Climate Articles
Quenching our thirst for oil
Growing global oil demand harms U.S. security and economy
Global oil demand—led by the United States and followed by China, Japan, and India—will dramatically increase over the next two decades. China has made oil deals around the world over the past few years that can deliver a supply of more than 7.8 billion barrels of oil to the country over the next several years.
The United States must meanwhile prepare for a coming oil price crunch caused by increasing global demand and slowing global production (see Deutsche Bank: Oil to hit $175 a barrel by 2016 and World's top energy economist warns peak oil threatens recovery: "We have to leave oil before oil leaves us").
The safest, cheapest, and fastest path to energy security is to implement oil savings measures—outlined below-to reduce dependence on foreign oil and protect our pocketbooks. CAP's Daniel J. Weiss, Rebecca Lefton, and Susan Lyon lay out the problem — and the solution - in this repost.
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The deadly toll of the 'safe' and 'clean' coal and oil industries
The oil rig that exploded off the Louisiana coast on Wednesday is a tragic reminder of why the movement that mobilized forty years ago for Earth Day is still so necessary, notes Brad Johnson in this WR repost.
It has now sunk below the waves in a fiery grave, potentially spilling thousands of gallons of oil underwater. Hope for the eleven men left missing in the explosion has dropped sharply. Grist’s Jonathan Hiskes notes that this comes within weeks of:
– The awful coal-mine explosion that killed 29 men under the criminal safety record of Massey Energy CEO Don Blankenship.
– The crash of a coal freighter into the fragile Great Barrier Reef as it tried to take a shortcut from Australian mines to Chinese furnaces.
– The Tesoro oil refinery explosion that killed five workers in Washington state.
– The spillage of 18,000 gallons of crude oil from a Chevron into a canal in the Delta National Wildlife Refuge, also in Louisiana.
The cold reality is that fossil fuel production, just like its combustion, is neither clean nor safe, despite the endless propaganda from the mouthpieces of Big Oil and King Coal:
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Robert Redford Reflects on 40 Years of Activism
Robert Redford is one of those Hollywood icons who was never content to be a celebrity. He wanted to put his fame and fortune to good use, and he's done that through tireless advocacy on behalf of the environment. A trustee of the Natural Resources Defense Council since 1974, Redford was an early proponent of renewable energy and has been a fierce protector of Western wildlands. In an OnEarth interview, Redford reflects on a lifetime of environmental activism, his love for the West, and why -- on its 40th anniversary -- Earth Day should be more important than ever.
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TED: Ideas worth spreading: Winning the Oil Endgame
Watch Chief Scientist Amory Lovins describe how to wean the U.S. off oil and revitalize the economy in this recently re-released TED Talk from 2005. Learn more about RMI's work to eliminate oil use.
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Star-Studded Video Kicks Off Urgent Climate Campaign
It's one of the twenty-first century's most promising sources of renewable energy: the click of the mouse. The NRDC Action Fund aims to tap into this powerful force as we launch our latest Web-based video campaign, one that travels at lightning speed across popular social networking sites. The campaign will harness the political might of a new generation of online activists in demanding that Congress finally take action to curb global warming while, in the process, creating millions of green-collar jobs and enhancing our national security.
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Q&A with author Anne Lutz Fernandez
The average U.S. household spends one out of every five dollars on transportation -- more than the cost of medical care or food. Cars are the leading cause of child deaths in the United States. And the number of people killed by car wrecks in 2007 was the equivalent of a passenger plane crashing every day. Childhood obesity, entrenched poverty, crowded emergency rooms, overworked court systems -- the unrecognized costs of America's car-focused lifestyle are staggering. And yet the concept that many Americans associate with their cars is "freedom." How did this happen?
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Created: Good, clean fun Video - Must See
Our favourite part of the initiative is the promotional video, narrated by a woman with a twinkly faux-French accent, who explains in anguished tones that, if the world's water supply dries up, "It is estimated that our entire population of water-park enthusiasts will have nowhere to play." Oh, the humanity!
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Talking With... Robert F. Kennedy
Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. is an NRDC senior attorney, Time Magazine's "Hero for the Planet" and the best-selling author of Crimes Against Nature.
