Since things are on fire here, let me resort to a retro moment and resurrect the “ponderables” style of post, likely for just this one day.

Herewith, I present some intriguing items that have gushed from the open hydrant that is my Internet connection and washed up on the stony shore of my mind. Have fun, but please watch out for the sharp jaggy pieces.

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Technology Review: High-Energy Batteries Coming to Market:

A Swiss company says it has developed rechargeable zinc-air batteries that can store three times the energy of lithium ion batteries, by volume, while costing only half as much. ReVolt, of Staefa, Switzerland, plans to sell small “button cell” batteries for hearing aids starting next year and to incorporate its technology into ever larger batteries, introducing cell-phone and electric bicycle batteries in the next few years. It is also starting to develop large-format batteries for electric vehicles.

Same volume, half the cost, triple the energy storage? Yowza. You can do your own analysis about what that would do to personal transportation, the zombie meme of hydrogen fuel cells in cars, and just about every aspect of getting from point A to point B.

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TreeHugger: CO2 Scrubbing Artificial Trees Won’t Save Us - Need Massive Investment, Colossal Infrastructure:

For some reason (frankly, entirely lost on me) the idea of artificial trees to remove CO2 from the atmosphere seems to grab people’s imagination in a way other geoengineering schemes don’t. Well, over at Yale e360 there’s a good piece that goes into the pros (artificial CO2 scrubbers could work with low chance of unintended consequences) and cons (it’s gonna be really expensive) of deploying them on a wide scale:

There are a number of different ways of using these artificial trees — which won’t look much like trees, despite some artists’ conceptions — and the original piece details different methods being researched, but it’s really other aspects of this that grab me.

Highly recommended, including the linked-to piece at Yale e360 and the Royal Society’s report from a few months back on geoengineering.

I think the reason why so many people, at least among those I speak with, love this idea is the Magnitude Disconnect. People see that something is technically feasible, but they have no appreciation for the sheer size of the problem–our yearly CO2 emissions, the amount of CO2 we’d have to pull out of the atmosphere to make a difference (after spending a couple of centuries putting it there), etc. Plus, even if they’re artificial, who doesn’t like trees?

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Carbon capture coal tech must be ready by 2019: U.S.

TreeHugger: Carbon Capture Is “Essential” for Developing World, And Still a Pipe Dream

Clean Coal: The Future’s Not So Bright

CCS cannot significantly reduce tar sands emissions - WWF report

I have very little hope that CCS/clean coal/clean oil will arrive on a scale and soon enough to be a significant contributor to dealing with the infinitely nasty climate problem we’ve created for ourselves.

The WWF report, which I had a surprisingly hard time tracking down, is here [PDF].

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Why we don’t do much about climate change:

A fascinating paper from the World Bank looks at the question of how people understand climate change and change their behaviour accordingly - or more often, don’t.

Climate change, the paper argues, is an anthropogenic problem, so the solutions need to be anthropogenic too. Instead, current talk of solutions focuses almost exclusively on economics and on technical solutions - but rarely on individual behaviour. And individual decisions, such as travel, heating, and food purchases, result in about 40 per cent of OECD greenhouse gas emissions.

Of course we are bombarded with exhortations to change our behaviour, but the net effect has been slight. Awareness of, and concern about, climate change is growing, but so are driving, flying, and so on.

So if people know more, and they worry more, why don’t they do more? Part of the problem, argues author Andrea Liverani, is assuming that information leads to action. In fact, information doesn’t even necessarily lead to understanding:

Concern about climate change does not necessarily mean understanding of its drivers and dynamics, nor of the responses needed. Polls show that the public admits to remaining confused over climate change’s causes and solutions.6 This “green gap” in public attitudes partly stems from how climate science is communicated and how our minds’ (mis)understand climate dynamics.

…

Even if we were indeed fully rational, knowledge would not necessarily lead to action.

If nothing else, this should trigger some interesting debates with your fellow enviros.

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In the ongoing saga of The Worst Science Book of the Decade, a.k.a. Superfreakonomics, by Levitt and Dubner, we now have a first-rate slap down from Real Climate, An open letter to Steve Levitt:

By now there have been many detailed dissections of everything that is wrong with the treatment of climate in Superfreakonomics , but what has been lost amidst all that extensive discussion is how really simple it would have been to get this stuff right. The problem wasn’t necessarily that you talked to the wrong experts or talked to too few of them. The problem was that you failed to do the most elementary thinking needed to see if what they were saying (or what you thought they were saying) in fact made any sense. If you were stupid, it wouldn’t be so bad to have messed up such elementary reasoning, but I don’t by any means think you are stupid. That makes the failure to do the thinking all the more disappointing. I will take Nathan Myhrvold’s claim about solar cells, which you quoted prominently in your book, as an example.

As quoted by you, Mr. Myhrvold claimed, in effect, that it was pointless to try to solve global warming by building solar cells, because they are black and absorb all the solar energy that hits them, but convert only some 12% to electricity while radiating the rest as heat, warming the planet. Now, maybe you were dazzled by Mr Myhrvold’s brilliance, but don’t we try to teach our students to think for themselves? Let’s go through the arithmetic step by step and see how it comes out. It’s not hard.

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And it’s not as if the “black solar cell” gaffe was the only bit of academic malpractice in your book: among other things, the presentation of aerosol geoengineering as a harmless and cheap quick fix for global warming ignored a great deal of accessible and readily available material on the severe risks involved, as Gavin noted in his recent post. The fault here is not that you dared to advocate geoengineering as a solution. There is a broad spectrum of opinion among scientists about the amount of aerosol geoengineering research that is justified, but very few scientists think of it as anything but a desperate last-ditch attempt, or at best a strategy to be used in extreme moderation as part of a basket of strategies dominated by emissions reductions. You owed it to your readers to present a fair picture of the consequences of geoengineering, but chose not to do so.

I can’t begin to do the whole piece justice by pulling out quotes, so please go read it all. It’s a beautiful example of how to dismantle a ridiculous claim with established facts, a little arithmetic, and a conspicuously civil tone.

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Honestly, Levitt and Dubner, the authors of the much ridiculed Superfreakonomics, are the gift that just keeps on giving.

The latest example is a doozy:

Ezra Klein - The law of unintended juxtapositions:

From Steven Levitt’s recent appearance on the Diane Rehm show:

Of course, ocean acidification is an import issue. Now, there are ways to deal with ocean acidification, right, it’s actually, that’s actually, we know exactly how to un-acidifiy the oceans, is to pour a bunch of base into it, so, so if that turns out to be an incredibly big problem, then we can deal with that.

Wow.

One can only wonder what kind of economic incentive they would cook up to collect all the “base” needed to “un-acidify the oceans”.

Read that reply from Levitt again, and tell me which grade a child would have to be in before you would consider it an acceptable answer in an earth science class. You can probably guess my answer.

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It’s almost impossible to over estimate the role water is already playing and will play in the coming decades as we confront our energy and environmental challenges. From drought and a lack of water for personal use, agriculture, and power generation, to rising sea level, to impacts on which technologies we can use to generate electricity, water and ice are everywhere in the E/E landscape.

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Sea levels to rise faster than expected, scientists say

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Green Car Congress: Study Finds North Carolina Sea Levels Rising Three Times Faster Than in Previous 500 Years:

An international team of environmental scientists led by the University of Pennsylvania has shown that sea-level rise, at least in North Carolina, is accelerating. Researchers found 20th-century sea-level rise to be three times higher than the rate of sea-level rise during the last 500 years. In addition, this jump appears to occur between 1879 and 1915, a time of industrial change that may provide a direct link to human-induced climate change.

The results appear in the current issue of the journal Geology.

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The Associated Press: Turmoil from climate change poses security risks:

An island in the Indian Ocean, vital to the U.S. military, disappears as the sea level rises. Rivers critical to India and Pakistan shrink, increasing military tensions in South Asia. Drought, famine and disease forces population shifts and political turmoil in the Middle East.

U.S. defense and intelligence agencies, viewing these and other potential impacts of global warming, have concluded if they materialize it would become ever more likely global alliances will shift, the need to respond to massive relief efforts will increase and American forces will become entangled in more regional military conflicts.

…

Former Republican Sen. John Warner, a longtime chairman of the Armed Services Committee and a close ally of the military, has been touring the country to talk about climate change and national security.

“We are talking about energy insecurity, water and food shortages, and climate-driven social instability,” says Warner. “We ignore these threats at the peril of our national security and at great risk to those in uniform.”

Among the flash points:

* Himalayan glaciers are likely to recede, producing fresh water shortages in India, Pakistan, Bangladesh and parts of China.

* Receding Arctic ice could trigger a territorial conflict involving Russia, the United States, Canada and others.

* Sea level rise in Bangladesh, and drought in other parts of the world could unleash a flood of cross-border “climate refugees” and violence.

* The Indian Ocean island of Diego Garcia, an atoll only a few feet above sea level, likely would disappear, taking away a critical U.S. military staging area.

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Accelerating ice loss from Antarctica and Greenland

See the post for a couple of hair-raising graphs of the polar ice situation.

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Arctic sea ice is refreezing quite slowly. Go figure!

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Nature: “Dynamic thinning of Greenland and Antarctic ice-sheet ocean margins is more sensitive, pervasive, enduring and important than previously realized”

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When the ice melts

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Hydropower industry braces for glacier-free future

FACTBOX - Impacts of glacier retreat on hydropower

Melting Glaciers Changing Europe’s Energy Outlook

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Solar Projects Battling for Water

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On the Water Front: Sausage Making and California Water Legislation

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Changing Climate Complicates Central Asian Water Management

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TreeHugger: Drought Decimates Kenyan Herders’ Net Worth

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TreeHugger: Linda Loudermilk’s Luscious ‘Water is a Human Right’ Jewelry

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The other day I posted about the supremacy of numbers over words when it comes to assessing energy and environmental issues (Numbers beat words), and here’s another great example: The non-issue of wind turbines killing birds.

