Month: September 2013

For the last decade, according to the denial industry, sea ice has been “recovering”. Which is completely correct, if, by “recovering”, you mean there is 75 percent less ice volume than there was 30 years ago.

Over the weekend the ever-reliable Daily Mail came up with another masterpiece of boneheaded backwardness.  As boring and predictable as this  whack-a-mole is, obviously, readers need some handy links when they get the inevitable triumphant “I told you so” from Aunt Teabag and Uncle Dittohead.

Dana Nuccitelli and John Abraham explain:

When it comes to climate science reporting, the Mail on Sunday and Telegraph are only reliable in the sense that you can rely on them to usually get the science wrong. This weekend’s Arctic sea ice articles from David Rose of the Mail and Hayley Dixon at the Telegraphunfortunately fit that pattern.

Both articles claimed that Arctic sea ice extent grew 60 percent in August 2013 as compared to August 2012. While this factoid is technically true, it’s also largely irrelevant. For one thing, the annual Arctic sea ice minimum occurs in September – we’re not there yet. And while this year’s minimum extent will certainly be higher than last year’s, that’s not the least bit surprising. As University of Reading climate scientist Ed Hawkins noted last year,

“Around 80% of the ~100 scientists at the Bjerknes [Arctic climate science] conference thought that there would be MORE Arctic sea-ice in 2013, compared to 2012.

The reason so many climate scientists predicted more ice this year than last is quite simple. There’s a principle in statistics known as “regression toward the mean,” which is the phenomenon that if an extreme value of a variable is observed, the next measurement will generally be less extreme. In other words, we should not often expect to observe records in consecutive years. 2012 shattered the previous record low sea ice extent; hence ‘regression towards the mean’ told us that 2013 would likely have a higher minimum extent.

The amount of Arctic sea ice left at the end of the annual melt season is mainly determined by two factors – natural variability (weather patterns and ocean cycles), and human-caused global warming. The Arctic has lost 75 percent of its summer sea ice volume over the past three decades primarily due to human-caused global warming, but in any given year the weather can act to either preserve more or melt more sea ice. Last year the weather helped melt more ice, while this year the weather helped preserve more ice.

Last year I created an animated graphic called the ‘Arctic Escalator’ that predicted the behavior we’re now seeing from the Mail on Sunday and Telegraph. Every year when the weather acts to preserve more ice than the previous year, we can rely on climate contrarians to claim that Arctic sea ice is “rebounding” or “recovering” and there’s nothing to worry about. Given the likelihood that 2013 would not break the 2012 record, I anticipated that climate contrarians would claim this year as yet another “recovery” year, exactly as the Mail on Sunday and Telegraph have done.

Continue reading “Another Year, Another Sea Ice “Recovery”.”

The Hill:

Billionaire climate change activist Tom Steyer is launching a four-part, $1 million ad buy that attacks the proposed Keystone XL oil sands pipeline.

The former hedge fund chief’s first ad, slated to run during today’s political talk shows, alleges Keystone wouldn’t help the U.S. because the oil would be  “refined and loaded on ships to be sold overseas to countries like China.”

“Foreign countries will get more access to more oil to make more products to sell back to us, undercutting our economy and our workers,” the ad states.

The Obama administration is weighing whether to grant a cross-border permit for TransCanada Corp.’s pipeline, which would bring oil from Canadian oil sands projects to Gulf Coast refiners.

Keystone pipeline supporters have pushed back against activists’ allegations that Keystone would largely be an export pipeline, either for crude it carries or refined products made with it.

 

The Green-Tea heresy keeps spreading among the hardest of Hard Right groups.

OK, they’ve been a little slow on the uptake – the obvious advantages that renewable energy offers in decentralizing economic and political power have been pretty clear to a lot of us for, oh, 3 decades or so. But better late than never. This is a problem for the Koch Brothers, who’ve up to now been able to convince the Fox News/Glenn Beck crowd that their interests are identical to Exxon’s.

Utilities are starting to get panicky about this unruly mob of solar energy activists, as well they should be. The creative solution on their part would, of course, be to leverage their expertise and influence to get out in front and pioneer a new regulatory and distribution model that makes renewable energy the ultimate centerpiece. Whether they can break through their own encrusted habits and modes of thinking is the question. But if the Tea Party can do it, who knows?

