Climate Climate & Energy

Climate change disrupts ecosystems that provide valuable services

This post is by ClimateProgress guest blogger Bill Becker, executive director of the Presidential Climate Action Project.

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If you are one of those people who loves the quiet communion of hiking in the high-country forests of Colorado, you'd better get there fast. In three years, those forests may be gone.

The Rocky Mountain News reported this week that every large, mature forest of lodgepole pines in Colorado and southern Wyoming will be dead in three to five years. Some 1.5 million acres of pine forest already have been destroyed since 1996. State and federal foresters call the loss "catastrophic."

What's causing the massive die-off? The root cause appears to be global climate change. Winters are warmer. That allows pine bark beetles to survive. The lodgepoles are less able to defend themselves because they have been stressed by years of drought. As a result, a rice-sized bug is felling vast expanses of forests in Colorado. Similar die-offs are underway elsewhere in the western United States and in Canada.

(Forest management practices -- mainly fire suppression in past years -- also are to blame. Dense vegetation allows the beetles to spread more quickly and older trees are more susceptible to the bug.)

Hybrids and biofuels: The road ahead

Many people make the mistake of comparing apples to oranges. One has to compare futures to futures and current status to current status. All technologies improve, but some improve more than others.

The Prius gets 46 mpg, while a similar-sized Toyota Corolla gets 31 mpg. One of our investments (Transonic) is trying to make an engine that (if it works!) can be placed in a Prius to produce a vehicle that will have lower carbon emissions than the hybrid Prius at below $1,000 in marginal cost. Other efficient engine efforts abound. If battery technology efforts like Seeo (one of our investments), EEstor, silicon nanowire batteries (or similar efforts that others have funded and many we are evaluating) are successful, we will get the same effect (better petroleum mpg) with a plug-in -- if we can also clean up our grid at the same time!

From my perspective, if I have to pick between a 5-10 times lower cost/performance battery and a cleaned-up electrical grid in the next 5-10 years (or even 20-25 years), or pick cellulosic fuels in 50 percent more efficient ICE engines, I consider the latter lower risk and significantly more probable.

I am confident that cellulosic biofuels without significant land-use impact or biodiversity impact can achieve costs of $1.25/gallon in less than five years and below $1.00 per gallon in 10 years (more details on that, especially on land use / biodiversity and sources of biomass, in a upcoming paper). At this price point, the technology will be adopted broadly and rapidly worldwide, even if oil prices decline substantially.

Today: George Waldenberger

In previous editions of the "Inhofe 400," we found some skeptics who were completely unqualified and others who are qualified but not actually skeptical.

Today's "skeptic" falls into the latter category. He is meteorologist George Waldenberger.

In response to his inclusion on the list, George sent an email to Inhofe's staffers that began:

Marc, Matthew:

Take me off your list of 400 (Prominent) Scientists that dispute Man-Made Global warming claims. I've never made any claims that debunk the "Consensus".

You quoted a newspaper article that's main focus was scoring the accuracy of local weathermen. Hardly Scientific ... yet I'm guessing some of your other sources pale in comparison in terms of credibility.

You also didn't ask for my permission to use these statements. That's not a very respectable way of doing "research".

Wow. He doesn't leave much to the imagination.

A few thoughts.

Antarctic shrinking much faster than expected

The global warming deniers (and the rest of us) just can't catch a break: Vast areas of the Antarctic ice sheet -- which has 10 times as much ice as Greenland -- is losing mass much faster than anyone expected. And the rate of ice loss has quickened in the last decade. In fact, 2007's ice loss was 75 percent higher than 2006's.

Jeez, it's almost like ... I don't know ... the whole friggin' planet is melting, and we are to blame! If only we had a group of scientists who would, like, report regularly on the impending catastrophe and explain to us how to avoid it ...

As the Washington Post reports:

Field test documents big consumer savings

A Northwest field test of smart-grid technologies has documented tremendous potential to run a grid that delivers power far more economically by controlling peak demand.

The Pacific Northwest GridWise Demonstration Project has just announced the results of their year-long test, which included two pieces:

• On the Olympic Peninsula of Washington, 112 homes, three onsite generation units and municipal water pumps were equipped with automated systems that allowed them to adjust grid power demand in response to price signals.
• Appliances embedded with microchips capable of automatically responding to grid power fluctuations were placed at 150 homes in Washington and Oregon.

The aim of the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory-managed project was to document the ability of automated control systems to cut usage of the most costly power. Reducing demand can eliminate the need for peak power plants and delivery systems used only a relatively few hours of the year. Among the study's findings:

• Average power bill savings among customers who participated in the Olympic test were 10 percent, and peak load reductions 15 percent.
• Power use reductions plus distributed generation reduced peak power distribution loads 50 percent for days at a time.
• These technologies have potential to lower peak power prices plus save $70 billion over 20 years by avoiding the need to build peaking plants and wires.
• If all appropriate appliances were equipped with the intelligence to respond to grid conditions, 20 percent of U.S. power demand could be adjusted, tremendously reducing the level of blackouts and brownouts.

Hybrid emissions: Facts and numbers

Having laid out my views in part I, let me turn to the actual data regarding hybrids -- both from an environmental and economic perspective.

How do carbon emissions per mile driven compare for various cars? The Volt is expected to be "less than $30,000" with a 1.0L engine. Compare this to the Corolla, with a 1.8Lengine (peak hp of 126; 31 mpg) and a price of $14,400. It's worth noting that this is in the optimistic, no-gasoline-use scenario for the Volt, computed below along with carbon emissions for the Volt running on cellulosic ethanol and gasoline, and emissions for comparable-sized ICE cars. Questions on the Volt's actual usage patterns remain: how many people will recharge everyday? What percentage of total miles will be on the grid, and what percentage on gasoline?

E.U. says it will be mindful of sustainability in boosting biofuels

Realizing that biofuel production can have negative social and environmental consequences, the European Commission says it will propose “strict conditions that biofuels used in the European market are produced in a sustainable way” instead of barreling ahead willy-nilly (because really, that would be crazy). The commission will announce specific climate-change mitigation plans later this month; […]

Antarctica ice melt more widespread and faster than thought, says study

Antarctica holds about 90 percent of the Earth’s ice, so it’s a bit problematic that the continent seems to be melting faster than expected. Not only is large-scale ice loss more widespread than thought, but the rate of meltiness has accelerated over the last decade, says a study in the journal Nature Geoscience. The West […]

Cape Wind project given preliminary environmental approval

Seems it was only October that the controversial Cape Wind project in Nantucket Sound was dealt a setback. Now here it is January, and the wind farm that NIMBYs love to hate is inching forward, having been given preliminary environmental approval from the Minerals Management Service. After a public comment period, the final fate of […]

Draft EIS for Nantucket Sound wind project is positive

The Mineral Management Service's Draft Environmental Impact Statement on the Cape Wind project is just out, and so far looks very positive, finding no environmental reasons to halt the project as it is envisioned.