The climate denial Crazy Bus is heading toward a cliff.
On board, increasingly uncomfortable republicans have been eyeing the drunk driver and their fellow, somewhat-odd passengers nervously for some time. But now, that precipice looms. I’ve posted in the last week on various strategies being deployed for those awakening few who do not want to be written up in history as the Bull Connors and Strom Thurmonds of planetary change.
Here, Bloomberg profiles Garret Graves, a young GOP candidate who has just won a runoff election in a safe district in South Louisiana, whose professional background makes it impossible for him to continue in denial and still profess a modicum of sentience.
I briefly got to ask the candidate about the issue that separated him from most Republicans. Graves used to be Gov. Bobby Jindal’s “coastal czar,” and from that perch he warned that rising sea levels were threatening the state.
Really, he did. As Mother Jones‘s Timothy Murphy reported, Graves presided over the drafting of the state’s coastal disaster plan, which used data from the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change to explain the need for billions of dollars in sustainability projects. None of this went viral the way that, say, Republican also-ran Lenar Whitney’s video attacking the climate change “hoax” did.
Areas of Rep. Graves district expected to disappear within 50 years.
“You want to take your thermometer, I’ll take a ruler,” Graves told reporter Stephanie Grace when asked about that video. “To say that it’s not happening while we’re watching it is not in the best interest of the people we’re supposed to be representing.”
Russia has its own problem with climate denial, which seems to come from the top. But like here in the US, while wealthy interests fund science denial to keep their populations ignorant of the threat from climate change, they quietly prepare for a climate altered future in which the arctic ocean opens for trade and exploitation.
Moscow has long claimed large portions of the Arctic, claiming that the underwater Lomonosov and Mendeleyev ridges demonstrate that Russia’s continental shelf extends far beyond its current 320-kilometer territorial waters. The proposed change would bring an extra 1.2 million square kilometers into Russia’s grip with, according to Natural Resources Minister Sergei Donskoi, at least 5 billion tons of new oil and gas reserves.
This all remains in question, but in 2007 the Arktika expedition both demonstratively planted a Russian flag on the seabed at the North Pole and claimed to have found proof of these claims.
However, the Kremlin is not just relying on scientific reports and legal claims. Instead, there is an increasingly strong military dimension to Russia’s presence.
The new Northern Command responsible for the Arctic will subsume the Northern Fleet, and there is a growing naval presence in the region. Last year the nuclear-powered missile cruiser Peter the Great led a squadron of 10 warships and four nuclear-powered ice breakers to the New Siberian Islands.
Indeed, Russia’s icebreaker fleet is a particular “ice-power” asset: It is the world’s largest and includes the massive nuclear-powered vessel 50 Years of Victory. Beyond that, Russia is constructing a chain of 10 Arctic search-and-rescue stations that, along with its 16 deepwater ports, are intended to consolidate Russia’s authority over the Northern Sea Route, which Putin has said may prove even more important than the Suez Canal in shaping global shipping flows.
Long-range air patrols have also been stepped up, and a new, year-round airbase is being built in the New Siberian Islands Archipelago between the Laptev and East Siberian seas to support an even greater presence. This is only one of the 13 new airfields and bases being built, as well as 10 air-defense radar stations.
Moscow has said this expansion is due to scientific research that shows its continental shelf extends further below the pole than previously contended.
I posted last week about an American Republican legislator calling for conservatives, or what passes for conservatives these days, to recognize the reality of climate change.
Now news of a leading Canadian conservative calling for a price on carbon. In listening to the interview above, I did not hear him use the words “climate”, “warming”, or “greenhouse”. Kind of shows the bind “conservatives”, in both the US and Canada, have put themselves in, by replacing their intellectual wing with anti-science, conspiratorial wack-jobs.
The idea of a carbon tax has long been anathema in the ranks of Canada’s Conservative party. But now, there appears to be a rift. Preston Manning, one of the architects of conservatism in Canada, is breaking ranks. He says carbon, like any other commodity, needs to have a price put on it.
But, he says, the idea does not run against the fundamental idea of conservatism.
Manning’s idea: Put a price on all energy production — whether oil, gas or hydro — then use the revenue to fund research into technology to help reverse the environmental degradation.
The Conservative government, though, has all but ruled out the option.
Meanwhile, the Washpost publishes a thought piece on how to reduce the gulf between rabid partisans.
