Climate Climate & Energy
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Nature magazine gives short-shrift to baseload solar
Nature recently ran an article ($ub. req’d) on “Energy alternatives: Electricity without carbon.” Like most discussions written by people who don’t follow clean energy closely, the article lumped baseload solar (also known as concentrated solar thermal power) in with solar PV and generally treated it as an afterthought. Here is everything that they wrote about […]
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BLM finalizes plan for leasing oil shale in U.S. West
The U.S. Bureau of Land Management has finalized plans to open some 1.9 million acres of public lands in Colorado, Utah, and Wyoming to oil-shale development, a necessary step on the road to tapping the vast reserves. The technology for turning oil shale into usable crude oil is energy-intensive and heavily polluting, but the Bush […]
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Lowballing the future of oil costs money
At a glance, this San Francisco Chronicle article is a bit difficult to parse, but it points to exactly the reason why I’ve been ranting about lousy oil price forecasts churned out by federal U.S. agencies (see here, here, and here). To wit: The Environmental Protection Agency says another arm of the Bush administration may […]
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Google knows what you’re doing
Oh, Google, what would we ever do without you? Check out this Google Maps-generated image of the region near Cannon Beach, Oregon: The strange patchwork of brown? Those are clearcuts in the Coast Range. And many of them appear to be recent. What’s really great is that you can zoom in so close that […]
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Earth hotter now than in past 2,000 years
The “hockey stick” graph is a reconstruction of Northern Hemisphere temperatures over the past thousand years. It showed a sharp rise starting about a century ago. Global warming deniers and doubters have long attacked the graph asserting that we were as warm if not warmer hundreds of years ago. But a 2006 National Academy of […]
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It begins with a T-shirt
Matt Stoller explains the magic of clean coal fairly well, but for a more sophisticated take, let’s turn to the Clean Coal Girlz at the RNC:
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Another large section of Canadian ice shelf breaks loose
In a predictable yet mildly troubling reminder of the Arctic’s continued ice melt, researchers say yet another massive ice chunk has broken off from an ice shelf in Canada. The Serson Ice Shelf just saw its mass more than halved when two large sections broke off recently, leaving it about 47 square miles smaller. For […]
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One farmer says ‘peak oil’ prompted energy-saving steps
Admit it, climate change is the kind of problem that leaves you wondering, “What the heck can any one person do about it?” That’s exactly how Patrick Holden said he felt about it during the “Climate Change and Food” panel discussion last week at the Slow Food Nation conference in San Francisco. Holden has been […]
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Why future Katrinas and Gustavs will be much worse, part 2
A lot of knee-jerk deniers (please don’t write in — I know that is redundant) misread “part 1,” as I knew they would. I was not wading into the issue of whether global warming has already made intense tropical storms more common. That remains a great subject of debate, mostly because of the inadequacy of […]
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Warming seas make strong storms stronger, says new study
As Gustav, Hanna, Ike, and Josephine become household names, more research has been added to the ongoing debate over the impact of climate change on hurricanes. A new study published in Nature indicates that warming seas have not increased the intensity of your everyday hurricane, but have made the mightiest storms even mightier. In essence, […]
