more energy than all the train options. But when the energy consumed during the rest of the lifecycle is included, large aircraft are actually more efficient on a passenger-kilometer traveled (PKT) basis than one of the two light rail systems profiled.

Looking at greenhouse gases reveals another change due to lifecycle GHG emissions. The highly electrified light rail systems in the Northeast not only emit more greenhouse gases than diesel-powered commuter rail and west coast light rail, it also emits more GHGs than midsize and large aircraft even though the Northeast light rail consumes the least overall energy. According to the paper, this is because “The San Francisco Bay Area’s electricity is 49% fossil fuel-based and Massachussetts’ is 82%.” This results in a reversal of one of the UCS study’s conclusions about rail travel – “Ride the rails in the Northeast to cut carbon and congestion.” (Chapter 4, page 20).

The problems with light rail powered by fossil fuel power plants become even more clear when you look beyond just GHGs into standard pollutants. SO₂ emissions were the worst for light rail due to coal’s high sulfur emissions. Urban diesel buses at peak ridership were still the best performers, but all three aircraft sizes were better than all of the rail options, and the lowest SO₂ rail option was actually the diesel commuter rail. And the three auto options were in the middle – worse than aircraft on a PKT basis, but better than all but one of the rail options.

57% of nitrogen oxides come from transportation, and the worst offender was again the off-peak urban bus. Commuter rail and pickups were tied for next worst, with electric rail having the lowest NO_x emissions. Aircraft were in the middle of the pack.

Finally, carbon monoxide pollution is mostly a result of autos, and nothing in the overall lifecycle changed that – the typical sedan (the best performer of the three autos) was still between five and six times worse than its nearest mass transit competitor, the off-peak urban bus. And while electric rail lines had an extremely low fuel emission profile for carbon monoxide, the construction of the rail lines themselves resulted in enough carbon monoxide emissions to make them worse overall than an urban bus at peak ridership – even though the bus was powered from a comparably highly polluting diesel engine.

As illuminating as the results of the lifecycle emissions estimates are, however, they aren’t the complete story.

The paper’s graphs illustrate that even if you were able to reduce the energy consumption, carbon emissions, and pollution to zero, the results are still counter-intuitive. As the table below shows, urban peak buses remain the overall best transportation, but large and medium size aircraft continue to perform extremely well. In fact, in energy consumption, GHG emissions, SO₂, and NO_x, air transportation performs as well as or better than all of the rail options. This is again because of the relative lack of infrastructure required for air vs. ground transportation.

Of course, we can’t reduce the effects of active vehicle operations (mostly fuel consumption) to zero, and aircraft are likely to have a greater problem with this than most other forms of transportation. But let’s assume that new research into low carbon aircraft fuels produce the 60-80% cuts in GHG emissions mentioned in this article, and let’s further assume that we can reduce GHG emissions for all the other forms of transportation by 90%. Again, GHG emissions of air travel continue to look good compared to rail travel due to the infrastructure costs of the train.

These thought experiments could go on forever, and I’m certain that there will be others who look at the paper’s results in far greater detail than I can by “eyeballing” the graphs. The overall point is this – the complete lifecycle of a form of transportation must be considered before we can reasonably judge whether one form of transportation is “better” than another. Replacing the pollution from personal cars and trucks with pollution from a coal plant may not, in fact, be a good tradeoff even if overall GHG emissions and energy consumption fall as a result. Similarly, ridership should also be considered before determining what the “best” solution for a given region will be. And finally, the mix of energy and infrastructure required for the “optimal” transportation scheme will be dramatically different from region to region, from urban to suburban to rural, and from short to long distance transportation.

As with renewable energy, one size will most definitely not fit all, and research and development in all of the main modes of transportation is well warranted.

Image Credits:
Vincent Laforet, NYTimes
Environmental Research Letters
S&R

I am no better than George Will. And it sucks.

Guest Scrogue — Wed, 15 Jul 2009 20:28:24 +0000

by John Harvin

“If English was good enough for Jesus Christ, it ought to be good enough for the children of Texas,” supposedly said Miriam “Ma” Ferguson, first woman governor of Texas, in opposing the teaching of foreign languages in Texas schools. In fact, the college-educated Ferguson probably didn’t say it. But the misquote endures because it captures pretty well one particular segment of the American population – those who are almost always against learning and science, particularly when that science is “inconvenient.”

Whether it’s evolution or landing on the moon or daylight savings time or climate change, there is always a group of people who are just plain agin’ it. It’s a lot of fun for those of us with a smattering of education to make fun of these rubes – at the Creation Museum in Kentucky, you can have your picture taken riding a saddled triceratops. But there are also anti-scientists who aren’t rubes and should know better, like George Will, who has jumped on the climate-change denial bandwagon.

97% percent of scientists around the world believe that climate change is occurring and is at least partially caused by man. According to Wikipedia, every single scientific organization worldwide of any standing has taken the same position.

As for the other 3%, it’s understandable why those who design SUVs and drill for petroleum should be reluctant to admit that global warming is occurring. My client Michael, who retired from Philip-Morris after thirty plus years, only recently acknowledged that smoking might play a role in lung disease. But why are George Will and my friend Chris, a CEO educated at Oxford and Harvard Business School, climate-change denialists? With George, I assume it is just simple cynical expediency. I’ve done enough big-time public speaking to know the only way to get paid is to tell the audience what it wants to hear and there are audiences for this stuff. George and Rush Limbaugh have mortgages and prescription bills just like the rest of us. (In kind, not in degree.)

With Chris it’s a mystery why he cares so much, but he has invested countless hours cherry picking the data to “prove” that global warming is a data blip. Is it simply pro-growth reflex?

Who knows? Not that it really matters. Whether George and Chris buy into it or not, overwhelming scientific evidence suggests anyone who asserts man-made climate change is not occurring is either A) a fool or B) completely blinded by self-interest.

The problem is this: I do believe in the climate change science. That takes me out of Category A, thank goodness. But I am pretty sure I am still a climate-change denialist. I am just in Category B.

Don’t get me wrong. At our house, we meticulously sort every bit of garbage for recycling. We compost. I ride public transportation to work. We have instructed the architect for our new home to install solar panels and a geo-thermal heat pump. Our new refrigerator has the highest energy rating possible. We bought a first-generation hybrid car. We support climate change legislation like the Waxman bill (HR 2998, such as it is).

But the inconvenient truth is we also have three vehicles, including a rather large Audi that my eco-friendly wife drives. We have two houses and are building another (for two people.) We have a television on every floor of both houses, including three flat panels, each of which soaks up as much energy as a refrigerator. We fly to Barbados in the summer and Tahoe in the winter.

In other words, sorting our garbage to reduce our carbon footprint is like pissing into a hurricane. At best, it is naïve and ridiculous tokenism. At worst, it is just a cynical as George Will’s denialism. When Al Gore justifies his massive mansion and fleet of cars by saying he purchases green energy and carbon offsets, that is pure sophistry.

Here’s the bottom line. If reducing global warming depends on reducing carbon emissions, the planet is screwed. Consuming the same amount more efficiently, i.e. driving a hybrid car, is just fiddling around the edges. It’s like obese people who drink diet soda with their fried chicken. In fact, carbon intensity will probably increase going forward, not decrease. For example, the computer you’re reading this blog on. That takes energy. In Japan, the hot new items are electric toilets with stool analyzers, heaters and music players in them. That takes energy. Organic food means fewer chemicals, but often requires far more tillage. That takes energy. Most of the new and wonderful things we routinely incorporate into our lives take more energy than what they replaced.

Is it possible to substitute non-carbon emitting energy sources for those that emit carbon? Yes, but a colleague of mine who is in the business of building windfarms claims that best case, alternative energy will replace 10% of carbon-sourced energy. Assume the best case: we are able to find enough efficiencies and alternative energy sources to hold steady. It’s not at all clear that holding steady is enough. Reducing carbon emissions per capita would mean consuming less food, less electronics, less transportation. And that’s just not very likely.

George may be anti-science, but if I believe washing out milk bottles makes up for driving an eight-cylinder Audi to the store to buy milk, I am anti-arithmetic. My grandkids will be screwed just as badly by my good intentions as by his Know-Nothing-ism. (Note to George. I know the Know-Nothings were really an anti-Catholic party. I’m making a point here, dude.)

Gulp. I am a climate-change denialist, just like Chris. And George. And Rush.

God help me.

_________________

John Harvin is the pseudonym of a prominent business executive and writer. He has traveled and worked in forty countries.

John has written for numerous national and international magazines and journals, and written and had published five books, including one non-fiction bestseller and two novels. (He’s actually written nine books, but that’s a different story.) He writes because it is the only way he can sort through the maelstrom of crap careening around inside his skull and figure out what he really thinks about anything.

When not working or writing, you can find him having dinner with his long-suffering wife, walking the dog, training for triathlons, skiing, ultra-cycling, scuba diving, motorcycle riding, hiking, working on his farm, worrying about his two grown children or yelling at the Cubs on TV. (Open your eyes, Alfonso. It’s a baseball, not a piñata!)

The Weekly Carboholic: Gas industry’s own fracking studies don’t support industry claims

Brian Angliss — Wed, 15 Jul 2009 12:30:18 +0000

“Fracking” is the slang term used for hydraulic fracturing, a process by which the gas industry injects a slurry of unknown composition into a gas well in order to break up the rock and release the natural gas contained within. At present, the EPA exempts fracking from regulation under the Safe Drinking Water Act (SDWA), but Representative Diana DeGette of Colorado has introduced legislation into the House (H.R.2766) to force the EPA to regulate fracking. In response, the gas industry has pushed back with studies that purport to show that regulation is both unnecessary and costly.

A new article by ProPublica, an “independent, non-profit newsroom that produces investigative journalism in the public interest,” shows that the exact same studies being used by industry to oppose fracking actually counter the industry’s own arguments.

