Tag: environment

In recent debates concerning a new energy bill in Congress, southeastern legislators argued against provisions requiring a certain percentage of electricity come from renewable resources by a future date.

What was their objection? If I recall, part of their objection was that there are fewer renewable resources in the southeastern U.S., compared to other regions.

Maybe someone should have asked around a bit.

Yahoo! News:

Just 15 miles off Florida’s coast, the world’s most powerful sustained ocean current — the mighty Gulf Stream — rushes by at nearly 8.5 billion gallons per second. And it never stops.

To scientists, it represents a tantalizing possibility: a new, plentiful and uninterrupted source of clean energy.

Florida Atlantic University researchers say the current could someday be used to drive thousands of underwater turbines, produce as much energy as perhaps 10 nuclear plants and supply one-third of Florida’s electricity. A small test turbine is expected to be installed within months.

You can see why our congressmen didn’t think of this one. I mean, who ever heard of the Gulf Stream?

It may not be a good time to move to the southwest.

Lake Mead Could Be Within a Few Years of Going Dry, Study Finds – New York Times:

Lake Mead, the vast reservoir for the Colorado River water that sustains the fast-growing cities of Phoenix and Las Vegas, could lose water faster than previously thought and run dry within 13 years, according to a new study by scientists at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography….

Other recent research has shown that the watershed feeding the Colorado River has historically had a tendency to be far drier than it has been in the past century. The new study projects that changes foreseen in a warming world could well help tip the region back into its dry norm.

It’s too friggin hot! For crying out loud, it’s February. We should have had at least one good freeze, even on the coast. I think we had one night where they were worried they might have to ice down the strawberries in Plant City, but I don’t think it happened.

Why am I griping now? I just looked up the weather for the week, and discovered that tonight is supposed to be our coldest this week… a bone chilling 55F. Even in Florida it’s supposed to cool off a little more than this (mid to high 70’s during the day). If it’s this warm in February, what is it going to be like this summer?

I know that just because it seems a little warmer this winter, it’s not necessarily a sign of global warming (just like if we have a cold March, it’s not a sign that we’re off the hook). However, Cheryl and I were talking about the city pool and how they don’t put up the bubble anymore. When we were kids, they used to have a big inflatable dome they’d blow up over the pool to keep things warmer. As we got older they put it up less and less, and now that we think about it… I’m not sure it’s been up in ten years (not that I’ve seen anyway).

There could be a good reason for it that has nothing to do with warmer temperatures (like money for one). But after a sweaty, February afternoon on the water, it makes me wonder a little.

*My cousin’s just getting back to Wisconsin after a trip to the Caribbean, so I’d imagine he’d have no problem exporting a little cold… if he could.

Those wily Brits are up to something again…

Bags of Change: Carrot Better Than Stick – TreeHugger:

Bags of Change encourages responsible shopping bag use by dangling a tasty carrot. In short you get a discount at any participating store into which you to take their funky organic hemp-cotton or Amazonian latex bags. So far over 50 stores are involved.

I kid because I care. Actually, I think it’s a pretty cool idea. My problem is my terrible memory. At least half the time I remember my cloth bags when I’ve got a cart full of groceries (and the bags are safe and sound at home). My memory might be a little better if I had a financial stake in the matter. That or I’d just have more reason to hate myself when I forgot.

This is not a good post. I’m mostly venting a little frustration from this evening (and not all of it from the subject of this entry).

I couldn’t avoid references to an article in the CS Monitor today. I must have come across half a dozen of them.

AS ARCTIC ICE MELTS, SOUTH POLE ICE GROWS

Over the past 20 years, southern sea ice has expanded, in contrast to the Arctic’s decline, and researchers want to understand why. Many climate-model experiments show the Arctic responding more rapidly than Antarctica as global warming kicks in. But after looking at the latest projections from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, “Arctic sea ice is well ahead of the models, and Antarctic sea ice is well behind what the models project,” says Stephen Ackley, a polar scientist at the University of Texas, San Antonio.

Two things immediately jump out for global warming skeptics (as I’ve seen already): the expansion of sea ice in the southern hemisphere, and observations that don’t precisely fit climate model predictions. These tid-bits are juicy for obvious reasons, even if I think they’re misleading. The article actually addresses findings that are worrisome, but they’re harder to grasp or explain than “south pole ice grows.”

Two things from the article jumped out at me: they were talking about SEA ice, and they seemed to be referencing the amount of AREA covered by ice.

Maybe I’m way off base here – that or I’ve completely misunderstood the article, but if they’re just talking about sea ice, that’s just one piece of the puzzle – and the least worrisome. As I’ve referenced before, NASA has surveyed Antarctic ice as a WHOLE (ice accumulated on land as well as at sea), and determined that as a whole it’s diminishing (not growing, as the title of the Monitor article perhaps misleadingly suggests). Don’t get me wrong, the amount of sea ice in the south is interesting, but it’s half of the story (or less).

