Signs From Earth

Population Trends: Magic Number is 2.1: Go forth and multiply a lot less (via @TheEconomist)

Live chart here: http://tinyurl.com/yf75sko

Gapminder chart of children per woman as GDP per person increases (2007) 

Large Blue circle is India, large red is China, large yellow at right is United States.

Economist: "Fertility and living standards: Lower fertility is changing the world for the better"

http://www.economist.com/displayStory.cfm?story_id=14743589

"Sometime in the next few years (if it hasn’t happened already) the world will reach a milestone: half of humanity will be having only enough children to replace itself. That is, the fertility rate of half the world will be 2.1 or below..."

Economist Opinion: Demography, growth, and the environment: 

Falling Fertility: Astonishing falls in fertility are bringing with them big benefits

http://www.economist.com/opinion/displaystory.cfm?story_id=14744915

Study estimates challenge in shifting world to "100% clean energy" by 2030 (via @eurekalert & @sciam)

Lillgrund wind farm with 48-turbines off coast of Sweden. Photo by Vattenfall/flickr 

Cover story of November 2009 issue of Scientific American, a preview now online.)

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=a-path-to-sustainable-energy-by-2030

"Shifting the world to 100 percent clean, renewable energy as early as 2030 -- here are the numbers"

http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2009-10/su-stw101909.php

Eurekalert: "Wind, water and solar energy resources are sufficiently available to provide all the world's energy. Converting to electricity and hydrogen powered by these sources would reduce world power demand by 30 percent, thereby avoiding 13,000 coal power plants. Materials and costs are not limitations to these conversions, but politics may be, say Stanford and U.C. researchers who have mapped out a blueprint for powering the world..."

"...Most of the technology needed to shift the world from fossil fuel to clean, renewable energy already exists. Implementing that technology requires overcoming obstacles in planning and politics, but doing so could result in a 30 percent decrease in global power demand, say Stanford civil and environmental engineering Professor Mark Z. Jacobson and University of California-Davis researcher Mark Delucchi.

"To make clear the extent of those hurdles - and how they could be overcome - they have written an article that is the cover story in the November issue of Scientific American. In it, they present new research mapping out and evaluating a quantitative plan for powering the entire world on wind, water and solar energy, including an assessment of the materials needed and costs. And it will ultimately be cheaper than sticking with fossil fuel or going nuclear, they say..."

PDF of paper: Mark Z. Jacobson: Review of solutions to global warming, air pollution, and energy security†

http://www.stanford.edu/group/efmh/jacobson/PDF%20files/ReviewSolGW09.pdf

also at: http://www.rsc.org/ej/EE/2009/b809990c.pdf

"This paper reviews and ranks major proposed energy-related solutions to global warming, air pollution mortality, and energy security while considering other impacts of the proposed solutions, such as on water supply, land use, wildlife, resource availability, thermal pollution, water chemical pollution, nuclear proliferation, and undernutrition..."

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The Price We Pay for Energy is Not the Price We Pay: Report Tallies Hidden Energy Costs (via @jarsciencenews)

Coal Fired Power Plant at Cheshire Ohio, Photo by "Picture Taking Fool,"/flickr  

http://www.sciencenews.org/index/generic/activity/view/id/48586/title/Report_tallies_hidden_energy_costs

Janet Raloff: "The average retail cost of U.S. coal-fired electricity was 9 cents per kilowatt-hour in 2007 (the most recent year for which data are available). But there are health and environmental costs of that power that consumers don't pay, at least as part of their electric bill. According to a new report, accounting for those costs would double the true cost of shooting some electrons through the nation's power grid.

"As long as such costs remain hidden, they risk skewing policy and purchasing decisions. A new report released today by the National Research Council now attempts to compute and tally those hidden health and environmental costs associated with energy..." 

National Academies Press: 

Hidden Costs of Energy: Unpriced Consequences of Energy Production and Use

http://www.nap.edu/catalog.php?record_id=12794

Link to FREE PDF of Executive Summary: 

http://www.nap.edu/nap-cgi/report.cgi?record_id=12794&type=pdfxsum

"Modern civilization is heavily dependent on energy from sources such as coal, petroleum, and natural gas. Yet, despite energy's many benefits, most of which are reflected in energy market prices, the production, distribution, and use of energy also cause negative effects. Beneficial or negative effects that are not reflected in energy market prices are termed "external effects" by economists. In the absence of government intervention, external effects associated with energy production and use are generally not taken into account in decision making..."