Q. Why are you so focused on clean energy right now?
A. The biggest crisis that we now face is global warming, climate chaos. So our greatest challenge is to extract and deploy energy in ways that don't endanger our civilization and compromise the aspirations of our children.
Q. How can clean energy compete with a fuel as cheap as coal?
A. Coal appears to cost just a few cents per kilowatt hour. But that doesn't include the cost of thousands of Americans who die every year from ozone particulates discharged by coal-burning plants....
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Nights getting warmer in India, cereal output may fall: Study
In an ominous sign of climate change hitting home, India has seen accelerated warming in the past few decades and the temperature-rise pattern is now increasingly in line with global warming trends.
The most up-to-date study of temperatures in India, from 1901 to 2007, has found that while it's getting warmer across regions and seasons, night temperatures have been rising significantly in almost all parts of the country.
The rise in night temperatures — 0.2 degrees Celsius per decade since 1970, according to the study — could have potentially adverse impact on yields of cereal crops like rice. The paper also finds that warming has been highest in post-monsoon and winter months (October to February).
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Warmer and weirder weather in the North, Inuit say
Inuit hunters are helping scientists understand an essential fact of Arctic climate change - the weather's not just getting warmer, it's getting weirder.
A new study published in the journal Global Environmental Change has combined the observations of Inuit on the land with cold, hard data to conclude that Arctic weather is getting less predictable all the time.
"The character of weather is changing," said lead author Betsy Weatherhead, an atmospheric physicist at the University of Colorado. "The kind of style that it has to it."
Weatherhead's research began as an attempt to reconcile differences between what Inuit were saying about their weather and what scientists were recording.
Hunters used to be able to count on stable weather, but were increasingly complaining that conditions were swinging wildly from day to day, making their traditional prediction skills less useful and endangering them on the land.
And the anomalies weren't showing up in the long-range studies developed by researchers.
"I've been hearing these reports from the Inuit probably since the late '90s," Weatherhead said. "My colleagues would give these presentations saying, 'The Inuit are saying this, and I don't see it. The data isn't showing it.' "
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American Industry's Thirst for Water: First Study of Its Kind in 30 Years
ScienceDaily (Apr. 12, 2010) — How many gallons of water does it take to produce $1 worth of sugar, dog and cat food, or milk? The answers appear in the first comprehensive study in 30 years documenting American industry's thirst for this precious resource.
The study, which could lead to better ways to conserve water, is in ACS' Environmental Science & Technology, a semi-monthly journal.
Chris Hendrickson and colleagues note in the new study that industry (including agriculture) long has been recognized as the biggest consumer of water in the United States. However, estimates of water consumption on an industry-by-industry basis are incomplete and outdated, with the last figures from the U.S. Census Bureau dating to 1982.
They estimated water use among more than 400 industry sectors -- from finished products to services -- using a special computer model. The new data shows that most water use by industry occurs indirectly as a result of processing, such as packaging and shipping food crops to the supermarket, rather than direct use, such as watering crops. Among the findings for consumer products: It takes almost 270 gallons of water to produce $1 worth of sugar; 200 gallons of water to make $1 worth of dog and cat food; and 140 gallons of water to make $1 worth of milk.
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Climate Change in the Deep
What happens at the surface doesn't stay at the surface. It seems that changes in Earth's climate can cause unexpectedly large changes in deep-sea ecosystems. Based on 18 years of studies, the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute's Ken Smith and coauthors show that such ecosystem changes occur over short time scales of weeks to months, as well as over longer periods of years to decades. The paper, Climate, carbon cycling, and deep-ocean ecosystems, is in PNAS. From the From the abstract:
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Second CRU inquiry reports
The Oxburgh report on the science done at the CRU has now been published and….. as in the first inquiry, they find no scientific misconduct, no impropriety and no tailoring of the results to a preconceived agenda, though they do suggest more statisticians should have been involved. They have also some choice words to describe the critics.
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Slash and Sprawl: U.S. Eastern Forests Resume Decline
Since the 1970s woodlands that had been rebounding started to shrink again
Trees once covered almost the entire eastern seaboard of the U.S. Vast forests supported a rich ecosystem, including flocks of the extinct passenger pigeon big enough to blot out the sun. But by the 1920s at least half of this forest was gone—a victim of tree-clearing for farming, forestry or fossil-fuel extraction.