Social psychological research shows that inviting partisans to affirm their sense of self-worth can help them escape political traps. Defensive partisan reactions, such as blindly opposing the other side’s ideas, are largely driven by the desire to see one’s political group — and, by extension, oneself — as moral, correct, and good. To protect one’s own political identity, people oppose competing ideological perspectives and the people who hold them — a politically destructive defense mechanism. Yet these reactions are not inevitable. When people engage in acts that affirm who they are — as good people, not as good partisans — they become more tolerant of threats to their political identity, and more open to the other side.
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..asking people to write about their core values unrelated to politics — a self-affirming activity — shrunk this partisan divide. Self-affirmed Democrats became less enamored of Barack Obama, and affirmed Republicans became more open to him. Ten days after the election affirmed Republicans even thought Obama would be a better president.
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Self-affirmation reduced people’s conformity to polls. When participants were affirmed, they were less swayed by polling information and more influenced by evidence about the actual effects of Obama’s policies on the economy. Moreover, these acts of self affirmation had lasting effects on people’s reactions to polls: In one study, partisan Republicans conformed less to the polls and were more influenced by economic evidence four months after they had been affirmed.
Maybe.
The problem is, today’s Fox addled, conspiratorial, information-deprived “conservatives” would see this as new age gobbledegook from the Agenda 21 global cabal.
A new piece in Nature, published along with a thoughtful editorial comment, asks whether the great expectations for “100 years” of natural gas supplies might be overstated.
Not long ago I posted on how the Energy Information Agency’s projections for renewable energy have been consistently, laughably, off the mark.
The EIA is also the agency that makes the grandiose predictions for natural gas.
To provide rigorous and transparent forecasts of shale-gas production, a team of a dozen geoscientists, petroleum engineers and economists at the University of Texas at Austin has spent more than three years on a systematic set of studies of the major shale plays. The research was funded by a US$1.5-million grant from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation in New York City, and has been appearing gradually in academic journals1, 2, 3, 4, 5 and conference presentations. That work is the “most authoritative” in this area so far, says Weijermars.
If natural-gas prices were to follow the scenario that the EIA used in its 2014 annual report, the Texas team forecasts that production from the big four plays would peak in 2020, and decline from then on. By 2030, these plays would be producing only about half as much as in the EIA’s reference case. Even the agency’s most conservative scenarios seem to be higher than the Texas team’s forecasts. “Obviously they do not agree very well with the EIA results,” says Patzek.
The main difference between the Texas and EIA forecasts may come down to how fine-grained each assessment is. The EIA breaks up each shale play by county, calculating an average well productivity for that area. But counties often cover more than 1,000 square kilometres, large enough to hold thousands of horizontal fracked wells. The Texas team, by contrast, splits each play into blocks of one square mile (2.6 square kilometres) — a resolution at least 20 times finer than the EIA’s.
Resolution matters because each play has sweet spots that yield a lot of gas, and large areas where wells are less productive. Companies try to target the sweet spots first, so wells drilled in the future may be less productive than current ones. The EIA’s model so far has assumed that future wells will be at least as productive as past wells in the same county. But this approach, Patzek argues, “leads to results that are way too optimistic”.
The high resolution of the Texas studies allows their model to distinguish the sweet spots from the marginal areas. As a result, says study co-leader Scott Tinker, a geoscientist at the University of Texas at Austin, “we’ve been able to say, better than in the past, what a future well would look like”.
The Texas and EIA studies also differ in how they estimate the total number of wells that could be economically drilled in each play. The EIA does not explicitly state that number, but its analysis seems to require more wells than the Texas assessment, which excludes areas where drilling would be difficult, such as under lakes or major cities. These features of the model were chosen to “mimic reality”, Tinker says, and were based on team members’ long experience in the petroleum industry.
The EIA projects that production will rise by more than 50% over the next quarter of a century, and perhaps beyond, with shale formations supplying much of that increase. But such optimism contrasts with forecasts developed by a team of specialists at the University of Texas, which is analysing the geological conditions using data at much higher resolution than the EIA’s. The Texas team projects that gas production from four of the most productive formations will peak in the coming years and then quickly decline. If that pattern holds for other formations that the team has not yet analysed, it could mean much less natural gas in the United States’ future.
Like all energy forecasts, the lower projections from the Texas team could turn out to be inaccurate. Technological advances in the next few decades could open up more resources at lower costs, driving US production even higher than the EIA has predicted. But it is also possible that the Texas forecasts are too high, and that gas production will fall off even faster than the team suggests.
