It’s time for us all – whether we’re leaders in Washington, members of the media, scientists, academics, environmentalists or utility industry executives – to stop acting like those who ignore the crisis or deny it exists entirely have a valid point of view. They don’t.
To provide a perspective as to Senator Reid’s comments, this paragraph provides the basis for the press release‘s title:
Senator Reid took the opportunity to lay out the importance of a clean-energy future and to lay out who is standing in opposition to seizing the opportunities clean energy presents and the costs to all of us (and all the U.S.) of their fossil-foolish concepts.
Perhaps most importantly, in the face of mounting climate disruption around the world, Senator Reid — the Senate Majority Leader — presented what might be the best commentary on climate change ever seen from a senior American politician.
What follows after the fold is the majority of his comments … which are worth the read.
There should be no one in this room who doubts the importance of reducing our reliance on fossil fuels – not only because it’s good for the environment, but because it’s good for the economy and good for national security.
We’ve already seen how incentives, funding and public-private partnerships have spurred job creation and innovation in this critical sector. This has been a ray of sunshine during the Great Recession.
It is easy to see the logic, the urgency and the opportunity of a clean energy revolution. That is why President Obama has fought hard to advance the policies that will reduce our reliance on oil and other fossil fuels, increase our production of clean energy and create good-paying jobs that can never be outsourced.
But his administration has waged an up-hill battle against moneyed special interests and their allies in Congress, who are invested in maintaining their sweetheart relationship with coal and oil companies.
As hard as it is to comprehend, there are still members of Congress resisting clean energy’s American success story. And sadly they’re doing their best to send clean energy industries and jobs overseas, and hindering the revolution in the process.
Twenty-five years ago, President George H.W. Bush promised to use the “White House effect” to combat the “greenhouse effect.” Yet a quarter century later, too many elected officials in Washington are still calling climate change a liberal hoax. They falsely claim scientists are still debating whether carbon pollution is warming the planet.
Of course, if those skeptics had taken a stroll along the Potomac River on a 70-degree day this February, they would have seen cherry trees blossoming earlier than at any time since they were planted 100 years ago. Washington experienced its warmest spring since record keeping began in 1895.
And back in the skeptics’ home states, the harbingers of a changing climate are just as clear as those delicate February blossoms – and infinitely more perilous.
This year alone, the United States has seen unparalleled extreme weather events – events scientists say are exactly what is expected as the earth’s climate changes.
The Midwest is experiencing its most crushing drought in more than half a century – or maybe ever. Presently, disasters have been declared in the majority of U.S. counties. More than half the country is experiencing drought, and seventy-five percent of the nation is abnormally dry this year.
Corn crops are withering and livestock are dying – or going to slaughter early – as heat waves parch America’s breadbasket, breaking records set during the Woody Guthrie Dust Bowl years.
Now ravaging wildfires have replaced the dust storms of the 1930’s. Devastating fires have swept New Mexico, Idaho, Colorado, Nevada and other parts of the Mountain West, destroying hundreds of homes and burning millions of trees. These fires are fed in part by vast areas of dead forest ravaged by beetles and other pests that now survive through warmer winters.
On the East Coast, extreme thunderstorms and high winds called “derechos” – literally meaning straight-line storms – have eliminated power for 4.3 million customers in 10 states in the mid-Atlantic region. One 38-year veteran of the utility industry told the New York Times this: “We’ve got the ‘storm of the century’ every year now.” At the height of this storm – while the power was out and the air conditioning wasn’t working – the East Coast experienced record high temperatures.
Down south, the Mississippi River is nearly dry in various places, with shipping barges operating in only 5 feet of water. Just Friday, barges were grounded because the water level was so low. And New Orleans’ water supply is now being threatened by salt water moving up the Mississippi due to extremely low water.
But while record drought has struck many parts of the United States, torrential rains have poured down in others. In June, the fourth tropical storm of the hurricane season – a season which typically begins in the fall – dropped 20 inches of rain on Florida.
And our nation’s infrastructure is literally falling apart because it wasn’t designed to withstand these conditions. Runways are melting, trapping planes. Train tracks are bending, derailing subways. Highways are cracking, buckling and breaking open. The water used to cool power plants – including nuclear power plants – has either run dry or reached dangerously high temperatures.
And that’s just in the United States – just through the month of July.
Arctic sea ice is also at its lowest point in recorded history.
This month, the massive ice sheet atop Greenland experienced sudden and almost uniform melting – a phenomenon not seen in the modern age.