Then, the forest rebounded for several decades as once-farmed fields were left fallow. But a new study reveals that since the 1970s eastern forests have begun to diminish again; roughly 3.7 million hectares of forested land—an area larger than the state of Maryland—have been transformed into subdivisions, tree plantations and lunar-esque landscapes resulting from mountaintop removal mining. In fact, the latter activity alone eliminated 420,000 hectares of woodlands in the past two decades.
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The complete guide to modern day climate change
All the data you need to show that the world is warming
According to the IPCC 4th Assessment Report (2007):
* Warming of the climate system is unequivocal, as is now evident from observations of increases in global average air and ocean temperatures, widespread melting of snow and ice, and rising global average sea level.
* At continental, regional, and ocean basin scales, numerous long-term changes in climate have been observed. These include changes in Arctic temperatures and ice, widespread changes in precipitation amounts, ocean salinity, wind patterns and aspects of extreme weather including droughts, heavy precipitation, heat waves and the intensity of tropical cyclones.
* Paleoclimate information supports the interpretation that the warmth of the last half century is unusual in at least the previous 1300 years. The last time the polar regions were significantly warmer than present for an extended period (about 125,000 years ago), reductions in polar ice volume led to 4 to 6 metres of sea level rise.
* Most of the observed increase in globally averaged temperatures since the mid-20th century is very likely due to the observed increase in anthropogenic greenhouse gas concentrations. This is an advance since the [Third Assessment Report's 2001] conclusion that "most of the observed warming over the last 50 years is likely to have been due to the increase in greenhouse gas concentrations". Discernible human influences now extend to other aspects of climate, including ocean warming, continental-average temperatures, temperature extremes and wind patterns.
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Up in the Air
Joe Bastardi, who goes by the title "expert senior forecaster" at AccuWeather, has a modest proposal. Virtually every major scientific body in the world has concluded that the planet is warming, and that greenhouse-gas emissions are the main cause. Bastardi, who holds a bachelor's degree in meteorology, disagrees. His theory, which mixes volcanism, sunspots, and a sea-temperature trend known as the Pacific Decadal Oscillation, is that the earth is actually cooling. Why don't we just wait twenty or thirty years, he proposes, and see who's right? This is "the greatest lab experiment ever," he said recently on Bill O'Reilly's Fox News show.
Bastardi's position is ridiculous (which is no doubt why he's often asked to air it on Fox News). Yet there it was on the front page of the Times last week. Among weathermen, it turns out, views like Bastardi's are typical. A survey released by researchers at George Mason University found that more than a quarter of television weathercasters agree with the statement "Global warming is a scam," and nearly two-thirds believe that, if warming is occurring, it is caused "mostly by natural changes." (The survey also found that more than eighty per cent of weathercasters don't trust "mainstream news media sources," though they are presumably included in this category.)
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NCAR: Scientists can't measure all heat trapped on Earth
Half of the energy captured by greenhouse gases isn't accounted for
Today's observational tools are not adequate enough to track all the heat that has been trapped by greenhouse gases the past couple of years, according to researchers at the National Center for Atmospheric Research.
About half of the total amount of heat entering the atmosphere is unaccounted for, according to Kevin Trenberth and John Fasullo, who published a study this week in the journal Science.
Satellite instruments indicate that increased greenhouse gases are trapping more heat from the sun, but scientists have been unable to track where all the captured heat is ending up using instruments on the land and in the oceans.
About 90 percent of heat from the sun is absorbed by the ocean and does not remain on the Earth's surface, so scientists first turned to the oceans to look for the lost heat. They found that in the upper 3,000 feet of the ocean water, temperatures had stalled.
Increases in water temperatures between 3,000 and 6,500 feet below the surface have been seen, but the increase is not significant enough to explain the missing energy.
Scientists cannot observe below that depth because it is out of reach of existing ocean sensors, and so Trenberth and Fasullo conclude that the lost heat is likely accumulating in the deep ocean.
