The Obama administration announced a plan to significantly cut methane emissions produced by gas and gas wells by the year 2025 through executive action. Judy Woodruff talks to Coral Davenport of The New York Times and Michael Oppenheimer of Princeton University about President Obama’s strategy in addressing climate change and how environmentalists and the industry are reacting to the proposal.
Peter Doran was the author of a paper famously misused in Michael Crichton’s novel “State of Fear”, a shibboleth we still hear about from the climate denial mill from time to time.
Doran was interviewed in San Francisco, December 2014, by John Cook. I was running the camera.
In a small room in Moscone Center, our team interviewed more than 20 scientists during last month’s American Geophysical Union Fall Meeting.
Currently working on a new video compilation of what key scientists told us this year, should be posting soon.
The acceleration of global sea level change from the end of the 20th century through the last two decades has been significantly swifter than scientists thought, according to a new Harvard study.
The study, co-authored by Carling Hay, a postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences (EPS), and Eric Morrow, a recent Ph.D. graduate of EPS, shows that calculations of global sea-level rise from 1900 to 1990 had been overestimated by as much as 30 percent. The report, however, confirms estimates of sea-level change since 1990, suggesting that the rate of change is increasing more rapidly than previously understood. The research is described in a Jan. 14 paper in Nature.
“What this paper shows is that sea-level acceleration over the past century has been greater than had been estimated by others,” Morrow said. “It’s a larger problem than we initially thought.”
“Scientists now believe that most of the world’s ice sheets and mountain glaciers are melting in response to rising temperatures,” Hay added. “Melting ice sheets cause global mean sea level to rise. Understanding this contribution is critical in a warming world.”
Previous estimates had placed sea-level rise at between 1.5 and 1.8 millimeters annually in the 20th century. Hay and Morrow, however, suggest that from 1901 until 1990, the figure was closer to 1.2 millimeters per year. However, everyone agrees that global sea level has risen by about 3 millimeters annually since that time.
“Another concern with this is that many efforts to project sea-level change into the future use estimates of sea level over the time period from 1900 to 1990,” Morrow said. “If we’ve been overestimating the sea-level change during that period, it means that these models are not calibrated appropriately, and that calls into question the accuracy of projections out to the end of the 21st century.”
News story here, analysis from Stefan Rahmstorf below the fold:
The current sea level rise rate — which started in 1990 — is 2.5 times faster than it was from 1900 to 1990, according to a study published Wednesday in the journal Nature. Scientists say that faster pace of sea level rise is from melting ice sheets in Greenland and West Antarctica and shrinking glaciers, triggered by man-made global warming.
“We’re seeing a significant acceleration in the past few decades,” said study lead author Carling Hay, a geophysical researcher at Harvard University. “It’s concerning for cities along the U.S. East Coast” where water levels are rising even faster than the world average.
“It’s definitely something that can’t be ignored,” Hay said.
“People have gone as far as throwing rubber ducks down the holes to see where the rubber ducks come out,” said Tom Wagner, cryosphere program manager for NASA, which funded the research. “And no one has ever found a rubber duck.”
Some water may linger in recently discovered aquifers inside the ice, one of which is estimated to be the size of West Virginia.
Regardless, a significant fraction is not coming out right away, the study found. During the peak of the rare melt event, the atmosphere-based model overpredicted the flow to the sea by a few fractions of a cubic kilometer a day. Nonetheless, by late summer, the model and actual outflow were about in sync, Smith said.
So, the model gets big melt events wrong, even if it is close to capturing the flow in the longer run.
“That water isn’t just going to stay; it’s going to start coming out eventually,” Smith said. “It might have come out 18 months later. I can’t envision the ice sheet absorbing that water for centuries.”
The planet’s two largest ice sheets – in Greenland and Antarctica – are now being depleted at an astonishing rate of 120 cubic miles each year. That is the discovery made by scientists using data from CryoSat-2, the European probe that has been measuring the thickness of Earth’s ice sheets and glaciers since it was launched by the European Space Agency in 2010.
A coalition founded by environmentalists and political conservatives will announce in Tallahassee today a petition drive for a Florida constitutional amendment that would open up the business of selling electricity from solar energy.
By seeking to allow entrepreneurs to become power providers, leaders of Floridians for Solar Choice coalition expect fierce opposition from the state’s major electric utilities.
“We fully anticipate that the utilities are going to do all kinds of misinformation and all kinds of scare tactics to try to get people not to vote in favor of the thing,” said Stephen Smith, executive director of the Southern Alliance for Clean Energy, a coalition founder.
The coalition chairman is Tory Perfetti of Tampa, who is Florida director of Conservatives for Energy Freedom.
