Climate News from Around The Globe

from Climate Depot

Morano: 'They're sort of shying away from [renewables], given all the scandals, given the collapse of the political narrative of green jobs' -- 'There's no cloud of cap-and-trade hanging over the GOP field. They're all united in promoting fossil fuels and not driving up the cost of them. -- 'They've solidly shifted, from 2008 - to a pro-fossil fuel, pro-domestic energy plan without much emphasis on renewables'

from Climate Depot

from Climate Realists by Co2sceptic

With the economy as tough as it is, Al Gore shouldn’t be the only person to make money off of global warming fears. In an effort to spread the wealth, I am offering a number of tips for readers to similarly grow wealthy from supposed global warming crises.

First, identify prominent purveyors of global warming doom-and-gloom. The bigger the media ham, the better. For a jumping-off list, I suggest Al Gore, James Hansen, Michael Mann, Gavin Schmidt and Joe Romm.

Second, whenever the purveyors of doom make ridiculous predictions about global warming, ask them to put their money where their mouths are. After all, if Al Gore can so fervently urge government to force us to spend our hard-earned money complying with his global warming predictions, he should certainly be willing to risk his own millions backing up his global warming claims.

Sometimes you might get lucky and discover a deluded alarmist who has beat you to the punch and offered such a bet on his or her own volition. For example, I just stumbled across this blog post from Joe Romm offering to bet even money that the Arctic Ocean will be ice-free by the year 2020. Talk about taking candy from a baby! I will be contacting Joe immediately. I urge all readers of this column to do the same.
Source: forbes.com/sites/jamestaylor/ Read in full with comments

from NOAA News Releases

The Antarctic ozone hole, which yawns wide every Southern Hemisphere spring, reached its annual peak on September 12, stretching 10.05 million square miles, the ninth largest on record. Above the South Pole, the ozone hole reached its deepest point of the season on October 9 when total ozone readings dropped to 102 Dobson units, tied for the 10th lowest in the 26-year record.

from Climate Depot

'In areas with substantial snow cover, canopy removal due to either fire or insect attack increased reflected radiation and approximately offset the warming that would be caused by increased release of carbon dioxide'

from Climate Depot

from Climate Depot

from NWS headlines by nws.social.media@noaa.gov

The NWS Climate Prediction Center released its annual Winter Outlook today. La Niña will continue to influence weather patterns across the country. However, a "wild card" this year is the lesser-known and less predictable Arctic Oscillation that could produce dramatic short-term swings in temperatures this winter.

from Climate Depot

'It confirms our suspicion that the reasonable critiques of the alarmism are having no appreciable impact on the 'science' or the cloak under which it is performed'

from Climate Depot

Former UN scientist Dr. Roger Pielke Sr., who resigned from IPCC: 'The 2007 IPCC WG1, in my view, was a failure in the assessment of the understanding of the human role in the climate system, as well as the extent to which the natural forcings and feedbacks influence the climate'

from Climate Depot

Flashback 2009: Skeptical French Scientist Allegre Rebukes Climate Critics: 'We are not in the Soviet Union, we can contest a scientific thesis'

Mocked Gore's Nobel Prize as 'Political Gimmick' -- Reversed View of Warming To Become Skeptic - Ridiculed Gore's Film as 'Nonsense'

from Climate Depot

from Climate & Energy | Grist by Roger-Mark De Souza.

Cross-posted from RH Reality Check.

"Are we going to talk about sex again?!" screamed my 12-year-old son, Nick, as he ran down the stairs, away from me. That was five years ago, and I had just sat down with him to have one of our father-son talks, this time about sex and sustainability.

Now Nick, a senior, is preparing for college at the same time that the global community is preparing for its own important landmark: The United Nations predicts that on Oct. 31, world population will reach 7 billion.

The confluence of these two events gives me reason to think about the world Nick is inheriting from my generation, and makes me consider what I can say to him as he heads off to college.

