View a slideshow of Tibet’s melting glaciers

On Aug. 8, 1975, geoscientist Wallace Smith Broecker published “Are We on the Brink of a Pronounced Global Warming?” in the journal Science, the first time the iconic phrase “global warming” was used in a scientific paper. Broecker — known by all as Wally — was already a prominent scientist by then, having served on Columbia University’s faculty for 16 years. Today, at age 78, Broecker is recognized as one of the fathers of climate science, with more than 450 journal publications and 10 books to his name, ranging from paleoclimatology to chemical oceanography.

The past 35 years have also seen humanity answer Wally’s question in the affirmative, running a radical experiment on the only planet we inhabit. Carbon dioxide levels have risen 40 percent to 392 ppm from preindustrial levels of 280 ppm, and the global mean temperature has risen 0.8 degrees Celsius, on 1.3 trillion tons of carbon dioxide. Humanity has produced 60 percent of that global-warming pollution since Broecker’s paper was published. As a result, the planetary ecosystem has fundamentally changed — weather has become more extreme, seasons have shifted, and global ice and snow are in decline — with more rapid and radical change on its way.

Wally’s seminal Science paper built upon decades of earlier work by scientists who had found natural cycles of planetary warming and cooling in Greenland ice cores (Dansgaard, 1973), developed a mean global temperature from meteorological records (Mitchell, 1963), modeled the greenhouse influence of carbon dioxide on the atmosphere (Manabe and Wetherald, 1967, 1975; Rasool and Schneider, 1971), and measured the rise of atmospheric carbon dioxide from the burning of fossil fuels (Keeling, 1973). Synthesizing the work, Broecker accurately predicted “that the present cooling trend will, within a decade or so, give way to a pronounced warming induced by carbon dioxide.”

“To those who even today claim that global warming is not predictable,” climatologist Stefan Rahmstorf writes at the peerless RealClimate blog, “the anniversary of Broecker’s paper is a reminder that global warming was actually predicted before it became evident in the global temperature records over a decade later.”

In fact, one can even go back to the 1896 work of Swedish scientist Svante Arrhenius, in which he predicted that the burning of coal could eventually double atmospheric CO2, leading to a temperature increase of several degrees Celsius, though he believed such a day was far into the future.

For the next 50 years, most scientists considered man-made climate change an unlikely speculation. In the scientific explosion following World War II, however, scientists began using new measurements and the era’s new digital computers to revisit the effect of humanity’s carbon dioxide pollution on the climate, and our modern understanding of the greenhouse effect developed through the work of pioneering scientists like Gilbert Plass, Hans Suess, Roger Revelle, and Bert Bolin (eventually the first chair of the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change in 1988).

By the end of the 1950s, Frank Capra had made an instructional film on man-made global warming, and Revelle had testified before Congress about the “large-scale geophysical experiment” humanity was conducting with industrial greenhouse gas pollution.

From the Desk of Dr. James E. Hansen

to:		pj@sustainabilitank.com
date:		Fri, Aug 13, 2010 at 2:52 PM

What Global Warming Looks Like…So Far

What Global Warming Looks Like discusses current global temperature anomalies in July 2010; see also summary and full paper accepted for publication in Reviews of Geophysics.

featuring:

Thomas R. Karl, L.H.D. Interim Director, NOAA Climate Services and Director, NOAA National Climatic Data Center

You can learn about future briefings in the AMS Climate Briefing Series by joining the list serve. You can also download this video and future videos by subscribing to the podcast.

For additional information about the series or to download the speaker’s presentations, visit the Climate Briefing Series web page (www.ametsoc.org/cb).

This event was recorded on May 6, 2010 in the United States Senate. The AMS Climate Briefing Series is made possible, in part, by a grant from the National Science Foundation’s Paleoclimate program.

 http://www.grist.org/article/2010-03-17-…

IT’S A DOME DEAL

If it does matter where CO2 is released, cities are in trouble.

EurObserv’ER has released its annual publication:

‘The State of Renewable Energies in Europe’ (February 2010).

The publication is available for free download at :
 http://www.eurobserv-er.org/pdf/bilan9.a…

(168 pages, French/English language, 6.6 MB)

‘The State of Renewable Energies in Europe’ is a synthesis of the technology Barometers published during 2009 (with data up to and including 2008). The publication gives detailed capacity and energy performance data for all 27 Member States of the European Union (for wind power, photovoltaics, solar thermal energy and solar thermal electricity, small hydropower, geothermal energy, ground source heat pumps, biogas, biofuels, municipal solid waste, solid biomass and ocean energy, see pages 10 – 87 of the document). Included as well in ‘The State of Renewable Energies in Europe’ is a chapter on socio-economic indicators (employment, turnover) for most technologies in a selection of Member States (pages 96 – 135). The publication concludes with seven country case studies, where specific regions are particularly strong in renewable energy industry: this regards regions in Italy, Luxembourg, Denmark, the United Kingdom, Finland, Sweden and Slovakia (pages 136-163).

The upcoming Wind Power Barometer from EurObserv’ER is expected later this month.

For the interest of your colleagues not subscribed to energy-l: the http://www.eurobserv-er.org website provides the service of e-mail notifications. Tell your colleague to sign in and she/he will be informed on future Barometer releases.

Direct links to all 2009 EurObserv’ER publications:

Barometer on Solid Biomass
(December 2009, PDF, 22 pages, English/French language, 2 MB)
 http://www.eurobserv-er.org/pdf/baro194….

Barometer on Heat Pumps
(October 2009, PDF, 20 pages, English/French language, 3 MB)
 http://www.eurobserv-er.org/pdf/baro193….

Biofuels Barometer
(August 2009, PDF, 22 pages, English/French language, 2 MB)
 http://www.eurobserv-er.org/pdf/baro192….

Solar Thermal Barometer
(June 2009, PDF, 20 pages, English/French language, 2 MB):
 http://www.eurobserv-er.org/pdf/baro191….

Photovoltaic Barometer
(April 2009, PDF, 23 pages, English/French language, 3 MB):
 http://www.eurobserv-er.org/pdf/baro190….

Wind Power Barometer
(February 2009, PDF, 27 pages, English/French language, 2 MB):
 http://www.eurobserv-er.org/pdf/baro189….

About the EurObserv’ER Barometer
Targeting the press and the interested general public, the EurObserv’ER consortium releases ‘thematic barometers’ every other month. The barometers focus on the latest state of renewable energies (solar energy, wind power, hydropower, geothermal energy and bioenergy) in EU member states.

Note: the interactive database on the website (click on ‘Interactive EurObserv’ER Database’ on the http://www.eurobserv-er.org homepage) allows you to download the Barometer data separately. This allows you to create your own graphs to be used in your publication.

The EurObserv’ER barometer is a project supported by the European Commission within the DG TREN Intelligent Energy Europe programme and by Ademe, the French Environment and Energy management Agency. The EurObserv’ER Barometer is the result of the investigation and research work of its authors. The European Commission is not responsible for any use that may be made of the information contained therein.

———————-
from The EurObserv’ER Consortium
Paris, Berlin, Warsaw, Amsterdam, Ljubljana

———- Forwarded message ———-
From: Harold Somer <harold.somer@gmail.com>
Date: Sun, Jan 31, 2010 at 9:19 PM
Subject: he Recent Supreme Court Decision- Speech is Money / Money is Speech

Dear All-of-You:

A consensus among the Democrats and Republicans in the Congress have agreed on the need to edit and modify the Preamble to The Constitution, to wit:

WE THE CORPORATIONS OF AMERICA, IN ORDER TO FORM A MORE PERFECT MARKET PLACE, ENHANCE FREE ENTERPRISE, PROMOTE PROSPERITY AND TRANQUILITY

AMONG THE PEOPLE, TO PROMOTE THE GENERAL WELFARE AND TO SECURE THE BLESSINGS OF THE FREE MARKET FOR OURSELVES  AND OUR POSTERITY, DO ORDAIN AND ESTABLISH  THIS CONSTITUTION FOR  THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICAN. – SELAH

In the words of the outstanding American Rush Limbaugh, this declaration affirms the truth and wisdom of- WHAT’S GOOD FOR WALL STREET IS  GOOD FOR AMERICA.  SELAH

Affirmed this day by the majority of  the Supreme Court.

Enjoy!

Harold Somer

Hard Copies to be mailed:

Chief Justice John G. Roberts

Associate Justices:

Samuel A. Alito

Anthony M. Kennedy

Antonin G. Scalia

Clarence Thomas*

Stephen G. Breyer

Ruth Bader Ginsburg

Sonia Sotomayor

John Paul Stevens

* Mr. Thomas didn’t have the credentials to be a Traffic Court  Judge.

