Science
World Powers Play Politics While Island Nations Drown
Published August 07, 2009 @ 08:09AM PT
Portraits of climate refugees from the cyclone that hit Sunderbans are testimony to the unpredictability and dangers of global warming, which are already being felt in coastal India. They were intended to urge visiting U.S. Secretary of State, Hillary Rodham Clinton, along with U.S. President Barack Obama, to take bold steps to stop global warming. © Greenpeace
UPDATE, Aug. 7: The 16-nation Pacific Islands Forum this week called for international help to protect vulnerable island states from rising sea levels and warmer temperatures.
The industrialized nations of the world are largely responsible for creating the climate crisis. But so far they're playing politics instead of making real commitments to cut their greenhouse gas pollution. So it's not surprising that small island states, which are facing almost certain doom, are discussing some drastic options for survival.
As reported on this blog in the past, these "drowning nations" are trying to cope with the looming climate crisis:
- Mohamed Nasheed, president of the lowlying archipelago nation of Maldives, has announced that he intends his homeland to become the world's first carbon-neutral nation. But given how small the country is, that will do very little to mitigate the problem. So Mr. Nasheed is also apparently prepared to move all of his countrymen to a new home – one that won’t be easily inundated by rising sea levels.
- Indonesia sought and received a dismissal of some $30 million in debt that it owed to the US. In return, the government of the Southeast Asian archipelago nation has agreed to spend the money on protecting the rainforests of Sumatra, the sixth largest island in the world. Indonesia is the world’s third largest greenhouse gas emitter thanks to the incredible amount of deforestation that occurs there.
- Tuvalu, the fourth smallest nation in the world, is already feeling the effects of global warming: the tiny archipelago nation has experienced much worse periodic high tides (called king tides) than normal in the past decade, causing increasingly destructive flooding. Tuvalu has vowed to totally remove fossil fuels from its energy mix by 2020, hoping to set an example that the world's major greenhouse polluters will follow.
Prospects for a strong successor to the Kyoto Protocol emissions reductions agreement, set to expire in 2012, are looking grim. Opportunities for the world’s richest nations to make some preliminary agreements, like the Obama administration-sponsored Major Economies Forum, or the preliminary UN climate talks in Bonn, Germany, have so far been squandered.
In July, the G8 group of industrialized nations failed to make real progress on agreements to slash greenhouse gas emissions. While proudly trumpeting their commitment to limiting global temperature rise to 2 degrees Celsius, they laid out absolutely no roadmap for how they plan to get there. (Afterwards, United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, as well as the chairman of the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, Rajendra Pachauri, did not hesitate to criticize the G8 for their failure. )
In response, the leaders of seven tiny Pacific island nations recently renewed their call for the developed world to commit to greenhouse gas emissions reductions of 45 percent below 1990 levels by 2020, and 85 percent by 2050. These are the targets many climate scientists say we must meet, if we're to avert the worst effects of global warming.
While the leaders of developed nations seem to feel they have the luxury of ignoring the reality of the crisis and the best recommendations on how to avert its worst effects, developing nations are not so lucky.
Another round of UN talks in Bonn are about to begin. There’s little reason to think the developed world will get as serious about climate change as the developing world, but here’s hoping...
Live Senate Hearing: Climate Change and Ensuring that America Leads the Clean Energy Transformation
Published August 06, 2009 @ 08:09AM PT
The full Senate Environment and Public Works Committee is meeting today to discuss how to implement successful, and largely market-driven, clean energy policies.
12:30: Hearing adjourned!
12:15: Sen. Whitehouse, to Krupp: You've said in your testimony that CCS is ready to roll? Can you elaborate on that?
Krupp: I was quoting an official at British Petroleum, noting that in Norway there are enormous amts of CCS going on. Because there's a price on carbon in Norway, so they're avoiding that cost by keeping it out of the atmosphere.
Until there's a driver, there's no reason to capture carbon.
Our nation does burn a lot of coal -- half our electricity generated from burning coal. We should leave a path open to cleaning up the carbon dioxide from that, the same as we have a path to cleaning out the sulfur dioxide.
