Shift fossil fuel subsidies to back clean tech: IEA
Fossil fuel subsidies worth $312 billion should be realigned to ensure the growth of renewable energy and curb the world’s reliance on carbon-intensive fuels, the International Energy Agency (IEA) said in a report. (Reuters)
Report Questions Wind Power’s Ability to Deliver Electricity When Most Needed
John Muir Trust
Posted in Energy
U.N. climate talks risk backsliding on Cancun outcome
Arguments over the agenda that have stalled U.N. climate talks in Bangkok this week show that some nations are trying to row back from hard-won agreements reached last December, Russia said on Wednesday. (Reuters)
With the usual attendant propaganda:
Because “debates” only have one side now: Google Wades Into Global Warming Debate
By John Brandon
Google is diving headfirst into the climate-change debate with a “21 Club” of hand-picked experts that the search engine giant hopes will drive the conversation — and guide investments — in climate change.
But it’s a discussion that even the club’s members say is meant to be one-sided. “If Google included people who challenged that debate, they would be wrong to do so,” said Matthew Nisbet, an associate professor for the School of Communication at American University and one of the 21 Google Science Communication Fellows. (FoxNews.com)
Posted in Activists, Cap and tax, Climate change, IPCC
Senate rejects measure to stop EPA on climate
WASHINGTON | Wed Apr 6, 2011 7:44pm EDT
The Senate rejected a measure on Wednesday to kill Environmental Protection Agency regulations of emissions blamed for warming the planet, handing a victory to President Barack Obama. (Reuters)
Big h/t to Steven Goddard for reminding us of the above clip.
Posted in Cap and tax, EPA
Obama’s Energy Funny
Chris Horner, AmSpecBlog, 6 April 2011
Government vs. Resourceship
John Bratland, MasterResource.org, 6 April 2011
China Sees Evil of Plastic Bags
Jonah Goldberg, USA Today, 6 April 2011
Obama-Backed Tesla Sues Its Critics
Henry Payne, Planet Gore, 6 April 2011
Should We Feed Hungry People, Even If It’s Bad for the Environment?
Alex Berezow, Forbes, 6 April 2011
UN IPCC: Analyst or Advocate?
Lee Lane, RealClearScience.com, 5 April 2011
GE’s Immelt: Jobs Czar from Hell
Debra Saunders, San Francisco Chronicle, 4 April 2011
New Energy Economy Drubbed in Debate
Vincent Carroll, Denver Post, 2 April 2011
Renewable Energy Standards Are Unconstitutional
Paul Chesser, Washington Times, 1 April 2011 (Cooler Heads)
Cap and Trade Spurred Coal Boom in Germany, New Study Finds
By: Michael Shellenberger, Breakthrough Institute
April 4, 2011 – Europe’s cap and trade program (Emissions Trading Scheme, or ETS) created perverse incentives that “spurred and sustained” Germany’s “dash for coal” and away from cleaner energy sources, according to a major new study by a team of German and American academics and published in Energy Policy. The 22 new coal plants will constitute one-third of total German peak electricity demand, and generate 54 megatonnes of carbon dioxide.
Windfall profits from the EU cap and trade program created incentives for an expansion of coal. Under the ETS, the researchers write, “the preference for emission-intensive coal investments, which was prevalent even without carbon regulation, was greatly increased by expected windfall profits. Without the cap and trade program, Germany would have likely moved to natural gas, not coal, the researchers said. “Realizing that for several years after liberalization in 1998 natural gas was the predominant option, this development constitutes a dramatic shift in technology choice.” (via Yubanet)
Posted in Cap and tax, Coal
Congress calls on EPA to back off dust regulations
By The Cattle Site
Contributed to The Sentinel
The Administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Lisa Jackson received a letter today from 101 members of the US House of Representatives expressing concerns about EPA’s potential revision to the National Ambient Air Quality Standards (NAAQS) for Coarse Particulate Matter, more commonly known as dust.
