I will admit upfront that there are many aspects of our current energy and climate situation that I find frustrating. I’m sure I’m not alone in that among people who comment here or merely read this site. But I feel compelled to point out one particular detail that sends me in full head-spinning mode, what I call “the vision thing”. You might be tempted to assume that I’m talking about “vision” in a metaphorical sense, as in some Senator not having a vision of where good public policy can take the US, or the CEO of some huge corporation being far too myopic. And if you made that assumption, you would be wrong, because in this instance I’m talking about vision in the most literal and mundane way, our ability (or requirement) to see things.

Specifically, we’ve all read accounts similar to this wholly fabricated one[1]:

Senator Smith has just returned from a trip to Greenland [or Glacier National Park or Alaska or Siberia or …] where he saw first hand the effects of global warming. “The amount of melting that’s taking place is simply stunning. You can’t truly appreciate the magnitude of the changes to the glaciers [or ice bergs or permafrost] until you see it in person. We have to find a way to rise to this challenge, forge international agreements to limit humanity’s CO2 emissions, and prevent this situatin from becoming much worse.”

Whenever I see or hear such a report, it takes all the willpower I have to keep from shouting at my monitor or TV screen or newspaper, “And why the hell did you have to travel thousands of miles to be convinced there’s a serious problem???”

Clearly, some non-trivial portion of these trips are purely for show to demonstrate the traveler’s environmental awareness and/or are taken simply because the person is in a position to do so on someone else’s dime. But I’m convinced that not all of them can be explained away so cynically, and at least some share of these trips really are “fact finding trips” that end of having a big impact on our hardy adventurer.

Which brings me back to my question: Why? Why, in the year 2010 with all that implies about the routinely available multimedia technology, would someone have to haul his DNA thousands of miles on an airplane to stand on a glacier and see a river of melt water roaring into a moulin before that person is able to say, “Holy shit — this really is a problem”? What Senator (or member of the House or mayor of a moderate to large city or CEO) can’t have a staff member pull together a devastating amount of visuals and reports on climate change? Why can’t he or she simply watch the Extreme Ice documentary, which should be enough to scare just about anyone spitless? Why can’t a member of the US federal government call our friends at NASA or NOAA or NSIDC and get a personal briefing?

If you’re wondering what set me off on this tangent, it was a graph in an excellent post Joe Romm made yesterday on CP, Arctic sea ice area and volume drop near record lows. While I strongly recommend you read the whole post, one graph leaped out at me:

Ignore the pretty colored boxes at the top for a moment and focus on the line graphs. In particular, notice the black line, which says that from 2007, the current year for minimum sea ice extent, and 2008, when the sea ice began to “recover”, as the deniers would have you believe, the overall volume of sea ice declined by 2,000 cubic km (16,000 to 14,000), or about 12%. That’s over 6.5 times the most recent estimates I’ve seen of the yearly volume of ice loss from Greenland (roughly 300 cubic km per year), and is equivalent in weight to about 5.4 million Empire State Buildings.[2]

Why isn’t this graph, based on the best available science, far more compelling than what a Senator or CEO can see by flying to some spot in the far north and standing on glacier for 20 minutes and observing one tiny speck of the landscape? And if we really are this tied to a “only seeing is believing” brain wiring, how can we arrange to get a few thousand of the world’s most powerful people to make this trip before it’s far too late?

[1] For a non-fabricated one, see Change of heart from climate sceptics:

Michael Hanlon the formerly ultra-sceptic science editor of Britain’s two-million-copies-a-day Daily Mail has also changed his mind after a recent trip to see a glacier in Greenland.

[2] The ESB weighs 365,000 tons, and each cubic km of ice is roughly one billion tons.

The climate blogosphere erupted yesterday with the news that Bjorn Lomborg has a new book coming out that seems to reverse his bottom-line conclusion on climate change. While I haven’t read the new book, I think a fair summary of his pre- and post-pivot positions would be:

Pre-pivot: Climate change is real but it’s not a big deal. We should spend money on a bunch of other things to help people. Don’t get your undies in a twist.

Post-pivot: WE’RE ALL GONNA DIE FROM CLIMATE CHANGE!!! TAX CARBON!!! SPEND MONEY ON R&D!!! [BillPaxtonInAliens] WHAT ARE WE GONNA DO NOW MAN??? [/BillPaxtonInAliens]

Perhaps I’ve taken some liberties here; you be the judge.

I think this situation, aside from being important because of the seriousness of climate change and all the attention Lomborg gets (for reasons that escape me), is fascinating. For years now I’ve wondered how the hard core deniers, as well as those who say climate change is real but at most a minor problem, would walk back from their positions once the evidence became so overwhelming that not even their most loyal and reality immune followers could deny it. Consider it the Dilemma of the Iraqi Information Minister, e.g.:

August 11 - The LA Times reports that the Iraqi military was itself fooled by the creative reporting of furloughed Iraqi Information Minister Muhammed Saeed al-Sahaf (M.S.S.): “After the information minister claimed that Iraqi forces had retaken the Baghdad airport from U.S. troops, two former commanders said, Republican Guard Gen. Mohammed Daash was dispatched to check out a rumor that four or five American tanks had survived the Iraqi counterattack. Daash returned to his headquarters in a panic. “Four or five tanks!'’ the commanders quoted Daash as telling his fellow generals. “Are you out of your minds? The whole damn American Army is at the airport!'’ ”

(Please, no jumping to absurd conclusions like, “Lou is saying the deniers are equivalent to Saddam Hussein and his flunkies!” because I never said that, OK?)

In the case of the hardest of the hardcore deniers, like Fox News and the fossil fuel companies that want us to believe CO2 is “plant food” and more of it is always better (a proposition I’ve yet to see pan out in the real world regarding anything, including chocolate, sex, good wine, and, well, sex), I think they have only a couple of possible moves:

• Say absolutely nothing about it and pretend they never uttered a single word of denial. I.e. the same strategy most cats use moments after falling off a couch for no reason or doing something equally stupid.
• Go on the attack and blast the climate scientists for not making a compelling case sooner, and therefore making the situation much worse, in terms of both the expense and the degree of government intervention required, by causing decades of delay. Being around rational human beings when the deniers trot out this insanity will be like sitting in the front row of a Gallagher show, but with brain matter from Exploding Head Syndrome substituting for watermelon.

Back to Lomborg. Astute readers will remember that this isn’t his first change of direction. Last August, in fact, I wrote about how he suddenly seemed to be a fan of geoengineering and focusing on cuts in soot and methane emissions (see Bjorn again on CC). One could see this latest embrace of a carbon tax and more focused spending on decarbonizing the world economy as a continuation of that shift; publicly held opinions tend to be like ocean liners: you can redirect them, but it’s usually a wide, slow turn. In a follow-up post about a month later I talked about the geoengineering pivot, they way for deniers and minimizers to “split the difference” between their do-nothing stance and the mainstream scientific conclusion that we have to reduce our CO2 emissions a lot and very quickly (see Earth–Now, with geoengineering!).

So, Lomborg continues to help delay meaningful action on climate change, and he gets lots of juicy attention for an upcoming book, all while asymptotically approaching the view of mainstream science on what needs to be done. I’m beginning to think that Lomborg is not only just as deluded or evil as the hardcore deniers, but he’s also vastly smarter more subtle.

Related:

• Climate change: The facts of life
• Brendan DeMelle: Bjorn Lomborg Now Says Climate Change “Chief Concern,” Calls for Carbon Tax
• Lomborg: Just Kidding. We Do Need Climate Action Now

Rick Piltz, over on ClimateScienceWatch has a thought provoking piece that begins by talking about Stephen Schneider and quickly turns to the thorny question of what the proper role is for climate scientists in society. (I shouldn’t have to point out this post to you, as Piltz’s site is without question one you should be following closely via RSS feed.)

From Ehrlich on Schneider: Being a scientist doesn’t relieve one of the obligations of a citizen (emphasis added):

Andy Revkin, in his New York Times DotEarth blog, touched on this divergence in a post focused on the eminent atmospheric scientist Richard Somerville (“The Road from Climate Science to Climate Advocacy”). Revkin wrote:

Richard C. J. Somerville, a climatologist at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography near San Diego, is one of a growing array of scientists who have chosen to move beyond studying heat transfer and cloud physics and take on the role of activist: prodding society to move aggressively to cut greenhouse gases….

“For me, and maybe for many, I think that ‘going public’ and making a statement as an individual, who is also a climate expert, is simply a next logical step,” Dr. Somerville said.

“After all, many politicians have said that scientists should be heard from more. As long as we are always at pains to make clear that we are speaking only as individuals, not on behalf of our employers or other organizations, then I think we are just behaving as good citizens.”

But Revkin noted:

Other scientists disagree with this kind of activism, most notably Susan Solomon, who was the co-leader of the 2007 I.P.C.C. assessment of climate trends. In an email exchange on the general issue of scientists and policy debate last weekend (just before she flew to Antarctica), she said: “If we as scientists go beyond what we know into our personal opinions and values, we begin to engage in the same sort of personal speculation masquerading as authoritative that we dislike when it is done by the skeptics.”

With all due respect to Susan Solomon, who has made an incalculable scientific contribution, it seems to me insufficient to speak in terms of a simple dichotomy between “what we know,” on the one hand, and “personal opinions” and “personal speculation,” on the other, as though there were no intellectual terrain between “knowing” something with, say, 95 percent confidence, and being reduced to something like speculative, amateurish punditry. It’s as though scientists, including those who write the IPCC assesssments, have nothing to offer to an actual dialogue with policymakers in terms of policymakers’ decisionmaking jurisdiction, or to a more general public audience.

