This will likely result in higher food prices.

California's Drought May Be Worst in a Millennium


http://www.scientificamerican.com/ar..._id=SA_Twitter

…””This study really established how exceptional and severe this last drought was even in the last thousand years,” said Benjamin Cook, a climate scientist at NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies who studies the drought on the West Coast. ..."The conclusion that I think is the most compelling is that warming from anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions really made the drought more severe than it would have been," Cook said. “California is on track for the warmest year on their record.”…
…”Regardless of how much of this year's heat was man-made or natural in origin, 2014 serves as an important reminder that heat can seriously exacerbate drought events," wrote Williams in an email. "If temperatures continue rising, we should expect record-breaking drought years to become increasingly common."

There will likely be net benefits,but don’t forget the physics.

Can hydrogen-powered cars lead a transformation to a clean-energy economy?

http://scitation.aip.org/content/aip...E1PA8Z,AVZM3,1

…” A commentary at the Detroit News declared, “Fuel cells are problematical because harnessing hydrogen is not simple or cheap.” Similar statements appeared at the Australian and the Daily Mail. Grist reported that new production technologies “are in the early stages of development, while others are getting cheaper and better quickly—but none of them are ready for prime time.”
Somewhat outside the popular press, that unreadiness for prime time seems more widely recognized. IEEE Spectrum, reporting on research published in Nature that could possibly lead in the future to simplification of the difficult process of separating hydrogen gas for fuel cells, emphasized that “it is extremely costly and energy intensive to isolate” the gas. In a recent three-part series, Scientific American reported an analyst’s view that using natural gas for hydrogen production is “unsustainable long term” and explained that the “challenge will be to take the promise of renewable energy-powered electrolysis” for taking hydrogen out of water “from the pilot level to commercial scale.” "

Originally Posted by radind

There will likely be net benefits,but don’t forget the physics.

That's occurred to me as well ... that is, where does the hydrogen come from? Electrolysis, I suppose, or some similar process. And if so, where does the electricity come from for the electrolysis?

There is no way around constructing a complete state equation that includes the energy needs and the materials needed for the entire system of energy generation, not just the attractive last step of burning H2 to get H2O.

Originally Posted by TnT

That's occurred to me as well ... that is, where does the hydrogen come from? Electrolysis, I suppose, or some similar process. And if so, where does the electricity come from for the electrolysis?

At present, coal or natural gas which sort of defeats the purpose. Next, how do you store the stuff? H2 has a very low boiling point and has a nice exothermic reaction with O2. Cf. The Hindenberg accident.

There is no way around constructing a complete state equation that includes the energy needs and the materials needed for the entire system of energy generation, not just the attractive last step of burning H2 to get H2O.

My guess is that pursuing some sort of compact battery that has chemicals that don't explode in the presence of O2 would be better.

Global warming leads to California drought

Climate study shows disappearing Arctic sea ice could reduce water availability in western U.S.

April 13, 2004

By Tim Stephens, Staff Writer (phone number redacted -- likely inactive)

The sea ice covering much of the Arctic Ocean is melting, a trend that may have dramatic consequences for the western United States. Researchers at the University of California, Santa Cruz, recently looked at the long-term effects of reduced Arctic sea ice on the global climate, and their most striking finding was a significant reduction in rain and snowfall in the American West.

The study highlights the vulnerability of western states, which depend on winter precipitation for their water supplies, to changes in the regional climate. The results also show the surprising ways in which a small change in one component of the global climate system can affect particular regions, said Lisa Sloan, professor of Earth sciences at UCSC.

"We were surprised at the result ourselves, but it shows how interconnected the climate system is. Here we are reducing Arctic sea ice, and the biggest climatic response is felt in an entirely different part of the world," she said.

Sloan and graduate student Jacob Sewall used powerful computers running a global climate model developed by the National Center for Atmospheric Research to simulate the effects of reduced Arctic sea ice. Their findings were published online by the journal Geophysical Research Letters on March 24 and will appear in a subsequent print issue of the journal.

Sewall and Sloan based their study on projections of recent trends in Arctic sea ice cover published by a NASA researcher in 2002. Taking the projected ice cover in the year 2050 as a starting point, the researchers ran the model to see how the global climate would behave.

