Hurricane Sandy wreaks agricultural havoc | MNN - Mother Nature Network

Hurricane Sandy wreaks agricultural havoc | MNN - Mother Nature Network

Hurricane Sandy slams the U.S. East Coast, as seen by NASA's GOES-13 satellite. (Photo: NASA)

2012 has already been a rough year for farming in North America, as crops withered under record heat, drought and wildfire, while others washed away in Hurricane Isaac's torrential rains. This followed similar problems in 2011, ranging from the historic Texas drought to Mississippi River floods and Hurricane Irene.

 

Despite all the recent setbacks, however, farmers were dealt yet another blow this week as Superstorm Sandy flogged and flooded a swath of crops along its 2,000-mile path. The post-tropical cyclone hit in late October, when many U.S. growers have already harvested summer produce, but it still found ways to wreak havoc.

 

Sandy got started in the Caribbean, killing more than 60 people before surging north toward the U.S. East Coast. The majority of those deaths were in Haiti, where heavy rainfall caused devastating floods and landslides that crushed buildings, wiped out roads and inundated farmland. "Most of the agricultural crops that were left from Hurricane Isaac were destroyed during Sandy," Prime Minister Laurent Lamothe told Reuters, "so food security will be an issue."

 

Cuba took a direct hit as Sandy grew into a category 2 hurricane, and 20 to 30 percent of the country's coffee farms were destroyed overnight, according to Food World News. The worst damage occurred in the Sierra Maestra mountains, where 92 percent of Cuban coffee beans are grown, and it came just as the harvest normally peaks in late October and early November. Experts say Cuba may now produce less than 4,000 metric tons of coffee in 2012, its lowest output in more than a century. Sandy also struck hard in the Bahamas, where farmers lost crops such as bananas, cassava, tomatoes and watermelons, the Eleutheran newspaper reports.

 

Damage assessments remain underway in the U.S., with many towns still in disaster-relief mode. At least 50 deaths are confirmed so far, and some estimates suggest damage could exceed $20 billion. Yet the overall impact on U.S. agriculture may be less severe than in the Caribbean, since the summer growing season is over in cooler climates and many farmers sped up harvesting ahead of the storm. "Sandy is a big weather story, but it's mainly a human life issue on the East Coast — no real impact on crops or harvest," John Dee of Global Weather Monitoring tells the Economic Times.

 

That's not the case everywhere, though. Localized crop damage has been severe, including at some New York City outfits like Red Hook Community Farm and Battery Urban Farm, which were flooded by several feet of seawater. Many rooftop gardens escaped the floods and endured the winds, according to the New York Observer, but it wasn't just plants in the line of fire. "The bees got washed away, flooded out," says the chief operating officer of Brooklyn Grange, which had the city's largest commercial apiary. "It was pretty devastating."

 

It's important to realize Sandy didn't occur in a vacuum, points out ecologist Steven Apfelbaum of Applied Ecological Services in Wisconsin. "This isn't the only storm that's impacted agriculture in the U.S. this year," he tells MNN. "We've had intense, damaging storms over large areas of the U.S., one of the most extensive droughts in recent history, and we had nearly 500 heat records broken during just one day in August." Even small shifts have taken a big toll, he adds. "The fruit crops in Wisconsin and Michigan were blooming three weeks earlier than normal this year, then we got normal spring weather conditions and lost nearly 100 percent." Combined with the effects of Hurricane Sandy, Apfelbaum says U.S. crop-insurance claims in 2012 could be "profoundly larger than anything we've ever seen in this country."

 

While no one can directly link a single storm to global warming, the wild weather of 2011 and 2012 is exactly what climate models have been predicting for years: longer droughts and stronger storms. "Before, climate change was talked about as an abstraction, something that would happen in the future," Apfelbaum says. "But the changes we're experiencing now are not abstract at all. They're very real."

 

The issue of climate change has been conspicuously absent from this year's U.S. presidential race, but storms like Sandy are reminders that it can't be ignored forever. And while politicians dance around it, Apfelbaum says farmers should take initiative to protect themselves. "Build buffers into your farm plans where streams overflow, areas that are going to be able to absorb the recoil," he says. "Put in grassy waterways and native, deep-rooted perennial plant buffers. Take some of your land out of these row-crop uses and build intrinsic capacity for absorbing the impact on your own land."

Evidence of pesticide harm to bees is now swarming | Damian Carrington | Environment | guardian.co.uk

Evidence of pesticide harm to bees is now swarming | Damian Carrington | Environment | guardian.co.uk

The new paper, published in Nature, shows that bumblebees foraging naturally and exposed to realistic doses of pesticides suffer in two key ways. First they are about twice as likely to die: two-thirds of the bees are lost when exposed to two pesticides compared to only a third when not exposed. Second, the exposed bees are half as successful in gathering food.
The new results reveal, again, shameful failings in the regulatory regime. The ecotoxicology tests currently required only look at honey bees. Yet bumblebees, the subject of the new research, are just as important in providing the pollination that creates much of the food we eat. Tomatoes, for example, rely on bumblebees. Furthermore, bumblebees are very different, bigger in size individually, but living in colonies of just dozens, compared to the tens of thousands in honey bee colonies.
Another failing is that current tests require just 96 hours of exposure, but the new research only saw the damaging effect after three weeks. "If we had done our study for just 96 hours, our conclusions would have been very different," says Nigel Raine, at Royal Holloway, University of London, one of the research team.
Yet another failing is that pesticides are only tested individually, not in the combination bees are exposed to in reality. The new work clearly shows a damaging cumulative effect from a combination of just two pesticides.

How To Power Through The Next Sandy | Fast Company

How To Power Through The Next Sandy | Fast Company

The aftermath of Hurricane Sandy has left more than 8 million people without power and without the ability to power up critical devices--including cell phones. Sure, there are rechargeable batteries and power inverters on the market to help you in a pinch, but they require the foresight to stock up ahead of time, and they aren't always reliable.
Fortunately, several tech companies are developing grid-free solutions for the times when you need quick, reliable access to alternative power sources.
For Cleveland-based Tremont Electronics, that alternative power source is your own body. Tremont makes the nPower PEG, or Personal Energy Generator, a small, wand-like device you can carry with you as you go about your day and your normal activities, such as walking, running, or biking. The nPower PEG converts the kinetic energy you generate into electricity that can immediately power smaller devices you hook it up to (think smartphones and MP3 players, not laptops and tablets).
CEO Aaron LeMieux originally came up with the idea for the nPower PEG while on a 1,500-mile hike on the Appalachian trail. It's the first product from Tremont, and at $200 a pop, it's much more expensive than simply picking up a rechargeable battery pack.

