I’m back – only to find my internet had slowed to a crawl, even as I tried to dig out of an enormous pile of emails. New modem fixed the problem.
As to my research retreat last week, I can report that Lake Superior is now, in fact, as warm as they say.
This makes,… what? Seven times now?
Michael Mann, a Pennsylvania researcher who’s been a target of climate-change skeptics, was cleared of wrongdoing by U.S. investigators in the flap surrounding e-mails hacked from a U.K. university.
Finding no “evidence of research misconduct,” the Arlington, Virginia-based National Science Foundation closed its inquiry into Mann, according to an Aug. 15 report from the inspector general for the U.S. agency. Pennsylvania State University, where Mann is a professor of meteorology, exonerated him in February of suppressing or falsifying data, deleting e- mails and misusing privileged information.
The report confirms findings from the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s inspector general and a separate panel of seven scientists based at universities in the U.K., U.S. and Switzerland. The University of East Anglia announced the committee. Ron Oxburgh, the former head of Shell Transport & Trading Plc and a member of the U.K. House of Lords, was chairman.
It is the evidence proponents of offshore wind farms have been waiting for: a Dutch study has found that offshore wind turbines have “hardly any negative effects” on wildlife, and may even benefit animals living beneath the waves.
The researchers reached their conclusions after studying a wind farm near Windpark Egmond aan Zee, the first large-scale offshore wind farm built off the Dutch North Sea coast.
Anti-wind farm campaigners have often argued that wind farms can have a negative impact on bird populations, while some critics have voiced concerns that offshore wind farms could prove disruptive to marine life.
However, Professor Han Lindeboom from the Institute for Marine Resources and Ecosystem Studies at Wageningen University and Research centre, said that the new study revealed little evidence of negative effects on local wildlife.
“At most, a few bird species will avoid such a wind farm. It turns out that a wind farm also provides a new natural habitat for organisms living on the sea bed such as mussels, anemones and crabs, thereby contributing to increased biodiversity,” he said.
“For fish and marine mammals, it provides an oasis of calm in a relatively busy coastal area.”
This, of course, is not the first study to show that offshore wind is benign.
Continue reading “Offshore Wind Turbines have Positive Impact on Wildlife, Biodiversity”
When I reported, as an afterthought, on the expanding range of brown recluse spiders under climate change, it turned into a very popular, viral post. Something about sea level rise and desertification doesn’t quite hit home as well as something that could crawl up your leg.
Now, CDC tells us, Vampire Bats may be next. (see ABC news video here)
U.S. health authorities have announced the first death by a vampire bat in the United States.
According to the AFP, on July 15, 2010, a 19-year-old man was bitten by a vampire bat in Michoacan, Mexico. Ten days later, the migrant farm worker left for the U.S. to pick sugar cane at a Louisiana plantation. He fell sick, presenting symptoms of fatigue, shoulder pain, numbness in his left hand and a drooping left eye.
MSNBC.com writes, “Despite ‘True Blood’s’ Louisiana setting, nobody thought of vampire bats because there are no vampire bats in the United States outside of zoos. But the young man had only just arrived in the United States.” Tests later confirmed that he was infected with rabies.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention(CDC) recently wrote, “This case represents the first reported human death from a vampire bat rabies virus variant in the United States.” According to the CDC, the victim had a notably aggressive form of rabies.
Although vampire bats currently are found only in Latin America, research suggests that the range of these bats might be expanding as a result of changes in climate (6).
Expansion of vampire bats into the United States likely would lead to increased bat exposures to both humans and animals (including domestic livestock and wildlife species) and substantially alter rabies virus dynamics and ecology in the southern United States.
From Jeff Master’s Weather Underground:
Arctic sea ice poised to undergo record decline in mid-August
A strong high pressure system with a central pressure of 1035 mb has developed over the Arctic north of Alaska, and will bring clear skies and warm southerly winds to northeast Siberia and the Arctic during the coming week, accelerating Arctic sea ice loss.Widespread areas of northeastern Siberia are expected to see air temperatures 4 – 12°C (7 – 22°F) above average during the coming week, and the clockwise flow of air around the high pressure system centered north of Alaska will pump this warm air into the Arctic. Arctic sea ice extent, currently slightly higher than the record low values set in 2007, should fall to to its lowest extent for the date by the third week of August as the clear skies and warm southerly winds melt ice and push it away from the coast of Siberia.