On the contrary, what policymakers and the public need from the climate science community includes scientists’ synthesis of and expert judgments about the state of knowledge in terms of its implications for policymaking and societal decisionmaking – even though that involves a necessary element of subjectivity. Policymakers need scientists to advise them in the context of assessing and managing the risks of climate change – in particular, on the implications of their decisions about adaptation and mitigation response strategies.

It will come as a surprise to no one who’s read more than about five of my posts on this site that I agree completely with Piltz. Let me burn a few words trying to explain why.

Scientists working in any area with significant public policy implications should be involved in talking to both policymakers and the general public. They are human beings first, citizens second, and scientists third. Thanks to their training and research and experience, they are not just exceptionally well qualified to speak out on whatever the topic is at hand, but they have an onus to do so. At the risk of being too flip, one could say that with great knowledge of important topics comes great responsibility.

The objections to this view are both obvious and serious. The one I hear most often is that when scientists stop restricting themselves to facts and strong conclusions established over years by the scientific process, and let themselves act based on things they “know”, in the colloquial sense, they risk not just making mistakes, but using their influence to greatly magnify the impacts of those mistakes. This is a very real problem, one we already see in action, even if in perverted form, as various organizations or media outlets cherry pick experts and pseudo-experts to take useful positions. (E.g. Michael Crichton and Christopher Monckton testifying before Congress on climate change.)

Another real danger is that if scientists take public, high-stakes positions on topics — climate change, peak oil, stem cell research, etc. — they will then become far more entrenched in those positions and less likely to change their minds when new evidence tells them to do so.

As for Susan Solomon’s concern, that scientists who become engaged in the policy process will be no better than the “skeptics”[1], well, that doesn’t bother me. If nothing else, thanks to their background they can’t be exactly like the “skeptics”. But it also assumes that at least some of them will not just engage with policymakers or the public, but do so in an exceedingly bad way.

In general all these arguments strike me as taking a slippery slope view of the situation. The danger isn’t that all scientists will automatically descend into hyper-partisanship and Internet wackaloonery, but that some tiny percentage of them will, and even that is too high a price to pay for their public service in speaking out. While I sincerely appreciate that opinion and recognize how trained scientists would tend to see the world that way (medical doctors aren’t the only ones who believe “above all else, do no harm”), I also respectfully disagree with it.

The bottom line, for me, is that if we apply our best judgment and perform a cost/benefit analysis, it’s clear that there will be some cost in the form of scientists making mistakes or becoming too emotionally tied to a given position or simply turning into Internet nutjobs, but the benefit from scientist activism far outweighs it. Look at the current world situation regarding sustainability issues and read the available reports, from the latest IPCC publication to the barrage of papers in peer reviewed journals to all the measurements taken by real-life citizens (”environment auditors”?) recording when flowers bloom and lakes ice over and dozens of other yearly events, and the signs of not just a gentle warming of the climate but a shift into a much less kind version of the world humanity has lived on for 10,000 years are almost too numerous to count. We desperately need to take action to minimize the human pain from these changes, and leaving the communicating about climate change to paid and cherry-picked mouthpieces is unfathomably irresponsible.

Once again, I go back to James Hansen talking about what it would feel like if some day his grandchildren asked him why he didn’t do everything he could to stop climate change when he knew what was happening. This is why I keep saying that all the children and grandchildren of world belong to all of us. We — as in all of us — have a moral duty to do everything possible to avoid handing them a world that’s racing to a temperature increase of 3C to 6C (or more) and has acidified oceans, dangerous high and rising sea levels, and massive droughts and floods.

[1] Can we finally drive a stake into the ground and say that from this day forward “climate skepticism” cannot be more than a transitory condition for any individual? I would expect anyone who is new to the topic of climate change or any other complex topic to be a skeptic, in the original, unsullied meaning of the word. But given the state of climate science and the freely available information about it today, anyone who stays in the skeptic category for more than a relatively short period (a few weeks? a few months?) either isn’t researching the topic or is actively refusing to learn from the material at hand. You can debate all day exactly what state those people are in, such as paid shill or ideologue or liar; I will continue to put them in the umbrella category of “denier”.

I’m still catching up after being away for three days, but I want to make sure the following post by Jeff Masters from Friday doesn’t escape your attention, Danielle a Cat 4; Earl more organized; Northwest Passage opens for 4th year in a row. The part that prompted me to post comes near the end of his comments, where Jeff turns his attention the Northwest and Northeast Passages and what they mean in a larger context:

What caused the opening of the Northwest and Northeast Passages?
The remarkable thinning of Arctic sea ice in recent years has left behind a very thin layer of mostly 1-year old ice in the Arctic, highly vulnerable to rapid melting. As I describe in detail in wunderground’s sea ice page, this thinning was mostly due to natural wind pattern in the 1990s, much warmer than average ocean waters invading the Arctic from both the Pacific and Atlantic Oceans, very warm air temperatures, and deposition of black soot from fires used to clear agricultural land in Europe and air pollution originating in industrialized regions of the Northern Hemisphere. This year, Canada experienced its warmest winter in history, and record warm temperatures were observed during spring over the Western Canadian Arctic. Spring 2010 was the warmest in the region since 1948; some regions of the Western Canadian Arctic were more than 6°C (11°F) above average. These warm conditions helped break the ice up early in the Northwest Passage. Warm conditions continued this summer over both the Northwest and Northeast Passages, with temperatures averaging 1 - 2°C above average over the majority of the region. As observed in previous years, contributing to this year’s melt was the presence of much warmer than average ocean waters invading the Arctic from both the Pacific and Atlantic Oceans, and the deposition of black soot on the ice, which absorbs sunlight and heats up the ice. Lack of sunshine and natural wind patterns this summer helped counteract the melting, though, compared to the record melt year of 2007. Still, 2010 is on track come in 2nd or 3rd place for the lowest summertime Arctic sea ice extent on record. The past six years have had the six lowest Arctic ice extents on record, and this summer’s melting season took a huge toll on the amount of thick, multi-year old ice, according to the National Snow and Ice Data Center. Modeling results from the University of Washington Polar Science Center (Figure 5) suggest that the volume of Arctic sea ice is at a record low for this time of year. The loss of so much old, thick ice this year makes it increasing likely that Arctic sea ice will suffer a record retreat that surpasses 2007’s, sometime in the next ten years. We are still on track to see the Arctic sea ice completely disappear in summer by 2030, as predicted by a number of Arctic sea ice experts.

…

But Antarctic sea ice is at a record high!
Climate change contrarians like to diminish the importance of Arctic sea ice loss by pointing out that in recent years, Antarctic sea ice extent has hit several record highs, including in July of 2010. They fail to mention, though, the fact that ocean temperatures in the Antarctic sea ice region have warmed significantly in recent decades–and faster than the global average temperature rise! So how can sea ice increase when ocean temperatures are warming so dramatically? This topic is discussed in detail by one of my favorite bloggers, physicist John Cook over at skepticalscience.com. In his words:

“There are several contributing factors. One is the drop in ozone levels over Antarctica. The hole in the ozone layer above the South Pole has caused cooling in the stratosphere (Gillet 2003). A side-effect is a strengthening of the cyclonic winds that circle the Antarctic continent (Thompson 2002). The wind pushes sea ice around, creating areas of open water known as polynyas. More polynyas leads to increased sea ice production (Turner 2009).

Another contributor is changes in ocean circulation. The Southern Ocean consists of a layer of cold water near the surface and a layer of warmer water below. Water from the warmer layer rises up to the surface, melting sea ice. However, as air temperatures warm, the amount of rain and snowfall also increases. This freshens the surface waters, leading to a surface layer less dense than the saltier, warmer water below. The layers become more stratified and mix less. Less heat is transported upwards from the deeper, warmer layer. Hence less sea ice is melted (Zhang 2007). ”

This counter-intuitive result shows how complicated our climate system is. Climate change contrarians are masters at obscuring the truth by taking counter-intuitive climate events like this out of context, and twisting them into a warped but believable non-scientific narrative. Lawmakers tend to hear a lot of these narratives, since the lobbying wings of the oil and gas industry spent $175 million last year to help convince Congress not to regulate their industry. This number does not include the tens of millions more spent by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, National Association of Manufacturers, coal industry, and other business interests intent upon stymying legislation that might cut into profits of the oil, coal, and gas industry. For comparison, the lobbying money spent by environmental groups in 2009 was approximately $22.5 million. Spending for PR efforts aimed at influencing opinion on climate change issues probably has a similar disparity. This is a major reason why you may have heard, “Hey, Antarctic sea ice is increasing, so why worry about Arctic sea ice loss?”