Wind Turbines Don’t Kill Birds; Coal Plants Do:

A study from the National Research Council last year tallied bird kills from total anthropogenic bird deaths, and found collisions with wind turbines comprised a minute fraction of human interaction bird deaths. Only 3 out of 100,000 anthropogenic bird deaths were from turbines. Cats and buildings had a far higher kill rate.

Nevertheless The Heartland Institute, a well known climate change denier group puts out regular bulletins keeping the idea alive that wind farms are bird killing machines. Their claim that Altamont Pass kills 4,700 birds a year is wildly at odds with both the original NREL counts (pg 22) and the Defenders of Wildlife count of 96 tallied at the now obsolete small turbines built in the 70’s, the worlds oldest and deadliest wind farm.

The three problems here, obviously, are that wind turbines killing birds is a new phenomenon in the minds of most people, they don’t see all the birds killed by buildings or climate change, and there are highly politicized organizations, like The Heartland Institute, gleefully playing the “absolute vs. relative” game to mislead people.

The “absolute vs. relative” game is pretty simple, and it’s abused constantly in energy and environmental discussions. Someone (typically some think tank or other organization) says, “if we all do X, then we could reduce our CO2 emissions as much as if we took 10,000 cars off the road!”. The claim is usually true, but the rub is that getting “everyone to do X” is usually a huge, bordering on impossible, proposition, and 10,000 cars is a tiny percentage of the number of vehicles on the road, just in the US. But 10,000 is a “big” number, so it feels like it’s much more of a step forward than it really is.

This also relates to something I wish we could all remember: If we all do just a little, then collectively we’ll accomplish only a little. And that, in turn, points to a much larger issue, the difficulty of moving from the simple, easy actions (like changing our light bulbs) to the much less “fun” changes to our consumption patterns and behavior needed to drop CO2 emissions by 80% in the next 41 years. As harrowing as that task is, it’s only made tougher by all the ways we lie to ourselves with fairy tales about wind turbines massacring birds, clean coal, our “clean hydrogen future” that’s just around the corner, etc.

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Can I jump in here, bring the entire conversation to a screeching halt, and point out something that drives me absolutely freakin’ nuts? Of course I can–it’s my site–but I’m trying to be polite about it.

Anyway, my beef is yet another example of a Metaphor That Refuses to Die, namely the idea that we need to take action on climate change as a form of “buying fire insurance” because all those fire marshals (i.e. the climate scientists) are telling us that it’s getting toasty out there and we have a lot of fuel lying about.

Bull.

This is a terrible metaphor, and a much better one comes from none other than Bill McKibben, who wrote in Environment: race against time (emphasis added):

At last month’s G8 summit, western leaders including Barack Obama and Gordon Brown pledged to forge a deal that would hold the increase in global temperatures to 2 degrees Celsius and the atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide to 450 parts per million.

Two years ago that would have been an unthinkably progressive stance. Then, the American president wanted to do essentially nothing at all about global warming. And because two years ago it seemed like those numbers might be good enough to tackle the problem.

But two years ago, almost to the week, scientists noticed that the Arctic was losing ice at an almost unbelievable pace, outstripping the climate models by decades. Clearly we’d passed a threshold, and global warming had gone from future threat to present crisis. It wasn’t just Arctic ice; at about the same time methane levels in the atmosphere began to spike, apparently as a result of thawing permafrost. Surveys of high altitude glaciers showed they were uniformly melting, and much faster than expected. Oceanographers reported – incredulously – that we’d managed to make the oceans 30% more acidic.

Those observations changed everything – and they produced what is almost certainly the most important number in the world. A Nasa team headed by James Hansen reported that the maximum amount of carbon the atmosphere can safely hold is 350ppm, at least if we want a planet “similar to the one on which civilization developed and to which life on earth is adapted.” Since we’re already at 390ppm, the message was clear: we don’t need to buy an insurance policy to reduce the threat of future warming. We need a fire extinguisher, and we need it now.

Let me expand just a bit on what McKibben said, even though he hit it pretty solidly.

To me, the whole issue is one of not just urgency, but probability. Buying fire insurance is basically a bet. You don’t expect your house to catch fire and turn itself and all your worldly possessions to ash at any specific time, or even within any given range of years. But the safety net of an insurance company check is worth the cost of paying your premiums, so many millions of people do it. In the case of climate change, there’s no uncertainty about where we were headed under a business as usual scenario, and we’ve had it figured out for some time. We didn’t know the precise details of how things would unfold–how much worse will tropical storms get? how much sea level rise will we see? exactly which areas will get squeezed by drought, and exactly how bad will it be?–but we knew it would be Very Bad.[1] The barrage of “it’s worse than we thought” news items didn’t change our assessment of if it would happen, merely the timing, and in some cases, the details.

In other words, the house is already ablaze, but it’s a small enough fire that we still have time to grab an extinguisher or hose and save the rest of the structure. But first, we have to wake up, smell the smoke, and take action.

I now return you to your regularly scheduled conversation.

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[1] Forgive the unpleasant metaphor, but I liken our situation to a car full of people driving at high but varying speed and heading straight for a bridge support. We know that they’re going to hit the support, we don’t know precisely when it will happen (thanks to their inconstant speed), or exactly which people will be thrown through the windshield, which will be crushed to death in the car, and which will survive, possible sans some body part or functionality thereof. Our inability to predict those grisly doesn’t detract whatsoever from the wisdom of telling our friends to pull over and find a vastly safer driver.

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EERE News: Department of Energy and National Labs Release New Data on Commercial Building Energy Goals:

The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) and the DOE national laboratories are releasing technical support documents that suggest how to achieve 50% energy savings in four key commercial building sectors. This is taking place less than two years after launching the Net-Zero Energy Commercial Building Initiative, which aims to achieve marketable net-zero energy commercial buildings by 2025.

The technical support documents were created by the DOE national laboratories under the direction of DOE’s Building Technologies Program. They describe the assumptions, methodologies, and analyses used to reach 50% energy savings over ASHRAE/IESNA Standard 90.1-2004 in general merchandise, grocery store, lodging, and medium office buildings.

The technical support documents demonstrate that higher levels of energy performance can be achieved in the commercial building industry. These reports are often the basis for Advanced Energy Design Guides—”how to” guides that target architects, engineers, and other design practitioners.

Report data is also shared with members of DOE’s Commercial Building Energy Alliances, which are comprised of commercial building owners and operators. Each alliance works with DOE to reduce the energy use and the environmental footprint in the retail, commercial real estate, and hospital sectors, as well as to help disseminate valuable building information within each sector.

Four technical support documents are available. The following documents are available as Adobe Acrobat PDFs. Download Adobe Reader.

* General Merchandise (PDF 3.5 MB)

* Grocery Store (PDF 2.6 MB)

* Lodging (PDF 987 KB)

* Medium Office (PDF 1.2 MB)

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I have to admit, I was already very impressed with the smattering of mainstream media pieces I’ve seen that treated the superfreaks, a.k.a. Levitt and Dubner, the authors of the (apparently) spectacularly bad Superfreakonimics, like the truth abusers they are.

The best example I had seen until the other day was Eric Pooley’s Bloomburg piece, Freakonomics Guys Flunk Science of Climate Change. If you haven’t read it, please do.

But now someone in the very much maligned (and deservedly so) media has so thoroughly blown up the superfreaks that I think it could well be the long-desired turning point in how the media perceives climate change deniers in general.

The capital-J Journalist in question is Seth Borenstein, and his article is Statisticians reject global cooling. Please go read it all. The thumbnail summary is that Borenstein asked experts to assess the temperature record, you know, the one that the deniers say endlessly is showing the end of global warming, without knowing what the data was. In other words, he conducted a “blind test” with experts and asked them about trends in the data. The conclusion, to no one’s surprise, was that there is no cooling trend.

Borenstein then brings our favorite book into the discussion:

A line in the book says: “Then there’s this little-discussed fact about global warming: While the drumbeat of doom has grown louder over the past several years, the average global temperature during that time has in fact decreased.”

That led to a sharp rebuke from the Union of Concerned Scientists, which said the book mischaracterizes climate science with “distorted statistics.”

Levitt, a University of Chicago economist, said he does not believe there is a cooling trend. He said the line was just an attempt to note the irony of a cool couple of years at a time of intense discussion of global warming. Levitt said he did not do any statistical analysis of temperatures, but “eyeballed” the numbers and noticed 2005 was hotter than the last couple of years. Levitt said the “cooling” reference in the book title refers more to ideas about trying to cool the Earth artificially.

This whiplash inducing passage and the entire article leave me with three conclusions:

• We need more Journalism like this article. We need news organizations to act as if (gasp!) science and expertise still matter, and remember that there are cases where we can say X is true, and anyone who says X is not true is simply wrong and does not deserve to be given equal weight as the “other side” of a discussion that, in fact, has only one side.
• I have now changed my view of the superfreaks. Until now, I had tried very hard to give them the benefit of the doubt. I didn’t want to ascribe to evil intent that which could be explained by stupidity, as the saying goes. (In my decades of technical writing and computer programming and consulting, I’ve seen some truly breathtaking examples of innocent stupidity, a few in my own work, so I’m always hesitant to say that every attention-getting error was an intentional grab for publicity and more money.) But things like the quote from Levitt above, and the bizarre, quantity-free comparison of CO2 and methane emissions Dubner makes in Simple Solutions to Fix Hurricanes, Global Warming, Malaria, have changed my mind. I’m now convinced that they really do know better, but were intentionally creating as much controversy as possible simply to sell more books and themselves.
• Perhaps I’m being overly optimistic yet again, but it feels to me like we are finally, at long last, have approached the tipping point in modern society where we treat the climate change deniers (and science deniers in general) the way we treat the “HIV doesn’t cause AIDS” camp, the “President Obama isn’t a US citizen” crew, the “we never landed man on the moon” cabal, etc. In other words, we talk about them only to debunk them, and most of the time we simply ignore them.