This spring, rain fell unexpectedly in Mecca despite 109-degree temperatures. It was the hottest downpour in the planet’s recorded history.
The Amazon River Basin has experienced super-flooding – reaching record high levels due to long summer rains and greater than normal glacial melting.
Massive forest fires have swept Siberia.
Monsoons in Bangladesh left hundreds dead and nearly 7 million people homeless.
And last week more than 600 million people in India were without power. Late monsoons and record temperatures increased demand for electricity to irrigate crops and air condition homes, overloading the fragile power grid and causing the blackout.
Scientists say this is genesis – the beginning. The more extreme climate change gets, the more extreme the weather will get. In the words of one respected climate scientist: “This is what global warming looks like.”
Dozens of new reports from scientists around the globe link extreme weather to climate change. Not every flood or drought can be attributed to human-induced transformation of our planet’s weather patterns. But scientists report that these extreme events are dozens of times more likely because of those changes.
The seriousness of this problem is not lost on your average American. A large majority of people finally believe climate change is real, and that it is the cause of extreme weather. Yet despite having overwhelming evidence and public opinion on our side, deniers still exist, fueled and funded by dirty energy profits.
These people aren’t just on the other side of this debate. They’re on the other side of reality.
It’s time for us all – whether we’re leaders in Washington, members of the media, scientists, academics, environmentalists or utility industry executives – to stop acting like those who ignore the crisis or deny it exists entirely have a valid point of view. They don’t.
Virtually every respected, independent scientist in the world agrees the problem is real, and the time to act is now. Not tomorrow. Not a week from now. Not next month or next year. We must act today.
As Americans, we have the power to choose the kind of world in which we live. Every decision we make – large and small – matters. Some choices are as simple as turning off the light when you leave the room. Others are more ambitious — such as committing the Department of Defense, the largest energy consumer in the world, to transition to clean, renewable energy.
But every choice has benefits — or consequences.
And, thus Senator Reid turned his comments to one fossil foolish energy’s consequences. Now, this isn’t exactly out of the blue as Senator Reid has spoken before about coal-power and the risks from it. As a matter of fact, a few years ago, he intoned that “Coal Makes Us Sick” in a Fox News interview.
About 50 miles north of Las Vegas, the Reid-Gardner coal-fired power plant is nestled in the pastoral Moapa Valley. Since it began operating during the Johnson Administration, Reid Gardner has burned tens of millions of tons of coal.
Each year for the last 47 years, more than 2.8 million tons of climate-changing carbon dioxide — not to mention thousands of pounds of toxins such as arsenic, mercury and lead – go up the plant’s four giant smokestacks.
About two football fields away from those smoke stacks lives a band of 300 Moapa Paiute Indians. Every day Reid-Gardner rains down on the dwindling Native American tribe fine particulates and coal ash filled with chemicals that cause cancer, emphysema and heart problems.
The soot – and the dangerous chemicals inside it – is literally killing the Pauites.
It’s no secret coal plants kill. Each year, more than 24,000 deaths are attributed to emissions from coal-fired power plants in the United States alone.
That’s why it is time to close the dirty relic, Reid-Gardner.
Just imagine living two football fields from thousands of tons of poisons, ever present, always spewing their toxins on your home.
Every year we spend hundreds of millions of dollars buying coal from other states to burn in Nevada. It’s time to make a different choice – a choice that brings new clean energy industries and jobs to Nevada. A choice to invest in our own natural resources.
The more dirty coal we use, the higher the price of coal gets. The more solar power we use, the cheaper it gets. Shutting down this one coal-fired power plant won’t save the planet all at once — but it would save an Indian homeland.
A famous maxim says “a journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.” For consumers, that step might be deciding to buy energy-efficient light bulbs, drive a next-generation vehicle or turn off the lights when you leave the room. For NV Energy, the first step should be deciding to turn out the lights on Reid-Gardner — and turn them out forever.
Our guests and speakers today will outline some of the other decisions that lie ahead.
While the comments about climate deniers merit the focus, Reid’s contrasting coal with solar power merits repeating:
The more dirty coal we use, the higher the price of coal gets. The more solar power we use, the cheaper it gets.
Let us hope that more politicians follow in Senator Reid’s steps in speaking truth like he did today … and taking policy action in line with what recognizing reality requires.
The first scientist to alert Americans to the prospect that human-caused climate change and global warming was already upon us was NASA climatologist James Hansen. In a sweltering Senate hall during the hot, dry summer of 1988, Hansen announced that “it is time to stop waffling…. The evidence is pretty strong that the [human-amplified] greenhouse effect is here.”