12:12: Sen. Whitehouse: Saying technologies aren't ready is a self-fulfilling prophesy.
12:00 noon: Sen. Boxer: Specuation issue. As former stockbroker, I understand what happens with speculation, there's cause for concern. In ACES, there's a floor of $11 on price. Some utilities have said to me, what about a collar?
Fehrman: Collar would help protect ratepayers, would still impose a second cost on customers however.
Sen Boxer: Some utilities, like Duke, which is heavily dependent on coal, support ACES. Supreme Court says carbon emissions are covered by the Clean Air Act. So it's unusual that a business person would rather choose a hard cap, with no ability to get allocations, offsets. Won't that put costs thru roof?
Krupp: Mid-America is in unique position. Made some decisions that were in retrospect bad: big new coal-fired plant online in 2007. Wholesale a lot of their energy. Under Waxman-Markey, the allocations follow the electrons.
Certainly the proposition, a cap but no trade, would be extraordinarily expensive to consumers. Trading promotes lowest-cost options, allows utilities and customers to switch energy generation sources.
Price collar: Just another world for a safety valve, which busts the integrity of the cap. Wont' guarantee emissions reductions, we won't be able to say to other nations, we're reducing emissions, we want you to as well.
Many things in ACES control costs -- cap and trade mechanism; allocation directly to consumers. In terms of market manipulation, whatever comes out of this committee has to have jail time for those who game the maket.
Sen. Boxer: Look at a collar in slightly different way. If we know that $11 is the floor, and that's sending a price signal, not sure why we can't use this to create regulatory certainty.
Sen. Inhofe: I read a whole long list of House Democrats, as well as James Hansen, who oppose cap and trade, in my opening statement. Ralph Nader opposes it. You have stated that "make polluters pay" slogan is wrong; that consumers will pay.
Fehrman: At Mid-American, we haven't had a base rate increase since 1975, and are a leader in renewable energy generation. This bill creates unreasonable costs for our customers, fees for allowances. We'd be better off taking those dollars and investing in renewables and nuclear, actually reducing our emissions to meet those caps.
Inhofe: How will purchasing allowances not reduce GHGs?
Fehrman: Waxman-Markey takes 2005 emissions and applies sliding cap to that level. There's cost of compliance -- driving emissions down -- and there's buying allowances from first emission of CO2 up to the cap. That latter cost doesn't reduce CO2 emissions.
Sen Inhofe: Your view on carbon capture and storage? When would be be commercially scalable?
Fehrman: We find that there is execptional work going on in industry, pilot projects, in a number of years, be it five or ten years, there will be CCS tech available. We will say that sequestration of carbon hasn't been studied, don't know all the issues involved. Need more study to fully understand the impacts.
Inhofe: "Majority of people believe" that tech isn't here on renewables and all sorts of these things. If we have these resources, and are only country that doesn't develop them, we need to use them as a bridge to the future.
11:50 ET: Second panel is introduced: Fred Krupp, President, Environmental Defense Fund; and Bill Fehrman, President and CEO, MidAmerican Energy Company.
Krupp: My message is simple: We can achieve strong emissions targets by 2020, at low cost, and create millions of new jobs in the process. Begins to cite a number of non-partisan studies on both costs and technologies -- see his formal statement to the committee for the details.
Fehrman: We oppose trade part of cap and trade: Customers will pay for emissions, plus the structures to reduce those emissions. Free allowances based on retail sales will favor utilities that rely largely on hydro and nuclear power, not allow coal-dependent utilities to receive enough allowances. Shortfall of 11 million allowances in just the first compliance year; and ratepayers will foot the bill.
Under acid rain program, allowances went to emitters who needed them to comply with new regs. Under Waxman-Markey as currently written, will be huge windfall to utilities that don't need them; also, penalizes utilities that have already made big investments in renewables.
11:49: Sen. Whitehouse to Sandalow: Over time, a lot of objection has risen to nuclear power, primarily around safety. But US Navy and European power agencies have demonstrated that it can be used safely. Around cost -- it appears that as we move toward modular systems, can better control costs. And disposal: we don't have a means for getting rid of horribly dangeous waste.
