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Natural gas prices plunged on Thursday to levels last reached in 2002 after an Energy Department report showed that the amount of gas in storage had hit a record high for this time of year.

The sharp price decline of natural gas, to below $3 per thousand cubic feet from a peak of over $13 last summer, has been caused by a drop in demand from factories and homes because of the recession, coupled with a big expansion of domestic production over the last few years….

Gas executives saw a silver lining, arguing that the low prices would help them make a case in the Senate when it takes up energy and climate change legislation later this year. The gas companies want federal incentives to sway utilities to switch to gas from coal, and they want more government entities and businesses to convert their diesel bus and truck fleets to compressed natural gas….

Mr. McClendon said he hoped that low gas prices could stimulate more replacement of coal with gas by utilities, something that is beginning to happen in some places, and he was also hopeful a cold winter would spur demand.

“It doesn’t set the stage for $10 gas, but it does set the stage for $6 to $8 gas, which is in our view a fair price for consumers and producers,” Mr. McClendon added.

And that is enough to be a climate-mitigation game changer and back out over half of existing coal plants over the next two decades at low cost — if we can pass the climate and clean energy bill.

Nile Delta:  “We are going underwater. The sea will conquer our lands”:  The Nile Delta is under threat from rising sea levels. Without the food it produces, Egypt faces catastrophe

“We are going underwater,” the 34-year-old [farmer Maged] says simply. “It’s like an occupation: the rising sea will conquer our lands.”

Maged understands better than most the menace of coastal erosion, which is steadily ingesting the edge of Egypt in some places at an astonishing rate of almost 100m a year. Just a few miles from his home lies Lake Burrulus itself, where Nile flower spreads all the way out to trees on the horizon. Those trunks used to be on land; now they stand knee-deep in water.

Maged’s imperial imagery may sound overblown, but travel around Egypt’s vast, overcrowded Delta region and you hear the same terms used time and again to describe the impact climate change is having on these ancient lands. . . .

Two years ago, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change declared Egypt’s Nile Delta to be among the top three areas on the planet most vulnerable to a rise in sea levels, and even the most optimistic predictions of global temperature increase will still displace millions of Egyptians from one of the most densely populated regions on earth.

Global warming and a hotter solar cycle will bump up average atmospheric temperatures about a third of a degree by 2014, and then flatten out for the rest of the decade, suggest climate scientists. Temperate regions of the Northern Hemisphere, “especially Western Europe, will experience the largest warming,” almost 2 degrees Fahrenheit, says the study in the current Geophysical Research Letters led by Judith Lean of the Naval Research Laboratory in Washington D.C.

Earlier this week — Tuesday, Aug. 18, to be exact — New York City experienced an unlikely late-summer weather event. The high that day was 88 degrees F., just slightly above the average of 82 degrees F., but thankfully lower than the record 94 degrees F. But just before 10 p.m., the wind suddenly picked up, lightning flashed (one New Yorker caught what appears to be a lightning strike on camera), thunder clapped, and the most remarkable sound followed: that of hailstones clattering against cars and – more noticeably to those cowering inside – the outside portions of the city’s many air-conditioning units…

On Wednesday, we found out that 70 m,p.h. winds had felled hundreds of century-old trees in Central Park. “Central Park has been devastated,” Adrian Benepe, the city parks commissioner, told the New York Times.   “It created more damage than I’ve seen in 30 years of working in the parks.”

…  More intense storms are a common prediction for a warmer world. And to the degree that more powerful storms increase the probability of that droplet going up and down and up again — gaining ice mass with each trip — it’s probable that hailstorms may be more intense in the years to come.That was the conclusion of a 2007 study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Particularly, the authors note, storm severity increases as the temperature and humidity differences between distinct air masses at different altitudes increases. The cooler the air above relative to that below, the faster the hot air will rise, and the more intense the storm.

Can a direct appeal to our palates succeed where pleas to intellect and conscience have repeatedly come up short? That’s the hope of a group of French chefs, sommeliers, and chateau owners who last week published an op-ed in the newspaper Le Monde calling on President Nicolas Sarkozy to ensure that strict targets on carbon emissions be adopted at the UN climate summit this December in Copenhagen. If not, they warned, the nation’s vaunted wine industry will likely go up in smoke.

“The jewels of our common cultural heritage,” wrote more than 50 wine and gastronomy professionals (including Michelin-starred chefs Jean-Luc Rabanel and Marc Veyrat), are today in serious danger. Summer heat waves, hailstorms in Bordeaux, and new diseases coming from the south are already making the nation’s vineyards more vulnerable, and as extreme conditions proliferate, they could result in the permanent destruction of the terroirs responsible for France’s “elegant and refined” wines.

Warmer weather will mean higher alcohol levels, over-sunned aromatic ranges, and denser textures, said the letter, which was also signed by Greenpeace; in other words, the loss of the “unique soul” of French wines—not to mention the loss of the nation’s winemaking superiority to more northerly nations like Scotland and Sweden.

Talk of wine regions moving north as the climate warms up is nothing new: The website climatechangeandwine.com is devoted to the topic, for example, and in his Pocket Wine Book 2009, British writer Oz Clarke says that a 2-degree-Celcius rise by 2050 would dramatically alter the winemaking landscape. . . Here in the States, supporters of strong mitigation measures have recently hit upon a different strategy.

Just three days ago, the editorial page of The New York Times lamented that though advocates of early action on climate change have talked about everything from the possibilities of green jobs and the importance of keeping America competitive in the quest for new technologies to the moral obligations of one generation to the next, none of that has been enough “to fully engage the public” on the topic (or to overcome the lobbying efforts of the fossil fuel industry). To really get Americans to pay attention (as Dick Cheney could have told you years ago), you have to frame things in terms of national security.

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This entry was posted by Joe on Friday, August 21st, 2009 at 12:46 pm and is filed under Climate Progress. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.