They ain’t no clahmut change. Its Gawd whut’s dewin’ it. Drill baby drill.
Question – are TV ads calling out these guys the answer. OFA has this one
I have questions about whether showing video of deniers making their arguments, however stupid the well informed know them to be, is a good idea. I do like it that “climate denier” is now obviously a poll-tested and focus grouped nickname for these guys. It means the correct spin is getting thru to the masses.
League of Conservation Voters has an ad out criticizing Senator Ron Johnson (from Wisconsin).
One of the enduring standards of climate denialism: We’re going into a new solar minimum, the earth is going to get colder, we’ll have a new “little ice age”.
I handled it some time ago in the video above. There’s been a minor revival due to a recent article in a right wind Danish newspaper. Dana Nuccitelli explains in The Guardian:
Recent articles in the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten (translation available here) and in the Irish Times both ran headlines claiming that another grand solar minimum could potentially trigger an “ice age” or “mini ice age” this century. These articles actually refer to the Little Ice Age (LIA) – a period about 500 to 150 years ago when global surface temperatures were approximately 1°C colder than they are today. This is quite different from an ice age, which are more like 5°C colder than today. The LIA was not actually very cold on a global scale.
So, in order to trigger another LIA, a new grand solar minimum would have to cause about 1°C cooling, plus it would have to offset the continued human-caused global warming of 1 to 5°C by 2100, depending on how our greenhouse gas emissions change over the next century.
In the Jyllands-Posten article, Henrik Svensmark (the main scientist behind the hypothesis that the sun has a significant indirect impact on global climate via galactic cosmic rays) was a bit more measured, suggesting,
“I can imagine that it will become 0.2°C colder. I would be surprised if it became 1–2°C”
So these two articles are suggesting that a grand solar minimum could have a net cooling effect in the ballpark of 1 to 6°C, depending on how human greenhouse gas emissions change over the next century. Is it plausible that a grand solar minimum could make that happen?
The short answer is, ‘No.’
Fortunately, Solar Output is Stable
We’re fortunate that the amount of solar radiation reaching the Earth’s surface is very stable. Climate contrarians will often ask if we’d prefer if the planet were warming or cooling, suggesting that global warming is a good thing because at least the planet isn’t getting colder. This is a false dichotomy – an ideal climate is a stable one.
The relatively stable climate over the past 10,000 years has allowed establishment of human civilization, by making it possible to create large stationary agricultural farms because we could rely on stable weather patterns. During that time, net global surface temperatures changes haven’t exceeded 1°C from the coldest to the hottest climates, though we’re now approaching that degree of change, with 1°C warming since the LIA, 0.8°C of that over the past century, with much more to come.
What difference would a grand solar minimum make in the amount of solar energy reaching Earth? Two examples are the Maunder Minimum, a period of very low solar activity between 1645 and 1715, and theDalton Minimum, a period of low (but not as low as the Maunder Minimum) solar activity between 1790 and 1830.
By 9 August, fresh snowfall concentrated along the southeastern ice sheet brought up the ice sheet albedo.
Across the northwestern ice sheet, melting increased the first 10 days of August, darkening the surface from a brighter than normal pattern associated with abnormally large snow accumulation that made difficult the Japanese SIGMA expedition.
Ice sheet albedo remains anomalously low along the western upper ablation area. The most persistent low albedo this melt season has been along the northwest, in the vicinity of Storstrømmen glacier.
Heat transport into the Arctic bypassed Greenland to it’s east. Svalbard has had a warm summer.
A reliable feature of climate is the poleward transport of heat in the atmosphere (and ocean) and the main contuit into the Arctic is the North Atlantic. So, what we see in this figure is normal and Greenland just didn’t get much exposure to this warm air stream (marked with up-pointing purple arrows). This extra heat bypassed Greenland much of this summer.
What was most interesting to me about this post was the mention of the Japanese Sigma Project. I need to find out more about their “difficulties” from Jason, but their web page indicates they were pursuing some of the same questions as Dark Snow Project.
Many climate models cannot simulate the recent abrupt melting of snow/ice in the Arctic. One of the possible causes is albedo reduction of snow/ice surface by light absorbing snow impurities such as black carbon (BC) and dust and by glacial microbes.
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We will also conduct shallow ice core drilling in Greenland ice sheet to obtain the variations of the atmospheric aerosols, snow impurities, and glacial microbes after the Industrial Revolution. The aerosol and microbe records reproduced from the ice core samples will be used for validation of the past climate condition in the Arctic simulated with ESM.
