Scholars and Rogues » Weekly Carboholic

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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.”

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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.”

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.”

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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).

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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

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.

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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.

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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.

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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 Weekly Carboholic: ACCCE hired Bonner, but didn’t notify Congress of forgeries when they were discovered

Brian Angliss — Thu, 06 Aug 2009 04:19:39 +0000

Before the House voted on the American Climate and Energy Security Act (ACES) earlier this year, someone hired Bonner & Associates (hereafter Bonner) to manufacture some grassroots opposition against ACES. At least one employee did so by forging letters from non-existent people to Representative Tom Perriello of Virginia. These letters were discovered, Bonner claims to have fired the employee, and a partner at Bonner apologized to the two minority groups from which the letters were supposedly sent. The apologies were, it’s fair to say, emphatically not accepted.

Since the Bonner story broke last Friday, there have been a lot of new information about who hired them, whether there were other Congresspeople who received forged letters, the legality or lack thereof, and an official response from a House committee with subpoena powers.

We now know that Bonner sent at least 12 letters to three different Congresspeople – the aforementioned Rep. Perriello, Rep. Kathy Dahlkemper, and Rep. Christopher Carney, both of Pennsylvania. We also know that these 12 letters were identified by Bonner and brought to the attention of the clients. And, as of Wednesday, we also know that two more letters have turned up in Rep. Perriello’s office – these forged on letterhead belonging to the Jefferson Area Board for Aging and the American Association of University Women. We don’t presently know if these two additional letters are part of the 12 discovered by Bonner or whether they represent two additional letters, for a total of 14 forged letters.

We also know that the American Coalition for Clean Coal Electricity (ACCCE) was the end client (via another PR company, the Hawthorn Group, which has released its own statement) who had hired Bonner to create the grassroots backlash against ACES – they admitted so in a statement by ACCCE president Stephen L. Miller on their Website. It reads, in part:

We are outraged at the conduct of Bonner and Associates. Bonner and Associates was hired by the Hawthorn Group – our primary grassroots contractor – to do limited outreach earlier this year on H.R. 2454. Based upon the information we have, it is clear that an employee of Bonner’s firm failed to demonstrate the integrity we demand of all our contractors and subcontractors. As a result, these egregious actions led to falsified letters being sent to Members of Congress.

ACCCE has always maintained high ethical and professional standards. In this case, the standards and practices that we require for grassroots advocacy outreach were not adhered to by Bonner and Associates. In this sense, the community groups involved, the Members of Congress who received the fraudulent letters, as well as ACCCE, were all victimized by this misconduct.

However, we also know that the ACCCE knew about the forgeries at least two days before the House vote and did not inform Congress of that fact. This comes from an ACCCE document describing the relationship between the ACCCE and Bonner:

Based upon information ACCCE received from the Hawthorn Group, it was Bonner & Associates’ own internal that identified these false letters and it was Mr. Bonner who first brought this to the attention of the Hawthorn Group. ACCCE was then made aware of the situation by Hawthorn on July 24, 2009.

The House Roll Call vote on ACES occurred on July 26, 2009.

The Sierra Club announced on Monday that it had mailed a letter to Attorney General Holder asking the Department of Justice to investigate whether Bonner’s actions were legal or not. The letter from Patrick Gallagher, Sierra Club Legal Counsel, reads in part:

First, the Department of Justice should ascertain whether forged letters were sent to other Representatives or Senators…. Second, the Department of Justice should investigate whether other community organizations were similarly misrepresented…. Finally, the Department of Justice should pursue criminal charges against Bonner & Associates.

At a minimum, Bonner & Associates, acting through its employees or representatives, appears to have violated 18 U.S.C. 1343 (“Fraud by wire, radio, or television”) and 19 U.S.C. 1346 (“Definition of ‘scheme or artifice to defraud’”).

Representative Edward Markey, Chairman of the Select Committee on Energy Independence and Global Warming, sent a letter to Jack Bonner with a list of 14 questions to be answered by August 12, 2009. S&R obtained a copy of the letter – you can read it here. Some of the more interesting questions from the letter can be summarized as follows:

Who did you do your lobbying for, is your client a registered lobbying firm, and how much did did they pay you?
Did Bonner lobby other Congresspeople on ACES and for what clients?
Give us details (compensation, contractor vs. employee status, etc.) about the employee you claim to have fired.
If you script your employees, give us copies of those scripts.
We want copies of all faked letters Bonner sent to any Congressperson, and we also want to know how you got ahold of actual letterhead from the two minority groups from which letters were forged.
Explain how you caught the fakes and what methods you used to ensure that you found all the faked letters and their recipients, and if you destroyed anyting, we want to know that too.

Rep. Markey has also sent a letter to the ACCCE demanding answers to questions similar to those posed to Bonner. S&R has also obtained a copy of this letter and you can read it here. It says, in part:

Press reports indicate that ACCCE may not have told the other affected offices that they too had received fraudulent letters until Monday, August 3, 2009.

The deliberate inaction prior to the House vote and the extended silence after the House vote – some 40 days after the ACCCE knew what had happened – raises serious concerns.

This story is still developing, and S&R will bring you periodic updates as the become available.

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Cash for Clunkers doesn’t do much for climate

According to an Associated Press article, Cash for Clunkers (C4C) has not had an appreciable effect on U.S. consumption of oil or its greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. According to the article, C4C reduced oil consumption by about 72 million gallons of gas per year, or the amount of gasoline consumed by Americans every 4.5 hours. Similarly, the GHG savings equates to about saving 57 minutes of GHG emissions per year.

The problem is that the estimated number of clunkers removed from the roads is only 250 thousand, compared to at total of approximately 260 million cars in the U.S.

There are certainly benefits to this program, but according to the individuals interviewed for the AP story, the benefits aren’t GHGs. Instead, the benefits are to the economy as a whole and the reduction of standard pollutants like sulfur dioxide, nitrogen oxides, and carbon monoxide. But two climate experts interviewed for the article had this to say about it:

“As a carbon dioxide policy, this is a terribly wasteful thing to do,” said Henry Jacoby, a professor of management and co-director of the Joint Program on the Science and Policy of Global Change at MIT. “The amount of carbon you are saving per federal expenditure is very, very small.”

and

“It’s not that it’s a bad idea; just don’t sell it as a cost-effective energy savings method,” [Michael Gerrard, director of the Center for Climate Change Law at Columbia University,] said. “From an economic standpoint it seems to be a roaring success. From an environment and energy perspective, it’s not where you would put your first dollar.”

It’s also entirely possible that these complaints are actually the tip of the metaphorical iceberg. As S&R reported last month, GHG and pollution emissions vary with the total lifecycle of that transportation method. For this reason, replacing “clunkers” that aren’t truly clunkers could actually increase GHG and pollution emissions as a result of the emissions created in the process of manufacturing the new vehicle.

Whether this is actually so remains for someone else to determine.

———-

National Academy of Sciences: we need independent GHG emission confirmation

Last week, the National Academy of Sciences’ (NAS) Committee on Methods for Estimating Greenhouse Gas Emissions and the National Research Council sent NASA administrator Charles Bolden a letter expressing their support for the replacement of the Orbiting Carbon Observatory (OCO) that failed to reach orbit earlier this year. The letter says that a replacement OCO is necessary for independent verification of carbon emissions reports that are presently self-reported by nations on an irregular basis.

