Month: October 2013

Paul Brown for Climate News Network:

Contrary to claims by critics of wind power, Spanish researchers say, the turbines do reduce carbon dioxide emissions significantly even though the wind does not blow constantly.

LONDON, 18 October – One of the most often repeated arguments of the anti-wind lobby is that the turbines produce electricity only intermittently, when there is enough wind to turn them.

This, the critics argue, means that so much gas has to be burnt to provide a reliable supply of electricity that there is no overall benefit to the environment.

But extensive research in Spain means this claim can now definitively be declared a myth. Wind, the researchers found, is a very efficient way of reducing carbon dioxide emissions.

A study of 87 of the country’s coal and gas plants and how they were run alongside Spain’s very large wind industry found that adjustments made to the fossil fuel plants to compensate for variable wind strengths made little difference to their C02 emissions.

The anti-wind campaigners claim that fossil fuel plants have to be kept running at a slow speed, all the time producing CO2, just in case the wind fails. At slow speeds these plants are less efficient and so produce so much CO2 – the opponents of wind say – that they wipe out any gains from having wind power.

But a report published in the journal Energy by researchers at the Universidad Politécnica de Madrid says this is simply not true. There are some small losses, the researchers say, but even if wind produced as much as 50% of Spain’s electricity the CO2 savings would still be 80% of the emissions that would have been produced by the displaced thermal power stations.

At lower penetrations, particularly when the number of wind turbines was small, each megawatt hour produced by wind replaced 100% of the CO2 that would have been produced by each displaced thermal megawatt

Above, the infamous “Germany has more sun” interview on Fox News – typical of the disinformation pedaled by the fossil fuel lobby and their clients in the face of booming renewable development elsewhere in the world (skip to 2:49 if you want the punchline immediately).
I’ll be showing this to an audience in Ludington Michigan, tonight, like I showed to astonished folks in Iceland a few weeks ago. It takes minutes for the laughter to die down, whereupon, I always give the obligatory Geography lesson – mindful that its been a while since we had a war with Germany, and a lot of folks may not know where that country is – a cloudy northern European democracy at the same latitude as Labrador, Canada.

As this solar resource map shows, Germany gets less sun than almost anyplace in the United States, except the rainy Olympic Peninsula – even Alaska has a greater solar resource than Germany – as this solar resource map from the (newly re-opened) National Renewable Energy Lab shows.

The Tea Party/Fox News/Talk Radio/ClimateScience Denial narrative (excepting maybe elements of the “Green Tea Party”, who are having glimmerings of understanding), is that, deploying renewable energy will sink our economy and drive us into the stone age.

Germany reminds us again that we did not leave the stone age because we ran out of stones.

We did it because we had a better idea.

Bloomberg/Business Week:

FRANKFURT, Germany (AP) — While politicians in the United States argue about spending cuts, deficits and the debt ceiling, Germany faces a different discussion: What to do with a looming budget surplus.

The country’s strong economy means it will take in more in tax revenue than it will spend next year for a third straight year, a group of top economic institutes said in a twice-annual report Thursday.
Continue reading “It’s Always Sunny in DusselDorf: While US is Paralyzed by Debt/Climate Deniers, Germany Deploys Renewables, Enjoys Budget Surplus”

Big hair, big suits. The video is pure 80s but the music is timelessly infectious, and I feel like moving.

I’ve made the point often.  If you want to know if climate change is real, check with the people who actually have money on the table, skin in the game – the big insurance companies. These folks have more money than God, (almost as much as Exxon) and hire the smartest number crunchers in the world to assess their risk exposure.  They are factoring in climate change, and pricing their coverage accordingly . As Eli Lehrer points out below, if they don’t get it right, someone will come in, undercut them,  and eat their lunch.

Munich Re, the big euro re-insurer, has had climate on the radar since the early 1970s.

Rtcc.org:

The head of exposure management at leading insurer Lloyd’s has slammed attempts to dismiss the latest UN climate science report, and says he’s unconvinced by claims the world is cooling.

