Timex
1601
NASA Study shows that Rainforests increase their carbon sink efficiency in response to heightened amounts of atmospheric carbon.
This is an interesting new thing that we didn’t previously know. Apparently, as we pump more carbon into the atmosphere, the rainforests actually pull more and more of it out.
The problem there is that the carbon the rainforests absorb doesn’t stay in the “sink” too long compared with the slower-growing temperate or northern forests - rainforest trees grow quickly, die quickly and rot quickly, so they will also release all that carbon in a relatively short time as well. Then of course there is the small issue with the whole shrinking of the rainforests thing.
Still, it’s more data, and more data is always good.
How a DVD Case Killed a Whale.
In August of 2014, biologists from the Virginia Aquarium and Marine Science Center Stranding Response Team were notified of an unusual sighting in the Elizabeth River, a busy, industrial tributary of the Chesapeake Bay. A 45-foot-long young female sei whale was spotted swimming up the river, far from the deep waters of the Atlantic where the species, listed as endangered, is normally found.
The whale seemed disoriented. Barco and her colleagues followed it for several days in an attempt to protect it from a fatal collision with a ship. Despite these efforts, the whale was found dead a few days later.
A necropsy revealed the animal had swallowed a shard of rigid, black plastic that lacerated its stomach, preventing it from feeding. The weakened whale also had been struck by a ship and suffered a fractured vertebrae. “It was a very long and painful decline,” Barco says.
The shard that caused the whale’s demise was identified as a broken piece of DVD case.
kind of in relation to those studies on not keeping on burning fossil fuels if we want to keep under a 2 degrees C temp rise.
‘Nebraska court approves controversial Keystone XL pipeline route’:
http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2015/jan/09/keystone-xl-pipeline-nebraska-supreme-court
Money now (and for the short term future) trumps keeping the world good for human habitation over the next 200+ years. Yey money!
Timex
1605
I think that’s kind of hyperbolic, don’t you Zak?
I mean, imagine they don’t build the pipe line. What happens. Will that prevent the usage of those fossil fuels?
No. It’ll just be piped out to the pacific coast.
My concerns about the keystone pipeline don’t center on trying to prevent access to Canadian fuel resources, because that isn’t gonna happen. Rather, i just want to make sure the pipeline is constructed safely, and that those operating it have a suitable level of responsibility for it. Hell, most of the pipeline is already constructed, and this is just the northern most branch.
roll on +2 degrees C! It will be teh awesome!
(ok it won’t, not really. However if you are maybe part of a survivalist group, in good health (as in fit and athletic) and can live without modern technology, you’ll do alright, probably).
is that better? I was trying to be subtle :)
Timex
1607
I wasn’t making light of the potential severity of impacts due to climate change, but rather pointing out that the keystone pipeline isn’t quite that important to it. That oil isn’t going to stay in the ground even if you don’t build the pipe.
yeah but it is all part of our Elites current ‘wrong’ thinking about wealth creation. They are driving us to (near) extinction, and they themselves will not be able to isolate themselves from that fully. It’s greed making people crazy is all :)
…and smart boffins agree :)
‘Stanford professors urge withdrawal from fossil fuel investments’:
http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2015/jan/11/stanford-professors-fossil-fuel-investments
Three hundred professors at Stanford, including Nobel laureates and this year’s Fields medal winner, are calling on the university to rid itself of all fossil fuel investments, in a sign that the campus divestment movement is gathering force.
In a letter to Stanford’s president, John Hennessy, and the board of trustees, made available exclusively to the Guardian, the faculty members call on the university to recognise the urgency of climate change and divest from all oil, coal and gas companies.
Stanford, which controls a $21.4bn (£14.2bn) endowment, eliminated direct investments in coalmining companies last May, making it the most prominent university to cut its ties to the industries that cause climate change. Months later, however, the university invested in three oil and gas companies.
