Month: April 2018

If you saw my cat-scan of an anti-wind fake news release, here – you get it that the fossil industry will go to any lengths to hang on to it’s business for a few more fleeting years, even if it means killing our children’s hopes for a livable planet.

Sad thing is, they are investing in disinformation and lies that are further misinforming a lot of well meaning people, who are so far down the chain that they have no idea who is pulling their strings.
They are going down.

Paul Krugman in the New York Times:

Not that long ago, calls for a move to wind and solar power were widely perceived as impractical if not hippie-dippy silly. Some of that contempt lingers; my sense is that many politicians and some businesspeople still think of renewable energy as marginal, still imagine that real men burn stuff and serious people focus on good old-fashioned fossil fuels.

But the truth is nearly the opposite, certainly when it comes to electricity generation. Believers in the primacy of fossil fuels, coal in particular, are now technological dead-enders; they, not foolish leftists, are our modern Luddites. Unfortunately, they can still do a lot of damage.

About the technology: As recently as 2010, it still consistently cost more to generate electricity from sun and wind than from fossil fuels. But that gap has already been eliminated, and this is just the beginning. Widespread use of renewable energy is still a new thing, which means that even without major technological breakthroughs we can expect to see big further cost reductions as industries move “down the learning curve” — that is, find better and cheaper ways to operate as they accumulate experience.

Recently David Roberts at Vox.com offered a very good example: wind turbines. Windmills have been around for more than a thousand years, and they’ve been used to generate electricity since the late 19th century. But making turbines really efficient requires making them very big and tall — tall enough to exploit the faster, steadier winds that blow at higher altitudes.

And that’s what businesses are learning to do, via a series of incremental improvements — better design, better materials, better locations (offshore is where it’s at). So what we’ll be seeing in a few years will be 850-foot turbines that totally outcompete fossil fuels on cost.

To paraphrase the science-fiction writer William Gibson, the renewable energy future is already pretty much here; it’s just not very evenly distributed.

Continue reading “Big Fossil Trying to Hold Back Renewable Tide”

Earth Day has come and gone, and it’s time to kick off the 2018 Dark Snow Project Field season fund raiser.

The video highlights the ways researchers and communicators have used the Dark Snow effort as a platform to publish research in major journals, and create new climate awareness initiatives in the media.

Scientists Marek Stibal and Jonathan Ryan both published significant research in 2017, shedding light on aspects of the increasing Greenland melt, and contribution to sea level rise.

Also in 2017, Rolling Stone’s Jeff Goodell, who flew with the Dark Snow team on a brain-boggling ride along the edge of the world’s fastest moving ice stream in 2013, published a landmark international best-selling book on the global impacts of sea level rise – The Water Will Come.

“I think about that trip to Greenland a lot.” says Goodell who described the trip, the team and the insights gained at length in the book, and explains in the video the expanded perspective  lasting impact of the Dark Snow experience.

Scientific American:

Algae growth as a result of climate change is making the Greenland ice sheet, a primary contributor to sea-level rise, melt faster, according to a new study.

Algae grows naturally on the ice sheet, but it thrives under a warmer climate. It makes the Greenland ice sheet, which is the second-largest ice sheet on Earth, less reflective of the sun, which means the ice absorbs more of the sun’s heat. This, in turn, drives more rapid melting, according to the paper published yesterday in Geophysical Research Letters.

Researchers found that algae accounts for about 5 to 10 percent of total ice sheet melt each summer. That means algae plays a greater role in melting than previously believed, said Marek Stibal, a cryosphere ecologist at Charles University in the Czech Republic and one of the lead authors of the new study.

“As the climate warms, the area that the algae can grow in will expand, so they’ll colonize more of the ice sheet,” he said in a statement. “Additionally, the growing season will lengthen, so the contribution of algae to melting of the ice will probably increase over time.”

Continue reading “Dark Snow Project 2018 Field Season”

Had never heard this.

Good climate comms.

FastCompany:

Last March, AB InBev announced every single bottle of beer it brews will be done with renewable energy by 2025. The company is making progress on that pledge and by this spring, every bottle of Budweiser brewed in the U.S. will be made with renewable electricity. This week the brand is unveiling a new symbol it will be putting on each bottle produced with 100% renewable energy.

AB InBev is using Budweiser, its flagship brand and the globe’s biggest international beer brand, to drive its renewable energy program, both internally and in its goal to encourage more companies to sign on to similar goals and adopt the new emblem. Every day around the world, 41 million Budweisers are sold, and the company says switching to renewable electricity in Bud brewing operations is the equivalent of taking 48,000 cars off the road every year.

An Anti Wind group sent out an expensive glossy mailer to thousands of households in my Mid-Michigan area.

The Mailer depicts massive wind turbines menacing a local farm. So massive, it made me curious to find out if the picture was indeed real. You can already guess the answer, but you might like to know how it was done.

For a dose of corrective reality, see my recent video with actual experts and real information.

Earth Family Alpha:

The Texas Chronicle
April 22, 2038
by Max Stamp

Few took notice of a story back in 2016 when a team of Japanese scientists sifting through plastic waste found bacteria capable of breaking down and “eating” one of the world’s most popular plastics ― polyethylene terephthalate, or PET. It was hailed as a potential breakthrough at the time.

But in a new twist, British and American scientists have announced that while studying this bacteria, they accidentally created a mutant enzymethat’s even more efficient at breaking down plastic bottles.

The discovery came as a team of scientists from the University of Portsmouth in the U.K. and the National Renewable Energy Laboratory in the U.S. examined an enzyme produced by the Japanese bacteria to find out more about its structure. By shining intense beams of X-rays on it, 10 billion times brighter than the sun, they were able to see individual atoms. Manipulating the structure to better understand how it worked, they accidentally engineered the mutant enzyme.

