Month: March 2015

The Oil Companies’ War on Coal heats up.

Wall Street Journal:

LONDON— Royal Dutch Shell PLC Chairman Jorma Ollila is joining Chief Executive Ben van Beurden in backing efforts to limit carbon emissions ahead of international climate talks in Paris later this year.

Mr. Ollila was set to tell employees Wednesday that society must find a “middle way” that “doesn’t threaten economic growth,” according to a transcript of a speech the company disseminated.

“Shell has been open and firm in its advocacy of cleaner-burning natural gas, carbon capture and storage,” which takes carbon from combustion and stores it in places like underground reservoirs “and carbon pricing. And we’re hopeful that policy makers will recognize the value of all three at the gathering in Paris later this year,” the transcript says.

Shell, which is heavily invested in big, long-lived natural gas projects, has been increasingly vocal in calling for energy companies to participate with policy makers in addressing climate change.

Mr. van Beurden told an oil-industry conference last month that oil companies should support a carbon-pricing system as well as “a shift from coal to natural gas.”
–
“Society needs to find a middle way,” he said, according to the Shell transcript. “To support the transition from one energy system to another in a manner which doesn’t threaten economic growth or deny emerging economic access to much needed energy.”

Ok. Progress.
But, the “middle way” between 2° and 6° –  is 4°.

 

Those towers mean pollution-free jobs, better crops, and more $.

WHO-TV, Des Moines:

At Iowa State University the new Wind Energy Student Organization started off its very first presentation with adviser Dr. Gene Takle.

Takle has been researching how turbines affect fields and found there is measurable influences on climate and wind turbulence, “One of the effects of turbines is they stir the air, so the crop, the corn canopy itself is drawing down the carbon dioxide level in that part of the atmosphere so within the crop it’s getting lower and lower, so the extra turbulence brings down this higher CO2 air from above and promoting more photosynthesis within the crop during the daytime period. So it’s a good thing and it looks like the turbines from our measurements are actually having a beneficial effect.”

Takle says other benefits of turbines are increase nighttime temperatures, decreased daytime temperatures, and enhanced evaporation. However, a negative includes increased respiration, but he maintains the positive effects outweigh negatives.

And farmers like to be involved with wind energy on their land according to Takle, “Wind turbines represent an alternative income stream for farmers. Farmers are in a very volatile economy, there’s up years, there’s down years. The turbines provide the same lease amount every year. So it provides some stable income, which is often valued by farmers. They don’t take very much land out of production and from what we’ve shown, they don’t have any negative impact on their farming operation. Possibly even a positive impact.”

According to the Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy, by 2030, lease payments will generate well over $600 million for landowners in rural areas in the U.S.

Accuweather:

Due to poor conditions along the Alaska Range, the 43rd Iditarod Sled Dog Race will begin in Fairbanks, Alaska, rather than Willow, Alaska, for only the second time in the event’s history.

While the ceremonial start will still take place Saturday, March 7, in Anchorage, race officials determined in early February that it would be best to “restart” the race Monday, March 9, in Fairbanks. Weather continues to throw a wrench into plans, however. Earlier this week, organizers moved the Fairbanks restart to a different part of town following deteriorating river ice near the original location, according an Alaska Dispatch News report.

“While some snow did fall east of the Alaska Range over the past couple of weeks, other parts of the trail, in very critical areas, did not get much or any of it,” said CEO Stan Hooley, when the decision to move to Fairbanks was announced.

The forecast in Anchorage for Saturday is mostly cloudy with some rain and snow possible and a high approaching 40, according to AccuWeather.com Senior Meteorologist Jason Nicholls. For Monday’s restart, some light snow is possible around Fairbanks with a high around 10, and lows Monday night will approach 20 below zero F, he added.

“There will be a shot of colder-than-normal air across Alaska during the week of [March 9],” Nicholls said. “The coldest weather will likely be early in the week with an easing of the cold late in the week. Above-normal temperatures are likely to return the week of the 16th,” he said.