Given the prescience of James Hansen’s science, we would be unwise to ignore his latest, more dire warning.
At the time, many scientists felt his announcement to be premature. I was among them.
I was a young graduate student researching the importance of natural – rather than human-caused – variations in temperature, and I felt that the “signal” of human-caused climate change had not yet emerged from the “noise” of natural, long-term climate variation. As I discuss in my book, The Hockey Stick and the Climate Wars, scientists by their very nature tend to be conservative, even reticent, when it comes to discussing findings and observations that lie at the forefront of our understanding and that aren’t yet part of the “accepted” body of scientific knowledge.
Dire warning
Hansen, it turns out, was right, and the critics were wrong. Rather than being reckless, as some of his critics charged, his announcement to the world proved to be prescient – and his critics were proven overly cautious.
Given the prescience of Hansen’s science, we would be unwise to ignore his latest, more dire warning.
In a paper published today in the prestigious journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Hansen and two colleagues argue convincingly that climate change is now not only upon us, but in fact we are fully immersed in it. Much of the extreme weather we have witnessed in recent years almost certainly contains a human-induced component.
Hansen, in his latest paper, shows that the increase in probability of hot summers due to global warming is such that what was once considered an unusually hot summer has now become typical, and what was once considered typical will soon become a thing of the past – a summer too improbably cool to anymore expect.
The time for debate about the reality of human-caused climate change has now passed.
We need to view this summer’s extreme weather in this wider context.
Not random
It is not simply a set of random events occurring in isolation, but part of a broader emerging pattern. We are seeing, in much of the extreme weather we are experiencing, the “loading of the weather dice.” Over the past decade, records for daily maximum high temperatures in the U.S. have been broken at twice the rate we would expect from chance alone. Think of this as rolling double sixes twice as often as you’d expect – something you would readily notice in a high stakes game of dice. Thus far this year, that ratio is close to 10 to 1. That’s double sixes coming up ten times as often as you expect.
So the record-breaking heat this summer over so much of the United States, where records that have stood since the Dust Bowl years of the 1930s are now dropping like flies, isn’t just a fluke of nature; it is the loading of the weather dice playing out in real time.
The record heat – and the dry soils associated with it – played a role in the unprecedented forest fires that wrought death and destruction in Colorado and New Mexico. It played a role in the hot and bone-dry conditions over the nation’s breadbasket that has decimated U.S. agricultural yields. It played a role in the unprecedented 50 percent of the U.S. finding itself in extreme drought.
Other threats
Climate change is also threatening us in other ways of course, subjecting our coastal cities to increased erosion and inundation from rising sea level, and massive flooding events associated with an atmosphere that has warmed by nearly 2?F, holding roughly 4 percent more water vapor than it used to – water vapor that is available to feed flooding rains when atmospheric conditions are right.
The state of Oklahoma became the hottest state ever with last summer’s record heat. It is sadly ironic that the state’s senior senator, Republican James Inhofe, has dismissed human-caused climate change as the “greatest hoax ever perpetrated on the American people.” Just last week he insisted that concern over the impacts of climate change has “completely collapsed.” This as Oklahoma City has just seen 18 days in a row over 100?F (with more predicted to follow), Tulsa saw 112?F Sunday, and 11 separate wildfires are burning in the state, with historic Route 66 and other state highways and interstates all closed.
The time for debate about the reality of human-caused climate change has now passed. We can have a good faith debate about how to deal with the problem – how to reduce future climate change and adapt to what is already upon us to reduce the risks that climate change poses to society. But we can no longer simply bury our heads in the sand.
Michael E. Mann is a member of the Pennsylvania State University faculty, where he directs the Penn State Earth System Science Center. He is author of The Hockey Stick and the Climate Wars, which describes his role as an accidental and reluctant public figure in the debate over human-caused climate change.
Comments Off on For society, ignorance doesn’t lead to bliss: “Science society cannot afford to ignore.”Tags:Global Warming · guest post · science
July 26th, 2012 · Comments Off on A challenge of Olympic proportions …
The opening ceremony is hours away and sporting events have begun for the 2012 summer Olympics in London. Besides a life-long joy at exposure to new sport, great sports feats, and the basic global harmony concept of the Olympic games, the London games caught my attention for the organizers’ plans to make it totally green. From targeting 100% renewable energy to discussions of trying to transform London Greens into gardens to supply fresh vegetables for the games, this (sadly unachieved) ambitious goal seemed appropriate for the pinnacle of global sports.
