Month: September 2016

More weirdness.  In a rational world, this would lead Cable interviewers to ask about climate change, but I expect they’ll keep focused on  emails and Pneumonia.  Once again, it may be up to the “climate people” to raise the obvious.

Mother Jones:

Former CIA Director R. James Woolsey has signed on as a senior adviser to Donald Trump—even though the two men’s views are oceans apart on an issue very close to Woolsey’s heart: climate change.

For years, the former CIA director has been an advocate for cleaner energy and has called for addressing global warming from a national security perspective. He argues that our current energy sources put us at “the whims of OPEC’s despots” and make us more vulnerable to terrorist attacks. He wants the United States to shift from its reliance on coal and oil to renewables and natural gas. “There’s enough consensus that human-generated global warming gas emissions are beginning to have an effect,” he said in an interview in 2010. “Next year might be cooler than this year but that doesn’t mean the trend isn’t there.” (Indeed, the world keeps getting warmer.)

In 2013, Woolsey was one of dozens of national security experts who signed a statement declaring that climate change represents a “serious threat to American national security interests.” The “potential consequences are undeniable, and the cost of inaction, paid for in lives and valuable US resources, will be staggering,” read the statement. “Washington must lead on this issue now.”

https://vimeo.com/123439824

Trump, on the other hand, doesn’t believe in global warming, having called it a Chinese hoax. He’s even pointed to cold winter weather in an attempt to debunk this “GLOBAL WARMING bullshit.” Trump wants to scrap President Barack Obama’s Clean Power Plan and back out of the Paris climate accord. Rather than move toward renewable energy, he wants to make the United States energy independent by resuscitating the coal industry.

Reuters:

“Mr. Trump’s commitment to reversing the harmful defense budget cuts signed into law by the current administration, while acknowledging the need for debt reduction, is an essential step toward reinstating the United States’ primacy in the conventional and digital battlespace,” Woolsey said.

Continue reading “Has Trump Hired a Climate Hawk?”

Observers asking if the sea ice has reached its annual minimum – which would be slightly earlier than usual. More info needed. Stay tuned.

In any case, I’ll be working on a video explaining why this year was so interesting.

 

GreenTechMedia:

The solar industry alone has created one out of every 80 jobs in the United States since the Great Recession. When including wind, LED lighting, and other clean energy categories, that number could be close to one in 33.

For the solar industry, a majority of these new employment opportunities are blue-collar construction and manufacturing jobs that pay an average of $21 per hour — far higher than the $16 per hour non-union manufacturing jobs that South Carolina was touting later in that episode.
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In fact, the solar industry has hired more veterans than anyone else, retrained coal workers, and even provided a soft landing for oil and gas workers who have lost their jobs. The vast majority of solar and wind workers are trained in less than six months because their previous work experience and training is completely transferrable.

According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, “wind technician” is the fastest-growing job category — expanding twice as much as the next-fastest growing job, occupational therapy assistant.

In 2015, the manufacturing arms of the solar and wind industries employed tens of thousands of people making pieces and parts in the United States. This is up by 20,000 people over 2014. In fact, this number is expected to continue to grow at that pace for the next five years.

Los Angeles Times:

Between 2002 and 2015, a major expansion of the renewable energy industry created  25,500 blue-collar job-years — some 53 million hours of construction work, according to the study by the Don Vial Center on the Green Economy at UC Berkeley.

The greatest job gains were “in counties such as Kern, San Bernardino, Riverside and Imperial, where unemployment rates are far above the state average and income is far below average,” the study concluded.

The effort is producing many middle-class jobs because almost all the large-scale renewable projects are built under project labor agreements, which provide union pay rates, health insurance and pension programs, said Betony Jones, associate chair of the center.

Sacramento Bee:

For years, Elohim Cofield hopped from job to job without landing a stable career that supported him and his family.

His luck changed two years ago when he joined an apprentice program that promises steady work at more than $40 an hour installing solar panels and other energy infrastructure.

Continue reading “Renewable Energy a Jobs Creation Powerhouse”

Yale Environment 360:

Two decades ago, while researching her doctoral thesis, ecologist Suzanne Simard discovered that trees communicate their needs and send each other nutrients via a network of latticed fungi buried in the soil – in other words, she found, they “talk” to each other. Since then, Simard, now at the University of British Columbia, has pioneered further research into how trees converse, including how these fungal filigrees help trees send warning signals about environmental change, search for kin, and transfer their nutrients to neighboring plants before they die.