MidwestEnergy News:

A group of conservative Tea Party activists in Atlanta turned heads this summer when they announced a partnership with the local Sierra Club chapter to help pressure Georgia’s largest electric utility to boost its investment in solar power.

Six weeks later, solar power picked up another unexpected supporter in Wisconsin, where on Aug. 20 the state’s Libertarian Party endorsed a clean energy group’s proposal to let customers lease solar panels and other small renewable generators.

“Most of us don’t trust the environmental movement because they’ve cried wolf forever and ever. There are all kinds of philosophical disagreements, but at the end of the day this was pretty much a no-brainer,” said Paul Ehlers, state party chair.

The proposal they endorsed would clarify state law to allow leasing and other types of third-party ownership for solar panels, wind turbines and other generators, in which neither the electric customer nor their local utility owns the system.

The Libertarian Party has no elected state legislators in Wisconsin, but it does have influence with a certain subset of the Republican Party, which currently controls the state’s government. The Libertarians’ stamp of approval could help change the long-polarized debate about distributed generation in the state.

“We have some credibility now. We can talk to Republican legislators in a way we couldn’t in the past,” said Michael Vickerman, program and policy director for RENEW Wisconsin, which is leading the Clean Energy Choice campaign.

Continue reading “Wisconsin Libertarians Open New Front in Solar Rooftop Push”

Dr. Kevin Trenberth has done some significant work recently on the movement of heat into the deeper ocean during the last decade or so.  I had a conversation with him on the meaning of climate sensitivity last may, some of which appeared in my most recent video this past week.

Ars Technica:

When discussing global warming, the public eye is mostly directed to global average surface air temperatures, but that’s just one slice of the climate pie. If you haven’t noticed, the ocean is awfully big, and it holds a great deal more heat energy than the atmosphere. In fact, about 90 percent of the energy that’s been added to the climate system by human activities has gone into the ocean.

Unfortunately, it’s hard to monitor that. There are a multitude of measuring stations for surface air temperatures, but our presence in the ocean is limited. With the advent of the Argo array—a fleet of autonomous, drifting floats that measure ocean temperatures—in the early 2000s, our data improved drastically. Still, the uncertainty has historically been greater for deeper waters.

Continue reading “The Weekend Wonk: Kevin Trenberth on Climate Sensitivity”

More in the continuing series on emerging impacts of distributed energy technology on the electric utility business model. In recent weeks I’ve pointed to press items from Georgia and Arizona on how solar photovoltaics could make our giant electric utilities go the way of typewriters and buggy whips.

Denver  Post:

The problem, said David Eves, chief executive officer of Xcel’s Colorado subsidiary, is that the benefits of rooftop solar do not cover the program’s costs.

“This is not about putting the brakes on solar,” Eves said. “It’s about having an honest discussion about costs and benefits.”

If changes aren’t made, however, Xcel said it wants to cut back its Solar Reward program to 6 megawatts of new solar arrays from a planned 36 megawatts.

It’s not just a Colorado fight — the battle is being waged at utility commissions from Georgia to Louisiana to California.

“We see utilities in state after state fighting,” said Carrie Hitt, vice president for state affairs at the Solar Energy Industries Association, a trade group.

Because rooftop solar cuts demand and puts kilowatt-hours on the grid, it undermines the utility’s business model, Hitt said.

“Rooftop solar doesn’t amount to a lot now,” she said. “They are worried about the future.”

Xcel is proposing cutting from 3 cents to a fraction of a penny a 10-year incentive that it offers for every kilowatt-hour a new installation in the Solar Rewards program produces.

The main battleground, however, is the price homeowners with rooftop solar get for putting kilowatt-hours onto the system — the so-called net-metering credit.

Xcel customers get a credit for each kilowatt-hour they put on the grid equal to what a residential customer is charged for a kilowatt-hour — 10.5 cents.

