All In One Boat

Nissan is serious about being the leader in electric vehicles by taking a three-step approach: (1) developing a charging infrastructure, (2) seeding the market with EVs in 2010, and (3) leading in EV manufacturing volume in 2012. The initial vehicles show-off a new body design, be freeway speed, and have a 100-mile range.

With Nissan USA located in Tennessee, it is seeing strong support there for a statewide charging infrastructure. Tennessee Governor Phil Bredesen stated, “Our clean-energy future depends on our ability to find real strategies for encouraging Tennesseans to adopt a zero-emission mindset.” The state is focused on heavily trafficked Interstate 24 and Interstate 65 corridors.

“As the nation’s largest public power supplier, TVA is looking forward to being part of this project to explore the potential of electric vehicles,” said TVA Chairman William Sansom in joining the Tennessee initiative. “Electric vehicles could put electricity to work overnight, or off-peak, when other power needs are lower.”

Nissan and EV

*

Then there is this from China:

SAIC Accelerates in Chinese Electric-Car Market
The Shanghai-based car maker sets up a $293 million joint venture to develop hybrid and all-electric cars.

Elisabeth Rosenthal writes in the NY Times about the worst of all possible outcomes of the economic melt down.

From Italy to China, the threat to jobs, profits and government tax revenues posed by the financial crisis has cast doubt on commitments to cap emissions or phase out polluting factories.

Automakers, especially Detroit’s Big Three, face collapsing sales, threatening their plans to invest heavily in more fuel-efficient cars. And with gas prices now around $2 a gallon in the United States, struggling consumers may be less inclined than they once were to trade in their gas-guzzling models in any case.

Reading the comments in the article from national leaders tells us they do not get it yet. The crisis offers unparalleled opportunity to start afresh, to throw every nickle into climate stabilizing technologies. If Detroit in 1942 could completely remake itself from car production to tank and plane production it is possible to imagine such a remake towards wind turbines, electrical infrastructure, solar panels on every mall in America. Not another gas firing automobile should be made. Communities, especially in the sun-belt should no longer use fossil fuel for light, household electrical or cooking within four years.

Andrew Revkin, also in the Times, refers to Rosenthal’s article and to Joseph Romm’s challenge we posted yesterday to ask readers — how do we move out of TRANCE mode in the face of climate change?

Landslides and floods caused by heavy rain have killed at least 59 people and forced more than 43,000 from their homes in southern Brazil.

Brazil

While the planet has experienced numerous changes in climate over the past 65 million years, the most significant climate change of the last 5,000 years has been in recent decades. That change is global warming.

A Cornell study reports that as a result of this warming, which has caused Arctic freshwater ice to melt and flow southward, the ranges of some cold-water, northern marine species have been moving down the North American coast — a counterintuitive finding.”

Unprecedented Warming

“Sea ice at the top of the planet has apparently reached the lowest volume ever recorded, say scientists, with conditions declining toward a point where the Arctic Ocean may soon be completely ice-free in summertime.
arctic ice

While final numbers are still coming in, experts at the National Snow and Ice Data Center in Boulder, Colo., believe the overall volume of Arctic sea ice — determined by measuring the area covered and the thickness of ice — has reached the lowest level since satellite measurements began in 1979. ”

Sea Ice

Wild, unprecedented weather continues around the globe, not only in the U.S.

“Flash floods and landslides have killed 50 people in Vietnam and Thailand, swept away thousands of homes and inundated farmland, official reports said on Sunday.

In Vietnam, the death toll from typhoon Hagupit, which struck the Philippines and China earlier in the week, has jumped to 32 with another five people missing.”

Weather in Southeast Asia

Attention! Ms. Palin! Attention!

The decade ending in 2006 was the warmest such period in the Northern Hemisphere for at least the last 1,300 years and possibly longer, says a new study written by a University of Arizona professor and six other researchers.

Warmest Decade

And to underline the report:

A huge 19 square mile (55 square km) ice shelf in Canada’s northern Arctic broke away last month and the remaining shelves have shrunk at a “massive and disturbing” rate, the latest sign of accelerating climate change in the remote region, scientists said on Tuesday.