National emission inventories, required under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, are self-reported and are not required regularly for all countries. Verification requires checking these self-reported emissions estimates. However, independent data against which to verify the statistics used to estimate CO2 emissions, such as fossil fuel consumption, are not available.

In addition, while the Japanese GOSAT has the ability to monitor CO₂, the letter claims that GOSAT’s spatial resolution is too low and it’s accuracy insufficient to measure the emissions of a power plant against the background CO₂.

The letter points out that, while OCO’s short on-orbit lifetime and poor global coverage makes OCO unsuitable to observe trends, but that OCO would be an ideal testbed for the technologies that could monitor the entire globe for years or decades at a time. And given the significant limitations of terrestrial monitoring of GHGs, satellites will be necessary to confirm the self-reported national emissions.

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Climate disruption may, or may not, make disease worse

It’s long been a tenet of climate disruption that increasing global temperatures will result in a wider range for tropical diseases and thus greater incidence of disease. But a feature article in Conservation Magazine asks a number of questions about the accuracy of this understanding and ultimately concludes that there are too many unknowns at this point to really know how diseases will respond to a warming world.

The basic problem is this: when there are so many other possible factors in the spread of disease, how can you accurately attribute the wider spread of a disease to climate disruption? The examples provided in the article illustrate this difficulty.

According to the article, tick-borne encephalitis (TBE) increased in the Baltics at the same time that the region warmed up significantly. But the Soviet Union collapsed over the same period as well, and the rate of poverty rose as a result. Since poorer people are less likely to get vaccinated and are more likely to forage for food in areas where ticks are more common, TBE researcher, Sarah Randolph concluded that “the disease surge probably had far more to do with human actions than planetary changes.”

Mosquitoes are some of the most prolific disease vectors in the world, spreading malaria and West Nile Virus among dozens of other pathogens and parasites. According to the article, West Nile cases in the U.S. appear to have more to do with the lifecycles of the mosquitoes that carry the virus than with climate change. Specifically, in the western U.S., West Nile cases spike the year after a dry year, while West Nile cases spike in wet years in the eastern U.S. These differences result from the relationship between different mosquitoes and their predators. Hot years in the West kill off mosquito predators and the mosquitoes recover before the predators do, leading to an increase in mosquitoes and accompanying West Nile cases. In the East, however, mosquitoes breed in standing water (water-filled tires, for example), and so rainier years produce more mosquitoes and more West Nile cases.

However, the data is only over a few short years, and whether this relationship holds for longer periods is, as yet, undetermined. But the observed reaction of West Nile to precipitation and heat illustrates that whether the disease gets more common and widespread or not will vary from region to region.

The questions are not limited just to human disease and parasites – how animal parasites, and the animals afflicted, will change as a result of climate disruption is also uncertain. According to the article, monarch butterflies are often afflicted by a parasite that makes the butterflies less able to fly long distances. Because so many monarchs migrate to Mexico, the migrating butterfly population remains healthy. But non-migrating monarchs in Florida have a much higher incidence of parasite infection than the migrating monarchs do. And so it’s possible that, if monarch wintering sites move further north out of Mexico and into Texas, the incidence of parasitic infection in monarch butterflies could rise.

But other parasites, such as those that infect musk ox in the Arctic, may respond differently, according to the article. The parasites infect the musk ox via accidental ingestion of slugs. If climate disruption kills off the slugs, then musk ox may actually get healthier as a result of climate disruption.

At this point there’s not enough information to know.

Image credits:
PhotoCarsOnline.com
NASA/JPL

The Weekly Carboholic: NE Pacific clouds observed to amplify warming

Brian Angliss — Sat, 01 Aug 2009 05:43:13 +0000

The question of whether clouds are a positive or a negative feedback is one of the biggest remaining questions in climate modeling. A new paper in the journal Science is another piece of evidence that clouds will amplify the effects of climate disruption instead of dampen it.

The authors of the study analyzed two unrelated observational methods and found that both showed a decrease in cloud cover over the Northeast (NE) Pacific as a result of climate changes in sea surface temperature (SST), sea level pressure (SLP), and two measurements of the troposphere (the lower atmosphere). The observational methods used were satellites and direct observation from ships, and even though the methods were different, both methods produced similar results and similar correlations to SST et al. As a result, the conclusions of the paper are stronger than most.

And those conclusions are that, as the NE Pacific heats up, the amount of cloud cover over the region declines. Less cloud cover over water means that the water absorbs more solar energy, further heating up the ocean surface. Similarly, cooler water in the NE Pacific means more clouds that further cool the ocean’s surface. In addition, observations shown in the paper illustrate this same relationship holds across the entire Pacific.

The authors also compared the observations to the 18 general circulation models (GCMs) in the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project phase 3 archive for how the models compared to the new clouds observations, and the results were striking – only two of the models produced the same statistical correlation sign (+ or -) as the observations, and one of those two is a statistical outlier for wind circulation.

According to the paper’s lead author Dr. Amy Clement of the University of Miami, one of the next steps is to extend their results out of the NE Pacific to the rest of the Pacific and, ultimately, to the rest of the globe. But according to Clement, the biggest problem is that only one GCM accurately reproduces all the observed cloud effects in the NE Pacific.

“This is the best we can do,” she said. “As more models pass this test, then we can begin to have more confidence in the sign of the low cloud feedback and how much that contributes to global climate sensitivity.”

Time, and much more research, will tell.

Thanks to Amy Clement, lead author of the paper for answering my questions and providing me with a review copy of her paper

———-

Skeptical Inquirer publisher calls Inhofe’s list uncredible

Before Marc Morano left Sen. Inhofe’s (R-OK) staff to become highly paid climate disruption denier and professional pundit, he collected a list of 687 scientists who supposedly rejected the the science underlying climate disruption. It was titled the United States Senate Minority Report on Global Warming, and the purpose was to play a numbers game with the IPCC scientists responsible for writing and reviewing the Fourth Assessment Report working group 1 scientific review. Supposedly, the 687 “expert” in the Minority Report outnumbered the IPCC scientists because of how many scientists were responsible for writing the IPCC Summary for Policymakers. Given that 2000 or so scientists wrote and/or reviewed the WG1 study, this claim was clearly and obviously false to anyone who understood the way that the IPCC WG1 worked, but that didn’t stop Morano and Inhofe from making the claim. Nor did it stop legions of uninformed climate disruption deniers from repeating the claim ad inifinitum.

While bloggers and some journalists have put a great deal of time into exposing the Inhofe list, it’s too easy to dismiss bloggers as activists and journalists as members of the mythical “liberal media.” But the avowed skeptical organization the Center for Inquiry isn’t so easily dismissed, especially by individuals claiming the mantle of “climate change skeptic.” Which is why the Center’s scathing investigation of the credibility – or rather the lack thereof – of the Inhofe list is such a big deal.

What the Center’s investigation found is that 80% of the scientists on the list had never published a climate-related paper. The Center could verify that only 10% were for certain involved in climate science, with an additional 5% that could have been. And 4% largely or entirely agreed with the scientific theory human-caused climate disruption. I think it’s fair to say that the Center’s claim that “[t]hese results cast serious doubt on the Senate Minority Report’s credibility” is a bit understated.