As part of the greening, however, one might want to question the greenwashing. Perhaps the most egregious? Deepwater Horizon and “Beyond Petroleum” BP is the chosen sponsor of carbon offsets for transportation to the games. Yes, you two (even U2) can join BP’s “target neutral” and have carbon offsets for your travel to the Olympics.
Putting aside the debate over carbon offsets (are these simply 21st century indulgences) and leaving aside questions about the true value of BP-created offsets, reading the “BP Target Neutral” site while ignoring the words “BP” is an interesting experience because, well, so much seems reasonable and worthwhile.
The image below comes from the “Carbon Visualization” page and is described as follows:
The visualisation uses Spaghetti Junction on the M6 near Birmingham as this basic ground. The familiar image from the British road network makes the immediate point that this is about roads, but then uses the recognisable scale to locate a cube-like shape showing the volume of carbon our cars, lorries and buses put into the atmosphere every day. The cube presents this visually, while the simple captions fill in the specific details. This, the image is saying, is what 90,000 tonnes of carbon dioxide look like, and that’s what we’re pumping into the atmosphere every day. Suddenly the daily figure is something real and dramatic.
That same page has links on “eco-driving” and “how-to-reduce”. That one has an image of a bike with the words:
Explore ways you can reduce the miles you cover in a car, or improve the way you drive, and so reduce your carbon footprint.
Interesting and, in many cases, useful material but then one returns to the logo with the letters: BP.
BP is, of course, not just the BP of Deepwater Horizon and other drilling ‘accidents’ (crimes?), but also is named in Bill McKibben’s recent Global Warming’s Terrifying New Math:
what all these climate numbers make painfully, usefully clear is that the planet does indeed have an enemy – one far more committed to action than governments or individuals. Given this hard math, we need to view the fossil-fuel industry in a new light. It has become a rogue industry, reckless like no other force on Earth. It is Public Enemy Number One to the survival of our planetary civilization. “Lots of companies do rotten things in the course of their business – pay terrible wages, make people work in sweatshops – and we pressure them to change those practices,” says veteran anti-corporate leader Naomi Klein, who is at work on a book about the climate crisis. “But these numbers make clear that with the fossil-fuel industry, wrecking the planet is their business model. It’s what they do.”
According to the Carbon Tracker report, if Exxon burns its current reserves, it would use up more than seven percent of the available atmospheric space between us and the risk of two degrees. BP is just behind
Go ahead and read that damning article. As Bill put it:
The three numbers I’ve described are daunting – they may define an essentially impossible future. But at least they provide intellectual clarity about the greatest challenge humans have ever faced. We know how much we can burn, and we know who’s planning to burn more. Climate change operates on a geological scale and time frame, but it’s not an impersonal force of nature; the more carefully you do the math, the more thoroughly you realize that this is, at bottom, a moral issue; we have met the enemy and they is Shell.
And, BP …
In light of this, should one take efforts like BP’s carbon offsets of flights for the Olympics as simply public relations activities to leverage the largest event on the world’s stage for greenwashing of the most malevolent kind or a sincere sign of BP’s recognition of the basic truth of Bill’s words?
As a thought, as one of my correspondents put it,
Is this bizarre or what? Let’s see if we can get them to offset their own emissions…
Louisiana Office of Tourism announced this week that [BP] would be hosting a series of events for Team USA that will pair three Gulf coast bands with chefs from Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama and Florida preparing “the world’s freshest and best-tasting seafood”.
July 26th, 2012 · Comments Off on The power of niche: Solar displacing diesel for a nation’s electricity supply
Writ large, around the world, liquid fuel (generally diesel) has a relatively small role in providing electricity and thus the “oil” and “electricity” domains have a minimal overlap. There are, however, exceptions that are notable generally in being “islands”. These islands can be temporal (power supply disruption leading to use of generators while the electric grid is restored), infrastructure (providing electricity to a site remote from the existing power grid — such as temporary or remote military bases) and/or traditional geographic islands — land surrounded by sea.
And, with oil prices above $80 barrel and unlikely to ever return to a few $10s per barrel, diesel-generated electricity is expensive, per kilowatt, compared to most other electricity options.
