Andy Revkin, of the NY Times’ dotEarth blog, has once again proved to all of us, like me, who think we finally have figured out where he’s coming from that we’re really wrong. This time around, it’s a dE post, On Harvard Misconduct, Climate Research and Trust, that doesn’t have me shaking my head, but banging it on the nearest hard surface.

I was all set to gear up say something about Revkin’s piece, but luckily, Steve Easterbrook not only beat me to the punch but did a better job than I would have. I simply cannot recommend Steve’s post, When did ignorance become a badge of honour for journalists?, and Revkin’s original, obviously, highly enough (the strikeout plus the italics for emphasis are from the original):

Here’s an appalling article by Andy Revkin on dotEarth which epitomizes everything that is wrong with media coverage of climate change. Far from using his position to educate and influence the public by seeking the truth, journalists like Revkin now seem to have taken to just making shit up, reporting what he reads in blogs as the truth, rather than investigating for himself what scientists actually do.

Revkin kicks off by citing a Harvard cognitive scientist found guilty of academic misconduct, and connecting it with “assertions that climate research suffered far too much from group think, protective tribalism and willingness to spin findings to suit an environmental agenda”. Note the juxtaposition. On the one hand, a story of a lone scientist who turned out to be corrupt (which is rare, but does happen from time to time). On the other hand, a set of insinuations about thousands of climate scientists, with no evidence whatsoever. Groupthink? Tribalism? Spin? Can Revkin substantiate these allegations? Does he even try? Of course not. He just repeats a lot of gossip from a bunch of politically motivated blogs, and demonstrates his own total ignorance of how scientists work.

That’s just the opening salvo, and it gets much uglier for Revkin from that point onward. Considering the seriousness of the matter at hand, Steve uses Appropriately Adult Words, so anyone offended by AAWs should consider him/herself duly warned. I expect Joe Romm to comment on Revkin’s post soon enough, and he will likely be even more pyrotechnic; consider Steve’s response the warm-up act.

Rather than merely toss this incident over the wall to you as a “Yeah! What Steve said!!!” post, let me use it as a springboard to talk about something I was already planning to mention today or tomorrow.

You probably noticed the lack of posts this week. I spent the last three days near one of New York’s glorious Finger Lakes, drinking wine, eating the insanely good garlic knots from Jerlando’s in Watkins Glen, and, most important of all, talking with my college sweetheart about several deep topics. The outcome of said discussions was interesting, to say the least. I’ll skip over all the angst and navel introspection and give you the bullet-point version:

• It is clearer than ever to me that no one is telling the mainstream public what they desperately need to hear about our overall sustainability situation, including climate change, energy, water, food, biodiversity, ocean acidification, etc. There are many people doing excellent work in individual portions of that spectrum, but I’ve yet to see anyone write The Book That Needs To Be Written. I had hoped that a new edition of Limits to Growth (as the authors promised in the last update) would be that book, but one of the authors tells me that they aren’t writing it. (And it likely would have been too reserved had they written it.) I had also hoped that Bill McKibben’s Eaarth would be that book, but it turned out to be yet another example of an excellent but far too mild book in this arena. (I’ve never met Bill, but based on his writing and interviews, and the videos of his speeches I’ve encountered, I think he’s easily one of the most decent human beings in the field. That’s a very serious and nearly impossible to overcome handicap.) Many other books of late by people like Hansen, Pooley, Oreskes, et [many] al. are each, in their own ways, terrific additions to the sustainability literature that we all should read and promote. But none of them is TBTNTBW.
• The mainstreamers need to be shocked shitless by the indisputable facts as we know them and the consensus view of where we’re headed plus the technology and policy needed to avoid one hell of a collapse in the next century. As I put it to my wife during our lakeside retreat, we need the message to feel like being grabbed by the neck and repeatedly punched in the face. People have to be so desperate to stop it that they seriously examine what they and everyone else is doing, and then start to make the needed changes. The situation is so urgent, and the forces against change, including the fossil fuel companies and greedy, myopic, opportunistic right wing politicians, so determined to stop us from acting in our own best interest that nothing less will do the trick.
• You can’t be nice and repeatedly punch someone in the face. You have to be willing to piss off people, to not care if you’re seen as “too extreme” or “alarmist” or “striking the wrong tone”, even though you’re sticking to the facts. This is not a trade off we should make grudgingly (as I was until the last few days, in fact, much to my embarrassment), but one we should eagerly embrace because it will greatly increase our odds of success against the deniers and liars.
• The obvious conclusion is that I should pursue writing TBTNTBW and make whatever sacrifices that dictates in my other work. Fewer blog posts here and fewer comments on other blogs seem like a virtual certainty, for example. I am also considering killing this blog entirely and launching a new one. I plan to withdraw from much of the ridiculous back and forth over clowns like Monckton, except when I feel like ridiculing someone; there are so many people on “our side” dealing with the worst of the deniers and the infinite mysteries like Revkin that my lack of contribution there won’t be noticed, let alone missed. There is at least one very significant alternative use of my time, as detailed above.
• This is a very radical shift for me. I’ve been writing this blog, in one incarnation or another, for seven years, and during that time I’ve told myself countless times to “be nice” and “keep my emotions in check” and “don’t let myself look like an alarmist”, etc. What a colossal mistake and fucking waste of time. If ever there were an issue that deserved the most accurate, honest, and complete treatment, the tangled mess known of our sustainability challenge is it. “Being nice” is nothing less than unilateral disarmament, and at a time when we’re facing extremely well funded protectors of the business as usual path that leads directly to billions of lost lives and soul twisting levels of human suffering.
• I don’t know exactly how this will unfold in the coming weeks and months. I expect to be even more surprised than you by what happens.

