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- Obama wins Nobel Peace Prize in part because "the USA is now playing a more constructive role in meeting the great climatic challenges the world is confronting." Looks like he'll be going to Copenhagen after all!
- Solar Decathalon 2009 Innovations, Part 1: Integrated Site Design
- Is it just too damn late? Part 1, the Science
- Twitter petition to thank Apple for quitting Chamber over climate change
- The Invention of Lying about Climate Change
- Wall Street Journal puzzled by a climate, clean energy and security bill that achieves multiple benefits
| Posted: 09 Oct 2009 06:06 AM PDT In a stunning announcement (full text below), "The Norwegian Nobel Committee has decided that the Nobel Peace Prize for 2009 is to be awarded to President Barack Obama for his extraordinary efforts to strengthen international diplomacy and cooperation between peoples." Obama won, in part, for reversing the immoral efforts of the Cheney-Bush administration to block and subvert international climate negotiations:
We already knew that "Obama was willing to attend Copenhagen climate talks," if he were invited. In an exclusive interview, Andrew Light, Center for American Progress Senior Fellow and an expert on international climate talks, explained to CP that now, effectively, he has been:
Light coordinates CAP's participation in the Global Climate Network, focusing on international climate change policy and the future of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change. He is also director of the Center for Global Ethics at George Mason University. He adds some historical perspective:
While some may argue that this award is premature, I disagree. This is a clear statement by the Nobel Committee not merely of the importance of US multilateralism to genuine progress toward global peace, but also of their understanding that climate change has become a critical international issue. Unrestricted emissions of GHGs represent perhaps the gravest, preventable threat to future world peace — a growing source of future strife, refugees, conflict, and wars (see "Memorial Day, 2029"). Al Gore and the IPCC won in 2007 "for their work to alert the world to the threat of global warming." Alerting the world was and is vital. Taking action is even more crucial. Obama and his international negotiating team led by Secretary of State Clinton have helped create the first genuine chance that the entire world will come together and agree to sharply diverge from the catastrophic business-as-usual greenhouse gas emissions path. This award simultaneously acknowledges what they have achieved and pushes them and the world toward delivering on Obama's promise. It is well deserved. Here is the Nobel committee's full statement:
Kudos to President Obama for inspiring the world and for starting to deliver on his unprecedented agenda of change. Kudos to the American public for rejecting the narrow, unilateralist, climate-destroying policies of his predecessor. |
| Solar Decathalon 2009 Innovations, Part 1: Integrated Site Design Posted: 09 Oct 2009 05:12 AM PDT This guest post on the Solar Decathalon is excerpted from The Dirt, the blog of the American Society of Landscape Architects (ASLA). The Solar Decathalon homes are open to the public from October 9-13 and 15-18. Future posts will feature other finalists.
Each of the 20 student teams received $100,000 from the DOE but still had to raise some $400,000-500,000 to pay for the 800-square feet homes. The DOE spokesman said that by teaming up with a range of companies, the students were learning "real world experience" that will make them the "energy leaders of tomorrow." Now in its fourth-generation, the Solar Decathalon is "pushing innovation and systems engineering." Some homes include microgrids that can be run through an iPhone. The homes will be judged by a team of architects, engineers, systems engineers, lighting specialists, and communications specialists on the overall architecture, engineering, comfort, marketability, appliances, lighting, and other aspects. The DOE said that not only must the homes be aesthetically appealing, but "they must also work." Using only solar power, the homes must heat 15 gallons of water to 150 degrees twice a day; run all appliances; heat and cool the homes; and maintain temperatures of 72-76 degrees with 40-60 percent relative humidity. The judges have also added a home entertainment component. TVs, powered by solar energy, must be able to run for six hours per day.. Additionally, six team members must live, eat, work within the homes from 10:00 AM to 6:00 PM every day during the competition. The homes are being wired by local D.C. energy provider, Pepco, which has connected the homes to the central energy grid. Zero net homes will get 100 points at the end of 10 days but will receive an extra 50 bonus points if they return surplus to the grid, creating an additional incentive for energy-efficiency. The DOE says, "Solar is here to stay, and these homes prove that it works." What the contest will prove is what technologies work best. A number of student homes included integrated systems with landscape elements at their core: Virginia Tech's Lumenhaus