"You can get a standard rechargeable battery pack and throw it in your backpack and leave it there for a couple of months, but that battery pack will have drained itself by then," he says. "So while you think you have the security of this backup battery, that's really not the case."
Though LeMieux had active, outdoorsy types in mind as the nPower PEG's target audience, he recently ran into a customer who had ordered one for a personal hurricane disaster kit.
"We'd seen lots of orders going to California and Oregon, places where you knew there were lots of active outdoors people," he says. "But that's something we hadn't thought of before."
K-TOR's Pocket Socket hand crank power generator is another personal energy generator option that can handle slightly larger devices, such as tablets, but is still small enough to fit in your pocket. And because of its powerful 10-watt generator, the Pocket Socket charges your devices at the same rate as your standard household electrical outlet.
For the solar power enthusiasts, Fenix International has created the powerful ReadySet Solar Kit, funded via Kickstarter, and capable of powering up to 10 iPhones on a single charge. ReadySet can even fuel Wi-Fi hotspots. What's neat about the ReadySet is it allows you to harness energy from a variety of sources, including solar panels, bicycle generators, and micro-wind turbines.
If you're out of power (or need a temporary home) right now, check out SandyCrashPads, a service that matches up people who need places to stay with people who have available rooms.

#Frankenstorm Sandy, Climate Science and 'Reverse Tribalism' - NYTimes.com

#Frankenstorm Sandy, Climate Science and 'Reverse Tribalism' - NYTimes.com

I’ve posted his essay on Slideshare because it’s worth reading and sharing on its own. But I wanted to address his notion now in the context of the intense push to interpret the current superstorm in the context of action on greenhouse gases, and my reaction to it on the blog so far.
Am I “guilty” of reverse tribalism myself?
I’d say yes, with an asterisk. Let’s explore a bit:
I have sometimes perhaps been too eager to challenge definitive statements related to human-driven global warming for fear they will provide ammunition to those working to foment doubt and maintain stasis on our energy menu.
It’s that tendency of mine that probably prompted this tweet by David Roberts of Grist.org today:

@Revkin People are discussing climate change all over the place! You really need to work harder to tamp this down.
— David Roberts (@drgrist) 29 Oct 12

My self diagnosis presumes that I see myself as, by nature, a member of some particular tribe. Indeed, I grew up caring deeply about the environment, so much so that as a kid I once left a threatening note on the seat of a bulldozer digging into a last patch of woods near our home in suburban Rhode Island. If I had a choice, I’d absolutely rather sing about the Hudson River with Pete Seeger than hang out in Washington, D.C., bars with energy lobbyists.
But as a journalist, I grew into the habit of detaching my personal passions from my profession’s need to sort through arguments for some sense of bedrock. So I’m a member of the journalism tribe, as well. That hasn’t changed with my move to the Op-Ed side of the paper. My opinion is that reality matters, however inconvenient it may be.
I never obtained an advanced science degree, but in majoring in biology and working in marine fisheries science long ago, and then through decades of reading and reporting on science, I developed a passion for this endeavor as the most powerful tool yet devised to separate myths and spin from durable knowledge, including knowledge of uncertainty. So I’m in the “defenders of science” tribe, too.
So I think I exhibit what you might call intertribal tension syndrome more than the reverse tribalism trait.
There’s another factor in play, for sure. It’s what Dan Kahan of the Cultural Cognition project at Yale calls identity-protective cognition. In a fascinating post, coincidentally published today, he described this as “a species of motivated reasoning” that “reflects the tendency of individuals to form perceptions of fact that promote their connection to, and standing in, important groups.”
He goes on to say:

There are lots of instances of this. Consider sports fans who genuinely see contentious officiating calls as correct or incorrect depending on whether those calls go for or against their favorite team.
The cultural cognition thesis says that many contested issues of risk—from climate change to nuclear power, from gun control to the HPV vaccine—involve this same dynamic. The “teams,” in this setting, are the groups that subscribe to one or another of the cultural worldviews associated with “hierarchy-egalitarianism” and “individualism-communitarianism.”

Put those two traits together, in any person, and you’re bound to get some moments where one tribal affiliation wins out over another.
To step outside what Randy Olson calls the “nerd loop” (the domain of those thinking a lot about climate, risk and communication), here’s a quick reprise of points that I’ve made through 25 years of covering the two-way relationship between humans and climate:
1. The unerring buildup of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere is bound to come with regrets.
2. Many parts of the planet, from sub-Saharan Africa to the northeastern United States, are subject to extreme storms, superdroughts or other climate-related disruptions with or without a push from greenhouse gases. Greenhouse heating will worsen some extremes and is almost assuredly contributing to some (but not all) now.
3. Limiting harm from inevitable hard knocks that come with such disruptions is job one on a crowding, busy planet.
4. Working to shift from energy norms that come with large emissions of carbon dioxide is an imperative in this century (along with bringing energy by any smart means to the billions of people without reasonable sources now). But even a crash effort to blunt the greenhouse-gas buildup wouldn’t avert the need for step 3.
The wind is howling ever louder here in the Hudson Valley, and the lights are flickering with greater frequency, so it’s time to end this post before my connection to The Times is lost.

A Hot Time for California Solar Power Plants : Greentech Media

A Hot Time for California Solar Power Plants : Greentech Media

The CPUC-approved PPAs lock in an estimated annual generation of 573 gigawatt-hours from each facility “for a term of twenty years with the option for SCE to extend the term to 25 years.” According to BSE, design specifications call for Rio Mesa to produce at least 573 gigawatt-hours per year and for Sonoran West, with storage, to produce at least 733 gigawatt-hours per year.
The revised PPA for Rio Mesa provides for BSE’s planned deployment of its second-generation technology. It will have a 250-foot-taller tower than in the first-generation, 372-megawatt Ivanpah plant now under construction, allowing for a more concentrated arrangement of heliostats that will reduce the land required to two-thirds of that needed for a comparable photovoltaic (PV) or power tower project.
The revised Sonoran West PPA provides for incorporation of the newer technology, as well as the first deployment of BSE’s steam-heated molten salts storage system. Stored generating capacity will give Sonoran West more production capacity and the flexibility to serve the grid in ways that help balance transmission system supply and demand and make electricity delivery more reliable, functions more typically associated with traditional power plants.
The CPUC-approved PPA calls for Sonoran West to have “a few hours” of generating capacity “when the thermal storage system has been charged and the sun is not shining.”
Perhaps most importantly, Rio Mesa and Sonoran West won PPAs despite not having Department of Energy loan guarantees. They will be the first U.S. concentrating solar power (CSP) projects built with only marketplace investment, state incentives, and the federal investment tax credit (ITC).
According to BSE, the contracts represent billions of dollars in direct investment and more than 2,000 construction jobs for California’s economically stressed Inland Empire region.

Why care about reducing energy usage? [Infographic] | Eco-Snobbery Sucks

Why care about reducing energy usage? [Infographic] | Eco-Snobbery Sucks

useful chart that shows in great detail how much energy can be saved, esp in heating/cooling with heat pump, but no mention of far superior results with ground source heat pump, or even better, solar heat seasonal storage under house from summer long harvesting in large watertank!

