Archive for February, 2008

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Solar Thermal Power

Friday, February 29th, 2008

“Investors and utilities intent on building solar power plants are increasingly turning to solar thermal power, a comparatively low-tech alternative to photovoltaic panels that convert sunlight directly into electricity. This month, in the latest in a string of recent deals, Spanish solar-plant developer Abengoa Solar and Phoenix-based utility Arizona Public Service announced a 280-megawatt solar thermal project in Arizona. By contrast, the world’s largest installations of photovoltaics generate only 20 megawatts of power.

In a solar thermal plant, mirrors concentrate sunlight onto some type of fluid that is used, in turn, to boil water for a steam turbine.

Solar Thermal

Posted in Non Fossil Energy | No Comments »

Solar Flight

Wednesday, February 27th, 2008

The Solar Impulse is an adrenaline driven project to circumnavigate the globe in a wide-winged aircraft, powered only by the sun.

In a world depending on fossil energies, the Solar Impulse project is a paradox, almost a provocation: it aims to have an airplane take off and fly autonomously, day and night, propelled uniquely by solar energy, right round the world without fuel or pollution. An unachievable goal without pushing back the current technological limits in all fields…

The Challenge

Watch the flash animation at the bottom of A Crazy Gamble.

Commentary at The Weather Chanel.

Posted in Non Fossil Energy, Science & Technology | No Comments »

Beer Returns to Roots

Sunday, February 24th, 2008

In Portland, Oregon, at the Lucky Labrador micro brewery, beer brewing has returned to it’s founding roots: fermentation by sun power. It’s thought that the first taste of beer came in Mesopotamia when barley or other grain being made into a kind of edible mush fermented and revealed the euphoric pleasures of alcohol. It’s more complicated today, but rising energy costs and a certain business sense is bringing it all back home.

Solar Flare will be pouring only at the Lucky Lab brewpub on Hawthorne Boulevard where it was brewed. Sixteen solar panels on the roof are the most visible part of a $70,000 system designed and installed by Ra Energy of Portland.

Glycol pumped through the panels and then to a heat exchanger and computer-controlled valves warmed Portland city water from about 55 degrees to more than 100 degrees in cloudy February.

“Come spring and summer, the system should keep a 900-gallon tank of water heated to 180 degrees,” said Gary Geist, co-owner of Portland’s three Lucky Labrador pubs. Pointing to a big natural gas heater in the brewery, he said, “that boiler should just sit there all summer.”

Thanks to federal and state tax credits and renewable energy grants, Geist expects the system to pay for itself in two to four years. “It makes sense because of the incentives and the level of the technology now,” he said, “and it’s just the right thing to do, especially here in Portland.”

The Oregonian: John Foyston

Posted in Non Fossil Energy | No Comments »

Unchained Goddess: CO2 Fears in 1958

Saturday, February 23rd, 2008

Unchained Goddess, 1958. Directed by Frank Capra

Posted in Climate Change | No Comments »

Storms and Climate Change

Tuesday, February 19th, 2008

From Jeff Masters at his wunderground.com blog

“Are storms getting more extreme due to climate change? That is a difficult question to answer, since reliable records are not available at all in many parts of the world, and extend back only a few decades elsewhere. However, we do have a fairly good set of precipitation records for many parts of the globe, and those records show that the heaviest types of rains–those likely to cause flooding–have increased in recent years. According to the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) 2007 report, “The frequency of heavy precipitation events has increased over most land areas”. Indeed, global warming theory has long predicted an increase in heavy precipitation events. As the climate warms, evaporation of moisture from the oceans increases, resulting in more water vapor in the air. According to the 2007 IPCC report, water vapor in the global atmosphere has increased by about 5% over the 20th century, and 4% since 1970. Satellite measurements (Trenberth et al., 2005) have shown a 1.3% per decade increase in water vapor over the global oceans since 1988. Santer et al. (2007) used a climate model to study the relative contribution of natural and human-caused effects on increasing water vapor, and concluded that this increase was “primarily due to human-caused increases in greenhouse gases”. This was also the conclusion of Willet et al. (2007).

Read more….