The gas industry claims that there is already sufficient regulation and oversight of fracking at the state level. The ProPublica article contests this claim, pointing out the following:

In fact, the report calls for some of same measures found in the congressional bill the industry is so hotly contesting.

Regarding fracturing in areas close to the surface or near shallow aquifers, the report reads: “States should consider requiring companies to submit a list of additives used in formation fracturing and their concentration.” It also says that shallow fracturing very close to certain drinking water aquifers “should either be stopped, or restricted to the use of materials that do not pose a risk of endangering ground water and do not have the potential to cause human health effects.”

The additives issue is specifically addressed in HR2766, just as the ProPublica article says:

In subparagraph (C) of paragraph (1) insert before the semicolon `, including a requirement that any person using hydraulic fracturing disclose to the State (or the Administrator if the Administrator has primary enforcement responsibility in the State) the chemical constituents (but not the proprietary chemical formulas) used in the fracturing process’. (Section 2 (b)(1))

The bigger problem is that, according to the article, “21 of the 31 states listed do not have any specific regulation addressing hydraulic fracturing; 17 states do not require companies to list the chemicals they put in the ground; and no state requires companies to track how much drilling fluid they pump into or remove from the earth — crucial data for determining what portion of chemicals has been discarded underground.”

So much for “the states do a great job regulating fracking already.”

As to the cost question, the study that supposedly claims that the cost of complying with the SDWA is about $100,000 per gas well has a number of major flaws. For example, the study uses data that’s 10 years old, it estimates costs for tests that aren’t required by the SDWA, and the vice president of the group who did the study (and was interviewed for the ProPublica article) believes “that many of the processes listed in the report are already being practiced to a greater degree than they were in 1999, meaning that even if they were required they may not be additional burdens at all.”

An estimate produced by Deutsche Bank analysts found something radically different from the industry’s preferred studies:

If all the testing that Godec includes is factored out, the regulations would cost the industry just $4,500 per well, according to his report, or just six hundredths of a percent of the cost of establishing a typical new well.

The jury’s still out on whether fracking is a threat to water supplies (anecdotes are not data), but one thing is abundantly clear: the industry didn’t do itself any favors by misrepresenting and/or cherry-picking study data and findings in order to oppose federal fracking legislation.

———-

Can concentrating photovoltaic compete with solar thermal and standard photovoltaic?

Photovoltaic (PV) electricity is notoriously inefficient. The theoretical maximum for a simple PV cell irradiated by a single sun (equivalent irradiance) is 31%, which is less than half of the efficiency of the best coal generation. More complex PV cells rely on the absorption of multiple light frequencies or the concentration of solar energy to achieve greater efficiencies. While there have been some interesting recent developments in solar power such as so-called combined-cycle solar, these developments aren’t intended for utility-scale electricity generation. A new technology reported by Greenwire has the potential to provide gigawatts of electricity – concentrating photovoltaic (CPV).

The point of CPV is to make solar electricity cheaper. Compared to solar thermal (the concentrating of sunlight on a tower that boils water to turn an electrical turbine), CPV uses much less water and has a more distributed footprint. Given that the same areas that are good for solar power are also short on water resources, cutting water consumption by over 99% is a huge deal. In addition, environmentalists are already getting concerned about large swaths of desert being converted into solar thermal and standard solar PV farms, with the accompanying environmental degradation and loss of wild space. CPV, on the other hand, is more like wind turbines – they can be spread out and the area between and underneath CPV structures can still be used for other purposes.

As far as the energy economics of the technology, one company mentioned in the article did a “cradle-to-grave” energy analysis and found that it takes only six months for their CPV technology to start producing more energy than it took to create the CPV structure in the first place.

But as good as CPV appears to be, the Greenwire article points out that CPV suffers from the same problem that all solar does right now – it needs government support in order to survive long enough to become cost-competitive with other supplies like natural gas and coal (although it’s on track to reach parity with other solar technologies in the next year or two).

CPV sounds like a great technology to me because it appears to be far more environmentally friendly than solar thermal is. But in the energy sector, as with commercial commodity products, the best technology doesn’t always win in the end. Instead, marketing, financing, and political influence are greater indicators of success than low water consumption, a small carbon footprint, and a smaller physical footprint.

———-

Wind turbines may affect weather

If you’ve ever laid down on the ground during a windstorm, you probably noticed that wind at ground level is much slower than wind at head height or a couple of hundred feet in the air. This is the main reason that wind turbines are raised up on massive towers – the wind blows stronger and more consistently high above the ground, making the turbine more efficient as a result. Similarly, wind doesn’t blow through the forest itself as fast as it blows does through open clearings. And faster or slower wind speeds has an effect on the weather downwind.

But what happens when you cover large swaths of land with extra-tall steel trees with spinning branches (aka wind turbines)? The Bright Green Blog at the Christian Science Monitor has a article devoted to answering this very question.

According to the article, wind farms on the scale of North American storm systems has an appreciable affect, in this case defined as “larger than typical weather-forecast uncertainties,” with the effects felt not just in North America but also across the North Atlantic and on into Europe. Of course, the size of a storm system is very often tens of miles in diameter and can be hundreds of miles across, but if you covered the Midwest with turbines, well, that’s certainly going to be large enough to qualify.

What does this mean? Well, the scientists interviewed for the article said that the impacts on wind speed, cloudiness, and temperature, but that the impacts were small compared to the benefits of removing carbon dioxide (CO₂) from the atmosphere. Beyond that, though, the scientists weren’t comfortable speculating.

———-

Geoengineering doesn’t help acidification

According to a new study in the journal Geophysical Research Letter and reported by Standford University News, some forms of geoengineering may cool the planet but do nothing to reverse the effects of ocean acidification.

In the immortal words of Obviousman: No Duh!

Ocean acidification is a result of the burning of fossil fuels. In essence, the CO₂ is emitted in to the air and then absorbed by the ocean, resulting in the creation of carbonic acid and a corresponding reduction in ocean pH. Geoengineering schemes like covering up the sun with a sunshield in space or emitting large amounts of sulfur dioxide into the stratosphere or seeding more clouds with a fleet of automated seawater spraying ships all work on the same basic principle – reduce the amount of solar radiation reaching the earth’s surface. However, none of them pull the extra CO₂ out of the atmosphere that would be required to stop additional ocean acidification.

Perhaps I’m being a little too harsh on the study authors. They did run the geoengineering method through climate models in order to better understand how ocean acidification will be affected, and that’s valuable information to have. But the overall conclusion – changing solar insolation via geoengineering does nothing to stop ocean acidification – well, duh.

———-

New study on the PETM raises questions, but no answers

55 million years ago, the Palaeocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum (PETM) produced between five and nine degrees Celsius of warming globally, and that warming lasted for tens of thousands of years. A new study published in Nature Geoscience investigated the PETM using a single climate model and claims to have found that CO₂ alone was insufficient to have caused the PETM.

However, once you read the actual paper, it’s not quite that clear-cut. First off, the PETM happened during a geological era when the Pacific was much larger than it is today and the Atlantic was much smaller and the Earth was much warmer before the PETM than today. And the authors of the study acknowledge all these points:

Undoubtedly, the climatic boundary conditions before the PETM were different from today’s – including different continental configuration, absence of continental ice and a different base climate, which limits the PETM’s suitability as the perfect future analogue.” (emphasis mine)

Second, the study investigates a single climate model, rather than the many different climate models that are available. Even so, though, the study does raise a couple of important questions that really should be answered.

The first question is whether, as the authors claim, this study represents “a fundamental gap in our understanding” of climate that “needs to be filled to confidently predict future climate change.” It certainly suggests that we don’t understand enough, but is the problem our understanding of the PETM, our understanding of recent climate change, or both? At this point, there’s not enough information to know the answer to that question. After all, some scientists have suggested that climate models are insufficient to predict the long-term changes to the Earth’s climate resulting from anthropogenic CO₂, and that over the next thousand years, CO₂ will actually drive far more heating than it does over the next century.

The second question is whether this study supports the contention that climate models are underestimating the effects of anthropogenic climate disruption. The authors found that their climate model only accounted for approximately 3.5 degrees of the five to nine degrees of warming that actually occurred during the PETM. If this is accurate, then this study could mean that the models to date have underestimated the effect of CO₂ emissions by 43% to 157%, and that climate disruption during the next century or two could be much, much worse than it is already expected to be.

Which question you focus on probably depends more on whether you’re a climate disruption “skeptic” or denier, or whether you’re a proponent of anthropogenic climate disruption.

———-

New climate idea might break US-China emissions stalemate

The U.S. won’t cut emissions until China and India are on-board, but China and India won’t cut emissions unless the U.S. and Europe cut even more. This Catch-22 of blame justifying a refusal to act has dominated post-Kyoto Protocol climate politics for years now, and recent news suggests that it’s not going to get better any time soon. Into this stalemate steps some of the same Princeton researchers who developed the climate wedge visualization aid with a possible new approach that is agnostic to the source of the CO₂.

The idea is to force the top billion or so people who are the highest CO₂ emitters to cut their emissions, no matter where those emitters are located on the globe. The U.S. would still have a huge number of people who needed to cut their emissions (people like me, for example) somehow, but so would a large number of Chinese, most of the EU, Russia, and even a few countries in Africa and the Middle East. But this scheme would automatically exempt, at least to start with, the poorest countries and even permit them to increase their emissions. This scheme would also rope in developing nations as they started to reach the per-capita emissions cap, so a country like India that is presently mostly under the cap would find itself having to start paying automatically as their economy improves over the next several decades.

It’s an interesting idea, and given that it might enable real action on climate disruption and CO₂ emissions, it’s certainly worth considering. I look forward to hearing more about it in the coming months, especially if it starts to get traction among climate policy wonks.

Image credits:
AAPG.org
Goodcleantech.com
Stanford.edu
PNAS

The end of the world as we know it—Review: One Second After by William Forstchen

Chris Mackowski — Tue, 07 Jul 2009 15:00:20 +0000

A bomb goes off high above the earth, and one second after, the world ends—not in a bang but a whimper.