The WTO vs. Ontario: Addressing the Bigger Picture of Trade and Renewable Energy | Renewable Energy News Article

The WTO vs. Ontario: Addressing the Bigger Picture of Trade and Renewable Energy | Renewable Energy News Article

In a move that will likely set a worldwide precedent barring governments from imposing local content requirements to their feed-in tariff programs, a forthcoming World Trade Organization report indicates that it will side with the European Union and Japan against the Canadian province of Ontario. Although the official report is not expected to be released until November, a leaked preliminary dispute settlement floated by the International Centre for Trade and Sustainable Development (ICTSD) signals the WTO's acceptance of two separately filed claims of protectionism against Ontario. Both Japan and the EU have claimed Ontario's feed-in tariff (FIT) program discriminates against foreign green energy manufacturers and unduly pressures local companies to purchase hardware from local suppliers.

The Case Against Ontario
In September of 2010, Japan filed an official dispute with the WTO claiming that certain provisions in Ontario’s FIT program directly violate Canada’s obligations under the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) 1994 — in specific, Articles III:4, III:5 and XXIII:1. These articles essentially bar governments from doing what Ontario stands accused of doing: requiring power generating companies that are participating in the FIT program to source a certain percentage of their equipment in Ontario. The local content requirement in Ontario is 25 percent for wind projects and 60 percent for solar. Japan further claimed that Ontario’s actions were out of compliance with Article 2.1 of the TRIMS Agreement and asked the WTO to view Ontario’s FIT program as an illegal subsidy.
Following Japan’s lead and echoing the same concerns, the EU’s official dispute was filed in August of 2011. Eventually, both complaints were merged by the WTO. Recently, it was leaked that the WTO had reached a preliminary decision on the matter — one that the government of Ontario, which defends its actions by saying the requirements were put in place to encourage local clean energy production, will likely appeal.
The Rising Tide of Complications
What appears on the surface to be a cut and dried case of unfair discrimination against foreign manufacturers is actually far from it. The implications of the WTO’s impending official decision, which isn’t likely to stray from the preliminary dispute settlement report, may have consequences that reach far beyond any direct impacts to Ontario’s renewable energy efforts and could result in a glut of litigation against other governments with similar local content requirements written into their FIT schemes.
“They don’t call them trade wars for nothing,” says Clint Wilder, senior editor with Clean Edge, Inc. and co-author of Clean Tech Nation: How the US Can Lead in the New Global Economy. “It’s a real dilemma. It’s very discouraging to see these kind of trade wars breaking out over renewable energy. The industries of clean tech are becoming the critical industries for global economic competitiveness in the 21st century. The downside is, when industries achieve that status you’re going to get these disputes.”
Pointing to a recent dispute between the U.S. and China over the dumping of solar exports that resulted in the U.S. Commerce Department levying stiff tariffs against Chinese imports, Wilder says, “We’ve certainly seen it before, with the U.S. taking action against China. But what’s interesting to me is that the Ontario market is hardly the only one — and far from the largest one — to have domestic content rules.”
Similar local content rules are in place in many countries, including Brazil’s wind and solar industries and in India, where crystalline photovoltaic projects are required to use products manufactured in-country. In Saudi Arabia, the recently announced K.A.CARE program, which plans to add 55,000 megawatts of renewable energy capacity over the course of the next 20 years, plans to opt in favor of awarding “extra bid points” for developers who utilize local content — however once the second round of procurements are launched, the plan is to make the use of local content mandatory.

PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti: Sandy gone, Caribbean mourns 58 dead, cleans up - Americas Wires - MiamiHerald.com

PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti: Sandy gone, Caribbean mourns 58 dead, cleans up - Americas Wires - MiamiHerald.com

While Jamaica, Cuba and the Bahamas took direct hits from the storm, the majority of deaths and most extensive damage was in impoverished Haiti, where it has rained almost non-stop since Tuesday.
The official death toll in Haiti stood at 44 Saturday, but authorities said that could still rise. The country's ramshackle housing and denuded hillsides are especially vulnerable to flooding when rains come.
"This is a disaster of major proportions," Prime Minister Laurent Lamothe told The Associated Press. "The whole south is under water."
He said the death toll jumped on Saturday because it was the first day that authorities were able to go out and assess the damage, which he estimated was in the hundreds of millions of dollars, the bulk of it in lost crops.
Nineteen people are reported injured and another 12 are missing, according to Haiti's Civil Protection Office.
One of the remaining threats was a still-rising muddy river in the northern part of the capital, Port-au-Prince.
"If the river busts its banks, it's going to create a lot of problems. It might kill a lot of people," said 51-year-old Seroine Pierre. "If death comes, we'll accept it. We're suffering, we're hungry, and we're just going to die hungry."Officials reported flooding across Haiti, where 370,000 people are still living in flimsy shelters as a result of the devastating 2010 earthquake. Nearly 17,800 people had to move to 131 temporary shelters, the Civil Protection Office said.
Among those hoping for a dry place to stay was 35-year-old Iliodor Derisma in Port-au-Prince, who said the storm had caused a lot of anguish.
"It's wet all my clothes, and all the children aren't living well," he said. "We're hungry. We haven't received any food. If we had a shelter, that would be nice."
Santos Alexis, mayor of the southern city of Leogane, said Saturday that two people were reported dead there, including a man in his late 30s and a boy around 10 years old who drowned. He said the city was hit by heavy rains but that no major damage was reported.
"Water came into the houses, water got on the beds, but they didn't lose their homes," he said. "Leogane was underwater mostly, but now we have less water."
President Michel Martelly and Lamothe handed out water bottles to dozens of people in a Port-au-Prince neighborhood on Friday. They also distributed money to local officials to help clean up the damage.
Sandy left dozens of families homeless when it barreled across Jamaica Wednesday as a Category 1

Motherboard TV: The Thorium Dream | Motherboard

Motherboard TV: The Thorium Dream | Motherboard

http://motherboard.vice.com/2011/11/9/motherboard-tv-the-thorium-dream

• A LFTR is a completely different type of reactor. For one thing, it can't melt down. It's physically impossible. And since it’s air-cooled, it doesn’t have to be located near the shore. It can even be placed in an underground vault. A tsunami would roll over it, like a truck over a manhole cover.
  A LFTR uses liquid fuel -⎯nuclear material dissolved in molten fluoride salt. Conventional reactors are atomic pressure cookers, using solid fuel rods to super-heat water. And that means the constant possibility of high-pressure ruptures and steam leaks.
  LFTRs don’t use water. Instead, they heat CO2 gas to spin a turbine for generating power. So if a LFTR leaks, it’s not a catastrophe. The molten salt will "pool and cool" like candle wax, for easy containment, recovery, and re-use.
  LFTRs burn Thorium, a mildly radioactive material as common as tin and found all over the world. We’ve already mined enough raw Thorium to power the country for 400 years. It’s the waste at our Rare Earth Element mines.
  LFTRs consume fuel so efficiently that they can even use the spent fuel from other reactors, while producing a miniscule amount of waste themselves. In fact, the waste from a LFTR is virtually harmless in just 300 years. (No, that’s not a typo.) Yucca Mountain is obsolete. So are Uranium reactors.
  LFTR technology has been sitting on the shelf at Oak Ridge for over forty years. But now the manuals are dusted off, and a dedicated group of nuclear industry outsiders is ready to build another test reactor and give it a go.
  Will it work? If it doesn’t, we’ll have one more reactor to retire. But if it does work⎯- and there is every reason to believe that it will -⎯the LFTR will launch a new paradigm of clean, cheap, safe and abundant energy.
  Let’s build one and see.
  

