Month: January 2014

Just weeks after a humiliating apology for a flawed story on the Benghazi, Libya attack of September, and the suspension of Lara Logan for her role in that,  the once great 60 Minutes has done it again, proving what happens when you hire a Fox News flack to be your leader. (see below)

Joe Romm in Climate Progress:

Clean technology is booming by every key indicator — but you would never know that from Sunday’s absurd 60 Minutes piece touting an imaginary “Cleantech Crash.”

As documented in the recent Department of Energy (DOE) report, “Revolution Now: The Future Arrives for Four Clean Energy Technologies,” the only thing in cleantech that is crashing is the cost of key components. This price crash has enabled explosive growth in wind power, solar power, LED lights and electric vehicles, as shown in the four charts from the report reposted here.

Ironically, this boom is so self-evident that just Saturday the New York Times published afront page story on “the solar power craze that is sweeping Wall Street.” As the article notes, “Solar companies have had the wind at their backs lately.”

It’s true there have been some losers among cleantech companies, but that’s precisely what you would expect in an industry where the norm has become ruthless cost-cutting, which in turn is a great boon to consumers.

But for 60 Minutes, this incredible boon is a bust. Here’s a transcript of a clip from the show:

LESLIE STAHL (over pictures of solar panels, biofuels, wind turbines): “It’s called clean tech. And the new technologies that were developed in the energy sector were supposed to create jobs, and help America break its reliance on fossil fuels. The government supported it, and billions of tax dollars were spent. So how is the investment going?

STAHL (to DOE interviewee): “Solyndra went through half a billion dollars before it failed. Then I’m going to give you a list of other failures. Abound Energy. Beacon Power. Fisker. VPG. Pfff…I’m exhausted.”

INTERVIEWEE: “As I told you at the beginning, the energy business is tough!”
Continue reading “60 Minutes in Toilet Again. Is Fox in the Henhouse?”

Mixed bag here – overall positive news on the renewable front. Wind and solar energy pouring on to the German grid has lowered electrical prices, the pressure on coal fired power plants has lowered the price of coal, encouraging some to burn more of it – at the same time as coal-bound utilities sink into deeper trouble. Craig Morris has a good take below.
Remember – you’re going to hear constant bad-mouthing of the German experience with renewables – meanwhile they keep rolling along with a national budget surplus and 5 percent unemployment.  The problems that may arise will come, if anything, from failure of traditional business models to make way for the renewable tide – something we’d better get straight on this side of the pond, as well.
Video above discusses how renewables force negative electricity pricing in some areas.

Bloomberg – August 2013:

Germany, Europe’s biggest electricity market, is beating up its traditional utilities.

RWE AG (RWE) and EON SE are getting hurt by falling power prices and a shrinking market share this year. They’re set to report second-quarter earnings this week just as RBC Capital Markets said both may need to raise capital.

“Lower earnings for RWE and EON have knock-on implications for the balance sheet of both companies,” John Musk, an analyst at RBC Capital in London, said last week. “The market has yet to factor in the longer-term earnings impact of German power prices,” which have dropped about 27 percent in a year.
Continue reading “Germany: Rising Renewables, and Falling Electricity Prices”

While the midwest freezes with anomalous arctic cold, they’re nude sunbathing at Lake Tahoe, and the California drought continues.

Riverside Press Enterprise:

California marked 2013 as the driest calendar year in state history, with precipitation well below normal across much of the state. Riverside, for example, saw a mere 3.36 inches of rain in 2013, breaking the old record of 3.43 inches in 1961. Los Angeles saw 3.6 inches of rain last year, about half an inch less than the previous record. Many of the state’s reservoirs are less than half full, and well below historical averages, after two consecutive dry winters. More than 94 percent of California is in moderate drought or worse, according to the U.S. Drought Monitor, a collaboration of federal agencies and the University of Nebraska.

NPR:

For the third year in a row, rain and snowfall in the state have been extremely low. In a normal year, Los Angeles gets close to 15 inches of rain. In 2013, LA got about 3.5.

The U.S. Drought Monitor reports that almost 95 percent of California is enduring some level of drought. The California Department of Water Resources says much of the drought the state is experiencing can be attributed to climate change.
Continue reading “California’s Drought: No End in Sight, Water Supplies at Risk, Climate the Culprit”

Image above shows the general area where scientists were trapped last week in Antarctic Ice.

