Climate Progress

The “virtuous traveler” at the Toronto Star interviewed me for an article on offsetting air travel, “The winds of (climate) change.” The piece is pretty good. Here are some highlights:

Joseph Romm, a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress and author of Hell and High Water, is a critic of tree-planting as a carbon offset option.

“Trees take a long time to grow and they can be cut down,” he says. “I think planting and preserving trees is a good thing, but it won’t solve global warming.”

Offsets might “leave people with the impression that you can solve the climate problem by spending a few bucks,” he says. “The solution is going to take a lot of hard work for many decades.”

Still, he admits they are a step in the right direction.

“If you get well-credentialled offsets, it’s a good idea,” he says, suggesting that green-minded travellers seek out offset companies focused on clean energy projects.

The article focuses on the two offset companies that testified with me in July, Terrapass and Native Energy, both of whom seem well-credentialed. The article notes that a very high standard for offsets exists:

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So you want some do-it-yourself climate solutions. Popular Science is the place to go.

The magazine details how, for $300, you can build a vertical wind turbine (pictured below) for your home in about 3 days. It will generate 50 kilowatt-hours per month, which might be about 10% of your electricity use, depending on the size of your house and how efficient you are. You can also download plans at windstuffnow.

Or maybe you want something a tad bit easier to make, something to “keep your gadgets powered even when the grid fails you.” Follow these instructions, and for a mere three hours in work and $150 in parts, you’ll have your very own solar charger (pictured below).

But don’t worry, Denyers, it’s all just a grand coincidence that global warming theory predicts record rainstorms and flooding. The fact that the British and the Chinese link their record flooding to global warming should not stop us from burying our head in the sand mud. Still, the news from the Midwest is harsh:

Ferocious thunderstorms, heat and humidity added to the Midwest’s flooding misery Friday as thousands of people returned to damaged homes, many without electricity to run fans or pumps.

A sudden thunderstorm with 70 mph wind slammed into the Chicago area Thursday evening, tearing down huge trees and damaging buildings. In the suburbs, part of an industrial facility’s roof collapsed, injuring 40 people, and a tornado was reported as the storm moved into Michigan.

Early Friday, another band of thunderstorms was dumping more rain along a line from southern Iowa into Wisconsin.

Most of southern Iowa was under a flash flood watch through Friday evening as as much as 8 inches of rain fell, the National Weather Service said.

Après nous le deluge.

A very good article in the Washington Post lays out the problem we face.

“Global warming will intensify drought, and it will intensify floods,” explains Stephen Schneider, editor of the journal Climatic Change and a lead author for the authoritative Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). Why?

“As the air gets warmer, there will be more water in the atmosphere. That’s settled science…. You are going to intensify the hydrologic cycle. Where the atmosphere is configured to have high pressure and droughts, global warming will mean long, dry periods. Where the atmosphere is configured to be wet, you will get more rain, more gully washers.”

The droughts will be especially bad. How bad?

Richard Seager, a senior researcher at Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory of Columbia University, looked at 19 computer models of the future under current global warming trends. He found remarkable consistency: Sometime before 2050, the models predicted, the Southwest will be gripped in a dry spell akin to the Great Dust Bowl drought that lasted through most of the 1930s.

Droughts and water shortages already been driving conflict around the globe:

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Six Western states and parts of Canada join to cut greenhouse gases - San Francisco Chronicle. Arizona, California, New Mexico, Oregon, Utah, and Washington along with Canadian provinces Manitoba and British Columbia “have set a goal to reduce the region’s greenhouse gas emissions about 25 percent by 2020.”

Priority changes on green policies - LA Times. “Reflecting a shift in priorities under the Democratic majority, Congress is moving to spend as much as $6.7 billion next fiscal year to combat global warming, an increase of nearly one-third from the current year.” Still, I agree with Frank O’Donnell of Clean Air Watch: “Those spending measures are no substitute for better fuel-economy standards and tough caps on greenhouse gas emissions.”

Water Levels in 3 Great Lakes Dip Far Below Normal - New York Times. The reason for the dip is not perfectly understood, but it appears to be a combination of factors including climate change.

U.S. green project enters Canadian home market - canada.com. All about the LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) for Homes program, an important marketplace innovation.

Heat Spells Trouble for France’s Nuclear Reactors - NPR (Audio). Nuclear power is supposed to fight global warming, but, ironically, “many French reactors have had trouble operating during hot spells.” This story explains why.

Capturing CO2 and injecting it into a well to squeeze more oil out of the ground is not real carbon sequestration. Why? When the recovered oil is burned, it releases at least as much CO2 as was stored (and possibly much more). Therefore, CO2 used for such enhanced oil recovery (EOR) does not reduce net carbon emissions and should not be sold to the public as a carbon offset.

Yet a company, Blue Source, LLC, proposes to do just that, to capture the CO2 from a fertilizer plant, pipe it to an oil field, and inject it into wells for EOR :

The company hopes to profit from the project by earning credits for the carbon reductions in voluntary carbon markets and by selling carbon dioxide to energy companies.

