volatile and heating

Climate disruption is the term recommended by longtime climate scientist Michael Tobis. That’s the term.

Saying “climate disruption” is stating the whole problem.

When evidence is needed, try NASA’s Eyes On The Earth as a top ‘go to’ website.

Slacktivist sez: The facts of the matter do matter to those for whom facts matter.

“We’re not going to go down the science route”, says Karen Alderman Harbert, president and chief executive officer of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce’s Institute for 21st Century Energy.

Harbert frequently testifies in front of Congress and
provides analysis to the media, policymakers and industry leaders.
Harbert is Republican administration former assistant secretary
for policy
and International Affairs at the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE).
She was the primary policy advisor to the DOE Secretary
and to the department on domestic and international energy issues,
including climate change, fossil, nuclear, and renewable energy and energy efficiency.
Harbert was also a member of DOE’s Executive Board as well as the Credit Review Board.
She negotiated and managed bilateral and multilateral agreements
on energy security and research and development objectives.
She was vice chairman of the International Energy Agency
which advises its 27 member nations
on energy policy issues
and orchestrates international responses
to energy supply disruptions.
Harbert was the deputy assistant administrator for
Latin America and the Caribbean
at the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID).
She had oversight of programs in 11 countries,
totaling more than $800 million and 1,000 employees.
In the private sector, Harbert worked for a developer
of international infrastructure and power projects
valued at more than $9 billion int he Middle East, Asia, and Latin America.
Harbert gained experience on economic reform and privatization
through earlier positions at the USAID, the Organization of American States,
and the International Republican Institute. [link here]

Michael Tobis also said:

“The problem with quotes on Twitter is that you can’t always be sure of their authenticity.” ~ Abraham Lincoln

deeply told

We know so little. Regard is essential. That’s humility and with it awe.

Here’s 4 minutes of our ocean, best clips of Howard Hall, to show beauty abounds, poise in wonder, life among our tiny container.

Take care. Be care, my friends.

Be care, the frenzy we’ve forgotten and the future we’re able.

science of drought

Stuart Staniford:

Terrifying Drought Projections

On the projections of the Palmer Drought Severity Index: I was pretty freaked out by the paper.  This post covers PDSI at a very basic level, and discusses the projections.

Recent History of Drought vs Models

This post looked at the somewhat imperfect fit between climate models and drought data for recent history.

Extracting Signal From Drought Noise

This post extracted the global warming signal and the El-Nino signal from the drought data.

seabed windfall

Everyone in green could use a little gilt.

The Royal Family have secured a lucrative deal that will earn them a 15% royalty from Britain’s massive offshore windpower.

“The purpose of a Civil List was to bring the Monarchy under Parliamentary control. As long as the Monarch depends financially on Parliament, they can be brought to heel if they try to interfere, unconstitutionally, in political debate. A large and inflation-proofed stream of revenue from the Crown Estate removes that constraint.

“By 2020, 6,400 turbines – each one rising 500ft above the sea – are expec­ted to be in operation around the UK coastline. Household energy bills will have to rise to pay for the £75 bil­lion [$118B] expansion, which has been described as one of the biggest engineering projects in recent history.

“Charles seemed enthused….”

climate science continues

Brian Angliss Says:

My understanding that climate disruption is anthropogenic isn’t a question of faith…  It’s a question of overwhelming scientific evidence and logic.  Here’s a list of facts:

Climate sensitivity is most likely between 1.7 and 4.5 deg C/CO2 doubling (actually the energy retained by said doubling, making this an energy unit) and is most likely 3 deg C because observations and empirical data based on multiple paleoclimate reconstructions, the observed effects of volcanism on climate, as well as the modern observed temperatures.  None of these independent data sets require modeling.

Atmospheric CO2 is increasing due to the combustion of formerly sequestered fossil fuels.  This is an empirical result based on the isotopic signatures of CO2 in the atmosphere and an accounting of where the observed increase in CO2 could be coming from.

Atmospheric CO2 absorbs IR wavelengths and scatters it, changing the optical properties of the atmosphere as the concentrations of CO2 in the atmosphere change.

