Climate Progress

While wind and solar get the media attention of a sexy starlet, good old geothermal power is treated like an aging character actor.

But geothermal energy is, in fact, sizzling hot these days. Big-time investors from Warren Buffet to Goldman Sachs to Morgan Stanley to Google have begun investing:

In 2007, private equity firms invested more than $400 million in geothermal energy, which is derived from hot water under the Earth’s surface and can be used for space heating or generating electricity

Why the interest in a form of energy that President Bush repeatedly tried to zero out of the Department of Energy Budget? One reason is the soaring cost of conventional power, like coal and nuclear. Another is the growing awareness of just how much is zero-carbon electricity will need in coming decades.

But perhaps most important for this reemerging technology, in the 2005 energy bill, Congress finally extended the renewable energy tax credit to geothermal “which at 2 cents per kilowatt hour for the first ten years, can account for a third of the cost of a project” — and which will expire in December unless Congress gets its act together (see here)!

The U.S. currently has 3 gigaWatts (3000 megaWatts) of geothermal, one third of the world’s capacity, generating $1.8 billion electricity sales. What is the ultimate potential?

The US Geological Survey estimates the US could generate 150,000 megawatts.

A major 2007 study by MIT on Enhanced Geothermal Systems (EGS) found that it could be a provider of substantial baseload (24/7) power:

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What is the point of no return for the climate — the level of CO2 concentrations beyond which catastrophic outcomes are virtually unstoppable?

No one knows for sure, but my vote goes for the point at which we start to lose a substantial fraction of the tundra’s carbon to the atmosphere — substantial being 0.1% per year! As we saw in Part 1, frozen away in the permafrost is more carbon than the atmosphere currently contains (and much of that is in the form of methane, a far more potent greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide).

What is the point of no return for the tundra? 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 tried to 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. 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.

In short, those would-be points of atmospheric stabilization, 550 ppm or 690 ppm, aren’t stable at all — they are past the point of no return. We must stay well below 450 ppm to save the tundra and hence the climate.

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[This 3-parter will look at the tundra-climate connection, modeling of tundra loss from future warming, and some new research.]

The tundra is probably the single most important amplifying carbon-cycle feedback. None of the IPCC’s climate models, however, include carbon emissions from a defrosting tundra as a feedback.

Yet, as NOAA reported last month (here), levels of methane (a far more potent greenhouse gas than CO2) rose last year for the first time since 1998, which may be an early indication of thawing permafrost. So it seems like a good a time for a review and update of what we know.

The tundra or permafrost is soil that stays below freezing (0°C or 32°F) for at least two years. Normally, plants capture carbon dioxide from the atmosphere during photosynthesis and slowly release that carbon back into the atmosphere after they die. But the Arctic acts like a freezer, and the decomposition rate is very low. The tundra is a carbon locker. We open it at our own risk.

We now know the Arctic contains far more carbon than previously thought (Science, subs. req’d) — nearly 1000 billion metric tons of carbon (some 3600 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide). That exceeds all the carbon dioxide currently in the atmosphere. The permafrost may contain more than a third of all carbon stored in soils globally, much of it in the form of methane. Problem: Global warming is melting the top layer of permafrost, creating the possibility of large releases of soil carbon, and that is a potentially devastating vicious cycle. We are defrosting the tundra freezer-and at an unprecedented rate.

We know methane is bubbling up out of the tundra far faster than previously thought (Nature, subs. req’d). In fact, a 2006 study by Alaska researchers (GRL, subs. req’d) finds rapid degradation to key elements of the permafrost “that previously had been stable for 1000s of years.” The study, titled “Abrupt increase in permafrost degradation in Arctic Alaska,” concludes that this recent degradation exceeds changes seen earlier in the 20th Century by a factor of ten to a hundred.

What’s happening in Siberia is even more alarming:

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The most serious impacts of global warming involve water and the hydrological cycle:

• Sea level rise and storm surges
• Droughts and desertification
• Deluges and Flooding
• Loss of snowpack and inland glaciers

That’s why “The Water Environment Federation (WEF) and a coalition of national water organizations called on Congress to recognize the severe impacts that global climate change will likely have on water resources in the United States.” The groups noted that climate change is already begun to effect water resources around the country. The letter to Congress (here) calls for a number of measures including

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I don’t. But should you?

You can’t read everything or listen to everybody. Life is just too short. I debated Christy years ago so I know he tries to peddle unscientific nonsense when he thinks he can get away with it.

But some of the more than 360 (!) comments in my recent post “The deniers are winning, especially with the GOP” can’t seem to get enough of the analyses by these two scientists University of Alabama in Huntsville (UAH) who famously screwed up the satellite temperature measurements of the troposphere.

In the interest of saving you some time, which is a major goal of this blog, let’s see why these are two people you can program your mental DVR to fast forward through. First off, they were wrong — dead wrong — for a very long time, which created one of the most enduring denier myths, that the satellite data didn’t show the global warming that the surface temperature data did. As RealClimate wrote yesterday:

We now know, of course, that the satellite data set confirms that the climate is warming , and indeed at very nearly the same rate as indicated by the surface temperature records. Now, there’s nothing wrong with making mistakes when pursuing an innovative observational method, but Spencer and Christy sat by for most of a decade allowing — indeed encouraging — the use of their data set as an icon for global warming skeptics. They committed serial errors in the data analysis, but insisted they were right and models and thermometers were wrong. They did little or nothing to root out possible sources of errors, and left it to others to clean up the mess, as has now been done.

Amazingly (or not), the “serial errors in the data analysis” all pushed the (mis)analysis in the same, wrong direction. Coincidence? You decide. But I find it hilarious that the deniers and delayers still quote Christy/Spencer/UAH analysis lovingly, but to this day dismiss the “hockey stick” and anything Michael Mann writes, when his analysis was in fact vindicated by the august National Academy of Sciences in 2006 (see New Scientist’s “Climate myths: The ‘hockey stick’ graph has been proven wrong“).