This makes these islands particularly appropriate for the introduction of renewable energy systems to displace oil. Especially as the prices have to account not just for the price of crude, but the the full price of transporting and storing the oil along with operating the diesel electricity generators. The U.S. military’s term for this: Fully-Burdened Cost of Fuel (FBCF). With a FBCF of $10s per gallon (plus lives at risk) in remote operating areas of Afghanistan, it isn’t surprising that solar panels have displaced traditional diesel generators for some Marines in Afghanistan. To date, however, such programs have been partial — perhaps even on the margens — reductions of island oil demand for electricity.
This, however, is changing.
The small Pacific island nation of Tokelau is to get a solar makeover. Right now, Tokelau is burning about 2000 barrels a year of diesel shipped in from New Zealand at a cost of NZ$1 millon (e.g., with shipping, about $500 per barrel or over $10 per gallon). That diesel provides Tokelau’s 1400 people about 16 hours a day of electricity.
This is about to change as New Zealand’s Power Smart Solar will replace the diesel generators with solar systems — and improve the electricity system to a 24/7 supply — and turn Tokelau to the first 100 percent solar electric nation.
The installation of 4,032 solar panels (one megawatt of solar) and batteries across the three atolls will eliminate diesel fuel use and provide consistent high quality electricity. The original tender specification called for the solar systems to supply 90% of Tokelau’s electricity demand. Through creative design, project management methodology, and sheer scale Powersmart Solar will be installing solar systems capable of providing 150% of current electricity demand allowing the Tokelauans to expand their electricity use without increasing diesel use.
The following video provides a conceptual look at one of the coming installations. This is for Nukunonu Atoll by Powersmart Solar and IT Power. The system will comprise of 1152 x 230 Watt solar panels or 265 kW.
Using solar pv and batteries to provide 24/7 electricity in replacing part-time electricity that prices out, in a full system cost, at well over 50 cents per kilowatt hour (compared to a U.S. average of about 10 cents) is a ‘no brainer’. While, right now, solar PV is far from a ‘no-brainer’ for every electric consumer around the world, increasingly, as solar pv prices fall (and other electricity prices/costs rise), ever more ‘islands’ are joining Tokelau’s atolls as prime locations for major renewable installations.
Tonga currently generates electricity from costly imported diesel fuel.the facility will generate approximately 1880 megawatt hours of electricity per annum, meeting approximately 4% of Tongatapu’s total electricity demand.
July 24th, 2012 · Comments Off on 97% of Greenland is in thaw … unprecedented
This guest post from Fish Out of Water helps bring attention to the drastic impacts that a warming planet is having on ice in the northern hemisphere.
Greenland Ice Darkening
Dark surface of Greenland icecap in summer, photo by Jason Box, PhD.
The ends of the ice ages were triggered when earth’s wobble placed the Arctic in position to receive maximum summer time solar heating. The relatively small effects of the orbital variations were amplified by the melting of snow and ice which reflect sunlight back to space. Because rock and water take up heat from sunlight, ice loss adds heat to the environment, leading to more ice loss. Ultimately, this feedback loop led to the melting of large continental glaciers ten thousand feet thick. Today the same process is taking place at a rapid rate as the area of Arctic sea ice rapidly declines, the ice of Greenland darkens and the snows of Siberia melt weeks earlier in spring. Greenland June ice darkened rapidly in 10 years. image by Jason Box, PhD.
Ice sheet reflectivity this year has been the lowest since accurate records began in March, 2000. In this condition, the ice sheet will continue to absorb more solar energy in a self-reinforcing feedback loop that amplifies the effect of warming. It’s not a runaway loop, just an amplifier. A record setting melt season is likely if this pattern keeps up this year.Perhaps most remarkable about the 2012 pattern is how much darker the snow and ice is becoming, not only at the lowest elevations around the ice sheet periphery where melting is always most intense, but in the higher elevation net snow accumulation area. June monthly average reflectivity is below the 2000-2011 average across the southern-central area where surface elevations are above 2,000 m (6,561 feet). A purple area about 1/4 the distance north of the ice sheet southern tip at an elevation of 2,400 m (7,874 ft) has reflectivity 7% below the already declining 2000-2011 June (12 year) average.
Consistent with the low albedo anomaly at high elevations is the shift of the summer radiation balance from negative (cooling) to positive (heating) (Box et al. 2012). In the 12 years between 2000 and 2011 the high elevation ice sheet net radiation (sum of upward and downward solar and infrared radiation) approached positive values. What I expect we will see if these low albedo conditions persist is 100% surface melting over the ice sheet. This would be a first in observations. It may not happen this year, but the trajectory the ice sheet is on, along with amplified Arctic warming, will have the ice sheet responding by melting more and more.