The jet streams have shifted poleward as predicted.

The tropopause has increased in altitude as predicted.

The stratosphere has cooled while the troposphere has warmed.  This is consistent with only one known source of tropospheric heating – greenhouse gases.  Unless the physics of thermodynamic heat transfer through the atmosphere is entirely wrong, the sun cannot be the source of this heating because in that case, the stratosphere would also be heating.  This has been measured using both satellites and radiosondes.

All of these facts are so well understood that the burden of proof is no longer with the people proposing that these are facts, but rather with the people arguing that they are erroneous.  None of them can be simply rejected out of hand as being false, and none of them require any “belief” whatsoever.

The only explanation that fits ALL the facts to date is that human-emitted CO2 is the predominant cause.

Now, all that being said, research is ongoing into clouds, into so-called black carbon, into the effects of aerosols, and models are being refined with better spatial and temporal accuracy.

So the science continues to improve and should continue to be improved via research.  And there’s an outside possibility that something will turn up that turns all this on its head.

But given the strength of the evidence, it’s unreasonable to reject making changes to the way we power and move our civilization.  I’m all for arguing over the best way to make those changes, but we’re years if not decades past the point where we should have stopped arguing about the necessity of those changes.

un-herd authoring

“But there’s a lot more to mass media than us,” as Charlie Petit puts it:

  • Chris Mooney: We Have Met the Enemy – and It Isn’t Ignorance;
    Ah. I knew it.
    This is why my brother in law, a terrific and kind fellow in most regards, is incapable of thinking that little ol’ mankind is able to change the climate of a whole planet. And he’s no fundamentalist. Just conservative, distrustful of gov’t, and sure scientists somehow mislead themselves.
  • Charles Alexander: Beyond an Unreasonable Doubt;
    It’s a book review.
    I’m pretty well convinced that, overall, the science writing press has not done much false-balance reporting on climate change for years now. But there’s a lot more to mass media than us.


boggle of the day

South Pole Telescope. Spitzer Space Telescope. Magellan telescopes.

A galaxy is discovered with 800 trillion stars !

A Smithsonian astronomer says, “It’s like discovering a skyscraper in ancient Rome.”


power infrastructure

We really don’t realize what we’re facing do we? Watching energy unfold is at least as interesting as Napoleon & Waterloo, Rome & Jesus, dinosaurs & comets, historically speaking. Green juice is only part of it too, cuz without clean tech as well, extraction slop and commons spillover poisons us. What an era!

Nuthin’ to it. Make use of millions of power poles worldwide because 1) ready for quick installation, 2) trained workers, and 3) closest to grid. And 5) big customers with cash. So warehouse a PV panel supply contract, attach pole doohickies and burn a custom controller box. Hire sales to cash-stuffed utilities under green mandates. Gladly devour write-offs and hiring incentives.

black ribbon

As a youngster. A sad story within my family. It was during the late 40s or early 50s if I recall, my great-uncle discovered a breakthrough method to cure road asphalt. Normally crews would hold back traffic for hours and days while newly laid asphalt hardened. He found that fitting water sprinklers on paving machines would dramatically accelerate curing. Evaporation cools and other reactions. Simple and important. Cost savings. Time savings. Better hardening. Demand for his services skyrocketed as he was heralded in the news and booked for consulting. One pre-dawn morning while driving to a meetup in Minnesota, his car careened off a curve and into a rural general store. Families never forget such sorrow, nor pride.

I remembered that because:

bioasphalt

Iowa State University’s Christopher Williams was just trying to see if adding bio-oil to asphalt would improve the hot- and cold-weather performance of pavements. What he found was a possible green replacement for asphalt derived from petroleum.

Created by a thermochemical process called fast pyrolysis, Bioasphalt can be mixed and paved at lower temperatures than conventional asphalt.

bioasphalt wiki

dam safety

In general, there are 100 ways dams can fail.

Of the more than 80,000 dams in the U.S., about a third pose a “high” or “significant” hazard to life and property… 27,000 sites in Potential Failure Mode.