Perfetti said the ballot initiative is about “independence to decide from more than one option how you will power your future.”
“Both the consumer and business community will benefit. We will be protecting the environment and doing it in a free-market way,” Perfetti said.
Florida Power & Light Co., the largest utility and the owner of the largest solar plants in Florida, declined to comment.
The Florida initiative is part of a larger national “Green Tea Party” movement that is promoting solar energy for citizens who wish to have options besides being totally dependent on giant utilities.
So your goal is to allow people who generate electricity via the sun to sell the power they generate. Why can’t anybody do that now?
Florida is one of only five states in the United States that by law expressly deny citizens and businesses the freedom to buy solar-power electricity directly from someone other than a monopoly electric utility or government-owned electric utility.
Above, Dr. Tom Painter of NASA, interviewed a year ago, on California’s reservoirs, and snowpack.
Now that California has had some moisture during what is the normal rainy season there, you can expect to see a lot of hand waving about the drought being over. Especially as NOAA, NASA, and others make official announcements about 2014 being the hottest year in the record.
Water expert Peter Gleick throws some (carefully rationed) cold water on that.
While we do not know yet what the rest of the wet season will bring – and while we hope for the major storms needed to recharge our rivers, groundwater and reservoirs – it seems increasingly likely that California will not see enough precipitation to get out of the very deep deficit that three years of drought (so far) have produced.
There is, however, some misleading and confusing information out there. Some are already arguing that California’s rainfall is nearly back to normal or that because there may have been more serious droughts in the past we needn’t worry anymore. Most of these claims are based on misunderstandings of California’s hydrology, water systems, or current conditions, and on very narrow definitions of “drought.”
First, to understand the data, it is vital to realize that California’s “water year” runs from October 1 to September 30. This is not the “calendar year” (January to December). This distinction is important, because mixing data from different water years produces inaccurate analyses.
Here is a great example. If we look at the 2014 “calendar” year, it appears that California received a decent amount of water (Figure 1) – still dry, but not abnormally so.
Figure 1. California’s 2014 “calendar year” precipitation seems just slightly dry compared to the past 120 years. But this is a misleading graph. The State’s precipitation is measured by “water year” (Oct-Sept). See Figure 2. (Source: NOAA)
Pressure on oil prices has continued to build after key members of the Organisation of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (Opec) indicated there would be no let up in the cartel’s strategy of allowing the cost of a barrel to plummet.
Brent crude tested new six-year lows below $46 per barrel on Tuesday after the energy minister of the United Arab Emirates (UAE), a senior delegate among the cartel’s 12 members, said there would be no change in strategy despite the continued slide in the price.
“The strategy will not change,” said Suhail bin Mohammed al-Mazrouei, speaking in Abu Dhabi. “We are telling the market and other producers that they need to be rational.”
Mr Mazrouei added that it could take years for prices to stablise, adding: “We are passing through very interesting times…it is unlikely that we will see a sudden rise [in oil prices].”
The UAE, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and Qatar form a core of Gulf Arab oil producers who dominate Opec policy due to their overwhelming oil reserves and production capacity. Combined, these four account for almost two thirds of the cartel’s production of around 30m barrels per day (bpd) of crude.
High cost production, like “tight oil” from oil shales in North Dakota and elsewhere, will be hit hardest by the price drop. The New York Times reports that, even with a decline in that shale production, prices will stay down for the medium future, and then rise again. We can assume OPEC may have some response to that projection.
HOUSTON — Even with oil prices continuing to plummet and oil companies decommissioning drilling rigs every day, the Energy Department on Tuesday projected that domestic crude production would continue to rise in 2015, although growth would slow.
The forecast of even more American supplies on an oversupplied global market was not unexpected, but it added to the probability that oil prices that have plummeted around 55 percent since June will not completely recover any time soon.
But the department projected a modest recovery for the Brent global oil price benchmark, now around $46 a barrel, which it said would average $58 a barrel this year but rebound to $75 in 2016. On Tuesday, both Brent and the American benchmark oil prices tumbled sharply, but later rose from their lows. The projection came hours after North Dakota regulators reported that oil companies had decommissioned eight rigs overnight, reducing the number in the state to the lowest level in over four years. North Dakota, the No. 2 state in oil production behind Texas, still has 158 rigs drilling, but only last month there were 183 rigs operating.
The irony of “Drill Baby Drill”.
We’re told that if crazy environmentalists get out of the way, and allow unlimited exploration for oil, that prices will drop, and gasoline will be cheaper.
What is not well explained was the opposite side of that coin. Extraction of exotic oil from shale, deep sea drilling, and risky areas like the arctic depends on reliably high prices. Now those prices have collapsed, in part due to flow of non-traditional oil sources, as well some as larger movements in petropolitics I’ve posted on recently – and massive projects have to be, at least temporarily, shelved.