William Forstchen’s brilliantly disturbing book, One Second After, takes place in a post-apocalyptic America. The country has been brought to its knees by three nuclear missiles launched by unknown foes. The power of the attack comes not from the blasts themselves but from the electromagnetic pulse (EMP) it emits.

An EMP, Forstchen points out, could completely knock out America’s electrical infrastructure. Miles and miles of high-tension wires would absorb the power of the EMP, magnifying it beyond the ability of virtually any circuit-breaker to stop. Electrical systems would overload. Anything with delicate electrical circuitry—like cars, computers, and even calculators—would be fried.

And in Forstchen’s world, America without power would be hell on earth.

“We’re back a hundred and fifty years,” one character says.

“No, not a hundred and fifty years,” says another. “Make it more like five hundred. People alive in 1860, they knew how to live in that time; they had the infrastructure. We don’t. Turn off the lights, stop the toilets from getting water to flush, empty the pharmacy, turn off the television to tell us what to do…. We were like sheep for slaughter then.”

One Second After is not a cheerful novel, nor should it be. Forstchen wrote the novel as a cautionary tale against the threat of an EMP attack. Nearly every desperate situation a reader could imagine—and many that readers couldn’t imagine—unfolds in the book.

Forstchen unveils one small horror after another. How do you keep the water in your swimming pool potable? What do you do with the family dog when you’ve run out of food to eat? What do you do with the thief you’ve shot dead in the middle of the kitchen? What do you do for your diabetic daughter when all the insulin is gone?

What do you do when the strong begin to prey on the weak? How do you maintain law and order when civilization becomes uncivilized?

Although many readers would like to think the better angels of our natures would shine through in a time of national crisis, Forstchen draws from past historical situations—like the sieges of Leningrad and Stalingrad in World War Two—to show just how low mankind will sink in times of desperation.

The story never goes “Mad Max.” Forstchen wisely keeps events plausible, no matter how terrible they seem. He does create a nagging feeling, though, that things could get even worse than his story suggests.

The entire time, Forstchen beats the same drum: America is virtually unprepared to defend itself against an EMP attack. Communities are unprepared. Individuals are unprepared. Unprepared. Unprepared. Unprepared.

Although the book may be a warning first, it’s a compelling piece of fiction in its own right. The characters are well-crafted and add dramatic weight to the story. The novel’s protagonist, John Matherson, is a college history professor who works at a small, Christian liberal arts school in the western North Carolina mountains. He’s a fictionalized Forstchen who provides context and insights into events as they unfold, and he also serves as the moral foundation for the story, too.

Forstchen writes what he knows, so the entire community of Black Mountain, N.C., feels at once homey and heartbroken. He populates the community with people who could all be out of a Norman Rockwell painting—except Rod Serling starts to tinker with them as the story progresses.

The grim reality Forstchen shows in One Second After demonstrates the high cost of unpreparedness. He wants to spook readers into doing something—anything—whether they start stockpiling supplies just in case or they write to ask their Congressman to take an interest in the issue.

“This is an issue that doesn’t have a constituency,” Forstchen said. “What I hope I’ve done is put a voice to it.”

One Second After makes that voice, and that message, worth listening to.

What happens when all the lights go out?

Chris Mackowski — Mon, 06 Jul 2009 20:45:27 +0000

An S&R exclusive interview

William Forstchen has a bad dream—a really bad dream—that goes something like this:

A cataclysmic attack throws the United States back to the dark ages, with no electricity, no communication or transportation networks, and no medicines. The most vulnerable members of society—the very young and the very old—begin to die off first, but soon hundreds of thousands of people, millions of people, begin dying. Rogue bands of lawless predators, living by rule of force rather than by rule of law, prey on weakened communities. The government, crippled, can’t come to anyone’s rescue.

And all it takes is a single bomb detonated high in the atmosphere, two hundred miles above the continent.

“Welcome to my nightmare,” Forstchen says with the kind of grim chuckle usually reserved for gallows humor.

But this is no joke. “It sounds like it’s science fiction, Mayan-prophecy, end-of-the-world stuff,” Forstchen admits, “but it’s dead-on real.”

Forstchen is a professor of history at Montreat College, a small liberal arts school in the Great Smokey Mountains of North Carolina. He’s written some forty books, including a series of successful “alternative history” novels with former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich.

His most recent novel, One Second After, outlines his nightmare in chilling detail.

At first thought, it might seem far-fetched to imagine a single bomb wiping out the entire country. But it wouldn’t be the power of the explosion, per se, that would cause the problem. Instead, the real problem would be the electro-magnetic pulse—the EMP—generated by the explosion.

Traveling at the speed of light, the EMP would act like an enormous ripple in the earth’s electromagnetic field. As that ripple hits electrical systems, it would get amplified way beyond anything a typical circuit breaker could handle.

“This energy surge will destroy all delicate electronics in your home, even as it destroys all the major components all the way back to the power company’s generators and the phone company’s main relays,” Forstchen writes. “In far less than a millisecond, the entire power grid of the United States, and all that it supports will be destroyed.”

And if the power goes, everything goes.

“Everyone remembers the aftermath of Katrina,” Forstchen says. “It covered fifty-thousand square miles, but it was basically a local event. An EMP would be a nation-wide Katrina-like event.”

Some experts predict the resulting casualty rate could be as high as ninety percent by the end of the first year.

“This will raise a lot of moral questions, too,” Forstchen says. “Are we going to let people out of maximum security prisons? Do we triage off the elderly?”

The scenarios Forstchen envisions in the book aren’t necessarily fictional, either. “I didn’t want to turn this into some kind of Mad Max thing,” he explains.

Forstchen drew on his background as a historian to look for scenarios of desolation and desperation that would fit his post-EMP world. The WWII sieges of Leningrad and Stalingrad provided a terrible bounty of examples: tiered rationing, bread with sawdust baked into it to make it more filling, vicious bands of murderous thugs, communal graves.

His visit to the cemetery outside of Leningrad proved especially haunting. “There were six-hundred-thousand dead after the siege,” Forstchen says. “And the Russian have a tradition of putting laminated photos of the deceased on their tombstones. I will never be able to shake that.” That trauma, he says, is still on the Russian soul.

And, the novel argues, America would suffer trauma even worse if an EMP strike hit us.

“I imagined my daughter being in that (post-EMP) world,” says Forstchen, a single parent. “I imagined my daughter being ill in that world.”

As a result, he says, “it got really bad for me” writing novel. “I will never be able to shake that.” Other parents who’ve read the book have had similar reactions. “’I saw my kids in the middle of this,’ they’ve told me,” Forstchen says. “Any parent who reads this, it’s going to hit hard.”

But for most people, the threat of an EMP attack is so abstract and remote, it’s hard to get them to take an interest. “Some people look at it and think it’s too big: ‘I don’t want to think about it,’” Forstchen says. “Well, we have to think about it.”

Forstchen has worked with Reps. Roscoe Bartlett (R-MD) and Denny Thompson (D-Miss) to educate other lawmakers about the potential threat of EMPs, but he admits the going has been tough. Even the House Armed Services subcommittee that was studying EMPs was disbanded. “Unfortunately, this is an issue that doesn’t have a constituency,” Forstchen says.

One reason he wrote One Second After, he says, was to “put a voice” to the issue. So far, the strategy seems to be working. The book peaked at number eleven on the New York Times bestseller list and is being developed by Warner Brothers into a film.

“I’m more optimistic than I was six months or even a year ago, when I was working on the book,” Forstchen says. “Lawmakers are starting to get the word again.” In late June, Forstchen met with a group that included members of Congress and intellectuals from various political think tanks to again press his argument, which suddenly has new urgency because of missile testing in North Korea.

“Look at North Korea and Iran,” Forstchen says. “Why are they so interested in building small-scale nuclear missiles? Only one model fits.” It’s the fact that the U.S. is so vulnerable that our enemies are even contemplating such an attack, he adds.

But even beyond the national defense reasons, Forstchen points out that there are significant environmental reasons for protecting ourselves against EMPs. The biggest reason, he says, hangs high above us in the sky every day.

In late August of 1859, a series of solar flares erupted from the sun with such magnitude that they burned out telegraphy grids across Europe and North America. Similar solar storms have taken place in 1921 and 1960. According the Forstchen, research suggests that we’re heading into a period that could see another, similar upswing in solar activity.

“We built this delicate, elaborate infrastructure without thinking about how vulnerable it is,” Forstchen says. “We need to get off the stick and do something about our infrastructure.”

Just one percent of the money allocated in the recent bailout package could be enough to create a survival infrastructure, Forstchen says. “It wouldn’t save the entire system, but it could be used to create nodes of infrastructure that could be quickly built upon. Otherwise, what good is a bailout of there’s no country to bail out?”

Most importantly, Forstchen says, individuals should learn to prepare and protect themselves. “What’s the big lesson from Katrina: Don’t wait for the feds,” he says. His website offers a variety of simple, precautionary things people can do. It also offers tips on how to recognize an EMP should one occur.

“People need to think on three levels: on the level of citizens of America/citizens of the world, the personal level, and the community level,” Forstchen says. “Eight, ten, fifteen people thinking together can do a lot. We have to learn how to think together.”

Forstchen realizes he may sound like “a crazy old crank” for sounding alarmist. (During his first-ever radio interview on the book, the first caller rang it to accuse him of being a paranoid right-wing survivalist.) “I just want to see bipartisan action on this,” he says. “I don’t care who gets the credit. We’re all Americans. We need to get by the partisan bickering, at least on this. Otherwise, we’re all going to be on the same sinking boat the next day.”

Forstchen urges people to contact their congressmen about EMPs. “If enough people do, suddenly the issue has legs, and something can get done about it,” he says.

And that, Forstchen says, will definitely help him sleep easier.

S&R will feature a review of Forstchen’s book, One Second After, on Tuesday.