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World’s Oceans: 4% Undamaged

Friday, February 15th, 2008

“Fishing, fertilizer runoff, pollution, shipping, climate change—these are just a few of the ways that human activities influence the oceans that cover 70 percent of Earth’s surface. And in all that vastness—139 million square miles (360 million square kilometers)—less than 4 percent remains unaffected, and more than a third has suffered serious human impacts, according to a new map published in Science.

Marine ecologist Ben Halpern of the University of California, Santa Barbara’s National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis and an international team of colleagues first listed 17 ways humans affect the oceans and then mapped each of them. By overlaying each impact on top of one another, the ecologists created a “current state of affairs for the oceans,” Halpern says. “I was really surprised that there is no single spot on the planet that isn’t being affected by at least one of these factors.”"

Scary Stuff

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SubPrime Carbon Investments

Thursday, February 14th, 2008

“Al Gore advised Wall Street leaders and institutional investors Thursday to ditch businesses too reliant on carbon-intensive energy — or prepare for huge losses down the road.

”You need to really scrub your investment portfolios, because I guarantee you — as my longtime good redneck friends in Tennessee say, I guarandamntee you — that if you really take a fine-tooth comb and go through your portfolios, many of you are going to find them chock-full of subprime carbon assets,” the former vice president said.”

SubPrime Carbon

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Lake Mead: 13 Years to Run Your Boats

Wednesday, February 13th, 2008

Lake Mead could not be described as my favorite place on earth, but it is the take-out for many of us who consider the Colorado River run through the Grand Canyon our favorite place. Most runners will avoid Lake Mead and take-out up river a bit, but those who have seen it will testify, it is one, big body of water. Winds will whip over it raising white-caps and overturning small boats. It is the pleasure capital of the South West for those who love big boats, big motors and smoky air. Well, folks, it’s about to disappear. This is one more hurry-up among many that have been popping up like the unseasonable tornadoes in the South.

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.

“We were really sort of stunned,” Professor Barnett said in an interview. “We didn’t expect such a big problem basically right on our front doorstep. We thought there’d be more time.”

He added, “You think of what the implications are, and it’s pretty scary.”

Lake Mead Drying Up

Or, to put it another way, a-fuckin-mazing!

And just in case you think that McCain is green enough, that allowing him in wouldn’t be all that bad:

…while McCain claims that climate change is one of his top three issues, his agenda the subject is pretty much non-existant. McCain won’t stand up for mandatory caps (despite the fact that his own bill on the matter amounts to a mandate), and supports emissions reductions that are significantly lower than those that Obama and Clinton support. His idea of good climate legislation is more in line with the Lieberman-Warner bill, which calls for less than a 70 percent reduction of emissions by 2050. The Democrats, meanwhile, have stood up in favor of emissions reductions to 80 percent below 1990 levels by 2050 — the kinds of reductions current science says we need.

And both Clinton and Obama have outlined cap and trade plans that would auction off 100 percent of pollution permits and invest the proceeds in clean energy technologies that will reduce carbon emissions. But the Lieberman-Warner bill currently on the table, which is closer to McCain’s preferred approach to cap-and-trade, only auctions a small percentage of credits, giving most of them away to the very industries responsible for global warming. The Democrats also support subsidies and tax incentives to help develop a green economy, which McCain doesn’t support.


McCain - a paler shade of green…

Posted in Climate Change, Drought, Presidential 2008 | No Comments »

Climate Initiatives: The First 100 Days

Tuesday, February 12th, 2008

The window to get a grip on the serious threat of climate change and the serious response we must make is said to be about 10 years. Ten effing years! That doesn’t mean the water in Richardson Bay swells over the shoreline and races up to the Depot in Mill Valley ten years from today — though it certainly might get to the Redwood High playing fields given the right conditions. It does mean that the wagon we are sitting in will have crested the hill and begun to pick up speed on the long terrifying ride down.

And of that ten years one year is completely lost because the idiots are still in charge. So what should Obama/Clinton do upon arrival in the White House? Chris Mooney, [Storm World, and The Republican War on Science] one of the dependables when it comes to global warming, the science and the policy, offers this.