This world of 7 billion
I try to get my head around it. It's a world of 7 billion people. With greater connectivity than I could have ever dreamed possible. A world of widening disparities and growing environmental degradation. A world with a changing climate. A world of crashing economic markets and changing debt ceilings.

It's also a world of finite resources and growing demand.

Consider water: As the world's population grows, the demand for water mounts, and pressure on water resources intensifies. Unfortunately, the areas where water is most scarce [PDF] are typically those with high population densities and rapid population growth. Population growth limits the amount of water available per person, and drives people into marginal regions -- which are also water-stressed.

Consider forests: The top 10 countries experiencing the greatest loss of forest cover generally have large, fast-growing populations. Increased demand for fuel wood is driving a great deal of deforestation in the populous regions of East Africa and South Asia. Often, forests are cleared by migrant families that have been forced out of their crowded areas of origin.

Consider habitat loss: Global population is projected to grow to anywhere between 8 billion and 11 billion by the middle of the century, with much of that growth expected to take place in the humid tropics that harbor the planet's richest biodiversity. Habitat loss is generally greatest where population density is highest. Urbanization also takes a toll: Sprawling cities have led to the disappearance of numerous habitats. And city-dwellers consume more, increasing pressures on ecosystems.

Consider changing climate: An analysis by the organization where I work, Population Action International, identified 26 population and climate change "hotspots." These fast-growing countries are extremely vulnerable to climate change, in part because they face water shortages and declining agricultural production. The average number of children born to each woman in hotspot countries is five, and the average population growth rate is 2.5 percent -- a rate that, if unchanged, would result in a doubling of the population in just 29 years.

But continued population growth is not inevitable: In these hotspot countries, an average of one in four married women would like to avoid pregnancy, but is not using modern family planning. Addressing that "unmet need" for contraception would slow growth, reduce pressure on resources, and increase resilience. It is fundamental to invest in a woman's right to decide how many children she can have and when she can have them, and to ensure that she can have them safely.

Reflections for Nick
These challenges may seem remote to my son, Nick, growing up in suburban Virginia. But they will shape the world he inhabits in profound ways. So what can I share with Nick as he launches into this world of 7 billion?

Son, as you continue to develop into a young man who will assume responsibility in the world, consider the following:

Understand the complexity of the world as you feel it. The starting point for your career and your contribution must be to recognize the world's complexity and find your place within it. The United Nations projects that when you are 56 years old, in 2050, world population may have reached 9.3 billion. The size, shape, and form of that population matters to you, as it will affect your health, well-being, and security.

Recognize the value of women. I know that you already know the value of young women. I want you to know that the decisions these women make have a profound effect on the world. Ensuring that women can decide how many children they want, when to have their children, and the ways that they invest in those children is one of the most important moves we, as a society, can make. It is at the core of our lives. Recognize this and play your part as a man, particularly if you're lucky enough to get married, and perhaps even be the father to a daughter.

Incorporate the needs of communities. As you think of your areas of study and learning, be sure to respond to real demands in order to add value. Don't assume that you know what others need. Discover the genuine needs both of individuals and communities, and then respond.

Size (and scale) matter. Your world is inherently more complex and connected than I could ever have imagined when I was your age. It will only get more so. Determine where your impact can be most felt, and focus on the best way to have an impact at that scale. And, be sure to recognize how you can leverage innovation to maximize your impact.

Do the right thing. You know in your heart what's right. Infuse that sensibility in your contributions to the world. Individual rights are fundamental to human well-being. Don't confuse rights and wants. Make your contribution one that's based in a rights approach, but make it practical and palatable. Go with your convictions. As I share these reflections with Nick, the world reaches the 7 billion population landmark, and my family reaches a personal landmark of launching a child out into this expanding world, I'm reminded of a question from my younger 16-year-old son, Miki. Standing at the front door as he signed for a package from the mailman, he screamed: "Dad, did you order these condoms with endangered-species slogans on them?"