What does this mean for Inhofe’s infamous list? Probably not much. Morano no longer works for Inhofe, after all, and neither man has been overly concerned with verifiable scientific fact when it comes to climate disruption. But having the publisher of what is arguably the premier skeptical publication in the world say that the list is not credible won’t make their lives any easier. And over the long run, that’s probably a good thing.

———-

The ozone hole has reduced ocean CO₂ absorption

In 2007, scientists studying the Southern Ocean reported that it was not absorbing CO₂ as efficiently as had been expected. A study published in November, 2008 partly contradicted the 2007 conclusion and said that the original study was flawed due to insufficient resolution in oceanic current eddies. A new study published in Geophysical Research Letters adds yet another chapter to the ongoing questions about the Southern Ocean’s ability, or lack thereof, to absorb anthropogenic CO₂.

The fundamental absorption mechanism of any gas in water is related to the partial pressures of the gas in the air vs. dissolved in the water. At a constant temperature, the partial pressure at the water surface will equal the partial pressure of that gas in the air. Increase the amount of the gas in the air and more of it will slowly absorb into the water. This is fundamentally why increasing concentrations of CO₂ due to fossil fuel combustion is driving ocean acidification – the partial pressure of CO₂ in the Earth’s atmosphere is increasing and the ocean is absorbing more CO₂ as a result.

But this simple relationship isn’t sufficient to describe the real ocean. The real ocean has waves, is in contact with wind, and has currents and upwellings that change the relationship on local and regional scales. And it’s these real ocean effects that the study’s authors have modeled using coupled-climate-carbon models (CCCMs), models that focus on the effects of the carbon cycle on climate and vice versa. And the CCCMs have found that the ozone hole over Antarctica has been a significant factor in the reduction of CO₂ absorption by the Southern Ocean.

The Southern Annual Mode (SAM) is an atmospheric pattern that moves westerlies (prevailing winds in the mid-latitudes that tend to blow from west to east) closer to the pole. According to the paper, the SAM has moved poleward as a result of increasing GHGs and ozone depletion, and wind stresses on the Southern Ocean have increased. The result of increased wind is greater ocean mixing between the surface layers and deep, carbon-rich layers of the ocean. Essentially, the ocean surface layers that are carbon-poor are being blown off the deeper layers, creating a condition where the ocean can’t absorb as much CO₂ because the ocean has a higher CO₂ partial pressure than it would have had if the westerlies hadn’t been blowing so strongly.

The authors ran two sets of models, one with the effects of the ozone hole included and one without, and then compared the model runs with observed changes in the the partial pressure of CO₂ both in the Southern Ocean and in the air above it. The model that didn’t include the effects of the ozone hole didn’t match reported observations.

In addition, as the SAM exposes deep, carbon-rich water to the surface, ocean acidification of the Southern Ocean accelerates and the effects thereof worsen. These effects include reduced calicification of plankton and larger areas of low oxygen (hypoxia) that could lead to larger ocean dead zones.

In November, the Carboholic reported on a study that claimed the Southern Ocean was still absorbing CO₂ and that the problem with studies like this one was that they didn’t have detailed enough ocean models. The authors of this study addressed the criticisms of the prior one directly and concluded that more detailed ocean models were not necessary in this case because the CCCMs used were able to replicate observated changes in CO₂. It remains to be seen, however, what happens when both model types from the two studies are combined.

———-

Clinton Climate Initiative and Microsoft partner on Project 2°

Project 2° is an attempt to provide cities with easy-to-use software tools that can track and manage their greenhouse gas emissions. The idea is that cities all have the same sources of GHG emissions – transportation, electricity generation, energy consumption, and industry – and the similarities mean that all cities have similar needs with respect to their ability to determine where, how, and how much emissions are coming from each sector.

At the moment, the Project 2° website indicates that there are only three cities using the software – Chicago, Houston, and Rotterdam, with Chicago having the most information available on the website. Other resources at the Project 2° website are contact links for access to experts, documentation on official international GHG accounding guidelines, and a detailed demonstration of how the software works.

I don’t know if this will take off or not. Having Microsoft and Autodesk on board certainly doesn’t hurt Project 2°’s chances any, but who knows. Ultimately, though, something like Project 2° is needed if cities are going to be able to get a handle on their GHG emissions and how best to cut them in the near future.

———-

We might as well drive Model-Ts

Overall vehicle fuel efficiency hasn’t increased much in decades. Generally speaking, as gasoline and diesel engines have been made more efficient, the efficiency gains have been eaten up with increased vehicle mass and additional gadgets. According to a New Scientist article, modern automobiles, trucks, motorcycles, and buses are not dramatically more efficient than the Ford Model-T.

University of Michigan Transportation Research Institute researchers Michael Sivak and Omer Tsimhoni analyzed the total fleet fuel efficiency for cars et al from 1923 to 2006 and found that overall efficiency improved at only 2% per year average. In addition, the bulk of that 2% annual improvement actually took place between the OPEC oil embargo in the 1973 and 1991. According to the article, from 1991 to 2006, fuel efficiency improved a grand total of 1.8%.

One of the most critical points in the article is that removing old, low efficiency vehicles is critical to raising overall fleet fuel efficiency. Thus the various “Cash for Clunkers” ideas that have been implemented locally and the federal plan that was recently signed into law by President Obama.

The other critical point made in the article is not necessarily obvious:

“Society has much more to gain from improving a car from 15 to 16 mpg (6.38 to 6.8 km/l) than from improving a car from 40 to 41 mpg (17 to 17.43 km/l),” [Sivak and Tsimhoni] write in their paper. “Similarly, the benefits are greater from improving a truck from 4 to 4.5 mpg (1.7 to 1.92 km/l) than from improving a truck from 7 to 7.5 mpg (3.19 km/l).”

It’s not necesarily obvious that this claim is correct until you invert the numbers. Improving fuel efficiency from 15 to 16 mpg is 6.7 to 6.3 gallons per 100 miles, or 0.4 gallons less fuel burned. Improving efficiency from 40 to 41 mpg means burning only 0.1 gallons less fuel (2.5 to 2.4 gallons per 100 miles). In the same way, going from 4.0 to 4.5 mpg is better than going from 7.0 to 7.5 mpg because the improvement is 3 gallons per 100 miles vs. 1 gallon per mile respectively.

Image credits:
NASA Earth Observatory
San Francisco Chronicle
Geophysical Research Letters
CSIRO

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.

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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.

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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.

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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 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.

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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”

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….”

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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

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….

The Weekly Carboholic: Climate disruption lowering Juneau sea level

Brian Angliss — Wed, 20 May 2009 05:16:36 +0000

There’s a few reasons that I prefer the phrase “climate disruption” over “global warming” or even “climate change.” One of those reasons is that “climate disruption” describes what’s happening around the world in a way that people immediately understand – the climate they’ve grown accustomed to is going to be disrupted in some fashion, but not necessarily in a way that’s immediately obvious. One place that’s historically warm and wet could turn hot and even wetter (something that might reasonably be predicted by your average climate layperson) while another area could actually cool off and dry out as a result of climate disruption. The effects of climate disruption may be counter intuitive, thus the term “disruption.”

One such place that is facing a counter intuitive disruption is Juneau, the state capital of Alaska. As local glaciers melt rapidly, the sea level around the city is actually falling instead of rising.

