Over the past two decades, scientists have developed ways to predict how ecosystems will react to changing environmental conditions. Called ecological forecasts, these emerging tools, if used effectively, can help reduce pollution to our waterways.
Dead zone and toxic algae forecasts are similar to weather and climate forecasts. They can provide near-term predictions of ecosystem responses to short-term drivers such as this year’s nitrogen and phosphorus inputs. They can also be used in scenarios to analyze the impacts of controlling those drivers in the future.
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Dead zones (hypoxia) are regions within lakes and oceans where oxygen concentrations drop to levels dangerous to marine life. They’re typically caused by decomposing algae, the growth of which is stimulated by nitrogen and phosphorus inputs from land. Toxic algae, also stimulated by these same excess nutrients, can poison aquatic life and humans when they contaminate the water supply.
Lake Erie – This year’s Lake Erie toxic algae forecast is for a bloom larger than the one in 2014 that shut down the water supply to a half-million people in Toledo, and approaching the record-setting massive 2011 bloom. It’s worth noting that only a week or two before the formal forecast, NOAA was anticipating a relatively mild bloom, and the changed forecast was the result of one spring storm. Because these blooms are driven by diffuse phosphorus sources from the agriculturally dominated Maumee River watershed, this update is not surprising, and is a reminder of how much this issue is driven by these climate-induced increased storms. Continue reading “A Bad Year for Lake Erie? Climate, Algae, and Dead Zones”
As previously reported by EcoWatch, Tesla is building its Gigafactory to not only produce enough lithium-ion batteries to change the EV market and drive down prices, the company is also planning to storm the solar energy sector. In its partnership with SolarCity, Tesla is incorporating its batteries with SolarCity’s solar system to allow customers to store the excess energy created by the panels.
Tesla’s CEO makes it no secret that he’s planning on revolutionizing the energy grid. “Our goal here is to fundamentally change the way the world uses energy,” Musk told Bloomberg. “We’re talking at the terawatt scale. The goal is complete transformation of the entire energy infrastructure of the world.”
It appears that Big Oil and Gas are bracing for the clean energy revolution. Tesla’s very own Model S landed on the cover of Alberta Oil, an oil industry glossy, with the tagline “Hell on Wheels.”
The Tesla Model-S is one of the most beautiful and interesting automobiles to ever get made. It might also be one of the most dangerous. That’s because it’s managed to do something that no other electric vehicle has ever achieved: become an object of desire. Previous generations of electric cars, from the Nissan Leaf to GM’s famous (and infamous) EV-1, have tended to be high on cost and low on drivability. But the Model-S managed to bridge that divide, and as the reviewers at Car and Driver said in their review of the car, “it dispels conventional thinking about EVs – it’s a glimpse of the future.”
That future is at the core of The Powerhouse, a new book by Quartz journalist Steve LeVine that documents the race to build a better battery. It’s a race LeVine thinks could create a global battery market worth as much as $100 billion a year by 2030, and a global electric vehicle market that’s multiples of that. Given that most of those vehicles wouldn’t need much in the way of liquid fuels, that would have an obvious impact on the demand curve for oil – and the price upstream companies get for it. Creative disruption has already wracked most major industries, and it’s wrecked more than a few of them in the process. If it’s going to visit itself upon the fossil fuel industry, it’s almost certain to take the form of an electric vehicle. As LeVine’s book makes clear, that could happen a lot sooner than some people might want to think.
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Interview excerpt with Author Steve Levine:
AO: As you point out in your book, Exxon was the one that built the first rechargeable lithium ion battery. Could ExxonMobil or any of the other supermajors in the fossil fuel industry get into the battery business or did they miss the boat?
SL: They’re monitoring this very, very closely. Generally, the big incumbent companies tend to hold back and assume that when a new technology reaches the critical stage, it can swoop in and buy up anyone. I think that’s where they are. And it’s not just ExxonMobil that feels that way. Now, I don’t think you can say they’ve missed the boat. They think they can get on the boat. And they could – but it would be very expensive. The notion has been raised (I’ve raised it too) of Google buying Tesla. Google wants to market commercial autonomous vehicles, and it’s further ahead than anyone in the pure research into a self-driving vehicle. But it’s very expensive and it’s risky to actually make a vehicle. If it bought Tesla and then installed its autonomous technology into an already very cool car, that would be a powerful combination. But people who are a lot smarter than I am in the M&A field have said that it would cost $26 billion for Google to buy Tesla. It obviously has the cash in the bank, but it’s a big pile to spend. So could ExxonMobil or Chevron buy a battery company that made this big breakthrough? Yes. The question is, given shareholder value at that point, whether they would.