The jet stream has gone north of Greenland this summer
Greenland’s 10,000 foot altitude is an obstacle to the atmospheric circulation. Usually the jet stream solves this problem by staying to the south of Greenland, keeping it cold at the summit all year round. This summer temperatures have risen above freezing at the summit station 10,000 feet above sea level. These temperatures are the highest ever measured at the summit. The atmospheric anomalies over Greenland are greater than the anomalies that caused record heat over the United States. The shocking dome of warm air over Greenland produced one bizarre cold anomaly as it forced the jet stream south on its east coast towards England. English climate change deniers are having a field day in the cold and wet as the rest of the northern hemisphere bakes and melts. The jet stream has contracted to a shocking degree from its normal extent over the past 90 days. This bizarre contracted circulation pattern is leading to record ice melt across the Arctic and unprecedented melting in Greenland.
Greenland’s ice sheet is now melting from top to bottom, shocking scientists
Extent of surface melt over Greenland’s ice sheet on July 8 (left) and July 12 (right). Measurements from three satellites showed that on July 8, about 40 percent of the ice sheet had undergone thawing at or near the surface. In just a few days, the melting had dramatically accelerated and an estimated 97 percent of the ice sheet surface had thawed by July 12. In the image, the areas classified as “probable melt” (light pink) correspond to those sites where at least one satellite detected surface melting. The areas classified as “melt” (dark pink) correspond to sites where two or three satellites detected surface melting. The satellites are measuring different physical properties at different scales and are passing over Greenland at different times. As a whole, they provide a picture of an extreme melt event about which scientists are very confident. Credit: Nicolo E. DiGirolamo, SSAI/NASA GSFC, and Jesse Allen, NASA Earth
For several days this month, Greenland’s surface ice cover melted over a larger area than at any time in more than 30 years of satellite observations. Nearly the entire ice cover of Greenland, from its thin, low-lying coastal edges to its two-mile-thick center, experienced some degree of melting at its surface, according to measurements from three independent satellites analyzed by NASA and university scientists.On average in the summer, about half of the surface of Greenland’s ice sheet naturally melts. At high elevations, most of that melt water quickly refreezes in place. Near the coast, some of the melt water is retained by the ice sheet and the rest is lost to the ocean. But this year the extent of ice melting at or near the surface jumped dramatically. According to satellite data, an estimated 97 percent of the ice sheet surface thawed at some point in mid-July. …snip NASA press release…
Son Nghiem of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., was analyzing radar data from the Indian Space Research Organisation’s (ISRO) Oceansat-2 satellite last week when he noticed that most of Greenland appeared to have undergone surface melting on July 12. Nghiem said, “This was so extraordinary that at first I questioned the result: was this real or was it due to a data error?”
Nghiem consulted with Dorothy Hall at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md. Hall studies the surface temperature of Greenland using the Moderate-resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) on NASA’s Terra and Aqua satellites. She confirmed that MODIS showed unusually high temperatures and that melt was extensive over the ice sheet surface.
Thomas Mote, a climatologist at the University of Georgia, Athens, Ga; and Marco Tedesco of City University of New York also confirmed the melt seen by Oceansat-2 and MODIS with passive-microwave satellite data from the Special Sensor Microwave Imager/Sounder on a U.S. Air Force meteorological satellite.
The melting spread quickly. Melt maps derived from the three satellites showed that on July 8, about 40 percent of the ice sheet’s surface had melted. By July 12, 97 percent had melted.
This extreme melt event coincided with an unusually strong ridge of warm air, or a heat dome, over Greenland. The ridge was one of a series that has dominated Greenland’s weather since the end of May. “Each successive ridge has been stronger than the previous one,” said Mote. This latest heat dome started to move over Greenland on July 8, and then parked itself over the ice sheet about three days later. By July 16, it had begun to dissipate.
Even the area around Summit Station in central Greenland, which at 2 miles above sea level is near the highest point of the ice sheet, showed signs of melting. Such pronounced melting at Summit and across the ice sheet has not occurred since 1889, according to ice cores analyzed by Kaitlin Keegan at Dartmouth College in Hanover, N.H. A National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration weather station at Summit confirmed air temperatures hovered above or within a degree of freezing for several hours July 11-12. (ed note: I examined the temperature record on line. High temperatures were a degree above freezing on consecutive days at the summit.)
The record melting has caused unprecedented flooding on coastal rivers.