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  lftrsuk • a year ago

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  It saddens me to say that, IMHO, this documentary lacks the power to influence either public opinion or the opinions of policy-makers.
  We need philanthropic big-bucks to get Michael Moore to tell the complete story of the saddest ever 'accident of history' that side-lined Thorium Molten Salt Reactor technology. All Americans need to know that Alvin Weinberg can occupy the position of the most important individual in history to beneficially influence the future of all humankind..
  

“Weedeater” column by Nance Klehm | ARTHUR MAGAZINE

“Weedeater” column by Nance Klehm | ARTHUR MAGAZINE

In terms of my other projects, Social Ecologies is my business site and Spontaneous Vegetation is more my activist/artist/provocateur/public educator site. You’ll see with a lot of my projects—especially the one around human waste, which I have worked professionally on this too, working in Haiti, etc.—when I’m working on it in that provocateur place, my whole point is not to be scatological for people in an urban area to poop along with me, and I collect all the waste and compost and bring it back to me. But I got a huge amount of press for that—national press, Time magazine, etc., etc. Or my big worm project. These things are not to be icky, but I’m trying to go with the most base level of, what is our relationship to our own bodies. If we care about our own bodies, how do we care about other beings and our immediate habitat? It’s not just an environment, it’s a habitat. How do we treat the land that’s around us? That’s still an underpinning of that project. People just thought I was being funny or scatological or something, and I’m like, “No, this is empowering and this is about reconnecting with our bodies and see the landscape as well as our body is the same. I was trying to get that across, but I kind of fell short for a lot of people. I did it with a lot of humor, because you can’t avoid it, right? And I did it with a lot of artistic strategies to get people to look at these things.
You could just pick out any other project and look at those sites and if anything else pops out you can use it because I still feel like it’s the same through line.
People think I do a lot of different things. I’m like, “Yeah, but it’s all the same spider.”

A Conversation with Nance Klehm

A Conversation with Nance Klehm

In terms of my other projects, Social Ecologies is my business site and Spontaneous Vegetation is more my activist/artist/provocateur/public educator site. You’ll see with a lot of my projects—especially the one around human waste, which I have worked professionally on this too, working in Haiti, etc.—when I’m working on it in that provocateur place, my whole point is not to be scatological for people in an urban area to poop along with me, and I collect all the waste and compost and bring it back to me. But I got a huge amount of press for that—national press, Time magazine, etc., etc. Or my big worm project. These things are not to be icky, but I’m trying to go with the most base level of, what is our relationship to our own bodies. If we care about our own bodies, how do we care about other beings and our immediate habitat? It’s not just an environment, it’s a habitat. How do we treat the land that’s around us? That’s still an underpinning of that project. People just thought I was being funny or scatological or something, and I’m like, “No, this is empowering and this is about reconnecting with our bodies and see the landscape as well as our body is the same. I was trying to get that across, but I kind of fell short for a lot of people. I did it with a lot of humor, because you can’t avoid it, right? And I did it with a lot of artistic strategies to get people to look at these things.
You could just pick out any other project and look at those sites and if anything else pops out you can use it because I still feel like it’s the same through line.
People think I do a lot of different things. I’m like, “Yeah, but it’s all the same spider.”

Wreck the environment - drive an electric car | SmartPlanet

Wreck the environment - drive an electric car | SmartPlaneton free

While it may be true  that electric cars are not so clean if  the power is generated in coal fired plants, there is also a strong trend towards wind power, and an average house could collect solar power on its roof and recharge the car from home batteries at night, or be recharged at solar parkades during working hours!
threre was a real good comment that answers a lot of questions:

Cradle to Grave"

Although it is easy to "cherry pick" data to prove a point, it's necessary to include all elements of a situation in order to arrive at an accurate conclusion.
The same EV powered from Hydro-electric sources is desirable whereas being powered from a coal-burning power plant leaves much to be desired, and falls short of solving the problem.
Think ethanol as the saviour of car fuels. It did not work out as planned primarily because all factors weren't assessed.
As my teacher told me a long time ago: "Do your homework".

Posted by da philster

1 hr ago

• Reply

+1 Vote

+ -

One advantage of hybrids.

It is indisputable that the arrival of the Prius and its hybrid brethren and the slowly closing price gap between them and conventional vehicles has pushed conventional vehicle technology.

The MPG ratings of comparable sized and some midsized 2012 gas and diesel vehicles have risen to new heights previously thought unobtainable just 20 years ago. A significant change that is keeping conventional vehicles competitive when early pundits thought hybrid sales would over run conventional sales in a decade because of MPG alone.

Posted by Hates Idiots

1 hr ago

• Reply

0 Votes

+ -

Decrease your fuel consumption by HALF!!

Move closer to work, or carpool with one other person. If you're driving an EV, but commuting by yourself 50 miles a day, then don't pat yourself on the back. You're no environmentalist.

Posted by dmm99

15 minutes ago

• Reply

0 Votes

+ -

There are no fallacies in EV

JohnMcGrew>> here is where you are wrong.
Moving to EVs have no fallacies, just a misunderstanding here and there.
and an overzealous have-no-shame entrepreneurs that are trying to get rich on this new trend.
And will (and do) go overboard with promises that they can never keep.

Yes, EVs have been promoted as 100% environmentally good and sound, which is of course is not 100% correct.
but let us review a few thing here.

1. it is true that process of manufacturing EV is not 100% environmentally friendly.
BUT so is the process of manufacturing current IC vehicles .

Most manufacturing processes are the same for both types, things like all the parts , paint, wiring are mostly the same.
And will stay the same for some times to come. So no significant improvement is visible (right now)
Keep in mind however that due to significant differences between ICE driven car and EV, new designs and materials can be considered and used for EV that could possibly make the manufacturing of this vehicles more environmentally sound in the future.

The differences in weight distribution (lets us consider EV with in-weel motors ,as I think this is the best kind of design)
EV motor is lighter and with an in-weel design does not take up space in the car body allowing for more cargo space and passenger space in the cabin.
Since the car frame does not have to carry the weight of the engine, crash dynamics changes as there is no need to consider bulky and heavy hunk of metal going into passenger space during the crush the frame can be designed lighter but stronger
So over all weight of the car can be reduced.