Traveling wave technologies: Create power off current stocks of waste. Are you following that?
Sandalow: I'm not personally following that; we'll get back to you, Senator.
11: 43: Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse: Wildlife adapation amendments related to climate legislation are gathering broad, bipartisan and multi-regional support. Is that true?
Strickland: True. Adaptation challenges with public lands, protecting wildlife, and dealing with real world impacts of climate change are vitally important.
11:39: Sen. Benjamin Cardin: Where are we at on using public lands to develop renewables?
Strickland: We're at the very early stages. Regulations are being put in place to develop offshore wind. We're moving quickly to put infrastructure in place with solar also; now we have a huge backlog of private sector interest in dev. solar on public lands. We've used some of Recovery Act dollars to create four offices in the West to deal with that backlog. We're in early stages, but there's huge potential.
Wants Boxer to organize committee letter to get documentation on how much public land is available to use for generation of renewable energy vs. extraction of mineral resources.
Sen. John Barasso says that 138,000 acres of land would be needed to build a wind farm with capacity to replace one coal-fired power plant. That's three times the size of the District of Colombia. Are we willing to set aside enough land to replace hundreds of coal-fired power plants?
Wellinghoff: Starts by countering some misquotes on his positions that Barasso has just read into the record, to the overall point that he does not believe that renewables will completely replace fossil energy sources, but that there is enormous capacity for different kinds of renewables, combined with energy efficiency and nat'l gas. Spurred by a market-based carbon control system, says all this could allow nation to transition successfully (and implication is with minimal pain and gnashing of teeth) to low-carbon energy economy. "There's plenty of land out there in the ocean" to create millions of gigawatts of wind power.
11:24: Sen. George Voinovich brings up energy security. Concerned we have not harmonized energy, environment, economic, national security policies. "If nation knew how vulnerable we were today in terms of oil, they'd be shaking in their boots." Cites billions of dollars sent overseas for oil, with no idea of environmental impacts that it's having.
Tells Strickland we should take advantage of all resources we have, including domestic oil, but be the most aggressive in reducing use of oil as well (such as upgrading the energy grid to enable growth of EV use.) Wishes the president would talk about using less oil and also going after more domestic oil production.
11:21: Sandalow says the $2.4 billion being allocated to next-gen electric vehicle battery development, announced yesterday by President Obama, has the potential to be transformational in cutting the nation's dependency on foreign oil.
Stop Global Warming, or the Coffee Gets It
Published August 05, 2009 @ 05:49PM PT
Need another reason to put the brakes on global warming? And get serious about the adaptation we won't be able to avoid? Here's one that's close to my heart, and maybe yours: preserving our morning cup of coffee.
Coffee is the world's most valuable tropical export crop, produced by around 20 million small-scale farmers, writes Peter Baker on SciDev.net, but no one is preparing to manage the probable disruptions to coffee agriculture. Hotter temperatures, longer dry spells punctuated with more intense, heavy rainfall and floods: these conditions (already noticeable in some coffee-growing regions) will spread in coming decades, as the Earth's surface temperature continues to warm:
Coffee grows well within a limited climatic range. As temperatures rise, so will coffee — to higher altitudes and latitudes. But space is limited and there will be competition with other crops...
Climate change already seems to be affecting coffee production. It is difficult to attribute direct causality, but the changes we are seeing are entirely consistent with climate modellers' predictions.
Sometimes the effects are slow. For example, 50 years ago, nearly three-quarters of Indian coffee production was the premium bean, arabica; now it is less than half, with robusta coffee (a species that withstands hotter conditions) filling the gap.
And sometimes the effects are abrupt. Mexico is still recovering from Hurricane Stan in 2005: "The land is very tired; it has faced hurricanes, winds, natural deterioration. Everyone here has a smaller harvest, less maintenance and less investment," Ingrid Hoffman, a coffee farmer in Chiapas, told Reuters in 2009. "I think one day we will be able to recover."
Coffee grows well within a limited climatic range. As temperatures rise, so will coffee — to higher altitudes and latitudes. But space is limited and there will be competition with other crops. Coffee farmers will experience climate change through greater unpredictability, with more droughts and floods — the last thing any farmer wants.