What they found was a change in atmospheric circulation patterns that caused a small northward shift in the paths of winter storms over western North America. This shift in winter storm tracks resulted in significantly reduced winter precipitation from southern British Columbia to the Gulf of California. In some areas, average annual precipitation dropped by as much as 30 percent. The reductions were greatest along the West Coast, with lesser changes further inland. But even as far inland as the Rocky Mountains, winter precipitation fell by 17 percent.

The sea ice acts like a lid over the ocean surface during the winter, blocking the transfer of heat from the ocean to the atmosphere, Sewall explained. Where the sea ice is reduced, heat transfer from the ocean warms the atmosphere, resulting in a rising column of relatively warm air. The shift in storm tracks over North America was linked to the formation of these columns of warmer air over areas of reduced sea ice in the Greenland Sea and a few other locations, Sewall said.

"The projected reduction in sea ice cover during the winter is small compared to the reduction in sea ice during the summer, but it ends up having a big effect on North America," he said.

Sewall noted that the study only looked at the direct climate response to a reduction in Arctic sea ice and did not take into account additional climate effects that may result from increasing levels of greenhouse gases. Increased greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide are a major factor driving global warming, a trend that is expected to continue well into the future.

"In a scenario with increased greenhouse gases, we would expect to see other effects on the climate that would interact with the effects of reduced sea ice," Sewall said.

Higher temperatures due to global warming, for example, would increase the rate of evaporation and exacerbate the effects of decreased precipitation on the water supply. But there could also be effects on the climate system that might counteract the influence of reduced Arctic sea ice on winter precipitation in the West, Sewall said.

Arctic sea ice has been declining gradually over the past century, but the pace of the decline has picked up during the past two decades. The cause of the decline remains unclear, and it is not certain that the trend will continue.

Nevertheless, the new study serves as a warning that climate change can have small effects in one location that propagate through the system to become big effects somewhere else, Sloan said.

"As the climate changes, the effects will vary a lot from one region to another, and it may be hard to predict where the effects will be felt most. What we saw in this study is not something one would have predicted in advance," she said.

_____

(email and phone of a graduate student active at the University of California, Santa Cruz ten years ago is deleted because the student is likely no longer active there). Article shown in full for reasons of discussion.

The date is from 2004... and it looks to have predicted a result very well. Ten years of further shrinkage of Arctic ice means that your source of out-of-season fruits and vegetables... and some of your favorite wines... could literally shrivel up and die.

It seems California is getting some rain. A big storm is due Thursday Dec.11. Well, I guess that means there's no global warming. Cold winters in the East, wet winters in California. The deniers are right; case closed!

Originally Posted by Eric the Green

It seems California is getting some rain. A big storm is due Thursday Dec.11. Well, I guess that means there's no global warming. Cold winters in the East, wet winters in California. The deniers are right; case closed!

Droughts usually end with torrential rain.

http://www.sanluisobispo.com/2014/01...ught.html?rh=1

Amplification of the wind patterns -- the jet stream either goes farther north (causing a huge reduction of precipitation to the West Coast and the Rockies) or south (bringing heavy rain to the American West).

Originally Posted by Ragnarök_62

At present, coal or natural gas which sort of defeats the purpose. Next, how do you store the stuff? H2 has a very low boiling point and has a nice exothermic reaction with O2. Cf. The Hindenberg accident.

There are some ways to take materials with a high microscopic surface area, like Palladium/Charcoal mixtures or platinum catalyst types of stuff that might help contain H2 in a safer manner than just carrying it around compressed in a tank. But I've not read of any practical application available yet.

Another approach might be the in situ generation of H2. That is, have relatively safe materials on board that can be acted upon in some way to produce the H2 as it is needed and then feed it into the engine. But this is also highly speculative and has the usual problem of where do we get THAT stuff, etc., etc. And we lose potential economies of scale available in the bulk manufacturing processes.

Anticipated changes in climate will push West Coast marine species from sharks to salmon northward an average of 30 kilometers per decade, shaking up fish communities and shifting fishing grounds, according to a new study published in Progress in Oceanography.

The study suggests that shifting species will likely move into the habitats of other marine life to the north, especially in the Gulf of Alaska and Bering Sea. Some will simultaneously disappear from areas at the southern end of their ranges, especially off Oregon and California.