A number of the things that we’re finding today are problems that occurred during design and construction 40 and 50 years ago.

I think risk assessments, at least in North America, are moving more and more toward probabilistic approaches to risk assessment. In the earlier days, we began looking at probabilistic hydrology issues. Nowadays, our seismic hazards are determined by probabilistic seismic hazard analyses. One of these days, we may put all of this together in some sort of logic tree and come up with probabilistic failure of the dam by overtopping, by seismic, by liquefaction and a number of other different factors.

The professionals are on it:

Q. What are the chief causes of dam failures in North America?

Paul: Overtopping.

Brian: Overtopping, seepage.

Dan: Statistically, I thought it was seepage.

Brian: I think overtopping is the highest.

Gus: I think overtopping is the high and seepage and piping is probably second.

Paul: Overtopping is something that’s avoidable. You can perform the necessary calculations and develop a “fix” to prevent it.

Gus: Overtopping might occur because the spillway was inoperable. That’s the type of thing that causes dams to overtop in general, other than extreme floods.

Warren: The chief causes are more programmatic in that whatever technically caused it, it probably had something to do with a lack of maintenance or lack of an oversight program. Some of that gets back into funding.

How many industrial sludge ponds might fail?
What are the expected ecological impacts and decontamination strategies?

How does the sludge get produced and how could it escape?

When aluminium is extracted from bauxite via the so-called Bayer process, red sludge forms as a by-product. The sludge is in large reservoirs of mud and water.

What caused the accident is yet unclear, but it is likely that heavy rain has caused the dam containing the reservoir to break.

It is also possible that the reservoir was just not large or strong enough to hold the sludge it was filled with.

What is the chemical composition of the sludge?

It contains mainly fluoride, sulphate and aluminate, but also chrome, nickel, manganese and heavy metals such as lead. Its arsenic concentration is at least a hundred times above the allowed threshold for drinking water.

How might contact with the toxic sludge affect human health?

The most dangerous thing about the stuff is that it is – to put it simply – a dilute solution of sodium hydroxide with an extremely alkaline pH value, between 11 and 12.

This means it cauterizes eyes and skin and attacks the lung when inhaled.

Scary

no wolves, no water

LA Times:

When we exterminated wolves from Yellowstone in the early 1900s, we de-watered the land.

That’s right; no wolves eventually meant fewer streams, creeks, marshes and springs across western landscapes like Yellowstone where wolves had once thrived.

The chain of effects went roughly like this: No wolves meant that many more elk crowded onto inviting river and stream banks. A growing population of fat elk, in no danger of being turned into prey, gnawed down willow and aspen seedlings before they could mature. As the willows declined, so did beavers, which used the trees for food and building material. When beavers build dams and make ponds, they create wetland habitats for countless bugs, amphibians, fish, birds and plants, as well as slowing the flow of water and distributing it over broad areas. The consequences of their decline rippled across the land.

Meanwhile, as the land dried up, Yellowstone’s overgrazed riverbanks eroded. Spawning beds for fish silted over. Amphibians lost precious shade.

We’ve never seen Yellowstone.

don’t let the faucet run

It starts:

During my sophomore year, 1992, 1,500 scientists, including more than half the living Nobel laureates, admonished in their Warning to Humanity: “A great change in our stewardship of the earth and the life on it is required if vast human misery is to be avoided and our global home on this planet is not to be irretrievably mutilated.”

So what have we done? Not much.

From 1992 to 2007, global CO2 emissions from burning fossil fuels rose 38 percent. Emissions in 2008 rose a full 2 percent despite a global economic slump. Honeybees are dying by the billions, amphibians by the millions, and shallow Caribbean reefs are mostly dead already. Our soil is disappearing faster than ever before, half of all mammals are in decline, and a recent climate change model predicts that the Arctic could have ice-free summers by 2013. Unchecked, carbon emissions from China alone will probably match the current global level by 2030.

The god thou servest,” Marlowe wrote in Dr. Faustus, almost four hundred years before the invention of internet shopping, “is thine own appetite.” Was he wrong?