Commentary
Diminishing the importance of Arctic sea ice loss by calling attention to Antarctic sea ice gain is like telling someone to ignore the fire smoldering in their attic, and instead go appreciate the coolness of the basement, because there is no fire there. Planet Earth’s attic is on fire. This fire is almost certain to grow much worse. When the summertime Arctic sea ice starts melting completely a few years or decades hence, the Arctic will warm rapidly, potentially leading to large releases of methane gas stored in permafrost and in undersea “methane ice” deposits. Methane is 20 - 25 times more potent than CO2 at warming the climate, meaning that the fire in Earth’s attic will inexorably spread to the rest of the globe. To deny that the fire exists, or that the fire is natural, or that the fire is too expensive to fight are all falsehoods. This fire requires our immediate and urgent attention. Volunteer efforts to fight the fire by burning less coal, oil, and gas are laudable, but insufficient. It’s like trying to fight a 3-alarm blaze with a garden hose. Every time you reduce your use of oil, gas, or coal, you make the price of those fuels cheaper, encouraging someone else to burn them. Global warming will not slow down until Big Government puts a price on oil, coal and gas–a price that starts out low but increases every year. This can be done via emissions trading, a “fee and dividend” approach, or other means. People are rightfully mistrustful of the ability of Big Government to solve problems, but we don’t have a choice. The alternative is to geoengineer our climate–an extremely risky solution. It is time to pay the big bucks and send out the fire engines, before the conflagration gets totally out of control. Consider the Great Russian Heat Wave of 2010 and the Pakistani floods of 2010 a warning. These sorts of extreme events will grow far more common in the decades to come, because of human-caused climate change.

I could not agree more strongly with everything I quoted above, particularly the “Commentary” section.

I find it astonishing that so many people still fail to understand the basic facts of our situation:

• Humanity is warming the planet and severely altering the climate with tens of billions of tons of greenhouse gas emissions every year.
• Continuing on this path means leads inexorably to an incredibly broad and painful set of impacts on human beings.
• The only way to avoid the worst of what’s to come is through collective action, which means direct government intervention in our lives and markets to a degree not considered “possible” in recent memory in the US and many other countries.
• Those of us screaming about this do not like that answer, but we hate it less than we do the alternative. Personally, I would dearly love to see the “magical free market” solve this problem for us, but that’s a Libertarian/right-winger wet dream that has precisely zero chance of happening. Want proof? Look at the way we’re accelerating as we near the sustainability cliff, all thanks to a “free market” and the influence large economic actors can buy in a horrible twisted political system. Anyone who claims the “free market” will fix our climate change (and peak oil and food and water supply and …) problem is either lying or is so utterly at the mercy of ideology and therefore clueless that he or she should be ignored.
• The timing of this situation is one of our worst enemies. We’ve already emitted enough CO2 to trigger widespread, painful impacts in the coming decades; shutting down further emissions, meaning literally a 100% overnight reduction, would not be enough to avoid it. The best we can hope for is to keep those impacts from becoming vastly worse by taking action before they arrive. This is biggest single chance humanity will ever have to move from adolescence to adulthood.

But what the hell, it’s fun to forge an identity by making fun of the president and environmentalists and climate scientists and being loud and obnoxious and against something, all as a direct consequence of your willful blindness. And look how well it works out for teenagers who drink and drive or drop out of school or do any of the other insane things adults are always telling them not to do. How can anyone argue with that logic?

As always, the answer depends on semantics. If by “greenhouse” one means a completely controlled, artificial environment, operated by human beings, i.e. a big machine for maintaining an optimal growing environment for particular types of plants, then the answer is, by definition, “yes”. If you mean the warming environment, where humans have triggered climate change and now Mother Nature and Father Physics are doing whatever the hell they damn well please, then the answer is an emphatic “no”.

Which is a roundabout way of pointing out yet another nasty surprise from the world of scientific research. Instead of being iteration number 8,374 of “it’s worse than we thought”, this one goes into the category of, “we thought it was better and it’s actually worse”.

Drought Drives Decade-Long Decline in Plant Growth:

Earth has done an ecological about-face: Global plant productivity that once flourished under warming temperatures and a lengthened growing season is now on the decline, struck by the stress of drought.

NASA-funded researchers Maosheng Zhao and Steven Running, of the University of Montana in Missoula, discovered the global shift during an analysis of NASA satellite data. Compared with a six-percent increase spanning two earlier decades, the recent ten-year decline is slight — just one percent. The shift, however, could impact food security, biofuels, and the global carbon cycle.

“We see this as a bit of a surprise, and potentially significant on a policy level because previous interpretations suggested that global warming might actually help plant growth around the world,” Running said.

“These results are extraordinarily significant because they show that the global net effect of climatic warming on the productivity of terrestrial vegetation need not be positive — as was documented for the 1980’s and 1990’s,” said Diane Wickland, of NASA Headquarters and manager of NASA’s Terrestrial Ecology research program.

Conventional wisdom based on previous research held that land plant productivity was on the rise. A 2003 paper in Science led by then University of Montana scientist Ramakrishna Nemani (now at NASA Ames Research Center, Moffett Field, Calif.) showed that global terrestrial plant productivity increased as much as six percent between 1982 and 1999. That’s because for nearly two decades, temperature, solar radiation and water availability — influenced by climate change — were favorable for growth.

…

“This is a pretty serious warning that warmer temperatures are not going to endlessly improve plant growth,” Running said.

…

“This past decade’s net decline in terrestrial productivity illustrates that a complex interplay between temperature, rainfall, cloudiness, and carbon dioxide, probably in combination with other factors such as nutrients and land management, will determine future patterns and trends in productivity,” Wickland said.

…

“The potential that future warming would cause additional declines does not bode well for the ability of the biosphere to support multiple societal demands for agricultural production, fiber needs, and increasingly, biofuel production,” Zhao said.

“Even if the declining trend of the past decade does not continue, managing forests and croplands for multiple benefits to include food production, biofuel harvest, and carbon storage may become exceedingly challenging in light of the possible impacts of such decadal-scale changes,” Wickland said.

The article includes this illustration:

A snapshot of Earth’s plant productivity in 2003 shows regions of increased productivity (green) and decreased productivity (red). Tracking productivity between 2000 and 2009, researchers found a global net decrease due to regional drought. Credit: NASA Goddard Space Flight Center Scientific Visualization Studio

Yet again: The primary vector for the impacts of climate change on humanity will be water. Water for agriculture, personal use, and hydroelectric generation will all be threatened, thanks to shifts in rainfall patterns and the decline and disappearance of glaciers that provide summer water flows to critical parts of the world. Water will also do more damage from flooding, as seen in Pakistan, China, and parts of the US among others this year, and sea level rise that will threaten coastal cropland with salt intrusion.

The only real question is which specific effects will hit which parts of the world and in what order.

The results of this study shouldn’t be too great a surprise. We know that the Earth System is an extremely complex and highly interrelated set of subsystems, so we should expect to see cascading effects that result in opposing forces (e.g. warmer temperatures and longer growing seasons vs. drier conditions) with a net result not always to our liking. When you kick an essentially stable system as hard as we have by pushing the atmospheric CO2 level to roughly 390 ppm in such a short time (compared to that needed for species to adapt to a changing environment), you tip over a lot of dominoes, whether you know they exist or not.

In more concrete terms, this finding, assuming it’s held up by ensuing work[1], is very bad news.[2] As it becomes increasingly difficult to grow crops in some parts of the world, the impact of individual events, like the heat wave in Russia that’s expected to reduce their wheat production by one third, or about 35 million tons, will be greatly magnified. If some productive food growing areas of the world take a big hit when there’s a surplus of food worldwide, then we still have a sizable challenge to finance and deliver aid to the stricken area, but it can still be done. If that surplus is eroded by drought then our supply buffer will be reduced, possibly to dangerous levels. And at that point humanity suddenly is faced with some truly unpleasant questions.

[1] Speaking of other work, this isn’t the only very recent study that found climate change to be a less than universally favorable condition for plants and their CO2 uptake: Trees Soaking Up Less Carbon Than Expected, Study Finds

[2] Anyone here care to guess how long it will take the deniers to cherry pick the results and say that “a major study in Science found that Northern Hemisphere plants have continued to thrive” and conveniently overlook that the worldwide net plant productivity was down?

Thanks to all the (deserved) attention we’ve been paying to the floods in Pakistan, the landslides in China, the heat wave and fires in Russia, the roughly 300 hundred forest fires in British Columbia, etc., it’s no surprise that peak oil isn’t right at the top of everyone’s mind. Of course, reality doesn’t care what is or isn’t on our radar screen, and the world’s oil reserves are depleted by another 85 million barrels every day.

But it appears that some people are paying attention, says the Guardian in Peak oil alarm revealed by secret official talks (emphasis added):

Speculation that [UK] government ministers are far more concerned about a future supply crunch than they have admitted has been fuelled by the revelation that they are canvassing views from industry and the scientific community about “peak oil”.

The Department of Energy and Climate Change (DECC) is also refusing to hand over policy documents about “peak oil” – the point at which oil production reaches its maximum and then declines – under the Freedom of Information (FoI) Act, despite releasing others in which it admits “secrecy around the topic is probably not good”.

Experts say they have received a letter from David Mackay, chief scientific adviser to the DECC, asking for information and advice on peak oil amid a growing campaign from industrialists such as Sir Richard Branson for the government to put contingency plans in place to deal with any future crisis.

…

Yet the note of the workshop distributed last year talks about secrecy around the topic being “probably not good”, although it also suggests officials stick to the line that the “International Energy Agency is an authoritative source in this field” and stresses how the IEA believes there is sufficient reserves to meet demand till 2030 as long as investment in new reserves is maintained.

But the Paris-based organisation has come under increasing scrutiny from a growing group of critics who believe the IEA’s optimism is misplaced. Last year the Guardian revealed that the IEA was also riven with dissent over the issue with senior staff members privately telling newspaper they thought the official numbers on future global oil supply were over-optimistic.

The IEA predicted in the 2009 World Energy Outlook published last November that oil demand would grow from 85m barrels a day today to 88m in 2015 and reach 105m in 2030. The organisation presumes the challenge of meeting that demand can equally be met by a mixture of higher Opec production and considerably more output from unconventional sources.