National Research Council: http://sites.nationalacademies.org/NRC/index.htm

Dept. of Energy EIA: Electric Power Industry in Review 2007 

NYT: Fossil Fuels' Hidden Costs s in Billions, Report Says 

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Like PBS Frontline: Leveling Appalachia: Legacy of Mountaintop Removal Mining (via @yaleE360 and @mediastorm)

Samples Mine, Mountaintop Removal Mine, West Virginia. Panorama Photo: Dennis Dimick /flickr 

http://www.e360.yale.edu/content/feature.msp?id=2198

Video Report at Yale Environment 360 Produced by Chad Stevens at MediaStorm:

"During the last two decades, mountaintop removal mining in Appalachia has destroyed or severely damaged more than a million acres of forest and buried nearly 2,000 miles of streams. Leveling Appalachia: The Legacy of Mountaintop Removal Mining, a video report produced by Yale Environment 360 in collaboration withMediaStorm, focuses on the environmental and social impacts of this practice and examines the long-term effects on the region's forests and waterways..."

Energy Sprawl: Renewables' Achilles Heel

Corn ethanol and wind are two renewable energy sources being pursued in the United States. A research paper on "Energy Sprawl" released in August 2009 indicates that energy efficiency is as important a strategy in energy policy as pursuing land-intensive renewable energy sources like biofuels. Photo: brooklyn/flickr

A key challenge for renewable energy like biofuels, solar, and wind becomes the large amount of land needed to produce electricity and liquid fuels at large scale.

Fossil fuels coal, oil, and natural gas are energy dense because they contain concentrated ancient sunlight. Created from carbon-rich plant residues laid down millions of years ago, fossil fuels carry via those plants the energy of millions of years of sunlight densely packed into energy-rich rocks, liquid, and gas. 

On the other hand, renewables depend on current sunlight -- today’s sun and wind, this year’s growing season -- to produce their power. Consequently the energy density of renewables is much lower than fossil fuels.

Climate Change vs. National Security

 A coal fired power plant in Germany. Action against causes of climate change is tied to significant reduction in world use of fossil fuels. Photo: davipt/flickr

Slowly the idea seeps into major media mindset that climate change presents challenges far beyond polar bears and melting ice, that political stability and security of nations also are at risk. As has been discussed here and elsewhere, carbon emissions affect how the atmosphere works, and this in turn impacts stability and security of food and water supplies, and eventually survivability of societies.

The question remains whether these concerns linking continued use of fossil fuels and their impact on global climate will make a meaningful difference in the views and actions of policymakers and the public. 

John Broder reports in an August 9 New York Times article, "Climate Change Seen as Threat to U.S. Security,"  that climate change impacts in other nations, particularly sub-Saharan Africa, the Middle East, and South and Southeast Asia, could demand an American humanitarian or military response.

“The changing global climate will pose profound strategic challenges to the United States in coming decades, raising the prospect of military intervention to deal with the effects of violent storms, drought, mass migration and pandemics, military and intelligence analysts say.

What Prospect to Limit Carbon Emissions?

Global Carbon Emissions by Country in 2000: With about four percent of world population, the United States produces a quarter of the planet's heat-trapping carbon emissions. All land areas in map equal 100 percent. In this cartogram larger country size means more carbon emissions as a percentage of total emissions. From worldmapper.org  

Reports this week in Politico and the New York Times indicate prospects are dimming that climate legislation will come out of the U.S. Congress this year. If so, what chance for global agreement in December when negotiators and thousands of climate groupies burn all that carbon to fly to Copenhagen for the big international climate meeting? After all, this COP-15 summit is being billed as the crucial conference to cooperate and agree on common goals to limit planet-warming carbon pollution.

