Month: March 2014

I’ve posted on how a number of large companies are beginning to face reality and prepare for a carbon constrained future, with internal carbon pricing. These include Walt Disney, Walmart, and even oil companies like Shell and Exxon.

Despite the efforts of the climate denial machine, science and facts on the ground eventually win out, especially when investor’s money is at stake.  Since Bill Mckibben’s widely cited “Do the Math” piece in  in Rolling Stone, there has been an increasing awareness that a good deal of fossil fuels still in the ground, in particular the “exotic”, hard to get at tar sands, and oil and gas shales, will have to be left in the ground. This is the “Carbon Bubble” – corporate assets that, if used, will destroy the planetary life support system.

See Jim Hansen addressing that in recent testimony elsewhere on this page. Above, quick powerpoint lecture to bring you up to steam. Here, see Exxon CEO Rex Tillerson’s 2012 acknowledgement of the reality of human caused climate change, and the need to “adapt”.

Now a movement of shareholders has pushed Exxon Mobil to begin cataloging its exposure to carbon bubble risks.

Bloomberg:

Exxon Mobil Corp. has agreed to publish a report describing its plans for a future in which market forces and stricter climate regulation may leave some of its carbon reserves unburnable.

Exxon Mobil is the first oil and gas producer in the U.S. to commit to reporting on its risks of stranded assets due to climate change.

The commitment came in response to a shareholder resolution filed in the fall of 2013 by wealth management firm Arjuna Capital and shareholder advocacy group As You Sow. The resolution was withdrawn after months of negotiations with Exxon Mobil.

Investors have increasingly raised concerns that stranded assets, also known as a “carbon bubble,” could occur if fossil fuel reserves are suddenly revalued under future government policies for climate change or greenhouse gas emissions.

In its report, Exxon Mobil will let shareholders know what types of reserves it holds—from deep sea drilling, tar sands or elsewhere—so that “investors have a better idea of where the risks lie and how well the company can withstand those risks,” Danielle Fugere, As You Sow’s president, told Bloomberg BNA.

“That kind of differentiation is important to shareholders as they decide which company to invest in,” Fugere said.

The report will also discuss how climate risks could affect Exxon Mobil’s capital expenditure plans. The report will be posted on Exxon Mobil’s website by the end of March.

Continue reading “Huge: Exxon Will Advise Investors on Carbon Bubble Exposure”

If you’ve paid attention to the right side gutter of this blog in recent years, you’ve seen a graphic for the Climate Science Legal Defense Fund.
Incredible that we need this in 2014, but there it is.  The critical role here is not so much the high profile big name scientists that you’ve all heard of, but rather to provide a support system for younger, less well known scientists and grad students who may be intimidated by the Climate Denial Machine, and even turn away from needed research.
The good news? They have tee shirts.

Climate Science Legal Defense Fund Needs Your Help!

The Climate Science Legal Defense Fund (CSLDF) was launched in January 2012 by Scott Mandia and Joshua Wolfe to provide valuable legal resources to our climate scientists who are in need. CSLDF needs your help.

CSLDF needs to raise $80,000. The great news is that philanthropist Charles Zeller has graciously offered to MATCH the first $40,000 that is raised and philanthropist Peter Cross has offered to put up the first $10,000. This means CSLDF already has the first $20,000 of the $80,000 goal. We need YOU to help CSLDF reach its goal.

For the previous two years, CSLDF has been managed by Scott and Josh  “from their kitchens” They both have full-time jobs and families with small children and neither receives compensation for their time. Scott and Josh have accomplished much over the years on a part-time basis. To date, CSLDF has:

• Raised litigation fees to help Dr. Michael Mann defend climate science from politically-motivated witch-hunts.
• Provided resources to legal experts from PEER so they could offer free legal advice to scientists at professional conferences.
• Offered legal counsel to scientists hit with frivolous Freedom of Information Act requests.
• Provided legal workshops to scientists at professional conferences.
• Offered a series of legal education webinars partnering with American Geophysical Union (AGU).

But now it is time to “go professional” and that is where you can help. $80,000 can move the organization to this next level. CSLDF will use your tax-deductible donations to hire a full-time Executive Director who will manage the day to day operations of providing legal help to our experts as well as increasing fundraising efforts. Having the full-time professional helps to assure that CSLDF will be there for our scientists years down the road. After all, climate change is not going anywhere and the sad fact is that neither will the legal attacks on our scientists.