The Weekly Carboholic: Cassava, sorghum yields drop, toxicity rises with more CO2

Brian Angliss — Thu, 02 Jul 2009 05:18:03 +0000

Cassava and sorghum are tubers that form the protein base for hundreds of millions of people. But while there’s a great deal of protein in the plant, there’s also cyanide in the plant’s leaves. Whether the leaves are poisonous or not depends partly on how much protein there is – more protein means that the cyanide is less toxic and the plants are safe to eat for man and beast alike. But according to a new study reported in Reuters, higher carbon dioxide (CO₂) concentrations means both less protein and more cyanide, a toxic combination.

According to the article, an Australian team grew cassava and sorghum under different CO₂ concentrations that approximated the various projected climate disruption scenarios for the rest of this century. What they found was that “the amount of cyanide relative to the amount of protein increases” and that “[a]t double current CO₂ levels, the level of toxin was much higher while protein levels fell.” As a result, cassava-dependent communities could be poisoned, especially when experiencing a drought.

The article pointed out a greater worry, however – at high CO₂ concentrations, the crop yields fell significantly:

[Monash University researcher Ros Gleadow said] “There’s been this common assumption that plants will always grow better in a high CO2 world. And we’ve now found that these plants grew much worse and had smaller tubers.”

CO₂ has been referred to as “plant food” in some circles. This study suggests that this is not necessarily the case. Other studies have discovered increased crop yields due to more CO₂ in the atmosphere could actually lead to more starvation as the protein content of those crops falls dramatically.

Both studies illustrate that the “plant food” meme is false, at least as it applies to the staple crops people actually eat.

———-

Differences between aerosol effects in models vs. observations largely explained

Aerosols like pollution, airborne dust, black carbon particles, even sulfur dioxide (SO₂) have many different effects. Black carbon absorbs solar radiation and heats up the air or melts the snow and ice it settles on. Sulfur dioxide cools the planet when blasted into the stratosphere by a volcano, but may heat up the Earth and produce acid rain when located lower in the atmosphere. Airborne dust and pollution increase the rate of cloud formations – except when they decrease the rate instead. Scientists know that clouds and aerosols interact greatly, and since the effects of clouds on climate – and of climate on clouds – remains one of the few major unknowns in climate models, improving scientific understanding of aerosols is similarly critical to improving climate model predictions.

One of the recent problems with aerosols is that satellite measurement-derived estimates of aerosol radiative forcing (hereafter referred to as SDRF, for satellite derived radiative forcing) have differed by from modeled predictions of aerosol RF (MRF, modeled radiative forcing) by up to a factor of two, well outside the margins of error for both measurements and models. Even worse, there was also a statistically-significant difference between two different sets of SDRFs . Scientists haven’t been able to determine why there was such a large difference between and among the SDRFs and between SDRF and MRF until now. A new paper published in the journal Science claims to have not only explained the differences between the different aerosol RFs, but to explain differences between the two satellite-based datasets as well.

According to the paper, the discrepancy is a result of two assumptions made in the process of calculating aerosol RFs. The first assumption made in the calculation of SDRF is that “there is no radiative effect of the aerosols within cloudy sky areas.” Models, on the other hand, don’t make this assumption. The second assumption is that the there was no anthropogenic aerosols prior to 1750 (defined as the start of the industrial era), a false assumption. In addition, there is a third difference between SDRF and MRF that isn’t a difference in starting assumption – the SDRFs don’t have complete earth coverage. The MODIS satellite measurements that are the basis of most calculated SDRFs can’t take measurements over highly reflective terrain like ice and desert, and so significant swaths of the Earth’s surface can’t be observed. Again, the models don’t have this problem.

There are two ways to prove that the different calculated RFs are actually statistically the same – demonstrate that SDRFs can be made equal to the MRFs, or demonstrate that the MRFs can be made equal to the SDRFs. The paper does both. First, by using model data to fill-in the places that the satellites can’t measure and then by changing the initial assumptions used in SDRF calculations, the paper illustrates that the satellite-based RFs are equal to the modeled RFs (marked in blue in the image at right). Then, by changing the model parameters to match the assumptions underlying the SDRFs, the paper illustrates that the MRFs were made to be equal to the satellite-based numbers (marked in red in the image at right). If you notice, the two MODEL lines (Int and Ext) look very similar to the MODIS (Model) line, just as the MODEL (Sat & opt obs) line looks very much the same as MODIS line.

The paper also identifies what specific aerosol is mostly responsible – black carbon, aka soot. As the image shows, there has been a massive increase in the amount of black carbon present in the atmosphere since pre-industrial times (”more than a factor of six”). As a result, the reflectivity of the Earth’s atmosphere has dropped:

The global mean annual average single scattering albedo computed in the model for all aerosols at 0.55 um is 0.986 at pre-industrial conditions and 0.970 at present-day conditions. Thus the aerosol in present times is approximately twice as absorbing as that in pre-industrial conditions.

There are two caveats, however. The first is that the SDRFs are not model independent at this time – model data is used to fill in the parts of the satellite observations that the MODIS instruments can’t detect. This means that, if the models are wildly wrong, then the SDRF calculations are going to be wrong as well, although not as wrong as the models would be alone (the error would be proportional to the area filled in with model data).

The second, and more important, caveat is that the changed assumption about the pre-industrial aerosol levels may not actually be correct. Given that the new assumption also explains differences between two different SDRFs means that the assumption is likely to be correct, but further research will be necessary to test the validity of the new assumption.

All in all, this is a valuable study that will both improve climate modelling and quell some concerns about differences between models and observations of aerosol radiative forcing.

Thanks to paper author Gunnar Myhre for a review copy of his paper.

———-

Methane clathrates proposed for energy and carbon sequestration

An article in New Scientist suggests that countries are looking to methane clathrates (methane frozen into ice) for two purposes – a source of natural gas and a carbon sequestration opportunity.

As an energy supply, the methane held in clathrate form under the Arctic, off the coast of Japan and India, and elsewhere around the world hold significant potential. The article says that these deposits are estimated to hold trillions of cubic meters of methane that could, if questions of scale and safety can be worked out, power hundreds of millions of homes for a decade or more. But there are significant problems.

The first is that the methane held in the clathrates are difficult to extract – either the ice has to be melted or the pressure that helps keep the methane locked into the ice must be lowered. The article says that researchers tried the melting method and found it took too much energy, but that the decompression technique appeared to work well, and has been powering an industrial furnace in Siberia for decades.

Which brings us to the second problem. Extracting methane from clathrates on large scales runs the risk of destabilizing the entire deposit, and depending on where the deposit is and how large it is, that could result in underwater landslides that cause tsunamies. Any life close to the “methane burp” would probably be asphyxiated as well. And if the burp was really big, it could produce short-term climate effects around the world – methane is moderately powerful greenhouse gas as compared to CO₂.

Some researchers are hoping to extract clathrate a different way, though – by replacing the methane in the ice with CO₂. This has the supposed benefit of sequestering the CO₂ – but only if you assume that there will never be such a thing as a “CO₂ burp” out of a destabilized CO₂ clathrate deposit.

I understand the interest in this, and I think additional research is warranted. But industrial scale deployment of a methane clathrate harvesting technology should not be deployed until the risks and potential safety issues have been well documented and are understood.

Image credits:
Northern Arizona University
Science Paper, “Consistency between satellite-derived and modeled estimates of teh direct aerosol effect”

Senator Claire McCaskill tweets to weaken ACES (updated)

Brian Angliss — Wed, 01 Jul 2009 04:16:09 +0000

Senator Claire McCaskill of Missouri is calling for a further weakening of the American Climate and Energy Security Act (ACES) that passed out of the House last week. Of course, that’s not what she calls it. Sen. McCaskill twittered last week:

I hope we can fix cap and trade so it doesn’t unfairly punish businesses and families in coal dependent states like Missouri. (emphasis mine)

I can’t help but wonder what happened to the Senator who dared mention that oil prices shouldn’t be allowed to fall too far at the Rocky Mountain Roundtable, Session 2, Part 3, during the DNC:

There’s a certain reality here that it is important that we don’t get gas too cheap again, and I certainly agree with what [Randy Udall] said. We will never see the days of… when people are pumping $1, $1.50 gas again. And that may not be an all bad thing because it will motivate the politics on this issue to the forefront so we have a sense of urgency.

Lest you think I’m casting dispersions here, not only was I one of only a few obvious press in attendance, but here’s the audio in question. I apologize for the audio quality – I’m hardly a professional sound person.

A more cynical person than myself might make me wonder if Sen. McCaskill’s complaint about ACES is more because coal mining giant Peabody Energy, headquartered in Missouri, supported her election to the tune of $5,000 in direct PAC contributions (equal to former Sen. Ted Stevens of Alaska and fellow Missouri Senator Christopher “Kit” Bond). Given that’s a paltry sum compared to the donations she’s received from most other sectors, perhaps not.

Perhaps, though, it’s fair to wonder if Sen. McCaskill would have had the courage to criticize coal had coal prices spiked equivalently to oil prices last summer….

UPDATE: There has been some criticism of Sen. McCaskill for her comments about the ACES cap and trade provisions. Here’s a few links to sites that have also taken her to task for her call to weaken it even further:

Get Energy Smart NOW!
ThinkProgress
Chris Bowers of OpenLeft on AlterNet

The Weekly Carboholic: Early deaths cost Appalachia more than coal jobs earn

Brian Angliss — Thu, 25 Jun 2009 05:01:29 +0000

Appalachia has some of the most impoverished communites in the United States. The entire region is economically depressed as compared to the national average. But coal communities in Appalachia are even worse off than the rest of the region, a fact that runs counter to the idea that coal jobs support local communities. A new study out of the Institute for Health Policy Research at West Virginia University and published in Public Health Reports looked at this discrepency and found that, even using conservative assumptions, the economic costs of coal mining in Appalachian communities far outweighed the benefits from having a coal mine in the community.

