Month: May 2011

From AP:

Denmark earns the biggest share of its national revenue from producing windmills and other clean technologies, the United States is rapidly expanding its clean-tech sector, but no country can match China’s pace of growth, according to a new report obtained by The Associated Press.

China’s production of green technologies has grown by a remarkable 77 per cent a year, according to the report, which was commissioned by the World Wildlife Fund for Nature and which will be unveiled on Monday at an industry conference in Amsterdam.

“The Chinese have made, on the political level, a conscious decision to capture this market and to develop this market aggressively,” said Donald Pols, an economist with the WWF.

Denmark, a longtime leader in wind energy, derives 3.1 percent of its gross domestic product from renewable energy technology and energy efficiency, or about euro6.5 billion ($9.4 billion), the report said.

China is the largest producer in money terms, earning more than euro44 billion ($64 billion), or 1.4 percent of its gross domestic product.

The U.S. ranks 17 in the production of clean technologies with 0.3 percent of GDP, or euro31.5 billion ($45 billion), but those industries have been expanding at a rate of 28 percent per year since 2008.

“The U.S. is growing substantially, so it seems the policy of (President Barack) Obama is working,” Pols said. But the U.S. cannot compare with China, he said.

“When you speak to the Chinese, climate change is not an ideological issue. It’s just a fact of life. While we debate climate change and the transition to a low carbon economy, the debate is passed in China,” Pols said. “For them it’s implementation. It’s a growth sector, and they want to capture this sector.”

Update from Gunderson, with new discussion of Unit 3 explosion, Groundwater contamination, and the lack of reliable data from TEPCO, the Japanese Government, and now, the EPA.

For anyone that hasn’t been paying attention to how fast food prices are rising, and why, this week’s new report published in Science will come as news.  You know that canard about how rising CO2 levels will help us grow more crops? Turns out, not so much…

Science Magazine reports:

“It’s a frustration having to always answer questions about the future and having everyone think of climate change as something in the future,” says David Lobell, an agricultural scientist at Stanford University in Palo Alto, California. “It’s not something we have to anticipate. It’s something we have to learn from and deal with right now.”

Lobell and colleagues analyzed agricultural records of corn, rice, wheat, and soybeans from 1980 to 2008. Those four crops make up 75% of the calories consumed by the world’s population. Using historical weather data on temperature and precipitation, the researchers constructed a trend line of weather patterns, controlling for a certain amount of seasonal variation, and linked it to crop data year by year. They also constructed a second trend line that assumed no warming during the period, and then compared the two.

Worldwide, the authors report online today in Science, yields of corn and wheat declined by 3.8% and 5.5%, respectively, compared with what they would have been without global warming. Rice and soybean production remained the same. But the trends vary considerably from region to region. Unlike most other regions, the United States and Canada saw no climate-linked decline in food production during this period. Lobell says that this is consistent with data from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) showing that the eastern part of the United States has not warmed as much as other parts of the world for unknown reasons.

The most surprising finding, Lobell says, was how widely temperature trends varied by region and how dramatically they affected crop production. Rainfall, by contrast, seemed to contribute little to agricultural production trends. Although new technology and better farming practices have led to an overall increase in productivity, Lobell says, this increase isn’t keeping pace with warming. As the group reports in the paper, a rise in temperature of 1°C tends to lower yields by 10% in countries that aren’t at high latitudes.

As we go forward, science continues to show that projections of climate impacts that just a few years ago were decried as alarmist, now seem far too conservative.

UPI reports:

The Arctic Monitoring and Assessment Program forecast — for the international Arctic Council of eight arctic rim countries, including the United States — predicted sea levels would rise 2.75 times more than the top figure of the landmark 2007 U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which forecast of 7 to 23 inches by the end of the century.

Actually, the “23 inches” number has become a famous climate denial canard, that I treated in my video on sea level rise, above. The IPCC was very clear that their number included only the thermal expansion of ocean water, along with mountain glacial melt, not the poorly understood “rapid dynamical changes” of ice sheets.

The newest science is telling us that those changes are now in progress.

Reuters:

Global sea levels will rise faster than expected this century, partly because of quickening climate change in the Arctic and a thaw of Greenland’s ice, scientists said on Wednesday (May 4).

The rise would add to threats to coasts from Bangladesh to Florida, low-lying Pacific islands and cities from London to Shanghai. It would also raise the cost of building tsunami barriers in Japan.

“There is also a risk of very fast sea level changes. We have seen that in the past and it can happen in the future. and this will really significantly change the risk of flooding in the big towns that are threatened like Shanghai and New York and also areas like Miami, Amsterdam and Copenhagen are areas that have to prepare for much bigger risks of flooding in the future. And here we’re talking about frames of ten years where things can change dramatically and the risk can certainly increase a lot,” said Professor Dorthe Dahl-Jensen from the Niels Bohr Institute at the University of Copenhagen and a member of the Oslo-based Arctic Monitoring and Assessment Programme (AMAP).

Record temperatures in the Arctic will add to factors raising world sea levels by up to 1.6 metres (5.2 feet) by 2100, according to AMAP, which is backed by the eight-nation Arctic Council.

Continue reading “Sea Level Rise Accelerating”

First responders have it drilled into them. In a mass casualty situation, you can’t save everyone.  The procedure is to bust out the toe tags, decide which victims are beyond hope, tag them, and move on.

As greater extremes in greenhouse-fueled weather events become commonplace, we will no doubt see more choices being made like the one this week at Cairo Illinois, near the confluence of the Mississippi and Ohio rivers, currently seeing some of history’s worst flooding.

AP

WYATT, Mo. — The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers exploded a large section of a Mississippi River levee Monday in a desperate attempt to protect an Illinois town from rising floodwaters.

The corps said the break in the Birds Point levee would help tiny Cairo, Ill., by diverting up to 4 feet of water off the river. Just before Monday night’s explosions, river levels at Cairo were at historic highs and creating pressure on the floodwall protecting the town.

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But questions remain about whether breaking open the levee would provide the relief needed, and how much water the blast would divert from the Mississippi River as more rain was forecast to fall on the region Tuesday. The seemingly endless rain has overwhelmed rivers and strained levees, including the one protecting Cairo, at the confluence of the Ohio and Mississippi rivers.

Continue reading “Climate Triage in the Midwest”

This is the Ludington Pumped Storage Power Facility. It is on the shores of Lake Michigan, about half way up the “Mitt” of Michigan, near where the base of the pinky finger would be.

It is one of a number of facilities around the world that form the foundation of an energy storage network, that will become increasingly important as the planet moves from 20th century to 21st century energy sources. It’s a simple concept. During times of low electric demand, power from base load plants, or, say, wind turbines churning on lake breezes at 3 o’clock on a sunday morning, is used to pump water up several hundred feet to an artificial lake at the top of the dunes.  During times of high demand, (or low wind) – the floodgates open, the water rushes down, and turns turbines to produce energy, just like a hydro electric installation.

Think of it as a battery, the size of the Hoover Dam.

Now think of it undergoing an 800 million dollar expansion.

Continue reading “This is a Battery”

With 8 out of 20 MW now connected to the New York State grid, Beacon Power has officially begun operation of their flywheel energy storage system in Stephentown, New York.  The system consists of carbon fiber flywheels that spin that store grid energy by spinning at Mach 2 speeds.  The stored energy is then capable of being transmitted back into the grid to buffer disturbances without burning fossil fuels.

The system is scheduled to be fully operational this spring.

Video from last week’s interview on the Diane Rehm show.  Seems like they cut out all or most of Dr Chu’s remarks on climate change, but still worth a listen. Whole interview audio here.