A research team led by Son Nghiem of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., used satellite data to measure the surface temperature of the waters discharging from a Canadian river into the icy Beaufort Sea during the summer of 2012. They observed a sudden influx of warm river waters into the sea that rapidly warmed the surface layers of the ocean, enhancing the melting of sea ice. A paper describing the study is now published online in the journal Geophysical Research Letters.
This Arctic process contrasts starkly with those that occur in Antarctica, a frozen continent without any large rivers. The sea ice cover in the Southern Ocean surrounding Antarctica has been relatively stable, while Arctic sea ice has been declining rapidly over the past decade.
“River discharge is a key factor contributing to the high sensitivity of Arctic sea ice to climate change,” said Nghiem. “We found that rivers are effective conveyers of heat across immense watersheds in the Northern Hemisphere. These watersheds undergo continental warming in summertime, unleashing an enormous amount of energy into the Arctic Ocean, and enhancing sea ice melt. You don’t have this in Antarctica.”
Meanwhile, the ice sets up for melt season from a very low starting point.
The team said the impacts of these warm river waters are increasing due to three factors. First, the overall volume of water discharged from rivers into the Arctic Ocean has increased. Second, rivers are getting warmer as their watersheds (drainage basins) heat up. And third, Arctic sea ice cover is becoming thinner and more fragmented, making it more vulnerable to rapid melt. In addition, as river heating contributes to earlier and greater loss of the Arctic’s reflective sea ice cover in summer, the amount of solar heat absorbed into the ocean increases, causing even more sea ice to melt.
“As a son of Arizona, I know we have no greater resource than the 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 America. 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.”
Our Co-Chairman Tom Morrissey
“Conservatives who support school choice and healthcare choice should join me in supporting energy choice. As conservatives, we are morally obligated to fight new tax proposals. Monopoly utilities request to end net metering amounts to a tax on solar savings. It also seeks to line the pockets of a regulated monopoly through government intervention. I am proud to join Barry Goldwater Jr. in leading the charge towards more energy competition and private investment.”
(SCOTTSDALE, Ariz.) After failing to convince the Arizona Corporation Commission to impose a $50 a month surcharge on rooftop solar customers, the empire is trying to strike back.
Arizona Public Service is working to convince Arizona lawmakers to make permanent a new property tax on solar customers who lease their systems. Approximately 80% of homeowners in Arizona lease their solar systems. If allowed, this tax would make it more difficult for home and business owners to save money by installing solar and it would undermine the state’s solar industry which is currently the only competition that the state’s energy monopolies have. Despite spending millions of dollars and funneling money through shady front groups to promote their proposed $50-$100 per month solar surcharge, APS’ efforts exploded like the Death Star. But that’s not stopping them from trying again. A lobbyist with close ties to APS is pushing the passage of HB2595 which codifies a bizarre change in Arizona taxation laws that imposes a property tax only on customers who lease their solar systems.
And while APS continues to deny ties to attempts to make the tax permanent, it should be noted that last year APS denied claims that it was involved in third-party anti-solar campaigns. Those claims turned out not to be true by APS’ own admission. So can we really trust the claims that they’re making now about not trying to undermine the solar industry yet again? Continue reading “Grass Roots Conservatives Battle Solar Tax in AZ”
THOMPSONVILLE (WWJ) – It’s been a crazy past few winters at Crystal Mountain Resort & Spa.
Jim MacInnes, president and CEO of the Benzie County ski area, golf course and conference complex, said that this winter, there’s been plenty of natural snow — an astounding 245 inches, more than 20 feet.
But just two years ago, he noted, it got up to 82 degrees in March, killing off the ski season (not to mention northern Michigan’s fruit crops when they budded early and died when temperatures fell to below 20 degrees in May).
Friday, MacInnes appeared with Brenda Archambo of the National Wildlife Federation, Eric Keller of Clean Water Action, and representatives of the Michigan Land Use Institute to talk over the effects of climate change on Michigan’s tourism industry.
“Obviously, it’s made our business more difficult,” MacInnes said. “I look at climate as rolling dice — you never know what numbers are going to come up. This year it’s come up very nicely for us in the Midwest. But out West ,it hasn’t been so nice. Some ski areas took a long time to open, others never opened at all.”