The NYTimes article explains the basic process like this – when you melt off billions of tons of water ice from glaciers around Juneau, the land rebounds similarly to how a couch cushion rebounds when you stand up. In this case, the earth is rebounding faster than the sea level is rising, and so the local sea level is effectively dropping. In the town of Gustuvus, about 40 miles to the northwest of Juneau, the land is rising about three inches per year, the fastest rate of rebound in North America.

As a result of the lower sea level around Juneau, the NYTimes article points out that there could be wetlands lost, salmon runs could dry out, a formerly navigable channel is impassable to boats at low tide, and Douglas Island is in the process of becoming a peninsula.

Of course, if there’s a place where the local sea level is falling instead of rising, then there will also be places where the local sea level rises even more than the global average – like along the east and west coasts of the United States….

———-

Paper shows cooler periods entirely expected

In late April, David Easterling of the National Climatic Data Center (NCDC) and Michael Wehner of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory published a paper titled “Is the climate warming or cooling?” This paper represents an attempt by the authors to provide a peer-reviewed counterargument to climate disruption deniers who claim that the statistically insignificant warming since 1998 show that global warming is over.

It’s true that there has been no statistically significant warming since 1998. But this isn’t a statistically meaningful result. First, there was an unusually strong el Nino in 1998 that made that year unusually hot. In 2008 and thus far through 2009 there’s been la Nina conditions that have made the last year or so colder. And as a result, a statistical least-squares fit of a line to the data would be expected to show little warming for the last decade. But as the paper’s authors point out, if you choose 1999 as your starting point, all of a sudden there’s statistically valid warming again.

The problem, says the paper, is that natural variability is added atop the carbon dioxide (CO₂) driven warming signal. And when that natural variability is greater on short time scales than the CO₂ signal, then it’s all but inevitable that there will be decades where warming appears to stop only to start up again later. This is illustrated in the figure above for two periods in a single model run.

It’s a misconception that the Earth’s climate will warm perpetually without any variability – the real climate doesn’t work like that. Instead, the misconception is probably a result of poor communication about the differences between model averages (which intentionally smooth out the variability seen in the image above in order to discover underlying trends) and the results of a single model run. The Earth’s actual climate response is going to appear much closer to a single model run, with all the attendant peaks and valleys, than to any multiple model average.

The authors also analyzed the statistical significance of positive vs. negative trends in models and the measured data and found that even when negative trends existed in the model results, 0.0% of the negative trends were statistically significant to the 95% confidence interval. On the other hand, 26.0% of positive trends were statistically significant at the same confidence interval. This means that even when the models show negative trends, the trends are so small as to be effectively meaningless.

As the authors say, “it is reasonable to expect that the natural variability of the real climate system can and likely will produce multi-year periods of sustained “cooling” or at least periods with no real trend even in the presence of long-term anthropogenic forced warming.

———-

Convert biomass to electricity instead of ethanol

A new paper in the journal Science concludes that combusing biomass into electricity (bioelectricity) is more efficient than conversion into ethanol for combustion in automobile engines. Gross transportation output per hectare was 85% greater for bioelectricity than for ethanol and net output (subtracting out the life cycle costs of the vehicle itself) was 56% greater for bioelectricity than for ethanol.

The main reason? Internal combustion engines are woefully inefficient compared to electric motors.

While these are impressive results, the paper points out that the cost effectiveness of biomass conversion into either electricity or ethanol depends on the costs of competing electricity generation methods and petroleum. In addition, the calculations reported in the paper don’t automatically assume that bioelectricity is still the better method given systemic effects of “regional water resources, battery toxicity and recycling, air pollution,” etc.

Once those other effects are factored in, however, the end analysis may well show that the internal combustion engine must either fade away or find ways to become radically more efficient in a green transportation future.

Image credits:
Climate Change: Predicted Impacts on Juneau, Figure 26
NYTimes, from Geophysical Research Letters paper

The Weekly Carboholic: CBO produces climate analysis

Brian Angliss — Wed, 06 May 2009 12:30:34 +0000

The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) is well known for producing strictly non-partisan, tightly controlled and pretty conservative (as in careful not to overreach) economic forecasts for the effects of legislation on the national economy. These forecasts are usually quantitative in nature, giving dollar estimates for costs, benefits, savings, growth, and so on. Which is one of the reasons why last week’s release of the CBOs Potential Impacts of Climate Change in the United States was relatively unusual – it’s remarkably quantitative for a body whose products are usually numbers.

Perhaps more unusual, however, is the fact that the CBO produced the summary in the first place. Scientific summaries are usually the domain of the National Academies, NOAA, NASA, et al, not the budget office. But this time Senator Jeff Bingaman (D-NM), Chairman of the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, requested that the CBO produce “an overview of the current understanding of the impacts of climate change in the United States,” with an emphasis on the uncertainties surrounding those impacts and the policy difficulties that fall out of the difficulties.

Here’s a brief summary of the paper’s findings regarding the effects of climate disruption on the United States:

U.S. temperatures are expected to increase ~25% more in the U.S. than the global average, with Alaska increasing ~70% more than global average.
Northern areas of the U.S. are expected to get more precipitation while southern areas (esp. the Southwest) are expected to get less, and severe precipitation events (blizzards, severe thunderstorms possibly leading to flash flooding, etc.) will become more common.
There’s not enough information to make solid predictions about hurricanes, but more powerful storms are probable due to warmer ocean temperatures.
There’s not enough information at this time to know how the El Nino or oceanic currents will be affected.
Sea level rise will cause significant flooding and more dangerous storm surges, especially along the Texas, Louisiana, Florida, North Carolina, and Maryland coastlines.
An unknown number of species will be at risk of extinction due to changing climate.
Agriculture will change, but how much is dependent on what region of the U.S. is affected and how: the West may become too dry to support current crops, California may become too hot for wine grapes, and so on. But many areas are expected to be able to adapt by changing crops and/or changing when crops are sown and harvested.
Forests are expected to expand significantly, but this may cause additional problems in the Arctic.
Cold water fish species may go extinct or move north out of their traditional ranges and out of U.S. territorial waters.
Water supplies will become a major problem for the west while flooding and saltwater invasion of aquifers will produce water quality problems for significant parts of the rest of the U.S.
Energy demand (driven by winter heating) is expected to fall overall, and coastal/Arctic infrastructure will need to be repaired and improved more often.
Human health is expected to stay about the same, although the causes for mortality will change (from cold to insect-borne disease, for example).

All in all, the CBO estimates that the cost to the U.S. by 2100 will be about 3% of GDP, adjusted for inflation, for a 7 degree Fahrenheit increase in U.S., but with a few important caveats.

The first caveat is that the studies the CBO based their estimated cost off of don’t estimate the costs for the high end of temperature increases (13 degrees F or more) and don’t include all of the projected effects on the U.S. The second caveat is there are non-economic effects (species extinction, for example) for which assessing value is difficult. And the third caveat is that abrupt changes that are, definitionally, difficult or impossible to adapt to have not been included in the estimate.

Ultimately, the CBO says that the uncertainties are too large to really make good economic estimates of the costs. Instead, the approach is more like risk assessment and mitigation than a cost/benefit analysis. And the CBO concludes with a call for Congress to abandon carbon capitalism in favor of a carbon tax.