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Global temperatures hit hottest March on record: US agency
Global temperatures fueled by El Nino seasonal warming last month chalked up the hottest March on record, US weather monitors reported Thursday.
"Warmer-than-normal conditions dominated the globe, especially in northern Africa, South Asia and Canada," the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration said in a statement.
Combined global land and ocean average surface temperature for March 2010 was the warmest on record at 13.5 degrees Celsius (56.3 degrees Fahrenheit), which is 0.77 degrees Celsius above the 20th century average of 12.7 C, it said.
Average ocean temperatures were the hottest for any March since record-keeping began in 1880, while the global land surface was the fourth warmest for any March on record, NOAA said, citing analysis from the National Climate Data Center.
It added that the January-March period was the planet's fourth warmest on record.
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The CRU is not pleased with Steve McIntyre
In its response to the Muir Russell commission, the CRU discusses the Yamal imbroglio:
Our work later became the subject of widespread misrepresentation in the media, amounting to hysterical and defamatory reporting of a posting on the "Climate Audit" website, managed by Steve McIntyre. McIntyre produced an alternative chronology omitting many of the modern sites we had used and replacing them with data from another single location. This alternative chronology differed markedly from our chronology during the late 20th century. McIntyre implied that this is evidence that Briffa had improperly selected certain tree-ring data, specifically in order to manufacture a false impression of recent enhanced tree-growth in the Yamal region.
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Ice cap thaw may awaken Icelandic volcanoes
A thaw of Iceland's ice caps in coming decades caused by climate change may trigger more volcanic eruptions by removing a vast weight and freeing magma from deep below ground, scientists said on Friday.
They said there was no sign that the current eruption from below the Eyjafjallajokull glacier that has paralysed flights over northern Europe was linked to global warming. The glacier is too small and light to affect local geology.
"Our work suggests that eventually there will be either somewhat larger eruptions or more frequent eruptions in Iceland in coming decades," said Freysteinn Sigmundsson, a vulcanologist at the University of Iceland.
"Global warming melts ice and this can influence magmatic systems," he told Reuters. The end of the Ice Age 10,000 years ago coincided with a surge in volcanic activity in Iceland, apparently because huge ice caps thinned and the land rose.
"We believe the reduction of ice has not been important in triggering this latest eruption," he said of Eyjafjallajokull. "The eruption is happening under a relatively small ice cap."
Carolina Pagli, a geophysicist at the University of Leeds in England, said there were risks that climate change could also trigger volcanic eruptions or earthquakes in places such as Mount Erebus in Antarctica, the Aleutian islands of Alaska or Patagonia in South America.
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CO2 is tagged as culprit; Shellfish may be latest victims
Hundreds of scientists and experts from dozens of organizations around the Northeast have spent the last 10 years trying to figure out why shellfish populations on the East End of Long Island have not rebounded since being decimated by "brown tide" in huge numbers in the 1980s and 1990s.
Stephanie Talmage, a doctoral candidate at the Stony Brook University School of Atmospheric and Marine Science, thinks she and her professor might finally have the answer.
Since the first combustion engines were put to use in the late 19th century, humans have been spewing carbon dioxide, or CO2, into Earth's atmosphere. The effects of such "greenhouse gases" on climate have been well documented. But the effects on the world's ocean may be just as dramatic, if not more so. About half of the CO2 released by humans is actually captured by seawater rather than lingering in the atmosphere.
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Is this the end of migration?
Climate change is affecting bird behaviour at a staggering rate. Some 20 billion have already changed their flight plans
It's rained three times as much as usual this winter in Andalusia, and almost every day unemployed amateur ornithologist Javier Caracuel has walked past a disused mining tower in the decaying industrial town of Linares and looked up, expecting the pair of white storks that nest there to have migrated south.
Yet despite the surrounding high noise levels – the tower, some 10 metres high, is jammed between a school and a street clogged with traffic – and Andalusia's wettest winter in decades, the storks have stayed put. And they're not alone. "There have always been a couple of storks at the top of the church spire down by the railway station, but I've never seen so many across town," Mr Caracuel explains, "and there are dozens more in the villages."
