Month: July 2014

Guardian:

When American geologist Ulyana Horodyskyj set up a mini weather station at 5,800m on Mount Himlung, on the Nepal-Tibet border, she looked east towards Everest and was shocked. The world’s highest glacier, Khumbu, was turning visibly darker as particles of fine dust, blown by fierce winds, settled on the bright, fresh snow. “One-week-old snow was turning black and brown before my eyes,” she said.

The problem was even worse on the nearby Ngozumpa glacier, which snakes down from Cho Oyu – the world’s sixth highest mountain. There, Horodyskyj found that so much dust had been blown on to the surface that the ability of the ice to reflect sunlight, a process known as albedo, dropped 20% in a single month. The dust that was darkening the brilliant whiteness of the snow was heating up in the strong sun and melting the snow and ice, she said.

The phenomenon of “dark snow” is being recorded from the Himalayas to the Arctic as increasing amounts of dust from bare soil, soot from fires and ultra-fine particles of “black carbon” from industry and diesel engines are being whipped up and deposited sometimes thousands of miles away. The result, say scientists, is a significant dimming of the brightness of the world’s snow and icefields, leading to a longer melt season, which in turn creates feedback where more solar heat is absorbed and the melting accelerates.

In a paper in the journal Nature Geoscience, a team of French government meteorologists has reported that the Arctic ice cap, which is thought to have lost an average of 12.9bn tonnes of ice a year between 1992 and 2010 due to general warming, may be losing an extra 27bn tonnes a year just because of dust, potentially adding several centimetres of sea-level rise by 2100. Satellite measurements, say the authors, show that in the last 10 years the surface of Greenland’s ice sheet has considerably darkened during the melt season, which in some areas is now between six and 11 days longer per decade than it was 40 years ago. As glaciers retreat and the snow cover disappears earlier in the year, so larger areas of bare soil are uncovered, which increases the dust erosion, scientists suggest.

Continue reading “Dark Snow: From Arctic to Himalayas”

Michigan House District 11 Candidate Nancy Skinner is making  climate change a centerpiece of her campaign, going into next month’s primary, and has come out swinging with the piece you see above. She is in the running for Bill Maher’s #FlipADistrict  effort.

Last week I posted a bit of distilled climate paranoia, in a video from a Louisiana congressional primary, where Sara Pailin clone Lenar Whitney laid out the complete conspiracist’s looniest fantasy of climate science as a global plot. The piece has appeared in a lot of places, and I think its an example of looney climate denial having jumped the shark in the American mind.

Now, hardly a week later, I  can show you another view, above – one that every serious pollster tells us is true. Climate Change is becoming  a winning issue.

Anthony Leiserowitz for the Yale Project on Climate Change Communication:

Today, we are releasing a special report on The Politics of Global Warming, based on our spring 2014 nationally representative survey. We find that registered voters are 2.5 times more likely to vote for a congressional or presidential candidate who supports action to reduce global warming. Further, registered voters are 3 times more likely to vote against a candidate who opposes action to reduce global warming.

Many Americans are also willing to act politically:

• 26% are willing to join or are currently participating in a campaign to convince elected officials to take action to reduce global warming;
• 37% are willing to sign a pledge to vote only for political candidates that share their views on global warming;
• 13% are willing to personally engage in non-violent civil disobedience against corporate or government activities that make global warming worse.

The study also finds that while Democrats are more convinced that human-caused global warming is happening and more supportive of climate and energy policies than Republicans, there are deep divisions within the Republican Party. In many respects, liberal/moderate Republicans – about a third of the Republican party – are relatively similar to moderate/conservative Democrats, while conservative Republicans often express views about global warming that are distinctly different than the rest of the American public.