But an internal IEA source said: “Many inside the organisation believe that maintaining oil supplies at even 90m to 95m barrels a day would be impossible, but there are fears that panic could spread on the financial markets if the figures were brought down further. And the Americans fear the end of oil supremacy because it would threaten their power over access to oil resources.”

First of all, the fact that such a workshop was held doesn’t prove that peak oil is real or imminent, although I would argue that both points are true. But it does show that some government officials are at least aware of the problem and consider it a serious situation. That’s a pretty small victory compared to the scale of our current sustainability challenges, but it’s better than nothing.

I suspect that post peak, by perhaps 5 or 10 years, we’ll hear a lot about the behind-the-scenes discussions at the IEA and other groups and even governments, and the overall picture will be infuriating. We’ll hear about repeated attempts by people to raise the issue with their organizational superiors, only to be shunned and silenced. We may even hear from one or two individuals who has the courage to say along the lines of, “We didn’t see peak oil because we didn’t want to see it.”

The problem here, of course, is that old bugaboo, timing. As many have pointed out before, if we’re “lucky” and the peak in world oil production really is 20 years away, that still leaves us very little time to transition away from it, given the extent of the developed world’s dependence on it and the time needed to convert country-level infrastructures. But if those who think we’re much closer to a production peak turn out to be right, then we have a problem of staggering proportions.

The one glimmer of good news is that there’s a fundamental difference between peak oil and climate change: When we de-oil some segment of an economy, it’s done and its history doesn’t matter. I.e. trade in your gasoline powered car for a Nissan Leaf and the world gets 100% of the benefit of that conversion, regardless of how much gasoline your old car burned in the years you drove it. In climate change we’re dealing with not just the CO2 we’re emitting right now, but the legacy emissions of the last 200+ years which will continue to cause warming and its attendant knock-on effects for a long time.

[PLEASE do not just skim this post and then move on to the next thing competing for your time. I normally don’t beg for eyeballs, but I’m going to do that, and more, this time, because of the severity of the situation in Pakistan.]

It’s hard to overestimate the magnitude of the tragedy that’s still unfolding in Pakistan.

Some excerpts from just two of the dozens of articles on the Pakistan floods…

Pakistan floods are a ’slow-motion tsunami’ - Ban Ki-moon (emphasis added):

The United Nations general secretary, Ban Ki-moon, has appealed for swifter aid to provide immediate relief in food, shelter and clean water for the millions affected by the worst monsoon rains on record.

“Make no mistake, this is a global disaster,” Ban told a hurriedly convened session of the UN general assembly. “Pakistan is facing a slow-motion tsunami. Its destructive powers will accumulate and grow with time,” he warned.

Weather forecasts have said there could be four more weeks of rain, which will add to the flood problems.

The UN has appealed for $460m (£295m) in aid and donors have so far given about half that figure. But the secretary-general said all of the money was needed immediately to help victims over the next three months.

…

But tonight Mitchell, who has recently visited Pakistan to inspect the effect British aid has had so far, told the UN general assembly in New York that the international community had to do more. He told the UN it was “deeply depressing” that the international community was “only now waking up to the true scale of this disaster”.

Flood Disaster May Require Largest Aid Effort in Modern History:

One of the largest humanitarian relief efforts ever attempted is now mobilizing to help Pakistan cope with what its government and U.N. agencies are calling the worst natural disaster in modern memory.

The death toll is much smaller than in past disasters: About 1,600 are believed dead so far. But experts say initial assessments show the scale of damage and human suffering left by torrential monsoon rains over the past three weeks dwarfs the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami, 2005 Kashmir earthquake, 2008 Cyclone Nargis disaster in Burma, and Jan. 12 earthquake in Haiti — combined.

“What we face in Pakistan today is a natural calamity of unprecedented proportions,” Pakistan’s foreign minister, Makhdoom Shah Mahmood Qureshi, said during a special U.N. session to address the crisis, held here yesterday. “These are the worst monsoon floods in living memory.”

Debate is heating up over what caused the catastrophe, with experts pointing to deforestation, intensive land-use practices or mismanagement of the Indus River as possible causes. But top U.N. and Pakistani government officials are now clearly pointing to climate change as the principal culprit.

“Climate change, with all its severity and unpredictability, has become a reality for 170 million Pakistanis,” said Qureshi in his appeal for aid. “The present situation in Pakistan reconfirms our extreme vulnerability to the adverse impacts of climate change.”

…

Officials say about 800,000 to 900,000 homes have been destroyed or made unlivable. The government believes 4.6 million have been left homeless in just two provinces, Punjab and Sindh.

Areas in the country’s north and northwest have been hardest hit, especially Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province, where several communities have been cut off from the outside world after floodwaters washed out key bridges. About 70 percent of bridges and roads have been destroyed here, officials report. Pakistan’s government says little transportation infrastructure remains in the Swat valley, the scene of intense fighting between the army and Islamic insurgents in 2009.

Pakistan’s agricultural economy, the source of income for about 70 percent of the population, has borne the brunt of the damage. “This is where we have been hit the most,” said Qureshi.

More than 17 million acres of farmland was inundated, Qureshi said. U.N. officials figure that more than 200,000 head of livestock have been killed in the flooding. And the nation’s cotton crop, an important source of export earnings, has largely been wiped out after 1 million acres of the crop was lost to floods in Punjab.

The flood disaster could also exacerbate global food prices, in particular wheat. The government of Pakistan says the season’s harvest is pretty much gone and 1 million metric tons of wheat that was sitting in storage is now gone. Droughts in Russia, Australia and Canada had already sent wheat prices soaring in recent weeks.

What can you do if you live in the US or Canada or Europe or Japan or any of the other developed countries comfortably detached from the tragedy in Pakistan? Simple: Give money to a worthy relief effort.

My wife and I have always been fans of the American Red Cross, thanks in no small part to the help we saw them give so many people during the 1972 floods that Pennsylvania, among other areas in the NE US. So, we are contributing through their web site. You can also give through the International Committee of the Red Cross. Their article on the Pakistan flooding is here, and there’s a contribution link at the top of that page.

Americans can check the US State Department’s page for contributions, which has two of those “text to contribute” numbers, plus links to several relief organizations.

So don’t just sit there and feel bad about the Pakistan floods for 10 seconds and then go watch YouTube videos or play some brain cell killing game on facebook. Instead, take a couple of minutes and do something that will materially help human beings who are already in dire need and will likely be in even worse shape in the coming months. No one can demand that you get on a plane and fly thousands of miles to Pakistan to help distribute food and medical supplies, but I can demand this of you. If it helps get you over the hump, imagine that for this week this site isn’t free — you have to make a contribution of whatever amount you can afford. Yes, you’re on the honor system here, but I sincerely hope that at least some of you will seize the opportunity to do some good.

I mentioned in the title of this post that we can learn from Pakistan, too. What’s there to learn?

First, you’ll learn something about yourself after you respond (or fail to respond) to my plea for contributions.

Second, look at the world as we know it in August 2010, and think about where we, as in all of us, are headed in the coming decades. You can argue until your voice cracks or your fingers bleed about the degree to which the incredible heat and fires in Russia or the flooding in Pakistan are attributable to climate change, but the bottom line is undeniable: As we continue to pour astonishing amounts of CO2 into the atmosphere and the climate continues to respond in wildly unpredictable ways, events like these and many more just as awful and worse will happen with rising frequency. That will mean more direct human impact, more pleas for contributions from people lucky enough not to be directly devastated (this time, at least), and endless political debates about proximal vs. root causes of tragedies, e.g. are the deaths from the latest horror due to bad development patterns or climate change.

As the evidence and the terrible costs pile up, will we learn the lesson, exhibit the basic enlightened self-interest that is the hallmark of responsible adults, and take appropriate action? Stay tuned…

One site that doesn’t (yet) seem to have a large following, but certainly should, is Climate Ethics. If you sometimes tire of the verbal jousting that absorbs so much bandwidth on energy and climate blogs, and would like to find a place that has fewer, but longer and much more thoughtful posts, give CE a spin.

The latest post on CE, from Donald Brown, On The Moral Imperatives Of Speaking Publicly About the Ethical Dimensions of Climate Change-And How It Must Be Done, is particularly worthwhile (emphasis added):

We believe that those who understand the ethical dimensions of climate change have a duty to speak up strongly because with knowledge comes responsibility.

Now, one important reservation needs to be made, however, at this point. We believe that identifying the ethical issues entailed by climate change arguments will lead to three possibilities and all need to acknowledge this:

One, on some issues there will be an overlapping consensus among diverse ethical theories about what should be done.

…

When it comes, however, to what is “fair” there is a reasonable debate on what justice requires. And so once one focuses on “fairness,” there may be a conflict, as there sometimes is among ethical theories, on what “fairness” requires. This is the second possibility, namely that there is a conflict about what perfect justice requires.

…

The third possibility is actually, however, the most important type of issues about which we need public engagement. That is even in cases where it is difficult to determine what perfect justice requires, there are proposals and positions on these issues that all known justice and ethical positions would condemn as being deeply ethically problematic. On these issues we may not know what justice requires but we can spot injustice.

…

In taking about what ethics requires when speaking out about climate change, however, we must speak up about the dangerous, irresponsible, and hugely harmful way in which disinformation about climate change science is being disseminated around the world. (In fact words fail us about how to articulate the immensity of the irresponsibility of what we see going on in this regard; we would call it a gross crime against humanity but realize that many of the people actually doing this believe what they are saying because they have been told it by others. We plan to write a future post about how to classify this. We invite others to help us with the appropriate metaphors for this. In some ways criminal is not strong enough, and in other ways it is inappropriate .)