AO: It’s widely accepted that demand for oil in North America is in terminal decline, and that new demand growth will come from the developing world. Given the growing concerns about pollution and climate change there, not to mention the investments that China in particular has made in battery technology itself, is that a dangerous assumption to be making?
SL: I couldn’t have said that better. The oil and gas industry does have a lot on the line if it’s wrong. But what are you going to do? They’re under threat from so many quarters at the same time. This is why one of the arguments about what Saudi Arabia is doing is that it’s trying to monetize its biggest economic asset as fast as it can. A few months ago at a conference in Dubai, Ali Al-Naimi posed a rhetorical question: What if the Black Swan out there is that in 50 years demand for oil disappears? Demand for oil isn’t going to disappear. It’s going to be with us. It’s such a convenient and powerful and dense store of energy – even if every car on the planet was an electric car, for example, using fuel in jets is much more efficient than batteries will ever be. There’s going to be liquid fuel for a long time. But the demand for it could plunge. It could really plunge.
The race for renewable energy has passed a turning point. The world is now adding more capacity for renewable power each year than coal, natural gas, and oil combined. And there’s no going back.
The shift occurred in 2013, when the world added 143 gigawatts of renewable electricity capacity, compared with 141 gigawatts in new plants that burn fossil fuels, according to an analysis presented Tuesday at the Bloomberg New Energy Finance annual summit in New York. The shift will continue to accelerate, and by 2030 more than four times as much renewable capacity will be added.
“The electricity system is shifting to clean,” Michael Liebreich, founder of BNEF, said in his keynote address. “Despite the change in oil and gas prices there is going to be a substantial buildout of renewable energy that is likely to be an order of magnitude larger than the buildout of coal and gas.”
Instability and surplus are both occurring today, but surplus is proving more important. The world market is glutted with several million extra barrels per day (Mbbl/d), mainly from fracked U.S. oil and Canadian tar sands. The U.S. is now the world’s largest oil producer, with output at a 31-year high.
Late last year, the Saudis and allies announced they wouldn’t cut output to rebalance the market as they had in the past. Why should they? They’d simply give up market share to higher-cost producers. And the Saudis didn’t cause the imbalance; North Americans and other non-OPEC members did.
Until recently, only the Saudis (and to a lesser extent their Gulf allies) had big surplus production capacity, and at the world’s lowest cost. Saudi oil costs about one-tenth as much to extract as fracked U.S. oil or Alberta tar sands need to break even. Now an added reality is roiling markets: only the Saudis have enough cash to weather a prolonged price drop. While Iran, Iraq, Venezuela, Russia, and Nigeria are financially stressed, the Saudis claim 2.5 Mbbl/d spare oil capacity and $0.7–0.9 trillion of monetary reserves — enough to sustain several years of $50 oil and keep funding their $40-billion renewable-power program (meant to save oil for export).
In the movie ‘ZombieLand”, a key plot device and running joke is that, when killing the undead, it’s always best to “double tap” – make sure with an extra shot or bat to the noggin.
But movie zombies are wimps compared to climate zombies, which keep coming back to life within weeks every time they are put down.
Case in point, the current nonsense about, once again, a “new ice age” that the science denial crowd is flinging around, and mainstream media has shamefully parroted. Knowing that your crazy uncle will be sending you an email blast on this, I’ve put this together, once again.
In a nutshell, we are told that the sun may be in for a period of sunspot quiescence similar to that seen during the “Little Ice Age” of the 17th to 19th century.
Last week, in Llandudno, north Wales, the Royal Astronomical Society (RAS) held Cyfarfod Seryddiaeth Cenedlaethol 2015 — the “National Astronomy Meeting 2015″ (in case you don’t speak Welsh). An RAS news release had this startling headline, “Irregular Heartbeat Of The Sun Driven By Double Dynamo.”
Okay, that wasn’t the startling part. This was: “Predictions from the model suggest that solar activity will fall by 60 per cent during the 2030s to conditions last seen during the ‘mini ice age’ that began in 1645.”
Ah, but the word choice was confusing. We’re not going to have temperature “conditions” last seen during the Little Ice Age. If this one study does turn out to be right, we’d see solar conditions equivalent to the Maunder Minimum in the 2030s.