Continue reading “Climate Science Needs a Defender: CSLDF is that Organization”

Green Buildings which use 70 to 80 percent less energy than normal construction, or are even “net energy positive”, producing more than they use – are part of a 100 billion dollar global industry, expected to double in the next 5 years.

CitiesofTomorrow:

Equipped with their own energy sources alongside the city’s green energy networks (biomass and others), new buildings will be positive-energy they will be micro-producers of renewable energy. They will cover their own needs and, thanks to their connection to smart grids, will be able to adapt their consumption to the energy available and sell part of their production to electricity operators (“load shedding”).

• Tailwind for wind turbines
  Individual wind turbines will be a major source of energy. And although they are less efficient than their conventional counterparts, spiral wind turbines have the benefit of requiring little wind to operate and can make more effective use of fluctuating urban air flow.

• Photovoltaic panels will provide another important source of energy, with use varying by kWh price and country.
  Quite a number of technologies are commercially available: polycrystalline silicon, monocrystalline silicon, amorphous silicon, CIS (cesium, indium, selenium), CIGS, CdTe, etc. in many forms (rigid modules, flexible film, glazing, tiles, etc.). Solar panels can be attached to roofs and facades, and to supports that follow the course of the sun, etc. From one system to another, and depending on weather conditions, the number of kWh produced varies considerably. Solar cells will even be built directly into the windows of buildings…

• Thermal panels will be used to produce hot water. This technology involves making water flow through a tube array. This is a worthwhile contribution since demand for hot water, which represents on average 15 to 20% of a home’s consumption of energy, is hard to compress, whereas with good insulation and latest-generation boilers it is possible to reduce the amount of energy required for heating.

• Thermal panels can also be used to produce cold by coupling them with an absorption system.

• Shallow geothermal energy.

  Where the subsoil lends itself, buildings can also use shallow geothermal energy for heating and cooling: water injected into the subsoil (sometimes mixed) can recover heat from deep hot rocks. Shallow, low-temperature geothermal power harnesses the heat in the subsoil. Below 4.50 meters, the ground temperature is constant year-round, on average 12°C depending on the latitude and geothermal flows.

Continue reading “Green Building Takes Off”

Senate Foreign Relations Committee testimony, March 14, 2014.

Description:

Shane Smith embarks on an expedition to investigate why Greenland is melting, and how the resulting sea level rise will mean devastation sooner than expected. This is his Debrief from Season 2 Episode 2 of VICE on HBO.

Vice Media’s Shane Smith spent some time with Dr. Jason Box in Greenland last summer, not long after the Dark Snow trip.  The report is being broadcast tonight, apparently.

I don’t have HBO, so hope someone will let me know if it’s any good.

The GOP, which has lately, according to its own internal polling and focus groups, been identified by young people as not just anti-science, but stodgy, old-fashioned, homophobic, and racist – responds with a series of ads that are some 60 year old country clubber white guy’s idea of something the kids will really like.

I’ll admit, they did find an actor who would look right at home in a Competitive Enterprise Institute basement cubicle – see above, and immediately below – then read on.

Talking Points Memo:

On Friday “Daily Show” alumnus John Oliver teased his new HBO show, “Last Week Tonight,” by posting a clip to YouTube mocking new ads released by the Republican National Committee ostensibly aimed at younger voters.

The ads, featuring a scruffy twenty-something Scott Greenberg complaining about the price of gas and unemployment—brought on by pesky big government regulations—were largely panned by multiple outlets when they dropped this week.

Continue reading “GOP Goes Urban Cool with Cracked Pro-Big-Oil “Millennial” Ads. Hilarity Ensues.”

If you’re a climate change delayer/downplayer, and you’ve got a new high profile job, and every one from Krugman to Wonkette for eff’s sake is questioning your cred, you may have a problem with your cred.

For those that don’t follow the inside-baseball of the climate media game, a little update.

Stats guru Nate Silver, whose predictions for the last couple of elections have turned him into a data-driven diva for the political set, has launched a blog, (which I’ll decline to link) ostensibly to bring some kind of mathematical rigor to the news biz.  So he hires, as his climate science guy, Roger Pielke Jr – the non-climate-scientist-that poses as the climate expert that climate deniers love (as evidenced by his recent turn in the storied Lord Monckton chair of cracked and dodgy congressional testimony)

As I recently posted, Pielke has a penchant for headlining the Fox-worthy sound bite while burying the sciencey qualifiers in the footnotes.

TheWeek:

..FiveThirtyEight‘s science coverage stinks of sublimated ideology. The opening science pieces were pretty bad, but far more telling was Silver’s hiring of climate troll Roger Pielke Jr.