It was seen as a great opportunity to begin to break down the swirling bogs of bottles and plastic sacks that were beginning to become problematic in our oceans and waterways.

So in the spring of 2022, with great fanfare, implementation of the Clean Oceans Project began.  A large fleet of tankers moved into south Pacific where a large accumulation of pollution had grown to several thousand square miles.  Tanker ships from all over the world participated in the global effort to help eliminate one of the greatest legacies of over a hundred years of affordable and plentiful oil supplies.

Millions of tons of the now mutated bacteria was releases by Dow, BASF, and even ExxonMobil. Virtually every shipper of global oil supplies participated in the effort to clean our oceans from our reckless indifferencetowards them.  Within a few months, the results were encouraging.  The mass of bottles and plastics sacks began to decompose at a rapid rate and then fall deep into the ocean where it would further decompose and become relatively harmless to ocean marine systems.

The combined scientific panel at the United Nations (IGPOO) published a preliminary report declaring the initiative a scientific success and recommended that other trouble spots in the Indian Ocean be treated with the same protocols.

The world scientific community was almost giddy with success.

Then late in 2026, an odd report came out of Saudi Arabia. Even though Saudi reserve were still quite strong, production from the Kingdom dropped about 10% from 9 million bpd to a little over 8 mbpd.

It seemed that some of their older wells and especially the mighty Garwararea had seen its fine quality crude  become more tarlike and more difficult to pump and to refine. One area was closed off completely and was reportedly quarantined.

The next year, production in the Saudi oil fields again declined but they also declined in Azerbaijan. Production in Qater was off.  Then in 2028, the price of Brent crude  ticked up from 90.00 dollars a barrel to $120.  This was the highest price seen in the markets since the 2014 oil price collapse.

The next year prices increased again to $140.00. As they would for the next 10 years, closing this year at $240.00.

It seems that the over 300 tankers used in the UN’s Clean Ocean Projectwent back to work moving oil from one point on earth to next.  But as the they took in sea water for ballast after delivering the jacked up bacteria to the south Pacific experimental operation and the other sites, the ships discharged that bacteria tainted water into the waterways of every major oil channel on earth, thus infecting the earth’s oil producing facilities with uncanny epidemiological precision. Continue reading “A Hopeful Earth Day Fable”

Scientific American:

Two decades ago this week a pair of colleagues and I published the original “hockey stick” graph in Nature, which happened to coincide with the Earth Day 1998 observances. The graph showed Earth’s temperature, relatively stable for 500 years, had spiked upward during the 20th century. A year later we would extend the graph back in time to A.D. 1000, demonstrating this rise was unprecedented over at least the past millennium—as far back as we could go with the data we had.

Although I didn’t realize it at the time, publishing the hockey stick would change my life in a fundamental way. I was thrust suddenly into the spotlight. Nearly every major newspaper and television news networkcovered our study. The widespread attention was exhilarating, if not intimidating for a science nerd with little or no experience—or frankly, inclination at the time—in communicating with the public.

Nothing in my training as a scientist could have prepared me for the very public battles I would soon face. The hockey stick told a simple story: There is something unprecedented about the warming we are experiencing today and, by implication, it has something to do with us and our profligate burning of fossil fuels. The story was a threat to companies that profited from fossil fuels, and government officials doing their bidding, all of whom opposed efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. As the vulnerable junior first author of the article (I was a postdoctoral researcher), I found myself in the crosshairs of industry-funded attack dogs looking to discredit the iconic symbol of the human impact on our climate…by discrediting me personally.

Continue reading “Hockey Stick: Unbroken at 20”

It’s 4/20.

Description:

From Steppenwolf’s LP, simply entitled The Second, “Don’t Step On The Grass, Sam” is the best of the deep tracks on the album and one of the major underground radio songs of 1968 and 1969.

And it could get worse if we don’t wise up fast.

MIT News:

A new study by three MIT scholars has found that false news spreads more rapidly on the social network Twitter than real news does — and by a substantial margin.

“We found that falsehood diffuses significantly farther, faster, deeper, and more broadly than the truth, in all categories of information, and in many cases by an order of magnitude,” says Sinan Aral, a professor at the MIT Sloan School of Management and co-author of a new paper detailing the findings.

“These findings shed new light on fundamental aspects of our online communication ecosystem,” says Deb Roy, an associate professor of media arts and sciences at the MIT Media Lab and director of the Media Lab’s Laboratory for Social Machines (LSM), who is also a co-author of the study. Roy adds that the researchers were “somewhere between surprised and stunned” at the different trajectories of true and false news on Twitter.

Moreover, the scholars found, the spread of false information is essentially not due to bots that are programmed to disseminate inaccurate stories. Instead, false news speeds faster around Twitter due to people retweeting inaccurate news items.

“When we removed all of the bots in our dataset, [the] differences between the spread of false and true news stood,”says Soroush Vosoughi, a co-author of the new paper and a postdoc at LSM whose PhD research helped give rise to the current study.

The study provides a variety of ways of quantifying this phenomenon: For instance,  false news stories are 70 percent more likely to be retweeted than true stories are. It also takes true stories about six times as long to reach 1,500 people as it does for false stories to reach the same number of people. When it comes to Twitter’s “cascades,” or unbroken retweet chains, falsehoods reach a cascade depth of 10 about 20 times faster than facts. And falsehoods are retweeted by unique users more broadly than true statements at every depth of cascade.

Continue reading “In Case you Wondered – Yes, the Internet Selects for Bullshit”