What appears to be happening, speakers said, is that a warming North Pole is reducing the power that drives the jet stream around the earth. “So because there’s less power it stalls and meanders,” MacInnes said. “And you never know where it’s going to stall or meander. It could stall someplace that leaves you really cold, or someplace that leaves you really warm. So we have less certainty and wider weather swings.” Continue reading “Climate Change Tough on Michigan Ski Towns”
The winter ice pack in the Arctic was once dominated by multi-year*, thick ice. Today, very little old ice remains. This animation shows maps of sea ice age from 1987 through the end of October 2013. Age class 1 means “first-year ice,” which is ice that formed in the most recent winter. The oldest ice (9+) is ice that is more than 9 years old. Animation by NOAA climate.gov, based on research data provided by Mark Tschudi, CCAR, University of Colorado.
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While arctic sea ice extent has declined some 40 percent since the Satellite record began in 1979, even more dramatic has been the loss of ice thickness, or mass. Some 75 percent of ice mass has disappeared in just a few decades.
The animation above is the latest update, showing how dramatically the thick “perrennial ice”, colored lighter in this display, has been disappearing over recent decades.
Now, the US Navy has released an updated plan for arctic operations based on the accelerated disappearance of Arctic sea ice.
Shifting to greater use of wind and solar power will bring “some amount of strife for the existing utilities, especially for those invested more heavily in fossil fuels,” Musk, who is also chairman of solar-power company SolarCity Corp. (SCTY:US), said yesterday at a California Public Utilities Commission event in San Francisco.
Along with cheaper batteries to drive down the cost of Tesla’s Model S electric sedan, now priced from $71,000, the company is designing stationary battery packs “that last long, are super safe and are compact,” Musk said.
“We do want to make sure we have battery production capacity at a compelling price to offer a large-scale use of stationary storage,” Musk said. “Hopefully, we’ll have that plant up and running in about three years.”
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The South African-born Musk, 42, and his cousin, SolarCity CEO Lyndon Rive, spoke at the commission as part of its “Thought Leaders” series. The agency regulates power companies in California.
U.S. electricity sales peaked in 2007 and have been declining modestly since then. Sales in 2012 were 1.9% lower than 2007 sales, and sales in the first ten months of 2013 are below the same period in 2012. While the economic recession is an obvious explanation for the decline in sales in 2008 and 2009, it is much less clear why sales have continued to decline since then, even as the economy began to recover. While some observers have attributed this stalled growth to the ongoing effects of the “Great Recession,” other observers suggest other factors may have played a role, such as erosion of manufacturing, more efficient buildings, lighting and appliances and increased use of on-site generation.
ACEEE has just completed an analysis on electricity-use trends since 1993 and we looked at changes in sales over the 2007-2012 period in particular. We found that no single factor can explain the change in electricity use over the 1993-2012 period. The factors that appear most significant were energy efficiency programs and policies, warmer weather, changes in gross domestic product (GDP), changes in electricity prices, and long-term trends.
Over the more recent period of 2007-2012, savings resulting from energy efficiency programs and policies, and from warmer winter weather, appear to be the most important contributors to declining electricity use in the residential and commercial sectors. This finding is consistent with the ramp-up of energy efficiency savings achieved from utility-sector energy efficiency programs, and from appliance and equipment efficiency standards that have taken effect since 2007. The other possible factors that we considered, such as GDP and electricity prices, did not change very much over the last six years and therefore do not appear to have had a significant effect on the recent decline in electricity use. The factors contributing to the decline in electricity use in the industrial sector are less clear but may include energy efficiency programs and policies as well.
For years, low-cost solar-plus-battery systems were seen as a distant possibility at best, a fringe technology not likely to be a threat to mainstream electricity delivery any time soon. By far, the limiting factor has been battery costs. But thanks to a confluence of factors playing out across the energy industry, the reality is that affordable battery storage is coming much sooner than most people realize. That approaching day of cheaper battery storage, when combined with solar PV, has the potential to fundamentally alter the electricity landscape.
Today more than 1,000 youth from across the country marched to the White House from Georgetown University—where President Obama laid out his “climate test”—to protest the Keystone XL pipeline. Once at the White House, hundreds of youth were arrested while participating in a nonviolent civil disobedience sit-in. This protest was the largest youth act of civil disobedience at the White House in a generation.