For those who don’t know, Pielke is a highly skilled and intelligent policy professor, ostensibly committed to climate action, who spends the vast bulk of his time criticizing the climate movement and allied scientists. They’re wrong about drought. They’re wrong about extreme weather. They’rewrong about economic growth. Etc.

He does accept the reality of climate change, and keeps his criticism just inside the boundaries of accepted science (e.g., with strategic footnotes). So when he gets an irritated response from, say,President Obama’s science adviser John Holdren, who accused him of selective quotation and obfuscation, Pielke can twist the criticism around and write a stern, head-shaking article about how those darned Greens are just getting way over their skis on The Science. This is the Breakthrough Institute program for hippie-punching your way to fame and fortune, and its success on the career track is almost as striking as its wretched failure as a political tactic to actually achieve anything on climate change.

That kind of squid-ink careerist nonsense is what led Foreign Policy to put Pielke on its list of climate skeptics. It’s what led the late, famed climatologist Stephen Schneider to dismiss him as a“self-aggrandizer who sets up straw men, knocks them down, and takes credit for being the honest broker to explain the mess.” Pretty much.

Continue reading “Denier Darling’s New Job Off to Rocky Start”

Stealing data, hacking servers, dressing up as “computer technicians” to infiltrate scientific institutions, threatening scientists with death, and intimidation of scientific journals through internet trolling and threats of legal action.  All in a days work for the anti-science movement.
Quick – is this 2014 or 1420?

Anyone that’s been on the receiving end of intimidation and threats knows how dangerous the thought control machinery of right wing media has become.

Psychologist Dr. Stephen Lewandowski walks us through the intimidation and censorship tactics of the denial industry:

The evidence for global warming is overwhelming. The U.S. National Academy of Sciences stated as “fact” that the globe is warming from human economic activity. This overwhelming scientific consensus is, however, vociferously opposed by a vocal minority of actors. Who are those people and by what means do they oppose mainstream science?

“In whose hands the future” is a video by a cognitive scientist who studies the denial of science and who has himself been attacked for his work. The video takes viewers on a personal and scientific journey into the murky world of climate denial and the blogs that serve as staging ground for attacks on climate scientists and other scholars and public intellectuals in the climate arena.

The video analyzes the public aspect of the attacks on scientists and presents evidence that the blogosphere’s discourse differs considerably from conventional scholarly discourse. Instead of providing scholarly critique, the discourse in the blogosphere fits many criteria for conspiratorial thinking. The video also reports some of the less visible, subterranean means of attack, such as the attempted intimidation of journal editors and publishers by parties external to the scientific process.

The material in the video suggests that the public’s right to being informed about a critical issue is being violated by a small number of agitators.  There is also some reason to believe that scientists themselves may be unduly cautious in their public statements because of the anticipated harassment from political operators and their allies in the blogosphere.

 

Engadget:

Data.gov is getting a whole lot greener thanks to its new section dedicated to climate information. The new channel is the product of President Obama’s Climate Data Initiative (PDF), and pulls information that can help predict the effects of climate change and prevent any damage that may result. The raw data comes from the likes of the Department of Defense, NASA and the US Geological Society, but probably isn’t easy to grok for the average person. To help with that, Google and Microsoft have stepped in. Mountain View is donating 50 million hours of its Earth Engine’s computing power — the Global Forest Watch’s backbone — and is partnering with academics in the western US to produce a near real-time drought map and monitoring system.

Redmond, on the other hand, has developed a tool (dubbed FetchClimate) that can both recall historical climate data and forecast future weather trends based on the stockpiles of information stored in Microsoft’s Azure back-end. For example, the software giant says that this could allow state planners to predict extreme rainfall, preventing flood damage to infrastructure and transit lines as a result. These are still early days for the Initiative, but, as times goes on, more applications using its wealth of info will surely surface. For now, though, it’s nice to see tech companies exploit government data instead of the other way around.

NYTimes:

WASHINGTON — President Obama wants Americans to see how climate change could deluge or destroy their own backyards — and to make it as easy as opening a web-based app.

As part of an effort to make the public see global warming as a tangible and immediate problem, the White House on Wednesday inaugurated a website, climate.data.gov, aimed at turning scientific data about projected droughts and wildfires and the rise in sea levels into eye-catching digital presentations that can be mapped using simple software apps.

The project is the brainchild of Mr. Obama’s counselor, John D. Podesta, and the White House science adviser, John P. Holdren.

Continue reading “Cloud Feedbacks: Microsoft and Google Track Climate with Big Data”