…the time is right for a new president to sweep into office, define climate as a first-tier priority, and bring about a sea change — at least a figurative one in policy to stop a real one in the oceans. The initiative should start with a major speech in the first 100 or 150 days in which the president calls the nation to a historic challenge and lays out a plan. Dealing with global warming will not spell the end of the economy, but there will assuredly be costs — costs, that is, to avert even greater costs. We will be raising the price for some forms of energy use because they bring with them dire consequences (like the ultimate inundation of Florida). But by beginning to move away from carbon-based energy sources, we will also create many new economic opportunities, while also preventing intolerable and irreversible changes to the Earth. On any ledger sheet worth reading, dealing with global warming leaves us well in the black.

Even before the speech, the president will need to appoint a team committed to the endeavor. As New Hampshire’s Carbon Coalition has outlined, that means an Environmental Protection Agency administrator, a presidential science adviser, an Office of Management and Budget director, and a Council of Economic Advisers chair who all know what’s coming and are ready for it. It also probably means a high-level international climate envoy — preferably someone with a household name. (Guess who.) Hillary Clinton has further promised to create a National Energy Council in the White House, parallel to the National Security Council and headed by a top energy adviser. The council would coordinate both the federal response to climate change and the necessary accompanying energy policies.

Whatever the structure of policy-making at the highest levels, the staffing mandate has to extend down the ladder and throughout the agencies. The Bush administration offers a model in reverse. It installed people in the disparate branches of the federal bureaucracy who excelled at censoring scientists and at keeping global warming off the agenda. The next administration must be staffed by people who understand and accept the science and are committed to getting to work on the problem.

American Prospect

Posted in Climate Change, Presidential 2008 | No Comments »

Flooding in South America

Tuesday, February 12th, 2008

Very very little news in the US about catastrophic flooding in wide areas of South America, including Bolivia and Peru.

Flooding in Bolivia

Around 90,000 people are stranded in the capital of the north-eastern Beni province (Bolivia), reports say.

The situation could grow worse if rising floodwaters overflow a dyke surrounding the city, officials say.

At least 35 people have died and 350,000 have been affected by the worst floods to hit Bolivia in 25 years.

BBC

Weekend storms in and around the Peruvian city of Cuzco have caused a river to burst its banks, flooding homes and farmland.

The town of Huarcarpay was worst hit, with almost half of the town under water. Some houses were completely washed away by the floods.


BBC

And of course there are those who see the larger implications.

As Bolivia faces a second straight year of devastating floods, David Choquehuanca, Bolivia’s Foreign Minister, argued that developed nations who produce most of the world’s greenhouse gases are morally obligated to pitch in when the negative effects of climate change strike poorer countries.

A rainy season aggravated by La Nina — a periodic cooling of waters in the Pacific Ocean — has hit hard all across the country. In the capital La Paz, high in the Andes, hundreds of thousands of residents are living under severe water rationing after rain-fed landslides last month ruptured water mains throughout the city.

The mountain storms’ runoff is now flooding the eastern lowlands. Trinidad, a city of 90,000, was surrounded by muddy water, and thousands of local residents camped out under tarps along the shoulders of the city’s one raised highway.

Some scientists believe that global warming has raised ocean temperatures and increased evaporation, boosting the amount of moisture in the air and making La Nina storms more intense.

AP

Posted in Climate Change | No Comments »

Solar Classes

Tuesday, February 12th, 2008

The venerable Solar Living Institute in Hopland, CA is a cool place to visit, in person or on-line. They also offer classes around the Bay Area on everything from Solar Sales and Marketing to Solar Water Heating. Check them out!

Posted in Environment, Science & Technology | No Comments »

Technology to Move Us

Monday, February 11th, 2008

Interesting article this weekend by Holly Reich, appearing in newspapers around the country, about new motor technology that involves electrical motors on each wheel, meaning that no drive train is necessary and the vehicle, scooter or small car, can be made to collapse into very small places — while re-charging.

Scooter

Design work for these mobility devices is taking place at MIT. [click on Mobility and then on the words that appear.] And there is implementation already.