——————————————

Politico, Jan 22, 2010

The Supreme Court of The United States just decided that a corporation has the same rights as a human being which has great legal implications and does not restrict large corporate money from buying more political influence.  This allowance of corporations to operate as an entity can allow for political speech suppression, the right to the freedom of speech on the internet, websites, books, television and any media.

Basically this means the government has the right to censor free speech and free thoughts of Americans and can use criminal law to enforce its control over the freedoms of Americans.  This goes against the Constitution and basically over rides the constitutional rights that Americans had in the past and opens the door for corruption and censorship in the media.  There are currently 9 Judges on the Supreme Court of the US and this is how they voted.

The  Justices that voted against this decision are Discenters {dissenters?}:

Justice John Paul Stevens

Justice  Sonia Sotomayor

Justice  Steven Breyer

Justice Ruth Ginsburg

The Justices that voted for Allowing More Corporate Interests are:

Justice Clarence Thomas

Justice Antonin Scalia

Justice Samuel Alito Jr.  are all Bush appointees and conservatives ruling from the bench.

Justice Anthony M. Kennedy

Justice John G. Roberts of course broke the tie vote and threw his support to the Bush Judges making him an activist judge. In fact Roberts just voted for what Americans hate the most which is lobbyists and special interest corporate money influencing the people’s business. What right does the Court have to legislate and who gave these judges that right?

The Republicans charged that Sonia Sotomayor would rule from the bench and these judges are deciding to change the Constitution which is an appalling miscarriage of justice.

It was a slim vote of 5 in favor and 4 against and it falls on the conservative appointed judges that work to increase campaign spending by corporations.  In their infinite wisdom the courts also allowed unions to contribute to special favors from politicians in their attempt to appease the democrats which tend to gain more contributions by unions.  This allowance is supposed to make this medicine easier to swallow but corporate interests have deeper pockets.

When you consider the bank lobbyists from Wall Street, the insurance lobbyists, the Health care lobbyists, the oil corporation lobbyists and all the other lobbyists you can see where the Obama legislation will have no effect on his term.  A conservative Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky praised the court for restoring the first Amendment rights of corporations and unions.

The Supreme Court of the United States just opened more doors to lobbyists and special interest groups to fund their own agenda rather than the business of the people.  This reverses a 63 year old law that limits campaign free for all spending and increases lobbyists interests in government.

This court has decided to wipe away over 1oo years of US history and is devoted to increase corruption of the democracy once held high in the USA, making it no better than the dictatorship government of Haiti.

The Supreme Court has decided in its own lack of justice that the First Amendment rights extend not only to humans as was the case in the Constitution but to a corporation.  This has far fetched legal implications than you think in regards to lawsuits against a corporation which is now considered an “individual” or human person.

In a 5 to 4 decision the slim majority of one vote was cast to allow corporations to assume a human identity as an individual and the Supreme Court said that corporations “cannot be limited in their campaign contributions” to politicians.   Remember the phrase “Justice is Blind”?

This decision will allow more corporate money to influence public decisions that have a great bearing on Americans in a negative way.   This court’s decision comes at a very important time with mid-term elections this year the rich corporations will sway who gets in to the state elections and who gets to govern.  Big business will decide that -not the voter.  This law is incorrect in its assumption that one individual American is identical to one corporation and this just does not favor the individual who has less influence that a large, rich corporation on a politician.  The corporation obviously has more financial backing, more contributions means more special interests for that corporation and this law is a blatant and corrupt law and changes the Constitution as you knew it.

Really it is of no surprise that this court is a conservative court with its own special interests as you saw during the gore Bush election results which was a total sham of justice.

The dominance of corporate money in politics will loom large in the coming elections and during the health care reform bill the health care industry spent 1 million dollars per day to force lawmakers to stop regulating their industry. The business interests and profits of these large corporations will become more involved in campaign donations in the future.

Politicians are only interested in one thing and that is to remain in power and grab as much campaign dollars as they can to benefit their contributors not the people that elected them.  The bottom line is they are buying your votes to keep their corporations profitable by influencing politicians in Congress.

It is the Republican and Democrat politicians  that are now going to reap the benefits of this new law which allows them to accept any amount of money they wish and your taxpayers dollars are going to the benefit of corporations not the people of the United States.

Big business will get more earmarks, more special laws to protect them and more subsidies for their industry and the taxpayer just became less of a priority.  Big business is now in control of the government with sleazy back room deals which will become the norm as you saw during health care reform there will be 10 more lobbyists to each politician.

What this means is :

Fewer laws to protect consumers against insurance rates rising or rate hikes in credit card interest .

Fewer regulations on corporations that pollute your air, water and the impact of industry vs. global warming.

For instance if the big oil company’s want fewer restrictions on their impact of oil they simply will buy favor with the government by influencing politicians.  How lovely is that?

This new law also overrules 2 previous precedents which was a 2003 Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act of 2002 that restricted the amount of money spent by corporations.  The law also isolates the US as one of the worst political corrupt countries in the world where the Wall Street Banks will and do now do as they please as the financial industry stands to fall again in the future.  There is no stopping corporate interests now in government and your rights were just trampled on by allowing large corporate interest have a greater say than you.

To his credit Justice John Paul Stevens gave a 90 page response to the wrong that has been done in this decision but to no avail. Stevens said the majority that voted in favor of a corrupt political campaign system have made a grave error in judgment in treating corporations as “an individual” or a human being.

The Supreme Court also decided it was fine for Congress to:

Require corporations to disclose their sleazy purchases of politicians

Run disclaimers in their ads for political candidates.

Of course Justice Clarence Thomas voted against the disclaimers and this in effect “keeps hidden” what corporations spend and to whom the money went to.  Justice Clarence Thomas wishes to run the country like Haiti dictators who have taken in 2.7 billion dollars in aid and the money disappeared into thin air.

TAGS: Supreme Court Opens Doors to lobbyists, First amendment rights of corporations, corporate interests in us politics, US Political Limits on Campaign contributions, corporate interests, corporations given same rights as an individual, freedom of speech limited, censorship of the media, Rights Taken away from Americans, Corruption in US politics, Supreme court opens doors to more corruption.
 http://politicolnews.com/supreme-court-m…

 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Campaign_fi…
 UPDATED –

Justice Alito’s candid response to Obama’s rebuke

By E.J. Dionne Jr.
The Washington Post – an OP-ED – Monday, February 1, 2010.

The nation owes a substantial debt to Justice Samuel Alito for his display of unhappiness over President Obama’s criticisms of the Supreme Court’s recent legislation — excuse me, decision — opening our electoral system to a new torrent of corporate money.

- Thank you, Justice Alito,
- Justice Alito mouths “not true”

Alito’s inability to restrain himself during the State of the Union address brought to wide attention a truth that too many have tried to ignore: The Supreme Court is now dominated by a highly politicized conservative majority intent on working its will, even if that means ignoring precedents and the wishes of the elected branches of government.

Obama called the court on this, and Alito shook his head and apparently mouthed “not true.” His was the honest reaction of a judicial activist who believes he has the obligation to impose his version of right reason on the rest of us.

The controversy also exposed the impressive capacity of the conservative judicial revolutionaries to live by double standards without apology.

The movement’s legal theorists and politicians have spent more than four decades attacking alleged judicial abuses by liberals, cheering on the presidents who joined them in their assaults. But now, they are terribly offended that Obama has straightforwardly challenged the handiwork of their judicial comrades.

There is ample precedent for Obama’s firm but respectful rebuke of the court. I know of no one on the right who protested when President Ronald Reagan, in a 1983 article in the Human Life Review, took on the Supreme Court’s Roe v. Wade decision of 10 years earlier.

“Make no mistake, abortion-on-demand is not a right granted by the Constitution,” Reagan wrote. “No serious scholar, including one disposed to agree with the court’s result, has argued that the framers of the Constitution intended to create such a right. . . . Nowhere do the plain words of the Constitution even hint at a ‘right’ so sweeping as to permit abortion up to the time the child is ready to be born.” Reagan cited Justice Byron White’s description of Roe as an act of “raw judicial power,” which is actually an excellent description of the court’s ruling on corporate money in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission.

Reagan had every right to say what he did. But why do conservatives deny the same right to Obama? Alternatively, why do they think it’s persuasive to argue, as Georgetown Law professor Randy Barnett did last week in the Wall Street Journal, that it’s fine for a president to take issue with the court, except in a State of the Union speech? Isn’t it more honorable to criticize the justices to their faces? Are these jurists so sensitive that they can’t take it? Do they expect everyone to submit quietly to whatever they do?

In fact, conservatives have made the Supreme Court a punching bag since the 1960s, when “Impeach Earl Warren” bumper stickers aimed at the liberal chief justice proliferated in right-wing precincts.

