Month: August 2013

During the last few days of the Dark Snow trip, Jason Box and I kicked around the idea of coming back in August if we did not get enough samples.  Fortunately, things worked out, that would have most likely been beyond our budget – but it would be awfully interesting to be up on the ice sheet now, as the melt season, which started slowly, seems to have gotten a second wind.  After tracking pretty closely with the record 2012 melt in the early season,  things turned cooler in late June, and fell off the pace.  In recent weeks, the melt has reasserted itself.
(above graph from Polarportal.dk)

Robert Scribbler:

A strong, late-season melt pulse continued over the Greenland ice sheet this weekend as melt covered a much greater portion of the ice sheet than is typical for this time of year. As of late July, the area of the Greenland ice sheet subject to melt had spiked to nearly 45%. Soon after, a second melt spike to around 38% followed. Over the past two weeks, melt area coverage has fluctuated between 5 and 25 percentage points above the seasonal average for this time of year, maintaining at or above the typical melt season maximum of around 25% for almost all of this time.

This late-season melt surge was driven by a switch in the polar Jet Stream. A trough which had dominated through much of summer, bringing near average temperatures and melt conditions, had eroded and by late July a broad ridge began to form. This high amplitude wave dredged warm air up from as far south as the south-eastern US, then dumped it on the west facing coast of Greenland. There, last week, a new record all time high temperature of 78.6 degrees (Fahrenheit) shattered Greenland’s previous highest temperature of 77.9 degrees.

And this record heat is beginning to have a very visible affect on the ice. Aqua satellite passes this weekend recorded a visible darkening of ice cover in the region most greatly impacted by high temperatures last week. The snow and ice cover there has taken on a sooty appearance with darker gray tendrils finding their way deep into the ice pack. At the same time, large melt lakes expanded over the region with some of these lakes measuring more than  three kilometers across.

In this first Modis shot we see a broad region of darkened, melt-pond speckled ice forming over a very large swath of Greenland’s western ice sheet:

Continue reading “Late Season Melt in Greenland, Large Melt Lakes Now Emerging”

I’ve posted several times, and I’m repeating every where I go, that we are heading for a electric utility train wreck in this country if we do not reconfigure our regulatory and pricing structure for the grid to reflect the emerging disruptive effects of solar and renewable technology.

The New York Times recently reported on utilities beginning to push back against consumers who want to place solar panels on their rooftops. The electric companies are concerned that they will be stuck with the enormous expense of maintaining a large electric grid while more and more customers opt out of the system during the most expensive, and for utilities, profitable, part of the day – afternoon electric peaks, yet expect to have the grid in place as a back up system.  This is a real fear, as a recent survey of large US companies with revenues north of 1 billion reported that 51% of of the respondents would be expanding company-owned renewable generation within 5 years, and for 16 percent those expansions would be “significant”.

Wall Street has noticed. Utilities have noticed. Waiting for policy makers, especially at the state level to wake up.

The most recent evidence for the coming crunch comes from Arizona, potentially a leading edge solar state, where a local phony astro-turf group has begun running Fox News style ads bad mouthing solar and the, presumably, greedy and irresponsible people who are using it.  I’m going to take a wild guess and hazard that this group has roots with the Koch brothers, Americans for Prosperity, and the like, and the local utilities may be getting drawn in to an unholy association with that Excess of Evil.

AZcentral.com

A politically charged marketing campaign has popped up in the debate over solar power in Arizona, and it might be funded indirectly by Arizona Public Service Co., the company asking regulators to force new solar customers to pay significantly more on their monthly bills.

APS on Friday asked state energy regulators to change the rules for how electric companies give solar customers credit for the electricity they send to the power grid.

Solar companies months ago began their own marketing campaign to fight the proposed changes, which they see as a threat to the residential rooftop solar industry. By adding $50 to $100 a month to solar customers’ bills, the changes would take away much of the financial incentive for using solar.