Campus divestment campaigns have spread to about 300 universities and colleges over the last few years, but are largely dominated by students. The Stanford letter was initiated by faculty, and signed by the first female winner of the prestigious Fields prize in mathematics, Maryam Mizarkhani, as well as the Nobel laureates Douglas Osheroff and Roger Kornberg, Paul Ehrlich, a population analyst, Terry Root, a biologist and UN climate report author, and others – 300 faculty members in total.
The letter calls on Stanford to pull out of all fossil fuel investments, not just coal. “The urgency and magnitude of climate change call not for partial solutions, however admirable; they demand the more profound and thorough commitment embodied in divestment from all fossil-fuel companies,” the letter says.
This is a debate becoming more common in US higher education, from my understanding. iirc, American University (in DC) made the determination that they were beholden by their charter to use their current endowments to obtain the highest return available (kind of a fiduciary responsibility), but they opened up a new, entirely separate line that people could put money into that would only go toward green investments. I wouldn’t be shocked to see something like that happen with Stanford.
DTG
1612
Well, the first U.S. off-shore wind farm, which would actually be of a meaningful size (instead of measly 1 or 2 MW turbines here and there), looks like it’s probably dead:
“The controversial Cape Wind power project planned for development off Nantucket Island in Massachusetts has suffered what may be a fatal blow … the two local utilities that had contracts to buy power from the offshore wind farm terminated their contracts as the Cape Wind developers missed an end-of-year deadline to obtain financing and start construction…Cape Wind President James Gordon wrote to NStar and National Grid on Dec. 31, “Cape Wind has been the subject of extended, unprecedented and relentless litigation by the Alliance to Protect Nantucket Sound, Inc. that prevents Cape Wind from achieving the remaining Critical Milestones under the [power purchase agreement] as of this date.” The Cape Wind project in Nantucket Sound has been under development for 15 years and faced a blizzard of opposition and litigation over that period, including challenges from the Kennedy family…”
I think another main reason for the contract cancellations is cheap natural gas and the resulting plummeting price of wholesale electricity (except in the winter in the Northeast). The utilities wanted a way out and they got it. They get enough renewable energy to meet the law from large Canadian hydro. The hypocrisy is obvious at least to me. Blue Massachusetts, all for renewable zero-carbon power, except when it’s near where they live. This would be a 400+ MW capacity wind farm. Yes, it would alter how Nantucket Sound looks. But conventional power plants alter the landscape where they are. If we want an alternative energy future then we need to accept that, finally, it may actually need to be in our backyard and not somewhere we don’t need to see it. I think it would make the Sound look cooler, but I don’t own $50,000,000 worth of property on the shore of Cape Cod. I like to think that even if I did, I’d be for this.
Timex
1613
I actually worked on generating wind maps over new England that were used to determine placement of the wind turbines.
The location off the coast was so far out that they were barely visible to the naked eye. They were like little specs on the horizon.
The people who opposed them were a bunch of rich, left wing douchebags who talked about how they cared about the earth, until doing so required the tiniest, most insignificant sacrifice, at which point they fought it tooth and nail.
Seriously, they generated pictures of what the horizon would look like with them and you wouldn’t have even noticed they were there. Ridiculous.
Well, I guess when someone is wealthy enough to have an entire ocean as their “infinity pool,” they don’t want anyone messing with it.
Not so say I find those behemots wonderful to look at. Seriously, we have many of them around here (you can’t make a 2 hour roadtrip without seeng dozens of them) and they are a beautiful feat of engineering to behold… They’ve become part of the landscape, even Almodovar uses them in his movies now…
Timex
1616
Honestly, I don’t mind the look at them at all. They have a cool “futuristic” vibe to me, and represent technology and the natural world working well together… but I understand that’s just an opinion.
However, in the case we are talking here, they’re so far out that they’re barely noticable.
Here’s a rendering of what it would have looked like from the shore:
In the uk we are short of space, and i don’t think you should cover every landscape view with them, but i never would object to them around where i am. We have also, as Timex mentioned in his neck of the woods, had big campaigns against them due to spoiling the view etc. My main concerns with them are impact on migrating birds. Maybe for the uk we should focus less on windfarms (good for places like the USA, Canada, Spain etc where there is huge open space) and maybe more on ensuring each house can have it’s own wind turbine? And focus on out at sea like that scheme Timex was involved in? Add in solar and heat pipes for new house build regulations, and get back to subsidies for adoption on current houses and we could make it all work.