Richard Nixon made the Warren court’s rulings on criminal justice a major issue in his 1968 presidential campaign. “Let us always respect, as I do, our courts and those who serve on them,” he said in his acceptance speech that year. “But let us also recognize that some of our courts, in their decisions, have gone too far in weakening the peace forces as against the criminal forces in this country, and we must act to restore that balance.” Many conservatives cheered this, too.

As for the specifics of Obama’s indictment, Alito’s defenders have said the president was wrong to say that the court’s decision on corporate political spending had reversed “a century of law” and also opened “the floodgates for special interests — including foreign corporations.” But Obama was not simply referring to court precedents but also to the 1907 Tillman Act, which banned corporate money in electoral campaigns. The court’s recent ruling undermined that policy. Defenders of the decision also say it did not invalidate the existing legal ban on foreign political activity. What they don’t acknowledge is that the ruling opens a loophole for domestic corporations under foreign control to make unlimited campaign expenditures.

Alito did not like the president making an issue of the court’s truly radical intervention in politics. I disagree with Alito on the law and the policy, but I have no problem with his personal expression of displeasure.

On the contrary, I salute him because his candid response brought home to the country how high the stakes are in the battle over the conservative activism of Chief Justice John Roberts’s court.

 ejdionne at washpost.com

If It’s That Warm, How Come It’s So Darned Cold?
An Essay on Regional Cold Anomalies – within Near Record Global Temperature.

James Hansen, Reto Ruedy, Makiko Sato, Ken Lo

Overview. Public skepticism about global warming was reinforced by the extreme cold
of December 2009 in the contiguous 48 United States and in much of Eurasia. The summer of
2009 was also unusually cool in the United States. But when a cold spell hits, we need to ask:

• Cold compared to what. Our memory of the past few winters? Winters of our childhood? Winters earlier in the 20th century?
• Cold where and for how long? Regional cold snaps are expected even with large global warming. Weather fluctuations can be 10, 20 or 30 degrees, much larger than average global warming.
• The reality of seasons. As the plot of Earth we live on turns away from the sun, in winter or at night, it cools off. That’s true even with global warming, albeit not quite so much.

Before addressing these matters, we note that scientists reporting global warming have come
under attack for a supposed conspiracy to manufacture evidence of global warming. Perhaps because
some members of the public accept these charges as reality, vicious personal messages are sent to the
principal scientists almost daily.

The spiral into an almost surrealistic situation with ad hominem attacks on scientists may have
originated in part with vested interests who do not want society to address climate change. But there is
more than that – including honest, wishful thinking that climate change is not really happening. But
wishing does not alter facts.

The scientific method practically defines integrity. All scientists make honest mistakes, but the scientific method is designed to correct them.

[Albert Einstein: “The right to search for truth implies also a duty; one must not conceal any part of what one has recognized to be true.” Richard Feynman: “The first principle is that you must not fool yourself – and you are the easiest person to fool.”]

The skeptical nature of the scientific method causes conclusions to be reexamined as new data appears.
Cases of deliberate fudging of data, of scientific fraud, are so rare that these infrequent episodes live in
infamy for decades and even centuries.

We know of no cases of fraud in analyses of global temperature measurements. Despite
unfounded accusations, we believe that our best approach is simply to continue to report our scientific
results as clearly as possible. Most of the public continue to respect scientists for what they do and how
they do it. We presume that most of the public can separate science from political commentary.
Our data show that 2009 was tied for the second warmest year in the 130 years of near?global
instrumental measurements – and the Southern Hemisphere had its warmest year in that entire period.
Before discussing these data, and their reconciliation with regional cold anomalies, we must consider
the time frame of comparison.

If we look back a century, we find cold anomalies that dwarf current ones. Figure 1 shows
photos of people walking on Niagara Falls in 1911. Such an extreme cold snap is unimaginable today.
About a decade earlier, in February 1899, temperature fell to ?2°F in Tallahassee, Florida, ?9°F in Atlanta,
Georgia ?30°F in Erasmus, Tennessee, ?47°F in Camp Clark, Nebraska, and ?61°F in Fort Logan, Montana.
The Mississippi River froze all the way to New Orleans, discharging ice into the Gulf of Mexico.

As we will show, climate is changing, especially during the past 30 years. The changes are
perceptible, even though average temperature change is smaller than weather fluctuations. The answer
to the simple question: “How come it’s so damned cold” turns out to be simple: “Because it’s winter.”

3
GISS Global Temperature Analysis
Background. Global temperature change can be defined more accurately than global
temperature. The reason is simple: temperature varies strongly from one place to another,
depending on surface properties, the slope of the ground, etc. Temperature change is a
smoother field, so it can be defined with measurements at a smaller number of locations.
Temperature change is defined relative to some base period. The NASA Goddard
Institute for Space Studies (GISS) analysis uses 1951-1980 as the base period. This was the base
period being used to define “climatology”, average weather, in the 1980s when GISS scientists
began making climate simulations for comparison with observations. It seems best to keep this
base period fixed, because it has been used in many publications. Also many of today’s adults
grew up during 1951-1980, so it provides an appropriate period for analysis of how climate has
changed in human lifetimes. Finally, extensive Antarctic measurements did not begin until the
1950s, so use of an earlier base period would produce a large gap in the Southern Hemisphere.
The GISS temperature analysis is updated each month upon electronic receipt of data
from three sources: (1) weather data for several thousand meteorological stations, (2) satellite
observations of sea surface temperature, and (3) Antarctic research station measurements.

These three data sets are the input for a program that produces a global map of temperature
anomalies relative to the mean for that month during the period of climatology, 1951-1980.
The analysis method has been described fully in a series of refereed papers (Hansen et
al., 1987, 1999, 2001, 2006). Successive papers updated the data and in some cases made
minor improvements to the analysis. A central concept of the analysis is that temperature
anomalies present a smoother geographical field than temperature itself. The distance over
which temperature anomalies are highly correlated is of the order of 1000 kilometers at middle
and high latitudes, as we illustrated in our 1987 paper. Correlation distances, for monthly
temperature anomalies, are shorter at low latitudes, because of the scales of atmospheric
dynamics – but sampling studies show that the coverage of low latitude measurements is not a
major factor affecting accuracy of long?term global temperature trends.

Although the three input data streams that we use are publicly available from the
organizations that produce them, we began preserving the complete input data sets each

month in April 2008. These data sets, which cover the full period of our analysis, 1880?present,
are available to parties interested in performing their own analysis or checking our analysis.
The computer program used in our analysis can be downloaded from the GISS web site.
Results. The past year, 2009, tied as the second warmest year in the 130 years of global
instrumental temperature records (Figure 2a), in the GISS surface temperature analysis. The
Southern Hemisphere set a record as the warmest year for that half of the world (Figure 2b).
Global mean temperature was 0.57°C (1.0°F) warmer than the climatologic average (the
mean for the 1951-1980 base period). Southern Hemisphere mean temperature was 0.49°C
(0.88°F) warmer than the mean for the base period.
The global record warm year was 2005, for the period with near-global instrumental
measurements (since the late 1800s). Sometimes it is asserted that 1998 was the warmest
year. The origin of this confusion is discussed below.

There is a high degree of interannual (year-to-year) and decadal variability in both global
and hemispheric temperatures. Underlying this variability, however, is a long?term warming
trend that has become strong and persistent over the past three decades.

The long-term trends are more apparent when temperature is averaged over several
years. The 60-month (5-year) and 132 month (11-year) running mean temperatures are shown
in Figure 3 for the globe and the hemispheres. The 5-year mean is sufficient to reduce the
effect of the El Nino – La Nina cycles of tropical climate. The 11-year mean minimizes the effect
of solar variability – the brightness of the sun varies by a measurable amount over the sunspot
cycle, which is typically of 10-12 year duration.

There is a contradiction between the observed continued warming trend and popular
perceptions about climate trends. Frequent statements include: “There has been global cooling
over the past decade.” “Global warming stopped in 1998.” “1998 is the warmest year in the
record.” Such statements have been repeated so often that most of the public seems to accept
them as being true. However, based on our data, such statements are not correct.

The origin of this contradiction probably lies in part in differences between the GISS and
HadCRUT temperature analyses (HadCRUT is the joint Hadley Centre, University of East Anglia
Climatic Research Unit temperature analysis). Indeed, HadCRUT finds 1998 to be the warmest
year in their record. In addition, popular belief that the world is cooling is reinforced by cold
weather anomalies in the United States in the summer of 2009 and cold anomalies in much of
the Northern Hemisphere in December 2009.

Comparison of GISS and HadCRUT results. Figure 4 shows maps of GISS and HadCRUT
1998 and 2005 temperature anomalies relative to base period 1961-1990 (the base period used
by HadCRUT). The temperature anomalies are at a 5 degree-by-5 degree (latitude?longitude)
resolution for the GISS data to match that in the HadCRUT analysis. In the lower two maps we
display the GISS data masked to the same area and resolution as the HadCRUT analysis.