“The sceptics are just trying to push the debate and they start at 1998, which was one of the hottest years on record,” says Trevor Maynard in a blog titled ‘Silencing the Sceptics‘.

“It’s a bit like someone breaks the world record for running 100 metres and then in the next ten races people say, ‘Runners are getting slower’.”

He added:  “In some parts of the world we expect there will be more flooding and drought and food shortages, we just don’t know where exactly. It means all regions need to think about becoming more resilient.”

Eli Lehrer, of the Conservative R Street think tank:

Indeed, if free-market conservatives really want evidence of climate change, they ought to look towards the insurance markets that would bear much of the cost of catastrophic climate change. All three of the major insurance modeling firms and every global insurance company incorporate human-caused climate change into their projections of current and future weather patterns. The big business that has the most to lose from climate change, and that would reap the biggest rewards if it were somehow solved tomorrow, has universally decided that climate change is a real problem. An insurance company that ignored climate change predictions could, in the short term, make a lot of money by underpricing its competition on a wide range of products. Not a single firm has done this.

NYTimes – Flood Insurance Costs Rise:

MIAMI — Sharp increases in federal flood insurance rates are distressing coastal homeowners from Hawaii to New England and are starting to hurt property values and housing sales in areas just beginning to recover from the recession, according to residents and legislators.

Continue reading “Lloyd’s of London Latest Insurer to Warn on Warming, Mocks Deniers”

South Dakota Senator John Thune is one of Congress’ leading climate deniers. The South Dakota legislature has become renowned as a bastion of anti science enthusiasts, who famously proposed a resolution not long ago calling for “balance” in science education, and declaring

“..carbon dioxide is not a pollutant but rather a highly beneficial ingredient for all plant life on earth

.. That global warming is a scientific theory rather than a proven fact;

..That there are a variety of climatological, meteorological, astrological, thermological, cosmological, and ecological dynamics that can effect world weather phenomena and that the significance and interrelativity of these factors is largely speculative;

Last week the state was hit with the kind of destructive extreme weather event – an “early and unusual” blizzard,  that climate science has predicted will increase in coming  decades.

The government shutdown, supported by many in this conservative enclave, means that no federal help is available when needed.

LATimes:

The blizzard hit just days after 80-degree weather, before ranchers had moved their herds from less-protected summer grazing lands. Most ranchers were set to bring calves to market — the satisfying payday after another year of grueling labor. Thousands of head had been recently relocated here from Texas and New Mexico to escape punishing droughts in those states.

“Some ranchers lost all their cattle. They’ve yet to find one alive,” Christen said. “They’re facing absolute destruction.”

Yet Washington’s shutdown has deprived people here of a traditional safety net: Congress hasn’t passed a new farm bill to subsidize agricultural producers, and the lockout means legislators won’t be voting on the topic any time soon.

These days, Reder passes a federal Farm Services Administration office whose doors are closed. Like most American ranchers, the 47-year-old is a resilient small businessman used to tending to his own problems, with help from neighbors whose families settled this land generations ago.

Still, he’s frustrated and feels that federal lawmakers have turned their backs on the nation’s heartland in a time of need.

“We’re just a bunch of ranchers from South Dakota — it’s hard for our voices to be heard,” he said, sitting at the kitchen table at dawn Friday, drinking coffee, fielding calls from fellow cattlemen. “You see crises across the country, the hurricanes and tornadoes, and officials are right on top of it. But something of this magnitude, that has just about leveled this part of the country, and there’s nothing.”

Many residents in this conservative region had supported the government shutdown as a way to make Washington more fiscally responsible. “But one appropriate role for these guys is to lend a hand after disasters like this,” Christen said, “and they’re not here.”

Hot tip from Jeff Masters – New Weather Channel series starts Saturday, October 19.

The Weather Channel:

Hosted by Climate Journalist and adventurer Bernice Notenboom, Tipping Points embraces commentary from leading climate scientists surveying the complexity of the major tipping points effecting our current climate and their impact on changing weather patterns around the globe.