Apparently the economists at the CBO haven’t given up on convincing Congress that a carbon tax is a better way to go.

———-

HFC phaseout struggle at the White House

David Sassoon at SolveCliamte has been following the news of a significant struggle between the State Department and its allies and the White House economic team headed by Larry Summers. The struggle is over whether the administration should support an ammendment to the Montreal Protocols to phase out hydrofluorocarbons (HFCs) or should include HFCs within the carbon capitalism regieme described in the Waxman-Markey draft American Clean Energy and Security Act of 2009 (ACES).

The Montreal Protocol is the international treaty that phased out CFCs as a result of the discovery of the ozone hole over Antarctica. While HFCs don’t have the same ozone-destroying properties, they are very powerful greenhouse gases (GHGs). One ton of HFCs in the atmosphere acts like thousands of tons of carbon dioxide, and while releases of HFCs into the atmosphere are presently relatively small, the amount emitted is expected to grow dramatically.

If the HFCs were added to the Montreal Protocol, then they’d be gradually phased out independently of other GHGs and would be replaced by new products that were weaker GHGs and didn’t persist in the atmosphere for as long. And it appears that there are a number of other products already waiting in the wings to replace HFCs, so the phase out would likely be relatively painless. However, it appears that the White House economic team may want HFCs included in the carbon market specifically because they’re easy to replace. Sassoon runs some quick math and concludes that, at $25 per ton of CO₂ equivalent, a ton of one common HFC would be $50,000, so high a price that market manipulation becomes a real concern and the U.S. could potentially meet all it’s CO₂ emissions targets exclusively by stopping HFC production.

Sassoon points out that this kind of manipulation has already been observed in the EU emissions trading program.

Keep tuned to Sassoon’s blog at SolveClimate for more developments.

Image Credit:
CBO

The Weekly Carboholic: Texas Representative baffled by continental drift, CO2 toxicity

Brian Angliss — Thu, 23 Apr 2009 06:00:33 +0000

Today was the first of what will probably be many, many hearings on the Waxman-Markey climate change bill in the House of Representatives. One of the more… interesting exchanges occurred when Representative Joe Barton (R-TX) asked Energy Secretary Stephen Chu to explain where the oil in the Arctic came from. Here’s Chu’s response:

In other words, the oil was created somewhere else on the earth and then continental drift moved it up to what is now the Arctic. Yet Barton claimed on his Twitter account that he “baffled” Chu with his question. You watch the piece and tell me which one of the two men was baffled.

In case you’re not sure based on the first video, here’s another one that might help clear that up. It gets interesting at around 50 seconds:

I would have thought that a Representative from Texas would have watched the movie “Apollo 13″ and known that carbon dioxide (CO₂) will kill you if there’s too much of it in the air. Of course, Barton doesn’t represent Houston, so maybe he can be excused.

———-

Medieval Warming Period likely regional in extent

New Scientist reports that the Medieval Warming Period (MWP) in Europe was a regional phenomenon caused by an unusually strong North Atlantic Oscillation and a consistent La Nina in the Pacific. If this conclusion is found to be accurate upon additional review, then it pretty much scuttles one of the more common climate disruption denier memes, namely that the MWP was warmer than now.

Put simply, if the MWP was local to the area around the North Atlantic and the rest of the world was locked into La Nina conditions, the the global temperatures were almost certainly not warmer than modern temperatures.

My apologies for the short post this time, after so long a hiatus.

The Weekly Carboholic: as the Arctic melts

Brian Angliss — Thu, 02 Apr 2009 04:54:11 +0000

“I was in Siberia a few weeks ago, and I am now just back in from the field in Alaska. The permafrost is melting fast all over the Arctic, lakes are forming everywhere and methane is bubbling up out of them.”

“Lakes in Siberia are five times bigger than when I measured them in 2006. It’s unprecedented. This is a global event now, and the inertia for more permafrost melt is increasing.”

This is what University of Alaska ecologist Katey Walter is quoted as saying in a New Scientist article published last week titled Arctic meltdown is a threat to humanity. The article then proceeds to go through the worst-case scenarios that could result from the widespread warming of the Arctic, specifically changes in the thermohaline global ocean current and mass methane releases from permafrost and submarine hydrates.

Simply put, mass releases of methane could, if modelers like David Lawrence of the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) are right, create heating that feeds on itself (aka “positive feedback”) – warmer Arctic temperatures releases more methane that warms the Arctic further and so on. And if the Arctic changes enough and Greenland melts enough, then the thermohaline current could slow down, resulting in widespread changes ranging from a dramatic reduction in Asian monsoons to a general cooling of Europe. While not mentioned in the New Scientist article, the Carboholic has reported on the possibility of a weaker thermohaline current making oxygen depletion much worse throughout the global ocean, essentially making almost 2/3rds of the ocean unlivable for most existing marine life and 9% of the ocean entirely unlivable for any organism that relies on oxygen.

On potential problem is that the New Scientist article claims that climate models don’t presently include the heat of microbial decomposition of permafrost or the existence of a permanently thawed layer of permafrost that gradually grows due to said decomposition. If this is true, then it could make the real future that much worse than it already is expected to be based on existing models and trends in carbon dioxide emissions, sea level rise, et al.

It certainly doesn’t help that, after a decade of stability, the concentration of methane in the atmosphere started rising again in 2007.

As bad as all that is, there was an interesting aside in the article:

Incidentally, the changing winds might also be to blame for some of the cold and snowy weather in North America and China in recent winters, Overland says. Unusual poleward flows of warm air over Siberia have displaced cold air southwards on either side.

If true, then the unusually cold winter we’ve been having is a direct result of anthropogenic global climate disruption.

———-

Aerosols strongly influence tropical Atlantic temperatures

Studies have found that aerosols like volcanic ash, pollution, and dust can influence climate on a regional and global scale. The most famous recent example of this is the global cooling that happened for several years after the eruption of Mount Pinatubo in 1991 as a result of the sulfur dioxide blown high into the stratosphere, but other aerosols can have more subtle effects. A new study authored by scientists out of the University of Wisconsin-Madison and NOAA/NESDIS/NCDC shows that dust from western Africa, especially the Sahara, has a significant effect on the tropical northern Atlantic ocean (paper available indirectly via this site).

The northern tropical Atlantic (NTA) ocean has warmed more than almost any other are of the global ocean, but there’s been only limited agreement as to what the cause for the significant warming has been. Study authors Amato Evan, Daniel Vimont, Andrew Heidinger, James Kossin, and Ralf Bennartz analyzed the amount of dust over the NTA and found that between 65% and 70% of the observed warming could be a result of aerosols. Specifically, lower amounts of Saharan dust led to more insolation of the NTA and thus higher sea surface temperatures. That means that, of the observed 0.7 degrees C rise in the NTA, approximately 0.5 degrees C is believed to be a direct result of lower aerosol levels in the atmosphere.

The authors analysis doesn’t include a lot of factors that go along with changes in the amount of dust in the air, such as changes in cloudiness, humidity, and some of the feedback mechanisms between the atmosphere and the surface of the NTA. For that reason, the authors will almost certainly continue their research, as well they should. But their conclusion bears consideration:

[S]tudies have estimated a reduction in Atlantic dust cover of 40-60% under a doubled carbon dioxide climate, which, based on model runs with an equivalent reduction of the mean dust forcing, could result in an additional 0.3-0.4 deg C warming of the northern tropical Atlantic.

