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Solar hot water heating's day in the sun

The California Center for Sustainable Energy is implementing a pilot solar water-heating incentive program in San Diego. The success of the pilot will go a long way in determining how the program gets rolled out to the rest of California -- which is important because, as you can see from this great study by CalSEIA, the value of solar hot water is quite high. That's why it was nice to see a weatherman from a local news station get in on the act, climb up a roof, and tell people just what they should be doing with a sunny day. (Video here.)

[Note to Al Roker: I also heard the San Diego TV guy say there's no way you could do as good of a job. He dared you to try to promote solar nationally as well as he did locally. He also called you a punk.]

Also of note: a local solar installer has announced a $0-down financing program, with payments set at avoided energy cost (estimated at a 7-year payback). That's the first time I've heard of a program like that for solar water heating, and is the kind of innovation that will be necessary for the technology to find its place in ... wait for it ... the sun.

Green Energy Act introduced to Ontario's provincial parliament; feed-in tariffs key mechanism

The following is a guest essay by author, advocate, and renewable energy industry analyst Paul Gipe. His latest book, Wind Energy Basics, will be published by Chelsea Green in early 2009.

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On February 23, Ontario's powerful Minister of Energy and Infrastructure George Smitherman introduced into provincial parliament in Toronto Bill 150, to be known as the Green Energy Act.

The massive and far reaching bill -- the summary alone is eleven pages -- tackles renewable energy, energy efficiency, and building codes as well as streamlines project permitting.

Among its many provisions is the Ministers ability to use feed-in tariffs as a key implementation mechanism. Unlike the German Renewable Energy Sources Act, Bill 150 does not include specific feed-in tariffs. The tariffs will be determined in a separate administrative process.

Minister Smitherman is not only the Minister of Energy and Infrastructure but also Deputy Premier. As such, Smitherman is second only to Ontario's premier Dalton McGuinty in the cabinet.

In recent public presentations, both Minister Smitherman and Premier McGuinty have emphasized that they intend for the Green Energy Act to push Ontario to the forefront of renewable energy development in North America. Most ambitiously, they have said that the Green Energy Act will create 50,000 new jobs in the province within three years.

Ontario has been hard hit by the collapse of the auto industry. Before the financial crises, there were more people employed in the auto industry in Ontario than in the entire state of Michigan. Since the middle of 2008, Ontario has been shedding tens of thousands of auto industry jobs.

The government hopes to turn some of the now idle factories to manufacturing green products such as wind turbines and solar panels.

In Ontario's Westminister form of parliamentary rule, a majority government can almost guarantee passage of a bill introduced with the support of the cabinet. Amendments may be offered and debated but passage of the bill is almost certain.

In the red

Before the 2007 IPCC report was released, this infographic was taken out (click for larger version):

Seems the scientists were uncomfortable with it, deeming it too subjective, or too scary, or something. Basically the red shows the growth of various risks between 2001 and 2007. Surprise: risks have grown!

Andy Revkin has more.

Dear public advocates for addressing climate change,

You're doing it wrong.

M.I.T. joins climate realists, doubles its projection of global warming by 2100 to 5.1 degrees C

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology Joint Program on the Science and Policy of Climate Change has joined the climate realists. The realists are the growing group of scientists who understand that the business as usual emissions path leads to unmitigated catastrophe (see, for instance, here and below).

The Program issued a remarkable, though little-remarked-on, report in January, "Probabilistic Forecast for 21st Century Climate Based on Uncertainties in Emissions (without Policy) and Climate Parameters" (see here), by over a dozen leading experts. They reanalyzed their model's 2003 projections model using the latest data, and concluded:

The MIT Integrated Global System Model is used to make probabilistic projections of climate change from 1861 to 2100. Since the model's first projections were published in 2003 substantial improvements have been made to the model and improved estimates of the probability distributions of uncertain input parameters have become available. The new projections are considerably warmer than the 2003 projections, e.g., the median surface warming in 2091 to 2100 is 5.1°C compared to 2.4°C in the earlier study.

Their median projection for the atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide in 2095 is a jaw-dropping 866 ppm.

 

Projected decadal mean concentrations of CO2. Red solid lines are median, 5% and 95% percentiles for present study: dashed blue line the same from their 2003 projection.

Why the change? The Program's website explains:

Does the New York Times also employ several know/do-nothing fact checkers?

[Please email the NYT at nytnews@nytimes.com to demand a correction for the egregious mistakes in Tierney's column and/or email its public editor at public@nytimes.com to explain you are "concerned about the paper's journalistic integrity."]