I triple dog dare anyone here to say you don’t wish you could do this.

I can juggle (3 balls with two hands, 2 balls with either left or right hand, some minor flourishes), and I was about six shades of green 30 seconds into this video clip.

It has just come to my attention that the scitizen.com repost of my recent piece on Pakistan (their version: The compounding crisis in Pakistan, my version: The compounding crisis in Pakistan) made it look as if I had plagiarized two sources, when I had not.

(I also took a snapshot of the page via WebCite: http://www.webcitation.org/5s7hcoRvR, in case someone at scitizen.com completely deletes the article in question.)

I just moments ago sent the following note to scitizen.com via their “Contact” page:

I’m the Lou Grinzo you list as a contributor. After reviewing the version of my recent posting on Pakistan you posted, I am requesting that you immediately stop using my posts on my site, The Cost of Energy.

In the Pakistan piece (http://scitizen.com/future-energies/the-compounding-crisis-in-pakistan_a-14-3565.html) some critical parts of the formatting have been lost. Specifically, my use of “quote boxes” and links to indicate when I was quoting another source was lost. This makes it look like I am plagiarizing someone else’s work, which i most clearly did not do.

A much less important but still significant point is that you simply appended the footnote at the bottom of my post as a continuation of the text itself. Someone even took the time to delete the footnote indicator in the text and at the beginning of the note itself and add a paragraph break at that point in the text.

Such treatment of my work is not acceptable.

Please stop using my material immediately.

You may reach me at [e-mail address] if you have any questions about this matter or to send me confirmation that you will stop using my work.

This is a red miniature, with blooms about 1.5 inches across, straight from my front yard to your screen. Who knows, maybe this Intertubes thing has some value, after all…

In my ongoing attempt to improve the graphs page, I’ve created several versions that are identical except for colors. These are all the new, minimalist, button-free look.

I haven’t made any content changes since asking for feedback. Once I get the color nailed down then I’ll start on that and weed out old links, add new ones, possibly add the description text I talked about in the prior post’s comments, etc. I will definitely look into a good expanding menu implementation; I know there are about a gazillion of them online, I just need to find the time to locate some and experiment with them.

Please check them out and let me know in the comments if you have a preference (I like the red and blue ones).

• the current one, which even I don’t like (how whacked out on allergy meds was I when I did this???)
• white boxes on black — talk about minimalism run amok!
• light gray boxes on black, just to reduce the in-your-face brightness a bit
• red and white boxes on a light tan background
• blue and white boxes on a light tan background
• purple and white boxes on a light tan background (it looks better than it sounds)
• black boxes on white — a little something for the goth and True Blood fans

I’ve revamped the graphs page, and would like some feedback the results. Any topic is fair game — colors, layout, content, etc. I have plans to add olfactory feedback with the new HTML 5 SMELL tag, but I’m holding off until the new version of everyone’s favorite markup language is more widely supported, and I can find a digitized Spring Meadow scent I like.

The old version is here.

The new version is here.

Go see Neven’s latest post, which has four fascinating (and scary) animations he made from stills of Arctic sea ice concentration.

The energy and climate news hasn’t exactly been great lately, which means we all need a 22-second laugh break.

Here’s yours:

OK, break’s over. Back to the info-mines, you slackers.