This won’t cause the world to enter a mini ice age — for three reasons:
The Little Ice Age turns out to have been quite little.
What cooling there was probably was driven more by volcanoes than the Maunder Minimum.
The warming effect from global greenhouse gases will overwhelm any reduction in solar forcing, even more so by the 2030s.
Dark Snow Project won funding for this season’s field work, although the announcement was held until today.
We are of course very excited by the vote of confidence that this represents in the Dark Snow mission, and it’s been a heck of a chore keeping quiet about it….!
When it comes to saving the planet, Leonardo DiCaprio is putting his money where his mouth is.
The actor’s foundation announced Tuesday it has awarded $15 million in grants to a host of environmental organizations, including Amazon Watch, Save the Elephants, Tree People and the World Wildlife Fund.
“The destruction of our planet continues at a pace we can no longer afford to ignore,” DiCaprio said in a statement. “We have a responsibility to innovate a future where the habitability of our planet does not come at the expense of those who inhabit it.”
The groups receiving the grants are “working to solve humankind’s greatest challenge,” he said.
The 40-year-old actor has been an active environmentalist throughout his career. He created the Leonardo DiCaprio Foundation in 1998, a year after “Titanic” came out, to fund efforts that protect the planet and its endangered species. It now supports such projects in more than 40 countries.
Last year, the United Nations named DiCaprio a UN Messenger of Peace with a special focus on climate change.
I hope you’ll take a look at this one. It might sneak up on you.
My first piece since getting back from Greenland – I interviewed Konrad Steffen at a scientific conference in Ilulissat in early june, and was so struck by his vivid style of communication, that I paired him with some equally colorful stories from Byrd Polar Center legend Lonnie Thompson, who I captured with John Cook in a historic series of interviews last December in San Francisco.
A hundred years from now, people will watch and scratch their heads.
New paper in Nature Geoscience, Jason Box and Alun Hubbard are co-authors.
Above, I got a quick rundown from Dr. Box, a few days ago, via (sorry) herky-jerky skype from Northern Iceland.
UPDATE: Below, I finally found the clip I was looking for, Jason talking to the camera in August of last year, in the midst of a 30 hour rain event that engulfed our camp in southwest Greenland.
While on the ice for Dark Snow 2014, we experienced a 30 hour precip event that featured high wind and horizontal driving rain. Afterward, ablation stakes on-site indicated that a very large amount of surface melting had taken place during the previous day and a half.
The new study finds that increased incidences of rain on the Greenland sheet may indeed be a contributing factor to more mass loss, by sending large volumes of warm water deep into the ice, now and even more so as the arctic continues to warm.
One of the key factors that accelerates Greenland mass loss is the so-called “Zwally effect”, wherein warm melt water “lubricates” the underbelly of the ice, where it meets bedrock, and cause acceleration toward the sea.
Scientists now know that this effect is moderated over time, as the glacial drainage system opens up during the summer melt and becomes more efficient, meaning more water delivered to the sea with less uplift to the overlying ice.
However, in later summer, that drainage system begins to close down as temperatures drop, – making it vulnerable to increasing numbers of late season warm and wet events, which can cause more upheaval at the base of the ice, and could be responsible for substantial increases in late season movement.
For eight days during late August and early September 2011, reanalysis data27 indicate that a cyclone (minimum surface pressure of 992hPa) centred on Baffin Bay off the west coast of Greenland advected warm, southwesterly airflow over the GIS, bringing extensive precipitation, which was especially heavy in southeast Greenland.
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We find that a concomitant flow response is evident in all available velocity records from these regions, including three major marine-terminating glaciers located up to 370km north of Kangerlussuaq: ice flow increased by 9% and 95% above the preceding week at GPS sites on Store Glacier30 (S11) and Sermeq Avannarleq6 (A20) respectively.
The study began after observing exceptionally warm wet weather in late summer 2011, causing huge amounts of melt at the ice surface. At this time of the year, there was no snow on the surface of the ice to absorb and act as a buffer for all this rain and melt water, which then moved very quickly through the ice sheet. Continue reading “More Rain Events Speed Melt on Greenland Ice Sheet”
Above, straight talk from Glaciologist Eric Rignot. And how does that make you feel?
Last week’s piece in Esquire on the existential dread of climate scientists has touched a nerve and gone viral. The takeoff point for the piece was last year’s tweet from Jason Box – As the article has gone viral with 60 thousand plus shares so far, its come up in a lot of pro and con comments among scientists I know and respect. A lot of them take exception to the article’s gloomy tone.