The “masked” GISS data let us quantify the extent to which the difference between the
GISS and HadCRUT analyses is due to the data interpolation and extrapolation that occurs in the
GISS analysis. The GISS analysis assigns a temperature anomaly to many gridboxes that do not
contain measurement data, specifically all gridboxes located within 1200 km of one or more
stations that do have defined temperature anomalies.

The rationale for this aspect of the GISS analysis is based on the fact that temperature
anomaly patterns tend to be large scale. For example, if it is an unusually cold winter in New
York, it is probably unusually cold in Philadelphia too. This fact suggests that it may be better to
assign a temperature anomaly based on the nearest stations for a gridbox that contains no
observing stations, rather than excluding that gridbox from the global analysis. Tests of this
assumption are described in our papers referenced below.

Figure 5 shows time series of global temperature for the GISS and HadCRUT analyses, as
well as for the GISS analysis masked to the HadCRUT data region. This figure reveals that the
differences that have developed between the GISS and HadCRUT global temperatures during
the past few decades are due primarily to the extension of the GISS analysis into regions that
are excluded from the HadCRUT analysis. The GISS and HadCRUT results are similar during this
period, when the analyses are limited to exactly the same area. The GISS analysis also finds
1998 as the warmest year, if analysis is limited to the masked area.

The question then becomes: how valid are the extrapolations and interpolations in the
GISS analysis? If the temperature anomaly scale is adjusted such that the global mean anomaly
is zero, the regions warmer and cooler than average have realistic?looking meteorological
patterns, providing qualitative support for the data extensions. However, we would like a
quantitative measure of the uncertainty in our estimate of the global temperature anomaly
caused by the fact that the spatial distribution of measurements is incomplete. One way to
estimate that uncertainty, or possible error, can be obtained via use of the complete time series
of global surface temperature data generated by a global climate model that has been
demonstrated to have realistic spatial and temporal variability of surface temperature. We can
sample this data set at only the locations where measurement stations exist, use this sub?
sample of data to estimate global temperature change with the GISS analysis method, and
compare the result with the “perfect” knowledge of global temperature provided by the data at
all gridpoints.

Table 1 shows the derived error due to incomplete coverage of stations. As expected,
the error was larger at early dates when station coverage was poorer. Also the error is much
larger when data are available only from meteorological stations, without ship or satellite
measurements for ocean areas. In recent decades the 2-sigma uncertainty (95 percent
confidence of being within that range, ~2-3 percent chance of being outside that range in a
specific direction) has been about 0.05°C. The incomplete coverage of stations is the primary
cause of uncertainty in comparing nearby years, for which the effect of more systematic errors
such as urban warming is small.

Additional sources of error become important when comparing temperature anomalies
separated by longer periods. The most well-known source of long-term error is “urban
warming”, human-made local warming caused by energy use and alterations of the natural
environment. Various other errors affecting the estimates of long-term temperature change
are described comprehensively in a large number of papers by Tom Karl and his associates at
the NOAA National Climate Data Center. The GISS temperature analysis corrects for urban
effects by adjusting the long-term trends of urban stations to be consistent with the trends at
nearby rural stations, with urban locations identified either by population or satellite?observed
night lights. In a paper in preparation we demonstrate that the population and night light
approaches yield similar results on global average. The additional error caused by factors other
than incomplete spatial coverage is estimated to be of the order of 0.1°C on time scales of
several decades to a century, this estimate necessarily being partly subjective. The estimated
total uncertainty in global mean temperature anomaly with land and ocean data included thus
is similar to the error estimate in the first line of Table 1, i.e., the error due to limited spatial
coverage when only meteorological stations are included.

Now let’s consider whether we can specify a rank among the recent global annual
temperatures, i.e., which year is warmest, second warmest, etc. Figure 2a shows 2009 as the
second warmest year, but it is so close to 1998, 2002, 2003, 2006, and 2007 that we must
declare these years as being in a virtual tie as the second warmest year. The maximum
difference among these in the GISS analysis is ~0.03°C (2009 being the warmest among those
years and 2006 the coolest). This range is approximately equal to our 1?sigma uncertainty of
~0.025°C, which is the reason for stating that these five years are tied for second warmest.

The year 2005 is 0.061°C warmer than 1998 in our analysis. So how certain are we that
2005 was warmer than 1998? Given the standard deviation of ~0.025°C for the estimated
error, we can estimate the probability that 1998 was warmer than 2005 as follows. The chance
that 1998 is 0.025°C warmer than our estimated value is about (1 – 0.68)/2 = 0.16. The chance
that 2005 is 0.025°C cooler than our estimate is also 0.16. The probability of both of these is
~0.03 (3 percent). Integrating over the tail of the distribution and accounting for the 2005-1998
temperature difference being 0.061°C alters the estimate in opposite directions. For the
moment let us just say that the chance that 1998 is warmer than 2005, given our temperature
analysis, is no more than about 10 percent. Therefore, we can say with a reasonable degree of
confidence that 2005 is the warmest year in the period of instrumental data.

Comparison of GISS and NOAA global temperature change. NOAA recently announced
 http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/sotc/?report=gl… that 2009 was the fifth warmest year in their
analysis. At face value this result may seem to disagree with the GISS conclusion that 2009 tied
with several other years for the second warmest year. So we compare the GISS and NOAA
results in Figure 6, in which, following the NOAA convention, we have defined the baseline as
the mean temperature for the past century, 1901?2000.

Figure 6 reveals that the NOAA and GISS analyses are in good agreement, within the
estimated uncertainties. Both analyses find 2005 to be the warmest year. The discrepancy in
ranking of individual years is due in part to the GISS preference to describe as statistical ties
those years with global temperatures differing by a few hundredths of a degree or less.
Although quantitative analysis of the reasons for differences between these two analyses may
be warranted, it is beyond the scope of this essay.

Global cooling in the past decade?   That question can be addressed with a much higher
degree of confidence than the ranking of individual years. The reason is that error due to
incomplete spatial coverage of data becomes smaller for data averaged over several years. The
2?sigma error in the 5-year running-mean temperature anomaly shown in Figure 3, is about a
factor of two smaller than the annual mean uncertainty, thus only 0.02?0.03°C. Given that the
change of 5-year-mean global temperature anomaly is almost 0.2°C over the past decade, we
can conclude that the world has become warmer over the past decade, not cooler.

Why are some people so readily convinced of a false conclusion, that the world is really
experiencing a cooling trend? That misimpression may have a lot to do with regional short?term
temperature fluctuations, which are an order of magnitude larger than global average annual
anomalies. Yet many lay people do understand the distinction between regional short?term
anomalies and global trends. For example, here is comment posted by “frogbandit” at 8:38
p.m. 1/6/2010 on City Bright blog  http://blog.seattlepi.com/robertbrown/ar…):

“I wonder about the people who use cold weather to say that the globe is cooling. It forgets that
global warming has a global component and that its a trend, not an everyday thing. I hear people
down in the lower 48 say its really cold this winter. That ain’t true so far up here in Alaska.
Bethel, Alaska, had a brown Christmas. Here in Anchorage, the temperature today is 31. I can’t
say based on the fact Anchorage and Bethel are warm so far this winter that we have global
warming. That would be a really dumb argument to think my weather pattern is being
experienced even in the rest of the United States, much less globally.”

What frogbandit is saying is illustrated by the global map of temperature anomalies in
December 2009 (Figure 7a). There were strong negative temperature anomalies at middle latitudes in
the Northern Hemisphere, as great as ?8°C in Siberia, averaged over the month. But the temperature
anomaly in the Arctic was as great as +7°C. The cold December perhaps reaffirmed an impression
gained by Americans from the unusually cool 2009 summer. There was a large region in the United
States and Canada in June?July?August with a negative temperature anomaly greater than 1°C, the
largest negative anomaly on the planet.

Regional anomalies. How do these large regional temperature anomalies stack up
against an expectation of, and the reality of, global warming? How unusual are these regional
negative fluctuations? Do they have any relationship to global warming? Do they contradict
global warming?

It is obvious that in December 2009 there was an unusual exchange of polar and mid?
latitude air in the Northern Hemisphere. Arctic air rushed into both North America and Eurasia,
and, of course, it was replaced in the polar region by air from middle latitudes.

The degree to which Arctic air penetrates into middle latitudes is related to the Arctic
Oscillation (AO) index, which is defined by surface atmospheric pressure patterns and is plotted
in Figure 8. When the AO index is positive surface pressure is low in the polar region. This
helps the middle latitude jet stream to blow strongly and consistently from west to east, thus
keeping cold Arctic air locked in the polar region. When the AO index is negative there tends to
be high pressure in the polar region, weaker zonal winds, and greater movement of frigid polar
air into middle latitudes.