My wife and I just got back from a few blissfully disconnected days in the Finger Lakes, which means I’ll be hacking through new feeds for the rest of today and a goodly size chunk of tomorrow. Good thing we brought home some delightful bottles from various Cayuga Lake wineries — I’ll need the sustenance…

So, without further ado or commentary on my part, some news feeds that I think are worthy of your attention:

• Must Read: Turn the Tables on Monckton
• Facebook | Prawngate: Support John Abraham against Monckton’s bullying
• How Half the World Could Grow Thirsty At China’s Whim
• Big Oil Front Group Says CO2 Is Green (Warning: This one will make your blood boil.)
• Lake Champlain affected by climate change, report says You cab get the report here [PDF]
• New Study Charts Effects of Each Degree of Warming:
  

  The human impacts on climate come into sharper focus in a new National Research Council report that warns policymakers that carbon dioxide lives so long in the atmosphere “it can effectively lock the Earth and future generations into a range of impacts, some of which could become very severe.”

  The range of impacts — temperatures, crop yields, precipitation, streamflow, wildfires — have long been part of the global warming scenario, but the new analysis by leading climate scientists brings new consistency and clarity to model simulations by focusing on changes to expect from each additional degree of future temperature rise.

  …

  Specific impacts of the various climate models wander over a wide range of uncertainty when simulations are based on different levels of carbon dioxide concentration, different time periods, or different emissions scenarios, Solomon noted.

  But their results are “considerably more robust” and consistent when climate impacts are viewed “as a function of the warming level.”

  Beyond the specific impacts, the 242-page report describes carbon dioxide as the dominant and most unique greenhouse gas. Once released, it remains in the atmosphere for centuries, even thousands of years, and commits generations in the distant future to many years of a warming climate.

  “Every pound that every one of us emits, every ton that we emit as a group, will be with us for a long time,” she said. “Some of what we will be releasing now will be with us for generations.”

  …

  Taking this lag time into account, Solomon said that the changes described in the report are only “about half of the eventual impacts” for a given unit of heightened carbon dioxide concentration.

  With CO2 concentrations at current levels of 390 parts per million, the report shows that the climate system already is committed to at least 1 degree C (1.8 F) of warming.

  This is the part where I chime in a remind you all for the 10,000th time that “timing is everything” in climate change (as well as in peak oil), and that the enormous amount of CO2 we’ve built up in the atmosphere is the main reason I think we should be feeling a much greater sense of urgency.

  The report is a free prepublication download from The National Academies Press.

  See also Locking in our future

• Global temperatures rise to record levels

While hacking through my news feeds tonight, I came upon the following comment on the blog Rabett Run, in the post Rabett Run: A simple puzzler:

Monckton has now posted at WUWT asking for people to flood Abraham’s university with calls for disciplinary action. As a consequence, I have posted this:

We the undersigned offer unreserved support for John Abraham and St. Thomas University in the matter of complaints made to them by Christopher Monckton. Professor Abraham provided an important public service by showing in detail Monckton’s misrepresentation of the science of climate, and we applaud him for that effort, and St. Thomas University for making his presentation available to the world.

If you support Abraham, please visit Hot Topic and leave a comment in support.

http://hot-topic.co.nz/support-john-abraham/

Thinking that surely this must be a joke, I checked WUWT (a site I almost never read, as you might imagine), only to find the following Monckton in the post Abraham climbs down:

May I ask your kind readers once more for their help? Would as many of you as possible do what some of you have already been good enough to do? Please contact Father Dennis J. Dease, President of St. Thomas University, djdease@stthomas.edu, and invite him – even at this eleventh hour – to take down Abraham’s talk altogether from the University’s servers, and to instigate a disciplinary inquiry into the Professor’s unprofessional conduct, particularly in the matter of his lies to third parties about what I had said in my talk at Bethel University eight months ago? That would be a real help.

I can only imagine the level of stress that the mail server at St. Thomas University must be enduring.

If you’ve been following this situation and want to support John Abraham, please go to the post at Hot Topic linked above and leave a message to that effect. I honestly don’t know if a note to Father Dease would be helpful, but I plan to send one anyway.

Please note that because my connectivity will be very limited over the next few days, I am shutting off comments for this post.