The study reached this conclusion by gathering publicly available data from various government databases and then calculating how much economic benefit coal mines produced in Appalachian communities vs. how much the coal mines cost in early deaths. As a result, the study had to prove that there were unusual deaths in coal communities, and they did so using statistical analyses designed to account for the effects of “smokin, race, poveryt, physician supply, education, and other variables.” And even after adjusting for all these variables and removing their effects on early mortality, the study found that there was nearly 3000 excess deaths in coal-heavy Appalachian counties as compared to the rest of the US.

Multiply the number of excess deaths caused by “chronic forms of heart, respiratory, and kidney disease, as well as lung cancer” by the official value of statistical life (VSL, the amount of money that each life is worth for cost-benefit analyses performed by the federal government) and you have a conservative estimate of the costs of coal mining. Similarly, use an old 1997 estimate of the economic benefits to Appalachian communites, adjust for yearly inflation, unemployment since the start of the study period, add tax income and subtract government subsidies, and you get a reasonable estimate for the value of coal in Appalachia.

The result: just over $8 billion in estimated benefits to Appalachian communities, but at cost of $51 billion in lost economic power due just to the early deaths of people living in coal communities.

Put another way, since 1997, Appalachian coal communities have lost $43 billion dollars that they would have kept in their communities had they thrown the coal companies out.

The paper is careful to point out that they can’t definitively prove that air and water pollution from coal is responsible for the excess deaths detected in the coal communities. But the study’s conclusions and discussion make it abundantly clear that the preponderance of evidence is that coal pollution is directly responsible:

Elevated adjusted mortality [due to chronic diseases] occurred in both males and females, suggesting that the effects were not due to occupational exposure, as almost all coal miners are men. These illnesses are consistent with a hypothesis of exposure to water and air pollution from mining activities.
…
[G]iven the literature on the impacts of social disparities and the previously documented problems of coal-dependent economies, such a causal link [between excess mortality and coal mining] seems likely.
…
We concluded that [the role of environmental pollutants in excessl mortality] was possible given the results of the regression models and previously cited literature on the environmental consequences of coal mining.

And even with all that, the study points out that the cost estimate may in fact be too low. The cost estimates were just the costs of excess mortality and didn’t include health care costs, poverty reduction costs (such as food stamps), lowered property values due to nearby coal mining, or the intrinsic value of the natural resources (such as streams and mountains that could attract tourism or site renewable energy) that are destroyed in modern Appalachian coal mining (ie mountaintop removal).

The study’s authors specifically limited their scope to Appalachia. But if the results of their study holds nationally, then this could be yet another nail in coal’s coffin, right along side peak coal.

Thanks to lead study author Dr. Michael Hendryx, PhD, for a copy of this paper.

Paper reference: Hendryx M & Ahern MM, Mortality in Appalachian Coal Mining Regions: The Value of Statistical Life Lost, Public Health Reports 124, p 541-550, 2009.

———-

Emission of strong GHGs exceed IPCC emissions scenarios and expected to continue to do so

When scientists discovered that chlorofluorocarbons (CFC) were responsible for destroying the ozone layer that protects the Earth from dangerous ultraviolet solar radiation, the international community created a treaty known as the Montreal Protocol that layed out how to replace CFCs with other, less dangerous chemicals. Since then, however, climate disruption has become a serious concern. As a result, the powerful greenhouse gases known as hydrofluorocarbons (HFCs) that were created specifically to replace CFCs have become a serious problem as well. A new study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences and originally reported by Solve Climate has found that, unless there is international committement to phasing out HFCs in favor of other refrigerants, the world will generate enough HFCs by 2050 to equal 6-13 years of global carbon dioxide (CO₂) emissions.

According to the paper, the emissions scenarios used by the IPCC for the most recent Assessment Report underestimated the amount of HFCs being emitted into the atmosphere by approximately 20%. The study’s authors attribute this increase mostly to the wider deployment of refrigeration in developing countries. Because the bulk of the growth in HFC consumption is in developing nations instead of the developing world, national legislation limiting national emissions of HFCs like Waxman-Markey ACES or the Lieberman-Warner Climate Security Act frmo a couple of years ago have almost no effect on global HFC emissions. However, the study proposes several options for HFC phaseouts under the Montreal Protocol that could dramatically reduce HFC emissions. If the business-as-usual (BAU) emits so many HFCs that it’s equal to 6-13 years of CO₂ emissions, then the best-case Montreal Protocol solution proposed in the study could reduce that to 2-3 years of CO₂ emissions. That’s a huge potential savings in greenhouse gases that would reduce the thermal forcing on the Earth’s global climate.

As with the previousl study, however, not all the climate effects of HFCs were included. Only the direct effects on climate via radiative forcing (the amount of additional energy absorbed by the Earth due to the presence of HFCs) were calculated. But there are a number of indirect effects as well, such as energy consumed or saved during the use of HFC refrigerants and required to produce the HFCs in the first place. This means that the estimate of the climate effects of HFC consumption is conservative and thus likely to increase with a fuller accounting of indirect effects.

In other words, if the world doesn’t change refrigerants globally, we may find ourselves in a neverending cycle of “the Earth gets hotter, we run the AC more, which needs more energy and refrigerants, which makes the earth hotter….”

———-

Raytheon testing oil shale tech to sequester CO₂

Oil shale in the Green River Basin of Colorado, Utah, and Wyoming holds what could be a trillion barrels of oil. It’s locked in the rocks in a waxy form called kerogen that needs to be mined or heated in place to extract it efficiently. One of the technologies being tested to heat the kerogen enough to pump it with standard oil pumps is a massive microwave system that heats up the rock. The developer of this technology, Raytheon, thinks that they can adapt it to efficiently sequester CO₂ in a solid form underground.

Most current plans for carbon sequestration rely on pumping liquid CO₂ into deep saline aquifers or depleted natural gas fields. The aquifer option assumes that an aquifer will absorb the CO₂, become more acidic, and react with the rock, turning the CO₂ from a liquid into a carbonate mineral. The natural gas field option assumes that the CO₂ will stay liquid or may even turn into a gas, but that the geology that held the natural gas underground will also hold the CO₂ indefinitely. But both assume that the geology will be able to contain the injected CO₂ indefinitely, an assumption that has not been tested and remains a huge risk to any carbon sequestration scheme.

However, the Raytheon solution reported by GreenInc supposedly injects the CO₂ into the ground encased in a gel that solidifies when exposed to microwaves (or hot rock – the GreenInc article isn’t clear on this detail), theoretically all but eliminating the risk that the sequestered CO₂ will leak back out of the ground.

If it works, then the Raytheon solution is probably lower risk than liquid CO₂ injection into aquifers or old natural gas fields. But the massive microwaves are going to take a huge amount of elecricity, and in the western US that means scarce water too.

I can’t help but wonder if the CO₂ emissions from generating the electricity needed for for sequestration outweighs the amount of CO₂ actually sequestered….

Image Credits:
Vivian Stockman via SouthWings
PNAS, via SolveClimate

The Weekly Carboholic: study says offsets make ACES carbon cap almost meaningless

Brian Angliss — Thu, 18 Jun 2009 04:03:21 +0000

Michael Shellenberger is one of environmentalism’s persona non grata de jour. He and Ted Nordhaus founded the Breakthrough Institute in order to push for technological solutions to environmental problems instead of policy solutions that both men have argued are doomed to failure from the word “Go.” This was not exactly a popular thing to say in the halls of Congress or around the water cooler at any number of large environmental organizations dedicated to creating policy solutions.

An analysis of the American Climate and Energy Security Act (ACES) by Shellenberger and Jesse Jenkins, Breakthrough’s Director of Energy and Climate Policy, found that the offset provisions of the legislation are so loose that they essentially make the carbon cap portion of the ACES-defined “cap-and-trade” system almost meaningless.

The problem, as illustrated in the image above, is that the Congressional Budget Office estimates that companies will buy more carbon offsets (such as reforestation credits) than carbon allowances under the cap-and-trade proposal. Not only will this suppress allowance prices by an estimated 70%, Breakthrough estimates that it will also result in reductions of “cumulative emissions in supposedly capped sectors of the economy by just 0.5% through 2020.” That’s 55.1 billion metric tons instead of 55.4 billion metric tons of carbon emissions. (UPDATE: A typo in the Breakthrough Institute’s analysis has been corrected and the cumulative emissions is now 2%.)

Offsets are a huge problem in general – they’re difficult to verify and thus prone to fraud and easy to game. And this analysis illustrates that the sheer number of offsets available in ACES undermines the bill’s goal of cutting carbon emissions, perhaps fatally.

I’m still personally ambivalent about ACES. But if the analysis is accurate (and not everyone agrees that the Breakthrough analysis is), it means that parts of ACES are in desperate need of repair. Unless problems like this are fixed or, at a minimum no more problems like this crop up, I could actually find myself hoping for ACES to fail. And that is just depressing.

———-

China rejects binding GHG cuts

In yet a further indication of “the more things change, the more they stay the same,” TerraDaily reports that China will not accept binding cuts in greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions.

According to a quote from Chinese foreign ministry spokesman Qin Gang:

China is still a developing country and the present task confronting China is to develop its economy and alleviate poverty, as well as raise the living standard of its people. Given that, it is natural for China to have some increase in its emissions, so it is not possible for China in that context to accept a binding or compulsory target.

This is bad, but it’s hardly news. China has been hiding behind the “we’re a developing nation” and “the U.S. and Europe have to cut first because they’re more responsible than we are” excuses for years now. The problem is that China and the U.S. combine to total more than 50% of all GHG emissions globally, especially carbon dioxide (CO₂), so no real progress can be made on cutting emissions without both nations going along. And without a binding national cap, China has essentially said that they’ll continue to emit GHGs as necessary to grow their economy.