In other words, the very region responsible for spawning nearly all Atlantic hurricanes could see the sea surface temperatures rise significantly. And that could result in significantly more intense hurricanes (as they’re powered by energy transferred from the sea surface into the atmosphere) and more precipitation for the northern coast of South America. I think it’s safe to say that more research is warranted.

———-

Latest EIA Annual Energy Outlook updates energy consumption estimates for 2030

Last week, the Energy Information Administration (EIA) released it’s Annual Energy Outlook 2009 (AEO2009). This report updates the official projections for how much energy will be consumed, produced, imported, and exported by the United States from the end of 2007 through 2030. The AEO2009 estimates a “reference case” that has includes the existing legislation and reasonable economic growth estimates, but also a number of alternate cases that attempt to capture the effects of higher or lower consumption, changes in legislation, migration from coal to natural gas or renewables, and so on. And this year, the new AEO has some good news as well as some bad news.

The good news about coal is that coal-fired electricity is expected to shrink as a percentage of total electricity generation, from 49% in 2007 to 47% in 2030. The bad news is that the total amount of electricity produced by coal plants is still expected to increase from 2,021 billion kilowatts (kW) to 2,415 billion kW.

Similarly, the good news about hydroelectric and “other” technologies including wind and solar is that they’re expected to increase from 374 to 758 billion kW by 2030, but the bad news is that’s only an increase from 8.9% of total electricity generation in 2007 to 14.6% in 2030, according to the EIA reference case.

More good news: sulfur dioxide, nitrogen oxide, and mercury emissions are expected to drop significantly from present levels.

More bad news: total transportation fuel consumption is expected to rise by over 16% by 2030, and per capita carbon dioxide emissions are expected to drop from 19.7 to 17.1 tons. Not much improvement there, given the need to address anthropogenic climate disruption.

And there’s some mixed news too. Shale oil is not expected to start producing before 2023 at the earliest, and the EIA didn’t even try to estimate its impacts in any of their cases. Motor gasoline is expected to cost $3.88 per gallon in 2007 dollars (significantly more than that when accounting for predicted inflation). And that’s with drilling on the outer continental shelf – remove OCS drilling and the price per gallon goes up a whopping three cents.

All that said, there’s a major caveat that has to be added to all this information – the EIA is not allowed to estimate changes in legislation that are pending in their Annual Energy Outlooks. So if carbon capitalism is implemented, that will change these estimates. As will a renewable energy standard, more stringent CAFE standards, and so on.

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Large insurers required to disclose climate risks to regulators

Last week, InsuranceNews.net reported that the National Association of Insurance Commissioners (NAIC) has started requiring large insurers to tell regulators what risks climate disruption poses to the company and how the company is responding to those risks. While this applies only to insurers with more than $500 million in premiums per year, NAIC also suggested that smaller insurance companies voluntarily reveal their risks and responses as well.

The NAIC has crafted an eight question survey that the insurers will have to answer and that will be publicly available from insurance regulators. The questions include “how an insurer is altering its risk management and catastrophe risk modeling, steps it has taken to engage and educate policymakers and policyholders as well as changes in its investment strategies due to the challenges presented by climate change.”

While a number of insurance and consumer groups supported this action, two insurance associations in the midwest opposed it. In the article, a representative of the National Association of Mutual Insurance Companies in Indianapolis argued that the regulators had no need to know or publicize an insurance company’s exposure to climate disruption-based risks. A spokesman for the other group, Property Casualty Insurers Association of America in Des Plaines, Illinois, felt that climate models were too uncertain to be able to accurately assess the the risks.

Both companies are in coal-heavy states – Indiana and Illinois.

Image credits:
Jewishjournal.com
MODIS

The Weekly Carboholic: Project releases principles of climate science literacy

Brian Angliss — Thu, 26 Mar 2009 03:15:40 +0000

Ask yourself the following question: “What do I know about climate change?”

If you answered “very little” or “not enough,” then the new guide Climate Literacy – The Essential Principles of Climate Sciences might be a good starting point. It lays out seven principles that every person should know about climate science:

The Sun is the primary source of energy for Earths climate system.Climate is regulated by complex interactions among components of the Earth system.

Climate is regulated by complex interactions among components of the Earth system.

Life on Earth depends on, is shaped by, and affects climate.

Climate varies over space and time through both natural and man-made processes.

Our understanding of the climate system is improved through observations, theoretical studies, and modeling.

Human activities are impacting the climate system.

Climate change will have consequences for the Earth system and human lives.

It’s not appropriate to know these seven principles and believe them as a Christian believes the Ten Commandments. These principles are based on information that someone who is climate literate has to know. For example, to understand that “life on Earth depends on, is shaped by, and affects climate,” a climate literate person also needs to have a basic understanding of ecology, the physics of greenhouse gases, that extinctions have happened because of climate change, that human civilization occurred in a period of relative climactic stability, and that we have proof that life has, and continues, to change the composition of the atmosphere. In other words, a climate literate person is pretty scientifically literate as well.

The information supporting the principles is mostly generic, but some of it is downright disturbing when you understand the ramifications. For example, one of the consequences described is this:

Climate plays an important role in the global distribution of freshwater resources. Changing precipitation patterns and temperature conditions will alter the distribution and availability of freshwater resources, reducing reliable access to water for many people and their crops. Winter snowpack and mountain glaciers that provide water for human use are declining as a result of global warming.

In other words, permanent droughts, dust bowl-like conditions, and dried up rivers around the world are likely as as consequence of climate disruption. Not a pleasant thing to think about, really, which is probably why the authors of this guide described it so carefully using neutral language.

Perhaps the largest challenge to making this guide available and improving climate literacy is in the introduction, before the guide officially starts. It says, in part:

A climate literate person:

understands the essential principles of Earth’s climate system,

knows how to assess scientifically credible information about climate,

communicates about climate and climate change in a meaningful way, and

is able to make informed and responsible decisions with regard to actions that may affect climate.

(emphasis added)

“Scientific credibility” is probably the most difficult thing for a non-scientist to evaluate, especially given the state of anti-intellectualism and the media in the U.S. But given the large number of voices claiming to know the truth, it’s arguably the most important skill that the guide’s authors could hope to teach a climate-illiterate public.

And those authors? Here’s the list to date:

13 U.S. agencies: Department of Agriculture, Department of Commerce, Department of Defense, Department of Energy, Department of Health and Human Services, Department of the Interior, Department of State, Department of Transportation, Environmental Protection Agency, NASA, National Science Foundation, Smithsonian Institution, USAID
Other government groups: Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences, National Institute of Standards and Technology, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, The National Center for Atmospheric Research, U.S. Geological Survey, U.S. Forest Service
Other groups: American Association for the Advancement of Science Project 2061, American Meterological Society, Association of Science-Technology Centers, Bowman Global Change, Challenger Center for Space Science Education, Climate Literacy Network, College of Exploration, Federation of Earth Science Information Parters, Lawrence Hall of Science, University of California-Berkeley, National Environmental Education Foundation, National Geographic Education Programs, National Science Teachers Association, North American Association for Environmental Education, Sally Ride Science, TERC, Inc., The GLOBE Program

In my opinion, that list forms a pretty credible foundation upon which to build a program of climate literacy.