Figure 8 shows that December 2009 was the most extreme negative Arctic Oscillation
since the 1970s. Although there were ten cases between the early 1960s and mid 1980s with
an AO index more extreme than ?2.5, there were no such extreme cases since then until
December 2009. It is no wonder that the public became accustomed to the absence of extreme
blasts of cold air.

Figure 9 shows the AO index with greater temporal resolution for two 5?year periods. It
is obvious that there is a high degree of correlation of the AO index with temperature in the
United States, with any possible lag between index and temperature anomaly less than the

monthly temporal resolution. Large negative anomalies, when they occur, are usually in a
winter month. Note that the January 1977 temperature anomaly, mainly located in the Eastern
United States, was much stronger than the December 2009 anomaly.

The AO index is not so much an explanation for climate anomaly patterns as it is a
simple statement of the situation. However, John (Mike) Wallace and colleagues have been
able to use the AO description to aid consideration of how the patterns may change as
greenhouse gases increase. A number of papers, by Wallace, David Thompson (e.g., Thompson
and Wallace, 2000), and others, as well as by Drew Shindell and others at GISS (Shindell et al.,
2001), have pointed out that increasing carbon dioxide causes the stratosphere to cool, in turn
causing on average a stronger jet stream and thus a tendency for a more positive Arctic
Oscillation. Overall, Figure 8 shows a weak tendency in the expected sense.

Figure 10 shows the AO index for Dec?Jan?Feb and Jun?Jul?Aug. Variability is much
greater in the winter. There is weak correlation of the AO index and U.S. temperature in the
winter, but no significant correlation in the summer. An unusually large negative AO was
associated with the 2009 cool summer in the United States. Loss of Arctic summer sea ice is
likely to affect Northern Hemisphere continental temperatures, but sea ice loss so far is too
small and for too few years to allow empirical assessment.

We conclude that December 2009 was a highly anomalous month. High pressure in the
polar region can be described as the “cause” of the extreme December weather. But there is
no apparent basis for expecting frequent repeat occurrences of December 2009 conditions. On
the contrary – the weak winter trend is toward a more positive AO, as expected with increasing
greenhouse gases. But month?to?month fluctuations of the AO are much larger than its long
term trend, so high winter variability including cold snaps will surely continue.

However, other factors than the AO, including pervasive global warming due to
increasing greenhouse gases, affect the climate trends. Figure 10 shows that in the U.S. only
one of the past 10 winters and two of the past 10 summers were cooler than the 1951?1980
climatology. Let’s look at global maps of recent regional temperature anomalies and
temperature trends to help assess whether the U.S. tendency is an expected result due to
global warming. Figure 11 shows seasonal temperature anomalies for the past year and Figure
12 shows seasonal temperature change since 1950 based on local linear trends. The
temperature scales are identical in Figures 11 and 12.

The outstanding characteristic in comparing these two figures is that the magnitude of
the 60 year change is similar to the magnitude of seasonal anomalies. What this tells us is that
the climate “dice” are already strongly loaded. The change in the probability that the seasonal
mean temperature at any given location will fall in the category that was defined as unusually
warm during the period of climatology (1951-1980) has increased from 30 percent during the
period of climatology to about 60 percent today, as we illustrate in an upcoming publication.

The magnitude of monthly temperature anomalies is typically 1.5 to 2 times greater
than the magnitude of seasonal anomalies. So it is not yet quite as easy to see global warming
if one’s figure of merit is monthly mean temperature. Daily temperature change due to
weather fluctuations is even much larger than global mean warming. Yet it is already possible
to notice the effect by comparing the frequency of days with record warm temperature to days
with record cold temperature – days with record high temperature now exceed days with
record cold by about a two to one ratio (Meehl et al., 2009).

Summary
The bottom line is this: the Earth has been in a period of rapid global warming for the
past three decades. The assertion that the planet has entered a period of cooling in the past
decade is without foundation. On the contrary, we find no significant deviation from the
warming trend of the past three decades.
Weather fluctuations exceed the magnitude of average global warming over the past
half century. However, the perceptive person should be able to notice that climate is warming
on decadal time scales. The global temperature trend over the past few decades has been
strong enough that there is a noticeable “loading” of the climate dice that define the
probability of unusually warm or cool seasons.

Acknowledgements. The Niagara Falls photos belong to Moisha Blechman. John Hiddema and
Richard Brenne, respectively, suggested the need for the bulleted items and a response to widespread
accusations of “hoax” in an Overview. The need for an overview was also suggested by participants on
 References
Hansen, J.E., and S. Lebedeff, 1987: Global trends of measured surface air temperature. J. Geophys.
Res., 92, 13345?13372.
Hansen, J., R. Ruedy, J. Glascoe, and Mki. Sato, 1999: GISS analysis of surface temperature change. J.
Geophys. Res., 104, 30997?31022.
Hansen, J.E., R. Ruedy, Mki. Sato, M. Imhoff, W. Lawrence, D. Easterling, T. Peterson, and T. Karl,
2001: A closer look at United States and global surface temperature change. J. Geophys. Res., 106,
23947?23963.
Hansen, J., Mki. Sato, R. Ruedy, K. Lo, D.W. Lea, and M. Medina?Elizade, 2006: Global temperature
change. Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci., 103, 14288?14293.
Meehl, G.A., C. Tebaldi, G. Walton, D. Easterling, and L. McDaniel, 2009: Relative increase of record
high maximum temperatures compared to record low minimum temperatures in the U.S., Geophys. Res.
Lett., 36, L23701, doi:10.1029/2009GL040736.
Shindell, D., G.A. Schmidt, R.L. Miller, and D. Rind, 2001: Northern Hemispherre winter climate
response to greenhouse gas, volcanic, ozone and solar forcing, J. Geophys. Res., 106, 7193?7210.
Thompson, D.W.J., and J.M. Wallace, 2000: Annular modes in the extratropical circulation: Part I:
Month?to?month variability, J. Clim., 13, 1000?1016.

The following tells us the facts as going in to the Copenhagen negotiations.
Besides we have also some information on reaction to the Danish attempt to navigate the meeting:

* Danish draft suggests – World should make bulk of CO2 emission cuts of 50% by 2050 with the rich nations cutting their emissions 80%

* Danish draft says world should keep to bellow 2 degrees C rise.

* Danish Proposal has no mention of 2020 cuts for rich nations but suggests that year for peaking emissions.

* India minister says Danish draft “dead end” for talks because it has no 2020 targets for the Rich.

—————

FACTBOX – Climate negotiating positions of the world’s top emitters:
by Reuters News on 26 November 2009,
(Updated with new targets)

China unveiled its first firm target to cut greenhouse gases to include a reduction of 40-45% in energy intensity by 2020, and the U.S. said  that President Barack Obama would attend climate talks next month and promised an emissions cut of 17 percent below 2005 levels by 2020.

Following are the negotiating positions of 10 of the top greenhouse gas emitters before the Dec. 7-18 meeting in Copenhagen on a new global climate deal.

1) CHINA (annual emissions of greenhouse gases: 6.8 billion tonnes, 5.5 tonnes per capita)

* Emissions – China said it will cut its carbon intensity — the amount of carbon dioxide emitted for each unit of GDP — by 40 to 45 percent by 2020, compared with 2005 levels.

The domestic voluntary target will still allow emissions of world’s biggest greenhouse gas emitter to grow substantially over the next decade, analysts said.

This is the first measurable curb on national emissions in China. President Hu Jintao has also said China would try to raise the share of non-fossil fuels in primary energy consumption to 15 percent by 2020.

* Demands – China said developed nations’ targets to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions are still too low. It expects cuts of at least 40 percent from 1990 levels by 2020 and wants a promise of far more aid and green technology.
2) UNITED STATES (6.4 billion tonnes, 21.0 tonnes per capita)

* Emissions – The U.S. promised to cut 2005 emissions by 17 percent by 2020 and said President Barack Obama would attend the beginning of the Copenhagen summit. This amounts to about 3 percent below 1990 levels, the benchmark used in the Kyoto Protocol.
The U.S. also said it would extend cuts to 30 percent below 2005 levels by 2025, rising to 83 percent by 2050.

* Obama says he wants an accord in Copenhagen that covers all the issues and that has “immediate operational effect.”

Legislation to cut emissions by 20 percent from 2005 levels had been approved by a Senate committee but people few think it can become law before the Copenhagen talks.

* Finance – The United States says a “dramatic increase” is needed in funds to help developing nations.

* Demands – “We cannot meet this challenge unless all the largest emitters of greenhouse gas pollution act together,” Obama said.

3) EUROPEAN UNION (5.03 billion tonnes, 10.2 tonnes per capita)

* Emissions – EU leaders agreed in December 2008 to cut emissions by 20 percent below 1990 levels by 2020 and by 30 percent if other developed nations follow suit.