Blanca Lake below the Monte Cristo peaks. The Columbia Glacier, seen nestled below the peaks, is about 1.5 kilometers long and .75km wide. [L-R: Columbia Peak, E Wilmans, Monte Cristo Pass, Monte Cristo Peak, Kyes Peak]Tom Hammond of the North Cascades Conservation Council has hiked for many years with Dr. Mauri Pelto of the North Cascades Glacier Climate project. He just got back from a short stint with the team this year, and tells me weather this year was “sub optimal”, and the only glacier he was able to get on, Columbia, was ‘woefully thin on snow”.
Thursday morning–we’re camped on the far side of the lake, and headed up to the Columbia Glacier. This would be the last time we saw the lake, as sodden clouds engulfed the area.The (new) terminus of the Columbia Glacier. 10 years ago I would have been standing on steep blue ice 30 feet thick. Now it is a lake.
On July 14 a large crowd, made up of citizens from Michigan, Wisconsin, and across the midwest, gathered at the northern base of the Mackinaw bridge on a crytalline summer day to make noise about plans to pipe tar sands oil underneath the pristine waters of the Straits of Mackinaw. Filmmaker Bill Latka was there.
Among the luminaries addressing the crowd was Bill Mckibben, setting out on a cross country trip to raise more awareness about climate and misguided exploitation of exotic fossil fuel sources like Tar Sands and Oil shale. Citizens sounded off about oil spills that have already occurred in the midwest area, including the disastrous 2010 Tar Sands dilbit spill in the Kalamazoo river, still not successfully cleaned up, and the growing piles of petcoke from Tar Sands refining that are polluting the shores of the Detroit River. (see incredible footage below)
In a world where water is increasingly becoming the most precious of all commodities – it hardly seems rational to treat the world’s largest concentration of fresh water this way. The citizen pressure, coupled with pictures like these, seems to be working.
Above, Chris Hayes interviews a pro-solar Tea Party activist. The solar energy initiative they are talking about (this was broadcast last month) was successful.
“We believe this giant utility monopoly deserves some competition, and consumers deserve a choice. It’s just that simple.”
Holy crap. A conservative that really believes in conservatism. That could blow the whole scam…
“The Tea Party has formed an unholy alliance with the left,” Debbie Dooley recalls a panicked member of Georgia’s big energy lobby lamenting.
Dooley, a co-founder of the Atlanta Tea Party Patriots, doesn’t deny the charges. In fact, she is set this Tuesday to celebrate the official launch of the Green Tea Coalition – the same “unholy alliance” of right and left grassroots that has big oil interests reeling.
“It’s an unholy alliance because they see it as a threat to them,” Dooley said, speaking ahead of the launch. “In the past, the elites on both the right and the left got away with it. On the right, they’d say, ‘This person’s on the left. Stay away from them,’ On the left, they’d say, ‘They’re radical, they’re the Tea Party. Stay away from them.’
“But we got through all that bull, got to know each other, and started working together,” she said.
And it’s not the first time. In 2012, the Atlanta Tea Patriot Patriots joined the NAACP and the Sierra Club to successfully defeat a $7.2 billion transit tax referendum. That same year, Tea joined forces with Occupy Atlanta and the AFL-CIO to stop an anti-union bill that would have banned protests at private residences (the bill sought to protect the “right of quiet enjoyment” of CEOs).
“Producing coal in the US is now like scraping the bottom of the peanut butter jar–it is getting harder (and therefore more expensive) to produce the coal–which is one of the reasons coal costs are generally rising on average about 7% per year around the country….
Independent of what people think about climate change or mercury emissions or water use etc, repowering the US is an imperative, not a choice, because it is getting harder and more expensive to produce the fuel that has been responsible for 40-50% of US electricity.
Moreover, we don’t have too long to act, given that many US coal producers are currently in serious financial trouble, or already bankrupt”
When Powder River Basin coal producer Cloud Peak Energy in late July said it might cut production at its Cordero Rojo mine in 2015, the decision was based in part on projected increases in capital expenditures.
And although the company’s final decision will depend on whether coal prices rebound, the announcement highlights a growing issue for PRB miners — as production moves westward, the coal dips deeper into the earth and becomes more expensive to get to.
The amount of rock and dirt that must be removed to access the coal is known as a strip ratio. A strip ratio of 1 to 1 means a cubic yard of rock and dirt must be removed to mine one cubic yard of coal.