Climate change already seems to be affecting coffee production. It is difficult to attribute direct causality, but the changes we are seeing are entirely consistent with climate modellers' predictions.
Sometimes the effects are slow. For example, 50 years ago, nearly three-quarters of Indian coffee production was the premium bean, arabica; now it is less than half, with robusta coffee (a species that withstands hotter conditions) filling the gap.
And sometimes the effects are abrupt. Mexico is still recovering from Hurricane Stan in 2005: "The land is very tired; it has faced hurricanes, winds, natural deterioration. Everyone here has a smaller harvest, less maintenance and less investment," Ingrid Hoffman, a coffee farmer in Chiapas, told Reuters in 2009. "I think one day we will be able to recover."
This outlook is typical. Local organisations and governments are making brave efforts to recoup losses and return to the way things were, and attribute their problems to acts of God.
But are they right to think like this? Climate models suggest that things will get worse — but few stakeholders, including governments, international organisations, farmers, traders, companies or standards setters seem to be thinking ahead, trusting the science, making strategic plans, zoning the land, adapting or diversifying.
Science should be guiding their decision-making. And the problem is not just with coffee — many countries face a similar crisis in agriculture and land-use resource planning and implementation.
Singer makes an argument that will be anathema to some: The fair trade market mechanisms that have been used to promote a reformed global coffee trade, in which the growers can sustain their land, protect vital wildlife habitat, and get a living income from their crops, is perfectly unsuited to the global warming challenge. Only centralized planning and management, most likely coming from national governments, will help keep the world's caffeine fix flowing as the climate continues to destabilize.
"More adaptive, participatory research is needed to find out how best to help farmers, and there should be a greater emphasis on long-term research to develop crop varieties more resistant to climate extremes, pests and diseases. Neither NGOs nor private companies can hope to manage many such activities," Baker writes. "And there is an unresolved paradox: sustainability is about imposing order and stability, whereas climate change is about adapting and transforming."
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Image: Via Roasting Plant, one of my favorite artisanal coffee joints in NYC
URGENT: Tell Sec. Salazar not to weaken the Endangered Species Act!
Published July 30, 2009 @ 07:39PM PT
A few months ago, we reported on a chance for the Obama administration to overturn a Bush administration rule limiting the scope of the protections for polar bears under the Endangered Species Act. Essentially, the "polar bear special rule" demands that the global warming — its causes and effects — not be considered as harms to the bear's survival.
Interior Secretary Salazar let that rule stand, much to the dismay of wildlife advocates. But he did rescind another of the Bush administration's harmful changes to the Endangered Species Act, the so-called “self-consultation” rule. The rewritten regulation had allowed federal agencies to consider projects and permits that might affect endangered species without having to consult federal wildlife scientists at the Fish & Wildlife and National Marine Fisheries Services, which had up until then been required under the Endangered Species Act.
This consultation rule is very important to the survival and recovery of endangered species.
Unfortunately, we once again have to speak up as concerned citizens to let Salazar know that we demand a strong Endangered Species Act. According to the Center for Biological Diversity, which was in the forefront of the effort to get protections for the polar bear,
Interior Secretary Ken Salazar is currently accepting comments on potential changes to regulations governing implementation of a key provision of the Endangered Species Act. The affected provision requires federal agencies to consult with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife or National Marine Fisheries Services to ensure their actions don't jeopardize the continued existence of endangered species or harm their critical habitat.
Secretary Salazar is now asking for public comments to find out what we think about changes to the Act's consultation regulations — but only until next Monday, August 3.
Please take a moment right now to let Secretary Salazar know that you support a strong Endangered Species Act. He needs to hear from as many of us as possible that we strongly oppose any new regulations that will weaken standards that federal agencies use to carry out their responsibility to protect the plants and animals who can’t speak up for themselves.
Book Review: "How We Know What We Know About Our Changing Climate"
Published July 29, 2009 @ 04:45PM PT
"How We Know What We Know About Our Changing Climate" is above all about the process of learning: How to observe phenomena in the world, collect information about them, and draw logical conclusions based on the evidence. In short, it's about how science is done, and in particular how children and scientists can and are working together to learn more about how the climate is changing right now, all around us.