I’ve posted in the past about the internal contradictions of the fracking industry, which is looking more and more like a classic bubble.
Like fracking for natural gas, the oil shale revolution of the last decade has relied on expensive technology to crack, squeeze and/or cook petroleum out of difficult to reach deposits. Both of these industries rely on certain price assumptions for their future profitability. Continue reading “Big Fracking Deal? Or No Fracking Way?”
Readers of this blog know that Elon Musk, our contemporary analog to Steve Jobs of the Imac and Itunes years, is huge on solar energy.
Musk intends to build a giant battery manufacturing facility, which will crank out ever cheaper battery storage for electric autos, and eventually, for home and businesses, that will be part of his company, Solar City’s, increasing competitive play against the traditional utilities. (dozens of other companies are competing, and winning, in the same space as Solar City)
This is a wave that scares the utility industry a whole lot more than rising seas, fouling air and water, and increasingly freakish storms.
Therefore, let’s run with it.
Yet Musk’s so-called gigafactory may soon become an existential threat to the 100-year-old utility business model. The facility will also churn out stationary battery packs that can be paired with rooftop solar panels to store power. Already, a second company led by Musk, SolarCity Corp. (SCTY), is packaging solar panels and batteries to power California homes and companies including Wal-Mart Stores Inc. (WMT)
“The mortal threat that ever cheaper on-site renewables pose” comes from systems that include storage, said Amory Lovins, co-founder of the Rocky Mountain Institute, a Snowmass, Colorado-based energy consultant. “That is an unregulated product you can buy at Home Depot that leaves the old business model with no place to hide.”
At a private shindig in little town called New York City last week, SolarCity CEO Lyndon Rive and Chairman Elon Musk (Lyndon’s cousin and also the CEO, Chief Product Architect, and Chairman of Tesla Motors) made a few casual but potentially world-changing announcements, as is practically a habit with Elon.
Most notably, they stated that SolarCity would be including battery backup systems with every single one of its rooftop solar power systems within 5-10 years. Many of those, but not necessarily all of them, would come from Tesla’s planned gigafactory.
Even with the battery backups, Lyndon and Elon contend that a SolarCity installation will cost less than the price of electricity from the grid!
Hagupit is Earth’s seventh Category 5 storm of 2014
Hagupit is Earth’s seventh Category 5 storm of the year, making it the busiest year for these most extreme of tropical cyclones since 2005. In that year, eleven Category 5s were recorded (4 in the Atlantic, 2 in the Western Pacific, 3 in the South Indian, and 2 in the South Pacific.) Hagupit is the fifth Category 5 in the Western Pacific in 2014, and the fourth with a pressure of 915 mb or lower, as rated by the Japan Meteorological Agency. The last time four or more typhoons reached that intensity was 1997, when five did so. The other Category 5 storms of 2014:
Super Typhoon Nuri hit 180 mph winds east of Japan on November 3. The Japan Meteorological Agency put Nuri’s lowest central pressure at 910 mb. The extratropical remounts of Nuri went on to bomb into one of the most intense extratropical storms ever observed in the waters near Alaska, with a central pressure of 924 mb.
Super Typhoon Vongfong also had 180 mph winds south of Japan. Vongfong battered Japan’s Okinawa Island on October 9 – 10, killing 11 and doing $58 million in damage. The Japan Meteorological Agency put Vonfong’s central pressure at 900 mb at the storm’s peak intensity, the lowest pressure it has given to a storm since Super Typhoon Haiyan’s 895 mb pressure in November 2013.
Super Typhoon Halong topped out at 160 mph winds with a central pressure of 920 mb on August 3, eventually making landfall in Japan on August 10 as a tropical storm. Halong killed 12 and did $4 million in damage.
Another Western Pacific Super Typhoon, Rammasun, was only rated a Cat 4 when it hit China’s Hainan Island on July 17, killing 195 people and causing over $7 billion in damage. However, a pressure characteristic of a Category 5 storm, 899.2 mb, was recorded at Qizhou Island just before Rammasun hit Hainan Island. If this pressure is verified, it is likely that the storm will be upgraded to be 2014’s eighth Category 5 storm in post-season reanalysis.
The Eastern Pacific had one Cat 5 in 2014 that did not affect land: Marie (160 mph winds). The South Indian Ocean has had one Cat 5 this year, Tropical Cyclone Gillian in March (160 mph winds.) Gillian did not affect any land areas. Between 2000 – 2013, Earth averaged five Category 5 storms per year, with 51% of these occurring in the Western Pacific. Since 1996, only two years have had more than eight Category 5 storms in one year: 1997 (thirteen) and 2005 (eleven.)