"As the climate warms, the species will follow the conditions they're adapted to," said Richard Brodeur, a NOAA Fisheries senior scientist at the Northwest Fisheries Science Center's Newport Research Station and coauthor of the study. "We're going to see more interactions between species and there will be winners and losers that we cannot foresee."

The study, led by William Cheung of the University of British Columbia, estimated changes in the distribution of 28 near-surface fish species commonly collected by research surveys in the northeast Pacific Ocean. The researchers used established global climate models to project how the distribution of the fish would shift by 2050 as greenhouse gases warm the atmosphere and, in turn, the ocean surface.

Brodeur cautioned that like any models, climate models carry uncertainty. While they provide a glimpse of the most likely changes in global climate, they may be less accurate when estimating more fine-scale, local changes. "Nothing is certain," he said, "but we think we have a picture of the most likely changes."

Some species shifts are already being documented as West Coast waters are warming: predatory Humboldt squid from Central and South America have invaded the West Coast of North America in recent years, albacore have shifted to more northerly waters and eulachon have disappeared from warming waters at the southern end of their range.

"Thinking more broadly, this re-shuffling of marine species across the whole biological community may lead to declines in the beneficial functions of marine and coastal ecosystems," said Tom Okey, a Pew Fellow in Marine Conservation at the University of Victoria and a coauthor of the study. "These declines may occur much more rapidly and in more surprising ways than our expected changes in species alone."

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases...1210121401.htm

Originally Posted by Eric the Green

Anticipated changes in climate will push West Coast marine species from sharks to salmon northward an average of 30 kilometers per decade, shaking up fish communities and shifting fishing grounds, according to a new study published in Progress in Oceanography.

I've been hearing bits and pieces of similar things happening in the east. Chesapeake crabs are becoming rarer, but are being found near Long Island. Cape Cod lobsters are becoming more scarce, but are doing fine near Maine. Can't quote a formal study, but, yah...

What we're going to see in the next 2 Republican years is defunding the programs that protect our environment. I don't know if they'll get it through the Senate this year, but the House already cut back funds for the EPA and defunded the UN climate fund. They are also trying to repeal Dodd-Frank in this budget bill too, and insert other poison pills. Next year they will likely make Obama have to be the one to shut down the government if he doesn't "get his way." How much damage will they get away with?

The people on Nov.4 voted for more global warming, and they'll get it. And should millennials be asking themselves, is this what I wanted by staying home or by voting Republican? I might even venture to hope that some older folks might ponder that question. I don't know if they will. It seems that destroying all government action to solve problems is what they want.

Republicans could lose anyway on the energy front, if this guy is right. Of course, they may try to stop progress anyway. That's their job. But if he's right, then my decades-old prediction of a green energy boom starting in the last years of this decade is still spot on.

http://tonyseba.com/portfolio-item/c...ransportation/

Tony Seba:

In just 15 years, the world as we know it will have transformed forever. The ​age of oil, gas, coal and nuclear will be over. A new age of clean power and smarter cars will fundamentally, totally, and permanently disrupt the existing fossil fuel-dependent industrial infrastructure in a way that even the most starry-eyed proponents of ‘green energy’ could never have imagined.

These are not the airy-fairy hopes of a tree-hugging hippy living off the land in an eco-commune. It’s the startling verdict of ​Tony Seba, a lecturer in business entrepreneurship, disruption and clean energy at Stanford University and a serial Silicon Valley entrepreneur.

Seba began his career at Cisco Systems in 1993, where he predicted the internet-fueled mobile revolution at a time when most telecoms experts were warning of the impossibility of building an Internet the size of the US, let alone the world. Now he is predicting the “inevitable” disruption of the fossil fuel infrastructure.

Seba’s thesis, set out in more detail in his new book Clean Disruption of Energy and Transportation, is that by 2030 “the industrial age of energy and transportation will be over,” swept away by “exponentially improving technologies such as solar, electric vehicles, and self-driving cars.”.....

These 3 Colleges Stopped Investing in Fossil Fuels—One Year Later, Their Endowments Are Doing Just Fine

http://www.yesmagazine.org/climate-i...els-endowments

Someone said this graph refutes AGW. It seems to me that it supports it.

Will global warming stop if we stop carbon emissions now?

