Paul Ziemkiewicz has been working to clean up streams for decades, but the discovery that acid mine drainage or AMD, holds the elements used in electronics has made that effort not only noble, but potentially profitable. The most valuable — neodymium, praseodymium, terbium and dysprosium — that make high-performance magnets and others that fire up flat screen televisions, smart phones and LED lights, can be found in the leftover gunk from coal mines that turns streams orange and sterile.
Ziemkiewicz, a self-described “water guy,” said acid mine pollution is the biggest water problem in the state. Deckers Creek is a good example of the generational trauma that West Virginia’s streams have endured.
Thirty years ago, the nearly 25-mile length of Deckers Creek ran red all the way from the headwaters to the Monongahela River. But work by the Friends of Decker’s Creek, WVDEP and WVU has restored most of the creek.
Now, the abandoned mine at Richard is the last big source of AMD. It dumps into the otherwise clean stream, where fish now glide beneath the surface — at least until they get to the pollution — and farther upstream from the mine, trout are making a comeback.
“It’s the last big insult to Deckers Creek,” Ziemkiewicz said of the plume of acid mine drainage that still flows into the larger stream. And it’s here where the concrete arch of a brand-new bridge and the hum of equipment signal that something is happening within sight of the cut stone entrance to the mine where generations of men crawled on their hands and knees to remove the coal from the 48-inch Freeport seam.
Abandoned in the 1950s, the huge expanse of the underground mine complex stretches from Dellslow, just east of Sabraton, to a hillside above Cheat Lake. As the sandstone formation above the mine entrance dips toward the west, so the does the coal seam below it.
Nearly extending to I-68, Ziemkiewicz said the mine below this point is flooded. The water looks clear as it rolls out of the large pipe adjacent to the entrance, but in a four-foot-deep concrete trench buttressed by blocks on each side, the iron oxides leave a thick, orange mass, warning of its toxicity.
Alun Hubbard is one of the hardest of hard core glaciologist, and a friend that I’ve spent some time with in Greenland over the years. As the pictures richly illustrate here, he knows ice, up close and personal.
I’m striding along the steep bank of a raging white-water torrent, and even though the canyon is only about the width of a highway, the river’s flow is greater than that of London’s Thames. The deafening roar and rumble of the cascading water is incredible – a humbling reminder of the raw power of nature.
As I round a corner, I am awestruck at a completely surreal sight: A gaping fissure has opened in the riverbed, and it is swallowing the water in a massive whirlpool, sending up huge spumes of spray. This might sound like a computer-generated scene from a blockbuster action movie – but it’s real.
A moulin is forming right in front of me on the Greenland ice sheet. Only this really shouldn’t be happening here – current scientific understanding doesn’t accommodate this reality.
As a glaciologist, I’ve spent 35 years investigating how meltwater affects the flow and stability of glaciers and ice sheets.
This gaping hole that’s opening up at the surface is merely the beginning of the meltwater’s journey through the guts of the ice sheet. As it funnels into moulins, it bores a complex network of tunnels through the ice sheet that extend many hundreds of meters down, all the way to the ice sheet bed.
When it reaches the bed, the meltwater decants into the ice sheet’s subglacial drainage system – much like an urban stormwater network, though one that is constantly evolving and backing up. It carries the meltwater to the ice margins and ultimately ends up in the ocean, with major consequences for the thermodynamics and flow of the overlying ice sheet.
Scenes like this and new research into the ice sheet’s mechanics are challenging traditional thinking about what happens inside and under ice sheets, where observations are extremely challenging yet have stark implications. They suggest that Earth’s remaining ice sheets in Greenland and Antarctica are far more vulnerable to climate warming than models predict, and that the ice sheets may be destabilizing from inside.
Carbon capture would appear to be delusional just based on the scale, which most folks don’t appreciate. For the moment, Wyoming’s Governor seems to be placating enemies on the right as he pushes green energy, but holds up carbon capture as a sop to the powerful coal industry.
“As our report shows, CCS has been around for decades, mostly serving the oil industry through enhanced oil recovery (EOR). Around 80–90% of all captured carbon in the gas sector is used for EOR, which itself leads to more CO2 emissions.”