The nation of about 56,000 had imagined its oil and mineral production would turn every citizen into a millionaire. Instead, Greenland continues to rely on an annual $586 million subsidy from Denmark to stay afloat, a sum that’s equivalent to almost half its gross domestic product. Talk of severing ties from its former colonial master has also faded as Greenlanders see little prospect of achieving economic independence anytime soon.
“Now we know what is realistic and what isn’t, and we should not expect any revenue or pseudo-figure flowing into our budget from this and that,” Uldum said. “That’s simply not realistic. We’ll conduct a responsible economic policy.”
Less than a decade ago, the combination of a hotter planet melting the ice around Greenland and a booming Chinese economy driving up commodities prices looked destined to turn the world’s largest island into an Arctic El Dorado.
But none of the companies awarded licenses was able to make any commercial finds, even before the oil price dropped to a level that would make production unprofitable. And while global warming has melted some of the ice, the result has also been to make exploration more hazardous as icebergs the size of multi- story buildings break free from the island, threatening to sink any exploration vessels that might cross their path.
Here, Fox News shows its usual doctrinaire lack of awareness.
Chevron Corp (CVX.N) is putting a plan to drill for oil in the Beaufort Sea in Canada’s Arctic on hold indefinitely because of what it called “economic uncertainty in the industry” as oil prices fall.
In a letter to Canada’s National Energy Board on Wednesday, the company withdrew from a hearing on Arctic drilling rules because it has walked away from plans to drill in the EL 481 block, 250 kilometers (155 miles) northwest of Tuktoyaktuk, Northwest Territories.
The drilling project is the largest yet put on hold after oil prices dropped by nearly half over the last six months, even as a long list of oil companies cut their budgets for 2015 because of the price drop.
Williston, North Dakota is ground zero for the Shale Oil boom. In part due to the success of that production, oil prices have collapsed by half in the last few months. Places like Williston are now threatened with a classic Bust cycle after an expansive, and expensive, boom. Infrastructure and commercial spending stimulated by the boom may result in stranded assets, empty buildings and unemployment, if oil prices do not rebound.
So while a few have made big, short lived pay checks during the fat times, the price in misery for many in the area has been high. The transformation from quiet, bucolic heartland to bumper-to-bumper ratrace has taken a toll.
In a country with an unofficial underemployment rate of 20%, the tiny railroad whistle-stop of Williston, North Dakota near the Montana border (population 17,000 and spiking) is currently at capacity: There’s not a motel room to be had in the city, housing prices are double what they were a year ago ($300,000 for a two-bedroom home), and the daily onslaught of new arrivals is reduced to living in their cars, RVs, sporadic tent cities or the rapidly proliferating “man camps” – clusters of trailers in an open field that pack in oil patch workers dormitory style, sometimes six to a room.
Access to running water and simple sanitation is so rare that public businesses have had to lock their bathrooms to discourage makeshift sponge baths or the dumping of wastewater. Meanwhile, throughout the region, fast food professionals can make $15 an hour and waitresses start at $25 an hour, with a bonus if they’ll stay in the job for at least six weeks. (Pizza Hut brought in campers-vans just so its counter help could afford to live there.)
Welcome to Potterville. Brought to you by Big Oil.
According to a recent survey from Apartment Guide, the region around the town of Williston, North Dakota has the highest average rent in the U.S., beating out other traditionally expensive areas such as the Washington D.C. and New York City metropolitan regions. A renter in Williston can expect to pay an average of $2,394 a month for a 700-square-foot, one-bedroom apartment — space that would cost $1,504 in New York and $1,411 in the Los Angeles area.
Williston is in the heart of the oil patch — one of the most active oil-producing cities in the second largest oil-producing state in the country. In 2012, the number of oil rigs in the town increased from increased to about 200, a jump from the 70 or so that the town held in 2010. With that growth in oil rigs came a spike in population — the number of people in Williston has more than doubled from 14,700 people in 2010, to up to 33,000 people in 2012. But the housing market in the town hasn’t been able to keep up with the influx of people looking to make their fortunes in the oil field, which explains the inflated rent prices. Pam Winter, Apartment Guide’s Regional Sales Executive for North Dakota, said housing projects are rushing to keep up with demand.
Williston, North Dakota, which is in the heart of the boom, grew from 13,000 to more than double today, which meant major invests in housing and infrastructure. The city is currently $300 million in debt and four years behind in paying off that debt, and plunging oil prices could impact its ability to do so. Williston Mayor Howard Krug talked to Peter O’Dowd of NPR’s Here and Now about the challenges his town faces. (interview here)