When PRB production began in the 1970s, it mostly started on the eastern edge of the lease tracts, where strip ratios were sometimes better than 1 to 1, as the basin’s low-sulfur coal sat nearly exposed at the surface.
But as one moves west across the basin the coal seams dip further underground and the overburden — the rock and dirt covering the coal — increases.
Later this month, the lease for the Maysfield II North coal tract in Wyoming will be sold at auction by the US Bureau of Land Management. The lease tract is adjacent to the west end of Cordero Rojo and has a strip ratio of roughly 4.5 to 1, according to the BLM’s sale notice.
To put that into perspective, the tract’s coal seam is roughly 69 feet thick, but with overburden ranging in thickness from 266 to 397 feet, according to the BLM.
Localized, distributed wind energy is becoming increasingly common in the US, according to a new report from Pacific Northwest National Laboratory. The report makes it clear that it’s becoming increasingly common for Americans to simply install wind turbines directly on — or very close to — their homes, farms, or businesses, for the purpose of generating their own energy.
The new report — The 2012 Market Report on Wind Technologies in Distributed Applications— is essentially the first comprehensive analysis of distributed wind energy development in the US. “Distributed wind energy” refers to wind energy that is generated relatively close to where it’s used — as opposed to large, centralized wind farms, which, in many ways, function similarly to conventional centralized fossil fuel power plants.
“The public often pictures large wind projects with long rows of turbines when they think of wind power,” stated lead author of the new report, Alice Orrell, an energy analyst at the Department of Energy’s Pacific Northwest National Laboratory. “But this report provides detailed data that shows this image is incomplete. Many of the nation’s turbines are for distributed, not centralized, wind projects.”
According to new reports from the U.S. Department of Energy, the nation’s wind power sector is growing faster than ever before. Wind power was the United States’ single largest source of new electrical generating capacity installed in 2012, and nearly three quarters of wind turbine parts installed that year were made domestically.
Everything is going according to plan. All systems have functioned as designed. Every possibility has been considered. There are multiple safeguards. Our philosophy is “defense in depth”. Multiple redundancies will prevent highly unlikely events. These plants are really overbuilt to consider every possibility. Nothing can escape the containment vessels.
We’ve decided to build a 400 million dollar system to freeze the soil underneath the plant.
Q: What are the potential risks to humans, and who might be affected by the contamination?
This is a murky question, because it’s not that easy to determine whether health problems that may not show up for decades are caused by exposure to radioactive contamination. A report released in February by the World Health Organization, which was based upon estimates of radiation exposure in the immediate wake of the accident, concluded that it probably would cause “somewhat elevated” lifetime cancer rates among the local population. But figuring out the effect of years of exposure to lower levels of radioactive contamination leaking into the ocean is an even more complicated matter.
Minoru Takata, director of the Radiation Biology Center at Kyoto University, told the Wall Street Journal that the radioactive water doesn’t pose an immediate health threat unless a person goes near the damaged reactors. But over the longer term, he’s concerned that the leakage could cause higher rates of cancer in Japan.
Marine scientist Buesseler believes that the leaks pose little threat to Americans, however. Radioactive contamination, he says, quickly is reduced “by many orders of magnitude” after it moves just a few miles from the original source, so that by the time it would reach the U.S. coast, the levels would be extremely low. (See related, “Rare Video: Japan Tsunami.”)
Q: Will seafood be contaminated by the leaks?
As Buesseler’s research has shown, tests of local fish in the Fukushima area still show high enough levels of radiation that the Japanese government won’t allow them to be caught and sold for human consumption—a restriction that is costing Japanese fishermen billions of dollars a year in lost income. (But while flounder, sea bass, and other fish remained banned for radiation risk, in 2012 the Japanese government did begin allowing sales of octopus and whelk, a type of marine snail, after tests showed no detectable amount of cesium contamination.)
Buesseler thinks the risk is mostly confined to local fish that dwell mostly at the sea bottom, where radioactive material settles. He says bigger fish that range over long distances in the ocean quickly lose whatever cesium contamination they’ve picked up. However, the higher concentration of strontium-90 that is now in the outflow poses a trickier problem, because it is a bone-seeking isotope. “Cesium is like salt—it goes in and out of your body quickly,” he explains. “Strontium gets into your bones.” While he’s still not too concerned that fish caught off the U.S. coast will be affected, “strontium changes the equation for Japanese fisheries, as to when their fish will be safe to eat.”