The conversation continues ...

from junkscience.com

from Climate Depot

'While the global warming alarmists contend we are impacting these storms, the facts suggest otherwise'

from ICECAP By Joseph D’Aleo, Weatherbell.com

The ozone hole above the Antarctic has reached its maximum extent for the year, revealing a gouge in the protective atmospheric layer that rivals the size of North America, scientists have announced.

Spanning about 9.7 million square miles (25 million square kilometers), the ozone hole over the South Pole reached its maximum annual size on Sept. 14, 2011, coming in as the fifth largest on record. The largest Antarctic ozone hole ever recorded occurred in 2006, at a size of 10.6 million square miles (27.5 million square km), a size documented by NASA’s Earth-observing Aura satellite.

The Antarctic ozone hole was first discovered in the late 1970s by the first satellite mission that could measure ozone, a spacecraft called POES and run by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). The hole has continued to grow steadily during the 1980s and 90s, though since early 2000 the growth reportedly leveled off. Even so scientists have seen large variability in its size from year to year.

On the Earth’s surface, ozone is a pollutant, but in the stratosphere it forms a protective layer that reflects ultraviolet radiation back out into space, protecting us from the damaging UV rays. Years with large ozone holes are now more associated with very cold winters over Antarctica and high polar winds that prevent the mixing of ozone-rich air outside of the polar circulation with the ozone-depleted air inside, the scientists say.

There is a lot of year to year variability, in 2007, the ozone hole shrunk 30% from the record setting 2006 winter.

The record setting ozone hole in 2006 (animating here).


In 2007, it was said: "Although the hole is somewhat smaller than usual, we cannot conclude from this that the ozone layer is recovering already," said Ronald van der A, a senior project scientist at the Royal Dutch Meteorological Institute in the Netherlands.

This year, the ozone region over Antarctica dropped 30.5 million tons, compared to the record-setting 2006 loss of 44.1 million tons. Van der A said natural variations in temperature and atmospheric changes are responsible for the decrease in ozone loss, and is not indicative of a long-term healing.

"This year’s (2007) ozone hole was less centered on the South Pole as in other years, which allowed it to mix with warmer air," van der A said. Because ozone depletes at temperatures colder than -108 degrees Fahrenheit (-78 degrees Celsius), the warm air helped protect the thin layer about 16 miles (25 kilometers) above our heads. As winter arrives, a vortex of winds develops around the pole and isolates the polar stratosphere. When temperatures drop below -78C (-109F), thin clouds form of ice, nitric acid, and sulphuric acid mixtures. Chemical reactions on the surfaces of ice crystals in the clouds release active forms of CFCs. Ozone depletion begins, and the ozone "hole" appears.

Over the course of two to three months, approximately 50% of the total column amount of ozone in the atmosphere disappears. At some levels, the losses approach 90%. This has come to be called the Antarctic ozone hole. In spring, temperatures begin to rise, the ice evaporates, and the ozone layer starts to recover.

Intense cold in the upper atmosphere of the Arctic last winter activated ozone-depleting chemicals and produced the first significant ozone hole ever recorded over the high northern regions, scientists reported in the journal Nature.

This year, for the first time scientists also found a depletion of ozone above the Arctic that resembled its South Pole counterpart. "For the first time, sufficient loss occurred to reasonably be described as an Arctic ozone hole," the researchers wrote.

It was related to a rebound cooling of the polar stratosphere and upper troposphere. Notice the December and early January warmth and VERY NEGATIVE AO and the pop of the AO and rapid cooling starting in January.

The Antarctic after a record negative polar warming, turned colder in mid to late winter (starting in late August).



Also note the scientists mentioning the sulfuric acid mixture’s role in the ozone destruction. Sulfate aerosols are associated with volcanism and the recent high latitude volcanoes in Alaska, Iceland and Chile may have contributed to the blocking (warming). Like a pendulum, a swing to one state, can result in a rebound to the opposite extreme very obvious in the arctic.