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Synchronized chaos and natural climate variability

A new paper by two mathematicians from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee titled “Has the climate recently shifted?” was released a couple of weeks ago. It asks whether there has been a climate “shift” in recent years and if so, how did it occur. The authors, Kyle L. Swanson and Anastasios A. Tsonis, propose that the climate has in fact shifted recently and historically over the 20^th century and they propose a mechanism for this shift known as “synchronized chaos.”

If you’re unfamiliar with the term “synchronized chaos,” you’re not alone. In the Earth’s climate, there are any number of short and long term cycles going on at the same time, ranging from several different types of orbital variations (Milankovic cycles) to the El Nino Southern Oscillation (ENSO) to the 11 and 22 years solar cycles to the Pacific Decadal Oscillation and more. Over the Earth’s recent geologic past, ice ages have been driven largely by the Milankovic cycles. However, not all of these variations are cycles with a nearly constant period like the solar cycle. If you look at the ENSO image below, you’ll see that it varies pretty widely in the time between cold and hot cycles and how hot and cold each side gets. Synchronized chaos is the idea that, when certain of these chaotic variations come together in a certain way and begin to couple to one another, the climate changes from one relatively stable mode to another – it “changes gears,” so to speak.

Swanson and Tsonis propose in their paper that the variations they’ve been analyzing synchronized four times in the 20^th century, specifically in 1910-1920, 1938-1945, 1956-1960, and 1976-1981. In three of those periods there was also coupling, and the climate appears to have changed gears in those periods. The climate transitioned from cooling to heating around 1910, back to cooling around 1940, and then back to heating again around 1975. The authors explain the difference between synchronized variations and coupled variations as follows:

Think of a bicycle team engaged in a team time trial. The riders are all synchronized, with their motions carefully planned to maximize the teams overall speed. However, if those riders were coupled together, for example by attaching their bikes together with a rope, the slightest misstep among one of the bikers would be communicated immediately through the team and would lead to a group crash.

Of more immediate interest, however, is the fact that the authors have uncovered a new point of coupling in 2001/2002. As the media has been reporting since about the middle of 2008, this decade has been pretty much flat as far as global heating goes, and Swanson and Tsonis suggest that this may be because the climate changed gears again eight years ago, and that the change was driven by internal shifts in how the climate functions rather than by an external source such as anthropogenic carbon dioxide (CO₂). Swanson and Tsonis suggest that this change in function could be an unusually large amount of oceanic heat absorption or a change in how clouds are affecting the Earth’s albedo.

While anthropogenic climate disruption skeptics and deniers are likely going to latch onto this paper as proof that the climate changes without the help of human industry, the authors specifically addressed this in their conclusion:

It is straightforward to argue that a climate with significant internal variability is a climate that is very sensitive to applied anthropogenic radiative anomalies (c.f. Roe [2009]). If the role of internal variability in the climate system is as large as this analysis would seem to suggest, warming over the 21st century may well be larger than that predicted by the current generation of models, given the propensity of those models to underestimate climate internal variability [Kravtsov and Spannagle 2008].

Put another way, if the climate truly is borderline stable under normal circumstances, it won’t take much to throw it completely out of whack.

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First federal loan guarantee for solar energy issued

Last week, Energy Secretary Steven Chu announced that the Department of Energy (DoE) issued the first ever federal loan guarantee to a solar panel manufacturer. Solyndra Inc., makers of cylindrical solar cells, was granted $535 million in order to cover 73% of the construction costs for a new panel manufacturing facility in California. This was the first loan granted in a program that was passed four years ago and that has $38.5 billion dollars remaining that the Bush administration never spent. The recently passed stimulus package has another $60 billion in loan guarantees that are yet to be distributed.

According to the Washington Post article, Secretary Chu hopes to cut down the time to process an application from years to several months, and in the process use the loan guarantees to create a large number of energy-related jobs. The Solyndra guarantees are expected to employ 3000 construction workers, an additional 500 at the factory once it’s operational, and another 500 employees at the companies that supply Solyndra with their raw materials and critical componets.

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Stop drilling, baby! STOP!

“Drill, baby! Drill!” That was the refrain pushed by the GOP last summer during the run-up to the election. And it was a powerful phrase, driven by frustration at the price of oil, rising electricity and natural gas prices around the country, and the irrational hope that new oil drilled today would make prices fall tomorrow. But the NYTimes now reports that there’s a new refrain being heard at drilling fields around the country as the price for oil and natural gas falls dramatically off it’s 2008 highs: Stop!

With the price of gasoline 1/3 to 1/2 what it was last year, the lower prices are good for consumers hurt by the general state of the economy. But with lower prices comes less pressure on oil and gas companies to produce more. This in turn means that there’s less reason for those companies to drill for relatively expensive U.S. oil and natural gas, especially when there’s other places around the world where oil and gas are cheaper due to fewer and lower regulatory hurdles. In addition, the NYTimes reports that the companies are also pumping less oil and gas from the wells that they’ve already drilled.

The sudden drop in drilling has energy experts worried about what will happen when the recession turns around. Not only are the drilling crews disbanding or moving overseas, the newly drilled wells will see drops in oil and gas productions by as early as 2010, likely leading to yet another spike in oil and/or gas prices nationwide.

And if the economy recovers into another energy price spike, it’s a pretty safe bet that the recovery will stall out or even reverse again. And this is likely to be the case so long as the U.S. remains dependent on fossil fuels.

Image credits:
CCSP
NOAA Climate Data Center
weather.com

The Weekly Carboholic: California report recommends changes to adapt to rising sea level

Brian Angliss — Wed, 18 Mar 2009 12:00:02 +0000

Limit development in low-lying coastal areas. Consider abandoning existing development in coastal areas likely to be affected by sea level rise. Require structures built along the coast to be able to adapt to higher sea levels. Discontinue federally subsidized flood insurance for existing property in low-lying coastal areas. Those are some of the recommendations made last week in the first report by California’s Climate Action Team and reported by the LA Times.

According to the LATimes article, the state of California has concluded that it’s best to plan now for rising sea levels in the future. And so the Climate Action Team is preparing 40 different studies into adaptation and mitigation strategies for the state, many of which are presently undergoing expert peer review, and plans on submitting a comprehensive report to the Governor later this year. The changes already proposed in this one report, however, are radical compared to what most states have been willing to consider to date. Most states have their heads in the sand over the issue of climate change, and while few states have as many different climates as California does (coastal, desert, mountains, etc.), all states will be affected sooner or later, to some greater or lesser extent.

Furthermore, if California is seriously considering abandoning coastal properties, shutting down and moving inland power plants and water treatment facilities and hospitals (like those shown in the image above), and forcing ports to build so that a meter or more of sea level rise is no big deal, then other states will begin to take this seriously as well. Some entire towns may have to be given to the Pacific, something that, until this report, I’d only seen seriously discussed in government circles by the English. And every time I’ve heard it suggested that maybe parts of New Orleans shouldn’t be rebuilt or that homes and towns in flood plains should be abandoned instead of rebuilt by taxpayer-funded federal flood insurance, people’s hackles rise in a hurry. Having the state of California suggesting these approaches as a “good” adaptation strategy truly is radical.

