Climate Climate & Energy

When it comes to climate change, prevention is more important than adaptation

G. Gordon Liddy's daughter repeated a standard Denier line in our debate: Humans are very adaptable -- we've adapted to climate changes in the past and will do so in the future.

I think Hurricane Katrina gives the lie to that myth. No, I'm not saying humans are not adaptable. Nor am I saying global warming caused Hurricane Katrina, although warming probably did make it more intense. But on the two-year anniversary of Katrina, I'm saying Katrina showed the limitations of adaptation as a response to climate change, for several reasons.

Miltary tech goes eco

Earth2Tech brings us seven ways the military is using green technology. And don’t forget how they’re tackling overpopulation!

Offset customers don’t buy offsets to justify their other behavior

So, TerraPass just got done with a customer survey, with several thousand responses. Uncovered was the shocking news that people are not, in fact, using offsets as an excuse to indulge in other bad behaviors. (Here’s a one-page PDF summarizing results.) In fact, just as you’d expect, people who care enough to pay for offsets […]

Some unwitting climate change advice from the National Review

Hey, did anyone here read that recent article on political strategies for action on climate change? You know, the one published in the National Review?

[crickets chirping]

OK, I generally don't recommend the National Review on environmental policy, but I couldn't help peeking at the recent article [PDF] by Jim Manzi. Various writers of the more thoughtful right-of-center blogs have alternatively described it as "brilliant" and "a taste of how a wised-up, heads-out-of-the-sand Right could kick [liberals'] ass on the issue" of global warming. I hadn't realized that climate change was a game of flag football, but there you go.

El Niño was not the cause of 2006 warming patterns in the U.S.

A new study by NOAA's Earth System Research Lab finds:

Greenhouse gases likely accounted for more than half of the widespread warmth across the continental United States last year ... [T]he probability of U.S. temperatures breaking a record in 2006 had increased 15-fold compared to pre-industrial times because of greenhouse gas increases in Earth's atmosphere.

How did they come to this conclusion?

[T]he NOAA team analyzed 42 simulations of Earth's climate from 18 climate models provided for the latest assessment by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change ... The results of the analysis showed that greenhouse gases produced warmth over the entire United States in the model projections, much like the warming pattern that was observed last year across the country.

The Climate Got Me High

NOAA scientists say near-record U.S. temps in 2006 due to climate change Scientists from the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration said yesterday that the near-record annual average temperature in the Lower 48 states in 2006 was due to greenhouse gases and not to the weather phenomenon El Nino. By perusing weather records the researchers, […]

Interesting hydrogen-generating technology from Purdue

I hesitate to post this for a number of reasons, not least of which is that I think our fixation with maintaining automobility is going to be our undoing.

But there's no denying that if this works out as advertised*, this is a real step toward a noncarbon future that includes more energy, rather than less.

* Caveats:

1. The presser doesn't discuss the energy balance for reformulating the catalytic materials; aluminum is sometimes known as "congealed electricity" because of the energy cost of refining the virgin bauxite.
2. I have no idea how much gallium there is, although the presser suggests it's recyclable.
3. You would need to work out the energy cost of the whole process train, including the cost involved in building the windmills or PV panels needed to power the recycling process -- it's quite possible that this would turn out to be just another way to burn coal to make hydrogen, when all inputs and outputs are considered. We don't need ways to use coal to make hydrogen; we need ways to be entirely coal-free.

Magnetic cooling tech hits a milestone

Now this is hopeful: a real advance in refrigeration. Lots of potential here. How cool.

Dave’s Second Law of Sustainability Politics

Clean up coal emissions and you end up with more — and more toxic — coal ash. You get cleaner air, but you get ash that can’t be recycled (into, e.g., concrete). You breath free, but you’ve got arsenic and mercury leaching into your groundwater from coal-ash landfills. Look at this vintage coal magic: There […]

A new study gathers 20 years of public opinion about global warming

Matthew Nisbet of Framing Science and his colleague, T. Myers, trawled through two decades of data on public opinion about global warming (sounds fun, huh?). The results will be published in the fall issue of the journal Public Opinion Quarterly.

An abstract:

Over the past 20 years, there have been dozens of news organization, academic, and nonpartisan public opinion surveys on global warming, yet there exists no authoritative summary of their collective findings. In this article, we provide a systematic review of trends in public opinion about global warming. We sifted through hundreds of polling questions culled from more than 70 surveys administered over the past 20 years. In compiling the available trends, we summarize public opinion across several key dimensions including (a) public awareness of the issue of global warming; (b) public understanding of the causes of global warming and the specifics of the policy debate; (c) public perceptions of the certainty of the science and the level of agreement among experts; (d) public concern about the impacts of global warming; (e) public support for policy action in light of potential economic costs; and (f) public support for the Kyoto climate treaty.

Unfortunately, the full text isn't available online, but Nisbet says that if you drop him an email, he'll send you a PDF. I look forward to reading it myself tonight.