Sea ice is generally at sea. If it’s just an accumulation of frozen precipitation from water evaporating from oceans – or more directly, frozen sea water – there’s not as much change in ocean levels. You’re just changing it’s state from liquid to solid. (I think this may actually increase it’s volume a little, but not a lot. I think ice is less dense than water – which is why it floats – and why it expands when it freezes.) The much bigger problem is the land ice, which we very much want to stay on land – and not decrease in mass – given where the shedded mass likely goes.

So if the Antarctic ice is covering more area, how can their be less of it? As it happens, matter often can be measured in three dimensions: length, width, and height (or thickness). Area is a two dimensional measurement, but ice can be measured in three. Antarctic ice could simultaneously be spreading out – and therefore take up more area, but thin out sufficiently to take up less volume, and have less mass.

It’ll be interesting to see if there’s much chatter about this online, and see where the discussions go.

Well, it’ll be interesting to me anyway. If nothing else, I may find out how much crap I’m full of.

As I mentioned yesterday, until recently I haven’t worried very much about global warming. It’s been in the back of my mind, like any good liberal, but I haven’t done much about it. Like many folks, I was shaken a bit by the Al Gore movie; but a certain blog gave me an extra push.

I’ll admit that I hadn’t read much on the topic for more than ten years, back when I’d read (among other things) Al’s book, “Earth in the Balance,” during my more idealistic college years. Al was elected VP, and it seemed my concern for the environment shadowed Al’s. Hey, if my boy wasn’t talking it up, who was I to say something? Then there were the deniers.

It seems funny to me that global warming skeptics claim they’re frozen out of serious discussion on the subject, because all I seemed to see during the 90s and early 2000s was the skeptic’s view. I don’t recall where I saw them all, but I remember reading several claims regarding Antarctic ice getting thicker.

(Hey, we’re talking about 10 years of my life. I’m not going to do that much research for no stinking blog. If I’d enjoyed research even a little bit, I’d have continued my education. I don’t mean to brag, but my wife will vouch for me: I had the grades, and I aced my senior research project. Remember “The Activation of Episodic and Semantic Long-Term Memory” Cheryl? All right, maybe I do mean to brag… but just a little bit ;-))

There were other articles, discussing solar and cosmic radiation, water vapor, and (supposed) lags between temperature increases and CO2 increases through history; but the Antarctic ice stories stuck with me.

Like I said before, that blog and that movie kinda gave my complacency a kick in the pants. I started to read more. I read about the nature of water-vapor in the atmosphere. I read about stored carbon and methane. I read some of the rebuttals to the skeptics I’d seen before. My wife says I bore her with longer entries, so I won’t try to summarize everything I’ve read, but I’d like to give you one example. It has to do with that Antarctic ice.

As it turns out, there were quite a few readings taken through the years which showed a local accumulation of ice. If the globe was warming, you might expect to find a general decline in the amount of ice rather than an accumulation. As you may know, Antarctica is a REALLY big place, so it wasn’t easy to see what the ice was doing overall. Until recently.

NASA Mission Detects Significant Antarctic Ice Mass Loss

Scientists were able to conduct the first-ever gravity survey of the entire Antarctic ice sheet using data from the joint NASA/German Aerospace Center Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment (GRACE). This comprehensive study found the ice sheet’s mass has decreased significantly from 2002 to 2005…

Measuring variations in Antarctica’s ice sheet mass is difficult because of its size and complexity. GRACE is able to overcome these issues, surveying the entire ice sheet, and tracking the balance between mass changes in the interior and coastal areas.

Previous estimates have used various techniques, each with limitations and uncertainties and an inherent inability to monitor the entire ice sheet mass as a whole. Even studies that synthesized results from several techniques, such as the assessment by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, suffered from a lack of data in critical regions.

This is just one example of recent science, of measurements that weren’t possible before, which make compelling arguments that man-made global warming isn’t just a reality, it may be accelerating faster than models previously predicted.

You remember those global models… the ones that critics have said for years were too unreliable… with snarky (and misleading) comments like, “my weatherman can’t predict the weather two days from now, how can they predict the weather in 50 years?” Well guess what? The critics may have been right, those old models may have been unreliable. They may have been way too optimistic.

Listen, I don’t expect that you’ve been persuaded by this entry. There’s lots of stuff out there for you to read that will explain it much better than I could, so I won’t try. You know I don’t write for a living, and I’ve admitted that I’m hardly an expert on this subject. What I do hope you’ll do is read a little more. I don’t expect you to become a climate expert, just check out a couple of these links. Check out some of the “being green” entries on this blog. He’s a much better writer, and he’s much more convincing. Check out this book. Take a look at grist.org.

I think you’ll find there’s reason to be concerned.

How often have I asked you to do something for me? I think I asked you once to think about drinking more water from the tap, but that’s the only thing that comes to mind.