China’s emissions will fall naturally due to the global recession just as U.S. emissions have fallen. China’s economy is overwhelming driven by exports, and other nations simply lack sufficient money to import all the Chinese goods that China can manufacture. But China’s electricity is overwhelming generated from burning coal, their coal plants aren’t particularly efficient, and they’re still building coal plants at an alarming rate. As such, smog is a serious problem throughout China. And because of government corruption and horrible living conditions, I suspect that popular pressures to reform government and clean the nation’s air and water will ultimately slow China’s economic growth and it’s related carbon emissions.

But if not, then there’s always a carbon tariff on imported Chinese goods. That would get China’s attention….

———-

USGS study suggests peak coal may be closer than previously thought

“The United States is the Saudi Arabia of coal.” “We have enough coal deposits in the U.S. for 250 years.” These kinds of claims are heard all over the place by proponents of coal power and coal-to-fuel conversion technologies. And the claims are technically correct – to a point. But what coal boosters fail to mention is that there’s “total coal,” and then there’s “coal that can be extracted economically using available technology.” And, as a Daily Green article about a United States Geological Survey (USGS) study from 2008 points out, the two are most definitely not the same.

According to the Daily Green article, the USGS studied the Powder River Basin coal deposit in Wyoming and found that the recoverable reserves were only 38% of the total demonstrated reserves of 201 billion short tons. This difference was due to rights of way, coal deposits under rivers and towns, and so on. But the USGS also estimated that the amount of coal that was economically viable to mine at 2008 prices was only 6% of the total, or just 10.1 billion short tons.

I looked up some Energy Information Administration (EIA) data on total coal reserves and consumption rate and did some quick calculations. The EIA estimates that there are 489 billion short tons of coal in demonstrated reserves nationwide. But if we cut that down to only 6% of the total using the economic arguments made in the USGS paper, that produces a total of 29.34 billion short tons of coal that can be extracted profitably. Assuming that coal consumption grows at an annual rate of only 0.86% (the average of the growth rates between 2002 and 2008), the U.S. would consume all of that available coal by 2032.

Now, there’s a lot of caveats to this quick estimate. First, as prices rise, more and more coal will become profitable to extract and better extraction technologies will be developed. Second, the USGS analysis was for one coal deposit in one region, but there are massive coal deposits in the interior of the U.S. and in Appalachia. Whether the Powder River analysis holds for those other regions is presently unknown, at least to me.

But if my quick estimate holds water over the entire country, then there’s a question I have to ask – does it make sense to spend billions of dollars developing carbon capture and sequestration (CCS) technologies that might not even be ready for deployment until after we’ve passed peak coal?

———-

FutureGen coal CCS pilot project revived

Late in the Bush Administration, the FutureGen coal CCS pilot project was canceled because of supposed cost overruns – or because President Bush’s home state of Texas was rejected in favor of President Obama’s home state of Illinois. It later turned out that the overruns were erroneous, but the project wasn’t reinstated. According to the NYTimes last week, the Department of Energy (DoE) revived FutureGen. The DoE will supply $1 billion while the private energy and utility companies involved in the project will pay between $400 and $600 million total over several years.

———-

EU needs to upgrade its electricity transmission

Electricity transmission is likely to be one of the more difficult problems facing deployment of renewable energy. Most people don’t want high voltage power lines running near their property and environmentalists don’t generally like the idea of spoiling wilderness or habitat with the same. But under one renewable paradigm, more transmission lines are necessary if electricity will be moved from where it’s generated to where it’s consumed, such as moving wind power from the Midwest to the east coast of the U.S.

But there’s another, related problem that needs to be solved with transmission of renewable electricity – old transmission lines may be unable to carry the new electricity at all. According to an article in the Guardian, this is precisely what a new study of Europe’s transmission lines has found.

According to the article, the European Academies Science Advisory Council (Easac) electricity grid working group found that the 20% renewable electricity generated by 2020 could be “wasted unless it can be distributed properly.” Furthemore, the article says that the Easac report also found “[u]pgrading the grids in individual countries should be done to common standards, and eventually the movement of electricity across Europe might even be managed centrally.”

A report last year (and reported by the Carboholic) found that all of the EU’s electricity needs could be met by large solar farms located in the Sahara that then transmitted the electricity via high voltage direct current (HVDC) transmission lines to Europe around and across the Mediterranean Sea. The Guardian article says that the Easac report found the following:

In order to do that, you need to design the transmission system so it can cope with the large power flows through existing countries’ networks [but] Italy’s transmission system is not designed for that, nor is Spain’s.

No single country’s electricity grid is designed to carry half a continent’s electricity through its borders, which is essentially what would happen with Spain and Italy.

There is another renewable energy paradigm that might help alleviate the transmission bottleneck, at least enough to give the EU time to build out a whole new set of modern transmission lines – distributed generation of electricity. The question is whether or not solar and wind power could be made cheaply enough and deployed widely enough to make centralized renewable generation (like the Sahara proposal) largely unnecessary. Time will tell.

———-

Deep water wind turbine undergoing testing

According to an NYTimes GreenInc article last week, a deep water marine turbine is nearly ready for testing off the coast of Norway. The article and some background available on StatoilHydro’s website say that the turbine will float upon a tower that is anchored to the bottom with wires. The physics of a deep center of gravity (approximately 100 meters below the ocean’s surface) and some intelligent control systems will reduce the amount of bobbing that the floating turbine suffers as a result of wave action. The technology has been adapted from offshore oil drilling platforms, StatoilHydro’s area of expertise.

There are a number of reasons why deep water turbines are being developed. First, as the nearly eight year saga that is the Cape Wind project attests, environmentalism can run afoul of NIMBYism even in the most “liberal” of places – Nantucket Sound, Massachusetts. In this case, the wealthy homeowners along the Sound didn’t want white turbine towers spoiling their ocean view. But deep water turbines could be placed much farther out to sea, reducing the threat of NIMBY lawsuits.

Second, the American Wind Energy Association points out in their FAQ that winds tend to be stronger and blow more consistently farther offshore. This means that turbines will produce more electricity more consistently than near-shore or on-shore turbines will.

And third, according to the GreenInc article, not all regions of the world have shallow off-shore continental shelves that are suitable for shallow-water, near-shore wind turbines. In these situations, deep water turbines are the only offshore wind power option.

The turbine is slated to start generating electricity in July after the transmission line is laid from the turbine to the shore and will run for two years.

———-

More wind power means fewer hydroelectric dams?

Last week, the NYTimes had an article about the interaction between wind power and hydroelectric dams in the Pacific Northwest. The Bonneville Power Administration is building out large numbers of wind turbines along the Columbia and Snake rivers, but as the number of wind turbines goes up, environmentalists interested in restoring salmon habitat and spawning grounds have started to suggest that now is the time to remove the dams and return the rivers to a (more) wild state.

This provides yet another example of the tradeoffs and problems that environmentalists are going to have to face as their goals of wilderness protection, endangered species protection, renewable energy, sustainable agriculture, etc. come into conflict.

One of the problems facing this kind of a tradeoff is that the wind doesn’t blow all the time, and so standby electricity generation is necessary to fill in the gaps. In most parts of the country, that extra capacity is provide by natural gas or coal plants, but the Pacific Northwest is largely powered by hydroelectric. So removing too many dams and the electricity generation the dams provide will probably make the grid in the Northwest less stable, a point made by Bonneville in the NYTimes article.

In response, Bill Arthur, a Sierra Club representative for the Northwest, suggested in the article that Bonneville build more turbines scattered across a wider geographic area, with the idea being that the wind will probably be blowing somewhere and that the additional turbines would “smooth out” the wind power supply. And he pointed out that “dismantling [dams] could take six or more years, allowing plenty of time to plan the transition to new power sources.”

One of the problems with Arthur’s suggestion is that the list of alternative power sources that are likely to be available by the time the dams come down are the usual suspects: coal and natural gas, with possibly some solar power added into the mix. Is trading a hydroelectric dam that stresses salmon for a coal plant that poisons them or overheats their river (directly via cooling water discharges or indirectly via climate disruption) a good idea?

I don’t know. But I do know this – these tradeoffs aren’t going to go away. In fact, they’re going to get more common and become thornier different environmental projects collide head first more and more often over the coming years and decades. Ultimately, some hard decisions and difficult compromises will be necessary.

Image credits:
Breakthrough Institute
S&R
EIA
Solberg Production / StatoilHydro

Gene Randall ‘Reporting,’ Inc.

Brad Jacobson — Wed, 17 Jun 2009 19:16:02 +0000

My article published yesterday in Columbia Journalism Review: Former CNN correspondent-turned-PR consultant Gene Randall’s video “report” for oil giant Chevron might be unprecedented for how it blurred the line between public relations and journalism. But the Randall-Chevron production raises not only ethical questions, but also the question of whether a surge of newly pink-slipped reporters might go, as one media critic put it, “over to the dark side” and how that might further muddy the line between news and corporate advocacy.

The Weekly Carboholic: Port of Long Beach powers BP supertankers with electricity

Brian Angliss — Thu, 11 Jun 2009 02:48:38 +0000

Maritime shipping is responsible for emitting 3% of global carbon emissions, roughly equal to air travel and more than most nations. Worse than that, however, is the fact that most oceangoing vessels burn heavy fuel oil (aka bunker fuel), the heavy sludge that’s left after every other useful product has been refined from petroleum. Bunker fuel emits a truly massive amount of nitrogen oxide compounds (NOx) and, due to its high sulfur content, a huge amount of sulfur dioxide (SO₂). According to the International Council on Clean Transportation, one of the ways to reduce emissions at port was to implement “shore-side electricity” in port. This enables a suitably equipped shipping vessel to operate off of comparably clean electricity instead of extremely dirty bunker fuel.

And according to an article last week in the Long Beach Press-Telegram , the first supertanker with a shore-side electricity retrofit pulled into the Port of Long Beach and plugged in.