We’ve heard the Fox News version, that scientists trapped in the ice – in the world’s greatest concentration of ice – somehow proves there is no climate change.
In my interview with Glaciologist Mauri Pelto,  we discussed how global warming and glacier melt has actually made that particular area of Antarctica even more unpredictable and dangerous in recent years.

What I had not heard was the story of the Expedition’s guiding inspiration, Douglas Mawson.
Take a look at this, and imagine the courage of early scientific explorers.

Spirit of Mawson Expedition website:

In 1909, Douglas Mawson was 27 years old and already an Antarctic veteran. A trained geologist, he had effectively reached the area of the South Magnetic Pole as part of Sir Ernest Shackleton’s British Antarctic ‘Nimrod’ expedition. With several groups planning a return to Antarctica, Mawson resolved to raise the funds and lead his own team south. It was to be the most ambitious of all the Antarctic expeditions of 1912: three bases spread out along a near-unknown coastline. This was not a return to old ground; it was a complete scientific exploration of what many suspected to be an entirely new continent, lying in the ‘Australian quadrant.’ During the following year, Mawson somehow managed to raise the necessary funds; appoint a team of scientists, engineers, and ship’s crew; buy and provision a vessel; and obtain enough equipment and supplies to sustain a scientific expedition in the field for 14 months, backed up by the first wireless link to Australia.

In late 1911, the Australasian Antarctic Expedition headed south from the Tasmanian city of Hobart on board the steamship, the S.Y. Aurora. In spite of the unpredictable and often dangerous conditions, the teams were successfully set down on Macquarie Island and along the Antarctic coastline in three months. At Mawson’s Cape Denison base, the men had to erect their winter quarters particularly quickly; the place seemed to be a magnet for storms. During the winter darkness, scientific observations continued apace but in horrendous conditions; during one 12-hour period the wind had an average speed of 88 miles per hour, hurricane in strength. Mawson had established his base in the windiest place on the planet.

Continue reading “Spirit of Mawson – Historical Roots of the Trapped Antarctic Expedition”

In San Francisco last month for the American Geophysical Union, the very first interview that Jim Byrne and I conducted was with Stanton Glantz, Director of the Center for Tobacco Control Research and Education at UC San Francisco.
Dr. Glantz is a fountain of historical perspective on the role of tobacco companies in perfecting and promoting the anti-science agenda.

What climate wonks think about on their sundays off.

Greg Laden writes:

“In this picture, notice that it is not the case that super cold arctic air has expanded to engulf us in the  middle of the US.  When weather reporters are showing the map and discussing what is happening, they virtually (sometimes actually) say it this way, and the map seems to show it. But what this image of temperatures over a large part of the northern hemisphere shows is what is really happening.  The cold air in the “Arctic Vortex” which is normally centered on the north pole is offset, displaced, lopsided, etc.  It is not the case that “coldness” expands to include more territory … how would that work in a world that obeys physics? But rather, the cold region on the pole shifts and deforms.  So if you go north from the Twin Cities, for example, it gets colder and colder. But then, it gets warmer!”

WeatherNationTV blog:

This historic bout of arctic air is coming down from the North Pole as the polar vortex descends down into the lower 48.  The polar vortex is the pattern of winds around the North Pole, where all the arctic air is locked up usually.  A huge slab of the arctic air has been dislodged and the polar winds will drop down into the country, as far south at the Gulf of Mexico.

Wind chill warnings cover 5 whole states (North & South Dakota, Minnesota, Iowa, Wisconsin) and fan out into at least 6 other states from the Midwest to the Ohio River Valley.  The conditions will be very dangerous for anyone to be out more than a few minutes, as frostbite can kick in on anyone that isn’t wearing several layers.  Wind chill values will be ranging between -25° to -60° across the gray shaded area above!

By Monday,  the polar air shall dominate the Midwest, creating temperatures so cold, that it will be hazardous to your health to be outside more than a few minutes.  High temps will be around early on in the day in the Northeast, and then the storm system will cross the area, and temperatures will drop through the day.  The Florida Panhandle shall be around 25° colder than normal and it will feel, with some winds, into the 20s for highs!  Temperatures in Caribou, ME will be warmer than in New Orleans on Monday.

I had the pleasure of skyping with Dr. Mauri Pelto on Friday.
I was lucky enough to get invited along on part of Dr. Pelto’s glacier survey trip in 2012, on Easton Glacier in the northern Cascades, and he remains a frequent correspondent and resource for this series.
We talked about recent events, including the rescue of scientists in the Antarctic, recent extreme weather, and the California drought.