The deal will cut CO2 from the plant by about 650,000 tonnes per year by permanently storing the emissions in the oil fields, he said. The U.S. Department of Energy says that capturing CO2 from power plants for enhanced oil recovery could greatly boost U.S. oil reserves while permanently keeping CO2 from reaching the atmosphere.

Uhh, no. To repeat, if the captured CO2 is used to extract oil that releases CO2 when it is burned, then how is that offsetting anything?

The key ratio is CO2 injected vs. CO2 released from recovered oil. Fortunately, BP and UCLA did that life-cycle analysis (subs. req’d) in 2001 and concluded, “the EOR activity is almost carbon-neutral when comparing net storage potential and gasoline emissions from the additional oil extracted.” And that may be optimistic. The study notes:

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Climate Progress is happy to introduce Rep. Jay Inslee (D-WA) as the latest guest blogger. Jay has long been a leader on energy and climate issues (his full bio is here). In March, he was appointed to the 15-member Select Committee on Energy Independence and Global Warming. He has a forthcoming book on climate solutions with Center for American Progress Senior Fellow Bracken Hendricks — Apollo’s Fire: Igniting America’s Clean Energy Economy. I’ve known Jay since we appeared on a panel together in January 2007. He is uniquely qualified to provide an insider’s view on climate issues. Welcome, Jay!

We lost a battle but won a war against the Bush Administration’s refusal to address global warming on Tuesday. The battle means little. The war could mean a lot.

As a congressman from Seattle, I joined Senator John Kerry (D-MA) and other plaintiffs in supporting a lawsuit to force the Administration to issue the statutorily required national scientific assessment of global warming. Tuesday, Federal District court Judge Sandra Brown Armstrong ordered the Administration to comply with its legal duty to provide the American people a full and fair assessment of the science underpinning this national threat, as the law requires.

For an administration bound and determined to ignore the clear science of global warming, this is a traumatic event. For America, it is a long overdue win for the environment — and our grandchildren. In its ruling, the court held that Senator Kerry and I would not become parties to the case because we have access to a congressional remedy unlike the other plaintiffs. Since we obtained the result we desired, we can consider it a total victory nonetheless.

This does not mean that we are out of the woods yet, of course. The President’s outright refusal to accept a cap and trade system for carbon dioxide is a major hurdle to an effective global warming strategy. But this ruling means President Bush will not be able to argue that there are no costs to America for his policy of rank indifference to this major threat. In short, he may still be able to run, but he cannot hide.

It is about time the Administration is required to follow science rather than their political allies. This legal ruling means that we are one step forward in being able to require them to do just that.

I’ve argued that scientists are not overestimating climate change and in fact are underestimating it because they are omitting crucial amplifying feedbacks from their models. In this post, I’ll show how these omissions suggest the climate has a “point of no return” that severely constrains the safe level of human-generated emissions.

A major 2005 study (subs. req’d) led by NCAR climate researcher David Lawrence, found that virtually the entire top 11 feet of permafrost around the globe could disappear by the end of this century. Using the first “fully interactive climate system model” applied to study permafrost, the researchers found that if we somehow stabilize CO2 concentrations in the air at 550 ppm, permafrost would plummet from over 4 million square miles today to 1.5 million. If concentrations hit 690 ppm, permafrost would shrink to just 800,000 square miles.

While these projections were done with one of the world’s most sophisticated climate system models, the calculations do not include the feedback effect of the released carbon from the permafrost, which has locked in it more carbon than the atmosphere (and much of that is in the form of methane, a potent greenhouse gas).

That is to say, the CO2 concentrations in the model rise only as a result of direct emissions from humans, with no extra emissions counted from soils or tundra. Thus they are conservative numbers–or overestimates–of how much CO2 concentrations have to rise to trigger irreversible melting.

How do carbon cycle feedbacks constrain future safe levels of CO2 emissions? There’s really only one major climate model that can answer that crucial question. (more…)

The Center for American Progress is having a panel Monday at 1 pm at its DC headquarters in conjunction with the release of the report, Forecast: Storm Warnings.

Featured Panelists:
Dr. Peter Webster, Professor in Earth and Atmospheric Sciences, Georgia Tech
Mayor Richard T. Crotty (R), Orange County, Florida
John B. Copenhaver, President and CEO, DRI International
Jane Bullock, Former Chief of Staff, FEMA Director James Lee Witt

Come if you can: I’ve heard Webster a number of times, and he’s a great speaker — plus he is sure to talk about his important new paper, “Heightened tropical cyclone activity in the North Atlantic: natural variability or climate trend?”

I’ll post the report and the video when they’re available.

NPR’s John Dimsdale interviewed me Monday on Day to Day about “The Cost of Coal.”

Mike Tidwell interviewed me Tuesday on Earthbeat for a climate news round up. I’m at the 40-minute mark, but you might like the earlier discussion on “the vast divide between National Geographic Magazine’s editorial stance and its advertising.” Don’t miss the part where Mike says Hell and High Water is the best book on climate.