Oh, and one more thing: Thank you, Seth Borenstein.

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Let me be blunt about this: I’m a word guy, and I have a life-long and deep appreciation for the written and spoken word, whether it’s a short story, a novel, technical writing, a presentation, or a dramatic performance. But when it comes to energy and environmental issues–as in real, honest-to-Thomas-Edison science–numbers beat words ten out of ten times. Words are clearly important, to help motivate us and to build the contextual scaffolding around trhe numbers. Words alone are nothing more than hot air; but as Bertrand Russell said:

Mathematics, rightly viewed, possesses not only truth, but supreme beauty — a beauty cold and austere, like that of sculpture, without appeal to any part of our weaker nature, without the gorgeous trappings of painting or music, yet sublimely pure, and capable of a stern perfection such as only the greatest art can show. The true spirit of delight, the exaltation, the sense of being more than Man, which is the touchstone of the highest excellence, is to be found in mathematics as surely as poetry.

What better words could one imagine to persuade us of the superiority of numbers over, well, words?

I find myself very frustrated (for which, read: I walk around waving my arms and screaming about how humanity is too stupid to live) by some of the arguments I see presented in favor of one technology or public policy over another, simply because of their lack of fact-based rigor. One of the best examples I can give you of this phenomenon is an op-ed regarding space-based solar power, Space-based solar power can help on energy needs:

The United States is on a serious quest to free itself from a costly and worrisome dependence on foreign oil, and depleting supplies of domestic petroleum, coal and natural gas.

The country is pushing forward, thanks to some timely incentives from the federal government and state agencies, and we’re turning to renewable sources of energy — which will also help protect our environment.

As a former member of the House of Representatives whose legislative interests included energy, the environment and space exploration, I’m well aware of the ever-growing innovative approaches under way at NASA that can help shape America’s energy future, improve air quality and offset greenhouse gas emissions.

October is Energy Awareness Month, and this year’s theme — A Sustainable Energy Future: Putting All the Pieces Together — is especially timely. Here is my perspective on one significant piece, which has been worked on since 1967 and was presented to Congress in 1999, that could build on the space agency’s considerable technical prowess.

One of our greatest resources is all around us — sunlight. Each hour, the Earth receives more energy from the sun than the world’s population consumes in one year. And our star promises to shine brightly for billions of years to come.

With presidential direction and congressional support, NASA’s wellspring of talent could help foster the creation of solar power satellites — spacecraft that circle the Earth and beam the energy they generate down to the ground for distribution as electricity.

The International Space Station, a NASA-led project involving 15 nations and now the permanent home to six astronauts, serves as a highly visible symbol of how the sun’s radiance can be harnessed for the benefit of many. The station’s outstretched solar panels generate enough electricity to power the equivalent of 55 homes.

While it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to appreciate solar power as an environmentally friendly source of energy, it will take that level of expertise to develop a practical, economic concept to collect the sun’s radiance and relay this resource to Earth.

Two years ago this month, the National Security Space Office, a research arm of the Pentagon and the nation’s intelligence-gathering agencies, commented on the idea in a report, “Space-Based Solar Power as an Opportunity for Strategic Security.” This document characterized the prospect of a network of solar-power satellites as a grand opportunity to address the nation’s environmental and economic concerns as well as energy security.

The United States currently ranks behind Germany, Spain and Japan in solar energy use. Even though solar power has a long way to go to catch up with other sources of renewable energy, it is making impressive strides. With a network of solar-power satellites, we could expect accelerated growth in the nation’s solar-power industry to help invigorate our economy by creating high-paying jobs.

Since its birth in 1958, NASA has teamed with industry, academia and other federal agencies to offer the benefits from their cutting-edge research to those well outside the field of space exploration.

Environmentally friendly fuel cells have powered NASA’s human spacecraft since the 1960s. Now, the world’s automakers are turning to fuel cells as an alternative to fossil fuels. NASA’s legacy also includes work with wind turbines and biofuels, two more promising renewable energy sources.

Space-based solar power, initially proposed in the late 1960s, is a concept whose time has finally come. I urge the White House, Congress and NASA to act now. Our nation needs its brightest minds to offer alternative thinking to help solve our ever-growing energy needs.

Upon reading this piece of fluff, I was left wondering:

• What’s the cost/megawatt of generating capacity, over an appropriate life cycle, for SBSP? And I’m not talking about some mythical cost that relies on our finding a way to reduce the cost/kilogram of putting hardware into orbit by at least an order of magnitude, but the actual cost to develop and produce the hardware, get it into orbit, deploy it, and do about a million other things I don’t know enough to ask about.
• How reliable is SBSP in real world, large-scale implementation? The view of many lay people, that SBSP is a
  “launch, set up, and forget” technology feels to me like a case of irrational techno-exuberance. But I’m guessing, and so is everyone else, since we’ve never done anything with orbiting solar panels on anything even remotely approaching this scale. (Who thought we’d need to do so many in-orbit repairs of the Hubble Space Telescope, or that we’d be able to keep pulling so many rabbits out of our space helmets? And what about all those outages, aside from the refueling ones, we keep reading about for nuclear power plants, another “set up and forget” technology? Imagine that we’re routinely servicing not just a single telescope, which doesn’t leave many thousands of households sans electrons when it breaks, but dozens (hundreds?) of solar arrays that do.)

• What are the life cycle CO2 and other greenhouse gas and ozone depleting emissions for such a project? This includes the whole smash, from building the hardware to launching it on (likely many) rockets to making the rocket fuel, etc.
• How does the reliability and cost of SBSP compare to putting an equal amount of funding into, say, a smart grid and ground-based solar thermal generation with storage (like those desert towers surrounded by acres of mirrors we keep reading about) or widely enough distributed wind that it’s always producing power, large overcoming that source’s intermittancy issue?
• How vulnerable would SBSP be to attack? Would we simply be creating an immense, critical energy resource that would be hideously difficult and expensive to defend against any space-capable entity with an incentive to disrupt it?

Don’t misread this as a condemnation of SBSP. Everything I’ve read about it says it would work, but that with current launch vehicles and manufacturing processes it would be insanely expensive compared to any utility-scale generation technology in use today. I’m not dismissing it entirely, merely pointing out that we need a pretty hefty breakthrough to make this a viable path, and feel good, rally the troops op-eds like the one I’ve quoted above, are a waste of the resource we can least afford to squander: time.

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Got Water?

FACTBOX - Impacts of glacier retreat on hydropower

Climate: When the ice melts

Hydropower industry braces for glacier-free future

TreeHugger: Hydropower Not Likely Under New Climate Future

Water wars show we should all work together

Global warming: Indians decide to make their own glaciers

With this, well, gusher of water stories in just the last few days, one might think we need some blogger to stand on his soapbox and scream until his lungs bleed about the energy/water nexus, and how water will be the primary vector for the human impacts of climate chaos.

Oh, wait…

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The rumbles continue (and are likely still building) over the publication of Superfreakonomics, the book that is quickly shaping up to be the biggest single example we’ve seen recently of bad research and writing practices, whether accidental or as part of a willful attempt to gin up a controversy and make more money.[1]

The latest noteworthy aftershock is an interview with Ken Caldeira, the scientist who’s views seem to have been the most abused by the Superfreak authors, Geoengineering the Planet: The Possibilities and the Pitfalls (emphasis added):

Caldeira has become a focal point recently in the controversy surrounding the publication of Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner’s SuperFreakonomics, the follow-up to their previous best-seller, Freakonomics. A chapter of the book that deals with geoengineering and quoted Caldeira was circulated on the Internet prior to the book’s publication and was widely criticized for its poor understanding of climate science and its cynical, contrarian perspective.

In an interview with Yale Environment 360, conducted by author Jeff Goodell, who is working on a book about geoengineering, Caldeira spoke about how his work was misrepresented in SuperFreakonomics, as well as the prospects — and pitfalls — of plans to engineer the planet’s climate system. He views geoengineering as a last resort, one fraught with risks and unintended consequences. What if, for example, industrialized nations decide to inject heat-reflecting dust into the stratosphere and set off a climate reaction that causes drought and famine in India and China? For this and many other reasons, Caldeira argues that sharply reducing greenhouse gas emissions is by far the most prudent course.

Still, given the huge volume of carbon dioxide that humanity continues to pour into the atmosphere, Caldeira says it would be folly not to undertake research into geoengineering. With the prospect that the world could reach a level of dangerous warming this century, Caldeira maintains it’s necessary to determine which projects — such as putting particles in the stratosphere to reflect sunlight into space — might work and which will not. He likens geoengineering schemes to seatbelts — a technology that might reduce the chance of injury in case of a climate crash.

But, warned Caldeira, “Thinking of geoengineering as a substitute for emissions reduction is analogous to saying, ‘Now that I’ve got the seatbelts on, I can just take my hands off the wheel and turn around and talk to people in the back seat.’ It’s crazy.”

Frankly, Caldeira’s views, as highlight above in bold, are exactly where I think we should all be on these issues. As I’ve said before, as much as I detest the idea of geoengineering, if I were to find out tomorrow that my home office was at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue and not Rochester, I would be pushing hard to get Congress to fund geoengineering research. But unless someone finds a near-miraculous solution, I can’t imagine geoengineering changing the basic fact that we need to drop our global CO2 emissions as soon as possible.