2. second point that keeps coming up is the batteries.
Again, yes manufacturing the batteries is not very environmentally friendly.
But neither is manufacturing all those lead-acid batteries used in conventional cars today.
Along with all the liquids needed for proper operation of todays cars. (motor oil, transition oil, antifreeze etc. )
Going with EV eliminates a good portion of this chemicals.
EV motors do not need motor oil. They use more solid lubricant that does not need to changed as often as motor oil
Since there is no transmission, no transmission fluid is needed.
No antifreeze as electric motors use air cooling and heat sinks.

Now for the important things

Since at the present time EV have very limited range we cannot totally move away from gasoline.
So we cannot really have true EV.
We need EV with range extender (an ICE powered generator on board)
However this can be accomplished with a micro-turbine generator. Make it more efficient and more flexible as micro-turbine can operate on a range of fuel types including gas and biodiesel.
Properly calibrated Micro-turbine also emit a lot less of environmentally unfriendly pollutants compared to ICE

so even extended range EV make sense as next generation vehicle over ICE driven one.

Posted by vl1969

12 minutes ago

• Reply

The Original Green By Steve Mouzon: A Must-Read If You Care About Sustainable Design : TreeHugger

The Original Green By Steve Mouzon: A Must-Read If You Care About Sustainable Design : TreeHugger

Lloyd Alter
Living / Culture
May 31, 2010

Steve Mouzon has been a fixture on TreeHugger since I first read his thoughts on the original green, on how people designed before the the Thermostat age, and how buildings kept people warm in an era before oil, or cool before air conditioning was invented. I have come to base much of my thoughts on the sustainability of heritage buildings (I am a volunteer at a heritage preservation org) on what I have learned from Steve, much of which is summarized in the points made above in the illustration; that good buildings (old or new) are lovable, durable, flexible and frugal.
I looked forward to his new book, The Original Green: Unlocking The Mystery of True Sustainability and was not disappointed.
In the current world of green and sustainable design, so much weight is put on technology; the adding of solar power, high tech glass, qualifying for LEED. It is all about ADDING things. The lesson one learns from Mouzon, and from many heritage buildings, walkable communities and dense cities, is how well one can do with less, by taking stuff away, without any diminishment of comfort. Everyone is complaining lately about how much LEED costs and how poorly LEED buildings are performing, but they are complex things that have new and fancy equipment. But Mouzon points out old technologies are easy to maintain and adjust.
He is not, nor am I, saying that there is no place for modern design or technology; only that we should learn from what people have been doing for generations before the thermostat age. I always use Weber Thompson's Terry Thomas Building in Seattle as an example of how to design this way.
It is no different when one comes to urban design; if you build a walkable city then you don't need a car for everyday use. That does a lot more for consumption than moving from an SUV to a Prius. That's why I am so excited about the growth of bike culture, the conversion of Copenhagen and even much of New York to bike cities; the simpler, older technology delivers so much more bang for the bucks. Mouzon is part of a larger movement that includes everyone from Prince Charles to Jim Kunstler to Andres Duany , who think that if we are going to survive climate change and tough oil, we are going to have to party like it's 1899.
The Original Green pulls all this together. Mouzon rejects much of the conventional thinking about design and architecture, and certainly just about everything the mechanical engineers have to offer. He has little time for the profession as it currently operates, noting:

If you want to be significant in architectural circles today, you must out-weird Frank Gehry. As a result, today's architecture is on a terminal death-spiral towards the wall of Terminal Weirdness, where things simply cannot get any stranger. But what does this have to do with sustainability?

There is a lot to cover in this book, it is a shopping list of ideas. But there are some that just pop out, as they contradict so much of what is the accepted green mantra.
In Part One, What's the Problem? Mouzon lists global warming, population, the failure of architectural education, but also the fallacy of efficiency, TreeHugger has for years looked at every new fuel efficient car and fancy better insulation or window, but efficiency is not enough; he writes that "efficiency is fine if you want to ease your conscience, but if our behaviour doesn't change then our machines can't save us."
He illustrates it with an example of how he moved from a place where he and his wife had two cars and drove everywhere; by moving to a walkable city they are driving one-eighth as much. No car is going to get that efficient.
In Part Two, Mouzon lists the top ten better ways of being green. They include the source of our stuff (use local materials) and my particular favourite, the Expanded Comfort Range.

In 1963 Victor Olgyay did this drawing, showing a "comfort zone" (the guy with the pipe in the middle of the gray kidney shaped area) where depending on the mix of temperature, humidity and air movement, we would be comfortable. Then the engineers came in and said no, the temperature and humidity shall be what we tell them, a two degree spread at that red intersection. Mouzon writes:

Ask any mechanical engineer to describe the impact of a 30 degree comfort range versus a 2 degree comfort range. She will tell you that the 2 degree comfort range requires the conditioning equipment of run basically all the time, because outdoor temperatures are almost never going to be within that range. And if the equipment is going to be running all the time, why even bother having operable windows?

So because we are too lazy to put on a sweater or take off a jacket, we have let the thermostat and the mechanical engineer behind it change the way we make buildings.
The key to sustainability, according to Mouzon, is the Original Green,

"The sustainability that all our ancestors knew by heart, the traditional ways of building...
Once revered as the best carriers of information across the generations, traditions have more recently been reviled, especially over the past century or so, as impediments to progress, especially in architecture and the arts.

This isn't just about being cute. It is about learning how people did things before thermostats and air conditioning, with windows, awnings, porches, regional differences in design, building to last, building for flexibility, doing the simple instead of the complicated and please, no gizmo green.
If you are not an architect or a city planner, there is is still much you can do;
Choose it for longer than you'll use it;
Live where you can walk to the grocery;
Live where you can make a living;
Choose smaller stuff with double duty.
And more, which I will cover in subsequent posts, they are worth excerpting.
The wonderful thing about this book is that it brings together so many ideas and knits them into a coherent whole. If we are going to build a sustainable society it will not be with hydrogen cars or photovoltaic roofs, but through simple, sensible measures like designing our cities and towns so that we don't need cars and our homes so they don't need air conditioning. It is an important book, that talks about how we should design, but also how we should live. More at the Original Green.

An Illustrated Guide to the Science of Global Warming Impacts: How We Know Inaction Is the Gravest Threat Humanity Faces | ThinkProgress

An Illustrated Guide to the Science of Global Warming Impacts: How We Know Inaction Is the Gravest Threat Humanity Faces | ThinkProgress

http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2011/06/02/234291/royal-society-7f-4c-world/
In a must-read paper that is the source of the top figure, “When could global warming reach 4°C?” Betts et al. drop this bombshell:

Using these GCM projections along with simple climate-model projections, including uncertainties in carbon-cycle feedbacks, and also comparing against other model projections from the IPCC, our best estimate is that the A1FI emissions scenario would lead to a warming of 4°C relative to pre-industrial during the 2070s. If carbon-cycle feedbacks are stronger, which appears less likely but still credible, then 4°C warming could be reached by the early 2060s in projections that are consistent with the IPCC’s ‘likely range’.

