Category: Climate science

Tuesday linkfest

Labour weekend means just that, chez Hot Topic. Catching up with farm work, planting the vege garden, getting a sore back – all in a weekend’s work. But climate change waits for no man, so here’s a compendium of stuff that caught my attention over the last few days.

  • Contact Energy has announced plans for a huge – 218 turbine, 650MW – wind farm called Hauauru ma raki, to be built on a remote site south of Port Waikato. NZ turbine builder Windflow Technology has announced plans for new models designed to work in India and China, and Meridian has sent wind experts to Scott Base in Antarctica to advise on building wind turbines to reduce fossil fuel requirements. According to Stuff, they think it could be easier than building in Wellington.
  • Still more on the Arctic summer: the NSIDC updates its coverage with some excellent animations, while Cryosphere Today adds an archive of maps of atmospheric conditions over the summer, and introduces a web app that allows iPhone users to monitor sea ice conditions. Another reason why I want one. Technology Review visits Greenland to meet the teams measuring the melt, and down south, satellites spot a huge berg breaking off the Pine Island Glacier.
  • On the roof of the world, the Nepali Times reports Kiwi guides describing how the disappearance of ice on the planet’s biggest mountains is changing the climbs.
  • Two more good articles from TR: Fixing the Power Grid describes how big batteries (capable of supplying 1MW+ for hours at a time) can provide back up for grid problems, and Tiny Solar Cells looks at nanowire solar cells made by a team at Harvard.
  • Carbon emissions from shipping could be as much as twice those from aviation, according to a report from Intertanko. Strong growth in trade has driven emissions to 1.2 billion tonnes oer annum. Meanwhile, the Herald reports on aviation’s attempts to be seen to be more climate friendly – and Richard Branson’s efforts to beat Air New Zealand to the first use of biofuels in jets.
  • CO2 absorption in the Atlantic has nosedived, adding to concerns that the ocean carbon sink may be reducing – leaving more of our emissions in the atmosphere [University of East Anglia].
  • Coral reef specialists have issued a call to action on the impact of climate change: “We call on all societies and governments to immediately and substantially reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Without targeted reductions, the ongoing damage to coral reefs from global warming will soon be irreversible.”
  • The Daily Telegraph [UK] is in the process of becoming enthusiastically green. Latest evidence is a nifty widget – the Telegraph Earth Pulse – which monitors climate and general environment news.
  • A dairy farm can produce as much sewage as a small town (see North & South current issue), but worms can turn it all into mellow compost according to US researchers.
  • It looks like a “three-wheeled technicolour shoehorn”, but the No More Gas will do 75 mph and has a range of 30 miles. OK for getting around town, but I’d still prefer a Tesla Roadster…
  • The financial word is getting the climate message: Deutsche Bank thinks that efforts to combat climate change will drive an investment “megatrend”, Morgan Stanley estimates that global sales of wind, solar and geothermal power and biofuels could be US$1 trillion a year by 2030, and HSBC is launching a climate change investment fund for investors who want to track companies active in the field.
  • HT tends to steer clear of dsicussing peak oil, but the Guardian [UK] covers a new report that claims that we passed peak oil last year, and that global oil production will be halved by 2030. Adds a certain piquancy to energy strategy…

Time to buy new wellies

WellieRegular readers will know that I’ve been keeping a close eye on this year’s Arctic summer, and the record minimum sea ice extent reached last month (nice NASA picture here). The ice area is increasing now, but is still about 1m km2 below the same time last year. I might have to increase my bet… If all the summer Arctic sea ice disappears quickly, it won’t have any impact on sea level, but if the ice on land – mountain glaciers and the great ice sheets of Greenland and the Antarctic – melts, sea level will rise. During the last interglacial, about 125,000 years ago, global temperature was a degree or two warmer than today and sea level was about 5m higher. Some of that extra water came from Greenland and Antarctica.

When I was writing Hot Topic, the latest information suggested that Greenland was losing about 200 km3 (cubic kilometres) of ice every year, and Antarctica about 150 km3 (HT, p45). But time goes on, and the world warms. A study to be published in Geophysical Research Letters suggests that the glaciers of southeast Greenland are now losing 300 km3 of ice per year, a 400% increase in melt rate since 2004. AFP reports:

“Until 2004, the glacier mass in the southeastern part of the island lost about 50 to 100 cubic kilometres (12 to 24 cubic miles) per year. After this date, the melting rate accelerated to 300 cubic kilometres per year. It’s a jump of 400 percent, which is very worrying,” National Space Center head researcher and project chief Abbas Khan told AFP. […] The measurements indicated that the mountains hugging glaciers in the southeastern part of Greenland rose four to five centimetres (1.5 to two inches) per year, and that the banks of the glaciers thinned 100 metres per year.