According to the article, the British Petroleum supertanker Alaska Navigator had to be retrofitted to operate its oil pumps off electricity instead of the bunker fuel-burning auxiliary engines, and it cost the Port of Long Beach $24 million to produce the electrified pier. But the payoff is in the 10,000 gallons of bunker fuel per day that aren’t being burned while the supertanker is in port. The article claims that this saves the equivalent of 30 tons of NOx emissions (roughly equivalent to 187,000 cars) every time the Alaska Navigator – or the other electrified supertankers that will visit the port each month – puts in to offload its petroleum cargo.

And this is just the start – Long Beach is electrifying piers for other shipping vessels as well, as is the Port of Los Angeles. But as Long Beach Harbor Commission President Jim Hankla says in the article, “Ultimately, this all isn’t going to make much difference if the technology isn’t adopted on a global scale.”

Maybe national governments should consider regulations that require shipping vessels and ports to do just that.

———-

Most companies don’t mention climate change in annual reports

According to a new study by EDF, CERES, and CEES, most major companies don’t discuss climate change in their annual reports. According to the study, only 23.7% of companies in the S&P500 even mentioned climate change. Of the sectors that the study looked at, utilities discussed climate change the most often, followed by energy companies and then materials companies. The three worst sectors were financial, consumer products, with IT/telecommunications coming in dead last.

All of these sectors have their own impacts on climate change. Utilities generate our electricity and heat, energy companies drill and mine, materials companies make the plastics and metal that build our civilization. As such, these sectors have the most obvious exposure to climate risks. But telecommunications companies operate massive switching centers while IT companies have large data centers that each use as much electricity as 25,000 homes. Add a significant price per ton to carbon and the price for energy consumed by the data centers and central offices could skyrocket without a massive and simultaneous rollout of energy efficient servers and data storage.

There are other risks, though, to all of the sectors in the S&P500 study. The financial sector, composed of banks and insurers, has risks to investments made by banks and risks due to loss of property from extreme weather for insurers. Consumer products rely on natural resources that could become scarce or expensive, and many inexpensive goods rely on international shipping. Any number of industries that rely on access to water, energy, and raw materials will find themselves similarly at risk.

The ultimate conclusion of the study is that the “material” risks to companies as a result of climate change largely aren’t being disclosed. This prevents customers and investors from making intelligent decisions about what companies to support with their purchases and investment dollars.

There was one significant bright point in the study, however – the percentage of companies mentioning climate change in their latest annual report was the highest yet measured, and it nearly doubled between 2007 and 2008.

———-

Scotch distilleries to cut fossil fuel use

According to a BBC story, the Scotch Whisky Association distilleries have pledged to cut their fossil fuel use by 80% over the next 40 years. The story claims that most of the gains will be in the use of renewable electricity and energy efficiency.

The Association plans to make its industry more sustainable through a number of other measures as well. These include light-weight packaging and bottles, reduced landfill usage, water discharge management, and using sustainable oak for casks. As Richard Dixon of WWF Scotland pointed out in the article, “”Since the whisky industry relies on Scotland’s clean environment for its main ingredients it is important the industry takes steps to reduce its potential impacts.”

Sustainability – one more reason to enjoy your scotch.

———-

Videos show human effects on Earth

Last week, Wired put up a set of short videos taken by the NASA Earth Observatory, a cobbled-together but still very impressive camera system aboard the International Space Station. These videos show the effects of human activity on the Earth and range from the drying up of the Aral Sea and Lake Powell to the growth of urbanization of Dubai to the restoration of salt marshes in southern Iraq. They’re impressive for what they show about how much humans can do the Earth and how quickly things can change.

———-

Dependence is dependence, be it energy or minerals

According to an interesting NYTimes/Greenwire article, touting energy independence via renewable sources may trade one type of dependence for another, specifically imported minerals. Most renewable energy sources have some requirement for minerals that are either not widely available, or are not presently mined in any significant amount, in the United States.

The article points out that photovoltaic panels need minerals that are largely supplied by nations in Africa, China, and Russia. Most rare-earth minerals that are used in battery, efficient light bulb, and wind turbine manufacture are available, but not presently mined, in the US, but 97% of them come from China. The USGS has an old publication that discusses some of the issues with rare earth metals and their uses in technology.

“When you think about these dependencies — and think about hybrid vehicles as an example — the use of hybrid vehicles … is an attempt to minimize dependence on Middle Eastern crude oil,” Mark Smith, CEO of rare-earth miner Molycorp Minerals, said. “But think about what we’re doing here, if that’s the purpose. We’re trading one dependence for another.”

Is it wise to trade dependence on the Middle East for oil with dependence on Russia and China for the rare-earth minerals required for the creation of clean energy sources?

This adds another level of complexity to an already horrendously complex set of equations. And just as there will certainly be difficult trade-offs to be made between the conservation of species and wild lands vs. clean energy generation and transmission, there will also be tradeoffs between conservation and mining the very elements required for our technology.

Image credits:
Diandra Jay, Long Beach Press-Telegram
Standard & Poors
USGS

The Weekly Carboholic: Devil in the ACES details – fossil fuel industry pork

Brian Angliss — Thu, 04 Jun 2009 02:55:17 +0000

In any legislation that’s nearly 1000 pages long, it’s inevitable that there will be some interesting details. The American Clean Energy and Security Act (ACES) is no exception. Last week, Solve Climate reported on one of those interesting details, namely that ACES has a $50 million per year “self-assessment” that directly benefits the coal and other fossil fuel industries.

According to the article, the direct benefit comes down to the creation of a federal Carbon Storage Research Corporation that is funded by per-kilowatt charges on electric bills instead of a tax on fossil fuel-burning utilities. So not only do the utilities not have to organize themselves, with the overhead costs associated therewith – the federal government does the organizational heavy lifting – they also get to charge their customers a federally-mandated assessment that pays for carbon capture and sequestration (CCS) research instead of having to spend profit dollars to do that research.

Put another way, electricity users pay directly for CCS research and development instead of having utilities peform that research themselves based on market pricing pressure (the usual way to get companies to do R&D in a market economy). The Solve Climate article also points out that the utilities themselves will be the beneficiaries of the Carbon Storage Research Corporation’s federally mandated largess as the Corporation doles out money for research projects.

To recap, fossil fuel-burning utilities a) collect the assessment from their customers directly, b) don’t have to spend the time and money to organize themselves, and c) will be the beneficiaries of the money they collect.

The article points out that the assessment is not technically a tax because a supermajority of utilities who collect the self-assessment have to approve it, but given the advantages the utilities get from this, what motivation would they have to reject the assessment? None that I can see, and none that Dan Greenwood, a professor of corporate finance and law at Hofstra University’s School of Law, can see either. Greenwood is quoted in the article as saying:

This is every industry’s dream – to have the proceeds of a monopoly tax dedicated entirely to your interests. The money doesn’t need to be re-appropriated every year, all of it is dedicated to your industry, and your industry gets to decide on how the money is allocated.

Maybe this lovely piece of fossil fuel pork will be purged by other committees in the House or by the Senate, but I wouldn’t bet on it.

———-

Science academies call for Copenhagen to address ocean acidification

International negotiators have started the long process of working out a follow-on treat to the Kyoto Protocol that will be finalized in Copenhagen this December. Unfortunately, one of the more serious effects of increased atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO₂), ocean acidification, is not presently a driving force behind emissions limits. The Interacademy Panel on International Issues, a body composed of national science academies from around the world, released a statement that aims to raise the profile of ocean acidification among the treaty negotiators.

The IAP Statement on Ocean Acidification says, among other things, that:

If current trends in CO₂ emissions continue, model projections suggest that by mid-century CO₂ concentrations will be more than double pre-industrial levels and the oceans will be more acidic than they have been for tens of millions of years. The current rate of change is much more rapid than during any event over the last 65 million years.

As a result of the rising acidity and the rate of the increase, the Statement says

[Arctic] waters will be corrosive to Arctic calcifiers such as pteropods, and bivalves such as clams, which play a key role in Arctic food webs.

and

The ocean chemistry changes projected… [are] likely to be too rapid for many species to adapt to. Many coastal animals and groups of phytoplankton and zooplankton may be directly affected with implications for fish, marine mammals and the other groups that depend on them for food.
…
The impacts of these changes on oceanic ecosystems and the services they provide, for example in fisheries, coastal protection, tourism, carbon sequestration and climate regulation, cannot yet be estimated accurately but they are potentially large.

Do you like the taste of salmon or tuna? What happens if increasing CO₂ in the atmosphere acidifies the oceans so much that the food chain that feeds salmon and tuna collapses? No more salmon or tuna.

The Statement makes the following recommendations to the pre-Copenhagen negotiators:

Acknowledge that ocean acidification is a direct and real consequence of increasing atmospheric CO₂ concentrations, is already having an effect at current concentrations, and is likely to cause grave harm to important marine ecosystems as CO₂ concentrations reach 450 ppm and above;

Recognise that reducing the build up of CO₂ in the atmosphere is the only practicable solution to mitigating ocean acidification;

Within the context of the UNFCCC negotiations in the run up to Copenhagen 2009, recognise the direct threats posed by increasing atmospheric CO2 emissions to the oceans and therefore society, and take action to mitigate this threat;

Implement action to reduce global CO₂ emissions by at least 50% of 1990 levels by 2050 and continue to reduce them thereafter;

Reinvigorate action to reduce stressors, such as overfishing and pollution, on marine ecosystems to increase resilience to ocean acidification.

In order to hit the “50% below 1990 by 2050″ target, however, some scientists say that global emissions of all greenhouse gases (GHGs) must peak and then start to fall no later than 2015. A similar conclusion was reached by a couple of Tyndall researchers and reported by the Carboholic in September, 2008, where they concluded that “it is difficult to envisage anything other than a planned economic recession being compatible with stabilization at or below 650 ppmv CO₂e.”

———-

Permafrost’s complex response to rising temperature

Last week, a new paper was published in the science journal Nature (and reported by the National Science Foundation) that showed for the first time how carbon responds to different amounts of permafrost thaw. Previously, models had predicted that thawing permafrost would result in a release of carbon (in the form of CO₂ and/or methane) and methane releases from warming permafrost has been detected previously. But the measurements to date have not shown whether the carbon emitted was greater than carbon absorbed, or how old the carbon emitted was. The new paper not only reported details about both of these things, but also showed that whether permafrost was a net carbon sink or source depended on how long the permafrost had been thawed.