On the one hand, the A1FI is quite a high emissions scenario, and I suspect that humanity will turn off of it by 2030. On the other hand, even a much lower emissions like A2 is only a few tenths of a degree centigrade cooler. Also, while Betts et al. does a better job of incorporating carbon-cycle feedbacks into their modeling than virtually anyone else, I do not believe that they incorporate any feedback of methane emissions from the tundra or methane hydrates — and that is certainly the most worrisome of all of the carbon-cycle feedbacks (see “NSIDC bombshell: Thawing permafrost feedback will turn Arctic from carbon sink to source in the 2020s, releasing 100 billion tons of carbon by 2100” and Science: Vast East Siberian Arctic Shelf methane stores destabilizing and venting: NSF issues world a wake-up call: “Release of even a fraction of the methane stored in the shelf could trigger abrupt climate warming”).
Another important Royal Society article is the concluding piece, “The role of interactions in a world implementing adaptation and mitigation solutions to climate change,” by Rachel Warren. She makes a crucial point that is all too neglected in most discussions of adaptation — it is the interaction of impacts that is likely to overwhelm, particularly when you consider the very real risk of eco-system collapse over large parts of the Earth:

… a 4°C world would be facing enormous adaptation challenges in the agricultural sector, with large areas of cropland becoming unsuitable for cultivation, and declining agricultural yields. This world would also rapidly be losing its ecosystem services, owing to large losses in biodiversity, forests, coastal wetlands, mangroves and saltmarshes, and terrestrial carbon stores, supported by an acidified and potentially dysfunctional marine ecosystem. Drought and desertification would be widespread, with large numbers of people experiencing increased water stress, and others experiencing changes in seasonality of water supply. There would be a need to shift agricultural cropping to new areas, impinging on unmanaged ecosystems and decreasing their resilience; and large-scale adaptation to sea-level rise would be necessary. Human and natural systems would be subject to increasing levels of agricultural pests and diseases, and increases in the frequency and intensity of extreme weather events.
In such a 4°C world, the limits for human adaptation are likely to be exceeded in many parts of the world, while the limits for adaptation for natural systems would largely be exceeded throughout the world. Hence, the ecosystem services upon which human livelihoods depend would not be preserved. Even though some studies have suggested that adaptation in some areas might still be feasible for human systems, such assessments have generally not taken into account lost ecosystem services.

Precisely.
Right now, even the worst-case analyses for adaptation ignore the potential impact of ecosystem collapse (see Scientists find “net present value of climate change impacts” of $1240 TRILLION on current emissions path, making mitigation to under 450 ppm a must).
Warren also notes another area often ignored in adaptation analyses:

In the coming decades, one of the most serious impacts of climate change is projected to be the consequences of the projected increases in extreme weather events. For example, climate change-induced changes in precipitation patterns and changes in climate variability would increase the area of the globe experiencing drought at any one time from today’s 1 per cent to a future 30 per cent by the end of the twenty-first century…

Few studies examine the potential consequences of these increases in extreme weather upon individual sectors and/or regions, but these could be significant. Only a few days of high temperatures near flowering in wheat, groundnut and soybean can drastically reduce yield, while maize losses could potentially double owing to floods in the USA; and the AVOID study estimated that, in a 4°C world, 50 per cent of fluvial flood-prone people would be exposed to increased flood risk compared with approximately 25 per cent in a 2°C world.

Unfortunately, this issue was not published in time to take into account the Must-read NCAR analysis that warns we risk multiple, devastating global droughts even on moderate emissions path. And the sea level rise article adds little to the many recent scientific and media articles on the subject — see Coastal studies experts: “For coastal management purposes, a [sea level] rise of 7 feet (2 meters) should be utilized for planning major infrastructure.” Also, I would have liked to have seen an ocean acidification article that looked at what we face on the high-emissions, moderate carbon-cycle feedbacks scenario.
But there are several important articles, like “Agriculture and food systems in sub-Saharan Africa [SSA] in a 4^°C+ world,” which concludes:

The prognosis for agriculture and food security in SSA in a 4^°C+ world is bleak. Already today, the number of people at risk from hunger has never been higher: it increased from 300 million in 1990 to 700 million in 2007, and it is estimated that it may exceed 1 billion in 2010 . The cost of achieving the food security Millennium Development Goal in a +2^°C world is around $40-60 billion per year, and without this investment, serious damage from climate change will not be avoided. Currently, the prospects for such levels of sustained investment are not that bright. Croppers and livestock keepers in SSA have in the past shown themselves to be highly adaptable to short- and long-term variations in climate, but the kind of changes that would occur in a 4^°C+ world would be way beyond anything experienced in recent times. There are many options that could be effective in helping farmers adapt even to medium levels of warming, given substantial investments in technologies, institution building and infrastructural development, for example, but it is not difficult to envisage a situation where the adaptive capacity and resilience of hundreds of millions of people in SSA could simply be overwhelmed by events.

The article “Beyond ‘dangerous’ climate change: emission scenarios for a new world” concludes:

The analysis within this paper offers a stark and unremitting assessment of the climate change challenge facing the global community. There is now little to no chance of maintaining the rise in global mean surface temperature at below 2^°C, despite repeated high-level statements to the contrary. Moreover, the impacts associated with 2^°C have been revised upwards, sufficiently so that 2^°C now more appropriately represents the threshold between dangerous and extremely dangerous climate change. Consequently, and with tentative signs of global emissions returning to their earlier levels of growth, 2010 represents a political tipping point. The science of climate change allied with emission pathways for Annex 1 and non-Annex 1 nations suggests a profound departure in the scale and scope of the mitigation and adaption challenge from that detailed in many other analyses, particularly those directly informing policy.

However, this paper is not intended as a message of futility, but rather a bare and perhaps brutal assessment of where our ‘rose-tinted’ and well intentioned (though ultimately ineffective) approach to climate change has brought us. Real hope and opportunity, if it is to arise at all, will do so from a raw and dispassionate assessment of the scale of the challenge faced by the global community. This paper is intended as a small contribution to such a vision and future of hope.