Continue reading “Time to buy new wellies”

Crankwatch

Wp-Content Uploads 2007 08 Homer-1Al Gore’s making most of the climate news at the moment. Winning a Nobel Peace Prize and having a British judge find nine “errors” in An Inconvenient Truth has generated a lot of copy, and more hot air. Others have done a lot of footwork on this story: Deltoid looks at the nature of the “errors” and RealClimate examines the underlying science, but New Zealand has its own band of stalwarts banging away. Former ACT MP Muriel Newman, who runs a web site titled the NZ Centre For Policy Research, not content with fulminating against “political indoctrination” in NZ schools, has now written to the president of the Academy Awards demanding that Gore’s Oscar should be removed:

“With the release of the British High Court judgement overnight that found that ‘An Inconvenient Truth’ was littered with nine inconvenient untruths, it is clear that Al Gore embellished the truth to create dramatic effect (see the High Court Judgement http://www.nzcpr.com/dimmock.pdf). Given that the Oscar Award was presented in the documentary category and not the drama category, the only appropriate action now is for the Academy to rescind the Award as it was clearly inappropriately classed as a documentary. The second Oscar for ‘Best Original Song’ is not affected by the Judge’s ruling. The truth, as inconvenient as it is to Al Gore, is that his so-called documentary contained critical distortions that are quite contrary to the principles of good documentary journalism. Good documentaries should be factually correct. Clearly this documentary is not.”

What a broadside. I’m sure the Oscar committee are quaking in their boots and rushing to consider such an urgent issue, raised by such an important and perceptive commentator. Set aside for a moment that “embellishing the truth for dramatic effect” is pretty much what film-making is all about, Muriel seems to have forgotten a few basic facts herself.

Continue reading “Crankwatch”

And on Friday night…

GoreStop press: Canterbury lose semi-final, and – in a move guaranteed to enrage global warming sceptics – Al Gore and the IPCC have been jointly awarded this years Nobel Peace Prize [BBC, New York Times]. In the citation, the Nobel committee said:

By awarding the Nobel Peace Prize for 2007 to the IPCC and Al Gore, the Norwegian Nobel Committee is seeking to contribute to a sharper focus on the processes and decisions that appear to be necessary to protect the world’s future climate, and thereby to reduce the threat to the security of mankind. Action is necessary now, before climate change moves beyond man’s control.

Congratulations to Al and all the NZ scientists involved in the IPCC process – David Wratt, Jim Renwick, Blair Fitzharris and many others.

Another Friday roundup

NzmapI’m a sucker for pretty computer graphics, especially if they’re didactic. Today’s discovery is a superb Flash animation of the sea level history of Australia and New Guinea, lovingly prepared by Monash University‘s new SahulTime project [ABC coverage here]. From the web site:

The concept of SahulTime is similar to GoogleEarth, except that SahulTime extends each of GoogleEarth’s paradigms through a further dimension in time. Satellite-style images change to reflect coastlines, the icons are time-aware, and even photographs can can be taken through a timewarp to view reconstructed ancient landscapes.

You drag a pointer back along a profile of how sea level has changed over the last 100,000 years, and watch how Australia’s coastline changes, merging with New Guinea. Fantastic. Can we have one for New Zealand, please?

Meanwhile…

  • Al Gore’s film An Inconvenient Truth has been passed by a UK High Court judge as fit to be seen by UK schoolchildren, but only with changes to the accompanying teacher’s notes to clarify nine scientific “errors”. News media are buzzing: a few samples – Herald, BBC, and Guardian (UK). The BBC’s environment correspondent provides some context, and Stoat (aka climate scientist and ice gambler William Connolley) looks at how serious the mistakes really are. The right wing roots of the court case are explained by Oil Change International, and one of the “expert” witnesses looks like it might have been the NZ CSC’s own Bob Carter. Not surprising then that former ACT MP Muriel Newman’s NZ Centre for Policy Research site is all over the issue – though she manages to find two extra bonus “errors” from somewhere. Read the judgement in full here. Real Climate’s original review supports the judge’s finding that AIT gets the basic science right.
  • New Scientist reports on a Canadian study that finds that to keep global temperature under the EU’s target of 2C above pre-industrial levels, cuts of 90% of emissions will be needed by 2050, much deeper than the 50% reductions already promised.
  • The new edition of popular computer game SimCity is to feature global warming, offering players high and low carbon energy options – sponsored by BP. A sign of the times….