Led by Congresswoman Kristi Noem (R-S.D.) and Congressman Stephen Fincher (R-Tenn.), the policymakers collectively emphasized the devastating impact farmers, ranchers and all of rural America would feel if the EPA moves forward with regulating dust at unprecedented levels. (The Sentinel)
Posted in EPA
BY MICHAEL FOX PHD – Recently, there was a cable news segment which featured another know-nothing MD to discuss Fukushima and health effects of low leverl radiation. Such “experts” are commonly featured in media coverage of the Japanese reactor situation. Even my educated non-scientific wife caught some of the misrepresentations by this “expert”.
The “expert” guests routinely ignore the vast amount of information dealing with the health effects of low level radiation and Iodine-131 in particular. A huge world of scientific context is ignored. Additionally many of the experts from antinuclear advocacy groups who are more eager to misepresent this situation and scare the public rather than discuss the advances in the recent years on reactor designs, waste management environmental effects, as well as the advances in our knowedge of the health effects of low dose radiation. There are many interest groups and lobbying groups who have opposed nuclear technology for decades. (Hawaii Reporter)
Compact fluorescent lamps are a bad idea on many levels, not least of which is the small amount of mercury present in every lamp.
Greens and governments pretend CFL’s are a good idea because they lower energy use, even though clean-up procedures for a broken lamp read like a do-it-yourself Fukushima hazard.
But as more people use CFL’s, many more dead curly lamps are headed to the landfill, and someone noticed there might be a problem: (Daily Bayonet)
CFL bulbs: The U.S. EPA guidelines and the debate over mercury
John Funk
There is a dark side to those brilliant compact fluorescent light bulbs that are displacing old-fashioned incandescents.
It’s mercury, a heavy metal that even in small amounts can cause neurological problems in children and infants. (The Plain Dealer)
Is man-made CO2 different: 1000 years? Try 4 years.
That CO2 you emitted last Tuesday, is it coming back next month, next year or in March 3011?
Tim Flannery makes it clear that CO2 circulates o-so-slowly, circa “a thousand years”. Remember that CO2′s “greenhouse” effect occurs at speed-of-light timescales, so if the temperature is still affected, so must be the CO2 (according, at least, to the world-of-Flannery).
If we cut emissions today, global temperatures are not likely to drop for about a thousand years… Just let me finish and say this. If the world as a whole cut all emissions tomorrow the average temperature of the planet is not going to drop in several hundred years, perhaps as much as a thousand years because the system is overburdened with CO2 that has to be absorbed and that only happens slowly. [Thanks to Andrew Bolt]
There are a few clues that maybe CO2 doesn’t idle the centuries away aloft, and that (I know you’ll be shocked) the Climate Commission (and IPCC) have overstated things: if emissions are absorbed by the global system in a matter of months, it rather blows the idea that we have to act decades ahead to stop the catastrophe. If CO2 levels adjust quickly, our “sins” will be much more quickly forgiven, and we can wait-and-see.
The thousand year timeframe doesn’t fit very well with NASA’s official carbon cycle, and the empirical evidence.
You can see below in the NASA diagram that plants absorb 16% of all the carbon dioxide in the entire atmosphere each and every year (121Gt of the 750 Gt in the air) and oceans absorb 12%, meaning that 28% of all the CO2 in the global atmosphere is sucked down each year. Let’s call it “one quarter”.
In any given year, tens of billions of tons of carbon move between the atmosphere, hydrosphere, and geosphere. Human activities add about 5.5 billion tons per year of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere. The illustration above shows total amounts of stored carbon in black, and annual carbon fluxes in purple. (Illustration courtesy NASA Earth Science Enterprise)
If a quarter of all atmospheric CO2 is being turned over each year, that implies that if humans found the fountain-of -endless-energy, and stopped emitting any CO2 tomorrow, that within just four years, only about 30% of that co2 would remain. Indeed 90% of all the emissions that we’d ever put up there, since King Tut built a pointy-rock-house, would be gone by… 2020. (Jo Nova)
Posted in Climate change
UAH Temperature Update for March, 2011: Cooler Still -0.10 deg. C
April 5th, 2011 by Roy W. Spencer, Ph. D.