The “clean, green, silent electric scooter” for urban mobility houses the motors inside each wheel, eliminating the need for a powertrain. Thus, the scooter can be folded in half and wheeled behind one another like a rolling suitcase, or stacked up in a rack.

This is where the shared-use urban mobility concept comes in. The idea is that the scooters can be stored in racks at convenient city locations like subway stops, stores or banks as one-way rentals.

Users could swipe a credit card to remove a scooter from the rack (which charges up the batteries) unfold and take it for a short trip. Once they reach their final destination they could fold it up and rack it. This type of program was implemented in Paris last July with 10,000 bikes. It has been so successful that they are currently doubling the number of bikes and stacks.

Scooter

I want one!

Fuel-less Vehicles

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Let Us Praise This Man

Monday, February 11th, 2008

By Will Kirkland, 2005

It was in Bosnia, during a war:
Serbs were shooting at Muslims,
Muslims at Serbs;
Cruelty was organized.
Not all
Took sides. A Serbian family demurred:
This is where we live
these are our neighbors
let Allah and God settle their differences
as we have settled ours.

These Serbs were not
Well loved by other Serbs.
Shells fell day and night
On Muslims, and on all
Such traitorous Serbs.

During a break in the fighting
Muslims came to take their son away.
He never returned. Another died
While fighting with the Serbs. Their third
Was a girl, an infant at this time.
Her mother’s breasts went dry.
The shelling did not cease. The girl
Was given tea. Now inside the walls,
As well, the suck of death.

Until a Muslim farmer came
with milk. Every morning
Before the light
he brought a tin.
The child needs its milk.
What matter Serbs?

Though other Muslims cursed him
He came. He refused
the payment offered; didn’t want
their prayers.

Though the guns roared, his boots
Ascended the stairs, four hundred
And forty-two days let us praise

This man and the god he serves
Bringing milk to a child
In a time of war.

(C) Will Kirkland February, 2005

My work up of a story told by C Hedges in War Is A Force that Gives Us Meaning, p 52-53

Tags:
Posted in Poems, War | No Comments »

Climate Prediction and You

Friday, February 8th, 2008

Climate Prediction Net Wants You! Or more precisely, it wants your computer’s cycles when you aren’t using them. If you’re a good boy or girl you naturally turn off your energy sipping devices when you are away from them, but if you’re like most of us, you’re not so good. You walk away, have dinner, go to the movies, even go to sleep, and your computer stays on, gathering your e-mail, defragging your hard drive, sending out spam for someone else (I hope not!). So why not give back a little?

Climate Prediction is a massive experiment in using distributed computing. Instead of owning one multi-million dollar Cray super computer to crunch numbers, thousands of personal computers are enlisted, each to run some small segment of the problem, receiving and sending data over the internet.

The aim of climateprediction.net is to investigate the approximations that have to be made in state-of-the-art climate models (read more about this). By running the model thousands of times (a ‘large ensemble’) we hope to find out how the model responds to slight tweaks to these approximations - slight enough to not make the approximations any less realistic. This will allow us to improve our understanding of how sensitive our models are to small changes and also to things like changes in carbon dioxide and the sulphur cycle. This will allow us to explore how climate may change in the next century under a wide range of different scenarios. In the past estimates of climate change have had to be made using one or, at best, a very small ensemble (tens rather than thousands!) of model runs. By using your computers, we will be able to improve our understanding of, and confidence in, climate change predictions more than would ever be possible using the supercomputers currently available to scientists.

It’s pretty easy. Follow the link, download the appropriate program and set it up. There are many questions you can answer to be more involved, but to get started all you’ll need is an account (login name and password.) You’ll get a cool screen saver with the turning globe showing rain and snow, temperature, clouds… as you choose.

Requirements Download

Posted in Climate Change, Science & Technology | No Comments »

Tornadoes and Global Warming

Thursday, February 7th, 2008

The Evidence Is Thin. The Consequences Are Real

Chris Mooney, author of Storm World, is the person I turn to to help make out what, if anything, enormous weather events like the tornadoes in the South mean in the aggregate. As he says: “I want to approach the subject of this post with considerable caution.”

