Ground Roots

After reading this article about saving winter, I am seriously contemplating how to introduce the idea that, as individuals who believe climate change is happening and is VERY BAD, we ALL need to do something to slow and eventually stop climate change, so my new view is that what we need is a strong "ground roots" movement.

Then I ask myself: Is my term ground roots appropriate? I search Google and after reading many ground roots references, I find Ground Roots - the human story of the green revolution (link is to a moving specific post). What a delight! It is 11 pm, I have worked hard on our home organic vegetable garden today, but now can I sleep? Eventually yes, and after several busy days of breeding bird surveys, planting more vegetables, and most importantly, reading more of the GroundRoots blog by Lily, I decide it is time for you to see my thoughts, and Lily's GroundRoots blog.

Geothermal Energy Plans in Kenya

Geothermal energy in this context is not "geothermal heat pumps", but rather it is actually extracting high levels of heat energy from the Earth, typically at about 500 deg C, and using that heat energy to produce electricity from steam turbines coupled to electric generators, as already very well developed in coal and gas powered electricity generation.

From the article in Renewable Energy News, ".....the geothermal energy potential in Kenya is estimated be upwards of 10,000 MW." That is the equivalent 20 average coal fired power plants, which for a country the size of Kenya, is very significant. Their current commitments to geothermal are very encouraging (as spelled out in the linked article, which is long and very detailed).

Deep Water Wind Turbines

In many coastal areas of the world, the best winds for power generation are over water too deep to place a bottom mounted wind turbine. To address this potential, the US and the UK are jointly developing wind turbines on floating platforms. They will be anchored with cables and can be placed in 60 to 100 meters of water...water too deep for bottom mounted turbines.

Osmotic Power

This video is about a prototype osmotic power plant in Norway. The principal is basically the opposite of a reverse osmosis desalination plant. In the power plant, fresh water from a river and salt water from the ocean are placed on either side of an osmotic membrane in a pressure vessel. The fresh water diffuses through the membrane creating high pressure on the salt water side equivalent to a head of water about 120 ft high. This pressurized water is released through a nozzle creating a jet of water used to drive a water turbine and coupled generator. Improved membrane technology is what is renewing interest in this unique approach to carbon-free power generation.

The original lead was from a recent article in Renewable Energy World.

Climate and Veganism - a major opportunity

Why is being a vegan good for our planet? It is actually very simple. Our foods growing energy comes from the sun. Plants (including phytoplankton in the sea) contain the largest amount of food energy per unit of solar energy delivered to Earth. Farm animals fed on plants we grow loose a large amount of the initial solar energy delivered to Earth due to conversion inefficiencies...and adding to climate woes, animal wastes release large amounts of methane, nitrous oxide and carbon dioxide, all potent greenhouse gases.

Want to pursue further? Start with Marc Guenther's vegan posts. There are a multitude of issues eating less meat addresses, your health probably being #1.

Am I a vegan? Almost, and my wife Sally is a full vegan. My deviation from being a full vegan is because I still consume some fish, preferably caught by me on hook-and-line, but also some commercially caught in the wild, like sardines and wild Pacific Salmon. My consumption of hoofed animals and poultry and dairy is zero.

Climate Change and the Jet Stream

The above video does an excellent job of relating global warming to jet stream changes to extreme weather events. It is from The Yale Forum on Climate Change and the Media. Definitely worth watching. Be sure to hit the full screen button in the lower right.

A Republican Meteorologists View of Climate Change

From Paul Douglas' article in Bloomberg Business Week: "If you know anything about American politics these days, and follow the climate war at all, you might anticipate with some confidence that I agree global warming is a hoax. That’s a shame, and I hope it changes soon."

This is an excellent article that really exposes the political and monetary side to skepticism that humans are causing global warming.More from the article:

"Climate science shows that over a long period of time, the statistics have changed. Things that used to happen a lot, like consistent winter snow cover, are happening less reliably. Things that happened every now and then, like droughts and wildfires, are happening more reliably. And things that almost never happened -- such as the 15,000 new U.S. temperature records in March -- sometimes now do occur. And they can’t be explained with purely meteorological reasoning.........

