Climate Knowledge Resources - Wikipedia

I think you all recognize how useful I have found Wikipedia in preparation for my last Predicting Climate Change course.

Wikipedia is run by the non-profit organization Wikimedia. This means you see no ads as you search Wikipedia. It also means Wikipedia has no special interest groups it is supporting, and in return receiving funds from.

So I encourage you to support Wikipedia financially, as I have been doing.
Bill

For Wikipedia details, here are links attached to my donation receipt letter:

"This letter may serve as a record of your donation. No goods or services were provided, in whole or in part, for this contribution. The Wikimedia Foundation, Inc. is a non-profit charitable corporation with 501(c)(3) tax exempt status in the United States. Our address is 149 New Montgomery, 3rd Floor, San Francisco, CA, 94105. U.S. tax-exempt number: 20-0049703
You can follow us on Twitter, identi.ca or Google+, like us on Facebook and read our blog. Here is the Wikimedia Foundation annual report for 2010-11, the Wikimedia Foundation annual plan for 2012-13 and the Wikimedia Foundation’s five-year strategic plan. You can also now buy Wikipedia merchandise at shop.wikimedia.org."

Worse than Climate Change? Increasingly rampant use of pesticides could be!

Yes! It could bring catastrophes right to our door steps, as opposed to a century away, as with global warming.

This NY Times article was sent to me by class member and Sussex Bird Cub President, John Hoyt. It is very alarming, but very hard to dispute.

From my perspective - Yes, I have seen far fewer Monarchs this fall. I have also seen far fewer wild bees at our flowers. And I have read very troubling articles about Lowes and Home Depot selling flower plants so heavily dosed with pesticides that bees are dying by the thousands in their parking lots, not to mention your backyard.

And at the Rehoboth Film Festival, Sally and I watched More Than Honey about the bee decline, in a large part due to pesticides, and about how so many of our food crops are dependent on bee pollination. From the film, an Einstein quote, "If bees ever die out, mankind will die out 4 years later".

So where is Obama on this issue? Well, he does not look to be well positioned. But then if I lived in China or Russia, right now my future would probably look bleak as well. Hope you all can swim.

LENR - Low Energy Nuclear Reactions

Now with a headache and an overwhelmed brain, I offer the best two links I could find on the title subject.

First, from New Energy Times: LENR is Not "Cold Fusion" - A Crucial Distinction

And second from Wikipedia when I searched for LENR and got: Cold Fusion
In paragraph 5 of this link the authors make the statement: A small community of researchers continues to investigate cold fusion, now often preferring the designation low-energy nuclear reactions (LENR).

What is my opinion at this point? It would be great if LENR could be developed as a green energy source, but I am not optimistic, especially since the science can not be explained. If after researching it further, you come to a different conclusion, I would love to hear it. I did sign up for email headline notices from New Energy Times, but did NOT subscribe to their full publication at $40/yr.

Bloom Energy - An indepth look

Bloom Energy produces Bloom Boxes, which use fuel cell technology to convert methane and oxygen from air into electricity and carbon dioxide. They have gotten a lot of good press about being environmentally friendly, green energy, etc. However, when one looks at the numbers, there is considerable doubt cast about the validity of those claims. From the Institute for Energy Research (IER) comes this analysis, The Bloom is Off Bloom Energy

Bloom Boxes are being produced in Delaware, and the company is being aided by major subsidies funded in part by higher utility bills, the appropriateness of which is now being challenged in the court.

UK Offshore Wind Capacity Rises 80 Percent in One Year

This article from Renewable Energy News is encouraging about the growth of renewable energy, in this case wind energy. For perspective, an average coal-fired power plant's capacity is 500 Megawatts (MW). So the UK just added the equivalent of 3 coal fired power plants in wind turbines in one year.

Seems like a good achievement to me. I hope you will read the article, and make your own conclusions. The other key question is: What is the status in the US and in Delaware? More on that in the future.

“The sky is not falling, but the water is rising,”

What a magnificent quote for the reality ahead. That quote was by Charles Tear, the Miami Beach emergency management coordinator, and it was in a NY Times article, South Florida Faces Ominous Prospects from Rising Waters,

At the end of the article are these 2 paragraphs:

Officials here are seeking advice from the Netherlands, famous for its highly effective levees and dikes, but the very different topography of Miami Beach and its sister coastal cities does not lend itself to the fixes engineered by the Dutch. 

“Ultimately, you can’t beat nature, but you can learn to live with it,” Mr. Morales said. “Human ingenuity is incredible, but do we have the political will? Holland sets aside $1 billion a year for flood mitigation, and we have a lot more coastline than they do.” 

Many thanks to John Hoyt for spotting this article and sending me the link.