YR MON GLOBAL NH SH TROPICS
2010 01 0.542 0.675 0.410 0.635
2010 02 0.510 0.553 0.466 0.759
2010 03 0.554 0.665 0.443 0.721
2010 04 0.400 0.606 0.193 0.633
2010 05 0.454 0.642 0.265 0.706
2010 06 0.385 0.482 0.287 0.485
2010 07 0.419 0.558 0.280 0.370
2010 08 0.441 0.579 0.304 0.321
2010 09 0.477 0.410 0.545 0.237
2010 10 0.306 0.257 0.356 0.106
2010 11 0.273 0.372 0.173 -0.117
2010 12 0.181 0.217 0.145 -0.222
2011 01 -0.010 -0.055 0.036 -0.372
2011 02 -0.020 -0.042 0.002 -0.348
2011 03 -0.099 -0.073 -0.126 -0.345
La Nina Coolness Persists
The global average lower tropospheric temperature anomaly for March 2011 fell to -0.10 deg. C, with cooling in both the Northern and Southern Hemispheric extratropics, while the tropics stayed about the same as last month. (I’m on the road in Virgina, so the temperature graph will not be updated until I return on Thursday.) (Roy W. Spencer)
Posted in Climate
The greatest emergency of all is being ignored
Our response to climate change should be as urgent as it is to crises in Libya and Ivory Coast
Emergencies around the world are grabbing our attention and prompting action from our political leaders. The nuclear crisis in Japan has galvanised governments, from China to Germany, to review their own nuclear power programmes. The threatened humanitarian disasters in Libya and Ivory Coast have prompted military interventions from Nato and the United Nations. But when it comes to the most pressing international emergency of all, the destabilisation of the planet’s climate through mankind’s emissions of carbon dioxide and other industrial gasses, all urgency has drained away.
Today two stories underline the dangers posed by global warming. A consortium of European scientists is warning that the melting of Arctic sea ice could disrupt the North Atlantic Drift and the Gulf Stream. It is this current of water that ensures Britain has a mild, rather than an Arctic, climate. If the Gulf Stream is disrupted, these islands could experience winters as severe as northern Canada.
This is not certain to happen. But nothing is certain about the outcomes of this experiment we are performing on our planet’s climate. All we know is that the more carbon dioxide we pump into our atmosphere, the greater the risk we run of dangerous consequences.
Another report today shows that the Arctic ozone layer exhibited unprecedented damage this winter, partly as a result of emissions of industrial chemicals. The ozone layer crisis was declared “solved” many years ago thanks to tighter regulation. But those chemicals that mankind pumped into the atmosphere in previous decades are still having an effect. This is a lesson in the dangerous delay in the impacts of environmental pollution. Like ozone-damaging chemicals, the full effects of the carbon we are sending into our climate at this moment will only be felt later this century. (Indy)
The shut-down of Atlantic Meridional Overturning is about as silly as it gets, so I won’t bother going through that again and we just pointed out (again) the nonsense of “ozone depletion”.
Posted in Climate change, IPCC, Ozone
I’ll admit being unimpressed by dendrochronology as a paleoclimatic proxy but in the era of Mannian reimagining it does seem popular still. We have contemporary observations of explosive volcanic eruption particulates cooling the planet for years after the event but:
Icelandic volcano exonerated for harsh winter of 1783–1784
In June 1783 the Laki volcano in Iceland began to erupt, and continued erupting for months, causing a major environmental disaster. The eruption spewed out toxic sulfuric acid aerosols, which spread over northern latitudes and caused thousands of deaths. That summer, there were heat waves, widespread famines, crop failures, and livestock losses. During the following winter, temperatures in Europe were about 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) below average for the late 1700s; the winter was also one of the most severe of the past 500 years in eastern North America. The Laki eruption has been blamed for the anomalously cold winter of 1783–1784.