A Washington, D.C.-based conservative organization called 60 Plus, which focuses on seniors’ issues such as taxes, Social Security and Medicare, has produced an online video and created a website, azsolarfacts.com, in which it takes the side of APS in the solar debate.

The 60 Plus group has previously received funding from billionaire brothers David and Charles Koch. The group also received $9 million from an Arizona political consultant named Sean Noble, Bloomberg reported in October.

Noble is a paid consultant for APS, though utility officials would not disclose his services or discuss whether he was involved in crafting the 60 Plus campaign.

“Was it made with resources that could have originated with APS? I don’t know,” APS spokesman Jim McDonald said. “We are not directly funding them. We didn’t write the script, review the script.”

They are now being opposed by a conservative citizens Pro solar group, Tell Utilities Solar Wont’ be Killed, or TUSK –  significantly chaired by Barry Goldwater Jr.

From the dontkillsolar website:

“As a son of Arizona, I know we have no greater resource than our sun. Republicans want the freedom to make the best choice and the competition to drive down rates.That choice may mean they save money, and with solar that is the case. Solar companies have a track record of aggressively reducing costs in Arizona. We can’t let solar energy – and all its advantages and benefits it provides us – be pushed aside by monopolies wanting to limit energy choice. That’s not the conservative way and it’s not the American way.”

The Issue

Arizona Public Service wants to extinguish the independent rooftop solar market in Arizona to protect its monopoly. How? They want to eliminate the policy that lets homeowners get fair credit for the surplus power they return to the grid. This is called net metering and it’s successful in 43 states. APS wants the Arizona Corporation Commission to change the rules so the utility can keep homeowners’ excess solar energy for free while maintaining its monopoly status.

Continue reading “Solar Flame War in Arizona, Coming Your Way Soon..”

Every thinking American has to ask himself, “Why do climate deniers like brain-eating amoebas, and hate baby harp seals? Do they really share our family values?”

New research this week shows that under climate change, brain eating amoebas are extending their range into northern areas formerly inhospitable to them – meanwhile, baby harp seals find it harder and harder to survive under conditions of reduced arctic ice.

Science Daily:

Young harp seals off the eastern coast of Canada are at much higher risk of getting stranded than adult seals because of shrinking sea ice cover caused by recent warming in the North Atlantic, according to a Duke University study.

“Stranding rates for the region’s adult seals have generally not gone up as sea ice cover has declined; it’s the young-of-the-year animals who are stranding (those less than one year old),” said David Johnston, a research scientist at Duke’s Nicholas School of the Environment.

“And it’s not just the weakest pups — those with low genetic diversity and presumably lower ability to adapt to environmental changes — that are stranding,” he said. “It appears genetic fitness has little effect on this.”

The study, published online this week in the peer-reviewed open-access journal PLoS One, is the first to gauge the relative roles that genetic, environmental and demographic factors such as age and gender may be playing in harp seal stranding rates along the U.S. and Canadian east coasts in recent years.

Harp seals rely on stable winter sea ice as safe platforms to give birth and nurse their young until the pups can swim, hunt and fend off predators for themselves. In years of extremely light ice cover, entire year-classes may be disappearing from the population, Johnston said.

The new study complements a Duke-led study published last year that found seasonal sea ice cover in all four harp sealbreeding regions in the North Atlantic has declined by up to 6 percent a decade since 1979, when satellite records of ice conditions in the region began.

Tom Painter was originally going to come with us on the Dark Snow mission. We were disappointed to hear he couldn’t make it, but lucky for us, he sent along the more than capable fireball Mckenzie Skiles, who is currently analyzing the collected snow samples.

Dr. Painter discusses the science, history, and impacts of human caused changes in the “whiteness” of snow.  I’m liking this talk a lot because of Painter’s very personal communication style, clean simple examples, and ability to show how anthropogenic changes hit home.

It seems there is an increasing geographic occurrence of infections from an amoeba that attacks brain tissue – it is now being seen in areas further north than has been historically recorded, likely due to warmer water conditions.