By using phrases like “forest wisdom” and “mother trees” when she speaks about this elaborate system, which she compares to neural networks in human brains, Simard’s work has helped change how scientists define interactions between plants. “A forest is a cooperative system,” she said in an interview with Yale Environment 360. “To me, using the language of ‘communication’ made more sense because we were looking at not just resource transfers, but things like defense signaling and kin recognition signaling. We as human beings can relate to this better. If we can relate to it, then we’re going to care about it more. If we care about it more, then we’re going to do a better job of stewarding our landscapes.”

Yale Environment 360: Not all PhD theses are published in the journal Nature. But back in 1997, part of yours was. You used radioactive isotopes of carbon to determine that paper birch and Douglas fir trees were using an underground network to interact with each other. Tell me about these interactions.

Suzanne Simard: All trees all over the world, including paper birch and Douglas fir, form a symbiotic association with below-ground fungi. These are fungi that are beneficial to the plants and through this association, the fungus, which can’t photosynthesize of course, explores the soil. Basically, it sends mycelium, or threads, all through the soil, picks up nutrients and water, especially phosphorous and nitrogen, brings it back to the plant, and exchanges those nutrients and water for photosynthate [a sugar or other substance made by photosynthesis] from the plant. The plant is fixing carbon and then trading it for the nutrients that it needs for its metabolism. It works out for both of them.

It’s this network, sort of like a below-ground pipeline, that connects one tree root system to another tree root system, so that nutrients and carbon and water can exchange between the trees. In a natural forest of British Columbia, paper birch and Douglas fir grow together in early successional forest communities. They compete with each other, but our work shows that they also cooperate with each other by sending nutrients and carbon back and forth through their mycorrhizal networks.

Continue reading “The Weekend Wonk: How Trees Talk to Each Other”

Bumper sticker  foreign/energy policy.

Washington Post:

“To ‘take the oil’ would require the United States to occupy Iraq.  We tried that after 2003 with something approaching 200,000 troops and it did not work,” said Andrew Bacevich, a retired colonel and professor of history and international relations at Boston University.  “What would effective occupation actually require?  A minimum of a half-million troops, perhaps more.”

Bacevich added, “Presumably, Trump would have them stay until the oil runs out, which would entail an occupation running into decades. The total cost?  Probably more than the value of the oil itself.  The whole idea is beyond goofy.”

The troops tasked with taking the oil would also be in even greater danger than before because the seizure of the oil could ignite broader opposition across all Iraqi political groups.

“You could probably secure the area if you’re willing to have a forever war and 19-year-old Americans sniped at by Iraqis,” said Ollivant,  a former National Security Council director on Iraq for Presidents Bush and Obama.

 

Description:

In an exclusive interview on his legacy, President Obama speaks to The Times’s Mark Landler and Coral Davenport on climate change while visiting Marine Corps Base Hawaii.

NYTimes:

Campaigning against Mitt Romney in 2012, he barely mentioned climate change.

But soon after Election Day, Mr. Obama interrupted a broad discussion with historians about the country’s challenges with a surprising assertion. Douglas Brinkley, a historian who attended the session, recalled, “Out of nowhere, he said, ‘If we don’t do anything on the climate issue, all bets are off.’”
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Mr. Obama, who understood that a legislative push would be fruitless, told his advisers to figure out how to enact deep emissions cuts without Congress. They found a way through the Clean Air Act of 1970, which gives the Environmental Protection Agency the authority to issue regulations on dangerous pollutants.

In 2014, Mr. Obama unveiled the first draft of what would become the Clean Power Plan: a set of Clean Air Act rules that could lead to the closing of hundreds of coal-fired power plants.

The move enraged critics, including Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the majority leader, whose state relies heavily on coal.

Continue reading “Obama on “Terrifying” Climate Threat”

Today's view of the North Pole (#MODIS, Terra) is also really showing the sea ice rubble… pic.twitter.com/rE9BZhi10n

— Zack Labe (@ZLabe) September 8, 2016

Probably no arctic sea ice low extent record this year, but satellites show ice reduced to ragged mess.

After a summer of high profile extreme weather events across the US, and the world, weather experts have been hearing one question more than any other – “Is this weather, or climate change?”

When I interviewed TV weathercasters in June, I asked the question myself. Here, TV Met Dan Satterfield answers, with help from leading Atmospheric and ocean scientists.

