A Solar Scenario in Scientific American
A massive switch from coal, oil, natural gas and nuclear power plants to solar power plants could supply 69 percent of the U.S.’s electricity and 35 percent of its total energy by 2050.A vast area of photovoltaic cells would have to be erected in the Southwest. Excess daytime energy would be stored as compressed air in underground caverns to be tapped during nighttime hours.
Large solar concentrator power plants would be built as well.
A new direct-current power transmission backbone would deliver solar electricity across the country.
But $420 billion in subsidies from 2011 to 2050 would be required to fund the infrastructure and make it cost-competitive.
By way of contrast, the Friends of the Earth analysis finds that Lieberman-Warner (S. 2191) allocates approximately $800 billion in subsidies to the fossil fuel industry, with about $350 billion to subsidize carbon capture and sequestration specifically. About $350 billion is allocated to all sustainable technologies (wind, solar, biomass, geothermal).
2007 Weather Records
- Warmest January on record—global mean temperature 0.85 C above the 30-year mean
- 8000 high-temperature records set or matched in August at US weather stations
- Warmest April in England in 348 years, 0.6 C above 1865 record
- Canadian Northwest Passage open for five weeks starting August 11, first time ever navigable
- Arctic sea ice retreated to record minimum, 23% below 2005 record minimum
- Greenland ice cap
- Across North America, severe to extreme drought was present across large parts of the western U.S. and Upper Midwest, including southern Ontario
- Extreme drought in Australia
- Record Alaskan permafrost warming
- Record rains fell in China, England and Wales
- A tornado struck New York City in August
- A June cyclone struck Oman and Iran
- South Africa got its first significant snowfall in 25 years
The Frame and Scale of the Climate/Energy Challenge: Issues and Implications
“Does the current framing and scaling of the climate/energy issue adequately capture the challenge posed? If not, what might be a more appropriate frame and scale?”
Speakers- Dr. James G. Anderson, Philip S. Weld Professor, Department of Chemistry and Chemical Biology and Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences, School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, Harvard University
- Dr. Daniel Schrag, Professor of Earth and Planetary Sciences and the Director of the Harvard University Center for the Environment, Harvard University
The issues of global energy demand and climate response are, at one level, complex and contentious. However, they are joined by simple but important considerations. While the flow of energy is important to the global economic infrastructure, the flow of energy within the Earth’s climate system reveals simple but compelling conclusions. These will be explored in this briefing.
Biographies
Dr. James B. Anderson joined the faculty of Harvard University in 1978 as the Robert P. Burden Professor of Atmospheric Chemistry. In 1982 he was appointed the Philip S. Weld Professor of Atmospheric Chemistry. Professor Anderson served as Chairman of the Department of Chemistry and Chemical Biology at Harvard from July 1998 through June 2001. He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, the American Philosophical Society and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and a frequent contributor to National Research Council activities. He is a Fellow of the American Geophysical Union and the American Association for the Advancement of Science. He is a recipient of two United Nations Environment Programme Ozone Awards (1997, 2005); the National Academy of Sciences Arthur L. Day Prize and Lectureship; the E. O. Lawrence Award in Environmental Science and Technology; the American Chemical Society’s Gustavus John Esselen Award for Chemistry in the Public Interest; and the University of Washington’s Arts and Sciences Distinguished Alumnus Achievement Award. In addition, he received the United Nations Earth Day International Award; Harvard University’s 1989 Ledley Prize for Most Valuable Contribution to Science by a Member of the Faculty; and the American Chemical Society’s National Award for Creative Advances in Environmental Science and Technology.
Dr. Anderson’s research group addresses three domains at the interface of chemistry and Earth Sciences: (1) mechanistic links between chemistry, radiation, and dynamics in the atmosphere that control climate (2) chemical catalysis sustained by free radical chain reactions that dictate the macroscopic rate of chemical transformation in Earth’s stratosphere and troposphere; and (3) chemical reactivity viewed from the microscopic perspective of electron structure, molecular orbitals and reactivities of radical-radical and radical-molecule systems. Research addressing Earth’s climate focuses on establishing the primary mechanisms that couple chemistry, dynamics, and radiation in the climate system, the establishment of a high-accuracy record of climate change using interferometry from low Earth orbit, and strategies for testing long-term climate forecasts using absolute spectrally resolved radiance in the infrared.