For example, among registered voters:

• 88% of Democrats, 59% of Independents and 61% of liberal/moderate Republicans think global warming is happening, compared to only 28% of conservative Republicans;
• 81% of Democrats and 51% of liberal/moderate Republicans are worried about global warming, compared to only 19% of conservative Republicans;
• 82% of Democrats and 65% of liberal/moderate Republicans support strict carbon dioxide emission limits on existing coal-fired power plants to reduce global warming and improve public health, compared to only 31% of conservative Republicans.

 

Washington Post:

Scientists already are observing climate changes in the United States. They will grow worse. Higher seas mean higher storm surges and more at-risk property along heavily populated coasts — $66 billion to $106 billion worth will likely be below sea level by mid-century. The annual national storm cleanup tab will balloon. As the country warms, the average American will likely see a month’s worth — or more — of days over 95 degrees. The South and Southwest will be much hotter than that. The analysis considered how many cold-related deaths further warming would prevent and concluded that heat-related deaths would outweigh the potential benefit. Similarly, farmers in northern latitudes might see longer growing seasons, but those farther south, in what has been prime farming country, will have to make costly adjustments, changing what they grow and developing crops that can adapt to climate extremes. In the long term, uncontrolled warming could even produce days in the United States in which humans literally could not survive long without air conditioning.

“Hope is not a strategy,” Mr. Paulson said to us. But that is the strategy that Congress, in its perpetual inaction, is taking: Hoping that the scientists are dramatically wrong — or at least that the country can deal with the problem later. If Congress were the board of a large company, ignoring such a serious risk would give shareholders ample reason to fire every head-in-the-sand director. Voters might want to contemplate the analogy this November.

 

Below, for comparison,  the crazed climate denial porn of Lenar Whitney.

Continue reading “US House Candidate Makes Climate Action a Campaign Centerpiece”

Renew Economy:

Last week, for the first time in memory, the wholesale price of electricity in Queensland fell into negative territory – in the middle of the day.  For several days the price – normally around $40-$50 a megawatt hour – hovered in and around zero. Prices were deflated throughout the week.

There were several reasons for this. A restricted interconnector to NSW added to the volatile trading, as did uncertainty about the carbon price. But the overall softening of prices was primarily the result of the newest and one of the biggest power stations in the state – rooftop solar PV.

“Negative pricing” moves, as they are known, are not uncommon. But they are only supposed to happen at night, when most of the population is asleep, demand is down, and operators of coal fired generators are reluctant to switch off. So they are willing to pay others to pick up their output.

Negative pricing not supposed to happen in the middle of the day. Daytime prices are supposed to reflect higher demand, when people are awake, office building are in use, and factories are in production. It is supposed to be the time of day when fossil fuel generators used to make most of their money.

But that has now been turned on its head by the influx of rooftop solar. There is 1,100MW of it on more than 350,000 buildings in Queensland alone (3,400MW on 1.2 million building across the country), and  it is producing electricity just at the time that coal generators used to may hay (while the sun shines).

The impact has been so profound, and wholesale prices pushed down so low, that few coal generators in Australia made a profit last year.  Hardly any are making a profit this year. State owned generators such as Stanwell are specifically blaming rooftop solar.

Prime Minister Tony Abbott likes to say that Australia is a land of cheap energy. He’s half right. It doesn’t cost much to shovel a tonne of coal into a boiler and generate steam and put that into a turbine to generate electricity.

But the problem for Australian consumers (and voters) comes in the cost of delivery of those electrons –through the transmission and distribution networks, and from retail costs and taxes.

This is the cost which is driving households to take up rooftop solar, in such proportions that the level of rooftop solar is forecast by the government’s own modelers, and by private groups such as Bloomberg New Energy Finance, to rise six fold over the next decade – with households spending up to $30 billion on rooftop modueles.

 

Continue reading “Coal is Over”

Kentucky State Senator Brandon Smith says climate change science is false because Mars is the same temperature as Earth.

How do you explain someone out of a hole that deep?