I mentioned the piece in a post last week, and pointed out that “..A lot of journos picked up on the “f’d”, but forgot the “if””.
I think both Jason and I believe that doomsaying is not useful or helpful – but there may be a lesson in communication here.
The Esquire piece quotes expert Jeffrey Kiehl – “You reach a point where you feel—and that’s the word, not think, feel—’I have to do something.’ ”
Getting in touch with that emotional energy is a key to the solution.
Reaction to climate change from Jessica Carilli Phd, a corals expert at University of Massachussetts. More here.
Ultimately, its a relief to have your Doctor get real and say, “It’s cancer, and its bad….” Doesn’t mean its all over, just frees up a lot of energy to stop worrying get to work. And might inspire you to finally quit smoking.
But the real success of the Richardson piece is the way he depicts the internal struggle Box deals with on a daily basis.
“But I—I—I’m not letting it get to me. If I spend my energy on despair, I won’t be thinking about opportunities to minimize the problem.”
His insistence on this point is very unconvincing, especially given the solemnity that shrouds him like a dark coat. But the most interesting part is the insistence itself—the desperate need not to be disturbed by something so disturbing.
In a moment of candor I hadn’t seen before, Box revealed to Richardson that he’s already preparing for the worst:
“In Denmark,” Box says, “we have the resilience, so I’m not that worried about my daughter’s livelihood going forward. But that doesn’t stop me from strategizing about how to safeguard her future—I’ve been looking at property in Greenland. As a possible bug-out scenario.”
Despite what the Esquire article says, Box, whose work I have previously covered on Slate, is a bit of an outlier among climate scientists. Most of them aren’t as willing to talk about the plausibility of nightmare scenarios. Still, his frankness on climate change is welcome.
Ultimately, what scientists are after is truth, even if that truth is personally devastating. For that reason, being a climate scientist is probably one of the most psychologically challenging jobs of the 21st century. As the Esquire article asks: How do you keep going when the end of human civilization is your day job?
I reached out to a few well-known climate scientists for their reactions to the article.
Two environmental groups filed a petition Thursday to put the Midwestern moose — which roams Minnesota, North Dakota, Michigan, and Wisconsin — on the endangered species list, citing climate change as a leading cause of population decline.
In the most dramatic instance, the moose population in Minnesota has dropped nearly 60 percent in the past decade, the Center for Biological Diversity and Honor the Earth’s petition states.
“Rising temperatures and decreasing snowfall put moose at increased risk of overheating, which leads to malnutrition and lowers their immune systems, while ticks and other pathogens thrive in a warming climate,” the groups said in a statement. The group did not find that the species has been subject to over-hunting. In fact, Minnesota canceled its moose hunt two years ago, and other states have already either banned it or limited hunting licenses.
If the petition is successful, the moose will be eligible for the protections offered by the Endangered Species Act, including habitat conservation and population recovery plans.
Moose are cold-weather creatures, and warmer winters along the northern United States are not only bad for them — they are good for moose parasites. Brainworm and winter ticks were responsible for nearly half the moose deaths recorded by the Minnesota Department of Natural Resources in the winter of 2013-2014.
Ticks have largely been blamed for the devastation of moose in the Northeast, as well. Warmer winters mean ticks aren’t killed off. In New Hampshire, moose bearing as many as 150,000 ticks were found to waste away and die, according to the Washington Post.
“It’s a pretty tough way to go,” Kristine Rines, a wildlife biologist and moose project leader for the state’s Fish and Game Department, told the paper. “There’s no question that climate plays a huge part in this. If we had winters that lasted as long as they used to, we might not be having this conversation.”
Climate Change is causing wild bumblebees to disappear from large swaths of their historical range, which could spell disaster for pollinating crops in Europe and North America, new research suggests.
Lake Erie – This year’s Lake Erie toxic algae forecast is for a bloom larger than the one in 2014 that shut down the water supply to a half-million people in Toledo, and approaching the record-setting massive 2011 bloom. It’s worth noting that only a week or two before the formal forecast, NOAA was anticipating a relatively mild bloom, and the changed forecast was the result of one spring storm. Because these blooms are driven by diffuse phosphorus sources from the agriculturally dominated Maumee River watershed, this update is not surprising, and is a reminder of how much this issue is driven by these climate-induced increased storms. Continue reading “A Bad Year for Lake Erie? Climate, Algae, and Dead Zones”
As the 