........How did so much of the Republican Party enter perpetual denial? We’ve turned climate science into a bizarre litmus test for conservatism. To pretend that heat-trapping gases can be waved away with a nod and a smirk is political fairytale. No harm. No foul. Keep drilling."

2012 Warmest March Ever

From NASA Earth Observatory:
First they called it the year without a winter. Then springtime began to feel more like summer for most of North America. March 2012 saw thousands of daily temperature records fall in the contiguous United States (often called the “lower 48”), and the entire month was the warmest March in a temperature record that dates back to 1895.

“Of the more than 1,400 months that have passed since the U.S. record began,” NOAA climatologists wrote, “only one month (January 2006) has seen a larger departure from its average temperature than March 2012.”

Von Karman Vortices

Okay, this has nothing to do with global warming, but it is certainly a part of atmospheric science, which has a lot to do with climate modelling. I found the linked article from Earth Observatory (NASA) fascinating.

Tornado Forecasting and Reporting by NOAA

The above map is for 4/14/12 when a severe outbreak of tornadoes was experienced in the central US. Much to NOAA's credit, this outbreak was forecast and publicly announced at least 24 hours in advance, and this probably saved many lives.

If you go to the title link, you will find a page with options in blue blocks across the top. Click the Severe Thunderstorm block, and you will get another page with many graphical forecasts and recent historical maps like the above. This map is titled "Yesterday's Severe Thunderstorm Reports" and is in the lower right hand list of these graphical options. Selecting this option also gives one the actual reports in CSV (Excel readable) format, so if you really want to research whether severe weather is increasing, you can get the data to analyze this.

What do I plan to do?...I plan to continue to believe the true meteorologists and climate scientists studying this question.

Where Is the Hottest Place on Earth?

This is a fun read. The hottest places on Earth are so hot that it is impractical to install remote sensors there. But satellites work. Enjoy!...and let me know if you find a definite answer to the title question.

Volcanoes and Climate - Two Way Street

 Vatnajökull glacier shown in lower right, NASA photo

There has been a lot in the news lately about Iceland's volcanoes, the increased activity at one named Katla, and the potential for a major eruption soon. As you probably know, such an eruption could kill people nearby.... and far away due to air pollution, poison agriculture, disrupt air traffic over Europe, and if large enough, even cool the global climate for several years.

What I did not know previously is that some of the increased volcanic activity is attributed to global warming. From the title linked article by Professor Andy Hooper:

"This trend (of increased volcanic activity) is being exacerbated by climate change. Vatnajökull (Iceland's largest glacier) has lost an estimated 400  billion tonnes of ice since the end of the 19th century. This has reduced the pressure on the hot mantle material beneath the crust, leading to increased magma generation. At the end of the last ice age, this same effect led to eruption rates some 30 times higher than at present. The current rate of ice loss is much lower than then, but we can still expect the formation of extra magma equivalent to that which erupted from Eyjafjallajökull in 2010 every 10 years or so."

CO2 and Post Ice Age Global Temperatures - New Data

One difficult to explain relationship when looking back at geologic history, has been that following ice ages, data seemed to show global temperature increasing before atmospheric CO2 levels increased. It turns out that this data was all for the Antarctic region, and now when scientists look at true global temperatures (based on proxy measurements derived from fossil records at 80 locations around the globe), CO2 does rise before global temperatures rise. This of course is far more in line with the the expected cause and effect of CO2, a greenhouse gas, and global temperature.

After having read several articles about this recent work, the one by Jonathan Amos of the BBC was selected as the title link because it gives a more detailed explanation of all the factors involved. An oversimplified summary would be that: as the the Earth's wobble changed so that the northern hemisphere received more sunlight, the vast ice sheets began to melt. Fresh water from them slowed down the Atlantic overturning circulation (ocean conveyor). This trapped more heat near the equator and southern hemisphere, which in turn contributed to an increase in CO2 release from the deep waters of the southern oceans. And finally, the increase in CO2 levels, from about 180 ppm to 260 ppm, increased the rate of global warming. Here we are today at about 390 ppm CO2 and rising.