The heat may also be speeding up the break up of the Peterman glacier. Much above normal water temperatures, as much as 5 degrees Celsius above normal, are undermining Greenland’s outlet glaciers from below.
Peterman Glacier in northwest Greenland just spawned an ice island the size of 2 Manhattan Islands. In 2010 it also spawned a huge island of about the same size.
July 24th, 2012 · Comments Off on Time for a breakup …
Many have outlined reasons why Keystone XL pipeline is not a smart project for the United States. Opening the pipeline likely will lead to increased gasoline prices for many Americans. The pipeline, carrying the rather dangerous and difficult to clean up “Dilbit” oil, risks having leaks (despite industry promises that, well, such leaks would never, never, never happen … cross their fingers and laugh their way to the bank). There is that pesky little issue of how Tar Sands Oil will exacerbate climate chaos (which, of course, has nothing to do with extreme weather events, the drought devastating America’s 2012 crop yields, and …). In summary, when it comes to Keystone XL, there are plenty of reasons “Why not!”
And, these reasons add up to a basic conclusion to say to the pipeline promoters:
You’ll never get near my aquifer.
To understand that sentence’s full context, watch this video. You’ll be glad you did.
Increasingly, it seems, we need to look to ‘a-traditional media outlets’ like John Stewart and Stephen Colbert for (the most) truthful discussion about the nation’s challenges and opportunities. Rolling Stone, when it comes to catastrophic climate chaos, ranks among the nation’s best media outlets. As, for example, in the recent Bill McKibben powerful piece “Global Warming’s New Math”.
Consider the drought conditions across much of America, the withering corn crop, extreme extreme weather events across the globe, disappearing ice in the Arctic and Greenland, and other weather events showing the reality of climate change impacts on the global system. Consider those events, which are in line with what scientists have been predicted would occur with unchecked climate change, and should it surprise anyone that specialists in climate science are (extremely) worried looking to the future?
It is heartening to know that President Obama recognizes this. As per this post’s title, the President’s perspective is that we should be worried because the true experts are (beyond) worried:
those who have looked at the science of climate change are scared and concerned about a general lack of sufficient movement to deal with the problem.
Increasingly, those farmers seeing their crops withering away, people losing homes and livelihoods to extreme wildfires (which, of course, are not solely due to climate change impacts), people flooded out of their homes, Washington-area residents going days without electricity due to the massive Derecho, and parents contemplating catastrophic chaos implications for their children’s future are joining those “who have looked at the science of climate change” and these people, too, “are scared and concerned about a general lack of sufficient movement to deal with the problem.”
In that extensive Rolling Stone interview, President Obama talked extensively about climate change … as a political, and not just science, issue. Noting the radical difference between the political parties, with the Democratic Party’s acceptance of science underpinning a need for climate mitigation and the Republican Party’s anti-science syndrome suffering kowtowing to polluting industry interests, President Obama promised that climate science will be an issue in the 2012 campaign:
it’s been easy for the other side to pour millions of dollars into a campaign to debunk climate-change science. I suspect that over the next six months, this is going to be a debate that will become part of the campaign, and I will be very clear in voicing my belief that we’re going to have to take further steps to deal with climate change in a serious way.
Now, if you are not aware, that Rolling Stone interview is now several months old (that “six months” should have been a hint).
Since then, with much of the nation’s richest farmlands totally brown, most of the nation in drought conditions, heat record and after heat record after heat record falling (at a pace never seen before in recorded history), and so many extreme weather events occurring around the world that news media have a hard time keeping tracking, the President, most of the President’s cabinet, the Democratic National Committee, and the Obama-Biden presidential campaign have been strangely silent as to the linkages between climate change and extreme weather events — along with leaving Republican anti-science lunacies unchallenged and undiscussed.
Republican political operatives and politicians are likely quietly saying prayers of thanks for the absence of climate change science from the political debate. Americans have a high regard for scientists. Extreme weather events — not least of which extreme heat conditions — are fostering greater public attention to, awareness about, and concern over climate change. While Republican politicians’ science denial plays to the rabid extreme base and satisfies the fiscal interests of their largest political contributors, the majority of Americans respect scientists and the majority of Americans have, at least, a basic understanding that climate change is something meriting action such as investments (in highly popular across the citizenry) in energy efficiency and renewable energy programs. Anti-science attitudes might secure the support of a minority voters, the majority of voters respect science and scientists.