About three-quarters of the CO2 captured annually by multi-billion-dollar CCUS facilities, roughly 28 million tonnes (MT) out of 39MT total capture capacity globally, is reinjected and sequestered in oil fields to push more oil out of the ground.
The International Energy Agency says annual carbon capture capacity needs to increase to 1.6 billion tonnes of CO2 by 2030 to align with a net zero by 2050 pathway.
“In addition to being wildly unrealistic as a climate solution, based on historical trajectories, much of this captured carbon will be used for enhanced oil recovery,” says Robertson.
In my travels and interviews with midwestern farmers over the last 6 years, I have been continually struck by the similarities of the stories I am hearing of harassment, intimidation, onerous FOIA requests, reputational slurs in local media, and even physical threats they and local governing boards have received when they sought to site clean energy on their land, and in their communities.
The similarities to accounts of scientists like Michael Mann, (above) Malcom Hughes, Ben Santer, James Hansen, and others are not a coincidence. As Mann wrote in his book The New Climate War , as the fossil fuel industry gradually lost the fight to obscure the science of climate change, they moved from climate denial to solutions denial.
A decade ago, one of the primary bad actors in the attacks on scientists, the “American Traditions Institute”, which had been leading attacks on scientists, began to focus on mobilizing right wing extremists against what the coal industry then recognized was an existential threat, the suddenly-economically-competitive wind industry, and the prospect that solar would soon follow. ATI has been rebranded as “E&E Legal” in recent years, and continued from the same playbook.
A network of ultra-conservative groups is ramping up an offensive on multiple fronts to turn the American public against wind farms and Barack Obama’s energy agenda.
A number of rightwing organisations, including Americans for Prosperity, which is funded by the billionaire Koch brothers, are attacking Obama for his support for solar and wind power. The American Legislative Exchange Council (Alec), which also has financial links to the Kochs, has drafted bills to overturn state laws promoting wind energy.
Park Williams is Professor of Geography at UCLA, and is lead author of an influential study of Western US paleoclimate showing a repetitive occurrence of long periods of aridity – termed Megadroughts.
The period we’re in now already qualifies as a medium strength Megadrought, the only variable is how long it continues. This drought is also super charged by more than a 1 degree C rise in global temperatures in the last century.
Longest mega drought pattern in the last 1200 years lasted a century. Just sayin..
The news has been full of Lamar Smith, Chair and Poohba of the House Science Committee fulminating about NOAA and his attempts to gangplank Tom Karl. In a recent op-ed in the Washington Times (fishrap whose time and sugar daddy has come and gone) Smith writes
NOAA often fails to consider all available data in its determinations and climate change reports to the public. A recent study by NOAA, published in the journal Science, made “adjustments” to historical temperature records and NOAA trumpeted the findings as refuting the nearly two-decade pause in global warming. The study’s authors claimed these adjustments were supposedly based on new data and new methodology. But the study failed to include satellite data.
Atmospheric satellite data, considered by many to be the most objective, has clearly showed no warming for the past two decades. This fact is well documented, but has been embarrassing for an administration determined to push through costly environmental regulations.
Now this is very popular on the SKS list of denial as the El Nino driven SURGE is pushing global temperatures through the roof. Certain folk, including Congressman Smith, invoke the UAH MSU global temperature record as their gold standard. Yet anybunny looking into the matter knows of the serial screwups and the teeth pulling needed to get any information about the majic Spencer and Christy use to transform microwave intensity to temperatures and how it is hard to figure out what and where is actually being measured.
All is not clear in Alabama.
A friend of the Rabett Run knows quite a bit about MSU units and how Roy Spencer and John Christy have danced with the data.
He wrote a letter to Lamar Smith.
Eli thought reproducing the letter would be a public service. It is a bit long for a tweet, and, indeed some additional comments have been added at the end.
————————————————–
Rep. Lamar Smith,
Chairman House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology
2321 Rayburn House Office Building
Washington, DC 20515
RE: your Op-Ed 26 November in The Washington Times
Chairman Smith:
I read your op-ed with considerable interest. I’m a retired engineer whose work experience included several years in satellite design. As I read your article, my impression was that you do not understand the so-called “satellite temperature” data developed by Roy Spencer and John Christy of UAH. Allow me to provide some information.