The United States produces the most carbon pollution per person, and until recently led the world in total carbon emissions. So unless the US arrives in Copenhagen with a firm commitment to lead by example, why would other nations, especially China and India, bother to change their ways? After all we burned all that coal, oil, and natural gas to develop our materially rich and highly mobile way of life, who are we to tell developing nations they can't aspire to the same living standards?

Public Wary of Carbon Capture Projects for Coal

 

The Sleipner project in Norway is the largest carbon capture and storage project in the world. Each year it sequesters underground about a million tons of carbon dioxide, which equals about 25 percent of the CO2 output from a single coal-fired power plant. The United States has about 600 coal plants.

A couple of reports this week indicate that in Europe the campaign for "clean coal" has a lot of work ahead on the public relations front. The idea that coal can burn "cleanly" for power generation depends on our being able to capture and store deep underground -- without leaking out for centuries -- the carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions from power plant smokestacks. The technology to achieve deep carbon storage is called carbon capture and sequestration, or CCS.

A July 29 report in the Guardian newspaper of London, "Not under our backyards, say Germans, in blow to CO2 plans," says that a CCS demonstration project in Spremberg operated by Swedish power utility Vattenfall has been venting CO2 straight into the atmosphere because the firm cannot secure a permit from German authorities to begin test injections of CO2 into underground storage.

The Financial Times reports July 30 in "Public Wary of Carbon Capture" that a proposed CCS underground storage site in the Netherlands is also getting the cold shoulder from locals, and that the Dutch government and energy company Shell have opened a PR office in Barendrecht in hopes of improving public attitudes about this largely untested technology.

Where Went the Sun's Spots?

Kenneth Chang writes in The New York Times on the apparent disappearance of the sun's spots. 

This NASA picture above shows sunspots near maximum (left) on July 19, 2000, and minimum on March 18, 2009. Some think this lack of sun spots now could bode a period of lowered solar output. 

Sunspots typically wax and wane over 11-year cycles. The sun should have reached its sunspot minimum last fall, but this spring when the number of sunspots should have been on the rise, they were still largely absent.  Some sunspots returned in June and July, but have since disappeared.

"...Among some global warming skeptics, there is speculation that the Sun may be on the verge of falling into an extended slumber similar to the so-called Maunder Minimum, several sunspot-scarce decades during the 17th and 18th centuries that coincided with an extended chilly period...."

 

Severe Drought Across African Sahel

The green line at lower right shows the level of rainfall measured this year at Masinga Dam in in Kenya, which is less than half of the long term average. Kenya has closed down hydropower generation at the dam for lack of water. Source: NASA Earth Observatory

With drought comes famine and in the Sahel region of Africa the lack of rainfall has been particularly severe this year. NASA Earth Observatory has posted charts and maps showing how scant Sahel rains this year are affecting vegetation growth (below). Those who depend on rain for growing crops are vulnerable to famine as crops fail from lack of rainfall.

The BBC has reported that Masinga Dam in Kenya has stopped generating electric power because too little water is available to turn the dam's generating turbines, and some power blackouts are resulting. The Daily Nation reports that Kenya's cities are running short of water.

What Two Degrees Warmer Means

Beyond all the political discussion of limiting carbon emissions in the U.S. or globally, it is useful to keep in mind the potential impact of a two degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees F.) rise in global temperatures. 

David Archer at RealClimate has summarized:

"... even a “moderate” warming of 2°C stands a strong chance of provoking drought and storm responses that could challenge civilized society, leading potentially to the conflict and suffering that go with failed states and mass migrations. Global warming of 2°C would leave the Earth warmer than it has been in millions of years, a disruption of climate conditions that have been stable for longer than the history of human agriculture. Given the drought that already afflicts Australia, the crumbling of the sea ice in the Arctic, and the increasing storm damage after only 0.8°C of warming so far, a target of 2°C seems almost cavalier."

RealClimate: Two Degrees

More Permafrost, More Potential Warming

Frozen soil sediment deposit in Siberia. Photo: Edward A.G. Schuur

The Global Carbon Project has released a new study that indicates northern hemisphere land areas contain about twice the permafrost previously thought, and melting of this permafrost could significantly accelerate the impacts of global warming.