* Finance – EU leaders have agreed that developing nations will need about 100 billion euros ($147 billion) a year by 2020 to help them curb emissions and adapt to changes such as floods or heatwaves. As an advance payment, they suggest 5-7 billion a year between 2010 and 2012.
* Demands – The EU wants developing nations to curb the rise of their emissions by 15 to 30 percent below a trajectory of “business as usual” by 2020.

4) RUSSIA (1.7 billion tonnes, 11.9 tonnes per capita)

* Emissions – Cut greenhouse gases by 22-25 percent below 1990 levels by 2020. That means a rise from now — emissions were 34 percent below 1990 levels in 2007.

5) INDIA (1.4 billion tonnes, 1.2 tonnes per capita)

* Emissions – India is prepared to quantify the amount of greenhouse gas emissions it could cut with domestic actions, but will not accept internationally binding targets, Environment Minister Jairam Ramesh said. India has said its per capita emissions will never rise to match those of developed nations.

* Demands – Like China, India wants rich nations to cut emissions by at least 40 percent by 2020. But Ramesh signalled room to compromise: “It’s a negotiation. We’ve given a number of 40 percent but one has to be realistic.”
6) JAPAN (1.4 billion tonnes, 11.0 tonnes per capita)

* Emissions – Cut emissions by 25 percent below 1990 levels by 2020 if Copenhagen agrees an ambitious deal.

* Finance – Prime Minister Yukio Hatoyama told the United Nations that Tokyo would also step up aid.

7) CANADA (658 million tonnes, 19.8 tonnes per capita)

* Emissions – Prime Minister Stephen Harper in 2007 said Canada would its emissions by 20 percent below 2006 levels by 2020. Environment Minister Jim Prentice on Wednesday reiterated this target and said Canada’s plan mirrors the newly-announced U.S. target.
8) SOUTH KOREA (664 million tonnes, 13.7 tonnes per capita)

* Emissions – Cut emissions by 30 percent below “business as usual” levels by 2020, which is equivalent to a 4 percent cut from 2005 levels.

9) BRAZIL (440 million tonnes, 2.2 tonnes per capita)

* Emissions – Will cut its emissions by between 36.1 percent and 38.9 percent from projected 2020 levels, representing a 20 percent cut below 2005 levels.

10) INDONESIA (380 million tonnes, 1.6 tonnes per capita)

* Emissions – Aims to cut emissions by 26 percent by 2020 below “business as usual” levels.
Taking CO2 from deforestation into account, Indonesia is the world’s third largest emitter of greenhouse gases.

Note: Greenhouse gas emissions are 2008 data from Germany’s Energy industry institute IWR except for the EU, which are from a 2007 submission to United Nations

Population data source: michael.szabo at reuters.com; +44 207 542 9242; Reuters Messaging: michael.szabo.reuters.com@reuters.net))

NEGAWATTS!  NOT NUCLEAR POWER

We are reminded of this today by Leon Di Marco in a letter to The Financial Times.

Nuclear power is simply a distraction that wastes capital and manpower.
Published in The Financial Times: November 6 2009.
From Mr Leon Di Marco.

Sir, Your eminently sensible editorial “Follow the science of climate change” (November 2) is spoiled by the following (my italics): “The least glamorous forms of energy conservation, such as insulating buildings properly and making transport more efficient, still have a huge contribution to make. So do nuclear power …”

As Amory Lovins has been pointing out for decades (”negawatts”), energy efficiency is the first port of call in any carbon argument. But he also correctly points out that nuclear is a distraction. To put numbers on this, of the world primary energy consumption of 10TW-plus, nuclear could optimistically provide less than 500GW over the plant’s lifetime before the fuel runs out, and so a contribution of less than 5 per cent. Hardly huge.

Furthermore, the opportunity cost is completely disproportionate, not only in the capital requirement but also in the manpower. The Open University is already in the process of setting up a professional nuclear engineering course, which will mop up resources that would be far better put to developing renewables.

We have only one shot at this.

Leon Di Marco,
FSK Technology,
London W9, UK

—————

We found on google: FSK Technology Services, Inc. is a growing small business founded and owned by three women and showcasing a team of professionals with extensive commercial and government customer experience.

Core strengths include instructional technology, technical training and training support services, as well as technical documentation for hardware and software. The FSK team also provides information technology, and engineering and engineering support services. It tailors business process solutions for customers’ specific needs. Additional capabilities include program management, business analysis and proposal development, systems engineering, strategic IT planning, and engineering test and evaluation.

————–

Also, a previous letter to the editor from Leon Di Marco:
 http://euractiv.blogactiv.eu/2009/01/19/…

Smart Grids? Smart Baloney!
Posted by Mike Parr on January 19th, 2009
Organization: PWR
In reaction to the EurActiv article:
Smarter grids ‘crucial’ for delivery of EU climate goals

Response to Smart Grids? Smart Baloney!    »»
leon di marco
Comment by leon di marco | 2009/01/24
Mike Parr is wrong and apparently does not know what smart meters/grids will do- switching smart appliances on and off will be an automatic process and does not rely on the user – this would be unrealistic – there is no danger of smart meters being
expensive if they are installed in high volume, as in italy the control of the grid will be more complex but this will allow much more flexible use of intermittent renewable power and a much more efficient power distribution network ultimately when the European green energy supergrid is introduced an energy superhighway will convey electricity round Europe and the Mediterranean will become a major source of EU solar power, which will benefit us all.

 From:
The Hamburg University of Applied Sciences
Research and Transfer Centre Applications of Life Sciences
Lohbruegger Kirchstrasse 65
D-21033 Hamburg/Germany

T: +49.40.42875-6324
F: +49.40.42875-6079

 franziska.mannke at haw-hamburg.d

www.haw-hamburg.de/ftz-als.html

We learned about an online complete “one-stop” library on much of what matters onclimatechange.

The refernce is:

http://www.klima2009.net/de/ccsl

Subject 1: Re: Nuclear Reactors are going micro.

This is a radically new reactor design with a lot of interesting properties.

I found the patent application with Google patent search.   It’s not that big, so I attach a copy.

To answer Charles’s questions:

You get the heat out with pipes carrying a heat transfer fluid to and from the surface.   No ground water needed.

I believe it’s intrinsically extremely difficult to use this technology to make weapons grade material.

You make electricity with a steam turbine and cooling arrangements at the surface.

The patent application points out that the fact that the hydride fuel is its own moderator whose moderating effect is controlled by the same mechanism that controls the reactor, namely the temperature difference between the fissile hydride core and a   non-fissile hydride hydrogen store, means that the core can be made twice as big as required for criticality. This means that fuel burnup could be as much as 50%. This is a huge increase over current burnup rates of 1 to 3 %, and could dramatically extend refueling intervals.   (Apparently not proposed for the Hyperion product.)

The fuel cycle permits extremely easy separation of low life-time fission products from long-life actinides. All of the actinides can be kept in the purified fuel where they will eventually be burned up in a reactor.   This means that both the volume and half-life of waste can be reduced enormously.

Although proposed for small reactors, this technology could be used for big ones too. It’s a pity it was not invented long ago. It would have changed the whole trajectory of nuclear power.

Too late now, of course.

David

Subject: Nuclear Reactors are going micro; Ok, so what’s the catch?

Steve
 http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/20…

How do you get rid of the heat? Just let it diffuse into the ground? Do you need groundwater flow? No weapons grade is interesting, but it might be partially enriched making it easy to make WG. No moving parts: how do you make electricity with no moving parts? Some kind of fuel cell?

Still, interesting.

———————————————————————–

Subject 2: Wind Farms:

Lets see, we just took our class to a wind farm.   You get 1.5 GW machine working 30% of the time for 1 million, so that is $2 million per GW effective.
If this nuclear thing does 20,000 homes that implies (if US) it is 10 GW. for what did they say, 25 million?   That is $2.5 million per GW.
Wind might be marginally cheaper (if I did my math right), a lot less scary, but would need backup.

Charlie

********************************************************

Subject 3: Interesting conversation between one of ours and a Shell oilman:

There is some data available, but it’s held by groups such as CERA and is only available to subscribers of their various data services.   In one such study “The Cost of Oil”, they analyze lifecycle costs for new oil in a number of countries and environments around the world, looking also at unconventional oil sources (oil sands and shale).

[ph] maybe the friend’s research institution can subscribe.     Do you know if that’s possible?

I can’t share the report or data with you, but in my reading of it and thinking about industry activities in the last few years as oil prices have spiked and then fallen, I’m not sure I know where we are on your curve.

