Tag Archives: Climate & Energy

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This is what climate change looks like

BY Christopher Mims

March 11 tsunami leads to an explosion at Chiba Works, an industrial (chemical, steel, etc.) facility in Chiba, Japan.<br /> Photo: @odyssey
March 11 tsunami leads to an explosion at Chiba Works, an industrial (chemical, steel, etc.) facility in Chiba, Japan. Photo: @odyssey

So far, [today's] tsunami has mainly affected Japan—there are reports of up to 300 dead in the coastal city of Sendai—but future tsunamis could strike the U.S. and virtually any other coastal area of the world with equal or greater force, say scientists. In a little-heeded warning issued at a 2009 conference on the subject, experts outlined a range of mechanisms by which climate change could already be causing more earthquakes, tsunamis, and volcanic activity.

“When the ice is lost, the earth’s crust bounces back up again and that triggers earthquakes, which trigger submarine landslides, which cause tsunamis,” Bill McGuire, professor at University College London, told Reuters.

Melting ice masses change the pressures on the underlying earth, which can lead to earthquakes and tsunamis, but that’s just the beginning. Rising seas also change the balance of mass across earth’s surface, putting new strain on old earthquake faults, and may have been partly to blame for the devastating 2004 tsunami that struck Southeast Asia, according to experts from the China Meteorological Administration.

Even a simple change in the weather can dramatically affect the earth beneath our feet:

David Pyle of Oxford University said small changes in the mass of the earth’s surface seems to affect volcanic activity in general, not just in places where ice receded after a cold spell. Weather patterns also seem to affect volcanic activity – not just the other way round, he told the conference.

Scientists have known for some time that climate change affects not just the atmosphere and the oceans but also the Earth’s crust. These effects are not widely understood by the public.

“In the political community people are almost completely unaware of any geological aspects to climate change,” said McGuire.

This means a world in which we are warming the earth by pumping greenhouse gasses into the atmosphere at a pace that is unprecedented in Earth’s history is also a world in which the consequences of climate change could come hard and fast, including tsunamis and earthquakes.

Parts of the earth that are now rarely affected by tsunamis, such as northern coastal regions, could be hit by “glacial earthquakes,” in which glacier ice crashes to earth in massive landslides.

“Our experiments show that glacial earthquakes can generate far more powerful tsunamis than undersea earthquakes with similar magnitude,” said Song.

“Several high-latitude regions, such as Chile, New Zealand and Canadian Newfoundland are particularly at risk.”

It’s often difficult to visualize what climate change-related disasters might look like, but the images pouring out of Japan are yet another reminder of the specter of storm surges supercharged by more powerful weather and rising seas, and even climate-change caused tsunamis. (All of America’s coastal cities are vulnerable to these impacts—including, in this remarkable animation, New York City.) Right on the heels of Brisbane, Snowpocalypse, and Australia’s record dust storms, we have yet another reminder of what an Earth transformed by climate change could look like.

“Immediately after the tsunami came. 2 taken from their homes. They are left still under water! Rescue thank you! Arahama district town Watari Watari District, Miyagi!” Photo: @_mego
“Tsunami hot! Tsunami Image Onahama” Screengrab: @m577apc
“Just in: New photo – Massive tsunami wave captured by NHK cameras”
Screengrab: @ProducerMatthew
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Solar: It’s not just a California thing anymore

BY Todd Woody

The United States solar businesses boomed, as usual, in 2010, growing 67 percent to $6 billion, according to an annual report [PDF] released Thursday by an industry trade group. That’s been the story for the past several years, but what’s notable is that solar is no longer just a California thing. The industry is expanding to the East. Back in 2004-2005, California accounted for a whopping 80 percent of the U.S. market. In 2010, that share fell to 30 percent, with 258.9 megawatts of the 878.3 megawatts of photovoltaic power installed that year, according to the report prepared by the Solar Energy Industries Association and GTM Research.

Texas installed 22.6 megawatts of photovoltaics last year. Photo: Duke Energy

New Jersey is now the nation’s second solar state, with 16 percent of new photovoltaic installations in 2010. And while it is no surprise that sun-soaked states like Arizona, New Mexico and Nevada are also in the top 10, the list also includes states like Pennsylvania and North Carolina. Texas, the country’s No. 1 wind power state, made the top 10 with 22.6 megawatts of photovoltaics installed in 2010. The rest of the country collectively put 135.2 megawatts of solar on its roofs.

Back in 2007, only four states installed more than 10 megawatts of solar. Last year, 16 states did. The U.S. now is generating a total of 2.6 gigawatts from photovoltaic panels. But the domestic market was a relative laggard as the solar boom continued overseas.

