Archive for the category "Weekly Carboholic"
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The Fourth Assesment Report (AR4) of the Intergovernmental Program on Climate Change (IPCC) is a consensus report. This means that politicians and diplomats from many different nations had nearly as much authority over what was written as the scientists and economists who wrote the various documents did. While the working group documents were left more-or-less alone, the executive summaries for all three working group documents used language that was literally negotiated out between dozens of countries. If China or the U.S. didn’t like a word here or there, they could refuse to sign the document until the language was changed, and we know for a fact that they did so. And when literally everyone has to approve, you end up with a document that is as watered down as the most critical signatory wants it to be.
In addition, the nature of a large organization such as the IPCC means that it can’t react fast to recent data and scientific advances. For that reason, the various working groups that produced the actual reports didn’t look at data much beyond 2002, even though significant scientific advances occurred between then and the release of the report in 2007.
A new article published by the Earth Island Institute illustrates just how conservative the IPCC reports were with respect to the emissions of greenhouse gases (GHGs) in general, and carbon dioxide (CO2) in particular. Full story »
On February 23, NASA’s newest satellite failed to reach orbit, crashing instead into the southern Pacific Ocean. This satellite, the Orbital Carbon Observatory (OCO), was supposed to monitor the emission and absorption of carbon dioxide (CO2) for at least the next two years. This is a terrible loss for the scientists involved, and for climate science in general, for reasons I’ll explain shortly.
Luckily, all is not necessarily lost. Full story »
A poll conducted by the Pew Research Center in early January says that, of the priorities listed in the poll, “dealing with global warming” was dead last, with only 30% of respondents declaring it a “top priority.” This was below other issues such as the economy, jobs, fixing Medicare, crime, and the environment. But as is so often the case with polls, the devil is in the details and the methodology. For example, climate disruption is certainly an environmental issue, yet the issues are polled separately. And when you broaden the poll results beyond just the “top priority” category to include “important but lower priority,” global warming attracts support of 67% of the poll’s respondents. Full story »
Last year, the Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) released a prediction that record global temperatures should be expected in the next 2-3 years. GISS released their annual wrapup of the 2008 global temperature, and with it an updated prediction: 2008 was the coolest year since 2000 because of a strong La Nina in the tropical Pacific, and record temperatures are expected in the next 1-2 years. Full story »
It’s been just over a year since I launched the Weekly Carboholic in late 2008, and I had grand plans to write up something special to mark the anniversary and the new year. Instead I took three weeks off from writing the Carbo and dumped my time into writing about the Tennessee Valley Authority’s coal ash sludge spill. But we’re back as of this week, although we may be a little hit-and-miss through February. Full story »
The holidays tend to be high-energy, high-waste, and thus high-carbon. The following sites have a number of ideas for those of you interested in reducing your carbon footprint this holiday season. Full story »
There is a great deal of confusion regarding how long carbon dioxide (CO2) persists in the atmosphere. There are at least two reasons for this. The first reason is that there are multiple physical and biological processes that combine to remove CO2 from the air and they behave differently and at different speeds. The second reason is that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has changed how it describes the lifetime of CO2 in the Summary for Policymakers twice over the course of four assessment reports. And since most politicians and media don’t dive deeper into the assessment reports than the summaries, some confusion is reasonable, if unfortunate.
A new paper titled Atmospheric Lifetime of Fossil-Fuel Carbon Dioxide and reported on by Nature Reports aims to describe and understand the confusion over the lifetime of CO2. Full story »
One of the larger problem with climate models, and with climate science in general, is a general lack of fidelity in how the water cycle will be affected by anthropogenic climate disruption. This is especially important given that water vapor in the atmosphere is responsible for the bulk of the energy absorption (aka the greenhouse effect) that keeps the Earth’s average temperature well above freezing. But because of water vapor’s relatively short lifetime in the atmosphere before it’s removed via precipitation or chemical reactions, scientists have generally had a difficult time estimating just how water vapor affects climate. Full story »
The R-value for a 2×4 pine wall stud in a wood frame constructed residence is about 4.38. The R-value for the fiberglass batt insulation that fills the cavity between the wall studs is between 11 and 15 (source). In an exterior wall that’s constructed with studs at 16 inches on center, that means that roughly 9% of the wall has an R value that’s less than half that of the insulation. It also illustrates why green buildings are not necessarily going to be constructed of all-natural, renewable materials. Sometimes the natural materials just aren’t as good. Full story »
Stalactites are rock formations in caves that hang down from the cave ceiling, and they’re formed by water containing dissolved minerals as it drips penetrates the cave ceiling and drips to the floor (stalagmites are basically the same thing but sticking up from the floor instead). Given that stalactites and stalagmites are formed by water, you might expect that they grow faster or slower with the seasons, at least in areas where the climate includes seasonal variations in precipitation. After all, heavy rains add water to the water table and increase the growth rate of the stalactite as more water penetrates the cave. For similar reasons, you could probably expect that year to year variations growth rate variations would occur if there were rainy periods and droughts.