My prior related posts, in the order in which they originally appeared:

• John Abraham dismantles Monckton
• Abraham vs Monckton, Round 2
• Abraham replies to Monckton
• Abraham, Monckton, and the rest of us: Time to rumble
• Monckton responds; hilarity ensues

From Mother Jones, among other sources, comes Menendez, Schumer: Investigate BP’s Lockerbie “Blood Money”:

The Democratic senators from New York and New Jersey are now calling on BP to suspend drilling operations in Libya’s Gulf of Sidra until an investigation can be completed into whether the company pushed for the release of a convicted terrorist in order to seal a major oil deal.

Robert Menendez (D-NJ) decried the release last August of Lockerbie bomber Abdelbaset al-Megrahi a “moral outrage” at a press conference on Wednesday. Megrahi is the only person who has been convicted of the Pan Am Flight 103 bombing that killed 270 people in 1988. BP has admitted that it lobbied for a prisoner exchange—they have just not said which prisoners. Now Menendez and three other senators have called on the State Department and the British government to investigate precisely what role BP may have played in negotiating his release, as the company has since admitted that they pushed for a prisoner transfer to help ensure the $900 million oil deal went through. In recent weeks, one of the doctors who gave the dire prognosis for Megrahi that led to his release from a Scottish prison has come forward to say that the Libyan government paid him to make that determination. He now says Megrahi may live for another 10 years, and there are rumors that he has secured a book deal.

“If BP is found to have gained access to Libyan oil reserves by using a mass murderer as a bargaining chip, then make no mistake, any money it makes off that oil is blood money,” said Menendez.

Chuck Schumer (D-NY) said: “Until this deal is properly investigated, this project off the coast of Libya should not break ground. If BP is dealing in good faith, it should cooperate with this investigation.”

A top UK official has acknowledged that oil interests played “a very big part” in his release—and in securing BP’s big deal. The senators argue that the Megrahi example, and the overarching issue of a private company using a business deal to sway the justice system, presents a national security concern. The case “undermines our ability to hold international terrorists accountable,” said Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY).

These are incredibly serious charges, so I’m going to step as lightly as I can in my comments…

Obviously, I have no idea if this is true.

I have no trouble whatsoever believing that an oil company the size of BP would do something like this. Given the number of dollars involved in securing access to an oil field, plus the increasing pressure on International Oil Companies (like BP) to maintain market share in an environment in which National Oil Companies control a growing share of oil resources, I would expect any corporation to commit essentially any disgusting and disturbing act one could imagine if it thought it could avoid being caught.

The fact that Senator Schumer is involved gives the accusations a lot of credibility, at least in my estimation. Schumer has been one of my Senators for some time, and I have considerable respect for him, much more than I feel for the average member of the House or Senate. Senator Gillibrand is relatively new on the job, as she was appointed to the position after Hillary Clinton resigned to become Secretary of State, but I have a very positive impression of her, as well.

I hope that this matter is investigated thoroughly, and if it is shown that BP did what is alleged that someone in a position of power in the US (I’m looking at you, President Obama) will spearhead an effort to punish them very severely.

Yes, that’s my hand.

Yes, I managed to acquire a set of second-degree burns on the heel of my hand and all 5 (count ‘em — 5!) fingertips. I lost an argument with a gas grill.

I did something remarkably similar to my other hand about 10 years ago, so I know what to expect. I’m not the least bit concerned about the recovery, although this time (like the last incident) it hurt like hell and is still throbbing quite a bit. My biggest regret is that this little incident blew up my plans for a low-key, relaxing weekend with Mrs. Lou.

One last thing — this won’t slow me down online one bit.

I just made a minor update to the graphs page.

I added a link for the emissions version of the PECSS diagram (see US CO2 emissions by source and sector for details), and I also added a mini-section of buttons for some graphs related to the Arctic Oscillation, the weather pattern at the top of the planet that has a considerable effect on things like the rate of melt of Arctic ice (see the NSIDC’s page about the AO).

A couple of reminders…

Please feel free to make suggestions for new additions to the graphs page.

Please pass the link to the graphs page to your fellow energy and climate geeks. The page is pretty lightweight and has no ads, so it loads fast, and it tries to steal your ID only every fourth or fifth time you use it.

(click on the image for the full size version)

There’s a fascinating piece online from the U.S. Department of Energy’s National Energy Technology Laboratory regarding the additional water requirements of CCS carbon capture and sequestration), Determining Carbon Capture and Sequestration’s Water Demands. This is one of those numbers, or sets of numbers, I’ve been trying to track down, as I knew there was some additional water required, but I honestly didn’t know if the amount was trivial or the proverbial Big Deal. The answer is that it’s certainly not a trivial increment, but it varies with the technology being used to generate electricity:

The additional withdrawal increases the water footprint by 55% to 97%, and while consumption grows by 73% to 93%.