No, it's just a matter of degree.

http://theconversation.com/what-woul...es-today-35011

Originally Posted by Eric the Green

Someone said this graph refutes AGW. It seems to me that it supports it.

Liar, stooge, fool, or someone unable to read a graph -- take your pick on whoever says that it refutes global warming.

We are obviously in the warmest time since the Eemian interglacial of roughly 125K years ago. We are about to overshoot that due to a very recent buildup of carbon dioxide. We could probably get away with Eemian conditions, but overshooting them could be dangerous:

The Eemian climate is believed to have been about as stable as that of the Holocene. Changes in the Earth's orbital parameters from today (greater obliquity and eccentricity, and perihelion), known as Milankovitch cycles, probably led to greater seasonal temperature variations in the Northern Hemisphere, although global annual mean temperatures were probably similar to those of the Holocene. The warmest peak of the Eemian was around 125,000 years ago, when forests reached as far north as North Cape, Norway (which is now tundra) well above the Arctic Circle at 71°10′21″N 25°47′40″E. Hardwood trees such as hazel and oak grew as far north as Oulu, Finland.

At the peak of the Eemian, the Northern Hemisphere winters were generally warmer and wetter than now, though some areas were actually slightly cooler than today. The hippopotamus was distributed as far north as the rivers Rhine and Thames. Trees grew as far north as southern Baffin Island in the Canadian Arctic Archipelago: currently, the northern limit is further south at Kuujjuaq in northern Quebec. Similarly, the prairie-forest boundary in the Great Plains of the United States lay further west near Lubbock, Texas, whereas the current boundary is near Dallas, Texas. The period closed as temperatures steadily fell to conditions cooler and drier than the present, with 468-year-long aridity pulse in central Europe, and by 114,000 years ago, a glacial period had returned.

Kaspar et al. (GRL, 2005) performed a comparison of a coupled general circulation model (GCM) with reconstructed Eemian temperatures for Europe. Central Europe (north of the Alps) was found to be 1–2 °C warmer than present; south of the Alps, conditions were 1–2 °C cooler than today. The model (generated using observed GHG concentrations and Eemian orbital parameters) generally reproduces these observations, leading them to conclude that these factors are enough to explain the Eemian temperatures.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eemian

Climate Change Takes A Village

...(J)ust a few years ago, no one thought Shishmaref would be here anymore.

The remote village of 563 people is located 30 miles south of the Arctic Circle, flanked by the Chukchi Sea to the north and an inlet to the south, and it sits atop rapidly melting permafrost. In the last decades, the island's shores have been eroding into the sea, falling off in giant chunks whenever a big storm hits.

The residents of Shishmaref, most of whom are Alaska Native Inupiaq people, have tried to counter these problems, moving houses away from the cliffs and constructing barriers along the northern shore to try to turn back the waves. But in July 2002, looking at the long-term reality facing the island, they voted to pack up and move the town elsewhere.

Relocation has proven much more difficult than that single vote, however. And 12 years later, Shishmaref is still here, ready to begin another school year.

There are obvious signs that something is amiss, however. One of the first things you see as you arrive in Shishmaref is a small wooden building propped precariously on the edge of the beach. A back corner dangles over the edge of an incline, the water lapping just a few feet away.



http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/1...n_6296516.html

Read the news carefully.

Google engineers: “Today’s renewable energy technologies won’t save us. So what will?”
The Wall Street Journal publicizes the sentence but scants the question and its answers.

…”They assert that “incremental improvements aren’t enough” and offer “a suggestion for how to foster innovation in the energy sector and allow for those breakthrough inventions.” They write:
Consider Google’s approach to innovation, which is summed up in the 70-20-10 rule espoused by executive chairman Eric Schmidt. The approach suggests that 70 percent of employee time be spent working on core business tasks, 20 percent on side projects related to core business, and the final 10 percent on strange new ideas that have the potential to be truly disruptive.
Wouldn’t it be great if governments and energy companies adopted a similar approach in their technology R&D investments? The result could be energy innovation at Google speed. Adopting the 70-20-10 rubric could lead to a portfolio of projects. The bulk of R&D resources could go to existing energy technologies that industry knows how to build and profitably deploy. These technologies probably won’t save us, but they can reduce the scale of the problem that needs fixing. The next 20 percent could be dedicated to cutting-edge technologies that are on the path to economic viability. Most crucially, the final 10 percent could be dedicated to ideas that may seem crazy but might have huge impact. Our society needs to fund scientists and engineers to propose and test new ideas, fail quickly, and share what they learn. Today, the energy innovation cycle is measured in decades, in large part because so little money is spent on critical types of R&D.
We’re not trying to predict the winning technology here, but its cost needs to be vastly lower than that of fossil energy systems. For one thing, a disruptive electricity generation system probably wouldn’t boil water to spin a conventional steam turbine. These processes add capital and operating expenses, and it’s hard to imagine how a new energy technology could perform them a lot more cheaply than an existing coal-fired power plant already does.”…