Ben Johnson, ASLA, professor of Landscape Architecture, Virgina Tech, said Lumenhaus' site and landscape features were designed to contribute to the home enterprise and assist the solar-powered functions. Lumenhaus is "low-energy and high green," said Johnson. Instead of a green roof on top of the home (which Johnson said the team decided not to use because of height restrictions), there are two types of green roofs that form terraces around the site. The green roof terraces are used for water treatment and lowering the home's carbon footprint. Johnson said recent research his department is conducting points to a fascinating number: 400-square feet of dense groundcover with a density of 32 leaves per square inch can sequester the C02 output of one person. Using these calculations, the Lumenhaus team determined the amount of plants needed for the site. For one terrace, the landscape architecture students involved in the project used sedum, which "sequesters carbon and doesn't give it up, unlike other seasonal plants that dump their carbon during their lifecycle." Additionally, the green roof terraces assist in solar absorption. To assist with greywater mitigation, water output from the home's sinks, dishwasher, washing machine, and other appliances, are infiltrated through the terraces and ponds in an integrated manner. Grey water is also used to water the green-roof terraces. "Theoretically, you can drink it," Johnson added. Unfortunately, Johnson noted, it's not allowed. The hydroponics help create the site dynamic but also solve the greywater problems. Virginia Tech started on this project more than two years ago. "Landscape architecture students were involved from the early concept phase." Virginia Tech won the competition in 2005 so wanted to "up the ante." To do this, Johnson said, they needed an interdisciplinary design team that included electrical, computer, and structural engineers, architects, and landscape architects. Johnson noted that the landscape architect was the "lead on site," while the architect was the lead during development. Johnson added that the site development / landscape component of the Solar Decathalon had improved dramatically from four years ago. The team thought siting the home in a landscape would also help them win marketability points. The total project budget was around $600,000. SemperGreen UK and LiveRoof provided elements of the green roof terraces, along with Oscar Warmerdam. Cornell University's Silo House
Additionally, Cornell's team was interested in the C02 sequestration capacity of the plants, as well as their ability to frame the site. "It's important to immerse the landscape so it doesn't stand alone. Without the plants, the building would be naked." Cornell students grew more than 1,000 plants to surround their home themselves. The Solar Decathalon homes are open to the public from October 9-13 and 15-18. The awards ceremony will be held Friday, October 16. More photos are available at Solar Decathalon multimedia resources. Image credit: National Mall photo by Annie Coghill/U.S. Department of Energy Solar Decathlon. Lumenhaus, Silo House photos by Krista Sharp. Natural Fusion landscape by Penn State University. |
| Is it just too damn late? Part 1, the Science Posted: 08 Oct 2009 02:28 PM PDT No. It's not too late to avert the worst impacts of human-caused global warming. In fact, it's not too late to stabilize total warming from preindustrial levels at 1.5°C — or possibly less. But the U.S. must pass a comprehensive climate and clean energy bill, leading to a major global deal, to give us a plausible chance of getting on the necessary emissions pathway. From a scientific perspective, a major new study (subs. req'd, discussed below) is cause for some genuine non-pessimism, concluding "Near-zero CH4 growth in the Arctic during 2008 suggests we have not yet activated strong climate feedbacks from permafrost and CH4 hydrates." The media and others want to move quickly from denial to despair, because both perspectives justify inaction, justify maintaining our grotesquely unsustainable behavior, justify sticking with the global Ponzi scheme in the immoral delusion we can maintain our own personal wealth and well-being for a few more decades before the day of reckoning. I have, however, received a number of queries from progressives about the meaning of this somewhat misleading Washington Post article, "New Analysis Brings Dire Forecast Of 6.3-Degree Temperature Increase," which begins:
The WashPost story is about the Climate Rapid Overview and Decision-support Simulator — the C-ROADS model. It "translates complex climate modeling into readily digestible predictions" and "is being adopted by negotiators to assess their national greenhouse-gas commitments ahead of December's climate summit in Copenhagen," as explained in a recent Nature article (subs. req'd, excerpted here). As one of the leading C-ROADS modelers — my friend Drew Jones — explained in his blog, the Post headline could have easily been:
The first thing to remember is that the major developed countries, including China or India, haven't agreed to cap their emissions, let alone to ultimately reduce them. Until that happens, no model of global commitments is going to keep us anywhere near 2°C (3.6F). Second, people forget that the 1987 Montréal protocol would not have stopped the atmospheric concentration of ozone-destroying chemicals from rising forever. And yet we appear to have acted in time to save the ozone layer. Third, people also seem to forget that the United States government led by President Bush's father, and including the entire Senate, agreed that we would tackle global warming the same way — with the rich countries going first. I have no doubt that China will ultimately agree to a cap (see "Peaking Duck: Beijing's Growing Appetite for Climate Action"). Indeed, if a shrinking economy-wide cap on GHGs similar to the House bill or draft Senate bill ends up on Obama's desk in the next few months, then the international community will almost certainly agree on a global deal, which will include China sharply reducing its business-as-usual growth path. Then in the next deal in a few years, China will, I expect, agree to a cap no later than 2025. But I'm getting ahead of myself. This is an important issue that I will treat in a multipart series. People seem to view this question of "Is it too late?" as if it were primarily a scientific issue, but that is because they have internalized their preconceptions about what is politically possible in terms of clean energy deployment in this country and around the world. There is no evidence scientifically that it is too late to stabilize at 350 ppm atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide, at 1.5°C total planetary warming from preindustrial levels. Nor is there any scientific evidence that we can't afford to overshoot 350 ppm — as we already have — for a period of many decades. True, I don't view it as likely that we will stabilize at 1.5°C warming. But that overlays my view of the science with my view of the solutions and the politics. I do think it is entirely possible that we will stabilize under 450 ppm, near 2°C. That's a key reason why I blog. It would, however, probably require a heroic WWII-style and WWII-scale effort by the nation and the world starting sometime in the next decade. This post will briefly touch on the science. Future posts will consider climate solutions and the needed domestic and international action to employ them at the necessary scale and speed. The catastrophe we are trying to avert is multimeter sea level rise, the loss of the inland glaciers that provide water to a billion people, rapid expansion of the subtropical deserts (i.e. Dust-Bowlification of one third the habited land mass), killing off more than half of all species and turning the oceans into hot, acidic dead zones — each of which is all-but inevitable on our current path of unrestrained greenhouse gas emissions (see "An introduction to global warming impacts: Hell and High Water"). No one knows for certain what level of emissions is needed to avert that series of catastrophes. Indeed, some of these catastrophes occur at much lower levels of emissions than others. And some may play out over very long periods of time, but still become all but unstoppable at much lower levels of emissions. The literature makes clear that as you go above 450 ppm and 2°C, these impacts become more likely, more intense, and more imminent. In fact, no one knows for certain whether one can, in fact, stabilize at, say 550 ppm and roughly 3°C warming — in any meaningful definition of the word "stabilize" (which does not include desperately devoting all of humanity's resources to sucking every last drop of CO2 and CH4 from the energy system and atmosphere). Whatever the threshold is, staying above it for any length of time risks a rapid acceleration of emissions that will make it all but impossible to get back below that point of no return. Hansen and his leading scientific coauthors have made a case we must ultimately return atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide to 350 parts per million to avoid catastrophic climate impacts (see "Stabilize at 350 ppm or risk ice-free planet, warn NASA, Yale, Sheffield, Versailles, Boston et al"). But they don't know — and on one knows — how long we can safely stay above 350. If I have read Hansen et al. correctly, then I think they may be mostly right for a different reason than he thinks, which is to say, I think the carbon-cycle feedbacks act as the equivalent of the amplifiers that he models: "Additional warming, due to slow climate feedbacks including loss of ice and spread of flora over the vast high-latitude land area in the Northern Hemisphere, approximately doubles equilibrium climate sensitivity." It is increasingly clear that the virtually all of the major carbon cycle feedbacks are positive — see Science stunner: "Clouds Appear to Be Big, Bad Player in Global Warming" — an amplifying feedback (sorry Lindzen and fellow deniers) and Study: Water-vapor feedback is "strong and positive," so we face "warming of several degrees Celsius"). These include
In short, if you get near 450 ppm and stay there for any length of time, you will shoot up to 800 to 1000 ppm, which certainly gets you an ice-free planet and other unimaginably catastrophic impacts. But we aren't there yet, and we can stay below 450 and get back to 350 (or lower) this century if we choose to. The best piece of scientific news I have read in a while comes from a NOAA-led study, "Observational constraints on recent increases in the atmospheric CH4 burden" (subs. req'd, NOAA online news story here), which found:
Woo-hoo! Yes, early this year I reported that NOAA found "Methane levels rose in 2008 for the second consecutive year after a 10-year lull," but so far that most dangerous of all feedbacks — Arctic and tundra methane releases — does not appear to have been fatally triggered. Now it should be said that even if it did start, it doesn't mean we couldn't drop total emissions faster than the feedbacks overwhelmed them — it just means it would be much, much, much harder to do so. Those who suggest it is too late are combining a scientific judgment that I believe is not yet possible to make with judgments about climate solutions and our political will to employ them fast enough that may prove true, but which are subjective judgments nonetheless — and that's quite different from saying "it's too late." In Part 2, I'll look at the scale of the energy challenge, which simultaneously makes clear how difficult the political challenge is and how very far we can go using existing and near-term strategies (including behavior change, which is at one level much harder, and at another level, potentially the fastest change of all). |
| Twitter petition to thank Apple for quitting Chamber over climate change Posted: 08 Oct 2009 01:21 PM PDT |
| The Invention of Lying about Climate Change Posted: 08 Oct 2009 12:37 PM PDT
I don't review many books because:
But I have a dozen books on my table right now — and another dozen will be coming in the next couple of months. Some are very good, including Gore's new book on solutions due early November. Right now, I am happy to unhesitatingly recommend Climate Cover-Up: The Crusade to Deny Global Warming by James Hoggan editor of with Richard Littlemore, key figures behind the terrific Desmog.blog. I think everyone who follows the climate issue needs to understand the whole gory history of the most immoral and, so far, most successful, disinformation campaign in US history — the effort, largely funded by conservatives and fossil fuel companies, to deny climate science and delay the urgent action needed to preserve the health and well-being of countless future generations:
While I follow the issue very closely, I still learned a lot from this book, especially the fascinating Chapter 11 on "using courts and cash to silence critics of climate confusion." I didn't know the whole story of how uber-denier Fred Singer managed to get Roger Revelle (one of Al Gore's teachers, who famously alerted Gore to the climate threat) to co-author a piece of nonsense. I didn't know the story of the lawsuit that resulted when Revelle's graduate student tried to speak up about "what he saw as Singer's blatant manipulation — his outright bullying of — of Revelle" who "was in his eighty-second and it would turn out last year," who "had already suffered a serious heart attack and was in failing health — unable according to his students and staff to pay attention for more than 15 or 20 minutes." And if you want some more details on that, you can go here and here. But while some of the details are on the web, sometimes you just need to curl up with the whole well-told story. This is a must-read book. |
| Posted: 08 Oct 2009 10:49 AM PDT Someone directed me to this odd post from the normally reliable and politically savvy WSJ "Environmental Capital" blog:
[Answer to WSJ: Both!] Is there really so little to blog about in the vast energy and environmental arena that the WSJ has to spin up this non-story? Senator Kerry (and many others, including CP) have written and spoken at great length for a long time about the fact that any bill would have multiple benefits. Unlike the WSJ, however, most of us think that's actually a good thing. I think it kind of silly to attack the bill because, say, avoiding catastrophic global warming and reducing oil consumption, is good for both national security and energy security or because solving those problems will generate millions of new jobs (and, yes, even preserve existing manufacturing jobs) or because more than one technology or strategy will be needed to achieve those goals:
Yes, to be fair, WSJ, your example doesn't actually support your argument! And, to be fair, natural gas and nuclear power are in fact global warming solutions — more so than they are energy security solutions, since neither of those directly substitute for oil very much these days.
I'm sure the WSJ blog is savvy enough to understand that every major bill that passes Congress represents a compromise among different groups and thus includes provisions of that any individual supporter might not adopt if they were king or queen. But, as I've said, the oil is a drop in the figurative bucket, maybe 0.1% of global production. I'm also sure the WSJ realize is that we face two major environmental/energy problems — global warming plus our absurd and growing dependence on one fossil fuel in particular that appears to be peaking in supply. Solving both of those problems at the same time is in fact good policy. And there is a lot of evidence it's also good politics (see Lindsay Graham (R-SC): "If you had a bill that would allow for responsible offshore drilling, a robust nuclear power title, I think you could get some Republican votes for a cap-and-trade system."). |
Solar Decathalon 2009
Cornell University's team wanted to create an agricultural and industrial aesthetic with Silo House. The home is coated in steel that oxidizes on the outer most layer. Landscape architecture students worked with Assistant Professor of Horticulture 
I don't think the basic story should be a surprise to regular readers of this blog. We're in big, big trouble, and we're not yet politically prepared to do what is necessary to avert catastrophe — as I've said many times. But that is quite different from concluding it's too late and we're doomed.
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