Climate.gov:

..heavy downpours along the Gulf Coast of the United States have increased since the middle of the last century. That trend is consistent with what climate experts have predicted would happen as greenhouse gases warmed the planet: more water vapor in the air to fuel extremely heavy rain.

By itself, that general connection isn’t conclusive evidence that global warming had a hand in the mid-August downpour in Louisiana. Now, however, a preliminary analysis of the event led by climate scientists at NOAA’s Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory found that warming due to greenhouse gases has made—conservatively—events like the one in August at least 40% more likely and 10% more intense.

Because the devastating flooding occurred due to the rainfall over the entire region, the scientists drew a geographical box around the part of the Gulf Coast impacted by the event, and studied the three-day rainfall totals in the region for the period from August 12-14. Over this region, observations indicate that rainfall amounts observed during the event usually happen somewhere in the region about once every 30 years. At any local site, the extreme rainfall totals were closer to 1-in-500 year events.

Continue reading “New Video: Weather? or Climate Change?”

Michigan’s “Thumb” area is deeply conservative, and the 10th Congressional District (see map) is listed as a safe Republican stronghold. The Thumb is also home to a high concentration of Michigan’s wind turbines, as the flat farmland, bounded by Saginaw Bay and Lake Huron, is swept by steady winds throughout the year.
What do these folks think of Wind energy?

American Wind Energy Association:

Michigan is a wind manufacturing heavyweight. 26 factories employ well-paid workers and build wind turbine parts and supplies, which are delivered to U.S. wind farms across the region. Apparently Michigan voters have noticed that the added benefit of growing wind power in the U.S. means good news for the Michigan economy. A poll released by American Wind Action just last week finds support for wind among 81 percent of Michigan’s Tenth Congressional District. That includes broad support across party lines, with at least three-quarters of Republicans, Independents and Democrats having a favorable impression of wind.

Iowa obtained nearly one-third, 31 percent, of its electricity from wind energy last  year. And Iowa’s Third District ranks in the top 20 U.S. Congressional districts for the most wind capacity, a new drought-resistant cash crop for the state’s farmers. The Third District also happens to be the home to the tallest operating U.S. wind turbine in the country. All of this simply means, out of the more than $11 billion in capital investment that wind power has attracted to local economies in Iowa so far, the Third District has seen some great benefits. That’s why it’s not surprising that a recent poll found 91 percent of respondents in that District support wind energy.
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All of this data continues support strong polling results found elsewhere this year. Lazard, a highly reputable financial advisory and asset management firm, found bipartisan support for clean energy policies has increased among U.S. voters, with 91 percent of likely voters and over 80 percent of self-described conservatives supporting wind energy growth. According to North American Windpower, 70 percent of likely voters in 2016 support legislation that requires energy companies to generate 15 percent of their power from alternative energy sources over the next several years, up from 60 percent of voters in 2012.

Below, David Jenkins, president, Conservatives for Responsible Stewardship in the Knoxville News-Sentinel.

As a long-time conservative who loves wildlife, enjoys the great outdoors and strongly advocates for responsible environmental stewardship, I believe some of your readers aren’t being told about the significant economic and environmental benefits of using more wind energy to power our homes and our lives.

Studies show that wind energy has the lowest impact on wildlife and its habitat of any energy source. It emits no air or water pollution, requires no fuel, uses virtually no water, creates no hazardous waste, and a typical wind project repays its carbon footprint in six months or less, providing zero-emission energy and reducing the need to burn fossil fuels.

Continue reading “Unstoppable. The More People see Wind Energy, the More they Like it”

Make no mistake, modern presidential campaigns like Hillary Clinton’s, are data driven, and respond to public pressure and opinion.  They seek out hot button issues to get ahead of parades and movements.

They also are intensely aware of targeting key constituencies in electorally critical areas.
So it’s of more than a little interest that Hillary Clinton came out of the labor day weekend – traditional “beginning” of the home stretch Presidential campaign, in the crucial state of Florida, with a strong message on sea level rise and climate change.

Although Clinton has multiple electoral college pathways to victory in this year’s election, and theoretically could win without a victory in  Florida – for her Republican opponent, or any republican in any year, Florida is an absolutely critical must-win to take the Presidency.

The speech tells us that climate change is now an issue to put on the front burner in this key state.  The physics of this tidal shift in public opinion will continue to ratchet the pressure on climate-denying Republicans.