Dr. Daniel Schrag is Professor of Earth and Planetary Sciences at Harvard University and the Director of the Harvard University Center for the Environment. Dr. Schrag studies climate and climate change over the broadest range of Earth history. He has examined changes in ocean circulation over the last several decades, with particular attention to El Niño and the tropical Pacific. He has also worked on theories for Pleistocene ice-age cycles including a better determination of ocean temperatures during the Last Glacial Maximum, 20,000 years ago. He also helped develop the Snowball Earth hypothesis, proposing that a series of global glaciations occurred between 750 and 580 million years ago that may have led to the evolution of multicellular animals. He is currently working with economists and engineers on technological approaches to mitigating future climate change. Among various honors, Dr. Schrag was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship in 2000. Dr. Schrag came to Harvard in 1997 after teaching at Princeton, and studying at Berkeley and Yale.
Draft Oversight Report: Systematic White House Climate Change Censorship
The House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, chaired by Rep. Henry Waxman (D-Calif.), today released a draft report entitled Political Interference with Climate Change Science Under the Bush Administration.
The report is based on the committee’s January 30 and March 19 hearings, depositions, and interviews of government officials on White House censorship and manipulation of governmental climate change science over the last 16 months.
Scientists, reports, and testimony from NOAA, NASA, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the National Climatic Data Center, and the Environmental Protection Agency were affected.
Findings include:- Media requests to speak with federal scientists on climate change matters were sent to Council on Environmental Quality for White House approval
- The White House edited congressional testimony regarding the science of climate change
- CEQ Chief of Staff Phil Cooney and other CEQ officials made at least 294 edits to the Administration’s Strategic Plan for the Climate Change Science Program to exaggerate or emphasize scientific uncertainties or to deemphasize or diminish the importance of the human role in global warming
- The White House insisted on edits to EPA’s draft Report on the Environment that were so extreme that the EPA Administrator opted to eliminate the climate change section of the report
- CEQ eliminated the climate change section of the EPA’s Air Trends Report
- CEQ Chairman James Connaughton edited the August 2003 EPA legal opinion disavowing authority to regulate greenhouse gases
Climate Change Bills Markup
- S 1581 — Federal Ocean Acidification Research And Monitoring (FOARAM) Act of 2007
- S 2307 — Global Change Research Improvement Act of 2007
- S 2355 — Climate Change Adaptation Act
- S 2332 — Media Ownership Act of 2007
Several bills designed to promote research on adapting to global warming were approved Tuesday by a Senate panel.The bills are not geared toward limiting climate change. Rather, they are aimed at helping federal, state and local officials adapt to the possible consequences of global warming.
The Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee approved the measures by voice vote. The Environment and Public Works Committee will begin marking up a broad climate-change bill Wednesday.
Tuesday’s markup was mostly perfunctory, but one bill did engender some debate. The measure (S 2355), sponsored by Maria Cantwell, D-Wash., would require the president to prepare a strategy for addressing the impacts of climate change in the United States and require federal departments and agencies to prepare adaptation plans.
The legislation also would direct the Commerce secretary to conduct regional assessments of the vulnerability of ocean and coastal resources.
Ted Stevens, R-Alaska, said science does not currently have the ability to make those types of predictions on a regional scale.
“This requirement of the bill would have many significant impacts on the economy of my state,” Stevens said.
Barbara Boxer, D-Calif., chairwoman of the Environment and Public Works Committee, said she would work with Stevens to address his concerns as the measure proceeds.
The committee also approved a bill (S 2307), sponsored by John Kerry, D-Mass., and Olympia J. Snowe, R-Maine, that would set up a “national climate service” within the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration to assess the impacts of climate change at state and local levels.
Proponents say state and local governments do not have enough information about how global warming could affect specific regions of the country. They also say the government needs to do a better job of relaying this information in a way that is relevant to policy makers.
The bill is partly a response to criticism of the government’s implementation of the 1990 Global Change Research Act (PL 101-606), which requires assessments every four years of the impacts of changes in the global environment. The Clinton administration issued one national assessment in 2000, but the Bush administration has not issued one.
The bill would amend the law to clarify how comprehensive an assessment should be, a Senate aide said. It also would require a new strategic plan for the Global Change Research Program, an interagency group established under the law.
Many similar provisions in the bill are included in House-passed energy legislation (HR 3221). The two chambers are now preparing to move a new version of the energy bill to the floor; it remains unclear whether the climate-science language will become part of the final package.