I have one major concern, however. The LATimes article points out that the Climate Action Team is using the IPCC 2007 Fourth Assessment Report as their baseline, but as I reported in the last week’s Carboholic, the IPCC predictions were overly conservative. So planning for a worst-case sea level rise from the IPCC estimates is already a case of too little, too late. So if the report proposes that 1100 miles of levees, built for $14 billion and with a yearly maintenance cost of $1.4 billion assumes 1.5 meters of sea level rise, what happens to the cost if that goes up by double, as several papers presented at the Climate Change Congress in Copenhagen say it will? If nearly half a million people will live in flood plains by 2100 at the IPCC estimate, how many more people will be affected?

The gist of the recommendations in the report are ultimately going to stand regardless. As Mary Nichols, chairwoman of California’s Air Resources Board, was quoted as saying:

“The recommendations are sensible: Defend what is worth protecting, move what can reasonably be moved, try to avoid doing further harm, consult affected communities, prepare to respond to emergencies.”

It’s hard to argue with those.

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“Virtual” water exports a problem for Australia and the world

Everyone knows instinctively what water is and what you use it for. You turn on your tap, flush your toilet, drink a bottle of “spring” water, water your lawn, take a whitewater ride down rapids, go fishing in a reservoir – all of that is a use of water. So are the flowers you buy that were imported from Africa, or the shirt you wear that is made from Australian cotton or wool, or the lettuce on the salad you eat during December that was grown in the Imperial Valley of California. The difference is that this water is hidden, or in the parlance of an article from The Age, it’s “virtual” water. And environmental scientist Tim Jarvis is of the opinion that arid and drought-stricken Australia should export less of it’s virtual water.

“Australia is a massive net exporter of virtual water, in other words, water we take to grow crops that we grow for export, such as wheat, rice, cotton,” Mr Jarvis said.

“We have to address this fundamental discrepancy that exists between the fact we’re the driest country yet we’re one of the largest net virtual water exporters,” he said.

Jarvis’ comments about the export of virtual water applies far beyond Australia’s borders. California’s Imperial Valley is desert made ideal, year-round farmland through massive canals importing water from the Colorado River. That water is then exported to the rest of the United States, even those parts that have far, far more water than the desert southwest and the Mojave (which the Imperial Valley would very nearly be without irrigation). Ethiopia exports to Europe so that Europeans have fresh flowers year round, but those flowers contain huge amounts of water that could become quite scarce if Africa dries out as anticipated in the coming decades. Every agricultural product has a cost in virtual water that is used to produce the product, and that virtual water is exported and imported around the world. And this doesn’t even begin to take the huge water costs of resource extraction (settling ponds), energy production (fly ash ponds, steam turbines, and cooling), and even bottled water from overseas (Fiji, Switzerland, et al).

Water will eventually become a valuable commodity world wide, instead of the nearly-dirt-cheap resource it is today. When this happens, cities in deserts (Las Vegas, Phoenix, Los Angeles) may find themselves without enough water to survive, at least at today’s population, without spending great amounts of money to import water. And regions that have sufficient water will have to fight off dryer regions that have designs on their water – some regions (like the Great Lakes) have already had to take action to prevent water from leaving the drainage.

What happens then is anyone’s guess, but resource conflicts over access to potable water aren’t outside the realm of possibility. Neither are mass migrations and environmental refugees from hot, dry areas to cooler, wetter areas – and all the cultural and social ramifications that such migrations bring with them. Which is why international diplomatic meetings like the World Water Forum, meeting in Istanbul this week, are so important.

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An update on high voltage direct current transmission lines

Alternating current (AC) has historically ruled electricity transmission. Because AC transmission enables the use of transformers to change the voltage from tens or hundreds of thousands of volts to 240 or 120 volts, it’s used all over the world and has been since the early 1900s. But AC is not the only game in town – direct current (DC) lines exist and are used in certain specific applications. For example, because DC lines have lower losses, they’re used to transmit electricity over extremely long distances. In addition, because different regional electricity grids are out of phase with each other, DC lines (which have little or no phase at all) are used to connect different regional AC grids to each other.

The New Scientist had an article last week on recent developments in high voltage direct current (HVDC) transmission lines. The article reports that there are a number of new HVDC lines being installed internationally, such as a 6.4 gigawatt, 2000 km long line from the Xianjiaba dam to Shanghai in China.

Perhaps more interesting, however, is the idea of the “supergrid,” where HVDC lines are used to interconnect entire continents with electricity so that electricity created in one place (such as solar power in the U.S. desert southwest or the Sahara Desert or wind power from offshore wind farms in the windy North Sea) is available wherever it’s needed, no matter how far away that electricity is used. Not only that, but because HVDC lines are much less wasteful, huge gains in effective electricity production could be realized through improved transmission efficiency.

Perhaps the most interesting part of the article, however, is an analysis that was performed by Gregor Czisch, an independent energy consultant who calculated that a $1.8 trillion investment in building a HVDC network in Europe would be enough to power the entire continent with renewable energy exclusively. This sounds like a lot until you consider that it’s only about 10% of what European utilities are already expected to spend on power plant construction by 2030. And the article claims that Czisch calculated that the completed grid could deliver 100% renewable electricity for less than 5 cents per kWh.

There remain some technological challenges – there’s no such thing as a high power DC circuit breaker at the moment, for example – and NIMBY politics will always play their part in anything as major as tens or hundreds of thousands of miles of new transmission line, but there are no technological or political problems that appear insurmountable at this time.

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MIT develops new Li-ion battery that charges really, really fast

According to the Boston Globe, scientists at MIT have developed a new electrode that enables a lithium-ion (Li-ion) battery to be fully charged 100 times faster than existing batteries. These new batteries, if commercially viable, could charge a cell phone in mere seconds, a laptop battery in less than a minute, or a plug-in hybrid/fully electric vehicle in mere minutes, instead of the hours that existing batteries require. This does assume that you have a sufficiently robust connection to the power grid that you don’t blow the main circuit breaker on the house every time you try to fast recharge your plug-in Prius.

At least two companies, A123Systems and Umicore, have already or are considering licensing the technology for commercialization.

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New biodiesel stays liquid at colder temperatures

One of the major problems with biodiesel is that it gels in the cold, turning into Jello® in the gas tank instead of flowing through fuel lines like petroleum-based diesel does. This problem has limited its usability in the winter and in cold environments in general. But according to the NYTimes blog GreenInc, Integrity Biofuels of Indiana may have solved this problem, and to prove it, they drove biofueled trucks in Alaska in the winter and ran a diesel electric generator down to -24 degrees Fahrenheit overnight without any problems.

The reason that biofuels gel at low temperature is that there are too many saturated oils, but Integrity has used urea to separate the saturated oils from the unsaturated ones, enabling them to create blends that should run down to -60 degrees F before turning into a gel. According to the GreenInc article, the cost of the reusable urea additive is about five cents per gallon.

While biodiesel has the same problems that any biofuel does, namely the conversion of food-producing farmland to produce fuel crops and questions about energy efficiency, biodiesel has one significant advantage – biodiesel can be made from used cooking oils harvested from the grease traps and fryers of tens of thousands of restaurants around the country and the world. Whether there’s enough used cooking oils to make a dent in diesel consumption is a question I haven’t investigated, but turning a waste product that was once landfill bound into a viable and environmentally-friendly product is always a good idea.

Image credits:
Pacific Institute
New Scientist