Written in clear, engaging prose by children's author Lynne Cherry, and illustrated abundantly with photographs by Gary Braasch, the book is aimed at children in grades 4 through 9. Although the books strikes me as a little text-heavy for the younger members of that set, it's meant to be one that teachers and students use together to explore how scientists gather data about the natural world, and analyze it for clues on global warming's progress and impacts. (A teacher's guide for the book is available, and the great resource section at the end of the book includes information on student and citizen science projects.)
Kids love animals, so cannily, the authors often describe how young students and citizens have worked actively with scientists on critter-centered projects, like Monarch Watch, the Thousand Eyes Project, and Frogwatch.
Toward the end, the books gets into some "what next" content: "Taking Charge of Your Climate Footprint," "The Power of Friends and Community," and "What You Can Do," a pragmatic list of personal actions children can take, and encourage the adults in their lives to take as well -- from asking parents to turn off idling car engines, to eating less meat.
It's all good advice for living a more ecologically sound life, but I'm especially happy to see that Cherry and Braasch have not skimped on the bigger picture, either. The book's final chapter describes how citizens, scientists, and adults use the law -- in this case the Endangered Species Act -- to make change for the better part of policy as well as personal preference.
Climate Solutions from Solar Forests and Artificial Leaves
Published July 28, 2009 @ 10:45AM PT
Biomimicry is a rich source of inspiration for designers, engineers and scientists. They look at how evolutionary biology has solved problems, and then use artificial materials to recreate these solutions found in nature.
Many clean energy and climate solutions are turning to trees and other plants for design cues:
The Solar Forest concept, reported at Inhabitat, is racing around the blogs this week. It's designer Neville Mars' idea for an electric vehicle (EV) charging port powered by gracefully branching trees covered in solar panel "leaves." The leaves track the sun to generate power with maximum efficiency. Certainly the concept has a lot more aesthetic and pragmatic appeal than leaving acres of parking lots to bake in the sun.
Google, meanwhile, installed a "grove" of pole-mounted solar panels in the parking lot of its Mountain View, Calif. headquarters in 2006. It's the solar forest concept taken live, although lacking the sylvan look and feel.
And then there's "solar ivy" -- a concept product by a Brooklyn design group called SMIT (Sustainably Minded Interactive Technology) that seems to be on its way to market. Composed of netting covered in "leaves" made of flexible solar cells, the "Grow" system can be draped down the side of a building. In addition to converting light to energy, each solar leaf has piezoelectric generators on the underside as well -- so that as they flutter in the wind, that movement is harvested as energy as well.
"Artificial forests at nano scale" are another compelling avenue of research and development. The idea here is to create materials that mimic the leaf's ability to convert sunlight into energy, and then capture that energy for human uses. Another grail of this research is to find a synthetic way to emulate a leaf's ability to capture carbon out of the atmosphere and store it -- technology that could help us in re-stabilizing the climate.
The big news so far this year in artificial forests at nano scale is that a team of European researchers recently announced that they've succeeded in modifying chlorophyll from an alga so that it resembled the light antennae of bacteria, nature's most efficient photosynthesizers.
They then figured out the structure of these light antennae -- opening the way to creating an artificial leaf.
This isn't the first time there's been a wave of excitement on the synthetic photosynthesis front. In March of this year, researchers at the Energy Department's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory announced that nano-sized crystals of cobalt oxide can split water molecules into hydrogen and oxygen, the central part of the photosynthesis process.
In 2002, at the height of the "nanotech bubble," a team of scientists published research on using cadmium-laden nanocrystals to fix carbon dioxide (that is, transform it into other organic molecules, which is how plants store carbon absorbed from the atmosphere).
(And these are just two examples of what I'm sure are tens or dozens more.)
Why at the nano scale? In part because of the promise nano materials hold: when substances are created at these incredibly small scales, they often have properties that they don't exhibit at larger scales. For instance, they can have much more net surface area (to soak up sun) than the same materials at conventional macro scales.