All parties have a duty to: (a) defer at least initially to the peer reviewed science, (b) not make claims that are inconsistent with what has been clearly refuted, and, (c) particularly not assert that conclusions about human-induced warming have been refuted or debunked when: (1) every Academy of Science in the World, (2) the vast majority of climate scientists actually doing climate change science (above 97% according to two recent papers), and, (3) almost all of the scientific organizations in the world that have relevant expertise have supported the consensus view which has three parts:

(1) The world is warming

(2) It very likely human caused and in fact there are multiple lines of robust evidence pointing to human causation

(3) Under business-as-usual great and perhaps unimaginable harms could happen (notice we did not claim we know they will happen)

This is just a taste, hopefully enough to get you to click through, read it all, and subscribe to the blog’s RSS feed.

As for this post by Donald Brown, I think it’s fair to say he shares my very low opinion of deniers, even if he expresses it in a much classier way. (The end of his post is particularly strong in this regard.)

I realize this is a bit afield from the topics and approaches I normally write about here; I try to stick to the “feeds an’ speeds” (i.e. the numbers) and the brute force economics of making desperately needed, sweeping changes to society. I do that largely because that’s my comfort zone, but lately I’ve been thinking a lot about ethical issues and intergenerational responsibility. I doubt this post marks a major change in what I’ll be writing about or how I’ll address any given topic, but I expect to come back to it once in a while.

The US Dept. of Energy issued their monthly Short-Term Energy Outlook on AUgust 10th, which includes this text:

Forecast economic growth combined with increased use of coal and natural gas is expected to contribute to increases in fossil-fuel CO2 emissions of 3.4 percent in 2010 (U.S. Carbon Dioxide Emissions Growth Chart). Projected coal-related CO2 emissions increase by 6.0 percent in 2010 primarily a result of increased electricity sector coal usage. Higher natural gas consumption in the industrial and electric power sectors is expected to lead to a 3.9-percent increase in CO2 emissions from natural gas. Demand for petroleum in the transportation sector (motor gasoline, diesel fuel and jet fuel) combined with continued industrial sector fossil fuel demand growth contribute to the projected 0.8-percent increase in fossil-fuel CO2 emissions in 2011. However, even with these increases, projected CO2 emissions in 2010 and 2011 remain below their level in any year from 1999 through 2008.

and links to this graphic:

Add your own commentary. I got nothin’…

The flooding in Pakistan is a truly horrific event, and even worse could be coming:

But the biggest problem may be an escalating food shortage. According to a report issued on 14 August by the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, 3.2 million hectares of standing crops and 200,000 head of livestock have been lost, along with most food supplies stored in affected homes. These figures will only grow, compounded by the fact that Sindh is one of the country’s main agricultural areas.

The situation can be partly salvaged if the winter wheat crop is planted by September, but that depends on clearing the sediment dumped by the floods. “Pakistan has the largest continuously managed irrigation system in the world,” says James Wescoat of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Now the system is almost certainly silted up. Clearing it will be a huge task, especially now that floods and landslides have knocked out many roads.

Even more striking than the current misery and the potential food problem mentioned above, is that Funding Lags to Aid Pakistan’s Millions of Displaced:

Nick Clegg, the UK’s deputy prime minister, has called the international response to the floods “absolutely pitiful”.

He noted that the scale of the disaster is such that the public is struggling to understand just how great the need for aid is, and that that may be why donations are low compared to the 2005 Pakistan earthquake, the January Haiti earthquake or the 2004 Indian Ocean Tsunami.

Other reasons may include the slow pace of floods, compared to more sudden and “dramatic” earthquakes and tsunamis, and the relatively low death toll of 1,600.

Britain is currently at the top of the donor list, having given around 26 million dollars in relief, closely followed by Australia, the U.S., Canada and Saudi Arabia.

There has been some criticism over India’s hesitancy in coming to Pakistan’s aid, prompting claims that a political spat may be at the root of the belated and small pledge of five million dollars, which is only a tiny fraction of India’s 500-million-dollar aid budget for the year.

Critics claim that Pakistan was quick to help India after the 2001 Gujarat earthquake, which killed 25,000 people.

I don’t want to wade into the relations between India and Pakistan, which haven’t always been the best, to put it mildly, but this seems like a perfect opportunity for India to improve that situation. Nothing will change hearts and minds quicker than generosity in a time of need.

In a larger sense, the overall level of aid is indeed “absolutely pitiful.” Why might that be?

Many parts of the world are still feeling less than economically robust, which clearly reduces the contributions from individuals, although I doubt that explains more than a small portion of the anomaly.

The more cynical among us (but not me, I hasten to add) might want to point to racism, an all too common reason for many of humanity’s sins against humanity, but the examples called out in the article of events that triggered greater amounts of aid seem to kill that notion.

One potential factor that came to mind was “compassion fatigue” (or “donor fatigue”). Coming toward the end of what feels like a long season of terrible news from Russia, the Gulf of Mexico, and generally miserable heat and humidity in places like most of the US, would also tend to suppress giving. But again, that’s only private contributions, not that from governments.

Pakistan hasn’t received nearly the amount of press coverage in the US that one might expect, yet another factor putting downward pressure on private donations.

Frankly, I’m stumped.

Take a step back from current events and ask what happens in the next decade or so if such tragedies become much more routine. Coastal flooding (putting the food and water for millions in Bangladesh at risk, for example), tropical storms, crop shortfalls because of drought and heat, even a lack of water for personal consumption and use as mountain glaciers, “natures reservoirs”, continue to disappear all have the potential for major, near term human impacts as climate change sinks its fangs ever deeper into humanity.

We talk a lot about the costs of climate change impacts — with emissions X and climate change Y we’ll have impacts totaling Z dollars/year by 2050, etc. But those are very high level estimates that gloss over some thorny details, like exactly where those dollars come from, who makes the decisions to donate, and how might those donations change according to factors unrelated to each event, some of those reasons being very ugly.

How long would it take for people in “rich” countries to see one or more such “natural” tragedies every year before they would simply stop caring and stop giving, and worst of all, stop supporting decisions by their elected officials to give? Would we reach a Machiavellian point where people in the US (or Europe or Canada or Australia or …) say nothing and give nothing, while thinking, “the world already has too many people; better they go than me.”[1] I realize how blindingly offensive that thought is, and even beyond that its surface level vileness is absurdity, given how much more people in the countries I listed consume and emit than the average person on the afflicted countries.

But could it happen? Could one of the worst impacts of being pounded year after year by climate change be a change to our very nature? I’m almost afraid to find out the answer.

[1] Given some of the truly disgusting things we hear already from some of the right wingers on talk radio, it would be tempting to say we’re nearly there already. I’m making an exception for those miscreants and assuming, perhaps too generously, that they won’t really mean it when they’re the first ones to say such things publicly.

If you follow the energy and climate news you’ve probably noticed the occasional article about some big coal plant being canceled. This is usually positioned as a reason to celebrate for those of use concerned about climate change. I really hate to say this, but climb down from the table, take off that ridiculous party hat, and pay attention, because Killer Koal isn’t going anywhere, as the AP points out in, Old-style coal plants expanding (emphasis added):

An Associated Press examination of U.S. Department of Energy records and information provided by utilities and trade groups shows that more than 30 traditional coal plants have been built since 2008 or are under construction.

The construction wave stretches from Arizona to Illinois and South Carolina to Washington, and comes despite growing public wariness over the high environmental and social costs of fossil fuels, demonstrated by tragic mine disasters in West Virginia, the Gulf oil spill and wars in the Middle East.

The expansion, the industry’s largest in two decades, represents an acknowledgment that highly touted “clean coal” technology is still a long ways from becoming a reality and underscores a renewed confidence among utilities that proposals to regulate carbon emissions will fail. The Senate last month scrapped the leading bill to curb carbon emissions following opposition from Republicans and coal-state Democrats.

…

Approval of the plants has come from state and federal agencies that do not factor in emissions of carbon dioxide, considered the leading culprit behind global warming. Scientists and environmentalists have tried to stop the coal rush with some success, turning back dozens of plants through lawsuits and other legal challenges.

…

As a result, current construction is far more modest than projected a few years ago when 151 new plants were forecast by federal regulators. But analysts say the projects that prevailed are more than enough to ensure coal’s continued dominance in the power industry for years to come.

Sixteen large plants have fired up since 2008 and 16 more are under construction, according to records examined by the AP.

Combined, they will produce an estimated 17,900 megawatts of electricity, sufficient to power up to 15.6 million homes — roughly the number of homes in California and Arizona combined.

They also will generate about 125 million tons of greenhouse gases annually, according to emissions figures from utilities and the Center for Global Development. That’s the equivalent of putting 22 million additional automobiles on the road.

The new plants do not capture carbon dioxide. That’s despite the stimulus spending and an additional $687 million spent by the Department of Energy on clean coal programs.

A few observations…

The AP dared to directly connect fossil fuels and “wars in the Middle East”? Wow, that’s one I don’t see often (enough).

The additional 125 million tons of CO2 emissions is about a 2% increase in all US emissions, or a 3.5% increase in emissions from electricity generation. Those sound like small amounts, but at a time when we should be struggling to cut every ton possible, any increase emissions, even if it’s “only” 125 million tons, is a big deal because it represents that much more we have to cut somewhere else.