Sounds like the distinguished gentleman has garbled one of the more reliable Climate Crocks, “There’s Global Warming on Mars”..
one of my favorite videos with a movie mash-up – below.

Continue reading “The Temperature on Mars, and Other Fables”

It’s winter in the Antarctic. Time for another seasonal revival of the “Antarctic Ice is Growing” Crock.

Guy Williams is Co-leader of the ‘Sea Ice Processes and Change’ project within the ‘Oceans and Cryosphere’ research program of the Antarctic Climate and Ecosytem Cooperative Research Centre at the University of Tasmania.

Guy Williams in The Conversation:

This year could well see a new record set for the extent of Antarctic sea ice – hot on the heels of last year’s record, which in turn is part of a puzzling 33-year trend in increasing sea ice around Antarctica.

Unsurprisingly, these records have provided fodder for those wishing to cast doubt on climate science or to resist action on climate change. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) itself states that while hypotheses exist for Antarctic sea ice trends, they are “incomplete and competing” (see page 909 here).

But far from waving the white flag, or falling on their ice corers, Antarctic sea ice researchers are relishing this grand puzzle of the Southern Ocean.

In terms of natural experiments, they don’t come much bigger or more exciting than those unfolding across the Antarctic climate system right now. What’s more, the science is beginning to yield answers.

Continue reading “What Antarctic Ice is Telling Us”

From “You Can’t Take it With You”, directed by Frank Capra, most famous for “It’s a Wonderful Life” – contained this forgotten bit of americana, proving once again how a dream of distributed, free, energy from the sun has fascinated generations of idealists and dreamers.

The visionary Capra was also the director of the famous Bell Telephone Science Hour specials from the 1950s, which were ahead of their time in highlighting the then-emerging research on climate change, as well as the birth of solar energy technology, and what it all meant – below the fold.

Continue reading “Jimmy Stewart on Solar Energy: 1938”

Following up on the most recent video, the Real News Network again asked me to flesh out some details. Could be a trend.

In response to some rather unkind, although funny, comments last time, I tried to find a better setting, like, not in my basement, but ran into a wi-fi deadspot in my chosen place.  At times like these, I have to remember that “This ain’t PBS” is still a guiding esthetic principle of the Climate Crocks series.

 

The nice thing about the Solar City business model is that they do not live and die by the price of solar panels, that is, if the Chinese decide to subsidize solar panels to the point of giving them away, Solar City’s core business just gets better, as their “product” is not panels, but the contracts by which they install the panels for free on rooftops, and take a portion of the energy savings in payment.

That said, as my recent video pointed out, we are on the leading edge of an unprecedented buildout of solar energy, and Elon Musk and co. have taken steps to insure that the sheer volumes of solar panels that will be needed in the near future will be available.

EcoWatch:

Elon Musk’s alternate-energy aspirations don’t end with Tesla’s electric vehicles.

Musk is also chairman of SolarCity, a firm responsible for three times the solar panel installations as its closest competitor. Along with executives Peter Rive and Lyndon Rive, Musk announced this week that the company will create a solar plant that would be the equivalent of Tesla’s “gigafactory” plan announced earlier this year.

“We are in discussions with the state of New York to build the initial manufacturing plant, continuing a relationship developed by the Silevo team. At a targeted capacity greater than 1 GW within the next two years, it will be one of the single largest solar panel production plants in the world,” the trio wrote in a company blog post.

Solarcity blog:

We are in discussions with the state of New York to build the initial manufacturing plant, continuing a relationship developed by the Silevo team. At a targeted capacity greater than 1 GW within the next two years, it will be one of the single largest solar panel production plants in the world. This will be followed in subsequent years by one or more significantly larger plants at an order of magnitude greater annual production capacity.

Continue reading “Solar City to Build World Class Solar Panel Production Facility”

Napoleon famously said, “Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.”  I normally would like to assume that others who do not share my views are still people who have a legitimate set of values, and may just be misinformed. But harsh experience teaches, we can’t automatically assume that everyone cares about the natural world, the planet we leave to our children, or the creatures with whom we share it.