…”And they add something that the WSJ opinion editors might well allow to be said in an op-ed, but that they’d never say in an editorial or select for a “Notable & Quotable” blurb: “While humanity is currently on a trajectory to severe climate change, this disaster can be averted if researchers aim for goals that seem nearly impossible.”

Maybe energy will get more expensive, and it's worth the price to save the planet. Or maybe we get less energy, and it's worth the price to save the planet. Or maybe research has to go faster. Or maybe, the shift will happen anyway to the degree that the fossil fuel companies go out of business, as this guys says.

http://motherboard.vice.com/read/how...empire-by-2030

Or maybe, we just keep fiddling while the Earth burns, and most of us live in oppressive poverty under the Republican/DINO oligarchy.

Dr. Daryoush Allaei didn’t set out to revolutionize the wind industry, but he may have stumbled on an idea that could become a major game changer, not only in the wind market, but the entire field of energy production.
In a non-descript office in an unremarkable building on the north side of Chaska’s Jonathan Industrial Park, sits a pair of rudi-mentary prototypes ready to show the world a different way of thinking.

The models illustrate the idea behind Invelox – a wind generation system designed to capture, accelerate and concentrate wind power. Life-size counterparts will be rolled out in the next few months for testing. And if Allaei can convince the world that his idea works, he can envision a day when his wind generation systems are atop every building and every home all around the world.....

He developed a tower shaped like a giant old phonograph horn lying on its back that could collect wind closer to the ground than traditional turbines, thereby reducing the cost of construction materials as well as operation and maintenance costs. “Harvest en-ergy closest to the source,” he reasoned.

The company, SheerWind, was created two years later.

In addition to reducing costs, Allaei believes his creation to be more efficient and more versatile than the kinds of windmills peo-ple have used for thousands of years.

“It is based on a concept of elegant simplicity,” states his promotional brochures. “Instead of a pinwheel, you begin with a scoop.”

http://www.swnewsmedia.com/chaska_he...0be3982fc.html

South Florida's rising seas!



Hey, Miami Beach becomes Venice!

In today’s world, the likes of Google and Facebook have more sway over the public’s news diet than any individual media outlets do. This is why people paid attention when Google Chairman Eric Schmidt went on NPR recently to explain that Google made a mistake by helping to fund the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) and would stop doing so, because ALEC was “literally lying” with its position that man-made climate change is not happening. Schmidt went on to say, “The facts of climate change are not in question any more… Everyone understands climate change is occurring, and the people who oppose it are really hurting our children and our grandchildren and making the world a much worse place."

http://oilprice.com/The-Environment/...-Bad-Year.html

Global Land-Ocean Temperature Index Graph from NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies.

Originally Posted by Eric the Green

Global Land-Ocean Temperature Index Graph from NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies.

Kind of odd that there were warm spells during WWI and WWII. The energy released by many exploding bombs created a temporary bump? I doubt it, most likely a coincedence. But it still looks interesting.

How much ice is the Greenland Ice Sheet losing?

To analyze how the height of the ice sheet was changing, Csatho and UB research professor and photogrammetrist Anton Schenk, PhD, developed a computational technique called Surface Elevation Reconstruction And Change detection to fuse together data from NASA satellite and aerial missions.

The analysis found that the Greenland Ice Sheet lost about 243 metric gigatons of ice annually -- equivalent to about 277 cubic kilometers of ice per year -- from 2003-09, the period for which the team had the most comprehensive data. This loss is estimated to have added about 0.68 millimeters of water to the oceans annually.

The figures are averages, and ice loss varied from year to year, and from region to region.

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases...1215154522.htm