In April, President Obama stated that climate change and the need for action to address it would be part of the 2012 Presidential campaign. By failing to follow-up on the President’s , the Obama-Biden campaign is better serving Mitt “Etch-a-Sketch’ (on climate as on other issues) Romney than its interests and the interests of the American people.
To date, large cities from New York City to Los Angeles have stolen the headlines with major announcements about dramatic investments and worldwide partnerships that advance clean energy solutions and address greenhouse gas emissions. While these efforts are indeed critical to scaling the clean energy economy, small- and medium-sized jurisdictions also possess the power to nurture clean energy economic development. They can also often execute with a degree of speed and decisiveness that sometimes eludes larger cities.
While their efforts do not usually make headlines beyond their local news outlets, small- and medium-sized cities are stepping up with real results. It is in these living laboratories of innovation that we see the next generation of solutions for the clean energy economy in buildings, transportation, and waste management. These communities have the political leadership, an energized citizenry, receptive utilities, and capable business communities that are working together to build the new energy future from the ground up.
Real innovation is rare, because it is challenging and risky. But cities and towns not yet ready to take entrepreneurial leaps are nonetheless making important changes by using their bully pulpits, planning authorities, and purchasing power to galvanize their communities and move local markets. They are making slow and steady progress that will ultimately result in the full transformation of our built environment and transportation system away from fossil fuel dependency.
This study documents a range of real-world examples where American cities and other municipalities exploited the opportunities provided by ARRA (Stimulus Package) funding to foster long-lasting shifts toward Energy Smart practices — whether energy efficiency, better urban planning, or introduction of renewable energy.
At this time, a press release call is underway allowing practitioners to outline their programs its successes.
Perhaps my favorite moment in the call was a comment from Bellingham’s experience that shows that the IRS does have an impact on the nation’s perspective fostering energy :
“We don’t call them energy audits because we found that nobody likes to get an audit. That’s why we call them assessments
Bellingham has had some 785 residential energy “assessments” with 489 moving to projects based on these “assessments”. These average $479 per year in energy savings.
On Long Island, Babylon has conducted over 1300 BPI home energy audits (not yet with Bellingham’s word sensitivity). And, the program has financed about 870 retrofits with average energy savings of $1200 per year. E.g., this represents more than $1 million in reduced energy costs for Babylon residents. This is about 1.5% of Babylon’s total housing stock. That community is also requiring all new residential buildings to be Energy Star certified with LEED certification required for all commercial structures larger than 4000 square feet.
Comments Off on Pioneering Energy Smart futures in American municipalitiesTags:Energy · research
Today, a group of the nation’s leading experts on climate science sent a brief letter to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. The message is simple: include climate change in the review of the Keystone XL pipeline. From that letter:
At the moment, your department is planning to consider the effects of the pipeline on “recreation,” “visual resources,” and “noise,” among other factors. Those are important—but omitting climate change from the considerations is neither wise nor credible. The vast volumes of carbon in the tar sands ensure that they will play an important role in whether or not climate change gets out of hand; understanding the role this largescale new pipeline will play in that process is clearly crucial.
Yes, evidently, at this time the Department of State is ‘fast and furious’ in its resolve to understand how the Keystone XL pipeline construction will impact the driving opportunities for off-road vehicle enthusiasts but is maintaining a stoically blind eye to any thoughtful consideration of how Keystone XL just might, in fact, help foster putting more carbon atoms into the atmosphere. This makes total sense to you, doesn’t it? After all, it isn’t as if anyone is linking the nation’s drought conditions, the severe weather events around the world, or other drastic risks to human activities — including the burning of fossil fuels — is it?
Reminiscent too much of those who highlight (truthfully) that humanity is responsible only a small percent fo the total carbon cycle (conveniently forgetting that it is humanity’s ‘small percentage’ that is tipping the balance to change such that we’ve seen a near 50 percent increase in CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere with resultant and mounting environmental impacts), Tar Sands advocates like to emphasize that the resulting pollution will only be a small fraction of global CO2 emissions. Absolutely true — just as each individual coal-fired electricity plant is only a small fraction … However, remembering my elementary-school math, it does seem that ‘fractions’ eventually add up to whole numbers.
We are writing to ask that the State Department conduct, as part of its evaluation of the Keystone XL pipeline proposal, a serious review of the effect of helping open Canada’s tar sands on the planet’s climate.
![BP -- Blowin' People [Up]](https://i0.wp.com/farm5.staticflickr.com/4071/4660477439_e4501797d3_n.jpg?resize=320%2C307)
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