…the total amount of ice lost from the shelves along Ellesmere Island this summer totaled 83 square miles — more than three times the area of Manhattan island.

The figure is more than 10 times the amount of ice shelf cover that
scientists estimated on July 30 would vanish from around the island this summer

Arctic Ice

“A Dutch-based company announced plans Tuesday to produce affordable electric cars by the end of 2009, promising they will be much more powerful than existing models and have zero emissions.

Detroit Electric is in negotiations with Malaysia’s national auto maker, Proton, to produce the car in this Southeast Asian nation and is also talking to a German and a U.S. carmaker, said the company’s chief executive, Albert Lam. He declined to name the companies.

“We believe in affordable electric vehicles for the public. That is our dream … to find innovative ways to counter global warming,” Lam told a news conference before journalists test drove a sports car, a sedan and a subcompact car fitted with Detroit Electric’s technology.

Malaysian Prime Minister Abdullah Ahmad Badawi drove the sedan Sunday when he arrived at a National Day parade — which officials called a testament of the government’s commitment to finding green alternatives to tackle rising fuel prices.

Lam said the car will use lithium ion batteries and a motor developed in-house.”

Dutch-Malaysian Electric Car

Attention Governor Palin: Arctic Sea Ice! Gone!

Arctic sea ice has shrunk to the second smallest extent since satellite records began, US scientists have revealed.

The National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC) says that the ice-covered area has fallen below its 2005 level, which was the second lowest on record.

Melting has occurred earlier in the year than usual, meaning that the iced area could become even smaller than last September, the lowest recorded.

Researchers say the Arctic is now at a climatic “tipping point”.

Very interesting article.

“…global warming, at its core, is not a technology or policy problem. It is the greatest failure of thought in human history.

Attempts to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions will fail unless people first alter their thinking and behavior.

Earth is warming because humans, primarily in industrialized nations, suffer from systems blindness.”

Systems Blindness

Bob Doppelt’s book, The Power of Sustainable Thinking.

“Pacific Ocean shellfish - the mussels and snails, the clams and cockles - are heading for a mass invasion into the North Atlantic that could alter the entire ecology of both oceans as sea ice vanishes from the warming high Arctic, two California scientists predict.”

But the headline implies too much. Adds, in the first paragraph, to the drumbeat of fear we all feel, in prognosis more benign.

“Studying the fossils of marine organisms from 3.5 million years ago, the two California paleontologists saw that water from the Pacific Ocean must have been flowing north through the Bering Strait and into the Arctic Ocean where the ice had cleared and food was abundant. From there, hundreds of Pacific marine species moved into the warm North Atlantic to “colonize and enrich” the sea there, Vermeij and Roopnarine concluded.

“But a million years later the ice age returned in the far north and put an end to all of that,” Roopnarine said. “The Arctic Ocean, covered densely with ice again, became virtually a desert.”

Now that the northern seas are warming and a new mass migration of marine species is in the offing, “there’s a fair likelihood the invasion might generate new fisheries,” Roopnarine said. “Extinctions are unlikely, and there might be a cascading increase in abundance, perhaps, but that’s not easy to predict.”

Vermeij agreed. “Invasions like this can increase the genetic diversity of many species,” he said, “and in the long run we’ll see a lot of new hybrids.” “

A little lead on Earthweek holds out the hope that a species of grass could suck lots of CO2 out of the atmosphere and, at the same time, leave prime corn growing land available for corn

New research in the United States may have found a way to use the majority of traditional grain crops for food rather than diverting nearly a quarter of them for biofuel production.

A team from the University of Illinois says the giant perennial grass Miscanthus x giganteus can produce far more biofuels per acre than current sources, such as corn.

To achieve the current White House goal of offsetting 20 percent of gasoline use with ethanol would take about a quarter of all U.S. cropland out of food production, the researchers say.

Writing in the journal Global Change Biology, crop sciences professor Stephen P. Long said that Miscanthus can be grown on land unsuitable for growing corn or other grains, meaning that acreage used for those crops could be once again allocated exclusively for food production.