The data shows a lot of variability and no real trends after the Montreal protocol banned CFCs. The models had predicted a partial recovery by now. Later scientists adjusted their models and pronounced the recovery would take decades. It may be just another failed alarmist prediction.

Remember we first found the ozone hole when satellites that measure ozone were first available and processed (1985). It is very likely to have been there forever, varying year to year and decade to decade as solar cycles and volcanic events affected high latitude winter vortex strength. PDF.

from Climate Connections:NPR

Out of this world, or close to home? These "galaxies" may not be what they seem, so fire up your telescope and stir up your imagination.

from Climate Depot

from Climate Depot

'There is a trade-off between climate change policies and competitiveness'

from Climate Depot

from Climate Depot

Mooney: 'The NYT piece does a stellar job of skirting the truly obvious explanation (for collapse of AGW movement): a conservative denial machine was whipped up by "ClimateGate," leading to a whole new and destructive brand of climate politics'

from Climate Depot

from Climate Depot

'There has only been one US hurricane strike in last 1,130 days. 7,000 days have passed since a cat 5 hit US. In 1886, US was hit by 7 hurricanes...It has been over 6 years since a major one hit US. Deadliest hurricane to hit US happened in 1900. Florida hurricanes are in sharp decline. Fla.has averaged nearly one per year since 1850. It has been over 6 years since Fla. was hit – the longest hurricane free period in that state.'

from Climate Depot

from Climate & Energy | Grist by Charles Kenny.

We usually speak of "alternative energy sources" as positives. Across the developing world, however, these "alternatives" take the forms of dung and wood for cooking, candles and kerosene for lighting. Governments have done an absolutely dismal job of rolling out access to modern energy.

But there is, as is so often the case, some good news buried here: Cleantech off-grid solutions are now competitive. Just as many in developing countries skipped landlines and went right to mobile phones, we may soon see the billions who now rely on traditional fuels skip coal and oil and transition directly into sustainable energy sources -- which will be an enormous help to the global environment.

The International Energy Agency suggests that 1.4 billion people worldwide still lack access to electricity in their homes. These people are overwhelmingly in poor countries, and most live in rural areas. That means, for example, that only one in seven of the rural population of sub-Saharan Africa has electrical access. Even many of those with access to electricity still have to depend on sources like wood or dung for cooking -- adding up to 2.7 billion people worldwide who use "traditional" or "biomass" sources. Wood and dung account for 10.2 percent of the global energy supply.

The limited reach of modern energy sources is grim news for the poor people left using alternatives. India alone sees 2.5 million cases of severe burns each year caused by overturned kerosene lamps. And the World Health Organization labels wood stoves "the killer in the kitchen" -- the indoor air pollution they produce is responsible for 1.5 million deaths a year.

Beyond their health impacts, fuels like wood, candles, kerosene, and dung are a very expensive source of power. That's because they are grossly inefficient at turning fuel into usable energy. For each joule of energy a candle turns into visible light, 2,500 joules are wasted (largely as heat). The same number for a traditional incandescent light bulb is one joule to light for every 50 wasted. (For an LED it's about one to seven.) Traditional wood stoves convert fuel to cooking heat with one-third or less of the efficiency [PDF] of gas stoves. As a result, poor people often can't afford adequate lighting, cooking, or heating -- when the sun goes down, their houses simply get cold and dark.

Why are so many poor people reliant on heating and lighting technologies that date back centuries or even millenniums? In part because governments in the developing world have focused on providing subsidized electricity to an elite few rather than rolling out access to the many. Survey evidence from a few years ago suggested only 60 percent of costs are met by revenues in the electricity sector of the average developing country. About a third [PDF] of electricity companies in Africa and South Asia don't even have the resources to conduct basic operations and maintenance -- let alone roll out access to new customers.