Continue reading “Colorado Latest Battle Ground as Utilities Realize Solar Energy’s Threat to their Survival”

Every presentation I give nowadays, I have several slides relating to the extreme events in summer 2010 –  the “1000 year heat wave” in Russia and the simultaneous catastrophic flooding in Pakistan.  These events have since been shown to be connected by a “blocking event” – a wave in the jet stream that got stuck in place for an extended period in July 2010, diverting moisture from Russia, and sending it plunging toward Pakistan.

Jeff Masters explains:

In July over Europe and Asia, the jet stream has two branches: a strong southern “subtropical” jet that blows across southern Europe, and a weaker “polar” jet that blows across northern Europe. The polar jet stream carries along the extratropical cyclones (lows) that bring the mid-latitudes most of their precipitation. The polar jet stream also acts as the boundary between cold, Arctic air, and warm tropical air. If the polar jet stream shifts to the north of its usual location, areas just to its south will be much hotter and drier than normal. In July 2010, a remarkably strong polar jet stream developed over northern Europe. This jet curved far to the north of Moscow, then plunged southwards towards Pakistan. This allowed hot air to surge northwards over most of European Russia, and prevented rain-bearing low pressure systems from traveling over the region. These rain-bearing low pressure systems passed far to the north of European Russia, then dove unusually far to the south, into northern Pakistan. The heavy rains from these lows combined with Pakistan’s usual summer monsoon rains to trigger Pakistan’s most devastating floods in history.

The unusual jet stream pattern that led to the 2010 Russian heat wave and Pakistani floods began during the last week of June, and remained locked in place all of July and for the first half of August. Long-lived “blocking” episodes like this are usually caused by unusual sea surface temperature patterns, according to recent research done using climate models. For example, Feudale and Shukla (2010) found that during the summer of 2003, exceptionally high sea surface temperatures of 4°C (7°F) above average over the Mediterranean Sea, combined with unusually warm SSTs in the northern portion of the North Atlantic Ocean near the Arctic, combined to shift the jet stream to the north over Western Europe and create the heat wave of 2003. I expect that the current SST pattern over the ocean regions surrounding Europe played a key role in shifting the jet stream to create the heat wave of 2010…Human-caused climate change also may have played a role; using climate models, Stottet al. (2004) found it very likely (>90% chance) that human-caused climate change has at least doubled the risk of severe heat waves like the great 2003 European heat wave.

I point out to my audiences that decades ago, when disasters such as this hit third world countries, our general reaction in the west was to be grateful that we lived in so friendly and temperate an environment, general sympathy for the suffering poor people in that far off place, and perhaps a gift to the Red Cross or other agency in the hope that relief supplies might get to those in need. (the video below was produced in 2010 immediately in the aftermath of the Russia/Pakistan event)

Times have changed, however. Some of the countries that are vulnerable to events such as summer 2010 are now armed with weapons of mass destruction. And they harbor political factions who do not share western, secular, democratic values.

Following the drought disaster, Russia, one of the world’s leading grain exporters,  banned grain exports.  In august, 2010, the Washington Post reported:

In Egypt — one of the biggest importers of wheat and a nation that experienced deadly violence in bread lines two years ago — the government assured the public that it has a four-month supply of wheat and urged Russia to honor contracts it signed before the ban.

Grain harvests around the world have been devastated by unusual weather this year.

Heavy rain destroyed much of Canada’s wheat crop, and the country is forecasting a 35 percent drop in production. In China, the world’s most populous nation, the worst flooding in more than a decade is predicted to cut rice production by 5 to 7 percent. China produces about one-third of the world’s rice.

Rising prices for stable foods continued into the following year, and NPR reported in January 2011:

Political unrest has broken out in Tunisia, Yemen, Egypt and other Arab countries. Social media and governmental policies are getting most of the credit for spurring the turmoil, but there’s another factor at play.

Many of the people protesting are also angry about dramatic price hikes for basic foodstuffs, such as rice, cereals, cooking oil and sugar.

The advent of of the unrest now referred to as “Arab Spring” coincided with rising grain prices and food rioting across the region.  On December 17, 2010, a vegetable vendor in Tunisia set himself afire. That event was a spark that ignited unrest that has toppled regimes in Tunisia, Egypt, and Libya.  Unrest continues in those countries.