“U.S. demand growth was, however, outpaced by a global market boom driven primarily by the German and Italian markets,” the report noted. “Over 17 GW were installed globally in 2010, more than 13 percent growth over 2009. As a result, despite U.S. demand expansion, the U.S. market share of global installations fell from 6.5 percent in 2009 to 5 percent in 2010.”

That could change in the years ahead, though, as subsidies subside in Europe and solar companies look to the U.S. as the big growth market. The report predicts the U.S. solar market will double in 2011, but warns that expiring federal subsidies make growth in 2012 and beyond uncertain.

At least one Chinese solar company is betting the solar boom will continue. On Thursday, JA Solar announced it will begin construction this year of a new factory that will have a capacity to manufacture 3,000 megawatts’ worth of photovoltaic cells a year, thanks in part to a government loan.

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Kill cap and trade…promote the heck out of clean energy

from Grist’s Randy Rieland

…Now a bipartisan team—imagine that—of think tanks say we should keep it dead and instead spend a lot more money on renewable energy technologies.

All we are saying … is give clean a chance: The proposal from the right-leaning American Enterprise Institute and the liberal Brookings Institution and Breakthrough Institute concludes that the only way forward on climate is to go all in on renewable energy. They’re recommending a yearly $25 billion investment in clean technology research by the Energy Department—a position their report presents as middle ground:

    The choice is not, as liberals often maintain, between global warming apocalypse or mandating the widespread adoption of today’s solar, wind, and electric car technologies. Nor is the choice, as conservatives have argued, between an economy wrecked by liberal global warming policies or expanding drilling and nuclear power.

The think-tankers also push the idea of a new generation of small nuclear reactors and favor ending federal government subsidies for any forms of energy that don’t improve efficiency. [Politico]

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Wonder why climate bills stall in the Senate? Follow the money

BY Randy Rieland
The oil lobby has spent tens of millions lobbying Congress.

Let’s review. We just lived through the worst accidental oil leak in history. And we’re at the tail end of a summer of cataclysmic weather that top climate scientists tell us is a taste of the globally-warmed future. Yet the United States Senate failed even to pass a climate bill so tepid that it qualified as what a Republican (South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham) once would have described as “half-assed.”

How does this happen? The Center for Responsive Politics offers a whopper of a clue. It reports that during the first six months of this year alone, Big Oil spent $75 million lobbying Congress. The report also points out that last year, when green groups retaliated and spent a record $22.4 million on their own lobbying, they still were outspent 7 to 1 by fossil fuel lobbies. The Center’s Open Secrets Blog has all the dirty details as part of a weeklong series on how Big Oil fuels Washington.

Target practice: For BP, the Gulf oil leak has been the gift that keeps on giving—and not in a good way. At yesterday’s hearing in Houston on the Deepwater Horizon explosion, federal investigators nailed the oil giant for not addressing hundreds of maintenance problems on the rig. BP’s erstwhile partners pointed one finger after another at their beleaguered colleague. Even Brad Pitt unloaded on BP, saying:

    I was never for the death penalty before; I am willing to look at it again.

Dirty business: If you think clean coal is an oxymoron you’ve got plenty of company. Turns out a lot of utility companies don’t buy the concept either. According to AP reporter Matthew Brown, 30 old-fashioned dirty coal plants have been built since 2008, or are under construction:

    The expansion, the industry’s largest in two decades, represents an acknowledgment that highly touted “clean coal” technology is still a long way from becoming a reality and underscores a renewed confidence among utilities that proposals to regulate carbon emissions will fail.

Waiting to inhale: And while we’re on the subject of the air we’d rather not breathe, the EPA is postponing the announcement of tougher smog regulations at least until late October. More likely the agency will stay mum on smog until after the November elections, because any announcement would provide ammo for Republicans who have been accusing the federal government of running amok. Even November would be way too soon for some on Capitol Hill. Why rush asked a group of seven senators in a written complaint to EPA chief Lisa Jackson earlier this month? New smog regulations can wait until 2013.

We take it all back: Feels like you could use a little positive spin right about now, so how’s this? Bob Marshall, in the New Orleans Times Picayune, reports that some enviros think the BP gusher in the Gulf may actually save more Louisiana wetlands than it destroyed:

    … three months of daily newscasts have dramatically increased national awareness of the state’s real coastal disaster, and the billions in fines BP is expected to pay could bankroll critical projects Congress had refused to fund.

Whine and punishment: And here’s another little pick-you-up. During a visit to a remote research base in the Russian Arctic, Russia’s prime minister, Vladimir Putin, suggested that too much has been made of man’s role in global warming, pointing out that climate change helped kill off woolly mammoths long before the age of human industrialization. German scientist Inken Preuss set him straight:

    Climate change has never happened like now and man is making a huge impact.

He got told.