As the fight over the Keystone XL tar sands pipeline seems be accelerating towards a final decision, protestors have turned up the heat on President Obama to reject the project as this major, youth-led protest, XL Dissent, took over the White House.
The “Warm Arctic – Cold Continents” paradox in full display this winter, as brutal arctic air bulges down over North America and Central Asia, but the Arctic is anomalously warm, with the lowest sea ice extent for February/early March in the satellite record.
Large areas of open water between Iceland and Greenland that have formerly been ice covered, as well as in the Barents Sea.
I’ll be communicating with an expert currently moving to a location in the Arctic.
Drought and Global Climate Change: An Analysis of Statements by Roger Pielke Jr
John P. Holdren, 28 February 2014
Introduction
In the question and answer period following my February 25 testimony on the Administration’s Climate Action Plan before the Oversight Subcommittee of the U.S. Senate’s Committee on Environment and Public Works, Senator Jeff Sessions (R-AL) suggested that I had misled the American people with comments I made to reporters on February 13, linking recent severe droughts in the American West to global climate change. To support this proposition, Senator Sessions quoted from testimony before the Environment and Public Works Committee the previous July by Dr. Roger Pielke, Jr., a University of Colorado political scientist. Specifically, the Senator read the following passages from Dr. Pielke’s written testimony:
It is misleading, and just plain incorrect, to claim that disasters associated with hurricanes, tornadoes, floods or droughts have increased on climate timescales either in the United States or globally.
Drought has “for the most part, become shorter, less, frequent, and cover a smaller portion of the U.S. over the last century”. Globally, “there has been little change in drought over the past 60 years.”
Footnotes in the testimony attribute the two statements in quotation marks within the second passage to the US Climate Change Science Program’s 2008 report on extremes in North America and a 2012 paper by Sheffield et al . in the journal Nature, respectively.
I replied that the indicated comments by Dr. Pielke, and similar ones attributed by Senator Sessions to Dr. Roy Spencer of the University of Alabama, were not representative of main- stream views on this topic in the climate-science community; and I promised to provide for the record a more complete response with relevant scientific references.
Dr. Pielke also commented directly, in a number of tweets on February 14 and thereafter, on my February 13 statements to reporters about the California drought, and he elaborated on the tweets for a blog post on The Daily Caller site (also on February 14). In what follows, I will address the relevant statements in those venues, as well. He argued there, specifically, that my statements on drought “directly contradicted scientific reports”, and in support of that assertion, he offered the same statements from his July testimony that were quoted by Senator Sessions (see above). He also added this:
The United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change found that there is “not enough evidence at present to suggest more than low confidence in a global-scale observed trend in drought.”
In the rest of this response, I will show, first, that the indicated quote from the US Climate Change Science Program (CCSP) about U.S. droughts is missing a crucial adjacent sentence in the CCSP report, which supports my position about drought in the American West. I will also show that Dr. Pielke’s statements about global drought trends, while irrelevant to my comments about drought in California and the Colorado River Basin, are seriously misleading, as well, concerning what is actually in the UN Panel’s latest report and what is in the current scientific literature.
I spoke last fall at the Local Futures conference in Northern Michigan, and organizer Aaron Wissner clipped and uploaded a portion of my talk – where I mentioned the current discussion about climate, jet stream behavior, and arctic sea ice.
I think it’s good, and accurate, but I would probably restate when I said “everybody agrees there is something wrong with the jet stream, and there is an emerging agreement that it has to do with the loss of arctic ice”. Dr. Kevin Trenberth would pillory me for that one – I went too far.
What I should have said was, there is general agreement that we are in “a new normal”, some of that is manifesting in extreme weather events, – many of which are related to atypical jet stream behavior, but there are differing views as to primary drivers of that change. Below, Dr. Francis and Dr. Jeff Masters describe the basics of the “weather whiplash” idea.
In the last few weeks, this debate has moved out from the hallways at scientific conferences, into a mass media stage. I’m somewhat – well, actually quite a bit – proud, that I presented the first online discussion between two of the major players, Dr. Jennifer Francis, and Dr. Kevin Trenberth, almost a year ago in the “This is Not Cool” video series, before it rose to media kerfuffle status.
Our Co-Chairman Tom Morrissey