Climate Tipping Points

For a report commissioned jointly by Allianz, a leading global financial services provider, and WWF, a leading global environmental NGO, and prepared by the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research, see Climate Tipping Points.

This link contains several short videos narrated by Timothy Lenton, a researcher at the University of East Anglia, and lead author of the highly cited paper, Tipping elements in the Earth's climate system.

A Positive: The Ocean Heat Sink is working.....

...which means much of the added energy from the greenhouse gas warming is being stored in the deep oceans. But what does this really mean to us humans???

If a substantial amount of global warming ends up warming the deep oceans, does this means we will not be affected by that portion of global warming?

A very hard question to answer. The Latest ocean research shows the oceans are indeed absorbing a substantial amount of heat due to greenhouse gas warming, and the best scientific estimates are that, YES, it will impact world inhabitants, just later as opposed to now.

My view on how this will first impact our World?

It will further undermine the West Antarctic Sheet (WAIS) grounding on the bed rock it rests on. This will lead to an accelerated collapse of the WAIS and a substantial rise in sea level. This sea level rise coupled with what is already going on in melting the Greenland ice sheet (largely unrelated to deep water warming), will mean sea levels rise so precipitously, that millions of people will be forced to become Climate Migrants (Climigration).

Where? Bangladesh and the Maldives for sure, most probably New Orleans, Lewes and Rehoboth-DE, New York City, and MANY other places around the World.

So "Optimistic Bill"....What would you do???

I would put more money into making nuclear fusion work. That is a route that essentially will work for all time....as best we can define that phrase.

Optimistic Bill

PS - I am loving the Rehoboth Film Festival, and just saw The Rocket. I used to love to make rockets as a kid.... and I got pretty good at it. But the 10 year old star of this moving far eclipsed me.

Fusion Power Optimism at NIF

NIF = National Ignition Facility, and they have very recently used high power lasers to compress a Hydrogen fuel pellet enough to achieve a fusion reaction releasing more energy than the laser beams contained. According to the BBC, this was a first in the quest for power generation via nuclear fusion, which is combining light atoms, as opposed to conventional nuclear fission, which involves splitting heavy atoms, like uranium.

More on this in Class 5. Optimistic Bill

Climate Change Tipping Points from Wake Up, Freak Out

We will be watching the linked video in our upcoming class, but it is well worth watching two or more times to grasp all the concepts presented. The video link is HERE.

Want more information about the creators, go to wakeupfreakout.org

And please note that this video does not portray the forecast changes as inevitable, so to Judy Hendricks (who was seeking some optimism at the end of our last class) and to all of our Class, lets hear from you about some of your optimistic ideas to avert catastrophic climate change. This will be our main subject in class 5, and lots of class time will be available for discussion of ideas, new info, etc. I am usually optimistic, so lets see what we can come up with. Bill

OTEC Followup from today's class

See Hawaii Ocean Science and Technology Park for latest details on OTEC scale-up efforts. As a reminder, OTEC stands for Ocean Thermal Energy Conversion. And as I mentioned in class today, Sally and I plan to visit this facility in Jan 2014, and of course will update you with what we see and learn.

Global Warming Put to Music

After yesterday's anouncement by Obama of the formation of a climate change task force (which includes Delaware's Markell), maybe this piece by Daniel Crawford titled, A Song of Our Warming Planet, should be adopted as the task force's theme song. It is the top video link on Andrew Revkin's blog. Note that if warming continues at the present rate, by 2100 some notes will be inaudible to the human ear.

Feeding the World....while also reducing greenhouse gas emissions

Cattle release methane, and lots of it. Methane is a greenhouse gas 23 times more potent than CO2. Plus with a World population over 7 billion and still growing, we are running out of resources to feed our World.

So do we really need to eat beef, chicken and pork to get our protein? Absolutely not!!!! Look at some of the earth's largest animals - Elephants, Hippopotamus, Rhinocerus, they are all vegetarians, but still very big and strong. In the US, 13% of the population is vegetarian or vegan. In India 31%. In OLLI, I am estimating significantly more than 13%. (A more precise survey would be welcome.)

From a global perspective, it boils down to more efficiently using our limited resources, which are fertile land and fresh water. Consuming crops is far more efficient than consuming animals which have been fed crops. This is due to limited ecological efficiency in converting energy from one trophic level to another. A rough approximation is that the conversion is only 10% efficient. See Wikipedia for more details.

So what are your plant-based eating resources. In OLLI there is an excellent class, Plant Based Eating 101 taught by Dorothy Greet. On the internet, there are an almost infinite number of resources, such as Marc Gunther on Reinventing Meat, or John McDougall's web site dedicated to improving your health through plant based eating.

At the very least, take a look at the health benefits You will gain, and the benefits to the World through better utilization of limited resources, and a reduction of greenhouse gas emissions. Sally and I both both do it.