Our database of these most extreme of tropical cyclones is of poor quality and there are not enough of them to say if they are showing climate-related trends yet or not, but the forecast is for more of these high-end tropical cyclones to occur in a warmer climate. The 2013 IPCC report predicts that there is a greater than 50% chance (more likely than not) that we will see a human-caused increase in intense hurricanes by 2100 in some regions, and the 2014 U.S. National Climate Assessment said “Hurricane-associated storm intensity and rainfall rates are projected to increase as the climate continues to warm.”
Typhoon Hagupit made landfall in Dolores, Eastern Samar, at 9:15 pm local time on Saturday, December 6, said the Philippines State weather bureau PAGASA. At landfall, the Joint Typhoon Warning Center rated Hagupit a major Category 3 storm with 125 mph winds, and the Japan Meteorological Agency gave it a central pressure of 935 mb. Moderate wind shear of 10 – 20 knots and interaction with land helped to slowly weaken Hagupit before landfall. Satellite loops show that the eye is no longer distinct and the cloud tops of the intense eyewall thunderstorms have warmed, indicating weakening. Nevertheless, Hagupit is a very large and intense storm, and will be slow to weaken. The storm brought heavy rains of 1.79″ (45 mm) in just one hour to Laoang Municipal Building, Northern Samar, ending at 10 pm local time Saturday.
Keith Schneider is a long-time National correspondent for the New York Times. He is also an international correspondent for Circle of Blue, a water-energy-climate research group.
Keith has traveled widely in Asia and elsewhere covering the story of the developing world’s increasing appetite for energy and industry, and the impacts on natural systems that follow.
I talked to Keith, and others, in researching my upcoming Yale Climate Connections video, which will be about the new US/China agreement on climate and greenhouse gases.
I think it’s one of the most important pieces I’ve done, and I hope it will be posted in a week or so.
Meanwhile, in our wide ranging chat, I asked Keith about a question we’ve heard in the wake of the new agreement – “What about India? Aren’t their emissions going to be a problem?”
This year is also set to be one of the warmest on record in the Central England Temperature (CET) series, which goes back to 1659 and is the longest instrumental temperature series in the world.
The World Meteorological Organization (WMO) also says 2014 is on track to be the warmest globally.
According to the body, this is largely due to record high global sea surface temperatures.
The WMO is the UN’s authoritative voice on global weather and climate.
Both the Met Office and the UN organisation say that the observed temperatures are consistent with what would be expected from human-induced climate change.
December 5, 2014 – A Republican House member is battling the skepticism toward climate-change science that’s common in GOP ranks. And he wants to put lawmakers on record in the process.
Rep. Chris Gibson said Thursday he plans to introduce a resolution on climate change that will help others “recognize the reality” of the situation. Gibson said the extreme weather he has witnessed in his own upstate New York district supports the science, and he wants to be a leader in spurring recognition of changing weather patterns.
“My district has been hit with three 500-year floods in the last several years, so either you believe that we had a one in over 100 million probability that occurred, or you believe as I do that there’s a new normal, and we have changing weather patterns, and we have climate change. This is the science,” said the two-term lawmaker who was reelected in November.
“I hope that my party—that we will come to be comfortable with this, because we have to operate in the realm of knowledge and science, and I still think we can bring forward conservative solutions to this, absolutely, but we have to recognize the reality,” Gibson said. “So I will be bringing forward a bill, a resolution that states as such, with really the intent of rallying us, to harken us to our best sense, our ability to overcome hard challenges.”
Gibson spoke at an event hosted by Citizens for Responsible Energy Solutions, which is a pro-Republican advocacy group; a PAC that supports Republicans called Concord 51; and the Conservation Leadership Council, a group of conservatives that includes Gale Norton, who was Interior Secretary under George W. Bush. The Environmental Defense Fund helped create the CLC.
Citizens for Responsible Energy Solutions (CRES) was joined today by Senator Kelly Ayotte (R-NH) and Representative Chris Gibson (R-NY) for an energy innovation forum titled “Waking Up to America’s Future”, a conversation about free market energy solutions and the policy outlook for the 114th Congress. Sen. Ayotte and Rep. Gibson have shown true leadership putting forward common sense energy solutions that will grow our economy while also preserving our environment for future generations.
