Climate Climate & Energy

Another guy with his hair on fire

Another good Scientific blogging interview is "Urgency and Global Warming: An Interview with Martin I. Hoffert." I'm tempted to quote the whole thing, but instead you should just go read it. He's much more of a techno-optimist than I think is warranted, but if we all shared his sense of urgency, it would probably be more realistic.

(Apparently he hasn't read The Black Swan either.)

Responsible climate policy means reducing transportation emissions

In the Northwest, it's impossible to address climate change without doing something about transportation. Take a look at this chart showing CO2 emissions from fossil fuels in Washington.

In Washington (as in Oregon), everything else pales in comparison to the emissions that come from transportation. In fairness, the chart above shows only emission from fossil fuels. But fossil fuels represent better than four-fifths of the state's entire portfolio of greenhouse-gas emissions [MS Word doc]. They're also the emissions that are best understood, and by far the most practical to cover in carbon legislation, such as cap-and-trade systems.

Whether we aim to reduce our climate emissions by 80 percent below 1990 levels (the amount that scientists say is necessary in the developed world if we're to slow climate change) or by 50 percent (the target that the state's leaders have proposed), there's pretty much no way to get around making big cuts in transportation emissions.

On a related note, the Western Climate Initiative -- the group of western states and provinces setting a joint climate strategy -- just announced their shared target. I was actually a bit surprised when I saw the numbers.

And it’s goood …

The NYT has done itself proud with not one but two op-eds this week pushing for energy efficiency — first Nic Kristof’s, and now the The Mustache of Understanding. I guess the idea is gaining traction. The Mustache references a potentially revolutionary change being pushed by Duke Energy’s Jim Rogers. (On Rogers, the cynical should […]

Could used chopsticks fuel a fire?

The whole point of alternative energy solutions is finding a fuel source that is already overly abundant and underused, and will continue to be ubiquitous for some time, right? In Japan, that fuel source is chopsticks.

Existential threats are a bummer

Following the letters to Grist complaining about a declining humor quotient and the posts wondering if we're just focusing too darn much on the climate crisis, it occurred to me that there's precedent for what we're going through.

Just like people in the USA and USSR had to get used to the idea of annihilation -- and still go about their daily lives -- we are watching people struggle with the problem of living their lives while knowing that the chances that their kids will be able to live nearly as well are declining rapidly.

Thus, the paradox: knowledge is no longer power. Instead, the better informed you are, the more likely you are to feel existential despair.

Bovines aren’t the only ones to blame

Thought cows were the only gassy animals belching up a climate change storm? Apparently the Scandinavian moose is also quite the methane machine: Norwegian newspapers, citing research from Norway’s technical university, said a motorist would have to drive [about 8,000 miles] in a car to emit as much CO2 as a moose does in a […]

Umbra on replacing a boiler

Dear Umbra, When changing boilers for heating a house for the next 30 to 40 years, should we choose gas or electric? We have gas now and want to go from 80 percent efficient to 95 percent efficient. About 60 percent of our electricity comes from Missouri River hydro and 40 percent from coal. We […]

A simple video about CFLs

Natalie Portman, Chloe Sevigny, and Kyra Sedgwick in a National Geographic Green video about CFLs:

Feds look into space solar

Perhaps in the future, all of our stuff will be powered by space solar. Wacky.

Read on

A study by Stephen Schwartz of Brookhaven National Lab, to be published in the Journal of Geophysical Research (JGR), has the deniers and doubters delighted.

"Overturning the 'Consensus' in One Fell Swoop" gloats Planet Gore, which says the study "concludes that the Earth's climate is only about one-third as sensitive to carbon dioxide as the IPCC assumes" and so we "should expect about a 0.6°C additional increase in temperature between now and 2070″ [0.1°C per decade] if CO2 concentrations hit 550 parts per million, double preindustrial levels.

Is this possible? Aren't we already warming up 0.2°C per decade -- a rate that is expected to rise? Has future global warming been wildly overestimated by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) consensus?

Or, as I argue in my book, has future global warming been underestimated by the IPCC? This is perhaps the central issue in the climate change debate, so this will be a long post. To cut to the chase, it is not possible for one study to overturn the consensus, and in any case this inadequately researched, overly simplistic, and mistake-riddled study certainly doesn't.

Climate sensitivity expert James Annan points out key mistakes that rip the guts out of Schwartz's analysis. That is strike one. Now I'll offer my two cents.