The panel also approved a bill (S 1581) that would establish an interagency committee on ocean acidification. Greenhouse gas emissions can make oceans more acidic, potentially destroying ecosystems. It was introduced by Frank R. Lautenberg, D-N.J.
Arctic Sea Ice Melt and Shrinking Polar Ice Sheets: Are Observed Changes Exceeding Expectations? 1
This forum was aired on C-SPAN.
Is the Arctic sea ice cover melting faster than expected? If so, what are the contributing factors and why was the rate of melting unanticipated? How much sea ice cover has been lost in terms of extent and volume? What are the implications of both the loss of sea ice and the rate of loss? Is the Greenland ice sheet losing its mass faster than anticipated? If so, what are the contributing factors and why was the rate of loss unanticipated? What are the implications of continued accelerated ice loss from the Greenland ice sheet with respect to Sea Level Rise? Is the Antarctic Ice Sheet getting bigger or smaller and by how much and how fast? Are there parts of the Antarctic ice sheet that are gaining mass and parts that are losing mass? If so, what are the contributing causes? What are the implications of continued ice mass loss in Antarctica, especially the decay of ice shelves?
Speakers:- Dr. Mark Serreze, Senior Research Scientist, NOAA National Snow and Ice Data Center, Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences (CIRES), University of Colorado, Boulder, CO
- Scott B. Luthcke, Geophysicist, NASA Goddard Space Flight Center’s Planetary Geodynamics Laboratory, Greenbelt, MD
- Dr. Konrad Steffen, Professor of Climatology and Remote Sensing and Director of the Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences (CIRES), University of Colorado, Boulder, CO Program Summary
Rates of Change in Arctic Sea Ice Cover: Causation, Extent and Implications
- Since the advent of routine monitoring via satellite in 1979, the area of the Arctic Ocean covered with sea ice, known as ice extent, has declined in all months, most strongly in September. The rate of ice loss appears to have accelerated in recent years. Sea ice extent for September 2007 was the lowest ever recorded, beating the old record set in September 2005 by 23%, an area the size of Texas and California combined.
- Essentially all state-of-the-art global climate models indicate that sea ice extent should be declining over the period of observations, pointing strongly to a role of increased greenhouse gas concentrations. However, the observed rate of decline in September exceeds that from nearly all models. While natural climate variability explains part of the observed rapid ice loss, it appears that the models, as a group, are underestimating the sensitivity of the ice cover to the effects of greenhouse warming.
- There is strong evidence that reductions in sea ice extent have been accompanied by substantial thinning. There is growing recognition that once the ice thins sufficiently, it will become sensitive to a “kick” from natural climate variations that, through feedback mechanisms such as ocean warming in ice free regions due to solar radiation, result in rapid loss of the remaining summer ice cover.
- Transition to an ice-free Arctic Ocean in summer could occur as early as 2030. While climate simulations suggest that ice loss may have impacts on weather patterns well beyond the Arctic, little is known at this time. While ice loss will have adverse ramifications for Arctic ecosystems and the peoples of the Arctic, given the current trajectory, the region will also become accessible to shipping and resource exploitation. The summer of 2007 saw the fabled Northwest passage open for the first time since regular monitoring began in 1972.
Recent Observations on Changes in Polar Land Ice Mass
Mass changes of the Earth’s ice sheets and glacier systems are of considerable importance because of their sensitivity to climate change and their contribution to rising sea level. Recent changes in the cryosphere highlight the importance of methods for directly observing the complex spatial and temporal variation of land ice mass flux. Since its launch in March of 2002, the NASA/DLR Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment (GRACE) mission has been acquiring ultra-precise inter-satellite K-band range and range-rate (KBRR) measurements enabling a direct mapping of static and time-variable gravity. These data provide new opportunities to observe and understand ice mass changes at unprecedented temporal and spatial resolutions. Through the detailed reduction of these GRACE KBRR data, we have computed multi-year time series of surface mass flux for Greenland and Antarctica coastal and interior ice sheet sub-drainage systems as well as the Alaskan glacier systems. These mass flux solutions provide important observations of the seasonal and inter-annual evolution of the Earth’s land ice as well as overall trends. The gravity observations show the Greenland ice sheet is losing significant mass at the low elevation coastal regions that is not compensated for by gains in the high elevation interior resulting in an overall rate of loss of 154±10 Gt/yr. In addition strong inter-annual variations are observed such as the large mass loss of 2005 resulting from higher surface temperatures and a longer melt season. The gravity observations show the Antarctic ice sheet is losing mass at the rate of 105±30 Gt/yr with the loss concentrated from the western Antarctic ice sheet and in particular at the tip of the peninsula. The high elevation regions of the Antarctic ice sheet are showing no significant rate of change in mass. The Alaskan mountain glaciers are observed to be losing mass at a rate of 98±8 Gt/yr with the largest losses observed in the Yakutat Ice fields and Glacier Bay regions. The combination of GRACE high-resolution mass flux observations together with the surface elevation change and surface melt observations is beginning to reveal a detailed understanding of the Earth’s high latitude land ice evolution.