A few problems spring to mind: 1) pricing. If a farmer can get more for growing the grass than for growing corn, then grass it will be — corn land or not. 2) “Exotic species” syndrome. We’ve seen a lot of this lately, in which a species — of plant, shellfish, bird– is introduced into a niche it didn’t evolve in. In some cases the introduced species will not survive. In others, not only does it survive but it thrives, and gobbles up the land, food, water needed by existing species, driving them to extinction. Even under well meaning proposals this is a threat which needs to be fully understood before rising for the standing ovation.

In a related piece, Steve Lawrence of AP writes of the re-introduction of tules and cattails into the Sacramento delta. The driving idea is that the islands in the delta which have been farmed and have been submerging into the river bottom for over 100 years need to be built back up. Tule and cattails are what created them if the first place, so why not return some to their original state and let nature take its course. As an added benefit, the two reeds are excellent CO2 captors.

“All that soil out there are plants that grew 6,000 years ago and didn’t decompose completely,” said Robin Miller, a biogeochemist with the Geological Survey. “That’s what peat is. So we’re just making the same thing happen that happened here for millennia.”

About 2 1/2 years ago, scientists noticed that their “big garden,” as Miller calls it, was removing carbon dioxide, one of the greenhouse gases blamed for global warming.

“We were capturing a lot of (carbon dioxide) at levels much greater than other systems — marshes and forests, grasslands,” said Roger Fujii, the project’s director and the bay-delta program chief for the Geological Survey’s California Water Science Center.

That revelation persuaded state and federal officials to expand the project. They are now trying to determine whether the tules and cattails could be used to combat global warming through what they call “carbon-capture” farming.

Under that scenario, companies could meet state greenhouse gas limits by paying delta farmers to plant tules and cattails rather than row crops.

“They can just sit back and watch the tules grow, and they should be making money,” Fujii said. “That’s what the vision is. It’s not to do it just on Twitchell Island. It’s to see if we can do it throughout the delta on subsided land.”

Cattails for Climate Change

There are problems, however, that need investigating. How much methane is produced? Nitrous oxide?

The predictions that global climate change would bring rain in faster, denser fall is being borne out in New Hampshire. The Southwestern quadrant of the state, which was hit hard in 1999 and 2005, and along with the entire state in the spring of 2006, is underwater over large areas today. A reported 11 inches falling in some places. The average rainfall for Keene, New Hampshire, in August, one of the places hit yesterday, is 3.9 inches.

Satellite observation and number crunching have shown that rising temperatures, indeed, lead to more extreme downpours — and fewer light rains. More extreme downpours in turn, lead to flash flooding, property damage and loss of life. The poorer the area is, the worse the problem.

The observed rise in the heaviest tropical rains is about twice that produced by computer simulations used to assess how human-caused global warming could change rainfall, said the researchers. …

But this analysis, using satellite measurements, is the first to find a strong statistical link between warmth and extreme tropical downpours, the researchers said.

Extreme Rain

Like Las Vegas, Nevada yesterday for example

A chunk of ice spreading across 18 square kilometers (7 square miles) has broken off a Canadian ice shelf in the Arctic, scientists said Tuesday.

Derek Mueller, a researcher at Trent University, was careful not to blame global warming but said the event was consistent with the theory that the current Arctic climate isn’t rebuilding ice sheets.

“We’re in a different climate now,” he said. “It’s not conducive to regrowing them. It’s a one-way process.”

Mueller said the sheet broke away last week from the Ward Hunt Ice Shelf off the north coast of Ellesmere Island in Canada’s far north. He said a crack in the shelf was spotted in 2002, and a survey this spring found a network of fissures.

The sheet is the biggest piece shed by one of Canada’s six ice shelves since the Ayles shelf broke loose in 2005 from the coast of Ellesmere, about 500 miles from the North Pole.

Ice Break Off

New Mexico, for all the images of cactus and dry plains is no stranger to flooding. When the monsoon season hits the dry earth doesn’t soak in the rain and flash flooding is commonplace. The remnants of Hurricane Dolly, however, brought new records to the state.

an estimated 6.6 inches of rain fell in Ruidoso, N.M., over a 48-hour period. The state’s official single-day rainfall record of 2.3 inches was shattered when an estimated 4.6 inches fell there Saturday night and Sunday morning, the newspaper said.