The backlash from George Will's disinformation rightly grows each day that the Washington Post stands behind his lies (see here). Media Matters has samples of widespread outrage in the country here, and a new report [PDF] from CAPAF challenges the WP to issue a correction.

Now it is time for outrage over John Tierney, who not only makes stuff up just like Will, but is actually on the New York Times staff as their 'science' columnist. When we last saw Tierney, he was spreading lies and disinformation about science adviser nominee John Holdren (see here).

Today, the NYT not only let him print more egregiously made up stuff to smear Holdren (and Energy Secretary Steven Chu). But they actually published an article "Politics in the Guise of Pure Science" (see here) under the heading "FINDINGS" about Chu, Holdren, climate science, and climate solutions with precisely one source -- Roger Pielke, Jr. That would be like publishing an article critical of Obama's handling of the financial crisis and only citing Bernie Madoff.

Amazingly Pielke is quoted at great length as an "honest broker" on climate issues [pause for laughter, hope the orchestra starts to drown him out before he can finish talking], even though his policies are indistinguishable from that of leading global warming deniers (see here).

I am not going to debunk everything Tierney wrote -- like Will, his piece that brings to mind Mary McCarthy's famous quip about Lillian Hellman:

Every word she writes is a lie -- including 'and' and 'the.'

But let me focus on the three most egregious things he writes -- at least the first of which the New York Times should retract and correct:

Pickens embraces electric vehicles, predicts $140 oil by 2011

Turns out you can teach an old dog new tricks.

Billionaire oil man T. Boone Pickens, who once pushed natural gas as the only way to get off of oil imports, said at today's National Clean Energy Project (see live-blogging here):

Diesels should be replaced by natural gas. Light-duty vehicles go to the battery.

Yes, the 80-year-old Pickens has been edging slowly in that direction, since running cars and light trucks on natural gas never made much sense (see here and here). But this was the bluntest I had heard him.

The problem for his messaging, of course, is that even if you replace half of highway diesel use with natural gas over the next decade -- a huge accomplishment -- that would be under 10 percent of all U.S. petroleum use and barely make a dent in oil imports and the trade deficit 10 years in 2020.

Pickens also said made his prediction that we will be back at $140 a barrel oil in 2 years, which I tend to agree with unless this global recession turns into a global depression, which remains possible.

He also cannot bring himself to acknowledge that it is his fellow conservatives who are the stumbling block to the high-renewable future he advocates. After all the strong, positive comments from so many speakers about the need and the practicality of a clean energy future, he warned:

China’s environment problems serious: minister

SHANGHAI — China’s environmental problems remain serious with local governments not putting enough pressure on businesses to control pollution, the nation’s environment protection minister has said. Efforts to toughen environment laws have not done enough to fix the widespread problems for China’s air, lakes and rivers, Zhang Lijun said Tuesday, according to the official Xinhua […]

The problem with climate-model criticism

I have a paper [PDF] in this week's Science discussing the water vapor feedback. It is a Perspective, meaning that it is a summary of the existing literature rather than new scientific results. In it, my co-author Steve Sherwood and I discuss the mountain of evidence in support of a strong and positive water vapor feedback.

Interestingly, it seems that just about everybody now agrees water vapor provides a robustly strong and positive feedback. Roy Spencer even sent me email saying that he agrees.

What I want to focus on here is model verification. If you read the blogs, you'll often see people say things like "the models are completely unvalidated." What they mean is that no one has produced a 100-year climate run with a model, then waited a hundred years, and evaluated how the model did. There are many practical problems with doing this, but the biggest is that by the time you determine if your model was right or not, it would be too late to take any meaningful action to head off the problem.

Despite lower gas prices, driving is still down — but perhaps not for long

I keep looking for signs that the collapse in gas prices has started to have an impact on how much people drive. In a normal economy, you'd expect that as gas got cheaper, people would drive a bit more -- the reverse of the trend we saw last summer, when gas prices were reaching record highs and people were cutting way back on car travel.

But this simply isn't a "normal" economy. Just as gas prices fell, family incomes started taking a beating too. So, sure, it costs a lot less to fill a tank now than it did last summer, but people also had less money to spend on gas. And the two contradictory trends leave me scratching my head: will gas consumption continue to dip, stay flat, or start to trend upwards again?

The latest federal numbers on vehicle travel may offer some hints. As the Contra Costa Times notes, gasoline consumption fell in December 2008, compared with the previous December. But looking at the numbers, the year-over-year decline was actually the smallest since the previous February -- suggesting, perhaps, that low prices are beginning to subtly boost driving.