Video of the Day: Wind Floats! : Greentech Media

Video of the Day: Wind Floats! : Greentech Media

The talk of the offshore wind community is the success of Seattle-based Principle Power’s two-megawatt WindFloat floating turbines off the coast of Portugal and Norway-based StatOil’s (NYSE:STO) three-megawatt Hywind floating turbines to be used for the proposed twelve-megawatt Gulf of Maine project.
Most of the presentations and many of the conversations during the American Wind Energy Association (AWEA) Offshore WindPower 2012 included excitement about the deep-water technology.
Several existing technologies continue to compete for prominence and innovators are proposing new solutions. In the hallways of the Virginia Beach Convention Center, GTM heard talk about venerable multinational energy power Alstom (EPA:ALO) developing floaters and an old-school independent developer looking to take the technology to Hawaii.
Newcomer PelaStar’s innovative approach is rumored to be winning attention in the U.K., where there are nearly two gigawatts of installed offshore capacity and they are building so fast they have exhausted the supply chain. The U.K.’s next step will be to move into deeper waters where floating technology will lead the way toward the national goal of fifteen gigawatts by 2020.

Basket Apartments: OFIS Unveils Healthy & Sustainable Student Housing Project in Paris | Inhabitat - Sustainable Design Innovation, Eco Architecture, Green Building

Basket Apartments: OFIS Unveils Healthy & Sustainable Student Housing Project in Paris | Inhabitat - Sustainable Design Innovation, Eco Architecture, Green Buildin

looks good, simply rotating each unit,makes it look friendlier, but i want to take it a step further,

i want to do a post and beam whole round log timber frame with the boxes sitting on a roller platform, and individually controlled, this way each unit can turn to, or avoid, the sun or breeze, for optimum comfort!

Geothermal Heat Pumps are Renewable and our Most Efficient HVAC Technology | Renewable Energy News Article

 This process can be enhanced by storing heat in tanks underground, under the basement ideally, as the PAHS houses do,  and insulating a skirt around it.
here is their story:

 

The question arises from time to time in building industry blogs about whether or not geothermal heat pumps (GHPs) are a source or renewable energy. GHPs, or ground-source heat pumps, don't fit neatly into any box, but suffice it to say that their appeal is for their efficiency AND the abundant renewable energy that they provide.

GHPs use the ground as a moderate temperature heat source during the winter and a heat sink during the summer.  They draw renewable (yes, renewable) thermal energy from the ground during the winter to heat buildings, and reject heat from buildings back into the ground in summer, thus replenishing the heat drawn from the ground during the previous season.
As for efficiency, it’s a lot easier to reject heat from the building to the ground (~55°F) compared to outside air that can be in excess of 100 deg. F on a hot summer day. And in winter, it’s easier to recover heat from the ground (~55°F) compared to outside air that can be <40°F. Consider the ground as a readily available renewable storage battery for heat that thin air (in the case of standard air-to-air heat pumps) simply cannot provide.
In his “Drill, Baby Drill" article author Eric Woodroof, Ph.D. says, “GHPs reduce the kilowatt-hours required for air conditioning. When you also consider that when a utility promotes GHP applications (for example as a Demand-Side Management method), the utility will have reduced demand during peak periods, requiring less generation plants and less pollution.”
GHPs do have higher installation costs than traditional air-to-air heat pumps, because of the cost of excavation for a horizontal system or drilling vertical boreholes (not “wells”) for closed loop systems for the pipework of the ground heat exchanger. They also require expert, qualified design and installation of the ground loop to achieve their full energy efficiency and savings potential.
But that ground loop is guaranteed to last over 50 years, posting a small fraction of life cycle cost. Indeed, in many cases it is projected that the ground heat exchanger will outlive the building it serves.
Woodruff provides an excellent analysis of GHP efficiencies, citing an example of a 5-ton air-to-air heat pump, “which would move 5 x 12,000 BTU/hour, which equals 60,000 BTUs per hour. If the air-air Seasonal Energy Efficiency Ratio (SEER) is 10, that means we use ~6 kW every hour we run the air-air heat pump.  In contrast, a GHP would have a SEER of 20 during the summer, which means you would only need ~3 kW. Thus, the GHP reduces demand by ~3 kW, reducing emissions and helping the utility shave peak demand during the summer.”
“In the winter,” says Woodruff, “the SEER of the GHP drops from 20 to 13.65 (COP = 4), meaning that the unit will draw 4.4 kW to move 60,000 BTU/hour. 4.4 kW equals about 15,000 BTU/hr of input energy, with the remaining 45,000 BTU/hr coming from the earth. The total fuel/energy usage is still less than conventional sources (fossil fuels) because the GHP gets ~75% of the energy from the earth (~45,000 BTU/hr), which avoids fuel that could be going into a natural gas fired heater/boiler.”
Most people think of renewable energy as easy-to-measure electricity (kilowatts) for the grid. But GHPs produce renewable energy measured in BTUs that are consumed without the transmission grid.
In some states, renewable thermal energy (BTUs) produced by GHPs is now being recognized by governments as a compliance measure under state mandates requiring utilities to buy electricity from renewable power generators like wind and solar. Maryland and New Hampshire passed laws last spring recognizing GHPs as a renewable resource that qualifies for Renewable Energy Credits for utilities, just like wind and solar power.
Those credits are earned according to the electricity use avoided by GHPs compared to standard HVAC systems. New metering devices can measure the temperature differential (ΔT) of incoming and outflowing fluid through a GHP, then accurately count the number of BTUs produced by the earth. A simple conversion to kilowatts equals the renewable electricity equivalent production of GHPs.
Reduced energy use through the deployment of GHPs ultimately means less pollution from coal and natural-gas fired power plants.
According to Oak Ridge National Laboratory Buildings Technologies Research and Integration Director Patrick Hughes, Ph.D., “GHPs capture a distributed, thermal form of renewable energy that is available everywhere. GHPs use the only renewable energy resource that is available at every building’s point of use, on-demand, which cannot be depleted (assuming proper design of the heat exchanger) and is affordable in all 50 states.”
Regarding GHPs’ use of electricity, Hughes says, “Although GHPs consume electrical energy, they move 3 to 5 times more energy between the building and the ground than they consume while doing so.”
The distributed thermal renewable resource offered by GHPs is already at the load, unlike the vast majority of wind and solar power generation resources that require costly and difficult to site transmission lines. And with GHPs, Hughes says, “The renewable resource is available on demand, unlike wind and solar, which may or may not be available when needed.”
Given both the energy GHPs recover from the ground in winter, and its recycling of heat to the earth in the summer months, the thermal energy tapped by GHPs in indeed renewable. With proper system design and consideration of soils and other factors, GHPs have been proven to save from 40 to 70 percent on heating and cooling bills (including hot water heating).
Those numbers can only get better with new units now being manufactured that promise to deliver even more renewable energy from the earth. And collectively, GHPs offer a 24-7 / 365-days-per-year solution to intermittent renewable power production from wind and solar sources.
GHPs can provide BOTH renewable energy AND dramatically raise the efficiency of our power grid while reducing energy consumption in buildings of all kinds in most locations around the country.

