Climate Climate & Energy

A roadmap to getting 70 percent of U.S. electricity from solar by 2050

OK, having spent an absurd amount of time bashing on a crappy article that came out while I was on vacation, let me turn my attention to an extraordinarily good one (via HillHeat): "A Solar Grand Plan," by Ken Zweibel (NREL), James Mason (Solar Energy Campaign), and Vasilis Fthenakis (Brookhaven National Photovoltaic Environmental, Health and […]

Reclusive candy billionaire opposes drilling near his Montana land

Ranchers and conservationists fighting to keep drills out of coal and gas deposits along Montana’s Tongue River are finding an ally in landowner and reclusive billionaire Forrest E. Mars Jr., former CEO of the Mars candy company. Sweet.

German scientists develop Combined Power Plant

Via the The Sietch blog, some very, very cool stuff out of the University of Kassel in Germany — the Combined Power Plant: The secure and constant provision of power anywhere and at anytime by renewable energies is now made possible thanks to the Combined Power Plant. The Combined Power Plant links and controls 36 […]

Hansen v. coal

PRE-PUBLISHING UPDATE: After I wrote this but before I posted it, I got an email from Grist reader CD notifying me of the sad news that Mass.’s gov approved the coal gasification plant. Decisions like this are going to look awfully stupid in a few years. —– I meant to mention this last week, but […]

Tourism and carbon neutrality

This story is critical -- another datum showing that the global jet travel binge is both global suicide and homicide all at once, complete with pre-flight thuggery from the TSA* and a side dish of helping-promote-coal-to-liquids on the side (there was another story today about the U.S. (Ch)Air Force's new plan for dealing with peak oil: burn liquified coal / natural gas mixtures).

Climate skeptics claim no warming since 1998

Honestly, if anyone tells you "For nearly a decade now, there has been no global warming" -- as this Boston Globe columnist has -- they simply are not interested in seriously trying to understand and deal with the gravest problem facing humanity. They deserve the label "global warming denier" for willfully trying to confuse the public debate.

Let's look at the data, from NASA, presented last month (PDF):

Through the first 11 months, 2007 is the second warmest year in the period of instrumental data, behind the record warmth of 2005, in the Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) analysis. The unusual warmth in 2007 is noteworthy because it occurs at a time when solar irradiance is at a minimum and the equatorial Pacific Ocean has entered the cool phase of its natural El Niño -- La Niña cycle.

Yes, in some global datasets -- not NASA's, however -- 1998 is still the peak year because that year we had global warming plus the warm phase of the natural El Niño-La Niña cycle. But guess what, deniers? Climate change is about a change in the "climate." A single year doesn't make the climate, that's why people use a running average -- in order to show the trend. Duh!

NASA points out:

Today: Christopher Castro

In previous editions of the "Inhofe 400," we found one skeptic whose only qualification for being a "climate expert" was to have written an op-ed and another who argues that climate change must not be happening because God would never allow it.

We also found some economists who don't seem to doubt that humans are causing the climate to change.

Today's "skeptic," Prof. Christopher L. Castro, is a bonafide atmospheric scientist, so he clearly has relevant expertise on his resume.

I emailed Prof. Castro about being on this list, and he replied:

Since I'm asked about this often, my "official" position on global warming is given in my series of lectures I present in NATS 101 (accessible via my website link). You are free to quote my position from that if you like.

I went on his website and found these quotes from this lecture (MS PowerPoint file, slides 3 and 4):

Battery technology continues to improve

This is my hybrid bike charging at a 7-11 while I ate some lunch. I was hauling a heavy load and had been tormenting another cyclist who had been trying to close a 10-foot gap with me for a couple of miles on Sand Point Way. I took my batteries to their limit of 4.6 amp-hours, so I had to pull out of the dogfight to refuel with 14 miles on the odometer.

Yet-Ming Chiang (formerly a researcher at MIT) combined lithium ion technology with nanocarbon particles to invent the batteries that power my bike, saw, and drill. These batteries solved just enough technical problems to make the hybrid electric bicycle fully feasible, and will probably do so for the first plug-in hybrid cars.

Yi Cui (a researcher at Stanford) heads a team that has come up with an improvement on the A123 battery by combining lithium ion technology with silicon nanowires.

"It's not a small improvement," Cui said. "It's a revolutionary development [producing 10 times the amount of electricity of existing lithium-ion batteries]."

The Forest Guild on climate change

Here's a window into how foresters are looking at climate change: the Forest Guild is a national, nonprofit network of practicing foresters whose advice and efforts on behalf of their landowner clients has a big role to play in the health and future of privately owned forests. The Guild "promotes ecologically, economically, and socially responsible forestry as a means of sustaining the integrity of forest ecosystems" (and the welfare of those dependent on them).

So it's not a big surprise that the new edition of their publication, Forest Wisdom (large PDF), goes to some depth in exploring the challenges presented by climate change. It includes articles like "Recent Trends in US Private Forest Carbon" (of nine forest regions identified by the Forest Service, four are most important in terms of potential carbon gains and losses -- the Northeast, Southeast, Midwest/Lake states, and Pacific Northwest -- due to their high ratio of private ownership, high productivity, and intensity of management), and also a piece on carbon markets.

What caught my eye was the cover story by editor Fred Clark, "Forest Stewardship in a Changing World," the main issues of which he describes like this:

Forest practitioners will be on the frontlines in the effort to protect our forests and our environment from the effects triggered by changing climate. Guild members already possess many of the tools and skills that will be most needed ... [and] are well-suited for meeting both the new realities and expectations that society is rapidly placing on forests.

The "What's New" section of their site links to this edition of the publication, and lots of other interesting papers all delightfully full of forester-speak, but I wanted to (heavily) paraphrase here some of Fred's main points contained in the cover story:

Cheap coal and $100 oil

Amid vague talk of how $100/barrel oil might represent a kind of sea change, inspiring corporations and individuals to lower their carbon footprints, the smart money is betting on another direction: the burning of more coal. That’s a harrowing trend. As NASA climatologist James Hanson recently put it: Coal will determine whether we continue to […]