Everybody knows that tornadoes in February are rare. The intensity of several of them was terrifying. But Mooney cites the IPCC to say this does not prove global warming, or even that these are the effects of global warming.

There is insufficient evidence to determine whether trends exist in the meridional overturning circulation (MOC) of the global ocean or in small-scale phenomena such as tornadoes, hail, lightning and dust-storms.

It doesn’t do the opposite either. Read all of Mooney’s post, and then my comment/question to him following.

For more analysis of the tornadoes themselves, with photos and measurements go to Jeff Masters at Wunderground.

For a news report of the (related?) heavy snow, rain and rising waters in the states south of the Great Lakes see this.

Update: This chart is a bit of what I was asking for in my comment on Mooney’s post. It shows class F2-F5 tornadoes against smaller ones, from 1950 to now. Interestingly, the number of small tornadoes has increased since 1990, though it is said to be a matter of better reporting than actual increase. The numbers of high intensity storms has decreased — one prediction of global warming models.

Posted in Climate Change | No Comments »

Alternative Energy Interest Rising

Thursday, February 7th, 2008

Besides the hidden phrase in the middle of this article — they are investing far more money in … oil sands — it is a quick look at the shifting perspectives in the major energy players of the world.

In a report scheduled for release Tuesday, the firm, Cambridge Energy Research Associates, concludes that multiple factors will continue pushing the world toward greater use of alternative energy sources like sun and wind power, regardless of what happens to oil prices.

“The focus today on clean energy is not a bubble or passing phenomenon,” the report says. “Unconventional clean energy is now poised to cross the divide and move from the fringes of the energy sector to the mainstream.”

Energy Turn Around

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Peak Gas

Thursday, February 7th, 2008

You’ve heard of Peak Oil, the theory that the known, and discoverable, fields of oil have reached their peak — or soon will. Even with better technology to extract more from less, there is a horizon of the end-of-oil and it is approaching fast.

Add to that Peak Gas, which in the US at least is upon us as I type.

Stymied in their plans to build coal-burning power plants, American utilities are turning to natural gas to meet expected growth in demand, risking a new upward spiral in the price of that fuel.

Utility executives say they have little choice. With opposition to coal plants rising across the country — including a statement by three investment banks Monday saying they are wary of financing new ones — the executives see plants fired by natural gas as the only kind that can be constructed quickly and can supply reliable power day and night.

But North American supplies of natural gas will be flat or declining in coming years, according to the Energy Information Administration.

Gas

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Rain Power

Monday, February 4th, 2008

We could have used some of this in Marin in recent weeks.

Scientists from CEA/Leti-Minatec, an R&D institute in Grenoble, France, specializing in microelectronics, have recently developed a system that recovers the vibration energy from a piezoelectric structure impacted by a falling raindrop. The system works with raindrops ranging in diameter from 1 to 5 mm, and simulations show that it’s possible to recover up to 12 milliwatts from one of the larger “downpour” drops.


Rain Power

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Sewage Still Stinking

Monday, February 4th, 2008

“Contamination levels of Richardson Bay waters near the spill site are above the state safety standard, according to preliminary test results released Saturday. County officials said that the contamination did not extend beyond Richardson Bay and that there was no indication San Francisco beaches were affected.

The sample at the Bay Front Office Park, taken upstream of the spill site, had the highest level of contamination, which could be caused by recent rainfalls pushing the sewage-contaminated water upstream, officials said. The Shelter Bay Mill Valley site, located downstream, was slightly elevated. Schoonmaker Beach and Dunphy Park in the Sausalito area showed low levels of bacteria but met the state standard for water recreation. ”

Contamination

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Sewage Spill in Marin Waters

Monday, February 4th, 2008

“More than two million gallons of partially treated sewage and storm water were dumped into the San Francisco Bay on Thursday night, and officials in Marin County, north of San Francisco, were trying to determine the extent of environmental damage. According to the county sheriff’s office, the spill occurred at a sewage treatment plant in Mill Valley after a pump, and an alarm system meant to monitor it, both failed after several weeks of near-constant rain.

Sewage in Bay

Marin IJ

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