As for what this means for, say, the US fleet of power plants, you could make a rough estimate by doubling the water withdrawal and consumption figures for subcritical and supercritical coal plants (which the DOE/NETL numbers show grow from 88% (subcritical, consumption) to 97% (subcritical, withdrawal)), and increasing IGCC withdrawal by 50% and consumption by 73%. Given that roughly 50% of the US’ electricity comes from coal, that’s a hell of a lot of gallons of water. The same article provides a pair of pie charts and text regarding showing US water withdrawal (2005) and consumption (1995):

The U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) estimated that thermoelectric generation accounted for approximately 41% of freshwater withdrawals, ranking slightly ahead of agricultural irrigation as the largest source of freshwater withdrawals in the U.S. in 2005. However, thermoelectric water consumption accounted for only 3% of total U.S. freshwater consumption in 1995 (Figure 1). A recent DOE/NETL study estimated that in 2005 total U.S. freshwater withdrawals for thermoelectric power generation amounted to approximately 146 billion gallon per day (bgd), while freshwater consumption was 3.7 bgd.

I will leave it as an exercise for the reader to dig into the numbers and cook up a more precise guesstimate of what a magic-wand style instant conversion of existing US generation facilities to full CCS operation would mean for water consumption and withdrawal. (Hint: The pie charts above show water figures for all thermoelectric generation, which includes natural gas and nuclear. So you can’t simply double the existing figures to get a ballpark estimate.)

But while we’re here, let me point out one detail that I think gets overlooked. If you look at those two pie charts above, one thing that leaps out at you is the disparity between withdrawal and consumption for thermoelectric generation. One way to think of this situation is that for power plants, withdrawal is more than anything a measure of any given the plant’s dependency on outside conditions, as opposed to its impact on the environment.[1] If your 1MW subcritical coal plant with CCS needs 1,200 gallons of water per hour, it better get it or you don’t push electrons, period. In other words, this is a measure of the vulnerability of a plant to local water availability.[2]

The water consumption, while roughly 75% of the withdrawal figures across the board for both CCS and non-CCS plants and quite literally a subset of the withdrawal amount, is more a measure of the plant’s impact on water flow, since that water is not returned to the source.

Taking a step back from the specifics, we’re left with some very big and troubling questions. How much of a factor will this additional water demand have for CCS and our ongoing struggles to reduce our CO2 emissions? I’ve said repeatedly that the biggest concern I have with CCS is the economic cost of retrofitting existing plants in the US, China, India, and basically everywhere else. These water withdrawal and consumption increments are so large that one has to wonder how many existing plants, even newer ones that happen to be close to a sequestration site or CO2 pipeline and have the on-site room for CCS hardware, will be viable candidates for retrofitting. Any reasonably accurate estimate of how the existing electricity generation infrastructure sorts out would require a plant-by-plant assessment that takes into account all these factors, with the potential for any one of them to escalate the cost of a retrofit, possibly to a prohibitive level.

With China, the world’s largest consumer of coal by a wide margin, already facing many water challenges even as they build more coal plants (which they would be all the more reluctant to abandon, since they’re brand new), one can only conclude that their prospects for nearly universal CCS retrofits are even worse than the US’.

This is certainly not the result I was hoping for when I found the water/CCS numbers, and it emphasizes yet again the importance of the energy/water nexus. If I can find the right inputs and the time, I will try to do a more detailed analysis of this situation.

[1] Yes, there certainly are such impacts, such as heated water that’s returned to lakes or rivers. I’m ignoring those effects here, as I’m focused more on the flow of water issues.

[2] The issue is slightly more perverse than that, as plants require not merely X gallons/hour to operate, but water at an acceptable incoming temperature, since it’s primarily used for cooling. This has already become an issue during heat waves with thermoelectric plants, and it’s one of the stealth issues that I think will become far more prominent.

Holy crap…

I don’t know about youse guys, but the news lately has left me wandering the back alleys of the Intertubes, looking for anything to restore my faith in humanity, or, minimally, make me smile. Luckily, we lives in a (virtual) world where there’s Topless Robot (which is most definitely safe for work, even if the name sounds like it’s the illegitimate love child resulting from a sweaty tryst between a Radio Shack catalog and an issue of Hustler).

Anywho. They posted this gem today. I double-dog-dare any self-respecting geek or nerd to watch this without smiling.

OK, break’s over. Back to the data mine!