Carbon Feedback From Thawing Permafrost Will Likely Add 0.4°F - 1.5°F To Total Global Warming By 2100 | ThinkProgress

Carbon Feedback From Thawing Permafrost Will Likely Add 0.4°F - 1.5°F To Total Global Warming By 2100 | ThinkProgress

Other variables of the model

a) Size of the carbon pool. MacDougall et al vary the carbon concentration of the permafrost from 15.8 to 26.3 kg/cubic metre, which leads to a range of 837-1206 PgC (billion tonnes of carbon) for the upper 3.5 metres of permafrost. This figure is larger than that assumed in previous studies. Consequently, the upper-end range of carbon release by 2100 calculated in this paper, 508 PgC, is much larger than the previous studies that did not use coupled carbon-climate models. For example, Schaeffer et al calculated 138 PgC as their upper limit. The entire permafrost soil carbon pool is estimated to contain 1700 PgC, about twice the mass of the carbon in the current atmosphere.
b) Climate sensitivity. The other important variable used in the model is the climate sensitivity, which varies between 2.0 and 4.5°C for a doubling of atmospheric CO₂, with a central value of 3.0°C.

Counter-intuitive results

The results shown in Figure 1 are very consistent for the 2100 median forecasts, ranging between 0.23 and 0.27°C of extra warming due to permafrost feedbacks. By 2300, the range of median has increased to 0.37 to 0.73°C. The results are a little counter-intuitive, with the biggest feedbacks in temperature terms not coming with the worst emissions pathways. On one hand, the amount of permafrost carbon released on the most pessimistic pathways is larger (39, 58, 67 and 101 ppm CO₂ respectively for the four DEP’s), and occurs sooner. On the other, in the lower DEP cases, the permafrost carbon released to the atmosphere has a stronger effect due to less saturation of the infra-red absorption bands.
Also counter intuitively, the uncertainty of the permafrost feedback is reduced in the higher emission scenarios. In these scenarios, there is less uncertainty that we will unleash all of the permafrost, and quickly. Not only that, but following the pessimistic pathways means that we will have already have inflicted so much violence on the atmospheric chemistry that the extra damage caused by the permafrost feedback will be felt relatively less strongly.

The industrial shutdown experiment

The results in Figure 1 imply that we are in for at least some backlash from the permafrost whatever emissions pathway we choose to follow. Because the real world will resemble a coupled climate-carbon cycle model, the releases of permafrost carbon will result in more warming, which will cause still more carbon to be released. In other words, at some level the cycle will become self-sustaining, even without any further human encouragement. MacDougall et al investigated this by imagining a complete shutdown of human emissions in 2013 and in 2050.

Figure 3. Showing the atmospheric concentration of CO₂ following a shutdown of human emissions in 2013(left) and, after following DEP 8.5 for 39 years, a shutdown in 2050 (right). The dotted blue line shows the results at a climate sensitivity of 3.0°C and the upper and lower lines 4.5° and 2.0° respectively. Selected and modified from Figure S8 in the Supplementary Information.
What Figure 3 demonstrates is that even in the case where human emissions cease altogether, the atmospheric CO₂ concentration will remain more-or-less constant in the most likely climate sensitivity case. Essentially, for a climate sensitivity of 3°C, the self-sustaining permafrost-related emissions match the uptake of CO₂ from the oceans and the terrestrial biosphere. Note that a self-sustaining feedback is not the same thing as a runaway greenhouse effect.

Permafrost feedbacks and the trillionth tonne

Allen et al (2009) argued that what matters most in determining safe levels of emissions is not so much the rate but the cumulative amount. Framed in this way, total emissions of a trillion tonnes of carbon will lead to a most likely warming of 2°C, a somewhat arbitrary, but widely accepted limit on the amount of warming that the world can endure without a high risk of catastrophic consequences. According to the trillionthtonne.org website, humans have already emitted 561 billion tonnes of carbon from fossil fuels, cement production and land use changes. We therefore have about 440 billion tonnes left to emit before we cross the trillion tonne limit. On present emission trends, this will occur in 2043.
MacDougall et al predict median permafrost emissions of 174 billion tonnes of carbon by 2100, which are more-or-less independent of the future pathway of our other emissions. Such feedbacks were not factored in to the trillionth tonne analysis, or were assumed to kick in after the “safe” limit of 2°C had been breached. Accordingly, the 440 billion tonnes we can still emit over the next few years and stay under the trillion-tonne limit needs to be reduced from 440 to 270 billion tonnes of fossil fuel, cement and land use emissions, a reduction of some 40%. Avoiding dangerous climate change becomes a lot harder once we face up to the permafrost feedback.

Why even this bleak prospect may be optimistic

Alert readers may have already noticed that this article has not yet used the word “methane”. When organic matter in the permafrost is thawed and decomposes it produces mostly CO₂ but also small amounts of methane, particularly so in the wetlands that are prevalent in areas of thawing permafrost. Schuur and Abbott (2011) polled 41 experts on permafrost decay who estimated that about 3% of the carbon released from the permafrost will be in the form of methane. Methane has a restricted lifetime in the atmosphere, measured in decades, but while present in the air it has a greenhouse effect some 25 times that of CO₂ over a 100-year period and higher values over shorter periods. According to Schuur and Abbott, the small amount of methane is responsible for approximately half of the warming effect from the permafrost emissions.
The UVic model does not simulate methanogenesis. That is to say that it does not model the generation of methane—all of the permafrost carbon that goes into the atmosphere in the model is in the form of CO₂. This is a significantly conservative simplification over the time period studied.
Also, their model assumes only purely thermal degradation of the permafrost. Physical erosion, for example at coastlines, is not considered. Their model accounts only for permafrost down to a depth of 3.5 metres and there is plenty of carbon stored below those depths that was excluded from their modelling.
Finally, this study does not consider any contribution of methane from methane hydrates, either from under permafrost or under ice sheets, nor from fossil methane currently trapped under an impermeable seal of continuous permafrost.

Summing-up

• Thawing permafrost will release carbon to the atmosphere that will have an appreciable additional effect on climate change, adding at least one quarter of a degree Celsius by the end of the century and perhaps as much as one degree. (In comparison, Swart and Weaver (2012) calculated that combustion of the in-place resources of the Alberta oil sands would increase temperatures by 0.24-0.50°C.)

• The temperature effect of the coming permafrost feedback is not sensitive to the emission pathway that we choose to follow.

• The permafrost feedback response to our historic emissions, even in the absence of future human emissions, is likely to be self-sustaining and will cancel out future natural carbon sinks in the oceans and biosphere over the next two centuries.

• Unfortunately, there are several good reasons to consider the outlook in MacDougall et al. as rosy; as the authors themselves make clear. However, as bad and inevitable as they are, feedbacks from the permafrost are just the (de-)icing on the fossil fuel cake that we are busy baking. It is still up to us to influence how severe climate change is going to be.

This piece was originally published at Skeptical Science and was reprinted with permission.
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ecodesign

ecodesign, a set on Flickr.

a wide variety of passive solar, daylighting, energy conservation, sunrooms, etc.