Beyond the fact that poor people just have less money to spend in general (that's what it means to be poor), the greater cost of their energy sources is one reason why energy consumption is a lot lower in poor countries than in rich ones. World Bank data suggest that, every year, people in low-income countries (with average GDP per head below about $1,000) use energy equivalent to that produced by burning 803 pounds of oil. Those in middle-income countries use up nearly four times as much -- the equivalent of 2,765 pounds, or a little more than a metric ton. The same figure for high-income countries is more than five tons.

From an environmental perspective, of course, it is probably a good thing that poor people use less energy. If they were using candles to light their houses anywhere near as brightly as rich people do using light bulbs, they'd be consuming 50 times the energy to do so -- and that would mean a lot more carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases in the atmosphere (alongside a candle collection that would do shame to Methuselah's birthday party).

Though it would be wonderful for poor people if they were all connected to the electricity grid, it could be devastating news for the global environment. According to World Bank data, the limited electricity sectors of low-income countries currently rely for nearly half of their power on hydroelectric sources, compared with about 7 percent from coal. If they were producing a lot more electricity, doubtless most of that power would come from fossil fuels. In middle income countries, for example, it is coal that accounts for nearly half of all electricity production, with hydro providing one-fifth. Fossil fuels as a whole account for only 30 percent of low income energy consumption compared with more than 80 percent in middle-income countries.

For all of the misery suffered by generations without electricity, at least the world has dodged one bullet -- a huge legacy stock of dirty power plants in low-income countries belching out CO2 for the rest of their 30-year lives. But that silver lining on the cloud of global energy poverty may be about to fray, because the cloud itself is evaporating. Many of the poorest of the world's people are at last becoming richer -- and they are going to demand more energy as a result.

Xavier Sala-i-Martin and Maxim Pinkovskiy [PDF] of Columbia University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology estimate that Africa will halve the number of people living on $1.25 or less -- the global definition for absolute poverty -- between 1990 and 2017. And the number of countries worldwide classified as low-income by the World Bank has fallen from 63 in 2000 to 35 this year. We've seen those are the countries that largely rely on hydro power rather than fossil fuels (think the Nam Theun dam in Laos or the Inga Dams in the Democratic Republic of Congo). And middle-income countries consume four times the energy. Absent new technologies that produce cleaner power for all of these richer countries, the global environment will be in even more dire straits than it is already.

Mercifully, just as the developing world is getting a lot more energy-hungry, methods to get that power from off-grid, energy-efficient, and environmentally sustainable sources are coming to the market. For example, solar lanterns -- which use solar cells to charge a battery that powers an LED at night -- are now available for less than $20. The payback period for buying that solar lantern rather than a cheaper kerosene model and the fuel to power it will fall from seven months today to below two months in 2015. And whole solar panels cost 40 percent of what they did a mere two years ago. In India, a panel costs about $300, the cost of a year's supply of kerosene for a lamp -- but the panel provides sufficient electricity for a battery to power a number of considerably brighter lights. More broadly, developing countries are spending more than rich countries on new renewable capacity -- $72 billion in 2010. David Wheeler at the Center for Global Development suggests India plans to generate 15 percent of its energy from renewable sources by 2020, mostly from solar. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change reckons that renewables could be delivering as much as 80 percent of the world's power by midcentury.

If we do manage this energy transformation, the world will have achieved a stunning combination of victories. First, over the energy poverty and poor health of those billions relying on dangerous, inefficient traditional sources, and, second, over the greenhouse gas excess of those consuming power from burning stuff -- be it dung, wood, coal, or oil. Making this conversion happen surely seems worth the odd carbon tax or renewable subsidy.

from NOAA News Releases

An environmental oceanographer who has published more than 100 scientific articles on the global carbon cycle and was among the first to publish scientific data about ocean acidification has been chosen to be the director of the NOAA laboratory known for studying ocean physics and chemistry, innovative research in tsunamis, and underwater volcanoes.