Adventurous and informative, Tipping Points explores the interconnectedness of all the elements that make up our climate system that influence global and local weather patterns. The Earth is in a delicate equilibrium; once one factor reaches its respective tipping point the other factors will also breach stability. As the atmosphere heats up and the chemical makeup of the atmosphere shifts there will be repercussions felt on a global scale. These elements are what Bernice and her team of climate authorities are going to explore is some of the most remote locations on the planet.

From the canopies of The Amazon to the ice sheets of Siberia, these climate specialists will chase answers to behavioral patterns of tipping elements in the climate system affecting our weather systems.

How close to tipping are we? When will these climates tip and what will be the indicators? How will our climate and weather patterns be affected once stability has been ruptured? Will large-scale discontinuities be the biggest cause for climate catastrophes in this century? These are the questions Tipping Points dares to ask, and further answer.

I did this video as kind of a lark a few years ago, exploring the ways writers and story tellers are dealing with emerging climate science. Since then, there’s been an acceleration in the number of examples of an emerging genre, “Cli-Fi”. In some cases, climatic change is an essential theme of the stories, and in other cases, it simply is a fact – it exists as a background to the action, an accepted part of  life in the future of the planet – as in the imagined “New Seoul” cityscape in “Cloud Atlas”.

The Earth 101 conference in Reykjavik was specifically devoted to the ongoing task of processing the awesome new understanding that scientists are giving us about how the planet works, and what our future here may be like.  Part of our work as communicators of this understanding is to change the story from one of helplessness and catastrophe, to empowerment and hope.

Writer Dan Bloom sends me this:

During the sweltering British summer of 2013, several bookstores in
the UK did something that was a long time coming: They set up
dedicated ”cli-fi” tables with a simple yet eye-catching signs
promoting fiction and non-fiction books with climate themes.

Continue reading “Cli-Fi: The Emerging Genre of Climate Change Literature”

The Republican War on Science is no small part of the motivation congress has to shut down government.  Part of the  Tea Party narrative is that righteous God-fearing, science denying ‘Merricuns are targets of Godless watermelon commie scientists and their pesky facts and data.

Jennifer Bogo, articles Editor of Popular Science, bumped me with these items.

Popular Science:

As the icebreaker Laurence M. Gould barrels south through the Drake Passage, cutting through the largest ocean current in the world, its portholes look exactly like a row of front-loading washers. Waves relentlessly churn against the glass. Above decks, they crash over the stern. Passengers—those that aren’t sleeping off seasickness meds—place their dinner plates on sticky mats and learn to walk with the ship’s rolling gait. This is the only way to reach Palmer Station, the smallest of the three U.S. Antarctic research stations. It takes four days. And the scientists who arrived there last week are about to make the same journey back.

But for them, a quick round-trip through some of the world’s roughest waters is hardly the worst part of the government shutdown. Last Tuesday, the U.S. Antarctic Program, funded by the National Science Foundation, announced it would be sending the three U.S. Antarctic stations into “caretaker” mode, suspending all research activities not essential to human safety and the preservation of property. By Thursday, all of the scientists at Palmer will be sent home, leaving the station with a skeleton crew of about a dozen contractors; if the shutdown continues, the disruption to the Antarctic summer research season could be catastrophic.

“We have 22 years of data showing the summer snapshot in this area that’s changing really rapidly,” says Oscar Schofield, an oceanographer at Rutgers University. “If we go to disaster scenario, where the whole season is lost, we’ll have a gap. The whole point of a time series is to have continuous data so that you can talk about the trends in the system. So that would be tragic.” Hugh Ducklow directs the long-term ecological research project at Palmer: “Once it’s gone, it’s never coming back—we lose this data forever,” he says. “Because of the nature of our work, where we’re analyzing long time series of data, as soon as you start getting breaks, some of the analyses become impossible. A lot of the scientific value of the past 22 years can be damaged by a single missed year.”

