Author: Bryan Walker

Let the wind blow (again)

Lester Brown doesn’t let up when he’s published a book. Over successive months his Earth Policy Institute produces follow-up articles focusing on particular topics. The latest is on wind power, which was strongly advocated in his recent book World on the Edge as the early leader in the move to renewable sources of energy. What he has to say about the global development of wind power ties in with my recent update on wind power in New Zealand and is well worth reporting here. What follows is mainly extract from his article.

There are now more than 70 countries developing wind resources. Between 2000 and 2010, world wind electric generating capacity increased at what Brown describes as frenetic pace from 17,000 megawatts to nearly 200,000 megawatts.

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Garnaut: no reticence on risk

I appreciated the candidness with which economist Ross Garnaut introduced and concluded his recently released update on the science of climate change, one of a series of updates to his 2008 Review which have been commissioned by the Australian government. In the introduction he explains how he began his original Review with no strong views and no more than a common knowledge of climate change science. He read a fair bit of climate science in the course of preparing the Review, including paying due attention to sceptics with genuine scientific credentials, and his investigations led him to the premise for his Review that “on a balance of probabilities” the central conclusions of the mainstream science were correct.

Since then he has moved in his thinking to regard it as highly probable that most of the global warming since the mid-20th century is human-caused. Further, he declares that he would now be tempted to say that those who think that temperatures and damage from a specified level of emissions over time will be larger than is suggested by the mainstream science are much more likely to be proven correct than those who think the opposite.

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Whispering wind #2

The arrival of a Wind Energy Association Newsletter suggested it might be time for an update on wind power in New Zealand. It’s nearly two years since I wrote about wind farm prospects in my own Waikato region. The first of those wind farms, at Te Uku, is now up and running. The Prime Minister was present at the opening on 11 February, and is reported by the wind energy association as saying “In a world where we want to get away from fossil fuels and ultimately have a cleaner, greener environment, wind is a tremendous technology for us.”

The newspaper report, however, failed to report that remark and focused on his use of the occasion to defend the Government’s wish to privatise up to 49% of Meridian Energy. It also reported him as saying that new technology and generation such as Te Uku would only be introduced “when it pays for itself”. One would like to think that at this point he pointed out that fossil fuel-generated electricity doesn’t pay for itself but is heavily subsidised by future generations, but if he did the paper didn’t think it newsworthy.

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On an island: coping with sea level rise

A recent Rowntree Foundation report on the vulnerability to the effects of climate change by mid-century of Britain’s coastal communities has attracted some media attention. It struck me as underlining the relevance of one of the chapters in the book Adapting to Climate Change which I recently reviewed on Hot Topic. The chapter, on adaptive governance for a changing coastline, noted a strategic shift in national coastal management policy in England away from investing in expensive ‘hard’ engineered defence towards designing a more naturally functioning coastline. This means that many coastal communities now face great unease and anxiety about their future, since the new policy preferences for retreat and realignment mean no future guarantees for protection.

[See end for comments by Gareth.]

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Riders on the storms

I listened with interest to Kevin Trenberth on the latest Climate Show describing how the increased water vapour in the atmosphere resulting from human-caused global warming is leading to greater extremes in weather events. It sent me back to take another look at the section in James Hansen’s book Storms of My Grandchildren where he explains the greatly increased strength of storms we can expect as the century unfolds, unless we leave most fossil carbon in the ground. I reviewed the book a while back on Hot Topic and thought it worth outlining more closely here, as an extension of my review, Hansen’s argument in the ten pages where he specifically addresses the storms of which the book’s title speaks.

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