The relevant agencies don’t take CO2 emissions into account? Let me be perhaps the millionth or so person to suggest we pass some laws to change that, along with a time machine so we can make the new rules go into effect around the mid-1970’s.

As a very round number, assume that a new coal plant will be in operation for 50 years. So these plants will be cranking out electrons and CO2 until 2060. Just wondering — what percentage of people who read this site reasonably expect to still be alive in 2060?

I don’t find the comments in the article about what assumptions the coal companies are making about legislation to be convincing. The article says it’s an acknowledgment that “clean coal” technology isn’t close. I think it’s just as likely to be proof that the plant operators think existing plants will be grandfathered in when legislation is eventually passed in another five or ten or who knows how many years. In short, they’re trying to build as many plants without emissions controls or CCS as possible now, on the assumption that they’ll be able to keep running them with only relatively affordable upgrades being forced on them. The “if you force us to spend this money, we’ll be able to convince the public service commission to let us hike rates, and the voters will send you packing in the next election” argument convinces a lot of politicians to go easy on power companies.

Overall, I think this article is one more piece of evidence that shows how insanely hard it will be for the US to get on an emissions reduction path anywhere near what’s in our own best interest.

Pete Sinclair’s latest Crock video is a must see (as they all are, frankly), even though this one features Christopher Monckton:

If you have more than 60 seconds to spend on this, then click on over to the source page for the first three of these images, NASA’s GISS Surface Temperature Analysis: July 2010 — What Global Warming Looks Like. (The last one is from NOAA.)

The topic of methane popped up in the comments, and just this morning I stumbled across a related interview with some scientists looking into this particular facet of climate science.

Living on Earth: Getting to the Bottom of Methane (emphasis added):

YOUNG: So, why are we concerned about these releases of methane from the oceans?

REAGAN: Well, recently scientists have realized that vast quantity of methane that exists in the oceans and in the permafrost in various forms. And as the climate warms the oceans warm in concert and various processes may cause this methane to enter the ecosystem. First in the oceans and then possibly into the atmosphere.

YOUNG: So this most recent study looked at the East Siberian Arctic Shelf, which I guess is fairly shallow water. But that’s not the only spot where scientists are finding this, right?

REAGAN: That’s correct. In fact, about a year and a half ago, an expedition in the Bering Sea Svalbard area found a series of methane plumes erupting from the shallow continental shelf west of the island of Spitsbergen. And what was interesting about these plumes was not only their existence and their size, but that we see plumes erupting out of the sea floor in some 390, 400 meters of water and reaching high up into the water column.

And, in the case of the East Siberian Arctic Shelf we also see that the methane is passing through the water column and reaching the atmosphere. Previous studies thought that much of the methane would be oxidized in the oceans and release to the atmosphere would be minor. But now we’re seeing releases that are both large enough and shallow enough to let that methane get into the atmosphere.

YOUNG: Give me a sense of how much methane we’re potentially talking about?

REAGAN: Various numbers have been thrown out, but we estimate that the quantity of methane in gas hydrates exceeds, possibly by a factor of two, all of the carbon in developed and undeveloped fossil fuel reservoirs.

…

YOUNG: So if we do get a big burp of methane all at once that might be one of what we call a — I guess a feedback loop, right?

REAGAN: That is what has been hypothesized and what scientists have been concerned about for many years. When you look at the sheer size of the methane reservoir there is a reason to be concerned. However, I don’t think we should be scared and I don’t think we should be sounding alarms just yet. What we need to do is do the work and study the situation. Scientists are just starting to quantify this.

The observations off of Spitsbergen, the recent discovery in the East Siberian Arctic Shelf, these are key because they are the first real evidence that this release may be happening now, and this is motivating scientists to study the problem even harder.

Click on through for more, including downloadable versions of the interview in RealAudio and MP3 formats.

The position of the scientist interviewed, namely that we should be “concerned” but not “scared” is exactly the right one, in my opinion. You’d be hard pressed to find an area of climate science where we wish we knew a hell of a lot more than we do than methane hydrates and permafrost. Those deposits are indeed huge, and if they’ve been outgassing a little at a time for centuries, then they’re not yet a serious issue. But if they’re releasing much more methane (and, in the case of permafrost, CO2) as global warming increases, then we could have one hell of a problem. That’s about the most compelling argument one can make for vastly increasing funding for research on a particular topic.

Lake Superior reaches record temp:

Experts say the lake’s surface temperatures set a new record high this week — and the entire lake likely is warmer than ever recorded.

…

On Tuesday, the waters atop Lake Superior reached the highest temperature ever recorded. The lake-wide average surface temperature hit 68.3 degrees. The average for Aug. 10 is just 55 degrees.

…

Tom Johnson, a professor of geological science at the Large Lakes Observatory, avoids slapping blame for this year’s heat on long-term global warming.

“I don’t look at this summer and say ‘aha, we have a hot summer and therefore it proves that global warming is happening,’” he said.

At the same time, Johnson said the long-term trend is clear. Warmer winters are affecting Lake Superior and are consistent with global trends.

“I look at the last 30 years and say ‘man, we’ve had a lot of very warm years in the last 30 years.’ ” He said. “And that to me says we’re looking at a trend that is very consistent with what the climate community is predicting.”

Researchers say the trend for several decades now is clear — ice is forming later on Superior, going out earlier, and like this year, allowing the lake to warm earlier and longer.

Aside from the obvious implications this worries me for a very personal reason: I live downstream of that warm water. As it flows eastward, it will soon be in Lake Ontario (which is already running hot), about 3 miles from where I’m sitting as I type this. And this winter that warmer water could mean some truly spectacular lake effect snow storms. I’m hoping the area I live in continues to benefit from the “skip over” effect, where the big storms come in off the lake and skip over the first few miles of land before dumping their moisture. We’ve had a number of storms since my wife and I moved here in 2004 that did that, with the “snow line” usually falling somewhere around US Route 90:

Lake Mead’s Water Level Plunges as 11-Year Drought Lingers:

Lake Mead, the enormous reservoir of Colorado River water that hydrates Arizona, Nevada, California and northern Mexico, is receding to a level not seen since it was first being filled in the 1930s, stoking existential fears about water supply in the parched Southwest.

…

In the 75 years since the workers began to hold back the Colorado River behind the Hoover Dam, the lake’s water has taken two precipitous plunges: first during the prolonged drought of the 1950s, which ranks second only to the current dry spell, and again in the mid-1960s, when water managers began filling Mead’s cousin 250 miles upstream, Lake Powell.

Neither dip was as severe or prolonged as that of the past decade. Nearly full in 1999, Mead has shrunken to 40 percent capacity, causing the ominous, bleach-white bathtub ring on the surrounding mountainsides to grow taller by the year. In the past five months, the lake steadily shed another 15 feet, to about 1,087 feet above sea level today. Four more feet and the lake surface will hit what would be the lowest mark since 1937 — something the government projects will happen in October.

…

Mead’s disappearing act highlights the Southwest’s chronic overuse of Colorado River water. Trouble originated with the 1922 Colorado River Compact, which estimated the river’s water flow at 16.4 million acre-feet per year and divided that up among seven states and Mexico. Today, scientists believe the compact overestimated the flow by as much as 2 million to 3 million acre-feet, because flow measurements taken during the 20th century were skewed — it was the wettest century of the last 500 to 1,200 years, according to recent paleoclimate studies of tree rings.

Climate change threatens to stretch the river’s water even further. Over the last decade, the Southwest has suffered the sharpest temperature increase on the continent, declining late-season snowpack, loss of vegetation and rampant wildfires — all while growing faster than any other region in the United States. Eight studies completed from 1991 to 2007 predict that climate change will reduce the snowpack runoff that feeds the Colorado River anywhere from 6 percent to 45 percent over the next half-century.

…

“We need to be making major policy changes to Western water,” Udall said. “And a lot of people aren’t willing to do it until you have a full-fledged crisis on your hands.”

…

Greater cutbacks and impacts follow as Mead’s surface plunges further. When the 28.5-million-acre-foot reservoir’s surface hits 1,050 feet, or about 26 percent capacity, deliveries get slashed by 417,000 acre-feet, Las Vegas shuts down one of its two intakes and Hoover Dam’s massive turbines lose the hydraulic pressure needed to generate electricity. The maximum cutback of 500,000 acre-feet kicks in when Mead’s surface hits 1,025 feet, or about 20 percent capacity.

Even holding back the maximum 500,000 acre-feet of water — enough to serve 2 million residents for a year — accounts for less than a third of the reservoir’s current deficit, which is expected to grow as temperatures increase an estimated 2 to 4 degrees Celsius by 2050, as studies predict.

It’s hard to find a more immediate large-scale example of the energy/water/climate nexus in action than the US Southwest and the Colorado River. Rising temps, rising population, reduced water input, and potentially reduced hydroelectric generation, with a steaming pile of political gridlock and inadequate action thrown in for good measure.

A few more specific observations:

The article above also details some other, pricey, steps that are being taken to ensure that Las Vegas, which gets 90% of its water from Lake Powell, won’t run out of water. This is one of those utterly boring yet terrifying aspects of our energy and climate challenges: Even in those cases where we can “fix” a situation to alleviate the impacts through mitigation or adaptation, it can be very expensive. Similar to the peak oil situation, which is not a case so much of running out of oil (at first) as it is one of running out of cheap oil, we’re entering an age when many things we implicitly assumed would “always be cheap”, like water and basic food supplies (ask anyone counting on this year’s Russian wheat harvest), are about to become much more expensive. Tat will likely be true even in those cases where we take the right steps once we get around to recognizing and responding to the problems.