The authors monitored three sites in Alaska where various types of permafrost data has been collected since 1985. Since at least 2004, the authors have been monitoring total carbon moving in and out of the three sites and determining the carbon’s age via by radiocarbon dating. What the authors found is that all three sites – selected for minimal, moderate, and extensive thawing of the permafrost – absorbed carbon during the Arctic summer and emitted carbon during the Arctic winter. As expected, the site with minimal thawing was balanced and the site with extensive melting was a net source of carbon. But the site with moderate thawing was actually a net carbon sink.

Unfortunately, the extensively thawed permafrost emitted much more carbon than it absorbed. So much more, in fact, that all the carbon absorbed while the permafrost was in a “moderately thawed” state was released back into the environment once the permafrost thawed more extensively.

According to the paper, the results of the radiocarbon data confirm that microbial respiration of “old” carbon (carbon prior to nuclear tests in the 40s and 50s) has the potential to emit a significant amount of carbon into the atmosphere.

The authors also attempted to estimate what this could mean for future carbon emissions even as they pointed out that it must “be done with caution.” They estimated that, based on some models, permafrost thaw could release 0.8-1.1 Pg of carbon per year, roughly equal to the estimates of carbon emissions from land use changes such as agriculture, forestry, et al. While the paper says that this emission rate depends on a host of factors that are not presently known, it is consistent with laboratory results.

Thanks to Ubertramp for the NSF link and to Dr. Schuur for the electronic copy of the paper

———-

Swiss RE expects a wave of climate litigation

According to an article in National Underwriter, reinsurance giant Swiss RE expects that a wave of lawsuits relating to climate change is going to hit in the next few years and that it will be similar to the mountain of lawsuits companies faced due to asbestos.

The Zurich-based firm, in an examination of the consequences of globalization of class actions on insurers, said, “We expect, however, that climate change-related liability will develop more quickly than asbestos-related claims and believe the frequency and sustainability of climate change-related litigation could become a significant issue within the next couple of years…”

The company advised, “Given the potential implications of this shift for the insurance industry, developments need to be monitored closely.”

If SwissRE is correct, then we can expect lawsuits against utilities and oil companies. Imagine, for a moment, if the entire population of New Orleans brought suit against Peabody, Arch Coal, and ExxonMobil as a class action for their part emitting CO₂ that “created” Hurricane Katrina, or all the families who lost family members in Katrina charged the companies with wrongful death lawsuits. Add into the equation the legal precedent set in the UK by the Greenpeace ruling that released six activists because they stopped climate damage and we have the potential for a horrendous amount of litigation.

Even I’m not thrilled by the sound of that, and I’m someone who wouldn’t cry a single tear if Peabody et al went out of business tomorrow.

According to the National Underwriter article, the SwissRE report warned that “coercive settlements” could be come a significant problem and suggested that “consideration should be given to alternative dispute resolution schemes.”

Image credits:
Engineeringnews.co.za
pmel.noaa.gov
David Froese, University of Alberta, via New York Times

The Weekly Carboholic: GPS degradation to affect climate measurements too

Brian Angliss — Thu, 28 May 2009 15:55:52 +0000

According to the Government Accountability Office (GAO), the the Global Positioning System (GPS) could degrade significantly as early as next year. The GAO report says that the existing GPS satellites are aging and need to be replaced, but new satellites are years late and hundreds of millions of dollars over budget. For this reason, the constellation of 31 GPS satellites has a chance of falling below the minimum number needed (24 satellites) to provide the required accuracy for military uses starting in 2010.

Normally, the trials and tribulations of the GPS system might not be considered a climate issue, given that most people only know about the everyday items that use GPS signals – smart phones and car navigation systems for starters. But GPS is used for thousands of lesser known applications. For example, many telecommunications central offices use GPS receivers as the master clock that enables them to efficiently transmit data and voice communications across the country. And survey equipment uses GPS to plot road locations and elevation.

GPS is also used to track the 3000 Argo ocean probes that monitor temperature and salinity in the global ocean, and the movement of glaciers on Greenland and the amount of post-glacial isostatic rebound are both measured by very accurate GPS receivers. A less accurate GPS system would make these measurements less accurate as well, possibly resulting in related climate science data (on sea level rise, ocean heat content, etc.) becomming less reliable.

In a Twitter “press conference,” Air Force spokesman Col. Dave Buckman downplayed the risks found by the GAO. According to the IDG article, Col. Buckman said that it was “very unlikely” that users would even notice the reduction in accuracy. That may be true for the average person driving a car around town, but scientific users, like military users, need position to be as accurately determined as possible, especially for things like glaciers that move (generally) very slowly, or for sea level rise where the changes could be millimeters per year.

———-

Secretary Chu suggests white roofs to combat climate disruption

According to The Independent, Energy Secretary Steven Chu suggested that buildings have their roofs painted white in order to reduce climate disruption. The rationale is simple – white reflects energy. A white roof would reduce the amount of solar energy absorbed by the building, improving its energy efficiency by reducing the amoung of electricity required to cool the building. Less air conditioning means fewer carbon dioxide (CO₂) emissions from fossil fuel power plants.

In addition, white roofs (and lightly colored walls and streets) would increase the amount of energy reflected from the surface back into space. This is called “albedo,” and the more energy is reflected, the less is absorbed and kept within the Earth’s climate system. In fact, as the Carbo mentioned back in 2008, the albedo effect is huge – the energy reflected alone could save the equivalent of 44 billion tons CO₂. The Independent article quotes Sec. Chu as saying it would be like removing every car in the world from the road for 11 years.

This idea is relatively intuitive to anyone who owns a dark-colored car or who uses a windshield sun shade – dark-colored cars or cars without the sun shade get much hotter in the summer sun than light-colored and/or shaded cars do. But there’s another beneficial side effect too – light colors not only reflect energy from the sun back out into space, but also reflect the building’s own energy back into the building. As a result, lightly-colored buildings will not only need less energy for cooling in the summer, but they’ll also need less energy for heating in the winter.

All that for the cost of a couple million coats of paint.

———-

Ecuador wants cash to leave carbon underground

Oil is carbon that hasn’t been burned yet. At least, that’s the argument that the government of Ecuador is making. According to the Washington Post, Ecuador is trying to get carbon market credit for leaving the 410 million tons of CO₂ in the ground instead of extracting it and selling it (in the form of 850 million barrels of oil) on the oil market.

While there has been some discussion around the Web that paying nations and companies to leave fossil fuels in the ground might be a viable method to quickly reduce CO₂ emissions, the Post reports that the Ecuador proposal is the first of its kind. This partly due to the fact that the Kyoto Protocol specifically prohibits claiming energy reserves left untouched as a carbon credit. The Post quotes Ecuadoran environmentalist Roque Sevílla as saying Ecuadorans hope that the Copenhagen meeting this December might loosen the rules and allow the Ecuador proposal to become a “pilot project.”

There is one major problem, however. The land above the oil reserves is a National Park and is supposedly already protected from drilling. This means that Ecuador is asking to be paid for not extracting oil that shouldn’t be extracted in the first place, and this could be considered fraudulent. As such, the Ecuadoran proposal may fail even if carbon credit payments for fossil fuels not extracted are approved in Copenhagen. Time will tell.

———-

Subsidies, quotas warping “renewable” definition

What do the following things all have in common: trash pellets, nuclear reactors, coal mining waste, and microwaved tires? According to the NYTimes, depending on what state you’re in, they’re all considered as renewable as solar power or wind energy.

According to the article, companies are lobbying the state and federal governments to include their particular energy source in the definition of what is renewable.

“A banana is renewable — you can grow them forever,” said Bob Eisenbud, a vice president for government affairs at Waste Management, which receives about 10 percent of its annual revenues of $13.3 billion from waste and landfill energy generation. “A banana that goes into garbage and gets burned,” he added, is “a renewable resource and producing renewable energy.”

But is it really? The article says that many environmentalists disagree with Waste Management’s characterization, or with the inclusion of other sources of energy that emit CO₂ via burning something.

The environmentalists have a point. Burning tires that have been microwaved in an effort to make them burn more efficiently is a great idea because millions of tires take up huge amounts of space and can harbor insects that are vectors for disease (especially mosquitoes). But tires are petroleum products, a carbon-intensive fossil fuel, and so burning tires isn’t a whole lot different from burning oil directly.

Similarly, converting waste to electricity and burning it reduces the waste stream, but is solid waste a “renewable resource” or a byproduct of modern civilization? I’m personally inclined to say “byproduct,” at least until you consider landfill gas emissions (mostly methane). However, when carbon capitalism finally comes along, landfill emissions of methane will become ~20x more expensive than the CO₂ emitted from burning the methane, so the methane “renewable” question will likely take care of itself.

The NYTimes article points out that the problem of defining “renewable” goes beyond whether burning waste should qualify or not. Hydropower is certainly renewable, but it’s already heavily subsidized by the government. So should the government give hydropower utilities even more money than they’re already getting?

Graham Mathews, a lobbyist representing Covanta Energy, summarized the first part of this problem for the NYTimes article by saying “Energy policy is balkanized by region, and that dictates the debate. The politics become incredibly complicated.” In essence, since there is no federal law defining what is and, just as importantly, what is not “renewable,” state politics will define what does and does not qualify for federal credits and what technologies apply to state renewable electricity standards.

But Senator Jeff Bingaman (D-NM), chairman of the Senate energy committee, said that defining too many questionable technologies as “renewable” throws the numbers “way out of whack,” and then “the whole purpose of the renewable electricity standard is defeated.”

I’m sure that companies lobbying for including nuclear or coal mine waste as “renewable” would never want to defeat a renewable electricity standard….