I haven’t quoted any of the actual Q and A with Caldeira because it’s long and deserves to be read in its entirety.

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[1] Just so there’s no misinterpretation by people who love to read between the lines: I am not, in any way, shape or form, implying that the authors did this on purpose to sell more copies of the book and raise their public profiles. This is not a “wink wink nudge nudge” thing; I have no idea how they got from the established facts to the words on the pages of Superfreakonomics. But being a long-time technical writer, I will say that this level of error and spin is either a gigantic smoking gun or it’s a sign that the authors were stupefyingly sloppy.

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The US GAO (General Accountability Office) has issued a report, ENERGY-WATERNEXUS:
Improvements to Federal Water Use Data Would Increase Understanding of Trends in Power Plant Water Use [78 page PDF].

From the summary (”What GAO Found”):

Advanced cooling technologies that rely on air to cool part or all of the steam used in generating electricity and alternative water sources such as treated effluent can reduce freshwater use by thermoelectric power plants. Use of such approaches may lead to environmental benefits from reduced freshwater use, as well as increase developer flexibility in locating a plant. However, these approaches also present certain drawbacks. For example, the use of advanced cooling technologies may result in energy production penalties and higher costs. Similarly, the use of alternative water sources may result in adverse effects on cooling equipment or regulatory compliance issues. Power plant developers must weigh these drawbacks with the benefits of reduced freshwater use when determining which approaches to pursue.

Consideration of water use by proposed power plants varies in the states GAO contacted, but the extent of state oversight is influenced by state water laws, related state regulatory policies, and additional layers of state regulatory review. For example, California and Arizona—states that historically faced constrained water supplies, have taken formal steps aimed at minimizing freshwater use at power plants. In contrast, officials in five other states GAO contacted said that their states had not developed official policies regarding water use by power plants and, in some cases, did not require a state permit for water use by new power plants.

Federal agencies collect national data on water availability and water use; however, of these data, state water agencies rely on federal water availability data when evaluating power plants’ proposals to use freshwater more than federal water use data. Water availability data are collected by the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) through stream flow gauges, groundwater studies, and monitoring stations. In contrast, federal data on water use are primarily used by experts, federal agencies, and others to identify industry trends. However, these data users identified limitations with the federal water use data that make them less useful for conducting trend analyses and tracking industry changes. For example, the Department of Energy’s (DOE) Energy Information Administration (EIA) does not systematically collect information on the use of advanced cooling technologies and other data it collects are incomplete. Similarly, USGS discontinued distribution of data on water consumption by power plants and now only provides information on water withdrawals. Finally, neither EIA nor USGS collect data on power plant developers’ use of alternative water sources, which some experts believe is a growing trend in the industry. Because federal data sources are a primary source of national data on water use by various sectors, data users told GAO that without improvements to these data, it becomes more difficult for them to conduct comprehensive analyses of industry trends and limits understanding of changes in the industry.

Aside from the obvious policy implications, this document serves as an excellent overview of the basic concepts and US practices regarding the cooling of thermoelectric plants.

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I posted a few weeks ago about the breakthrough that (seemingly) explains the sharp rise in atmospheric methane we’ve measured since late 2006. For those who haven’t been following along, the most recent graph of atmospheric methane I posted was just a little over a month ago:

The mystery was, of course, where the heck all that extra methane was coming from.

The big fear, for at least some of us, was that it was the leading edge of the shock wave from the methane bomb going off. There’s something like 1.6 trillion tons of carbon (not CO2 or methane) in the Arctic region in the form of permafrost, so if even a very small portion of that thawed and was turned by microbes into CO2 and methane, or a big enough burp from Arctic methane hydrates was released, we would be in an almost unimaginable amount of trouble.

Then came the story I alluded to above, which I wrote about on September 28th (Methane mystery solved?), about an NOAA study that was summarized in an NOAA press release by saying:

Unusually high temperatures in the Arctic and heavy rains in the tropics likely drove a global increase in atmospheric methane in 2007 and 2008 after a decade of near-zero growth, according to a new study. Methane is the second most abundant greenhouse gas after carbon dioxide, albeit a distant second.

…

“At least three factors likely contributed to the methane increase,” said Ed Dlugokencky, a methane expert at NOAA’s Earth System Research Laboratory in Boulder, Colo. “It was very warm in the Arctic, there was some tropical forest burning, and there was increased rain in Indonesia and the Amazon.”

…

Dlugokencky and his colleagues from the United States and Brazil note that while climate change can trigger a process which converts trapped carbon in permafrost to methane, as well as release methane embedded in Arctic hydrates – a compound formed with water - their observations “are not consistent with sustained changes there yet.”

My conclusion was that I was less than comforted by this finding. This was “likely” the cause, and observations are “are not consistent with sustained changes there yet”? That’s a pretty loose conclusion, all things considered.

Now I have to wonder if there’s another cause that hasn’t been connected to the other dots just yet. That big dot is the Three Gorges Dam in China, and the thing that has me thinking such thoughts is the tantalizing item, Chinese dam may be a methane menace:

Marshland created when China’s Three Gorges Reservoir is partially drained during the summer may be a significant source of the powerful greenhouse gas methane, researchers say.

The findings, published in the Journal of Geophysical Research, are among the latest to raise questions over the green credentials of hydropower.

Unfortunately, the article itself is behind a pay firewall, so I can’t say if the findings would account for a sizable portion of the methane increase or something more like 0.001%.

For a refresher on just how large this dam project is, see Wikipedia’s entry, Three Gorges Dam. Notice that the dam started to come online in pieces in 2003, and didn’t get mostly up to speed until 2006/2007. How much of this marshland creation happened in late 2006, when the observed methane levels started to rise?

I don’t know, but I’m going to try to dig up more details on the dam, the amount of methane it’s estimated to have produced, etc.

As for what this means if the dam is a major contributor to this run-up, I think it’s a mixed bag. It strengthens the conclusion from NOAA that it wasn’t the permafrost or hydrate bombs going off, but it also points to our being locked into those emissions, unless someone has a suggestion about how we can convince China to radically alter how they use their immense and very expensive electron pusher.

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I’ve mostly stayed away from the slowly-erupting mess over the publication of Superfreakonomics and its “global cooling” chapter, largely because I thought it would quickly blow over and turn into just another pointless annoyance. Obviously I committed a pretty substantial Bushian misunderestimation with that conclusion.

As is often the case with a brouhaha involving those seeking to take a, shall we say, “pointedly contrarian” view of climate change, the trail starts with Joe Romm and his carpet bombing of the Superfreakonomics authors, which has now swelled to five installments (with more to come, I would guess):

• Error-riddled ‘Superfreakonomics’: New book pushes global cooling myths, sheer illogic, and “patent nonsense” — and the primary climatologist it relies on, Ken Caldeira, says “it is an inaccurate portrayal of me” and “misleading” in “many” places.
• Error-riddled ‘Superfreakonomics’, Part 2: Who else have Nathan Myhrvold and the Groupthinkers at Intellectual Ventures duped and confused? Would you believe Bill Gates and Warren Buffett?
• Error-riddled ‘Superfreakonomics’, Part 3: It takes a village to debunk their anti-scientific nonsense, but why did they stop Amazon from allowing text searches?
• Error-riddled Superfreakonomics, Part 4: They get the economics dead wrong, too, and their response to critics is full of misrepresentations, just like their book
• Part 5: Error-riddled Superfreakonomics claims Caldeira’s “research tells him that carbon dioxide is not the right villain.” Caldeira updates his website to read “Carbon dioxide is the right villain.”

Recently, the RealClimate site has jumped into the fray with, Why Levitt and Dubner like geo-engineering and why they are wrong:

Many commentators have already pointed out dozens of misquotes, misrepresentations and mistakes in the ‘Global Cooling’ chapter of the new book SuperFreakonomics by Ste[ph|v]ens Levitt and Dubner (see Joe Romm (parts I, II, III, IV, Stoat, Deltoid, UCS and Paul Krugman for details. Michael Tobis has a good piece on the difference between adaptation and geo-engineering). Unfortunately, Amazon has now turned off the ’search inside’ function for this book, but you can read the relevant chapter for yourself here (via Brad DeLong). However, instead of simply listing errors already found by others, I’ll focus on why this chapter was possibly written in the first place. (For some background on geo-engineering, read our previous pieces: Climate Change methadone? and Geo-engineering in vogue, Also the Atlantic Monthly “Re-Engineering the Earth” article had a lot of quotes from our own Raypierre).

Paul Krugman probably has the main issue right:

…it looks like is that Levitt and Dubner have fallen into the trap of counterintuitiveness. For a long time, there’s been an accepted way for commentators on politics and to some extent economics to distinguish themselves: by shocking the bourgeoisie, in ways that of course aren’t really dangerous.

and

Clever snark like this can get you a long way in career terms — but the trick is knowing when to stop. It’s one thing to do this on relatively inconsequential media or cultural issues. But if you’re going to get into issues that are both important and the subject of serious study, like the fate of the planet, you’d better be very careful not to stray over the line between being counter-intuitive and being just plain, unforgivably wrong.

This is another highly recommended RC post. (See the post itself for the version of their text with live links to the sources mentioned above. Also, please note that the link to the chapter does seem to work, but it appears to be one of those rare ones that reports a damaged file when trying load the document into FireFox, but you can right-click download it just fine.)

An excellent page, one well worth book marking as we wait for our popcorn to emerge from the microwave, is FAIL: Superfreakonomics, from the blog Left as an Exercise. This is an already long, but still growing, list of responses to and analyses of the Superfreakonomics chapter.

One piece of commentary worth highlighting is from Ezra Klein, writing in the Washington Post, The Shoddy Statistics of Super Freakonomics. You might surmise from the title that Ezra is not exactly impressed with the Superfreaks’ stats skills.