Greenland Ice Sheet: Dynamic Response to Recent Climate Warming
Recent rapid changes in marginal regions of the Greenland ice sheet show mainly acceleration and thinning, with some glacier velocities increasing more than twofold. Recent data show a high correlation between periods of heavy surface melting and increase in glacier velocity. A possible cause is rapid melt water drainage to the glacier bed, where it enhances basal sliding. An increase in melt water production in a warmer climate could have major consequences on ice-flow rate and mass loss. Melt extent on the ice sheet for 2007 was the largest ever recorded since the beginning of satellite measurements in 1979, beating the old record set in 2005 by 10%, an area.
The Greenland Ice Sheet is losing mass, and that this has most likely been accelerating since the mid 1990s. Although Greenland has been thickening at high elevations, because of the predicted increase in snowfall, this gain is more than offset by an accelerating mass loss, with a large component from rapidly-thinning and accelerating outlet glaciers. The mass balance decreased from near balance in the early 1990’s to minus 100 Giga tons (Gt) or even less than 200 Giga tons of ice for the most recent observations in 2006.
The likely sensitive regions for future rapid changes in ice volume are those outlet glaciers in Greenland like the Jakobshavn Isbrae, with an over-deepened channel reaching far inland. Inclusion of these processes in models will likely demonstrate that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s 4th Assessment (2007) Report underestimated sea-level projections for the end of the 21st Century.
Biographies
Dr. Mark Serreze received his BS and MS from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, in 1982 and 1984, respectively. His MS work focused on the energy and mass balance of a small ice cap on Northern Ellesmere Island in the Canadian high Arctic. After a brief stay at the Lamont Doherty Environmental Observatory, he entered the PhD program within the Department of Geography at the University of Colorado, Boulder, graduating in 1989. His dissertation addressed Arctic sea ice circulation and its links with atmospheric variability. He is now a Senior Research Scientist at the National Snow and Ice Data Center, part of the Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences at the University of Colorado.
His early research focused on variability in Arctic weather patterns, and aspects of the Arctic’s hydrologic cycle. Over time it became increasing clear that the Arctic environment was rapidly changing, characterized by increases in surface air temperature, thawing of permafrost, and most notably, a shrinking sea ice cover. Dr. Serreze’s research over the past decade has largely turned to understanding these synergistic changes.
Community service has included contributions to the National Science Foundation, the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration, and the World Climate Research Programme. He is a member of the American Geophysical Union and the American Meteorological Society. As of October 2007, Dr. Serreze had authored or co-authored 84 publications in peer-reviewed journals and 8 book chapters. His textbook with Roger Barry, “The Arctic Climate System”, published in 2005 by the Cambridge University Press, won an award from the Atmospheric Science Librarians International.
Scott B. Luthcke is a geophysicist at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center’s Planetary Geodynamics Laboratory. His research focuses on the reduction of satellite tracking and altimeter data for planetary science investigations. His recent research focuses on the recovery of local time variable gravity solutions for cryopsheric and hydrologic mass flux investigations. Scott is currently a member of the ICESat, GRACE and Jason-2/OSTM science teams and is a member of the American Geophysical Union. Scott has authored 25 scientific peer-reviewed papers including his recent paper on Greenland mass flux published in the November 24, 2006 issue of Science. He received a BS in Physics from the University of Maryland and an MS in Physics from the Johns Hopkins University. He has received the NASA/GSFC Exceptional Achievement award (2006) and the NASA/GSFC Honor Award in Earth Science (2007).
