Month: July 2014

John Oliver is being recognized as one of the UK’s most valuable exports.

“WTF”  was a pretty typical reaction to video of a newly discovered physical feature on Siberia’s Yamal peninsula last week.

A lot of speculation about the crater-like formation has been around the possibility of methane gas release from thawing permafrost.
The video above is the first close-up I’ve seen. Russian speakers weigh in.

Siberian Times:

The crater on the Yamal Peninsula was caused by aliens, a meteorite, a stray missile, or an explosive gas cocktail released due to global warming, according to various theories in recent days.

Images of the remarkable phenomenon have gone round the world since The Siberian Times highlighted helicopter images of the giant hole earlier this week.

The first expedition to the scene – the scientists have just returned – took these epic pictures of the hole, including the darkening pattern on the inner rim.

Now they are using Russian satellite pictures to fix the moment when it suddenly formed.

They found the crater – around up to 70 metres deep – has an icy lake at its bottom, and water is cascading down its eroding permafrost walls.

It is not as wide as aerial estimates which suggested between 50 and 100 metres.

Continue reading “Siberian Mystery Hole Investigation Begins”

Science writer Mason Inman is crowd sourcing The Frack Lab, to help underwrite his reporting on Fracking and exotic fossil fuel production, such as this example.

Mason Inman in Scientific American:

Shale gas now accounts for half of all U.S. production, according to EIA statistics—a milestone that many studies expected wouldn’t be reached until the mid-2020s or later. “Assuming that technology will allow ever more shale gas production at low prices—and betting energy policy and the future energy security of the country on it—is risky business,” says geologist David Hughes, who retired from the Canadian Geological Survey and is now doing assessments of shale gas and oil for the nonprofit Post Carbon Institute, a California-based environmental think tank.

The EPA’s proposal for cutting power plants’ greenhouse gas emissions through 2030 is based partly on the expectation that natural gas will play a crucial role, especially during the next five to 10 years. The agency laid out various scenarios under which states might meet targets for cutting their emissions. Overall, all the scenarios foresee an increased reliance on natural gas; the EPA calls for switching over coal-fired power plants to burn natural gas and for more use of existing natural gas plants that are idle.

With the increased reliance on natural gas, the agency’s lower-emission scenarios foresee U.S. natural gas production continuing to rise, increasing nearly 15 percent by 2020. Meanwhile, natural gas prices would rise only about 50 cents over what they otherwise would be, to about $5.50 rather than $5 per thousand cubic feet.

Further, there are hopes for relatively low-cost natural gas to revive U.S. industries—from steel to plastics—that could take advantage of current prices, which by world standards are cheap.

At the same time, there is a hope that the U.S. will be able to export large amounts of natural gas. The EIA expects the nation to be a net importer for a few more years but then for net exports to soar through the 2020s, reaching about 10 percent of the nation’s production. “Certainly a couple of years back, before the Marcellus Shale added so much low-cost resource…we would have worried about the upward price pressure associated with adding that amount of new market in the gas space,” says Jen Snyder, a gas analyst with the research and consulting firm Wood Mackenzie. Now, Snyder says, Wood Mackenzie’s outlook is that “the resource base can handle the added demand, even with proposed LNG [liquid natural gas] export facilities, even with planned gas-intensive industrial projects.”

 

Continue reading “Fracking: How Long Can the Boom Last?”

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NASA:

Now in its third year, the drought in California grows worse with each month. 2013 was the driest calendar year in 119 years of records, and 2014 has not brought much relief, even as scientists and residents wait hopefully forEl Niño moisture. From stream gauges and reservoir levels to ground-based photos and satellite images, the landscape seems to grow browner and drier with each month.

In a weekly report issued on July 17 by the U.S. Drought Monitor, the entire state of California was classified as being in severe drought. The situation was declared extreme for 79 percent of the state’s land area and exceptional in 36 percent. For more information on drought classification levels, read this.

The pair of images above from the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) on NASA’s Aqua satellite captures a wide view of the situation. The top image was acquired on June 25, 2014; the lower image shows the landscape on July 2, 2011, just as the latest dry period began. Turn on the image comparison tool to see the changes.

Near the Pacific coast, some mountain forests are holding on, but much of area around the Coast Range has browned considerably. The green farmlands visible in the state’s Central Valley in 2011 are much less robust in 2014, with some lands dried out and many fields left fallow for lack of water. Just north of Yosemite National Park, the land is not only brown from drought; it is also scarred from the Rim Fire and other blazes in 2013.

In the Sierra Nevada, the snow cover has decreased significantly, and what remains has a tan or gray tint from dust and soil. On April 1, 2014, California Department of Water Resources noted that snow-water content was just 32 percent of the historical average at a time when snow cover is usually at its yearly peak. By May 1, snow-water content was 18 percent of normal.