In a way, the worst thing about the Colorado River situation is that it will teach us the wrong lesson. I’d guess that Las Vegas won’t run dry any time soon, although we might have to spend billions to keep those taps flowing. The problem here is that we’ll see what happens here — wait for a growing mess to turn into a true emergency before acting and then save ourselves with a big, heroic effort — and assume we can apply that to other situations, like climate change in general. As I’ve pointed out so many times that frequent readers of this site must be spontaneously bleeding from the eyes at the merest mention of it, climate change is an extremely perverse situation because of the timing involved. A significant portion of the CO2 we emit tends to hang around in the atmosphere essentially forever, in human terms. It’s not something we can throttle up and down more or less at will, but a ratchet that goes up quickly (thanks to our current emissions rate) or at a more moderate rate (under any emissions rate one can reasonably expect us to achieve), but barring any technological miracle it will continue to rise throughout the lifetime of everyone reading this.

That’s still not the perverse part, though. The impacts that CO2 creates on human beings don’t appear instantly; many of them, like unfortunate shifts in water availability and sea level rise, take from years to multiple decades to creep into our consciousness, even though we’re continually adding to the atmosphere’s CO2 level during that time lag. And let us not forget those nasty feedbacks triggered by the warming from our CO2 emissions, such as the albedo flip in the Arctic from shrinking ice cover and everyone’s two favorite monsters under the bed, methane hydrate deposits and the already defrosting permafrost. Oh yeah — and there’s ocean acidification and the 40% die off of phytoplankton in the last 50 years. Got a good solution for either of those in a spreadsheet sitting in your desktop folder?

My point here is not to retrace the hall of horrors we’ve constructed for ourselves, but to point out that a business as usual approach to problem solving once we’ve recognized the danger is just as bad as the BAU practices in our economics and industrial processes and politics that helped create the mess in the first place. We’ll probably avoid a disaster in the Colorado River basin through the semi-panicked spending of large sums of money and possibly a little luck, but I fear that experience will only reinforce the wrong mindset for dealing with the problems of the next few decades to centuries.

I really hate stories like the one linked below, because I have to choose between not saying anything about them or expressing myself and then having to explain (especially for newcomers to this site) that I’m Really A Greenie, Honest.

This time around, the story is not about anything that’s actually being done, but is simply an idea a few people are pondering.

What If Gas Receipts Had Warning Labels?:

Cigarette packs have the Surgeon General’s warning. Heavy machinery has a word of caution about operating while intoxicated. Doritos tell us their saturated fat content. What would happen if our gasoline receipts had disclaimers too?

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The idea comes from a conference speaker Lisa Margonelli, the director of the New America Foundation’s energy initiative and the author of Oil on the Brain: Petroleum’s Long, Strange Trip to Your Tank. In a New York Times op-ed awhile back, in the aftermath of the Gulf spill, she noted that every gallon of gas is indeed a gallon of risks, and that the spill is a unique opportunity to harness our political will to get “behind a sweeping commitment to use less gas — build cars that use less oil (or none at all) and figure out better ways to transport Americans.”

Now, I don’t think even she really believes her gas receipt warning label will actually come to pass. But it’s an interesting thought experiment. Most of the time, Americans live in a state of willful ignorance about the risks of oil. Before the Deepwater Horizon disaster, there was an oil spill practically every day in places like Nigeria. And as the coverage of the oil spill fades, and as this summer of weather chaos fades into the background, the urgency of those dangers will diminish — as it always does (just look at what happened after Hurricane Katrina.)

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Just as calorie counts inform us what we are putting into our bodies, a gas receipt warning label wouldn’t let us forget what we were really doing to our planet.

There’s no nice way to say this, so I won’t even try: This idea exemplifies precisely what’s wrong with the “environmental movement”, most notably in the US. We keep trying to come up with ever more creative and gentle ways to appeal to the better angels of consumers’ natures to coax them into making long-lived behavior changes. And, of course, it doesn’t work, for one blindingly simple and obvious reason: If you want all or nearly all people in a large and diverse group to do something they don’t want to do, you have to force them. That can be via law or by buying them off with a sufficiently large economic incentive, but be prepared to wield a carrot and/or a stick, because trying to reason with them just won’t cut it.

If we tried this gentle reminder thing on motor fuel receipts, I’m sure the overwhelming majority of Americans would not notice them at all or would see them and get pissed off that “someone was trying to tell them what they do with their own money”. In the latter case, it would likely make people dig even further into their entrenched position.

One slightly more interesting angle would be to really get in the consumer’s face. Instead of printing a static message or one chosen randomly from a static list, why not print something like, “The X gallons of gasoline you just purchased will add Y pounds of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere and add Z dollars to America’s trade deficit.” You could get even more creative and calculate the costs of adaptation to rising sea levels and other impacts, or who knows what.

Oh, there I go again — thinking that even an in-your-face version of a gentle nudge will convince a significant number of people to downsize their vehicle and/or drive less and/or hypermile when they do drive.

Silly me.

I hasten to add (he said, typing as quickly as possible) that I don’t like reaching these conclusions, so please don’t fall into the standard, hyper-polarized blogosphere trap of assuming that when someone says “X is true” he or she is pleased that X is true or stands to benefit from it in some way. In many cases all you should conclude is that your friendly neighborhood blogger thinks that X is true. I realize what a stunning notion that is, given the kinds of knock down, drag out knife fights over truly obscure minutia we see on almost any site about energy or environmental issues, but it’s true, dear reader.

On a related note, I highly recommend Dave Roberts’ Grist post, ‘Environmentalism’ can never address climate change.

It’s Hot Enough to Wake the Media observes TreeHugger:

It had to happen sooner or later. After experiencing the hottest decade on record (2000-2009), the hottest spring (2010), and the hottest overall Jan-June period, and then a bunch of record-shattering highs around the globe, as well as heatwaves and an unusually powerful monsoon, the media was bound to draw the connection between the extreme weather and the warming planet. It’s a bit of a tricky line to walk, to be sure — no single monsoon or heatwave, no matter how crippling, proves man is causing climate change. But ignoring that our warming climate plays a role in these weather events is dishonest too. Thankfully, a slew of media outlets — USA Today, Time, Reuters, etc — got the memo, and tackled the story with aplomb. Here’s what they had to say:

Click through for the details of which outlets said what.

My response to this is somewhere between mild surprise and shocked speechless, depending on the reading of my personal cynicism meter. If someone had asked me six months ago, “if the following list of events happened by mid-August, would you expect to see the mainstream media (mostly) start connecting the dots, and even (mostly) getting the ‘any one event doesn’t prove AGW but…’ part right?” I would have laughed, probably said something I won’t reproduce here, and generally expressed a conspicuous lack of confidence in the media. But guess what? It’s actually happening.

I’m as delighted as I am surprised.

This by no means indicates that we’ve somehow won the information war, and that light has finally reached the deepest, darkest crevasses of the media’s lack of resources and overall blockheadedness. There will always be the holdouts [insert your favorite list of culprits here], and I fully expect to see some of these outlets regress to their prior behavior of just a few weeks ago as soon as we see Washington DC get whacked by a snowstorm in January, for example. (File this away for future reference: When said snow storm whacks WDC or some other major city, watch the news reports to see if they explain the climate change aspects of such events. You know — warmer air means more moisture aloft which means greater snowfall in areas that are still, as expected, below freezing. I’ll go out on a limb right now and say that no more than 25% of the stories will make that connection, even if you weed out the hardcore buffoons like Fox.[1])

In fact, this latest glimmer of enlightenment in the media does almost nothing to change my overall view of them, given the years of absolutely dreadful, faux balance warped coverage we’ve already seen. What we’re seeing now is akin to the world’s economies dramatically reducing their CO2 emissions, in that it’s a sign of much needed progress, but we’re still living with the consequences of decades of bad behavior.

[1] Bonus prediction: In a few more years to a decade, as real world events continue to unfold in alarming fashion, expect outfits like Fox and individual bloviators like Limbaugh and Hannity and Beck to fall back on the most ridiculous position imaginable. They will say that the warming is real and human caused, but it’s news and the decades of delay in responding appropriately are completely attributable to the scientists who never made a compelling case. Did your head just explode with rage? Wait ’til they say it. Even with advance warning, it will still be rage-inducing.

The news about what’s going on Russia, especially in and around Moscow, is heartbreaking. I’ve been struggling over the last few days as I tried to figure out what I could say about it that actually added something of value to the online conversation.

Do I point out the painfully obvious (obvious, that is, to the enviro-cogniscenti, like my readers) that this one event doesn’t “prove” that “climate change is real” or anything of equal and simplistic absurdity, but that it’s a very good example of the kind of events which will be much more common in an increasingly warmer world? No, there’s nothing to add there.

How about pointing out, yet one more time, that the proper name for what we’re unleashing on ourselves via a couple of centuries of rampant environmental neglect should be called “climate chaos”, and not simply “climate change” or the ever so cozy sounding “global warming”? After all, who saw this particular event coming? Who even hinted at a scenario where Russia was baked by unrelenting heat and smothered by smoke and carbon monoxide from massive fires? If asked, I’d wager that if you could get experts to take a wild guess at some extreme weather events for 2010, they would have looked to the Gulf of Mexico and hurricanes or perhaps yet another crushing heat wave in Europe. But daily highs 30F above normal in Moscow???