Levitt and Dubner (a.k.a the Superfreaks) seem to be quite unamused by all this attention, and they are protesting quite loudly that they’re being misquoted, misunderstood, cast as evil climate change deniers when they’re no such thing, and so on. I’ll leave it up to you to decide if they’re being properly or improperly beaten and dragged through the blogosphere’s public square.

In giving my take on the situation, let me try something a little different here, something that the Superfreaks would probably appreciate.

Let us assume that you’re going to write a book about our area of expertise, which will make it a non-fiction title. Further, it’s not our first book, but a follow-on to a highly successful book you and your co-author published recently. Being a rational person who sees a lot of work going into this project, you want to maximize your income from the book, so obviously the optimal path is to be sure the book is squeaky clean in its facts and analysis, and then present it in an accessible and reader-friendly manner that doesn’t alienate people. (Why turn away potential customers with an abrasive style, after all?)

Sounds pretty conventional, bordering on being quaint, doesn’t it? Another approach would be to take the contrarian tack Krugman alludes to in the text I quoted above, but in not nearly as benign a way: Don’t merely fall into that trap, but willingly swan dive into it. Push hard for ways to mine the “everything you know is wrong!” notion, and write the book in a pointed and sarcastic way, more akin to how a blogger might do it. In looking for ways to be contrarian, don’t be overly fussy about statistical interpretation or whether you’re reaching absurd conclusions based on bad research and/or data. The gut reaction from the reader is more important than facts. If you stir the pot a little, that’s just great! It means more attention for you and your co-author, in the form of oodles of hits on your blog, lots of media interviews and speaking engagements in which you can cast yourself as the Poor, Innocent Victim who never said what everyone thinks you said and instantly become the coddled darlings of the contrarian crowd, and best of all, you’ll sell more books! After all, that was your number one priority–maximizing your income–wasn’t it?

Of course, such “perfect plans” sometimes fizzle or even backfire. Maybe you do the writing equivalent of climbing up on a table, screaming like a howler monkey, and throwing food around the dinner party, and no one notices. You get a couple of smirks and raised eyebrows, and the polite discussion meanders on with nary a mention of your antics. OK, it’s not a big deal, since you’re writing a follow-on to a very successful book, so you’ll still sell a few barge loads of copies. And there’s always the third book in the series where you can revert to a more civilized approach.

Another possibility is that people definitely notice, and at least one chapter in the book ignites a firestorm. You get pummeled endlessly by the bloggers and the print and broadcast media (except for those contrarians who have hugged you to their ideological bosom), you get to play the Poor Victim Card, and sales go up, up, UP! Success! (And the irony of using the very technique you talk about in the book as a way to write the book itself and make more money, with almost no one noticing your little parlor trick, is simply a bonus.) You’ll be getting a call from your agent with an offer for the next book in the series any minute now, unless it’s one of the morning news shows wanting you for an interview on their couch.

There’s also a third possibility: Things start out as in the above example–strong reaction, your plucky defense, gobs of attention–but then their opinion sours. Not only do people object to your dinner party antics, but they point out that in throwing things you’re actually hurting people, and all that screaming is inducing people to act in ways that harm themselves and others. In other words, your cherished and carefully crafted reputation for being a fiercely independent thinker and teller of nasty truths quickly transmogrifies into an image of a callous, greedy, narcissist who was and is willing to do damn near anything to push more copies of a book and build your personal brand.

Am I saying this is what the Superfreaks did, that it was all a calculated, money-driven exercise? Of course not; that would be incredibly irresponsible of me, as I have no way of knowing what’s going on in their heads and what kind of discussions they had between themselves and with their publisher and confidants. And I doubt there’s any way for those of us who aren’t in that very small inner circle to ever know the truth.

But ask yourself which possibility you think would be worse, that they wrote this chapter with good intentions but sloppy execution and fell into this particular mess accidentally, or they did it intentionally and are compounding the lie about important public policy matters, all for money? Honestly, I don’t know how I would answer that one, but I find either possibility quite depressing.

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As the saying goes, it’s not the things you don’t know that will get you into trouble, but the things you know that ain’t so.

I thought of this when reading, Just How Sensitive Is Earth’s Climate to Atmospheric Carbon Dioxide?:

Carbon dioxide levels climbing toward a doubling of the 280 parts per million (ppm) concentration found in the preindustrial atmosphere pose the question: What impact will this increased greenhouse gas load have on the climate? If relatively small changes in CO2 levels have big effects—meaning that we live in a more sensitive climate system—the planet could warm by as much as 6 degrees Celsius on average with attendant results such as changed weather patterns and sea-level rise. A less sensitive climate system would mean average warming of less than 2 degrees C and, therefore, fewer ramifications from global warming.

Human civilization is now running an experiment (and without a control) that will definitively determine the answer. Scientists, however, have also realized that history can be a guide: Two new papers published in Science this week examine the historical record preserved in a stalagmite and microscopic seashells, respectively, to offer some clues.

…

“Modern-day levels of carbon dioxide were last reached about 15 million years ago,” Tripati says, when sea levels were at least 25 meters higher and temperatures were at least 3 degrees C warmer on average. “During the middle Miocene, an [epoch] in Earth’s history when carbon dioxide levels were sustained at values similar to what they are today [330 to 500 ppm], the planet was much warmer, sea level was higher, there was substantially less ice at the poles, and the distribution of rainfall was very different.”

Further, “at no time in the last 20 million years have levels of carbon dioxide increased as rapidly as at present,” Tripati adds; CO2 concentrations have climbed from 280 ppm to 387 ppm in the past 200 years. And “our work indicates that moderate changes in carbon dioxide levels of 100 to 200 parts per million were associated with major climate transitions and large changes in temperature”—indicative of a very sensitive climate.

I think of our climate situation as being a chain of information discovery and communication.

First, we discover what we need to do, and then we communicate it to policy makers, consumers, and voters, and then we hope enough people do enough of the right things to save our collective backsides.

But that “figure out what we need” step has sub-steps of its own. First we figure out the mapping of atmospheric CO2 level to temperature change, and then we determine the mapping of temperature change to knock-on environmental effects–tropical storms, floods, droughts, ocean acidification, loss of species, etc. Finally, we determine how those environmental changes impact human beings.

I’ve increasingly become convinced that we’re seriously underestimating those first two mappings (CO2 to warming, warming to enviro changes). This is largely because of our ignorance; it wasn’t until very recently that we figured out at least some of the ice dynamics that influence how the Arctic ice and the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets respond to a warming planet, and they all point to quicker change than we expected. And I suspect we’re going to discover a few more nasty surprises in this area in the next few years.

We also don’t know exactly how much warming we can cause before we trigger immense releases of CO2 and methane from permafrost and methane hydrate deposits. We might discover a few years from now that the “magic number” to avoid unleashing the permafrost and hydrate bomb is an atmospheric level of CO2 around 360 parts per million, roughly 30 less than our current situation. Or maybe we’ll get lucky and run the CO2 level up to nearly 450 ppm without causing that catastrophe, or killing off the ocean’s food chain through acidification, or causing any of the other potential horrors we’re so worried about.

The complication is that part of the knock-on effects from anthropogenic CO2 increases and warming is even more warming. Quicker than expected Arctic ice melt results in more warming (the albedo flip effect, in which darker water absorbs more heat than does bright white ice), there is some additional CO2 and methane release from the Norther hemisphere, saturation of the upper levels of the oceans with CO2 reduces their ability to further absorb it, leaving even more in the air, etc. In other words, the dynamics of the very complex and interrelated system that is our planet strongly argues that X units of CO2 emissions will result in more than the expected Y degrees of warming.

(There’s also the issue of how we’re cooking the books by a whopping 40% by arbitrarily using 2100 as a cutoff year for our projections. As David Archer points out in The Long Thaw, 40% of the warming from our emissions up to 2100 will happen after that year. I mention it simply because so few people seem to be aware of it.)

My point is that in the case of the mapping of CO2 level to warming we seem to be building a stronger and stronger case for unconventional wisdom, a conclusion supported by science that overturns something “we all know”, i.e. the conventional wisdom, and it’s most definitely not good news.

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New Report Brings Greater Clarity to Burning Issue - United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP):

A far more sophisticated approach needs to be taken when developing biofuels as an environmentally-friendly energy option a new report concludes.

Governments should fit biofuels into an overall energy, climate, land-use, water and agricultural strategy if their deployment is to benefit society, the economy and the environment as a whole.

The report, the first by the United Nations Environment Programme’s (UNEP) International Panel for Sustainable Resource Management, says some first generation biofuels such as ethanol from sugar cane can have positive impacts in terms of greenhouse gas emissions.

As currently practiced in a country such as Brazil, it can lead to emissions reductions of between 70 percent and well over 100 percent when substituted for petrol.

However, the way in which biofuels are produced matters in determining whether they are leading to more or less greenhouse gas emissions. Conditions under which production of biofuels does lead to higher emissions have been identified in the report.

The production and use of biodiesel from palm oil on deforested peatlands in the tropics is cited. It can lead to significant increases in greenhouse gas emissions-up to 2,000 percent or more when compared with fossil fuels.

This is mainly as a result of carbon releases from the soils and land. However, a positive contribution to greenhouse gas emissions can arise if the palm oil or soya beans are instead grown on abandoned or degraded land.

The report Towards Sustainable Production and Use of Resources: Assessing Biofuels is based on a detailed review of published research up to mid-2009 as well as the input of independent experts world-wide.

It has been written to assist governments and industry in making sustainable choices in an area that over the past few years has become deeply divided while triggering sharply polarized views.

Achim Steiner, UN Under-Secretary General and Executive Director of the UN Environment Programme, which hosts the Resource Panel, said : “Biofuels are neither a panacea nor a pariah but like all technologies they represent both opportunities and challenges.”