There’s more, that I may post later, several balls in play today.

Welcome to the rest of our lives.

Video of Extreme weather in UK

Washington Post:

TACLOBAN, Philippines — The typhoon that recently barreled through the Philippines has left in its wake one of the most profound resettlement crises in decades, with the number of newly homeless far exceeding the capacity of aid groups and the government to respond.
–

What’s noteworthy in the Philippines, though, is not where people are resettling, but rather the degree to which they are staying put. Across the disaster zone, some 90 percent are still living in the same plot they were occupying before the typhoon.

Even if survivors wanted to go elsewhere, they have few options. The typhoon-hit region has a dearth of formal evacuation shelters, and the first 1,000 government-built “bunkhouses” here don’t meet minimum international standards, according to aid workers.

Under ideal circumstances, the survivors would be rebuilding with new materials, not scraps, but help has been slow to arrive. Only 9 percent of those affected by the storm have received support for rebuilding, including nails, tarps and tents, according to the Shelter Cluster, a committee co-chaired by the United Nations’ refugee agency.

Philippine manufacturers have failed to keep up with demand for even the most basic materials, such as corrugated metal, and Manila has been slow to import the materials from elsewhere. Leyte Province, the area most directly hit by Haiyan, has so far received just 2 percent of the metal it needs for new roofs, Leyte Governor Dominic Petilla said in an interview.

Voice of Russia:

Dr Keiran Hickey, a climatologist at the National University of Ireland in Galway, said: “The big issue here is the number of weather extremes we’re seeing around the world, including in the UK and in Europe but also obviously in North America as well, and the  and that would fit nicely into the predictions for climate change and global warming in that we would see moseverity of these big weather events seems to be getting worsere climate disturbance, less so-called ‘normal’ weather and more extremes taking place.”

Dr Hickey said a pattern of extreme weather conditions can be identified in several places across the planet: “And Ireland is a good example of that because since November 2009, there hasn’t been a six-month period gone by without one significant weather extreme affecting the country and that’s unprecedented probably over the last 100 years.”

This year in Ireland a dry spell meant fodder for farm animals had to be imported for the first time in 50 years. Then a summer heat wave saw temperatures exceed 30 degrees Celsius for the first time in decades, only for December to bring heavy rain and flooding.
Continue reading “2014 Starts with Bang. Extreme Weather and Climate Change”

Full disclosure, I am a recovering Catholic school kid. You never get over it.
That said, I have to observe that Pope Francis is emerging as a church leader unlike any other we have seen since John the 23rd.
And, he’s saying some things that will have strong impacts on the world’s billion or so Catholics, many of them in the US, many of them members of the increasingly powerful and already very climate-conscious Hispanic community.
Therefore, worth being aware of, believer or not.

A sampling of the Pope’s climate-centric comments:

We human beings are not only the beneficiaries but also the stewards of other creatures. Thanks to our bodies, God has joined us so closely to the world around us that we can feel the desertification of the soil almost as a physical ailment, and the extinction of a species as a painful disfigurement. Let us not leave in our wake a swatch of destruction and death which will affect our own lives and those of future generations.

The culture of selfishness and individualism that often prevails in our society is not, I repeat, not what builds up and leads to a more habitable world: rather, it is the culture of solidarity that does so; the culture of solidarity means seeing others not as rivals or statistics, but brothers and sisters. And we are all brothers and sisters!

Please, I would like to ask all those who have positions of responsibility in economic, political and social life, and all men and women of goodwill: let us be “protectors” of creation, protectors of God’s plan inscribed in nature, protectors of one another and of the environment.

People occasionally forgive, but nature never does. If we don’t take care of the environment, there’s no way of getting around it.

Riverside Press Enterprise:

A 2011 report by the Pontifical Academy of Sciences warned of the devastating future impacts of climate change and called on nations to act. That follows a 2001 report by U.S. bishops calling for action on climate change.

Other faiths also are working to combat climate change. More than 300 evangelical leaders, including the Rev. Leith Anderson, president of the National Association of Evangelicals, and the Rev. Rick Warren, the Orange County pastor who wrote the best-selling “Purpose-Driven Life,” have signed a statement on climate change. The Episcopal Church and the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America endorsed a joint statement on the issue in May. Buddhists, Jews and Muslims have formed groups to combat climate change.