Anthony Doerr

in it for the gold

organize the signals

Oil. Cash. Disruption.
Step #1: Eliminate whatever is stupid.

Brian Westerhaus’ blog:

Backed-up traffic costs $100 billion per year and wastes more than 2.5 billion gallons of fuel, not to mention the uncountable human hours —some of them yours.

What if traffic lights were smart?

Each set of lights is a sensor that feeds information about the traffic conditions, calculates the flow of vehicles, and works out how long the lights stay green in order to clear the road.  Each set of lights can estimate for itself how best to adapt to the conditions expected at the next moment.

Self-organizing traffic!

Self-controlled traffic lights detect the randomly occurring gaps in traffic.

The flow of traffic is managed as if it were a fluid. Travel time is significantly less, red lights are shorter and more naturally distributed. Does not fight natural fluctuations by trying to impose a rhythm.

magnitude and speed

Don’t they call this a hockey stick graph?

It is unquestionable that the last century has been marked by a warming trend having no equivalent over the last millennium. —The Geophysical Research Letters

“The rate of human-driven warming in the last century has exceeded the rate of the underlying natural trend by more than a factor of 10, possibly much more.”

Disruption this century is projected to cause a rate of warming that is another factor of 5 or more greater than that of the last century.

ozone injury is severe

A calamity in a swamp of calamity. Ozone.

Forest Service Summary Report [pdf]:

Tropospheric O3 is toxic to humans beings, plants, and many other life forms. Before the industrial age, the lower atmosphere was relatively free of O3. Today, this toxic contaminant is found across all geographic and political boundaries and in areas previously believed to be pristine. Plant scientists consider ground-level O3 the most pervasive air pollutant worldwide and a threat to world food, fiber, and timber

Once inside the leaf, Ozone immediately forms toxic derivatives that react with many components of the leaf cells. The first reaction to injury by oxidants is loss of chlorophyll, increased fluorescence, and changes in energy levels.

The cell membranes suffer changes in permeability and leakiness to important ions such as potassium…

As injury progresses and antioxidants come into play, carbon fixation is reduced, foliar and root respiration is increased, and there is a shift in the partitioning of carbon into different chemical forms and allocation patterns. At the most basic cellular level, a plant injured by O3 is not the same as a plant without injury.

Gail is cataloging findings at Wit’s End. “A cursory inventory of foliage will disclose that it is virtually impossible to find a leaf or coniferous needle that doesn’t have symptoms of poisoning from ozone.”

Carrying capacity —when a population’s consumption exceeds the carrying capacity of its environment— is a stunning challenge. Let’s all strive mightily.


belief and disbelief

Jonah Lehrer:

We like to believe that the gift of human reason lets us think like scientists, so that our conscious thoughts lead us closer to the truth. But here’s the paradox: all that reasoning and confabulation can often lead us astray, so that we end up knowing less about what jams/cars/jelly beans we actually prefer. So here’s my new metaphor for human reason: our rational faculty isn’t a scientist – it’s a talk radio host.

Does a scientist think? Or do they merely measure stuff?

“When a scientist doesn’t know the answer to a problem, he is ignorant. When he has a hunch as to what the result is, he is uncertain. And when he is pretty damn sure of what the result is going to be, he is still in some doubt.

We have found it of paramount importance that in order to progress, we must recognize our ignorance and leave room for doubt.

Scientific knowledge is a body of statements of varying degrees of certainty — some most unsure, some nearly sure, but none absolutely certain.”

—Richard Feymann

Climate Etc. by Judith Curry:

A considerable amount of climate skepticism has been fueled by big business, attempting to protect their personal financial interests (e.g. the Koch brothers, ExxonMobil). True, but so what?

It’s not as if the environmental community doesn’t have resources, and hasn’t use them in support of  climate policies and even climate alarmism.

All this just isn’t relevant to the scientific debate.