“Therefore a more sophisticated debate is urgently needed which is what this first report by the Panel is intended to provide. On one level, it is a debate about which energy crops to grow and where and also about the way different countries and biofuel companies promote and manage the production and conversion of plant materials for energy purposes-some clearly are climate friendly while others are highly questionable,” added Mr. Steiner.

From the report’s Summary:

This report provides an overview of the key problems and perspectives toward sustainable production and use of biofuels. It is based on an extensive literature study, taking into account recent major reviews, and considering a wide range of different views from eminent experts worldwide. The focus is on so-called first generation biofuels while considering further lines of development. This focus is due to state-of-the-art and data availability until the end of 2008. Potential benefits and impacts of second and third generation biofuels – preferably referred to as ‘advanced biofuels’ – are partially included, and might be subject to a specific report at a later stage.

The report focusses on the global situation, recognising regional differences.

In the overall context of enhancing resource productivity, options for more efficient and sustainable production and use of biomass are examined. In particular, “modern biomass use” for energetic purposes, such as biomass used for (co-)generation of heat and power and liquid biofuels for transport, are addressed and related to the use of biomass for food and material purposes. Whereas improving the efficiency of biomass production plays a certain role towards enhancing sustainability, progress will ultimately depend on a more efficient use of biotic (and abiotic) resources (incl. for instance, an increased fuel economy of car fleets), although a full consideration of all relevant strategies towards this end (e.g. changing diets high in animal based foods and reducing food losses) is beyond the scope of this report.

See the page above for a link to the 120-page report in PDF format.

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Of the many facets of our climate chaos mess, one of the most interesting and intractable for me is the mystery of why so many weathermen are such virulent deniers. I was reminded of this issue this morning when I read an item that popped up in my news feeds, KDKA’s Jeff Verszyla is tweeting up a storm:

Peter Adams, an assistant professor in the department of civil and environmental engineering at Carnegie Mellon University and an expert in atmospheric chemistry and climate change, said he first encountered meteorologists skeptical of climate change during a lecture in Cleveland this summer. In interviews last year with the Cleveland Plain Dealer, several prominent forecasters at Cleveland TV stations, including WJW’s Dick Goddard — Cleveland’s weather patriarch in the Joe DeNardo mold — rejected assertions about human-induced warming made by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

…

“It is safe to say that the science of how and why burning fossil fuels emits carbon dioxide and causes climate change is not a subject of any serious scientific debate,” Adams said.

“The mainstream climate scientists agree that a significant fraction of the warming over the 20th century was caused by human activities. Continuing to burn fossil fuels will only accelerate those changes. In my mind it’s inconceivable that we can continue burning fossil fuels and not have pretty dramatic climate changes.”

The American Meteorological Society, of which Verszyla is a member, endorses the IPCC view.

“Our stance is pretty clear on this and we’re in agreement with the global warming scenario as set out by the international panel,” Keith Seitter, AMS executive director, told the Cleveland Plain Dealer. “Still, we think they should research all that they can. And really, there should be less and less skepticism out there as the science improves each year — not more.”

Verszyla, who has a degree in broadcast communications and English from Allegheny College and a certificate of broadcast meteorology from Mississippi State University, declined further comment this week.

“The station has no comment,” wrote KDKA news director Coleen Marren in an e-mail. “Jeff was expressing his personal opinion and not that of the station or its management.”

Why do some meteorologists disbelieve climate change? Adams chalks it up to cultural differences between two different fields of study.

“There are big differences between weather and climate,” he said. “Weather is all about short-term variability and climate is about long-term trends and those are really governed by different processes.”

This last point–that weather and climate are, in effect, different fields concerned with different physical processes–no doubt explains part of this syndrome, but not all of it. What convinces the weathermen that they know more about climate than do the climate scientists, but not vice versa? Is there some sort of arrogance that’s either caused by or a pre-requisite for working in front of a green screen? And where are the female weatherperson deniers? (Or the female deniers from any profession, for that matter? Perhaps that’s an oil drum of worms best opened at another time, such as when I’m blogging late at night after my Nth glass of Finger Lakes wine.)

This is a particularly big stick in my eye, as one of the weathermen 44 who were mysteriously included on James Inhofe’s infamous list of over 400 climate experts is right here in Rochester. (See Inhofes List of 44 TV Weathermen, Global Warming Deniers, Debunked - Climate Change Deniers.) In fact, he had a letter in our local newspaper pushing the usual denier silliness just a day before (or possibly on the very same day) that the American Meteorological Society issued their call for:

1. Enhanced research on the scientific and technological potential for geoengineering the climate system, including research on intended and unintended environmental responses.

2. Coordinated study of historical, ethical, legal, and social implications of geoengineering that integrates international, interdisciplinary, and intergenerational issues and perspectives and includes lessons from past efforts to modify weather and climate.

3. Development and analysis of policy options to promote transparency and international cooperation in exploring geoengineering options along with restrictions on reckless efforts to manipulate the climate system.

Geoengineering will not substitute for either aggressive mitigation or proactive adaptation, but it could contribute to a comprehensive risk management strategy to slow climate change and alleviate some of its negative impacts. The potential to help society cope with climate change and the risks of adverse consequences imply a need for adequate research, appropriate regulation, and transparent deliberation.

That may be the most concise and intelligent prescription for dealing with climate chaos that I’ve ever seen.

But back to the issue of why we keep hearing about denier weathermen. Part of it is surely that they have a soapbox and credibility with the public. It’s not obvious to the average information consumer who doesn’t have a science background that there’s such a fundamental difference between weather and climate. So when the guy who tells them nightly whether they need to take an umbrella to work the next day or whether their kids’ soccer game will be rained out says climate change is a “crock of shit”, as GM’s Bob Lutz famously said, they tend to believe it.

Another part of it, I think, is a combination of experience with failure what I call guru envy. Experience with failure should need no explanation; the chaotic nature of the atmosphere has made weathermen the butt of jokes for as long as people have tried to predict weather. I suspect that nearly all weathermen have experienced this nasty fact of life so many times that they have a deep distrust of anyone who tries to predict things like temperature patterns over decades or centuries.

Weathermen know that on the scale of respectability and expertise and all around braininess, they are perceived to be below climate scientists. (Note that I said “are perceived” and not “are”.) Therefore, some of them leap at any chance to take the climate scientists with their models and (perceived) lack of real-world experience down a peg or three.

I think it’s analogous to a mechanic who knows how to tune internal combustion engines to perfection vs. the engineers who design new engines and understand and manipulate things like wave front propagation, volumetric efficiency, etc. The mechanic knows by its sound and behavior that a particular engine has a faulty cylinder ring or blocked injector, while the engineer who would be lost in a repair shop knows how to alter the basic design of an engine to get another 3% improvement in fuel efficiency.

Personally, I find it very disappointing that we have to deal with highly trained professionals who should know better trying to fight a mountain of data and, well, reality. The fact that it’s not in our best interest to indulge any of the deniers, and doing so will only delay desperately needed action, makes it all the worse.

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There’s a fascinating and very timely paper that’s just been published in the PNAS, Reducing abrupt climate change risk using the Montreal Protocol and other regulatory actions to complement cuts in CO2 emissions. As you can tell from the title, it’s an examination of ways to slow down the approach of climate chaos by means other than reducing CO2 emissions.

The six-page article is freely available from the above link in PDF format, and I highly recommend it.

Let me freestyle a little here and comment on the overall approach and the authors’ conclusions.

• The basic idea of looking for other strategies that we can use to complement our CO2 reduction efforts (and notice that the authors even use that word in the title) strikes me as being not just good or common sense, but absolutely imperative. We’re perilously close to some truly horrific tipping points, as the constant drumbeat of “it’s worse than we thought” news stories tell us, and we might even be past at least one of those milestones without having figured it out yet. Therefore, we should take the broadest possible approach to saving ourselves, which means not limiting our focus to CO2. As the authors point out, black carbon and other pollutants play a sizable role in the anthropogenic increase in radiative forcing at the root of this mess, so going after those sources, as well as employing large-scale reforestation efforts looks and feels like something we should have been doing for at least a decade or three (kind of like meaningful reductions in our CO2 emissions, which still haven’t begun).
• I’m a little concerned that any progress on non-CO2 contributors to climate chaos will only reduce the sense of urgency for implementing CO2 emissions reductions. I know that’s a policy issue and beyond the scope of such an article, but here in the real world it’s definitely a factor in play. Given the amount of money and effort being put into blocking any action whatsoever to forestall climate chaos, I shudder to think how non-CO2 based efforts would be twisted and misrepresented.
• The authors point out that there’s some uncertainty involved in their suggestions. The estimates for the radiative forcing effect of black carbon vary quite a bit, for example, and there’s also the concern that burning less coal and oil will reduce not just BC emissions but also sulfate aerosols from the air. Sulfate aerosols have a cooling effect, estimated at 1.15 watts/square meter.[1] In absolute value this is 69% of the warming effect of atmospheric CO2 (1.66), 72% of net anthropogenic forcing (1.6), and 3.8 times the forcing of BC[2]. (See Chapter 2 of The Physical Science Basis in the current IPCC report, especially Table 2.12.) In other words, it’s a hell of a lot of cooling we’re talking about, and stopping those emissions would result in a very quick drop in atmospheric sulfate aerosol levels, on the order of days to months, with an attendant rise in warming.[3] This is not to say that attacking BC emissions is a bad thing, merely that it has to be done in a way that doesn’t backfire.
• They point to sizable potential savings from biosequestration of carbon, through biochar and better forestry management (reduction of dforestation plus more reforestration). These efforts seem to have a sizable potential gain in terms of pulling carbon from the atmosphere, but they’re highly dependent on domestic and international policy efforts, so I don’t have a clue how to assess the probability of their actually being implemented on anything approaching the scale the authors discuss.
• The authors don’t address methane, the second-highest source of anthropogenic warming. Given the source of our methane emissions–largely food production and waste–it would be insanely difficult to reduce them by the usual 80% figure worldwide.[4]

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[1] I’ve added the direct forcing for sulfate aerosol (-0.4) and the middle value of the range given for sulfate-induced cloud albedo effect (quoted as 0 to -1.5) in IPCC Table 2.12, linked above.