Pope Francis’ visit to the US catalyzed the growing sense across the country, and across the globe, that climate change is, above all, a moral issue.
More and more scientists have realized that speaking to this moral dimension is far more persuasive than speaking the language of science and fact, as compelling as those are. Most people simply respond better to an issue that is framed in moral terms.
The emerging story of what Exxon knew, and when they knew it, shows that the differences have never really been about the science questions – even the major oil companies knew the basic science truths 4 decades ago. They simply made a moral decision that the lives of the next ten thousand generations of human beings were not as important as their own profits, and we are now witnessing the early impacts of that decision.
The blogger who won’t even tell us his real name, even though it is now open source, Steven Goddard, has been cited as an authority on climate.
Kind of like citing Orly Taitz as an authority on Kenyan Birth certificates. Did I mention “Goddard” is a birther, too? (not unusual in denierville – see below)
Fox News is reviving accusations that NASA’s peer-reviewed adjustments to temperature data are an attempt to “fak[e]” global warming, a claim that even a climate “skeptic” threw cold water on.
Tony Heller, a birthedwho criticizes climate science under the pseudonym “Steven Goddard,” wrote a blog post that claimed “NASA cooled 1934 and warmed 1998, to make 1998 the hottest year in US history instead of 1934.” After the Drudge Report promoted a report of this allegation by the conservative British newspaper The Telegraph, conservative media from Breitbart to The Washington Times claimed the data was “fabricated” or “faked.” On June 24, Fox & Friends picked it up, claiming that “the U.S. has actually been cooling since the 1930s” but scientists had “faked the numbers”.
However, the libertarian magazine Reason noted that even climate “skeptic” blogger Anthony Watts said that Goddard made “major errors in his analysis” and criticized the implication that “numbers are being plucked out of thin air in a nefarious way.”
—
I profiled Anthony a few years back for his own craziness in regard to alleged plots to distort the temp records.
Can we all agree that, if your denialist nuttery is such that even Anthony Watts can’t back you – you, my friend, are a denialist nut.
Some segments of the Internet are abuzz with the claim by climate change skeptic Steven Goddard (Tony Heller) over at his Real Science blog that NASA/NOAA have been jiggering the numbers so that they can claim that warmest years in the continental United States occurred recently, not back in the 1930s. Folks, please watch out for confirmation bias.
Via email, I asked Anthony Watts, proprietor of WattsUpWithThat, what he thinks of Goddard’s claims. He responded…
…while it is true that NOAA does a tremendous amount of adjustment to the surface temperature record, the word “fabrication” implies that numbers are being plucked out of thin air in a nefarious way when it isn’t exactly the case.
“Goddard” is wrong is his assertions of fabrication, but the fact is that NCDC isn’t paying attention to small details, and the entire process from B91’s to CONUS creates an inflated warming signal. We published a preliminary paper two years ago on this which you can read here: http://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/07/29/press-release-2/
About half the warming in the USA is due to adjustments. We’ received a lot of criticism for that paper, and we’ve spent two years reworking it and dealing with those criticisms. Our results are unchanged and will be published soon.
In Reykjavik last month, I had the chance to interview Mike Mann and Stefan Rahmstorf at length. Both are former IPCC authors, Mann is Professor of Geosciences at Penn State U, where he is Director of the Earth System Science Center, and is well known for his paleo-temperature reconstruction, the famous “Hockey Stick” graph.
I was able to include a lot of footage shot with the help of Phil Coates, an actual professional with a camera, meaning – good lighting, and good sound. The difference in quality is shocking, in a good way. Special thanks is also due to Gudni Elisson, organizer of the Earth 101 event which brought us all together in Iceland.
Also, this is the first of what I hope will be many videos produced with support from the University of Lethbridge, Alberta, and the Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada.
For anyone that wants a quick, credible intro to what’s in the new report – this should get them started.
After watching several videos of the breakup of Beaufort sea Ice during the dead of winter, I decided to contact a leading ice expert, Walt Meier of the National Snow and Ice Data Center, for analysis and perspective. I mixed his comments in with the increasingly-on-the-same-page warnings from his fellow scientists around the country.
I’ll post our full conversation later in the week.
I profiled Anthony a few years back for his own craziness in regard to alleged plots to distort the temp records.