Month: March 2013

Reuters:

A defense contractor better known for building jet fighters and lethal missiles says it has found a way to slash the amount of energy needed to remove salt from seawater, potentially making it vastly cheaper to produce clean water at a time when scarcity has become a global security issue.

The process, officials and engineers at Lockheed Martin Corp say, would enable filter manufacturers to produce thin carbon membranes with regular holes about a nanometer in size that are large enough to allow water to pass through but small enough to block the molecules of salt in seawater. A nanometer is a billionth of a meter.

Because the sheets of pure carbon known as graphene are so thin – just one atom in thickness – it takes much less energy to push the seawater through the filter with the force required to separate the salt from the water, they said.

The development could spare underdeveloped countries from having to build exotic, expensive pumping stations needed in plants that use a desalination process called reverse osmosis.

“It’s 500 times thinner than the best filter on the market today and a thousand times stronger,” said John Stetson, the engineer who has been working on the idea. “The energy that’s required and the pressure that’s required to filter salt is approximately 100 times less.”

The new study extending the  temp record back to 11,0oo years has gotten a lot of press.

I don’t read or speak Dutch, but a Dutch blogger has extended the graph forward a century, and backward to the last glacial period.  I expect this will be translated into english, and will provide more info when I see it.  If anyone wants to try google translate to make sense of it, by all means.

Powerful image of the anthropocene, though.

The Anthropocene is an informal geologic chronological term that serves to mark the evidence and extent of human activities that have had a significant global impact on the Earth‘s ecosystems. The term was coined recently by ecologist Eugene F. Stoermer, but has been widely popularized by the Nobel Prize-winning atmospheric chemist, Paul Crutzen, who regards the influence of human behavior on the Earth’s atmosphere in recent centuries as so significant as to constitute a new geological epoch for its lithosphere. To date, the term has not been adopted as part of the official nomenclature of the geological field of study.

UPDATE – a reader sends in this translation from the Chrome browser:

Guest Blog by Jos Hage Boot

Starting in March 2013 appeared in Science an article about a temperature reconstruction for the last 11,000 years . The lead author is Shaun Marcott from Oregon State University and the second author Jeremy Shakun, which we know from the previous year published and interesting research on the relationship between CO2 and temperature during and after the end of the last ice age. Temperature reconstruction of Marcott is the first full period of the Holocene covers. Obviously not perfect and the coming years will probably details on what changed. A normal part of the scientific process.

The temperature reconstruction ends mid century, therefore, in the graphs of their study the rapid temperature rise after 1850 is clearly visible. And what do you find? Again something that looks like a hockey stick as the graph in Mann et al 2008 .

National Review:

Deciding whether to approve the Keystone XL pipeline is surely one of the toughest challenges of Barack Obama’s presidency. He hasn’t made up his mind yet, of course. Or has he?

Bloomberg reports that the Obama administration “is preparing to tell all federal agencies for the first time that they should consider the impact on global warming before approving major projects.” Up to now, under the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA), federally approved projects had to consider potential impacts like dangerous spills or air pollution, but not global warming. Directing all federal agencies to take climate change into account under NEPA will transform environmental policy in this country, putting a huge new drag on the economy in the process.

But let’s concentrate on Keystone. The Bloomberg report makes it clear that Obama’s order opens the way for further litigation and substantial delays on Keystone, whether the federal government officially blocks construction or not. That’s because NEPA allows citizens and environmental groups to file claims against projects even after they win government approval.

So the Obama administration could green-light the pipeline, file a report that stops short of calling Keystone a major global-warming hazard, and still find the project delayed for years by environmental groups bringing court challenges under the new NEPA guidelines.

In this scenario, headlines loudly proclaiming Obama’s approval of Keystone would shield him from Republican attacks. Simultaneously, the president could mollify the left by claiming credit for guidelines that effectively allowed his allies to stop the pipeline. And that would be right. Obama can publicly “approve” Keystone, while simultaneously handing the left the tool they need to put the project on semi-permanent hold. Environmentalists would take the political heat, while Obama would get off scot-free. Pretty clever.

Young attendees at CPAC conference asked to respond to the idea of climate change.

Compare to another young attendee’s views on race.

ThinkProgress:

ThinkProgress spoke with Terry, who sported a Rick Santorum sticker and attended CPAC with a friend who wore a Confederate Flag-emblazoned t-shirt, about his views after the panel. Terry maintained that white people have been “systematically disenfranchised” by federal legislation.

When asked by ThinkProgress if he’d accept a society where African-Americans were permanently subservient to whites, he said “I’d be fine with that.” He also claimed that African-Americans “should be allowed to vote in Africa,” and that “all the Tea Parties” were concerned with the same racial problems that he was.

At one point, a woman challenged him on the Republican Party’s roots, to which Terry responded, “I didn’t know the legacy of the Republican Party included women correcting men in public.”

He claimed to be a direct descendent of Confederate President Jefferson Davis.

Huffington Post:

“I’m embarrassed to call myself a Republican right now,” Jimmy LaSalvia, co-founder and president of the gay conservative group GOProud, said at the Conservative Political Action Conference in National Harbor, Md., on Thursday. The gay Republican was referring to GOProud’s exclusion from participation at CPAC for a second year in a row, banned as an official sponsor. LaSalvia attended CPAC as a guest of the Competitive Enterprise Institute, a sponsor of CPAC which hosted a panel Thursday on which LaSalvia appeared, “A Rainbow on the Right: Growing the Coalition, Bringing Tolerance Out of the Closet.”

At the packed panel, attended by younger CPAC members, including quite a few conservative gays and lesbians, conservative commentators and activists on the panel who support marriage equality, including CNN pundit Margaret Hoover and Washington Post columnist Jennifer Rubin, made the case for gay marriage as a conservative value. Earlier in the day Senator Marco Rubio, criticized those who would call him a “bigot” for not supporting same-sex marriage, underscoring the tension the issue continues to cause among conservatives. LaSalvia, for his part, however, agreed with Rubio, making a similar statement during the panel discussion and getting applause from the audience

I’m posting the interview I did by Skype with Anton Vaks, whose recent research figured prominently in one of my recent videos.

Doctor Vaks has looked at the growth of speleothems, i.e. stalactites and stalagmites, in caves underlying areas of continuous and discontinuous permafrost in Siberia.  400,000 years ago, during an interglacial period slightly warmer than this one (so far), large areas of permafrost did go into a melting process once temp reached about 1.5 C above preindustrial temps. We are a little more than half way to that point, at about 0.8C above preindustrial.

The good news is, as the orbital cooling processes kicked in, the planet cooled, and permafrost did not run away. The bad news is, we are pushing the process much, much harder than the orbital forcings ever have.

Per Youtube limitations, had to break it up. Part 2 below.

If you have not seen yet, the permafrost video is below.

Continue reading “The Weekend Wonk: Anton Vaks on Permafrost Melt”

Paul Douglas with a look back at winter and a year remarkable for the number of warm temperature records.

“We have found a habitable environment that is so benign and supportive of life that probably if this water was around and you had been on the planet, you would have been able to drink it.”

JOHN P. GROTZINGER, a California Institute of Technology geology professor, on findings from the Mars rover about the planet’s distant past.

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Good thing it’s not possible to break a planet.

In January I posted on a University of Delaware study showing how a key, energy intensive region of the country could be run entirely on renewable energy.

Now we have a new study from Mark Jacobson and his team at Stanford, visualizing a renewable future for New York State.  Forming an idea of what this will look like is the first step in bringing it to reality.