New Mexico: Dolly Flooding

Global warming has been expected to bring not only droughts, but also floods, because what rain you get comes hammering down harder. And the downpours of the future now look to be even more drenching than expected.

A new Nature Geoscience paper (subscription required) considers the intensity of precipitation measured hour by hour for a century in the Dutch town of De Bilt. Theoretically, it’s thought that the intensity of rainfall, including the biggest cloudbursts, should rise by 7% for each degree Celsius that the temperature goes up. That’s based on a thermodynamics equation called the Clausius-Clapeyron relation - and it’s what you see if you look at extreme rainfall on the scale of days.

But it’s the rainiest hours, not the rainiest days, that interest the paper’s authors, Geert Lenderink and Erik Van Meijgaard of the Royal Netherlands Meteorological Institute. That turns out to make a difference.

Looking at the intensity of those rainiest hours, they find that although the 7% scale holds in cold weather, it tips up to about 14% once the temperature hits 12 degrees Celsius.

Climate Feedback on Rainfall

From Congressman Edward J. Markey’s Select Committee on Energy Independence and Global Warming:

Executive summary

I. President Bush’s Deputy Chief of Staff Joel Kaplan and numerous heads of cabinet agencies and White House offices endorsed EPA’s finding that greenhouse gas emissions endanger public welfare, and EPA’s proposal that both vehicle and stationary source greenhouse gas emissions should be regulated under the clean air act.

II. There was widespread agreement within the Bush administration that greenhouse gas emissions from motor vehicles endanger public welfare and should be regulated.

III. EPA additionally concluded that greenhouse gas emissions from stationary sources such as power plants and refineries should also be regulated using clean air act authority.

IV. The oil industry argued against regulatory action, and had the support of the office of Vice President Cheney.

V. Doing the oil industry’s bidding, the Bush administration reversed course.

[...others, including oil industry representatives from ExxonMobil, the American Petroleum Institute, and the National Petrochemicals and Refiners Association...argued that regulations to reduce greenhouse gas emissions would tarnish the President’s anti-regulatory legacy and therefore should be best left to the next President.]

The Report (pdf)

Committee Chairman Edward J. Markey (D-Mass.) said in a news release: “This is the dysfunctions and motivations of the Bush administration laid bare. The fact that they can, with near unanimity, completely switch positions on global warming to please the oil industry is shocking, and yet disappointingly predictable.”

Gerstenzang: LA Times

Baby Antarctic penguins being frozen to death by freak rain storms

Tens of thousands of newly-born penguins are freezing to death as Antarctica is lashed by freak rain storms.

Scientists believe the numbers of Adelie penguins may have fallen by as much as 80 per cent – and, if the downpours continue, the species will be extinct within ten years.

And the Emperor penguin – made famous in the Oscar-winning documentary March Of The Penguins – is also under threat.

Temperatures on the Antarctic peninsula have risen by 3C over the past 50 years to an average of -14.7C and rain is now far more common than snow.

Adelie penguins are born with a thin covering of down and it takes 40 days for them to grow protective water-repellent feathers. With epic rains drenching their ancestral nesting grounds, their parents try to protect them. But when the adults leave to fish for food, or are killed by predators such as seals, the babies become soaked to the skin and die from hypothermia.

‘Everyone talks about the melting of the glaciers but having day after day of rain in Antarctica is a totally new phenomenon. As a result, penguins are literally freezing to death,’ said Jon Bowermaster, a New York-based explorer who has recently returned from Antarctica.

Daily Mail
Original URL

The ship may be finally starting to turn, or at least the officers — those in control — are starting to talk about turning it. Yep, looks like a serious situation out there. Better nudge the helm a half a point to port…

Intel Capital is boosting its investments in clean technology startups as a way to develop new sources of power for Intel processors.

The chipmaker’s corporate venture arm, one of Silicon Valley’s largest, said this week it put 24 million euros in a German company, Sulfurcell, which converts sunlight into electricity by using modules coated with a thin metallic film.

Intel Raising Stake in Clean Tech