[ph] the energy cost curve and the dollar cost curve follow ‘different masters’ as it were.   What seems to happen is that people coast along not paying attention and then a snag in providing increasing supplies gets the attention of the speculators.   When increased prices do not stimulate increasing supply a price war occurs, breaking all the set relationships and then it collapses in disarray for things to resettle at some semi stable level.       I note that the oil prices plummeted this month, but the food prices did not, for example.       The physical cost of resources follows different learning curves, and that’s what I’m trying to help gather data on.

It’s also not clear whether we can realize we are at a point of diminishing returns until we have moved well past.   Another complexity in oil is that 80% of supply comes from National Oil Companies and they will have very different definitions of diminishing returns than will commercial companies.   What does diminishing returns mean when the “return” is political stability or local employment, or staying in power?

[ph] To me it means that whatever you measure you then study the learning curve *for that measure*.     I think the effort of physical economists to measure some ‘scientific’ value judgment for resources (in place of money denominated market judgments) can work better if putting the scientific judgments down stream of the hard measures.     The better alternative seems to be to look at empirical learning curves using physical measures, and make a value judgments about the implied feedbacks in the systems producing them, as well as use them to read signals of environmental responses.

Some general numbers from my own study and thinking that might bear on this.   In conventional (easy) oil fields, the energy return on investment is very large.   I would say typically in the range of 20-100:1.   This can include some very challenging environments such as arctic or deepwater, but the resources have not been exploited so there are high returns to be had on the energy invested.   As we move down the resource pyramid, these numbers change significantly.   For oil sands developments, such as in Canada, or oil shale developments in the US (not being done yet) utilizing new technologies, the range is more like 3-10:1.   Numbers I’ve heard quoted for ethanol are something like 8:1 for sugarcane, and a range of 0.6-1.3:1 for corn.   The CERA study by the way looks at financial returns that tell a very different story.

[ph] I guess the one I’d be interested in is the curve of changing net energy return rates for new fields and for new   methods to increase extraction.   I understand that some proposals for going back to old fields with new technology are now becoming economic, but that surely must also involve spending more energy to get it done too.   It’s the curvature of the mean change over time that shows the environmental response to efforts for maximizing the resource.

I had an interesting debate in the mid-1980′s with an economist.   At the time, I was Exploration Economics Manager for Shell.   The question was if it takes more than a barrel to make a barrel, but the barrel made is worth more than the barrels used (rising prices and futures markets), is that good business?

Does this help at all?

[ph] Sure, it helps a good bit.     What I’m trying to do is help pin more of this down.     I think the point of vanishing returns is not close to 100% energy extraction cost, though that question does help point to how economists have no model for connecting reality to what they say we can do with it…. :-)         I think the greater concern I have is that when resource supply snags for necessities are hit (whether permanent or temporary), the scarcity drives up the price and encourages investment.         If the system has guessed wrong, and the supply snag is terminal diminishing returns, all the investment really drives is accelerating price increases and wasteful depletion of a critical resource.       It’s that positively negative feedback loop that concerns me.       Do you know of anyone else who has thought about that?

Subject 4: AND THIS IS WHAT GETS PUBLISHED! Stick to the oil drum folks!
 http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/200…

Scientific Community Called Upon To Resolve Debate On ‘Net Energy’ Once And For All

ScienceDaily (Nov. 11, 2008) — “Net energy is a (mostly) irrelevant, misleading and dangerous metric,” says Professor Bruce Dale, editor-in-chief of Biofuels, Bioresources and Biorefining (Biofpr) in the latest issue of the journal published November 7.

Net energy is a metric by which some scientists attempt to assess the sustainability and ability of alternative fuels to displace fossil fuel but recent debate in Biofpr shows that scientists are undecided on its merits as a tool.

Instead, in a series of corresponding articles clearly stating the case for and against net energy, Professor Dale calls for a more holistic approach which takes into consideration issues such as greenhouse gas emissions, petroleum displacement and economic growth, particularly in the developing world. He is calling on the scientific community to come together to help establish, once and for all, parameters by which to calculate fuel efficiency by using not just one, but several metrics that can be used in conjunction to give a fuller picture.

The articles – Net energy: still a (mostly) irrelevant, misleading and dangerous metric, Bruce E. Dale; Net energy and strategic decision making: response to Professor Dale, Franzi Poldy; and Response to Dr. Poldy’s questions in this issue, Bruce E. Dale – are the culmination of the ongoing heated exchange, which has already attracted a huge response, between those in favor and those against the use of ‘net energy’ as a metric.

Professor Dale says: “The election of the new USA president, Barack Obama, who is an open supporter of biofuels will put them very much on the agenda. We need to resolve this issue of appropriate metrics once and for all so we can concentrate on the real task at hand – to deliver viable alternative fuels and reduce our dependence on fossil fuels.”

He adds: “Net energy is misleading because it does not give us the whole story of a fuel but instead asks us to make a judgement using a very small component of the decision making process, albeit an important piece of a large jigsaw. When trying to determine whether a fuel is viable or not, we not only need to consider energy in versus energy out but also the overall context such as petrol displacement, land usage and economic growth – this requires a balanced approach with several metrics.”

However, in a corresponding article, Dr. Franzi Poldy, CSIRO Sustainable Ecosystems, Australia, disagrees, arguing that in order for policymakers and governments to make decisions about which fuels are best, they need to have numbers to work with to establish a way of calculating the benefits of potential fuels – net energy is the best way to do this.

He says: “Although net energy is not the whole story about any fuel, it is an important part of the story for those concerned with long-term energy supply at the whole-economy level.”

Untapped energy source fuels a paradox.

By MICHAEL RICHARDSON, Thursday, Sept. 25, 2008, The Japan Times.
SINGAPORE — Ice that burns? It sounds like a magician’s trick. So do some of the exotic names given to gas hydrate — “flammable sorbet,” “crystal gas” and “burning ice.” But recent scientific surveys and test drilling in Asia and elsewhere have proven that this substance exists in massive, potentially recoverable quantities and that it could be an important commercial energy source for the future.

Indeed, some of the world’s biggest economies and energy users, including the United States, Japan, China, India, South Korea and Canada, are racing to develop production techniques and equipment to tap gas hydrate and bring it to market within the next decade. For all of them, except energy self-sufficient Canada, the ability to tap new domestic sources of natural gas offers the prospect of substantially reducing dependence on expensive gas imports.

Hydrate deposits up to several hundred meters thick are generally found in two places: on or beneath the deep ocean floor, or underground close to the Arctic permafrost layer, where high pressure and cold temperatures turn natural gas (methane, ethane and propane) into semi-solid form.

Gas hydrate looks like ordinary ice, although it is sometimes discolored. But when brought to the surface and allowed to warm, it can be lit with a match. It then burns with a soft orange flame. One cubic meter of gas hydrate releases as much as 164 cubic meters of natural gas, in which methane is usually the chief constituent.

While global estimates vary considerably, the U.S. government’s energy department says that the energy content of methane in hydrate form is “immense, possibly exceeding the combined energy content of all other known fossil fuels,” meaning coal, oil and conventional gas.

The presence of hydrates has been inferred from seismic surveys and subsea sampling along most of the world’s continental shelf margins. Some of the biggest deposits so far found are on the ocean floor off Japan, South Korea, India and China, and on and off U.S. and Canadian Arctic land territory.

Japan’s economy, trade and energy ministry announced last year that there were over 1.1 trillion cubic meters of methane hydrates in a Pacific Ocean trench, called the Nankai Trough, some 50 kilometers from the coast of Honshu, the main Japanese island. This reserve is equivalent to 14 years of gas use by Japan, which imports nearly all the oil, gas and coal needed to run its vast economy, the world’s second-largest after the United States.

Three years ago, the Japanese government said it believed commercial exploitation of methane hydrate was economically viable when oil traded above $54 a barrel, less than half its present price. In November 2007, the government in Seoul said it had found enough gas hydrates in the sea between South Korea and Japan to meet 30 years of demand. Six months earlier, China announced that it had for the first time managed to tap into seabed sediment containing gas hydrates in the northern part of the South China Sea. It said initial estimates indicated that the find contained the equivalent of more than 100 million metric tons of oil — about one-third of China’s annual oil consumption.

In doing so, China became the fourth country after the U.S., Japan and India to achieve this technological breakthrough in the deep sea search for energy. India announced in 2006 that it had made several huge discoveries of gas hydrates off its east and west coasts.

Since last April, the U.S. has signed separate agreements with India, South Korea and Japan to cooperate in hydrate research, exploration and production. Japan, the U.S. and Canada, working in close collaboration, have achieved several days of continuous extraction of methane from underground hydrate reserves in the Arctic permafrost. Large-scale production tests are planned in the Canadian Arctic this winter and in the U.S. Arctic next year.

Test production from offshore Arctic finds is expected to lag by three to five years, because marine deposits are less well documented than those on land. Sea sampling and drilling are also much more expensive. Japan said recently it plans to start test drilling in the Nankai Trough in 2012, possibly leading to commercial production by 2016. Korea has a similar production timetable.