And if you can’t disentangle the scientific debate from concerns about the fate of your preferred policy, then you have become hopelessly postnormal.

h/t Michael Tobis

Belief and disbelief are sisters of uncertainty. Get used to it.


large awe spinning

I often think of centurys’ sailors having no bloody idea what power they’ll encounter. Click pics for a stunning view of Hurricane Earl from the Space Station and another of 1999’s Floyd via satellite.

civilization spew

The outright ‘size’ of humans on Earth, the frenzy, the terrific effort of needs!

Biggest Threat Comes From Stuff We Haven’t Built Yet
With best management of ‘current and committed’ fossil-fuel infrastructure, we just might keep gas concentrations below 450ppm, 496 million tons, which will limit warming at or below 2 degrees C.

The trend is still fossil:
Since 2000 the world has added 416 gigawatts of coal-fired power plants, 449 gigawatts of natural gas–fired power plants and even 47.5 gigawatts of oil-fired power plants… new highways, millions of new cars, gas-fired factories… the U.S. still generates half of its electricity via coal burning, and so on.

Carbon-neutral is slow:
Including nuclear & hydro, all carbon-free sources of energy combined provide a little more than 2 of today’s total power of 15 terawatts.

Carbon-neutral must grow:
To keep gas concentrations at today’s level in 2030, we should have installed at least 10 terawatts years ago. To meet demand and keep concentrations near 450ppm by 2050, carbon-neutral sources must reach 30 terawatts.

We have a ‘terawatt challenge’, Mr. Jones.
“What if we never built another CO2-emitting device, but the ones already in existence lived out their normal lives?”

“We found that atmospheric concentrations of CO2 would stabilize at less than 430 ppm and the increase of global mean temperatures since preindustrial time would be less than 1.3°C. In light of common benchmarks of 450 ppm and 2°C, these results indicate that the devices whose emissions will cause the worst impacts have yet to be built.”


Arrrgh… wars galore as populations shift, oceans acidify, food chains collapse, gloom and doom, gloom and doom, oh woe. We’re overwhelmed and a’that.

‘Complex Systems’ is a term to truly, truly ponder. Folks sift for dominance of one form or another, others imagine chaos, but tipping points are opposed by reactions, vigorous  reactions…. If we’re diligent, perhaps strong efforts worldwide will meet terrific upcoming challenges.

We’ll need optimism.

Many environmental authors and some scientists use a bully pulpit to thump opportunists and lunatics, already ill equipped to confront good science. We can scare cynics toward good sense, but it’s better to lead the rest of us toward a workable horizon. We’ll need pointers and working prototype.

I shouldn’t be so strong. But I think we’re well past the matter of excess gas; we should be. All slogging toward forward options, discovering our choices, is the premier mission.

kaboom visitors

NASA says today’s asteroids flying between the Earth and Moon are grazing us by merely 50,000 miles. The Catalina Sky Survey discovered both objects on Sunday.

This near-miss was not detected earlier because these two asteroids are too small for today’s equipment. But smaller asteroids, say just 100 feet across, are dangerous. They’ll explode in the upper atmosphere sending an intensely hot jet of superheated gas over a large area.

One asteroid, 2010 RX30, estimated by NASA to be between 10 and 20 meters across, passed within 248,000 kilometers of Earth at 10.51 am BST today. The second, 2010 RF12, estimated to be only 6 to 14 meters across, will pass within 79,000 kilometers at 10:12 pm tonight. Both were only discovered on Sunday, just three days before their time of closest approach. That is due to their small size; smaller objects are harder for telescopes to pick up.

:::Fireball::: The center of mass of an exploding projectile is transported downward in the form of a high-temperature jet of expanding gas.

The burst first descends at subsonic velocity, coupling its kinetic energy and internal energy to the atmosphere.

Blast waves and thermal radiation pulses from the hot jet of vaporized projectile impact the Earth’s surface where it expands supersonically at temperatures well above the melting point of glass.

Devastation at Tunguska in Russia in 1908 is now thought to have been caused by an asteroid just 100 – 150 feet across! Current equipment is designed to give us early warning of asteroids 500 feet across. There’s some healthy discussion about what’s adequate.