Dr. Konrad Steffen received his education at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH) in Zurich, Switzerland. He studied first electrical engineering and then graduated in natural sciences; with a master degree in 1977 on the climatology of the high Canadian Arctic, and a Ph.D. degree in 1983 on the climate impact of an ice free ocean. He s a Professor at the University of Colorado teaching climatology and remote sensing and his research involves the study of processes related to climate variability and change, cryospheric interaction in Polar Regions, and sea level rise based on in-situ measurements, satellite observations, and model approximations. He has lead field expedition to the Greenland ice sheet and other Arctic regions for the past consecutive 33 years to measure the dynamic response of the ice masses under a warming climate; since 1990 he established a climate monitoring network on the Greenland ice sheet with a total of 22 instrument towers transmitting data via satellite link every hour for process studies and model verification. He participated in the field measurements and first publication that proposed the dynamic response of the Greenland ice sheet to climate warming in 2002.His work has been featured by several TV stations and popular science paper.
Dr. Steffen serves on a number of national and international committees, most notably he is the co-chair of the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) World Climate Research Program (WCRP) Climate and Cryosphere Program (CliC), the vice president of the IUGG Association of Cryospheric Sciences, the former vice president of the Commission for Snow and Ice for the International Association for Hydrological Sciences, a member of the subcommittee on Earth science to advise the NASA administrator, and he is leading the cryosphere chapter for the for the U.S. Climate Science Program, Synthesis and Assessment Product 3.4 on Abrupt Climate Change.
Dr. Steffen is the director of the Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences (CIRES), the largest research unit at the University of Colorado Boulder Campus. He has published over 75 scientific papers in peer-review journals, and 5 book chapters.
Cyclone Sidr Devastates Bangladesh 1
Bangladesh dated with a nightmare as cyclone Sidr ripped through the southwestern coast late Thursday, killing over 700 people and demolishing houses, crops, vegetables and trees alike along its trail of devastation over an area of thousands of square kilometers.Dr. Jeff Masters, Wunderground:Packing winds over 220km an hour, the fierce tropical storm roared across the shoreline after it hit landfall at the Khulna-Barisal coast at 7:30pm Thursday, cutting off all communications and utility services across the country.
“I’ve never seen anything like this in my 47 years life,” Khalilur Rahman, a government official in Patuakhali, told The Daily Star over telephone last night. “It was a panic beyond description. People found no way but to keep on screaming as long as the cyclone ran rampage here.”
Storm surge is usually the biggest killer in Bangladesh cyclones, and was responsible for the vast majority of the 140,000 people killed in the 1991 Bangladesh Cyclone. This storm struck eastern Bangladesh as a Category 5 cyclone—the only Category 5 cyclone on record to hit the country. The triangular shape of Bengal Bay funnels high surges into the apex of the triangle where Bangladesh sits, and the shallow bottom of the bay allows extraordinarily high storm surges to pile up. The maximum storm surge from Sidr was probably 20-25 feet, and affected the regions near and to the right of where the eye made landfall. The eye fortunately came ashore in the Sundarbans Forest, the world’s largest forest of mangrove trees. This region is the least populated coastal area in the country. Storm surge levels of 10-20 feet probably affected the provinces of Barguna and Paruakhali, which are more heavily populated. Undoubtedly, the storm surge killed many more people in these provinces, and Sidr’s death toll will go much higher. However, Bangladesh has done a much better job providing shelters and evacuating people during cyclones since the 1991 storm. Over 650,000 people did evacuate from Sidr, and it is unlikely the death toll will put the storm on the list of the world’s deadliest cyclones of all time.
The International Federation of Red Cross/Red Crescent Societies has launched an emergency appeal for support.
NOAA Arctic Report Card
 Atmosphere Sea Ice Greenland |
Biology Ocean Land |
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| Warming and mixed signals | ||
NOAA has recently debuted a new website, Arctic Report Card 2007, summarizing the state of environmental changes in the arctic, linking each section with the detailed reports from NOAA researchers. Their summary:
Collectively, the observations indicate that the overall warming of the Arctic system continued in 2007. There are some elements that are stabilizing or returning to climatological norms. These mixed tendencies illustrate the sensitivity and complexity of the Arctic System.
Wildfires and the Climate Crisis
The Select Committee on Energy Independence & Global Warming will hold a hearing on Thursday, November 1, at 9:30 a.m. in room TBD. The hearing is entitled, “Wildfires and the Climate Crisis.” Witnesses will be by invitation only.