What I’d like you to do now is a little more important, but it requires a lot less effort. Consider signing an online petition. It’s about the ongoing climate negotiations in Bali, and the role the US has taken to thwart progress. The hope is the petition will urge the US, Canada, et al to consider cooperating, rather than stifling progress towards a meaningful successor to Kyoto.

I really wish I had more time to tell you why I think you should, but it’s getting really late. I will say that I was probably more like you a few months back, but I’ve come to feel that things are a little more urgent. Maybe tomorrow. In the mean time, at least give it a look, and consider taking a small step towards a better world.

We stopped buying bottled water about a year ago. Here’s a few good reasons why:

From Think Outside the Bottle:

Worldwide, consumers spent $100 billion on bottled water in 2005.

Making bottles to meet Americans’ demand for bottled water required the equivalent of more than 17 million barrels of oil last year – enough fuel for more than 1 million U.S. cars for a year – and generated more than 2.5 million tons of carbon dioxide.

Each year more than 4 billion pounds of PET plastic bottles end up in landfills or as roadside litter…

Studies have shown bottled water is on average no safer than tap water and can sometimes be less safe…

To visualize the entire energy costs of the lifecycle of a bottle of water, imagine filling up a quarter of each bottle with oil.

 

Although the water from our tap is pretty clean, we do filter it for taste.

If you need to take it further than your living room, think about picking up a cheap, reusable bottle or thermos.

Think about this: how many other things can you do that are better for the environment, will save you money (both in the short term and long term), and you can start right away… without any effort? Hell, I could argue drinking from the tap takes less effort. Water is friggin’ heavy! Imagine not having to lug it home from the store.

So when you pass by that water at the store, give in to your inner slacker. Think about how heavy it’s going to be. Give those back muscles a break, and feel good about it.

Not long ago I was having a group discussion with my family about electric cars. Cheryl and I had just seen the movie, “Who Killed the Electric Car,” which prompted the long follow-up discussion.

We were all over the place… taking about the differences between emissions from autos versus power-plants (one of the nearby power-plants in Tampa has long been considered one of the worst polluting plants in the nation), to the trade offs associated with electric cars. Chief among the tradeoffs we discussed was range, and the time it takes to recharge batteries. One of us brought up the possibility of replacing (or augmenting) gas stations with battery-swap stations. Granted, the batteries would be heavy (and there’d probably be a number of them), but if they were accessible and standardized you could probably work out some mechanism for swapping them out. Then driving an electric car would be virtually indistinguishable from driving gasoline fueled cars. Well, besides the fact that electric motors tend to be more reliable than internal combustion engines, so they wouldn’t need service nearly as much.

There’d be another advantage to battery swapping. One of the concerns about electric cars is the cost of replacing the battery, when it eventually reaches it’s discharge/recharge cycle limit. (It may take a long time, and you may be saving a lot of money on gas in the mean time, but it’s still a valid concern – well sort of.) If you were swapping batteries when they’re close to fully discharged, like you put gas in your car, you wouldn’t need to worry about the up-front cost of buying batteries. Instead, the price would be spread out – factored into the cost of swapping.

Well, imagine my surprise when I saw this article on Treehugger this morning…

George Monbiot: “We Need 100% Cut in Carbon Emissions” (TreeHugger):

Monbiot also tackled the challenge of making our vehicle fleet entirely electric. Suggesting that instead of owning our own chargeable batteries a product service system could be set in place where we could lease batteries. Instead of stopping to fill up with petrol we would stop to pick up a newly charged battery and continue happily on our way, allowing us to travel great distances by electric car.

I think that’s a pretty nifty idea. The beauty of it is that it doesn’t rely on technological advances that may or may not happen soon, like perfecting fuel-cells. (Well, maybe it’s not that far off after all.) This seems possible right now. If we could then just clean up our electricity production we’d be in like Flynn.

I’ll admit that I’m no expert. I haven’t done a lot of research on the subject. There may well be a problem disposing of all those batteries when they’re no longer usable (if they don’t lend themselves to recycling). I wonder if anyone has looked into it closely (besides, perhaps, Mr. Monbiot). If we’ve thought about it, surely someone else has.

There’s an editorial in the November 5th issue of The New Republic which addresses a few of the global warming doubters out there.

The article mentions researchers who were surprised to find evidence that the world’s oceans are no longer absorbing as much carbon dioxide as they used to. (Just in case you missed the memo, that’s potentially a very bad thing.) The editorial mentioned another study which found that the world’s carbon dioxide emissions seem to be growing at a rate that is even faster than the IPCC’s (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) projected “worst case scenarios.”

While global warming skeptics often scoff at the IPCC’s projections on the grounds that climate science can be uncertain, that uncertainty, to the extent it exists, cuts both ways: Things may ultimately turn out to be better than the IPCC predicts, but they also could turn out to be worse.

Are you betting on better; and if so, what are you willing to bet?