[2] I’ve added the direct BC forcing (0.2) and the BC/snow forcing (0.1), also from IPCC Table 2.12, linked above.

[3] As I’ve pointed out before, this is perhaps the single most perverse detail of our environmental mess. It’s bad enough that we burn (and are therefore dependent on burning) such an immense amount of coal around the world, but we’d be in very big trouble if we were somehow able to instantly stop using it. In planning and human terms, the CO2 from a couple of centuries of fossil fuel use will be with us forever, but the partially offsetting sulfates from burning all that coal would disappear very quickly. Who says Mother Nature doesn’t have a twisted sense of humor?

[4] But see the article By Degrees - Curbing Climate Change While Capturing Lost Methane about capturing methane that leaks from natural gas wells and facilities. In the US in 2007, we had 699.9 million metric tons of methane emissions (measured in CO2 equivalent units), with the top five sources being natural gas systems (176.6), landfills (169.0) and enteric fermentation (138.5), coal mining (71.1; yes, yet another reason to hate coal), and animal waste (65.0). These values are from the EIA’s publication EIA - Emissions of Greenhouse Gases in the U.S. 2007-Overview; see page five of the document or the linked web page for a large (unlabeled) table with these numbers. Obviously there is at least sizable category of savings that’s centralized enough and with sufficient economic incentive to be worth pursuing.

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After this morning’s link fest on water issues, I thought I was done with it for a while. Wrong again.

Lester Brown on his must-read new book “Plan B 4.0: Mobilizing to Save Civilization” (guest post by Lester Brown on Climate Progress; emphasis as in the original):

In early 2008, Saudi Arabia announced that, after being self-sufficient in wheat for over 20 years, the non-replenishable aquifer it had been pumping for irrigation was largely depleted.

In response, officials said they would reduce their wheat harvest by one eighth each year until production would cease entirely in 2016. The Saudis would then import virtually all the grain consumed by their Canada-sized population of nearly 30 million people.

The Saudis are unique in being so wholly dependent on irrigation. But other, far larger, grain producers such as India and China are facing irrigation water losses and could face grain production declines.

Water Shortages Undermining Food Security

Fifteen percent of India’s grain harvest is produced by overpumping its groundwater. In human terms, 175 million Indians are being fed with grain produced from wells that will be going dry. The comparable number for China is 130 million. Among the many other countries facing harvest reductions from groundwater depletion are Pakistan, Iran, and Yemen.

The tripling of world wheat, rice, and corn prices between mid-2006 and mid-2008 signaled our growing vulnerability to food shortages. It took the worst economic meltdown since the Great Depression to lower grain prices.

…

We are in a race between political tipping points and natural tipping points. Can we cut carbon emissions fast enough to save the Greenland ice sheet and avoid the resulting rise in sea level? Can we close coal-fired power plants fast enough to save at least the larger glaciers in the Himalayas and on the Tibetan Plateau? Can we stabilize population by lowering fertility before nature takes over and halts population growth by raising mortality?

Yes. But it will take something close to a wartime mobilization, one similar to that of the United States in 1942 as it restructured its industrial economy in a matter of months. We used to talk about saving the planet, but it is civilization itself that is now at risk.

Saving civilization is not a spectator sport. Each of us must push for rapid change. And we must be armed with a plan outlining the changes needed.

I highly recommend the whole piece, as well as anything else Lester Brown writes. He’s definitely on the List of People To Whom You Should Listen, although I have no clue why he seems to have a much lower profile than some other members of The List.

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The Green Grok: Climate Update: Of Ice and Men:

With global warming, the extent of sea ice in the Arctic has been shrinking — by about 34 percent over the last 30 years (see graphic below). In total the average area of September sea ice has decreased over this period by more than 700,000 square miles — size-wise, that’s bigger than the state of Alaska.

…

As we entered the summer of 2009, the question was: whither Arctic Sea ice? Would it continue the upward trend begun in 2008, or would it dip back down perhaps establishing a new record? We now have the answer. The National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC) reports that 2009 showed another uptick in sea ice extent relative to 2007, but continued the long-term downward trend. The year 2009 now ranks third for the lowest summer sea ice extent, coming in behind 2008 and 2007 in the 30-year satellite record. The 2009 minimum of 5.10 million square kilometers (1.97 million square miles), while larger than the previous two years, is still well below the average for the past 30 years.

Against this backdrop a paper published online today in Geophysical Research Letters by Isabella Velicogna of the University of California, Irvine, shows that not only are both the Antarctic and Greenland ice sheets melting, but their rate of melting is accelerating over time.

Using satellite gravity data collected from GRACE, the Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment (April 2002 – February 2009), Velicogna found that:

* the annual mass loss from the Greenland ice sheet increased from 137 gigatons in 2002-2003 to 286 gigatons in 2007-2009;

* in Antarctica the annual mass loss increased from 104 gigatons in 2002-2006 to 246 gigatons in 2006-2009.

In both cases the rate of loss increased by more than 100 gigatons/yr. In case you were wondering, 100 gigatons are 100 billion tons or about 25 trillion gallons of water — that’s enough water to fill about 40 million Olympic sized pools.

…

Aradhna Tripati of the University of California, Los Angeles, and colleagues were able to extend the atmospheric CO2 record by developing a technique that derives atmospheric CO2 from the boron-to-calcium ratios found in foraminifera shells collected from sediments in the Pacific Ocean.

Their new record, published in ScienceExpress last week, shows that the last time CO2 levels were sustained at levels similar to today’s was between 15 and 20 million years ago, a time when:

* temperatures were roughly 3 to 6 degrees Celsius (5 to 11 degrees Fahrenheit) warmer than today,

* there was very little ice on Greenland or Antarctica and no permanent sea ice in the Arctic, and

* sea level was about 25 to 40 meters (80-130 feet) higher.

Makes you wonder about setting 450 ppm as the target for stabilizing CO2 concentrations — over the long term, will that be low enough?

And speaking of inexplicably-lower-profile-than-should-be people writing about the environment, the above is from Bill Chameides.

As for his closing comment, yes, it does make me wonder about 450ppm as the “magic number” for atmospheric CO2. I’ve been saying for some time that I think the accumulating evidence demands we conclude that the magic number is significantly less than 450. James Hansen and Bill McKibben (see 350.org) have been the leading proponents of the number being 350, as I’m sure most people reading this site knows. I don’t mean to imply that I know what the magic number is; it could be 400 or 380, or, if you think about the details Bill quotes above, it could be around 300. Given that the current level is about 387ppm and rising at roughly another 2ppm every year, those alternatives represent different degrees of urgency we should all be feeling.

I think that the reason we’re not hearing anyone in a public policy position talk about 350 being the target is pretty simple: The three stooges of climate agreements (China, India, the US), plus the rest of the traveling comedy troupe, can’t figure out how to get within an astronomical unit of staying below 450ppm. Talking about a net reduction in atmospheric CO2 would be laughable. Once again, it’s a matter of “don’t tell me what you need (political convenience), I’m telling you what you’ve got (a situation that demands something you don’t want to/can’t figure out how to deliver).”

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Water shortages causes [sic] 100,000 to flee homes in Iraq: UN:

More than 100,000 people in northern Iraq have abandoned their homes since 2005 because of water stress, after drought and over-extraction of groundwater caused the collapse of an ancient water system, UNESCO said on Tuesday.

“Drought and excessive well pumping have drawn down aquifer levels in the region, causing a dramatic decline of water flow in ancient underground aqueducts” known as karez, the UN’s Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO) said.

The karez system, designed in ancient Persia to cope with an arid climate, is a man-made underground system that for centuries has provided Iraqis with drinking water and irrigation needs.

A single karez is able to provide water for nearly 9,000 individuals and 200 hectares (500 acres) of farm land, the UN agency said in a press release.

The system, already badly affected by political turmoil and neglect, has been dealt a devastating blow by over-pumping of aquifers by modern wells at a time of drought, UNESCO said.

Since the onset of the drought four years ago, 70 percent of the functioning karez in northern Iraq have dried up, specialists found. By August this year, only 116 of 683 karez systems in northern Iraq were still functioning.

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While I have a chance, let me add a somewhat personal note. I got an e-mail from a longtime reader the other day that commented on how much the subject matter of TCOE has changed over the years. That’s undeniably true. In the early days, this site was wall-to-wall peak oil and its immediate implications. But over the intervening 5+ years, my views changed as I learned a lot more about climate change and came to appreciate the range and severity of its impacts, the energy/climate/water nexus being a perfect example. In a sense, I had no choice but to shift my focus significantly, especially given how often I preach that we should “go exactly where the data leads us, and nowhere else”.

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Have I mentioned lately that the primary vector for the human impacts of climate change will be water? If not, consider it said, and here’s some recent news with details:

India’s thirst is making us all wet:

One nation’s thirst for groundwater is having an impact on global sea levels. Satellite measurements show that northern India is sucking some 54 trillion litres of water out of the ground every year. This is threatening a major water crisis and adding to global sea level rise.

…

The data revealed that groundwater under northern India and its surroundings is being extracted exceptionally fast. Tiwari and colleagues calculate that between 2002 and 2008 an average of 54 cubic kilometres - enough to fill more than 21 million Olympic swimming pools - was lost every year. Boreholes in the region show the water table is dropping by around 10 centimetres a year (Geophysical Research Letters, DOI: 10.1029/2009gl039401).