Permafrost is carbon-rich frozen ground that covers vast areas of northern Asia, Europe, North America. Frozen for centuries, it is beginning to thaw and produce greenhouse gases methane and carbon dioxide. 

As more greenhouse gases from fossil fuel burning heat the atmosphere, more permafrost thaws. As permafrost thaws, it too emits its own share of greenhouse gases methane and carbon dioxide. A key concern of scientists is that thawing permafrost will further increase the rate of planet heating already underway driven our burning of fossil fuels coal, oil, and natural gas. 

This "feedback" process, where rising temperatures beget even more rising temperatures, is one of the great unknowns in climate research. Will we see runaway temperature increases as permafrost melts and adds even more methane and carbon dioxide to the atmosphere?

Global Carbon Project: Soil Organic Carbon Pools in the Northern Circumpolar Permafrost Region

Mapping 44 Hazardous Coal Ash Waste Ponds

 

A ruptured coal ash storage pond near Kingston, Tennessee in late 2008. The EPA has released a list of vulnerable coal ash storage ponds around the U.S. Most are in Appalachian states. EPA Photo.

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has finally released a list of 44 vulnerable "coal ash" ponds in the United States. Two weeks ago the agency tried to keep the list secret, claiming these hazardous toxic waste ponds could be terrorist targets. 

Bill Kovarik of Radford University has mapped the locations of these 44 hazardous sites, most of them in Kentucky, Ohio, West Virginia, North Carolina and Arizona.

These sludge ponds store the toxic waste remaining after coal is burned to produce electricity. Coal produces about 50 percent of the electricity in the United States, and also creates large amounts of carbon dioxide (CO2) when it is burned. Rising levels of CO2 are widely seen by scientists as the leading reason earth's temperatures are rising. 

If you live near one of these 44 toxic waste ponds, the EPA has said they have "high hazard potential." EPA verbiage accompanying the list says this means a failure of a dam holding back these coal ash wastes "will probably cause loss of human life."

Public interest has been high in these hazardous toxic waste ponds ever since one of them ruptured last December (picture above) at the TVA Kingston coal-fired power plant in Tennessee. That toxic sludge is still being cleaned up, and a recent report in the Knoxville News-Sentinel said the Tennessee Valley Authority expects cleanup costs will be about $1 billion. 

A TVA-commissioned study of the causes of that disaster said an "unstable" layer of ash in the failed pond caused the dam to break. The 1,400-page study released in late June, called "Root Cause Analysis," is a compendium of obscure and virtually inscrutable technical language. What is called the "Executive Summary" can be found here.

Suffice to say the price of coal for producing electricity keeps rising. When we turn on a light we subsidize the creation of devastated and polluted landscapes, whether they be mountaintop removal coal mines, or the toxic waste sites created by these hazardous coal ash ponds. And as we burn ever more coal (and oil) to power our modern 24/7/365 society, we keep heating up the planet.

Resources:

Krugman: Empire of Carbon

Paul Krugman in the New York Times on China's rapid run up in carbon emissions as it builds its economy (and all those things that we buy):

..."It is unfair to expect China to live within constraints that we didn’t have to face when our own economy was on its way up. But that unfairness doesn’t change the fact that letting China match the West’s past profligacy would doom the Earth as we know it...."

The Power Grid Revisioned

Showing transmission lines, this is one of several maps produced by NPR for a series on the U.S. power grid.

NPR has produced a major series on electricity in America, which includes a rich set of maps on the U.S. power grid: its structure, sources of power, where are power plants, and potential impact of solar and wind. A key challenge for solar and wind electricity is moving the power from where it is produced to where it is needed -- often a great distance across regions where no power lines exist.

The grid is an aging network of power plants and transmissions lines, and as we demand more and more electric power each day the grid comes under increasing pressure. 

The grid maps can be found here: Power Hungry: Reinventing the U.S. Electric Grid. By using the maps you can find out what kind of power source generates the electricity for your state.

NPR: Re-Envisioning Electricity in the U.S.

Signs From Earth: Smart Grid Needed for Renewable Energy

Signs From Earth: Charting a House on a Smart Grid

Signs From Earth: Ideas:Smart Grid