In their solo careers, Spencer and Christy are still pros at bad analysis. (more…)

Normally I would listen to Robert Hirsch and the legendary Charlie Maxwell, over CNBC’s “Mad” Jim Cramer. But Hirsch (here) and Maxwell (here) are making headlines for saying $12-$15 gasoline is around the corner, based on Maxwell’s projection of oil “reaching $180 a barrel in 2015 and $300 a barrel in 2020.”

Sorry guys, every extra $40 barrel is another dollar a gallon or so at the pump. Don’t quite know how they did the math, but they did it wrong.

When Mad Money’s Jim Cramer is the voice of sanity, you know the energy world is topsy-turvy, but I happened to catch him explaining to Matt Lauer on Today that such prices take us to $6 to $7 over the next few years, yes, but $12 to $15 gasoline requires a price of oil that the world is exceedingly unlikely to get to any time soon — $450 to $500 a barrel by my estimate. The world would almost certainly go into a deep global recession long before we hit those prices.

But the situation is dire, as I’ve noted many times (see below). The WSJ has a front page article today, “Energy Watchdog Warns Of Oil-Production Crunch: IEA Official Says Supplies May Plateau Below Expected Demand,” which begins ominously

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This past Saturday, Governor Sebelius vetoed the third (and final) piece of legislation that proposed two new coal-fired power plants in western Kansas.

There’s still a chance that legislators will attempt an override on May 29th. Like last time, an override is a given in the Senate, but the House votes are in question.

Her comments are starting to sting, and you can tell she’s sick of the shenanigans:

Rather than working toward a compromise solution, legislative leaders recklessly chose to jeopardize important initiatives for businesses and communities across our state by combining them with energy legislation I have previously vetoed twice. …this maneuver has done nothing to address the issues at hand - developing comprehensive energy policy, providing base-load energy power for Western Kansas, implementing carbon mitigation strategies and capitalizing on our incredible assets for additional wind power.

This third attempt to build the coal plants is unique in that the legislation pairs the coal plants with economic development incentives. Sounds like it should give coal proponents a leg up, until you find out that under the Kansas constitution, no single piece of legislation can undertake two subjects. So there’s a good chance that for this legislative session, the final attempt will be forced to die with a whimper. Let’s hope so.

– Kari Manlove

Roger Pielke has jumped the shark.

The ultraconservative Washington Times, in yet another media piece that misunderstands the recent Nature article on warming (see here), writes:

Roger A. Pielke, environmental studies professor at the University of Colorado, and not previously a global warming skeptic, reacted to the Nature article: “Climate models are of no practical use beyond providing some intellectual authority in the promotional battle over global-warming policy.”

Who is this “not previously a global warming skeptic”? Let me call him Mr. Pielke, since, unlike Dr. Jekyll’s, Mr. Hyde, Dr. Pielke and Mr. Pielke look exactly the same. The friendly non-skeptical heretic Dr. Pielke explicitly said on this blog that the “acceptable level” of atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide is 450 to 500 ppm (see here). The friendly Dr. Pielke has also said achieving such a target would require more than 14 wedges (see here), which is a bloody lot of effort.

But Mr. Pielke says climate models have no practical use. Yet it is climate models that tell us that if we don’t stabilize near 450 ppm, the consequences for the climate and humanity will be an unmitigated catastrophe. If climate models are of no practical use, then why go to all that effort mitigating? Why not do nothing — as the Washington Times prefers — and just go to 1000 ppm?

That’s why Mr. Pielke is the go-to guy for quotes on not mitigating …

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The year of living stupidly is over. No longer must we put up with the nonsense that Bush’s policies are anything but an outright catastrophe for greenhouse gas emissions and future generations.

The EIA reported yesterday:

U.S. carbon dioxide emissions from burning fossil fuels increased by 1.6 percent in 2007…. Factors that drove the emissions increase included … a higher carbon intensity of electricity supply.

President Bush immediately released a statement:

We are effectively contributing to the problem of global climate change through flawed energy policy, obstructionist domestic and international climate policy, and general disinformation.

Okay, he didn’t release that statement, but he should have, given that after EIA revealed the temporary dip last year, he claimed:

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The list of very knowledgeable folk who still are pushing no-till farming as a greenhouse gas mitigation strategy even though science passed them by a while ago include:

• Sen. John McCain (see “Relying on offsets = Rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic)
• Princeton University*
• The Chicago Climate Exchange
• The Nicholas Institute for Environmental Policy Solutions

I buried the science in the McCain post, but it deserves higher visibility. As a major review article from Agriculture, Ecosystems and Environment, “Tillage and soil carbon sequestration–What do we really know?” concluded:

In essentially all cases where conservation tillage was found to sequester C[arbon], soils were only sampled to a depth of 30 cm or less, even though crop roots often extend much deeper. In the few studies where sampling extended deeper than 30 cm, conservation tillage has shown no consistent accrual of SOC [soil organic carbon], instead showing a difference in the distribution of SOC, with higher concentrations near the surface in conservation tillage and higher concentrations in deeper layers under conventional tillage.… Long-term, continuous gas exchange measurements have also been unable to detect C gain due to reduced tillage. Though there are other good reasons to use conservation tillage, evidence that it promotes C sequestration is not compelling.

[Conservation tillage is “broadly defined as any tillage method that leaves sufficient crop residue in place to cover at least 30% of the soil surface after planting.]

This is actually not especially new research. The review article went online in June 2006, and, of course, as a review article, it was based on even earlier research — including a 1981 (!) study that came to the same exact conclusion:

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