It remains to be seen if 2011 Arctic sea ice extent will surpass the all-time low set in September 2007; it will be close, and will depend on the weather conditions of late August and early September, which are not predictable at this time.
It is already possible to sail completely around the North Pole in ice-free waters through the Northeast Passage and Northwest Passage, according to sea ice maps maintained by the UIUC Cryosphere Today website. This marks the fourth consecutive year–and the fourth time in recorded history–both of these Arctic shipping routes have melted free. Mariners have been attempting to sail these passages since 1497. This year, the Northeast Passage along the north coast of Russia melted free several weeks earlier than its previous record early opening.
National Snow and Ice Data Center images and text below:
Ray Anderson has died. NYTimes:
Ray C. Anderson was chairman and chief executive of the world’s largest carpet-tile manufacturer when he read a book that described people like him as thieves and plunderers of the planet. He saw the author’s point. He even wept. Then he set out to change things.
Mr. Anderson, an avowed “recovering plunderer” who re-invented his worldwide factory operation to reduce its environmental impact and became one of the nation’s most effective corporate advocates for environmental sustainability, died on Tuesday at his home in Atlanta. He was 77. His family said the cause was cancer.
Starting in the early 1970s, Mr. Anderson built a company based in Atlanta, Interface Inc., into a $1.1 billion a year concern manufacturing carpet, fabric and upholstery used in offices and commercial buildings.
(buy your Interface sustainable carpet here, at flor.com)
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Those efforts drew praise from environmental organizations and earned him an appointment to a White House environmental commission under President Bill Clinton.
They also helped his company’s bottom line. “What started out as the right thing to do quickly became the smart thing,” he told a business group in Toronto in 2005. “Cost savings from eliminating waste alone have been $262 million.”
In his speeches, Mr. Anderson credited that book, “The Ecology of Commerce” by Paul Hawken, with changing his perspective. He described reading it as a “spear in the chest experience.”
Continue reading “The Weekend Wonk: Brought to Life by a Spear in the Chest”
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Wind now generates 20 percent of Iowa’s electricity
What’s telling about Iowa is that these people who know wind power the best are big fans of the clean, renewable energy source. A full 81 percent of Iowa voters believe that the growth of the wind industry has been good for Iowa’s economy, according to a recent poll by GOP pollster Neil Newhouse. Further, Iowa voters chose wind, by a 3-to-1 margin, as their preferred energy source to power their state.
In 2010 alone, wind farm owners paid $16.5 million in property taxes and an additional $11 million in land lease payments to property owners.
Thus, Iowa illustrates for the rest of America the breadth of economic benefits from wind: manufacturing activity, tax revenue for rural areas that often need it most, and steady revenue streams for farmers, who operate in a notoriously high-risk business environment.
Branstad is not Iowa’s only trailblazing public official in the area of wind power. On Capitol Hill, fellow Republican U.S. Sen. Charles Grassley is credited with being instrumental in the development of the federal Production Tax Credit for renewable energy, which was established in the 1990s and continues to be the key financial policy driver for the wind industry to this day (in spite of being extended in only in short-term increments through the years). Today, Iowans are highly familiar with wind power, and the industry enjoys strong bipartisan support.
More Iowa wind fun-facts below!!
Continue reading “Iowa: 81 percent Support from Those that Know Wind Power Best”
Ferocious, flawed, but entertaining psycho-history of the nuclear industry.
Denise Bode, CEO of the American Wind Energy Association, writes the Texas heat/drought/power crisis revealed several lessons: wind power enhances a grid’s reliability, conventional power plants can’t operate all the time, wind farms that are dispersed are more dependable, and output from offshore and coastal wind farms can meet peak demand during summer:
It’s over, for the moment: ERCOT, the company that manages the Texas utility system, said Monday that it doesn’t expect peak electricity demand this week to surpass last week’s record levels.
As he did after a sudden freeze stressed the Texas system in February, ERCOT CEO Trip Doggett credited wind power with a critical contribution during last week’s power emergency. Doggett said electricity from wind farms recently installed along Texas’s Gulf Coast began flowing at just the right time to help meet peak demand in the late afternoons.With that in mind, some lessons from the week’s real-world experience with substantial amounts of installed wind generating capacity on a large utility system:
Adding wind power makes a utility system more reliable, not less.
Continue reading “Texas Drought Shows Windpower Vital, Reliable”