However, apart from the high costs and technical challenge, all the hydrate explorers face another possible danger — environmental disaster. While governments are attracted to an abundant clean fuel, scientists are concerned that drilling when combined with global warming risks disturbing the seabed and triggering an uncontrolled release of methane, a potent greenhouse gas.

The British government’s former chief scientific adviser, Sir David King, warned recently that one big unknown about global warming is the stage at which dangerous tipping points may be reached that lead to runaway heating of the planet. He cited as an example the release of methane hydrate deposits in the Arctic.

Some evidence suggests that a catastrophic release of methane from the ocean 55 million years ago, possibly caused by undersea volcanic explosions and landslides, was responsible for making the earth much warmer.

The modern hydrate quest is built on a paradox. When released to the air, methane is a greenhouse gas that traps around 20 times more solar heat in the earth’s atmosphere than carbon dioxide, the main global warming gas. But when burned, methane releases up to 25 percent less carbon dioxide than combustion of the same amount of coal. It also emits no nitrogen and sulfur oxides, which poison the air and human health when coal is burned without effective filters.

The world’s abundant methane hydrate deposits have been safely stored for thousands of years in the ocean depths and Arctic permafrost. Those who now seek to exploit what is probably the world’s greatest reserve of new fossil fuel must therefore be sure that in doing so they improve, not harm, the global environment.

Michael Richardson, a former Asia editor of the International Herald Tribune, is an energy and security specialist at the Institute of South East Asian Studies in Singapore.

The World Values Survey is available at: www.worldvaluessurvey.org www.happyplanetindex.org

Download the reports
Download the Happy Planet report (2006, pdf)
Download the European Happy Planet report (2007, pdf)

See the Global HPI map:  http://www.happyplanetindex.org/map.htm

From:      jeh1 at columbia.edu
Subject: Complete Trip Report.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                       Date: August 4, 2008

- July 3, 2008: Dear Prime Minister Fukuda: A letter to the leader of Japan before the G8 meeting
 http://www.columbia.edu/~jeh1/mailings/2…

- July 2008: *Climate Threat to the Planet: Implications for Energy Policy*
Slides for presentation given July 4 at United Nations University in Tokyo, available in PDF and Powerpoint.
 http://www.columbia.edu/~jeh1/2008/Tokyo…

 http://www.columbia.edu/~jeh1/2008/Tokyo…

Above is a summary of the State of the Science and a hint to the State of the Politics.

The links are here and we will post this also in our data base.

From:      jeh1 at columbia.edu
Subject: Dear Prime Minister Fukuda
Letter sent to Prime Minister Fukuda before the G8 meeting is at http://www.columbia.edu/~jeh1/mailings/2…

makes some very interesting points about relative parts of coal, oil, and gas in 2007 emissions and their historic part in the present composition of the air, and the various sources of these emissions.

He makes suggestions and asks for Fukuda’s leadership. Please open the above link in order to read Jim Hansen’s intervention to the G8.

The US is single market for Venezuela, Mexico, and Canada, but also a market for every other oil exporter.
Will the US now try to monopolize also the Brazilian future exports?

With World Vegetarian Week here, Bruce Friedrich, Posted May 19, 2008, on AlterNet, his Top Ten Reasons To Go Vegetarian.

1. Helping Animals Also Helps the Global Poor While there is ample and justified moral indignation about the diversion of 100 million tons of grain for biofuels, more than seven times as much (760 million tons) is fed to farmed animals so that people can eat meat. Is the diversion of crops to our cars a moral issue? Yes, but it’s about one-eighth the issue that meat-eating is. Care about global poverty? Try vegetarianism.

2. Eating Meat Supports Cruelty to Animals. The green pastures and idyllic barnyard scenes of years past are now distant memories. On today’s factory farms, animals are crammed by the thousands into filthy windowless sheds, wire cages, gestation crates, and other confinement systems. These animals will never raise families, root in the soil, build nests, or do anything else that is natural and important to them. They won’t even get to feel the warmth of the sun on their backs or breathe fresh air until the day they are loaded onto trucks bound for slaughter.

3. Eating Meat Is Bad for the Environment A recent United Nations report entitled Livestock’s Long Shadow concludes that eating meat is “one of the … most significant contributors to the most serious environmental problems, at every scale from local to global.” In just one example, eating meat causes almost 40 percent more greenhouse-gas emissions than all the cars, trucks, and planes in the world combined. The report concludes that the meat industry “should be a major policy focus when dealing with problems of land degradation, climate change and air pollution, water shortage and water pollution, and loss of biodiversity.“

4. Avoid Bird Flu – The World Health Organization says that if the avian flu virus mutates, it could be caught simply by eating undercooked chicken flesh or eggs, eating food prepared on the same cutting board as infected meat or eggs, or even touching eggshells contaminated with the disease. Other problems with factory farming — from foot-and-mouth to SARS — can be avoided with a general shift to a vegetarian diet.

5. If You Wouldn’t Eat a Dog, You Shouldn’t Eat a Chicken Several recent studies have shown that chickens are bright animals who are able to solve complex problems, demonstrate self-control, and worry about the future. Chickens are smarter than cats and dogs and even do some things that have not yet been seen in mammals other than primates. Dr. Chris Evans, who studies animal behavior and communication at Macquarie University in Australia, says, “As a trick at conferences, I sometimes list these attributes, without mentioning chickens and people think I’m talking about monkeys.”

6. Heart Disease - Our Number One Killer Healthy vegetarian diets support a lifetime of good health and provide protection against numerous diseases, including the United States’ three biggest killers: heart disease, cancer, and strokes. Drs. Dean Ornish and Caldwell Esselstyn — two doctors with 100 percent success in preventing and reversing heart disease — have used a vegan diet to accomplish it, as chronicled most recently in Dr. Esselstyn’s Prevent and Reverse Heart Disease, which documents his 100 percent success rate for unclogging people’s arteries and reversing heart disease.

7. Cancer – Our Number Two Killer Dr. T. Colin Campbell is one of the world’s foremost epidemiological scientists and the director of what The New York Times called “the most comprehensive large study ever undertaken of the relationship between diet and the risk of developing disease.” Dr. Campbell’s best-selling book, The China Study, is a must-read for anyone who is concerned about cancer. To summarize it, Dr. Campbell states, “No chemical carcinogen is nearly so important in causing human cancer as animal protein.”

8. Fitting Into That Itty-Bitty Bikini Vegetarianism is also the ultimate weight-loss diet, since vegetarians are one-third as likely to be obese as meat-eaters are, and vegans are about one-tenth as likely to be obese. Of course, there are overweight vegans, just as there are skinny meat-eaters. But on average, vegans are 10 to 20 percent lighter than meat-eaters. A vegetarian diet is the only diet that has passed peer review and taken weight off and kept it off.

9. Global Peace – Leo Tolstoy claimed that “vegetarianism is the taproot of humanitarianism.” His point? For people who wish to sow the seeds of peace, we should be eating as peaceful a diet as possible. Eating meat supports killing animals, for no reason other than humans’ acquired taste for animals’ flesh. Great humanitarians from Leo Tolstoy and Mahatma Gandhi to Thich Nhat Hanh have argued that a vegetarian diet is the only diet for people who want to make the world a kinder place.

10. The Joy of Veggies – As the growing range of vegetarian cookbooks and restaurants shows, vegetarian foods rock. People report that when they adopt a vegetarian diet, their range of foods explodes from a center-of-the-plate meat item to a range of grains, legumes, fruits, and vegetables that they didn’t even know existed.

Sir Paul McCartney sums it all up, “If anyone wants to save the planet, all they have to do is just stop eating meat. That’s the single most important thing you could do. It’s staggering when you think about it. Vegetarianism takes care of so many things in one shot: ecology, famine, cruelty.”

So are you ready to give it a try?

Check out VegCooking.com for recipes and meal plans and to take the World Vegetarian Week 7-Day Pledge.

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11. We just saw an article about the KOBE CLUB Restaurant at 68 W. 58th St., New York City.

When you dine under the 2,000 dangling Samurai swords, you might as well indulge in the signature meat (the Kobe Steak – we assume it is the original imported from Japan – unless they found it more economical to produce it somewhere in Kansas) “that will make all other steak dinners look like McDonald’s mystery meat.”

You can order the EMPEROR’S FLIGHT OF ALL-JAPANESE WAGYU BEEF for $395. -

The Flight is of 4-ounce fillet, 4-ounce sirloin and 10-ounce rib eye, cut from the highest grade Wagyu with a fat marble of 8 or higher. so for 18 ounce of highly fat meat – let’s say one pound when the fat comes out – you pay $395.

This is clearly a further good reason to become vegetarian.