However, a new study by D’Arrigo et al. challenges that interpretation, suggesting instead that the cold winter was caused not by the Laki eruption but by an unusual combination of a negative phase of the North Atlantic Oscillation (NAO) and an El Niño–Southern Oscillation (ENSO) warm phase. The authors analyzed 600-year tree ring reconstructions to show that the NAO and ENSO indices were similar to their values during the 2009–2010 winter, which, like the 1783–1784 winter, was unusually cold and snowy across western Europe and eastern North America. The 2009–2010 winter has been shown to be attributable to NAO and ENSO conditions (and their combined effect), not to greenhouse gas forcing or other causes. The authors add that other data and climate simulations support their hypothesis that this natural NAO/ENSO variability, not the Laki eruption, caused the cold winter of 1783–1784.
Source:
Geophysical Research Letters, (GRL) paper 10.1029/2011GL046696, 2011
Posted in Climate
New study says 2 degrees Celsius warming may be unavoidable by 2100
When it comes to modeling climate change, researchers rely on the specification of plausible emissions scenarios to explore how climate will change over the coming century. Using a standardized set of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gas scenarios allows researchers from different modeling centers to compare results and allows more methodical assessment of uncertainty in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) reports. The set of emissions scenarios used in the past two IPCC reports were published in 2001 and need to be updated to take into account more recent socioeconomic modeling results.
In a new study, Arora et al. use a completely new set of scenarios, referred to as representative concentration pathways (RCPs). These will form the basis for new climate projections to be assessed in the IPCC’s Fifth Assessment Report (due out in 2014). Using an upgraded Earth system model—which takes into account carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases, aerosols, land use change, and the flow of carbon between the atmosphere and the underlying ocean and land surface—the researchers are able to calculate the carbon dioxide emissions compatible with each RCP and, in particular, the emissions reductions required to meet certain levels of global warming.
The authors find that even under the lowest concentration scenario, global average temperature increases exceed the 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) limit agreed to by various governments in the Copenhagen accord. The researchers note that limiting warming to 2 degrees Celsius by 2100 will require global carbon dioxide emissions to be reduced to zero over the next 50 years, followed by measures to actively remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere before the end of the century.
Source:
Geophysical Research Letters, (GRL) paper 10.1029/2010GL046270, 2011
Posted in PlayStation® climatology
Kyoto pact rift threatens progress at U.N. climate talks
Poorer nations upped the ante on rich countries at U.N. climate talks on Tuesday by demanding that the world’s main climate treaty be extended from 2013 and for industrialized countries to deepen carbon-cutting pledges.
Failure to do risked scuttling drawn-out and often fraught negotiations on ways to slow the growth of planet-warming greenhouse gas emissions and avoid greater extremes of weather and rising sea levels.
The talks in Bangkok formally began on Tuesday and are the first major session after talks last December in the Mexican resort of Cancun ended with a series of agreements on a $100 billion climate fund and other steps, such as a scheme to transfer clean technology for poorer nations.
But Cancun put off the tougher issue over the fate of the Kyoto Protocol, which binds nearly 40 industrialized nations to emissions targets during its 2008-12 first phase. (Reuters)
Posted in Climate change, IPCC
Obama Official: ‘Climate’ Happiness is an Economic Downturn
By Chris Horner
I mean, yes, they feel that way, but you’re just not supposed to say it.
While I love the ClimateWire headline — “U.S. vows continuing effort toward a 17% emission cut” (subscription required), sort of like I vow to continue my effort toward hitting fewer pedestrians when I drive…not to hit fewer pedestrians when I drive…ah, J-school — the following excerpt from the piece is simply beyond belief.
Speaking to a U.N ‘Kyoto II’ negotiating group in Bangkok, U.S. Deputy Special Envoy for Climate Change Jonathan Pershing “noted in a series of slides that U.S. emissions have declined about 8.7 percent since 2005 — and while he acknowledged that a portion of that is due to the economic downturn, Pershing insisted that the more important metric is whether America is meeting its target.” (American Spectator)
Posted in Cap and tax, Climate change, Enviros, EPA
On Green Hell Blog On JunkScience.com On Corporate Energy Subsidies