Scientists at Palmer have been meticulously studying the Antarctic marine ecosystem—including all of the life in it, from microbes to penguins—every year since 1990. As a result, they’ve found themselves in the hot seat of climate change. The mid-winter air temperature along the West Antarctic Peninsula, where Palmer is located, has increased by 11 degrees Fahrenheit over the past 50 years—five times the global average. Scientists have also documented stronger surface winds, cloudier skies, more snowfall, less ice, and warmer ocean water. Understanding the significance of these changes in Antarctica, where the ecosystem is relatively uncomplicated, could help tease out effects to other areas of the globe.

EEnews.net:

In Punta Arenas, Chile, Vivancos, a recent graduate of Columbia University, boarded the Laurence M. Gould, an icebreaker that would take him and others across the Drake Passage and to the National Science Foundation’s Palmer Station.

Continue reading “Climate Science Takes Big Hit from Shutdown”

Bloomberg:

California’s three biggest utilities are sparring with their own customers about systems that store energy from the sun, opening another front in the battle that’s redefining the mission of electricity generators.

Edison International (EIX), PG&E Corp. and Sempra Energy (SRE) said they’re putting up hurdles to some battery backups wired to solar panels because they can’t be certain the power flowing back to the grid from the units is actually clean energy.

The dispute threatens the state’s $2 billion rooftop solar industry and indicates the depth of utilities’ concerns about consumers producing their own power. People with rooftop panels are already buying less electricity, and adding batteries takes them closer to the day they won’t need to buy from the local grid at all, said Ben Peters, a government affairs analyst at Mainstream Energy Corp., which installs solar systems.

“The utilities clearly see rooftop solar as the next threat,” Peters said from his office in Sunnyvale, California. “They’re trying to limit the growth.”

California is the largest of the 43 states encouraging renewables by requiring utilities to buy electricity from consumer solar installations, typically at the same price that customers pay for power from the grid. The policy, known asnet metering, offers a way for households to reduce their bills. It underpinned a 78 percent surge in the state’s residential installations in the second quarter from a year earlier, according to the Solar Energy Industries Association.

Common Dreams:

As Danny Kennedy, author of the book “Rooftop Revolution” and co-founder of solar company Sungevity in California, said in an interview with Alternet earlier this year:

Solar power represents a change in electricity that has a potentially disruptive impact on power in both the literal sense (meaning how we get electricity) and in the figurative sense of how we distribute wealth and power in our society. Fossil fuels have led to the concentration of power whereas solar’s potential is really to give power over to the hands of people. This shift has huge community benefits while releasing our dependency on the centralized, monopolized capital of the fossil fuel industry. So it’s revolutionary in the technological and political sense.
–
The tensions between decentralized forms of energy like rootop solar or small-scale wind and traditional large-scale utilities is nothing new, but as the crisis of climate change has spurred a global grassroots movement push for a complete withdrawal from the fossil fuel and nuclear paradigm that forms the basis of the current electricity grid, these tensions are growing.

Below, Lester Brown on the vision of a Green future:

Continue reading “California Utilities Face “Rooftop Revolution””

Grist:

America’s population and economy are both growing, yet its energy appetite is falling. That’s because of substantial energy-efficiency gains made in recent decades.

Those gains are helping the country reduce oil imports, save money on power bills, and move toward meeting agoal set by President Obama of reducing greenhouse gas emissions by 17 percent between 2005 and 2020.

The news is laid out in a Natural Resources Defense Council report cheerily titled America’s (Amazingly) Good Energy News [PDF]:

[O]ver the past 40 years Americans have found so many innovative ways to save energy that we have more than doubled the economic productivity of the oil that runs our vehicles and the natural gas and electricity that runs almost everything else. Factories and businesses are producing substantially more products and value with less energy. …

[B]ecause increasing efficiency is far less costly than adding other energy resources like fossil fuels, this is saving the nation hundreds of billions of dollars annually, helping U.S. workers and companies compete worldwide, and making our country more energy-secure.

America’s energy use peaked in 2007 and has been falling ever since, the report says. Less energy was used by Americans last year than in 1999, despite 25 percent economic growth in the intervening years.

My video on efficiency, the first of two, is below. If you’re pressed, skip to 7.09 for the relevant punchline.