Continue reading “How Climate Change Primed Syria for War”

Climate denier and frequent Fox News talking head Chris Horner of the tobacco and Oil funded Competitive Enterprise Institute used to have a favorite laugh line in regard to global temperature – “How do you measure the temperature of a planet? Where do you stick the thermometer?”

Actually, the planet has a very sensitive thermometer that has reliably continued to show the heat buildup, even in a decade of slower surface temp rise – and that’s the ocean.

Part of the “This is Not Cool” series for the Yale Forum on Climate Change & the Media, this new video includes interviews with an all star team including Dr. Kevin Trenberth, Dr.  Jerry Meehl, oceanographer Josh Willis, and others.  There will likely be a second video on this topic soon, as boiling down the issue of climate sensitivity is more than one can do in a 6 minute time slot, and I still have a number of interviews that did not make it into this one.

It’s no surprise that the initial line of denialist attack on the forthcoming IPCC Fifth Assessment Report (AR5), first installment due out later this month, will be the issue of “climate sensitivity”, that is, how much warming can we expect from a given level of greenhouse forcing.  A number of high profile media spots have lately raised the question about whether scientists will be slightly lowering the estimates from the canonical 3° C plus or minus 1.5° or so, to maybe 2.5C or thereabouts. It’s a distinction without a difference is the first response – but even to get to that first response you have to understand something even more fundamental – a slightly lower rate of surface temperature rise over the last decade or so does not change the fact that the planet continues to gather heat. That heat is going somewhere, and has an effect on the system – surface thermometers are only one indicator of a relatively small portion of that heat imbalance.

For more maniacal viewers, I’ll also be posting some of the original skype interviews in complete form in coming days and weeks.

Traditional Utility generation – the hub-and-spoke model, with a big power plant servicing many small users, is on the way out, as new technologies and transmission options become available – typically in patchwork fashion, around the country. Because we have no national plan for rethinking our aging grid infrastructure, and because the sclerotic congress seems content to allow America’s electric grid to lapse into third world status, corporations and state authorities have been building new connectivity piecemeal, with disruptive results.

The stories illustrate how cheap renewable energy is steadily blowing away competition and blowing up old business models when it comes online.

Midwest Energy News:

The U.S. grid is actually three grids: power generated in the east can’t really move to the west; power generated in the west can’t really move to the east. And Texas – in true Texas fashion – is an electrical state unto itself.

This Balkanized power grid, however, appears to be on the verge of breaking open, with the result that at least some electrons will be free to flow as the market dictates. And that could have particularly positive implications for generators of renewable power.

“This is a ground-breaking project,” said Russ Stidolph, senior vice president and chief financial officer of Tres Amigas, a company that aims to unite the three grids. The project, which has the same name, will be constructed near Clovis, New Mexico, where the interconnections come close to converging.

The developers are seeking $550 million to fund the first phase, which Stidolph said the company expects to begin building by the end of December. The first phase would allow 750 megawatts to move between the eastern and western grids (by way of comparison, the average coal-fired power plant in the U.S. can generate about 550 megawatts). The Tres Amigas developers envision a second phase that would establish a connection between the eastern grid and the Texas grid, allowing for the movement of 1,500 megawatts.

“There’s significant demand for transfer among the three grids,” Stidolph said. His company envisions an interconnection that continues to grow along with demand for the capacity to move electricity from one grid to another.

Power moving across longer distances

The power transmission system in the U.S. was built to accommodate a very local electricity market, in which power was sold to customers located nearby. Tres Amigas will help to enlarge the electricity market, which should help to make power more reliable and cheaper, and to enhance the movement of renewable energy.

“We think this holds great promise for delivering some of the best winds in the country to other parts of the country,” said Pat Pelstring, president and chief operating officer of National Renewable Solutions, a Wayzata, Minnesota-based developer of wind farms.

Pelstring’s company is developing a wind farm in New Mexico, close by the planned interconnect. He expects by the end of this year to complete the first phase, which will generate 20 megawatts. But National Energy Solutions is leasing 86,000 acres that straddle the border between New Mexico and Texas, where Pelstring thinks he can generate between 500 and 600 megawatts of power. Then, at least theoretically, he could send it almost anywhere in the country.