Will Gadd: ‘We were climbing ice that isn’t going to be there next week’:
When explorer Will Gadd set out to climb ice on every continent in the world 10 years ago, he assumed he would have plenty of time to accomplish his goal. With only Africa and Antarctica left on his to-climb list, however, the professional free climber and National Geographic Adventurer of the Year recently discovered that he would have to act sooner than he thought.
“I’d seen pictures of the ice on Kilimanjaro — and there are other peaks in Africa that have ice too — and I thought ‘I’ll get around to that one day, glaciers are there forever, they don’t go away,’” he said. “It didn’t really hit me until I started reading research papers on Africa, and one of them said the ice on Kilimanjaro could be gone in as little as five years.”
Arriving at the peak of the tallest mountain in Africa last October, Gadd could hardly believe that the massive ice structures he’d seen in recent pictures were the same as the small frozen formations that greeted him.
“The ice that I had pictures of wasn’t there, it was gone. The things I planned to climb were gone,” he said. “It was really striking to stand on top of the mountain and look around and feel this absence of ice.”
Approximately 85% of the glacial ice on Mount Kilimanjaro disappeared between 1912 and 2011, and the remainder could disappear before 2020, according to a 2012 report by Nasa. These are the same glaciers that survived three periods of abrupt climate change thousands of years ago, the most recent of which brought with it a 300 year drought starting in 2200 BC.
Yeah, don’t talk to me about solar. In Spain, at current efficient levels, solar becomes profitable at ten years more or less (we have lots of sun), far below the lifespan of solar cells. So one wonders why don’t we have more? Well, because the government has forbidden small operators to sell the electricity back into the network, which basically makes solar at home to need batteries/supercondenser (which increases costs a lot) and stops the industrial adoption of solar. Oh, and they did this retroactively. Because of complains of the main energy companies. Many people with tens of thousand of euros invested were fucked. Family businesses, mostly…
I can understand the argument that subsidies for renewables are expensive (specially in the current economic situation here). Although I still think they are worthwhile in the long term. But actively fighting against adoption into a free market? That’s sabotage.
I’m also very angry at anti-nuclear ecologists, which basically are getting to close nuclears here, which contaminate much less than any other viable option. It’s a profoundly unscientific position, almost as bad as the pro-oil conservatives. I mean, yes, renewables are preferred, but until we get there, nuclear is not a bad option. Even with all the crisis we have seen in it’s lifetime, it’s impact on health and climate (worldwide) is negligible compared to coal and oil (if more impactful at a local scale)…
We are very close to make renewables tecnologically feasible in some countries, but political attitude is abysmal across all the spectrum. It’s heartbreaking.
This is so sad. I’m hoping that when the North pole becomes ice free in summer (not long now, even going from by the most optimistic estimates), there will be a sudden public acknowledgement of the issue that will force some real action. I just hope it’s not too late then…
This goes back to the point i was making on GM, but what we have allowed to happen is for global companies (that only care about profit) to be more powerful than our governments and our democratic process. If we don’t change THAT then we don’t have a hope in hell of leaving a world worth enjoying for our grandchildren, it is that close a call.
Yes, but I don’t go about critizising hidroelectric energy generation (what those specific companies do -among other things- in Spain) and saying that it’s bad for the world. I attack the policies, not the product (unless the product is also problematic).
Plus the GM case is different. That’s an unethical company pursuing a necessary and life-saving technology. The equivalence would be having Shell and other big oil companies pushing eolic and hidroelectric like crazy (but keeping it monopolized). It’s still evil corporate behaviour, but nothing even close to the reality we are facing.
If, for example, the solution proposed to global warming was to go back to the 1800s energy consumption levels (without breakground efficiency technology) I would equally call out those goals as unethical (we could not maintain quality of life and overall population health at those energy levels. Millions would suffer greatly).