To me, the most interesting question is: What happens next. We’ve already seen the reports of the dramatic change of attitude about anthropogenic climate chaos among Russia’s leaders, but we’re left wondering, When the Smoke Clears in Russia, Will Climate Policy Change?:

“I don’t know what it would take to produce an active stance on climate change in Russia, but I hope this is enough,” said Samuel Charap, a senior fellow for the Center for American Progress who studies Russian climate and energy policy.

Recent comments made by Russian President Dmitry Medvedev link climate change and the wildfires, stoking speculation about what Russia may bring to the table in the next round of international climate talks. But once the wildfires’ smoke clears, they may not amount to much, according to Alexey Kokorin, the Moscow-based climate negotiator for the World Wildlife Fund.

Medvedev said in a public speech last week, “Unfortunately, what is happening now in our central regions is evidence of this global climate change, because we have never in our history faced such weather conditions,” according to a published transcript of the speech. “This means that we need to change the way we work, and change the methods that we used in the past,” he said.

In another speech, Medvedev said these events must act as a “wake-up call” for heads of state and social organizations, “in order to take a more energetic approach to countering the global changes to the climate,” as reported by TIME.

(Please click through and read the entire article. It’s worth your time.)

In one sense, leaders in Russia are no different than leaders in the US or China or India or anywhere else. They all have the famous American political observation that “all politics is local” encoded in their DNA. If forced to bet, I would say that once the smoke clears in Russia and a little time has elapsed, almost nothing will have changed. The leaders will convinced themselves that this was purely a weather fluke, regardless of what scientists tell them about loading the dice for such outcomes as we load the atmosphere with greenhouse gases, and therefore is not deserving of any meaningful action. They will also revert to myopia masquerading as pragmatism and convince themselves and their citizens that any large scale action is “too expensive” or “not justified”. Politicians are better at talking themselves out of meaningful action on long-term problems than they are at taking campaign contributions, bribes, and other mind-altering gifts from fossil fuel special interests, not that I mean to imply the two are completely unrelated in this context.

I know how cynical this sounds — Russia has been thrust into the role of being the fingertip that we use to touch the hot stove, and I’m saying that even they won’t learn a long-term lesson from this very painful experience. Looking at human history, I think that prediction is on very solid ground. This topic will come up repeatedly in the years and decades to comes. Next time it could be China or the US or India or Europe or just about anywhere there are large number of human beings that “randomly” takes the localized hit for our history of global actions.

Circle of Blue, which should be one of the news feeds you follow via RSS reader, has posted an excellent summary of the interaction between coal and water, A Desperate Clinch: Coal Production Confronts Water Scarcity, that begins with a focus on the Dump Creek tributary of the Clinch River in Virginia, and then broadens out to the coal and water portion of the energy/water nexus (emphasis added):

Within Dumps Creek’s 20,000- acre watershed there are two active and two abandoned deep mines. There’s also a scraped off mountaintop, that fully comprises one-fifth of the watershed, where miners blasted away the overburden to get at coal. Dumps Creek is critical to these operations—hundreds of thousands of gallons of water are used daily to cool and lubricate mining machinery, wash haul roads and truck wheels to reign in airborne particulates as well as to suppress underground dust that otherwise could ignite.

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These production practices are just the first stages of an economically essential and ecologically damaging accord between coal and water that is coming into sharper national relief. It’s not just that mining and combustion of coal could not occur without using vast amounts of water; it’s occurring in the era of climate change, population growth and an increasing demand for energy. The result is that the competition for water at every stage of the mining, processing, shipping and burning of coal is growing more fierce, more complex and much more difficult to resolve.

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Slowing down the vortex of coal’s conflicted outcomes has only gotten harder. The Energy Information Administration, a research unit of the federal Department of Energy, forecasts that by 2050 the demand for energy in the U.S. will be 40 percent higher than it is today. As the nation considers what it will take to cool the planet and serve the country’s steadily increasing energy appetite, federal scientists and policy makers are taking a fresh look at how long the coal era will persist, and by necessity the tumultuous space where water and coal intersect.

Nothing about what they see is pretty. Scientists define water use by two basic measurements. One is how much water is “withdrawn” from America’s rivers, lakes, and aquifers for domestic, farm, business, and industrial use, most of which is returned to those same sources. The second is how much water is actually “consumed” in products, by livestock, plants and people, or evaporates in industrial processes. In both measurements of withdrawal and consumption coal is at the top of the charts.

The U.S. withdraws 410 billion gallons of water a day from its rivers, lakes and freshwater aquifers. About half is used to cool thermoelectric power plants, and most of that cools coal-powered plants, according to the most recent assessment by the United States Geological Survey (USGS).

Similarly, the U.S. consumes about 100 billion gallons of water a day; nearly 85 percent is used for crop and livestock production. Of the 16.1 billion gallons that remain: industrial, mining and power plants use nearly 8 billion gallons a day, most of that for mining, processing and burning coal, according to the Department of Energy.

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Coal industry executives insist their favorite fuel will be part of the energy mix for at least the next generation, and likely beyond. And they are readying a favored fix for climate change, an unproven technology to snare all the carbon emissions at coal-fired plants and store them deep underground—so-called “carbon capture and sequestration” or CCS.

But there’s a big problem there, too. Scientists with Sandia National Laboratories who’ve studied carbon capture and storage say CCS will increase water withdrawal and use by 25 percent to 40 percent. In other words, without significant advances in a technology that is only now being tested in a handful of applications, the path to a low-carbon economy that still burns coal will put enormous new pressure on America’s declining supply of fresh water.

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The numbers—like a splash of cold water—are a national wakeup call: Mining companies use from 800 to 3,000 gallons of water to extract, process, transport and store one short ton of coal and dispose of mining waste, according to estimates by researchers at Virginia Tech University.

The typical 500-megawatt coal-fired utility burns 250 tons of coal per hour, uses 12 million gallons of water an hour—300 million gallons a day—for cooling, according to researchers at Sandia National Laboratories.

To produce and burn the 1 billion tons of coal America uses each year, the mining and utility industries withdraw 55 trillion to 75 trillion gallons of water annually, according to the USGS. That’s roughly equal to the torrent of water that pours over Niagara Falls in five months.

It almost seems like piling on poor old coal. We’ve known for a long time that it’s a dangerous and filthy way to move electrons down a wire, but now this growing awareness of its share in the energy/water nexus should make it clear to even the most hardened coal advocate just how bad an idea it is. The issue with water is not merely the amount that coal plants (and all other thermoelectric generation facilities) consume or how much heat pollution they cause when water is returned to a lake or river, but the long-term dependency that’s created when we build a coal plant. If any thermoelectric plant can’t get enough water that’s sufficiently cool it can’t run at full capacity and might not be able to run at all.[1][2] Our decision to build a new generating plant is based on numerous factors — e.g. do you build a plant here, near a big city that needs the electricity but has a questionable water supply, or would it be prudent to build it hundreds of miles away where the water supply seems much more secure, but with the added expense of adding new transmission lines to deliver the juice? These decisions are all based on assumptions about the future, and in the case of climate-dependent issues, like the availability of cooling water, those assumptions are riskier now thanks to the changing rules of the game. It’s almost as if someone delivered a swift jolt to the environment and knocked it out of its old, comfortable (to us) and predictable (by us) equilibrium…

[1] This is talking about once-through cooling systems, which are still in widespread use, and account for just over half of US thermo plants. See the stats at Annual Steam-Electric Plant Operation and Design Data, especially the spreadsheet F767_COOLING_SYSTEM.xls available from that page. Closed-loop or recirculating cooling systems can dramatically reduce water consumption. For more than you ever thought you would need or want to know about cooling systems, see Water Use Benchmarks for Thermoelectric Power Generation [PDF].

[2] The US Dept. of Energy report Impact of Drought on U.S. Steam Electric Power Plant Cooling Water Intakes and Related Water Resource Management Issues says, page 2:

During the summer and fall of 2007, a serious drought affected the southeastern United States. As shown in Figure 1, a part of this area of the country is still experiencing extreme drought. In 2007, river flows in the southeast decreased, and water levels in lakes and reservoirs dropped. In some cases, water levels were so low that power production at some power plants had to be stopped or reduced. The problem for power plants becomes acute when river, lake, or reservoir water levels fall near or below the level of the water intakes used for drawing water for cooling. A related problem occurs when the temperature of the surface water increases to the point where the water can no longer be used for cooling. In this case, the concern is with discharge of heated water used for cooling back into waterways that are just too warm to keep temperatures at levels required to meet state water quality standards. Permits issued under the Clean Water Act (CWA) National Pollutant Discharge Elimination System (NPDES) program limit power plants from discharging overly heated water. For example, the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) Gallatin Fossil Plant is not permitted to discharge water used for cooling back into the Cumberland River that is higher than 90°F (WSMV Nashville 2007).

The southeast experienced particularly acute drought conditions in August 2007. As a result, nuclear and coal-fired plants within the TVA system were forced to shut down some reactors (e.g., the Browns Ferry facility in August 2007) and curtail operations at others. This problem has not been limited to the 2007 drought in the southeastern United States. A similar situation occurred in August 2006 along the Mississippi River (Exelon Quad Cities Illinois plant). Other plants in Illinois and some in Minnesota were also affected (Union of Concerned Scientists 2007). Given the current prolonged drought being experienced in the western United States (see also Figure 1), and also the scarcity of water resources in this region in general, many western utilities and power authorities are also beginning to examine the issue. The problem has also been experienced in Europe as well. During a serious drought in 2003, France was forced to reduce operations at many of its nuclear power plants (Union of Concerned Scientists 2007)