Another reason is that nano-scale materials could potentially be incorporated into many relatively cheap substances we already use to cover big areas outdoors, like asphalt, concrete, rubber, paint, and vinyl. Imagine millions of homes sheathed in siding that incorporates nano-scale solar collectors, sitting in the sun all day and converting light into electricity.
So while nano materials research and development are often slow and expensive, the return on the time and money invested could be enormous in three ways: energy generated, carbon sequestered out of the atmosphere, and dollars earned.
Declassified Images Reveal Extreme Arctic Ice Melt
Published July 26, 2009 @ 08:05PM PT
Above: Beaufort Sea images, showing retreat of sea ice between 2001 and 2006. More info below.
Just hours after a mid-month request from the National Research Council, the Department of Interior released over one thousand spy images of the Arctic and other locations in the US. The Bush administration had classified the images and kept them from the public and federal scientists.
The newly declassified images document such a startling retreat of Arctic sea ice, that the UK's Guardian newspaper calls them "the secret evidence of global warming Bush tried to hide":
The pictures, kept secret by Washington during the presidency of George W Bush, were declassified by the White House last week. President Barack Obama is currently trying to galvanise Congress and the American public to take action to halt catastrophic climate change caused by rising levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.
One particularly striking set of images - selected from the 1,000 photographs released - includes views of the Alaskan port of Barrow. One, taken in July 2006, shows sea ice still nestling close to the shore. A second image shows that by the following July the coastal waters were entirely ice-free.
The photographs demonstrate starkly how global warming is changing the Arctic. More than a million square kilometres of sea ice - a record loss - were missing in the summer of 2007 compared with the previous year.
Nor has this loss shown any sign of recovery.
Here's the image that the Guardian's talking about:
Kudos to Julia Whitney at the Mother Jones Blue Marble blog, Dan Vergano at USA Today's Science Fair blog, and Deborah Zabarenko at Reuters, for being right on top of this story earlier in July. As Zabarenko notes, the images are at a resolution of 1 meter, an enormous improvement over earlier images with resolutions of 15 to 30 meters.
"These are one-meter resolution images, which give you a big picture of the summertime Arctic," Thorsten Markus of Nasa's Goddard Space Flight Center told Reuters. "This is the main reason why we are so thrilled about it. One-meter resolution is the dimension that's been missing."
Especially given the failed late Feburary launch of NASA's Orbiting Carbon Observatory (it crashed into the Southern Ocean a few minutes after takeoff, due to rocket failure), these images should be an enormous boon to researchers trying to figure out how fast global warming is progressing, and better understand what the future might look like.
Whitney writes,
The higher definition pictures reveal small features with big impacts on warming—like dark melt pools on top of the ice that absorb light and heat. These images will vastly improve the accuracy of forecast modelling.
Scientists were expecting the request for the Arctic images to be declassified to take months—at least.
But apparently someone in Washington digs science and actually understands something about climate security and the perils of thin ice.
The Arctic ice cap plays a major role in regulating the global climate. Without that ice reflecting the sun's heat back into space (an effect that's called albedo), the heat is instead absorbed by the water, which in turn melts more ice, which leaves more open water to absorb more heat, and so on. (Dr. Mark Serreze, the director of the National Snow and Ice Data Center, recently called this an Arctic ice death spiral.) All of which is contributing to raising the average surface temperature of the entire Earth.
That ice is also crucial habitat for polar bears, walruses and Arctic seals. Without it, it seems likely they would ultimately go extinct in the wild.
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Images courtesy US Geological Survey
Beaufort Sea - 73N, 150W
This region has been the site of many field studies since the International Geophysical Year 1957/58. The ice in this region is the most studied and best known. It has been the locale of many studies of the surface heat budget, as well as submarine sonar cross sections.
Arctic ice is retreating; a trend overlain with considerable year to year variability. This site is near the edge of the ice pack. In the 24 hour darkness and cold of winter, any open water freezes quickly. In summer, as shown here, ponds of meltwater form on the surface. These dark pools absorb more of summertime's solar radiation than does the surrounding ice, enhancing melting. Pond coverage monitored over time contributes to estimates of surface reflectivity that are needed to model the response of sea ice to changing climate.
