Climate Climate & Energy

Nice Berk If You Can Get It

Berkeley, Calif., goes all crazy with the green ideas Six months ago, voters in Berkeley, Calif., overwhelmingly approved a measure to reduce the city’s emissions 80 percent by 2050. Now proposals have been laid out to accomplish that goal, including requiring builders to use green materials, making landlords provide free bus passes to tenants, informing […]

Regulatory infrastructure will be crucial

I was traveling last week and missed "solar's inevitable dominance."

I disagree. There is nothing at all inevitable about solar. Sure, the technological potential exists. But the problem is not technology. The technology works great. The problem is policy.

Right now, if solar panels were free -- handed out on street corners -- you still would not see market uptake anywhere near the technical potential. Why? Because we do not yet have the right regulatory infrastructure.

Let me give you an example. Last year, the Arizona Corporation Commission passed a huge increase in the state's renewable energy standard. It will require upwards of 2,000 MW of solar, and there's somewhere around a billion dollars worth of funding to help.

So what happens?

Nuclear power is too risky

This past weekend the Ojai Poetry Festival featured the great American poet Gary Snyder, who read to a large crowd of listeners mostly from work written this century, especially his 2004 book of haibun called Danger on Peaks. (Haibun, we learned, is a mix of prose and haiku: Japanese professor Nobuyaki Yuasa has described it as having a relationship "like that between the moon and the earth: each makes the other more beautiful.")

Snyder read poems linking the destruction of the Buddhas of Bamiyan in March 2001 by the Taliban to the destruction of the Twin Towers, among others, as well as an indelible new poem called "No Shadow." He concluded with his classic "For All," the conclusion to which was recited by all the poets and the crowd.

He then went away from poetry for one moment to warn of a recent trend toward nuclear energy.

"Some people who should know better," he said, mentioning Stewart Brand, were calling for the construction of new nuclear power plants to hold down carbon emissions. Snyder objected vociferously, arguing that climate change would not destroy life on earth, though it might make things difficult for humans for a few hundred years. He specifically went after famous British scientist James Lovelock, the man who first formulated the concept of Gaia, for saying nuclear waste is overly feared as a pollutant.

Good reading on Mongabay

There is so much good stuff over there I hardly know where to start. You might consider subscribing to the weekly email.

Top of the list is an interview with Luke Hunter (the same biologist I pissed off with my pincushion post). Coincidentally, roughly a fifth of the interview dealt with that topic:

... does conservation of the species require radio-tagging? There are many, many cases where it does not. I often read proposals by graduate students who are wishing to radio-collar cats to address a conservation issue when they could far better achieve their goal by some other means.

Trapping or darting animals does increase their vulnerability, so it is critical to reduce that as much as possible. The great bulk of biologists I've met are very concerned about this and take great care in reducing the risk.

Take a few minutes out of your life (or off your boss's time clock) to sign this petition. This was my message: "Please cosponsor the Great Cats and Rare Canids Act. Your grandchildren will thank you." Dooo it ...

Umbra on albedo

Hi Umbra, Can we make small changes to increase the albedo in the Northern Hemisphere? Choose white or light-colored autos (white is safer, anyway), white or light-colored roofs. Could we float white “islands” (recycled Styrofoam) in our lakes and oceans in locations that would not disrupt transportation? Sometimes white plastic bags get caught in the […]

Industrial Revelation

Carbon emissions increasing faster than expected, says new study Remember climate change? It’s still happening — and faster than expected. From 2000 to 2004, global carbon dioxide emissions leapt from an average 1.1 percent annual growth rate to more than 3 percent annual growth, according to a new report published in Proceedings of the National […]

More debunkery of everyone’s favorite fiction writer

While Planet Gore now has the market cornered on entertaining global warming disinformation, Michael Crichton perfected it. For those last two or three people who still think the technothriller writer has his facts straight, check out reasic's terrific post on Crichton's inane 2003 talk, "Aliens Cause Global Warming."

Yes, Crichton, a real medical doctor, actually said:

Nobody believes a weather prediction twelve hours ahead. Now we're asked to believe a prediction that goes out 100 years into the future? And make financial investments based on that prediction? Has everybody lost their minds?

Wow! Not knowing the difference between weather and climate is like not knowing the difference between a general practitioner and an epidemiologist. I don't know what's worse -- the possibility that Crichton is just spouting standard denier crap he knows is crap, or the possibility he actually believes what he is saying.

Kudos to Coby Beck for pointing this post out.

That ain’t good

A stunning new study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) finds that the growth rate of CO2 emissions has tripled in recent years:

CO2 emissions from fossil-fuel burning and industrial processes have been accelerating at a global scale, with their growth rate increasing from 1.1 percent/year for 1990-1999 to >3 percent/year for 2000-2004. The emissions growth rate since 2000 was greater than for the most fossil-fuel intensive of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change emissions scenarios developed in the late 1990s.

That's right. CO2 emissions are rising faster than in the most pessimistic U.N. scenario. So much for all those ostriches and global warming delayers who say that economic growth is the key to solving global warming or that the U.N. scenarios are too extreme.

New Hansen paper

Today the Oil Drum linked to a James Hansen released paper analyzing the impact of peak oil, peak gas, and peak coal on the likely emissions of carbon. Hansen notes that most of our emissions scenarios have thus far failed to account for whether the carbon will even be there to burn.

Plenty of graphy goodness, but what I took away was this: There's just enough oil and gas left in the ground to take us up to, or maybe a bit over, the 450 parts per million of CO2 that climatologists worry about so much. This makes it imperative that we in the developed countries immediately phase out coal, the one supply of fossil carbon that can take us right over the cliff.

No more canaries in coal mines, please

While on a book tour recently, Bill McKibben made an interesting point in an appearance in Santa Barbara. McKibben -- a former New Yorker writer who wrote his first book on climate change back in 1989 -- told the crowd that to expect the Sierra Club and traditional conservationists to take on global warming with "the grammar of wildness" that John Muir drew from his life in the Yosemite Valley back in the 1860s was impractical and unfair.

He suggested that "we're all looking for the next metaphor" for global warming.

Yesterday Southwestern reporter John Fleck posted a good example of why: a list of stories published in recent months employing the "canary in a coal mine" metaphor. Many of these stories were terrific, including the very first one, from Corie Brown at the L.A. Times.

But it's clear: the canary metaphor is exhausted, perhaps dead. We need a new one. Suggestions, anyone?