It’s obligatory for climate denial shills to preface anti-environment rants with “of course we all want clean air and pure water, but…”

Anyone that’s followed the litany of anti-environment initiatives and rhetoric by the current crop of non-conserving “conservatives”, or listened to Rush Limbaugh’s hatred and venom toward the natural world, might understandably be skeptical.

Now there’s this.

Business Insider:

Pickup trucks customized to spew black smoke into the air are quickly becoming the newest weapon in the culture wars.

“Coal Rollers” are diesel trucks modified with chimneys and equipment that can force extra fuel into the engine causing dark black smoke to pour out of the chimney stacks. These modifications are not new, but as Slate’s Dave Weigel pointed out on Thursday, “rolling coal” has begun to take on a political dimension with pickup drivers increasingly viewing their smokestacks as a form of protest against environmentalists and Obama administration emissions regulations.

Last month, Vocativ noted many coal rollers focus their fumes on “nature nuffies,” or people who drive hybrids, and “rice burners,” or Japanese-made cars.

“The feeling around here is that everyone who drives a small car is a liberal,” a roller named Ryan told Vocativ. “I rolled coal on a Prius once just because they were tailing me.”

Weigel spoke to a seller of coal rolling customization equipment who described why some drivers see spewing smoke as a political protest.

“I run into a lot of people that really don’t like Obama at all,” the salesperson said. “If he’s into the environment, if he’s into this or that, we’re not. I hear a lot of that. To get a single stack on my truck—that’s my way of giving them the finger. You want clean air and a tiny carbon footprint? Well, screw you.”

For myself, I’ve always wondered, why go thru the hassle or expense of buying or building a giant, smoke belching noise machine, when a simple bumper sticker explaining that “I’m extremely insecure about my small penis”, would be so much cheaper.

Below, coal-rolling “humor”. Ha Ha.

Continue reading “If You Love this Planet, “Coal Rollers” Hate You.”

Tim Radford for Climate News Network:

LONDON, 5 July, 2014 − British whaling ships from Tyneside in the north-east of England made 458 trips to the edge of the Arctic ice between 1750 and 1850. Their log books contained detailed records of perilous journeys, whales caught, and the tons of blubber and barrels of oil they brought home.

For Matthew Ayre, a PhD student at the University of Sunderland, UK, and Dennis Wheeler, the university’s Emeritus Professor of Climatology, these log books and other records by merchant ships and Arctic explorers such as Sir John Franklin − who tried in 1845 to navigate the icy North-West Passage between the Atlantic and the Pacific − represent an extraordinary resource.

They give an account of the southern edge of the ice sheet, the prevailing weather, the spring and summer extremes, the storms, and the condition of the Arctic ice shelf.

Planetary climate

And the log books offer a snapshot of conditions in the century before the first systematic use of fossil fuels began subtly to alter the planetary climate.

The catch, of course, is that the log books were composed in the technical language used by the masters of sailing ships more than 200 years ago, augmented by the jargon appropriate to a trade abandoned by the British more than a century ago.

For Ayre, the first great challenge was to compile a systematic sea ice dictionary and translate it into the language used by scientists today. He then validated his data with five weeks on the US Coastguard ice breaker and research vessel, USCGC Healy, exploring the edge of the polar ice at first hand. His study, which is part of the collaborative ARCdoc project, concentrates on the Davis Straits between north America and Greenland, and the north-west Atlantic.

The evidence confirms satellite observations made in the last three decades that the extent of the polar ice was once far greater, and that the Arctic ice is in historic retreat.

“Significantly, this is the first time we have ever had direct observational information on the ice fronts in the north Atlantic and the Davis Straits area before 1900,” Dr Wheeler said. “Until the introduction of satellite information from the 1970s, we didn’t know what the ice was doing.