For dog musher Matt Failor, 32, of Willow, located in the south-central part of the state, warmer-than-normal weather has forced him to alter his training regime. Failor, who is gearing up for his fourth Iditarod, has been driving north to find colder weather and safer trails for his 30 Alaskan Huskies to train.

If you, or your dittohead Uncle, might be wondering how this can be, the video here, from last year, is still valid as to the effects of a wandering jet stream.

More news from Fairbanks below.

Continue reading “Iditarod Update: Dogsled Race Moved Again Due to Warm Weather”

You’re Welcome.

In 2012, I tagged along with Professor Mauri Pelto on his annual survey of glaciers in the Northern Cascades, something he’s been doing for 3 decades now.

He is the consummate professional, with an encyclopedic knowledge of his subject, (his valuable blog here) and the stamina of a mountain goat.  We were lucky enough to catch up with him in San Francisco a few months ago.

If there is a “War on Coal”, it’s coming from investors who realize that the era of 19th century energy technology is drawing to a close, and from the Chinese, who realize their system cannot survive continued reliance on poisonous, polluting, water hogging energy.
The numbers tell a grim tale for coal barons.

Tom Sanzillo has 30 years of experience in public and private finance, including as a first deputy comptroller of New York State, where he held oversight over a $156 billion pension fund and $200 billion in municipal bond programs.

Tom Sanzillo at IEEFA.org:

Peabody Energy’s numbers for 2014 show that the U.S. coal industry has decoupled from the broader, gradually recovering economy and that the company’s spiral has deepened. Company executives themselves forecast no recovery on the horizon, seeing further losses this year.

Peabody epitomizes the industry’s fundamental structural problem. It is being challenged by dramatic increases in the supply of natural gas, market incursion from renewable sources and the commensurate decrease in power prices.

The company acknowledges that total domestic coal demand could fall by more than 5 to 6 percent in 2015, but it also very optimistically forecasts a rise in natural gas prices into 2017 as a potential catalyst in reversing the eight-year trend in declining U.S. domestic coal demand. All growth capital expenditure has been suspended, and Peabody sees its stay-in-business capex running at less than 30 percent of depreciation, an unsustainable position over the medium term that will see the company continue to shrink.

Arch Coal is in trouble. It has posted significant losses for three years running and its performance in 2015 will most likely remain in the red.

Arch executives say they expect coal markets this year to perform about the same as they did last year, which was a brutal 12 months for U.S. coal producers. This admission—that 2015 will bring no upturn—suggests that whatever initiatives Arch pursues this year will be geared solely toward reducing losses. The company is in hunker-down-and-survive mode.

Continue reading “Coal and the Carbon Bubble”

With Merchants of Doubt about to drop, no time like the present to repost one of my most popular videos, detailing the parallels in tactics, and personel, of the tobacco denial, and climate denial, establishments.

Merchants of Doubt necessarily tells only part of the story, but the strategy of attacking science messengers was perfected by the Tobacco Lords long before the Fossil Fuel barons picked it up.

Dana Nuccitelli has published a piece looking more deeply at the Slick Willie Soon affair.
An interesting question to ask is, how does a hack for hire get his “science” papers, what he tells his funders are “deliverables” – published? Turns out there are several routes.

Dana Nuccitelli in the Guardian:

Soon’s funding and failure to disclose conflicts of interest raises red flags, and upon further investigation, the underlying problem is clear. Willie Soon does really bad science, and yet is treated as a climate expert and used by members of Congress to justify opposition to climate policies.

In a paper published last year with our colleagues, John Abraham and I discussed the disproportionate attention that poor-quality climate contrarian papers have received. And as I detailed in my just-published book, climate contrarians like Soon simply aren’t held accountable for their bad science and failed climate predictions. This lack of accountability and disproportionate attention are serious problems.

The reason Soon can be treated as an expert is that he’s been able to publish climate-related research in peer-reviewed journals. To get bad science published in peer-reviewed journals, Soon has followed the same strategies as other climate contrarians with flawed research. He has submitted papers to relatively obscure, non-climate science journals, and he’s exploited “pal review” with friendly journal editors.