Meanwhile, in Texas, new transmission is beginning to bring huge new wind resources from remote West  Texas to cities in the east – creating disruptive new realities for utilities.
Continue reading “Lumbering Toward a New Grid”

We live with an anti-science movement that includes more than just climate denial, and crosses sociological and political boundaries – perhaps as an outgrowth of general disenchantment with things “modern”, and the realization that the “City of Tomorrow” visions of world’s fairs and Disney installations have not played out as planned.

Recent news items tell us of an outbreak of measles, rare in the US with the advent of effective vaccine prevention programs. The outbreak occurred in the congregation of a  right wing mega-church in Texas, where the television evangelist Pastor had railed against “all of these shots” for innocent babies.  While its easy to snicker at the southern creationist crowd, the problem exists among the  Silicon Forest elite as well as the granola and sandal crowd.

Seattle Times:

As school begins in Seattle this week, it’s worth revisiting a disturbing fact: The Pacific Northwest is the nation’s hot spot for anti-vaccination free-riders.

Washington ranks seventh, at 4.6 percent, in the percentage of kindergartners whose parents last year demanded exemptions from mandatory vaccinations, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Oregon (6.4 percent) has the nation’s worst rate, followed closely by Idaho (5.9 percent) and Alaska (5.6 percent).

Call it a frontier mentality, or counterculturalism, or whatever. It is based on unfounded fear, not science.

The anti-vaccination craze was fueled by a 1998 study in the British medical journal The Lancet, which suggested a link between the vaccinations for measles, mumps and rubella (the M.M.R. immunization) and autism. The study was retracted, subsequent research has disproved the link and, in 2010, Britain’s General Medical Council barred the researcher, Dr. Andrew Wakefield, from practicing medicine.

Dr. Mauri Pelto of the North Cascade Glacier Climate Project has completed his 30th annual survey of glacier mass and conditions in the rugged region near the Canadian border in Northern Washington State.

The North Cascades area is breathtaking – the glacier conditions, heartbreaking.

His video above illustrates a little appreciated truth about the science of climate change – that it comes not from models or computers, but from millions of accumulated  data points, acquired through slow, disciplined, and (trust me on this) physically demanding effort on the part of researchers willing to spend lifetimes in that pursuit.  This boots-on-the-ice type of science is what I hope my readers will appreciate more and more through this blog and the accompanying videos.

 His report is posted now online.

Some Highlights.

Easton Glacier had a terminus that was fully exposed by the start of August. The terminus slope has thinned markedly in the last three years as retreat has continued. The retreat of Easton Glacier has averaged 10 m/year from 2009-2013. This year the retreat will exceed that with two months of exposure. The Deming Glacier retreat has been exceptional over the last 12 months with at least 30 m of retreat.

The snowline on Easton Glacier was at 1850 m on Aug. 10th. By the end of August the snowline had risen to 1980 m, where snow depths had been 1.5 m three weeks previous. The mass balance of Sholes, Rainbow and Easton Glacier will all be close to – 1 meters water equivalent, that is losing a slice of glacier 1.1-1.2 m thick. Mount Daniels had the best snowpack of any location in the North Cascades. On the small and dying Ice Worm Glacier ablation and runoff were assessed simultaneously. The expansion of the area where 2013 has all melted expanded rapidly from 8/13 to 8/21. The glaciers lower section had is often avalanche buried, this year the snowpack was gone on much of the lower section. However, snowpack averaged 1.7 m across the entire glacier on August 14th. With daily ablation of 7-8 cm/day this will be gone by early September. This will lead to a substantial negative mass balance this year. Lynch and Daniels Glacier both had limited exposed blue ice and firn, and snowpack values that were slightly above average. Both glaciers will have small negative mass balances this year. On Lynch Glacier a large crevasse at exposed the retained snowpack of the last three years, from 2010-2012 5 m of firn remains.

Hope to follow up with more from Dr. Pelto in the future.
My videos documenting last year’s trip accompanying Dr. Pelto and team are below.

Continue reading “Tough Summer for North Cascades Glaciers”