Climate Climate & Energy

As expected, the news is mostly bad, and then worse, and then worse still

Climate change is already having big impacts on the natural world and notable effects on human societies, according to the latest climate report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, being released on Friday. In short, climate change isn’t in the future; it’s in the right now. The previous installment from the IPCC, released in […]

When people ask silly questions

"If fossil fuels are the problem, wouldn't running out of them be good?"

There's an old joke about economists and other Panglossians that bears on this question:

A man leaps off the top of a skyscraper and, as he passes by each floor, true to his optimistic tendencies, he says, "Well, so far, so good."

Running out of fossil fuels is like this man running out of floors. The critical thing is not to jump ... i.e., not to commit all that carbon to the atmosphere in the first place.

Canucks 1, US 0

Turns out that springing forward a month early didn’t save any electricity at all in the U.S. From Reuters: But other than forcing millions of drowsy American workers and school children into the dark, wintry weather three weeks early, the move appears to have had little impact on power usage. “We haven’t seen any measurable […]

The ubiquitous Richard Heinberg talks with Acres USA

Interesting interview with Richard Heinberg about the effects of peak oil on U.S. agriculture, in Acres USA, "A voice for Eco Agriculture."

Who are the green power leaders? NREL tells us

DOE's National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) yesterday released its annual ranking of leading utility green power programs:

Customer choice programs are proving to be a powerful stimulus for growth in renewable energy supply. In 2006, total utility green power sales exceeded 3.5 billion kilowatt-hours (kWh), about a 30% increase over 2005. More than 500,000 customers are participating in utility programs nationwide, up more than 10% from 2005

Some highlights follow.

How can 3 percent be important?

Consider this argument often made by climate skeptics:

Water vapor is the most important gas, contributing 97 percent of the greenhouse effect. Carbon dioxide is only small percentage. Therefore, regulating carbon dioxide will have no impact on our climate.

WhileEven if these numbers are generally correct, there are lots of problems with this argument. For example, it disregards the fact that climate forcing by water is really a feedback, and that changes in carbon dioxide are amplified by the water vapor feedback.

Then there's this problem: the argument includes an implicit assumption that a small fractional change of any quantity is intrinsically unimportant. It might make intuitive sense: carbon dioxide is only 3 percent of total forcing, and how can 3 percent of anything be important?

This one will hit harder in the global south

Climate change is affecting the oceans in any number of unpredictable ways. For example, under pressure from rising ocean temperatures (and toxic waste), coral reefs — those glorious engines of biodiversity — are degrading. I knew that. But this one was new to me: They also become breeding grounds for poisonous algae. And that poison […]

Biofuel facilities that use fossil fuels help no one, waste resources.

The Onion, America's Finest News Source (TM), once told of a special device for dealing with a lost TV remote: a remote you could use to make the other TV remote beep, so you could find it underneath the discarded pizza boxes and such.

Little did the Onion writers know that Big Coal and Corporate Agribusiness would apply that same principle to produce a horde of monsters, the so-called "biofuels plants," facilities with a voracious appetite for fossil fuels, particularly yummy coal.

Drown and Out

Baby seals drown from melting ice as Canada hunt begins Pop an antidepressant before reading this: Canada has reduced this year’s quota for its annual harp seal hunt by 20 percent, to a mere 270,000 — not because of pressure from conservationists and animal activists, but because thousands of baby seals have already fallen through […]

More on fourth IPCC report

Bring your tissue to this one. On Friday, the IPCC publicizes its "emotional heart," the Second Working Group's contribution to the Fourth Assessment Report, covering impacts, adaptation, and vulnerability.

Preliminary drafts have been leaked. Why is it shaping up to be such a tear-jerker? According to Andrew Weaver, a lead author of Working Group I and climate scientist at the University of Victoria in British Columbia, this one illustrates "a highway to extinction, but on this highway there are many turnoffs. This is showing you where the road is heading. The road is heading toward extinction."