According to a Nature News article, a stalagmite has been found in a Chinese cave that, when analyzed, was found to contain 1800 years worth of monsoon information. Full story »
According to a new paper published in Nature Geoscience and available online here, scientists from the UK, US, and Australia have detected anthropogenic influence on the climate of both the Arctic and Antarctica. Ana according to a Scientific American article on the paper, one of the paper’s reviewers, Andrew Monaghan of the National Center for Atmospheric Research, believes that the paper may be understating the effect of anthropogenic carbon emissions on Antarctica. Monaghan’s reason? The new paper gives equal weight to cooling in the interior of Antarctica as to heating on the periphery, while interior cooling is suspected to be a result of the CFC-caused ozone hole. Full story »
When you put a price on the “services” that forests provide, deforestation costs the world economy between $5 and $7 trillion every year. But when you put a price on those services, and use that financial incentive to provide so-called carbon offsets, the law of unintended consequences reigns supreme. A new study reported in the Guardian shows that those unintended consequences may themselves be hazardous to the environment in other ways than just carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions or deforestation. Full story »
Most scientists and activists who understand the realities of anthropogenic global warming (AGW) have heard it repeatedly – climate scientists are wrong about global heating this time because they were wrong about global cooling in the 1970′s. Ignore for a moment the obvious logical fallacy here and focus instead on the claim that there was supposedly a scientific consensus in the 1970s that, due to global temperature data, the Earth was about to go into a new ice age. This claim by deniers is clearly verifiable, and that’s exactly what a team of researchers led by National Climatic Data Center climatologist Thomas C. Peterson has done. The team’s results revealed something surprising, given how widespread the “cooling consensus” claim is among climate skeptics and deniers: only 10% of related journal papers published between 1965 and 1979 supported a global cooling hypothesis – and 62% of papers supported the idea of global heating. Full story »
Mountain pine beetle infestations have been killing evergreen forests since before I was born. I have memories of my father pointing out the dead and dying trees to me, saying that those beetles would kill the entire forest if they got the chance, how the warmer winters meant that more eggs and larva survived to eat and kill more trees the next year, that we needed bitterly cold winters to keep the beetles in check. Unfortunately, there have been too many warm winters in a row, and pine beetle has spread to the point that entire swaths of forest are dead or dying, not just isolated trees or stands of trees. We’re at the point that the Colorado town of Frisco held its first annual BeetleFest, with expectations of an unfortunately long run of festivals in the future. Now a new release from the National Science Foundation suggests that the dying forests will change more than just the trees themselves. Full story »
The choices that U.S. consumers make are directly responsible for 37% of all U.S. carbon emissions. Direct emissions include those from residences and personal travel. Additionally, consumers’ choices are indirectly responsible for another 28% of emissions via landfill emissions, agriculture, and commerce. As such, U.S. consumers have some amount of control over 63% of all U.S. carbon emissions, at least according to a McKinsey & Co. study that was reported in the Wall Street Journal this past week. Full story »
Nuclear power is not, as the industry and some politicians claim, a carbon-free source of electricity. It is truly carbon free when you split uranium in a nuclear fission reaction, but acquiring that uranium-235 and disposing of its wastes are not zero-carbon enterprises. For that matter, nor is constructing the nuclear power plant itself. And now Nature News has reported on a study about how much carbon nuclear power plants emit over their entire life cycle, and the life cycle of its uranium fuel. Full story »
Scientists are understandably concerned about the impact that thawing and decaying permafrost will have on the world’s climate. Methane is a more potent greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide (CO2), and there’s a massive amount of organic matter stored in the world’s permafrost, up to 1/6 the entire amount of carbon in the atmosphere just in North America’s permafrost, never mind offshore methane hydrates and permafrost in Asia that is already showing signs of melting. Full story »
 In an unexpected development, jurors in the UK acquitted six Greenpeace activists in a case involving £35,000 ($62,591) worth of damages to a coal-fired power plant. The defense had argued that a 1971 law (Criminal Damage Act 1971) permitting damage to property in order to prevent even greater property damage applied to the activists. Specifically, the Greenpeace activists claimed that they were preventing “damage to properties worldwide caused by global warming”. And the jurors agreed.
This case defines a precedent for UK law that will be difficult to sort out. Does it mean that Parliament comes back through and refines the law to prevent this kind of “abuse” in the future? Or does it mean that the UK cannot build any more new coal plants without carbon capture and sequestration (CCS)? Full story »
 One of the more common arguments you hear from global heating deniers and skeptics is that the urban heat island effect is causing global temperature measurements to look a lot hotter than they actually are. This is such a powerful argument because there is some truth to it – when you plop down a new road or build a town around what used to be a rural National Weather Service temperature monitoring station, there’s going to be a major uptick in the temperature that station measures. Skeptics like Anthony Watts of Wattsupwiththat.wordpress.com have spent a great deal of time documenting situations where new roads, new construction, even the addition of an asphalt walkway to a gas grill could be responsible for spurious temperature readings out of weather stations. However, the argument that global heating is all a misunderstanding of the urban heat island effect took a hit recently with the release of a new study that finds temperatures measured in established cities trend nearly identically to rural temperatures. Full story »
Due to the large size of this week’s Carboholic, I’ve busted it up into sections for readability.
Science
When you’re talking about Antarctica and global heating, there are some serious problems. The few satellites that are in polar orbits to monitor the poles can’t directly detect how thick the ice shelf is, or what the salinity and temperature of the water beneath the ice shelf is. Floating sensor buoys can’t get beneath the ice shelves and are rather limited in their operational depth. And sending people out to drill deep holes and manually measure temperature and salinity is far too expensive and dangerous. And given that what the water under floating ice shelves is doing may be key to understanding how Antarctica will respond to global heating, the problems represent serious limitations. Which is why the key to understanding what’s happening immediately around and beneath the Antarctic ice shelves may well be elephant seals. Full story »
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MSM misunderstands or misrepresents permafrost study