I hope I’m not accused of being too flip with this one. Ok, I probably am. The most recent tragedy involving a 12 year old girl is not funny.

But the larger issue of climate denying politicians ignoring warning signals is what’s really important here. Not long ago, uber-denier James Inhofe contracted a severe illness from toxic algae in overheated Oklahoma lake waters, and laughed it off.  Maybe the brain-eaters got to him as well.

Add this to the recent report in Science that warmer temperatures lead to increased violence, and you’ve got yourself the ingredients for a zombie apocalypse. That’s all I’m sayin’.

Accuweather:

A 12-year-old girl contracted a rare infection caused by a brain-eating amoeba in Arkansas, and it may be tied to summer heat and drought conditions, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).

The amoeba, a single-celled organism, that caused the infection is called Naegleria fowleri, which lives in warm freshwater, such as lakes, rivers and hot springs. These organisms can travel up the nose to the brain and spinal cord as people swim or dive and can cause a deadly infection called Primary Amebic Meningoencephalitis (PAM).

The Arkansas Department of Heath (ADH) said in a press release that the most likely source of the Arkansas infection is the Willow Springs Water Park, located south of Little Rock, Ark. Another case of PAM in 2010 is also believed to be connected to Willow Springs.

“Most of the cases occur in what we call the southern-tier states, and, in fact, about 50 percent of cases have occurred in Texas and Florida,” Dr. Jennifer Cope, medical epidemiologist at the CDC, said.

The Arkansas case is the first confirmed one of 2013, Cope said. In the last decade from 2003 to 2012, 31 infections have been reported in the U.S.

Naegleria fowleri is thermophilic, or heat-loving. Most infections occur during July, August and September when there is prolonged heat and thus higher water temperatures and lower water levels.

Continue reading “I, for One, Welcome our New Brain Eating Overlords…”

I’m combing thru hours of video and still pictures collected during the Dark Snow Project stay in Greenland, working to find the best way to tell the story. I’ve decided to pull out significant parts of the narrative and put them together as occasional “Dark Snow Log” posts. Let me know what you think.

Dr. Jeff Masters informed me last night that a new temperature record has been set in Greenland, the warmest measured since records began in 1958.  The location was Maniitsoq, a small settlement on Greenland’s southwest coast, between Nuuk and Kangerlusuaq, where the team stopped briefly to refuel on our 11th hour, improvised run to the ice sheet on July 8.  That gave me the nucleus to begin pulling some video together.

I’m shouting this wherever I go. There is a revolution in energy production technology happening right now – it will be as disruptive to the utility industry as the internet has been to the communication industry. If states, utilities, and regulators don’t develop coherent strategies very soon to cope with unprecedented change, we are going to see a major economic train wreck within the decade over much of the country.

NYTimes:

For years, power companies have watched warily as solar panels have sprouted across the nation’s rooftops. Now, in almost panicked tones, they are fighting hard to slow the spread.

Alarmed by what they say has become an existential threat to their business, utility companies are moving to roll back government incentives aimed at promoting solar energy and other renewable sources of power. At stake, the companies say, is nothing less than the future of the American electricity industry.

According to the Energy Information Administration, rooftop solar electricity — the economics of which often depend on government incentives and mandates — accounts for less than a quarter of 1 percent of the nation’s power generation.

And yet, to hear executives tell it, such power sources could ultimately threaten traditional utilities’ ability to maintain the nation’s grid.

“We did not get in front of this disruption,” Clark Gellings, a fellow at the Electric Power Research Institute, a nonprofit arm of the industry, said during a panel discussion at the annual utility convention last month. “It may be too late.”

Advocates of renewable energy — not least solar industry executives who stand to get rich from the transformation — say such statements are wildly overblown. For now, they say, the government needs to help make the economics of renewable power work for ordinary Americans. Without incentives, the young industry might wither — and with it, their own potential profits.

The battle is playing out among energy executives, lawmakers and regulators across the country.

Continue reading “Utilities Wake Up – Rooftop Solar to Rival Conventional Power”