The changes in storks' behaviour that Mr Caracuel has observed in one near-forgotten mining town in north-eastern Andalusia are far from uncommon. At a recent high-level congress attended by 200 migration experts, leading Spanish ornithologist Miguel Ferrer estimated that 20 billion birds have changed their migrating habits in the last few decades. The biggest single identifiable reason behind such a massive behavioural shift, involving 70 per cent of the world's migrating birds is – surprise, surprise – climate change
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Cost of climate change not just environmental, Bard expert says
AS AN economist and climate expert at Bard College, Eban Goodstein looks at global warming from a dollars-and-cents perspective, and what he sees, he says, is staggering.
This year, the cost of global warming worldwide could be as high as $371 billion, he said. And over the next 40 years, the cost could rise as high as $7.5 trillion, said Goodstein, director of the Center for Environmental Policy at Bard, in Annandale-on-Hudson.
Those findings were detailed in a report, "An Initial Estimate of the Cost of Lost Climate Regulation Services Due to Changes in the Arctic Cryosphere," co-authored by Goodstein and released on Feb. 5, the day G-7 finance ministers began meeting to discuss the global economy.
THAT THE Arctic ice caps are melting is significant, Goodstein said, because the Arctic acts as the Earth's air conditioner. As the white ice melts, it no longer can reflect the suns rays, which instead are absorbed by the dark grounds and water. That, in turn, raises the planet's temperature.
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This is just the beginning, warn scientists
THE clash between molten rock and ice on the surface of the Iceland volcano has produced ash so fine that radar and other aircraft instruments are unable to detect it.
The near-invisibility of the ash swirling in vast clouds over Britain and Europe has magnified the confusion and trepidation brought about by the eruption of Eyjafjallajokull.
Now the uncertainty is set to increase still further, with scientists warning that, based on the volcano's historic behaviour, the eruption could be "just the beginning". The mountain may continue to blow out ash sporadically for a year or more.
Even more worryingly, Katla, the neighbouring volcano, is groaning from the eruption under pressure equivalent to 3,000 mini-earthquakes a day of up to 3.1 on the Richter scale. Katla is some five times bigger than Eyjafjallajokull and would erupt in a similar way — but spewing out far bigger plumes of ash.
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Global warming reduces grain output
BANGALORE: Rising temperatures and inadequate rainfall are causing grain output to stagnate in India, threatening food security in the world's second-most populous nation, according to a weather scientist.
In the past decade, average temperatures have increased by 0.25 degree Celsius when the monsoon crops are sown in June, and by 0.6 degree Celsius when winter crops are planted in October, said Krishna Kumar, a senior scientist at the Indian Institute of Tropical Meteorology, a state-owned researcher.
Prime Minister Manmohan Singh is counting on a bigger harvest to tame inflation from a 17-month high and to meet an election promise of ensuring food security for the poor by providing rice and wheat at below market prices. India's economy slowed in the quarter ended December after a drought last year ravaged crops and pushed global sugar prices to a 29-year high.
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Why climate change is such a hard sell
University of Calgary energy and environmental systems guru David Keith reflects on what we've done to heal the planet
As the G20 environment ministers meet today in Washington, D.C. people worldwide are preparing to mark the 40th anniversary of Earth Day on Thursday. David Keith, director of the Energy and Environmental Systems Group at the University of Calgary's Institute for Sustainable Energy Environment and Economy, reflects on what we've done to heal the planet, where we've failed and what we should be doing.
What have we accomplished since the birth of Earth Day?
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Beyond the Limits of Earth Day: Turning Up the Heat on Climate
Size doesn't matter.
Or at least, size is not the only thing that matters. In 21st century American democracy, massive public support is certainly desirable, especially over the long run. But what really counts with Congress is intensity.
A huge majority of Americans favor gun control, for example. According to the National Opinion Research Center at the University of Chicago, four out of five believe a police permit should be required for the purchase of a firearm.
But a small, intense set of Second Amendment absolutists will vote against any politician who favors such an approach. In most elections, a dedicated group of 10 percent, or even 5 percent, of voters can tilt the outcome. So politicians cater to the position whose supporters are most intense — who make sure a politician aligns with them on a single issue before they even examine the rest of his record.
What does this have to do with Earth Day?
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