This browning of California has been underway for quite some time, with precipitation averaging just 67 percent of normal over the past three years. According to the U.S. Drought Monitor and the National Climatic Data Center,the July 2013 to June 2014 period has been the warmest on record for the state and the third driest since 1895. Precipitation in the current water year (which started October 1, 2013) is just 56 percent of normal, and since May through September are typically dry even in normal years, drought relief is not likely any time soon.

“Eleven of the past fifteen years have been drier than normal, with the past three years delivering about 45 percent of normal rain and snowpack in Southern California,” noted Bill Patzert, a climatologist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. “This follows two of the wettest decades in California’s history—the 1980s and 1990s—when population more than doubled and the economy of the state exploded. So that makes this drought more punishing than those in the past.”

I’ve got a week to review and upgrade my video kit next week’s jump to Greenland, so I spent some welcome time outside over the weekend playing with video cameras and time lapse sequences.

Here are some raw results, which are pretty interesting in themselves, showing rolling clouds of moisture as my local corner of the upper midwest slipped out of a cool snap, and into a warm, humid regime normal for July.

A reader shares this very cool video.

Description:

WindStream Technologies, a publicly traded company (WSTI), is proud to introduce the world’s largest hybrid renewable energy project. It was recently commissioned on the rooftop of the prominent law firm, Myers, Fletcher, & Gordon (MFG) in Kingston, Jamaica. This installation is less than a quarter mile from the Kingston coastline and can typically experience winds gusting as high as 60mph. This grid-tied SolarMill solution not only safely generates energy, but also protects against surges from extreme conditions. This installation will generate approximately 106,000kWh annually for the firm. It has a return on investment of less than four years and will save the firm approximately $2 million dollars over the course of its 25-year lifetime. Comprised of 50 SolarMills, this is the largest hybrid, solar and wind, installation in the world!

Great graphics to describe why renewables are inevitable, and taking over now.

From Amory Lovins and the Rocky Mountain Institute.

Jonathan Mann is a Brooklyn resident who writes a song, every day, apparently, and posts to Youtube.

The guy is pretty good. You can encourage him here.

There’s an angry and confused time traveler
Wondering why things had to be the way they were
He’s making observations
He’s writing down notes
And we’re all indicted
In the book he wrote
Called “We’re All Just Apes I Guess, In The End”

John Abraham in The Guardian:

As I sit here in a northern part of the United States (Minnesota), a rare summer arctic blast barrels down from Canada on what otherwise is one of the warmest days of the year. Global warming? I could use some global warming today, people are saying.

Not only is this a teachable moment, but it coincides with a major new study on climate connections. First, let’s see the current jet stream. It is wildly undulating, first swinging up into northern Canada before curving back and plunging into the central United States.

Typically, the jet stream represents a separation between cold arctic air and warmer southern air. If you are north of the jet stream, temperatures are cold whereas south of the jet stream it’s more likely to be warm.

With this in mind, and the jet stream shown, you can almost predict the temperature pattern in the next image. The match is incredible and it is clear that my Minnesota cold-blast is more than balanced out by near 90°F temperatures in northern Canada. With all of this, I want to talk about a new study that looks at these fluctuations on a longer term.

Very recently, a paper Amplified mid-latitude planetary waves favor particular regional weather extremes was published in the journal Nature Climate Change. The authors, James Screen and Ian Simmonds, investigated the role that changes to upper level winds in the atmosphere have on the occurrence of extreme weather. What they found was very interesting.

The authors don’t ask the question “are humans changing the jet stream patterns?”. Instead, they ask, “how do undulations in the jet stream affect weather?”. To be fully accurate, the study isn’t just about jet streams, it really deals with mid-latitude planetary waves but for this article, I will use the term “jet stream” as a surrogate for simplicity.

The authors went back into our weather records (1979–2012) and found the 40 months with the most extreme weather (most extreme precipitation and most extreme temperatures). They then evaluated how “wavy” the jet stream was during those extreme months. They found that,

months of extreme weather over mid-latitudes are commonly accompanied by significantly amplified quasi-stationary mid-tropospheric planetary waves. Conversely, months of near average weather over mid-latitudes are often accompanied by significantly attenuated waves.

In common parlance, this means that when the jet stream undulates and travels very slowly, we see more extreme weather. Conversely, when the jet stream travels in a straighter path, the weather is less extreme.

Joe Romm in ClimateProgress:

“We’ve got this cool air coming down over the eastern half of the country, and that’s gonna just be kind of nice,” said Jennifer Francis, an atmospheric scientist and research professor at Rutgers University’s Institute of Marine and Coastal Sciences. “But along the east coast, we’re looking at storms and floods. On the west coast, we’re looking at heat and fires. And it’s all part of this jet stream pattern.”

Continue reading “Vortex Spins up Wayward Jetsteam Discussion Again”

More from Rocky Mountain Institute on the Solar juggernaut.  A tech revolution moving faster than cell phones.