 

Continue reading “Why Big Energy Took a Tip From Big Tobacco”

Now another study showing links between climate-enhanced drought, and political instability in the Middle East.

Above, scientists predicted this pattern of drought, and the resulting instability, in news reports from 1983, and ’88.

Slate:

By now, it’s pretty clear that we’re starting to see visible manifestations of climate change beyond far-off melting ice sheets. One of the most terrifying implications is the increasingly real threat of wars sparked in part by global warming. New evidence says that Syria may be one of the first such conflicts.

We know the basic story in Syria by now: From 2006-2010, an unprecedented drought forced the country from a groundwater-intensive breadbasket of the region to a net food importer. Farmers abandoned their homes—school enrollment in some areas plummeted 80 percent—and flooded Syria’s cities, which were already struggling to sustain an influx of more than 1 million refugees from the conflict in neighboring Iraq. The Syrian government largely ignored these warning signs, helping sow discontent that ultimately spawned violent protests. The link from drought to war was prominently featured in a Showtime documentary last year. A preventable drought-triggered humanitarian crisis sparked the 2011 civil war, and eventually, ISIS.

A new study published Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academies of Science provides the clearest evidence yet that human-induced global warming made that drought more likely. The study is the first to examine the drought-to-war narrative in quantitative detail in any country, ultimately linking it to climate change.

“It’s a pretty convincing climate fingerprint,” said Retired Navy Rear Adm. David Titley, a meteorologist who’s now a professor at Penn State University. After decades of poor water policy, “there was no resilience left in the system.” Titley says, given that context, that the record-setting drought caused Syria to “break catastrophically.”

“It’s not to say you could predict ISIS out of that, but you just set everything up for something really bad to happen,” Titley told me in a phone interview. Given the new results, Titley says, “you can draw a very credible climate connection to this disaster we call ISIS right now.”

The view from the Eastern US notwithstanding, this winter continues to provide evidence, not only of a warming planet, but that warming is proceeding in exactly the ways scientists predicted decades ago, based on an in-depth understanding of atmospheric physics.
Above, see a clip from a BBC production, “The Greenhouse Effect”, from 1988, where Syukuro Manabe predicts enhanced warming in the northern polar regions.

In a world warming from anthropogenic releases of carbon dioxide, we expect, for instance, that the troposphere, the atmosphere’s lower layer, will warm, even while the upper layer, the stratosphere, cools. And indeed, we observe that.

In addition, the dynamics of global change should produce a greater warming in polar areas, in particular the northern polar areas. This is due to several processes, including the loss of sea ice and its reflective, cooling influence, and increased areas of dark sea water and soil.  This winter has seen the continued shrinkage of the pool of cool arctic air that typically covers the most northern areas.

Jason Samenow in the Washington Post:

Using an analysis of atmospheric temperature data from the National Center for Atmospheric Research, Martin has been tracking the size of the Northern Hemisphere cold pool during winter (December-February) over time. Specifically, he has examined the total area of the hemisphere covered by temperatures 23 degrees (-5 degrees Celsius) or lower at an altitude of about 5,000 feet, for the period 1948-1949 to present.

In a study accepted for publication in the Journal of Climate, Martin found that four of the five smallest Northern Hemisphere cold pools on record — averaged over the winter — have occurred since 2004.

“Only 12 of the 43 winter seasons before 1990-1991 had below average seasonally averaged areas whereas 20 of 24 winter seasons have had below average seasonally averaged areas since,” the study says.

The study only incorporates results through last winter but reported last year’s “desperately cold” conditions in the eastern U.S. coincided with the most diminutive Northern Hemisphere cold pool on record up to that point in time.

Taking into account Martin’s analysis of the current winter, the size of the Northern Hemisphere cold pool has reached records low levels in back-to-back years.

Continue reading “Warming at the Top of the World”