…

The “lost” water doesn’t just disappear, though. Most of it runs into the oceans. The team calculates that it could be pushing up global sea levels by as much as 0.16 millimetres each year. That’s 5 per cent of total sea level rise.

Yes, you read that right: Fifty-four cubic kilometers of water per year.

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Kashmir glaciers shrinking at ‘alarming’ speed:

Rising winter temperatures are shrinking Himalayan glaciers in Indian Kashmir at “alarming” speeds, threatening water supplies to vast tracts of India and Pakistan, according to a new study.

The Kolahoi glacier, the largest in the region, has shrunk by 2.63 square kilometers (one square mile) in the past three decades to just over 11 square kilometers, said the study presented at a three-day international workshop on climate change that began Monday in the Kashmiri summer capital Srinagar.

Himalayan glaciers feed into Asia’s nine largest rivers that flow to China, India, Pakistan, Bangladesh and Myanmar.

…

“Other small Kashmir glaciers are also shrinking and the main reason is that the winter temperature in Kashmir is rising,” said the study, citing an increase of 1.1 degrees Celsius over the past 100 years.

…

“If you talk about Kashmir and you look at the statistics of climate change, it is melting faster here than any other place in the world,” said Sally Dotre, an expert from Cambridge University.

“And that’s going to have a dramatic effect in Kashmir and Pakistan, because it is already affecting water levels,” Dotre said.

Water levels in almost all the rivers in Indian Kashmir have decreased by two-thirds during the last 40 years.

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California Tries to Solve Water Woes:

In a sign that a deal addressing California’s longstanding water supply problems may be near, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger convened a special session of the Legislature on Monday to revisit a package of water bills.

…

Yet many factors have made the need to fix California’s water system problems all the more pressing.

The drought has led to water restrictions and increased prices for water around the state. And along with the drought, a federal order last year forcing water authorities to curtail the use of large pumps in the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta to help preserve dying smelt has reduced water flows to agriculture and resulted in dust-bowl-like conditions for many of the state’s farms. In 2008, over 100,000 acres of the 4.7 million acres in the Central Valley were left unplanted, and experts expect that number to grow this year.

In addition, environmental problems in the Sacramento River have resulted in a collapse of the Chinook salmon population, closing salmon season off the coast of California and much of Oregon for two years in a row.

…

Another disputed piece of the negotiations involves the monitoring of groundwater levels. Without monitoring groundwater usage, it is impossible to tell whether aquifers are being stressed, which can lead to weakened levees and damage to the surrounding environment. As the drought has persisted, tapping into groundwater supplies has increased, especially among farmers — and in some areas, state officials say, dangerously so.

While roughly 70 percent of the state’s water districts voluntarily measure groundwater levels, reporting the levels is not mandatory, and Democrats had sought to make it so. Republican lawmakers staunchly opposed state government “trespassing” on private property to do so. A compromise would make a water district’s failure to voluntarily report levels result in the loss of billions of dollars from state bonds.

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Some Coal Plants Cleanse the Air at the Expense of Waterways:

For years, residents here complained about the yellow smoke pouring from the tall chimneys of the nearby coal-fired power plant, which left a film on their cars and pebbles of coal waste in their yards. Five states — including New York and New Jersey — sued the plant’s owner, Allegheny Energy, claiming the air pollution was causing respiratory diseases and acid rain.

So three years ago, when Allegheny Energy decided to install scrubbers to clean the plant’s air emissions, environmentalists were overjoyed. The technology would spray water and chemicals through the plant’s chimneys, trapping more than 150,000 tons of pollutants each year before they escaped into the sky.

But the cleaner air has come at a cost. Each day since the equipment was switched on in June, the company has dumped tens of thousands of gallons of wastewater containing chemicals from the scrubbing process into the Monongahela River, which provides drinking water to 350,000 people and flows into Pittsburgh, 40 miles to the north.

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Experts warn rainfall may triple in 20 years:

Researchers monitoring climate change at the Academia Sinica suggested yesterday that the government and people of Taiwan take measures and precautions to avoid suffering devastation from natural disasters like typhoons and ensuing flooding.

The researchers said the continuing global warming and climate change will not only increase the frequency of torrential rains and floods but will also escalate the extensive damages.

They warned that heavy rains dumped on the island could intensify by three times within a period of 20 years.

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Water Issues Dividing and Challenging the U.S.:

With floods across the Midwest, droughts along the Southwest, and legal inter-state skirmishes in the West and South—water issues are dividing the United States and challenging its citizens like never before. As first reported by Circle of Blue in July 2008, increasing competition for diminishing water supplies is driving the United States into an era of water scarcity.

Forecasts suggest that climate change will only worsen the challenges of obtaining and maintaining enough freshwater for the country’s needs. Fortunately, scientists are providing new tools to figure out how quickly our liquid assets are being depleted, and developing models that make better use of the water we have.

Follow Circle of Blue’s continuing coverage of water scarcity and management challenges — and solutions — as the United States grapples with one of the most complex, yet universal struggles of the century.

Follow the above link to access the relates stories.

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Mississippi vs. Tennessee: Billion-dollar Supreme Court Question, “Is Memphis Stealing Water?”:

In February 2005, the state of Mississippi filed its first complaint that the city of Memphis was stealing water from the 7,000 square miles of the Memphis Sands aquifer that lies beneath Arkansas, Kentucky, Mississippi and Tennessee, according to The Commercial Appeal of Memphis. Three years later in February 2008, U.S. District Judge Glen H. Davidson dismissed the lawsuit because the state of Tennessee was not included in the league of defendants.

In June 2009, the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals confirmed the judge’s dismissal because Tennessee is an “indispensable party.” The district court ruled that the shared aquifer was an inter-state issue, and thus must be heard by the Supreme Court.

Mississippi filed a suit with the Supreme Court in September 2009 against Memphis and the Memphis Light, Gas, and Water (MLGW) utility–the largest three-service utility in the U.S.– seeking damages of one billion dollars.

According to court reports filed by Mississippi Attorney General Jim Hood, Memphis is “the largest city in the world that relies solely on groundwater wells for its water supply.” More than one million Memphis residents depend on the 160 million gallons per day pumped by from the Memphis Sand aquifer–60 million gallons of which Mississippi claims is stolen property.

Memphis and MLGW argue that the withdrawals are appropriate and within the limits. If they lose, the utility will be forced to build a multi-million dollar water treatment plant for subsequent future withdrawals from the Mississippi River.

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Georgia and Tennessee: 200 Years of a Tennessee River Toss-up:

In February 2008, the Georgia General Assembly passed a bill to move the Georgia-Tennessee border one mile north—the fourth attempt since the line was established in 1818. The latitudinal change would mean a portion of the Tennessee River would be included within Georgia’s boundary— providing a viable source of drinking water for 3.5 million residents of Atlanta.

According to The New York Times, Congress set the 35th parallel as Tennessee’s southern border in 1796. But Georgia claims that due to equipment failures the actual line drawn up by surveyors in 1818 was located one mile south of the projected latitude. Although Tennessee enacted these coordinates into its state law, Georgia never endorsed the border and attempted in the 1880’s, 1940’s, and again in the 1970’s to reconstitute the “correct” border.

The next step in this borderline issue would be for Georgia Governor Sonny Perdue to negotiate with Tennessee Governor Phil Bredesen, reported The Christian Science Monitor. However, most government officials agree that the issue will end up in the Supreme Court.

Moving the border would make 50 square miles of Tennessee now a part of Georgia, including a bend of the Tennessee River near Nickajack Cave in Marion County.

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America’s Water Supply: Scarcity Becoming Endemic:

Americans have good reason to be concerned about the future of the nation’s supply of clean fresh water, according to state and federal research and resource agencies.

The U.S. Drought Monitor, a weekly online report produced by the Department of Agriculture and the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration, notes in its latest assessment that one-third of the continental United States is suffering abnormally dry or drought conditions.

Drought conditions grip more than half of the West, with little change from the same time last year. The hardest-hit areas include California, in its third year of a statewide drought, and Arizona, which has been experiencing abnormally dry or drought conditions since August .

Groundwater resources, which provide half of the country’s drinking water as well as irrigation for crops and water for industrial use, also are diminishing, according to the U.S. Geological Survey’s (USGS) Groundwater Resources Program. The Ogallala Aquifer, the massive groundwater network that lies under the Great Plains and feeds water to more than a quarter of the region’s irrigated land, continues to be a significant concern.

“Basically the groundwater is being depleted of its resource,” said Kevin Dennehy, the USGS project coordinator. “It’s been happening for quite some time and it’s going to continue to happen. The removal of water from the aquifer is at a greater rate than water is being re-charged in the aquifer naturally.”

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Australia’s Adelaide: A Lesson for Urban Centers Facing the Global Water Crisis:

Australia’s fifth largest city, Adelaide, could see its 1.3 million inhabitants rely more and more on bottled water over the next year, according to local politicians. Mounting consequences of climate change and sluggish national political action have led to high salinity levels and depletion of wildlife along the River Murray.

Some senators in the South Australia province have predicted that the city will be forced to import water and completely depend on bottled water, The Guardian reported two weeks ago.

Ironically these reports from Adelaide came just days after fellow Australian city, Bundanoon, located on the eastern coast of the New South Wales province, put a ban on bottled water.

“It’s a city of more than 1 million people that gets 70 percent of its water on average from the River Murray, but the Murray-Darling basin has been on decline for decades” said James Pittock, a PhD scholar in Integrating management of rivers and climate change at Australian National University (ANU). Pittock was on holiday along the Murray-Darling Basin when CoB caught up with him over the phone.

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