Signs From Earth

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

See How Carbon Offsets Work

Ever wonder how carbon offsets work? Thanks to The Onion, "America's Finest News Source," it is all clear now. (And thanks to Joe Romm at Climate Progress.) 

From The Onion's highly regarded Infographic Series: "Carbon Footprint Offset Services: There are numerous services that allow you to pay into a fund to offset your carbon footprint. But how does it actually work?" Just about the way it's laid out here.

Moving Geoengineering From the Shadows

 Mount Pinatubo's 1991 eruption in the Phillippines injected sulfates into the atmosphere and cooled the earth. One geoengineering scheme would potentially replicate the cooling effects of volcanic eruptions. Photo: D. Harlow, USGS.

Would massive crop failures from heat waves and drought in the grain-growing regions of the American midwest be a sufficient reason to intentionally manipulate the atmosphere and cool the earth?

That was the opening question posed by Ken Caldeira of the Carnegie Institution and Stanford during a recent panel discussion on geoengineering at the Aspen Environment Forum. (Disclosure: I helped organize the session and event.)

This question of "geoengineering" -- whether, when, and how to intentionally change earth's atmosphere -- is poised for more attention as the carbon pollution we unintentionally produce by burning coal and oil keeps rising. As atmospheric carbon dioxide levels rise, they trap more of the sun's reflected radiant energy near the earth and drive up land and ocean temperatures.

And as temperatures go up, droughts already seen in Australia's Murray-Darling basin, or heatwaves that hit Europe in 2003 likely will become the norm, according to scientists such as David Battisti and Rosamond Naylor. Their study published in SCIENCE this year examines the likelihood and potential impact of future heatwaves on food supply as carbon emissions and temperatures rise.

Jamais Cascio, a founder of worldchanging.org and now writing at Open the Future published in early 2009 a very readable and insightful short book on this subject, "Hacking the Earth: Understanding the Consequences of Geoengineering." Cascio lays out the choices and ethical implications of "geoengineering" the atmosphere to control planetary heating.

In theory, several options exist: shoot sulfate particles or millions of light-reflecting disks high into the atmosphere to block the sun; fertilize the oceans with iron to encourage carbon-absorbing phytoplankton blooms; plant millions of trees to absorb carbon; spray seawater into the sky to create heat-reflecting white clouds; and somehow capture and bury carbon already in the sky.

So what to do as our rising carbon emissions heat the planet? Is there any realistic large-scale way to cool earth, or stem the heating? Volcanic eruptions have, and a recent example is the Phillippines' Mount Pinatubo. In 1991 the volcano cooled the earth when its eruptions injected massive amounts of sulfates into the atmosphere, partially blocking the sun. 

Report: Ecological Impacts of Climate Change

The U.S National Academy of Sciences has released a new 28-page illustrated booklet "Ecological Impacts of Climate Change." Available free as a downloadable PDF, the booklet shows in a visual way the accumulating impacts of climate change across the United States. 

As temperatures keep rising we see a variety of changes: growing seasons and ocean currents shift, animals modify their migratory and breeding behavior, plants such as grape varieties grow in new areas and abandon old, and habitats such as the Arctic ice shrink and change the ecology of the north. All regions of the country are being affected.

The booklet is based on a 2008 report by the National Academies with the same title, "Ecological Impacts of Climate Change." (Lest we get confused.)  This extended assessment is also available free as a PDF download from the National Academies Press website once you have registered.

 

The new Ecological Change booklet is a companion to "Understanding and Responding to Climate Change," which was updated in 2008 to include new information from the 2007 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) 4th Assessment Report.

Powerpoint slides for the new Ecological Change booklet are also available to download and use if you are so inclined. This to help educate or inform a local civic group, museum visitors, the kids at your neighborhood school, or even your peers at work. Climate impacts for each area of the U.S. are different and presentations are tailored for your region: Pacific Coast, Alaska and the Arctic, Western Mountains, Southwestern Deserts, Central U.S., Southeast, and Northeast.

Both booklets are part of an ongoing National Academy of Sciences study of climate choices ahead for the United States. A two-day summit was held the end of March, and webcasts of the sessions are available. The summit agenda is available here.

The changes we are seeing all around are going to be with us for a very long time, so we might as well understand and help others understand what is in store for our animal and plant neighbors, and ourselves. These materials from the National Academy of Sciences are a good place to start learning.

Related: Island Press this spring released a book Heatstroke: Nature in an Age of Global Warming, by Anthony Barnosky. A professor of biology at the University of California-Berkeley, Barnosky focuses on the changes we see in the natural world as temperatures rise rapidly, and he connects this with the end of the last ice age when mass extinctions occurred. 

Washington Post review by Barbara King: "A Hot Topic: In "Heatstroke," an ecologist argues that we need to rethink conservation in an age of global warming."

.."Barnosky likes ecosystems just as much as the next scientist, but in "Heatstroke: Nature in an Age of Global Warming," he argues brilliantly that conservation biology can no longer focus on saving them. The reason is simple: Thanks to global warming, the ecosystem we work to save today will have a different climate tomorrow. This means that many species will face extinction (or at least serious loss of genetic diversity), even if the land around them is protected from the logger's chainsaw and the developer's backhoe..."

Quandary for Renewables: Energy Sprawl

A large solar thermal power plant in Spain. Renewable energy projects based on biomass, wind, and solar need a lot of land to generate and transmit electricity. Photo: afloresm, flickr

An article in the Washington Post, "Renewable Energy's Environmental Paradox," addresses the inherent conflict between land conservation and renewable energy. All the alternatives to fossil fuels -- biomass, wind, and solar -- require a lot of land to produce the electricity needed to keep civilization humming. 

The article includes a chart showing the square miles of land needed by biomass, wind, and solar to produce a terawatt-hour of electricity for a year. So as our own civilization keeps sprawling across the landscape, so do our energy needs. "Energy sprawl" becomes a term that will likely come into greater use as land-intensive alternative energy schemes are proposed and built.

..."One of the biggest challenges renewable-energy projects pose is that they often take up much more land than conventional sources, such as coal-fired power plants. A team of scientists, several of whom work for the Nature Conservancy, has written a paper that will appear in the journal PLoS One showing that it can take 300 times as much land to produce a given amount of energy from soy biodiesel as from a nuclear power plant. Regardless of the climate policy the nation adopts, the paper predicts that by 2030, energy production will occupy an additional 79,537 square miles of land.

"The impact will be "substantial," said Jimmie Powell, the Nature Conservancy's national energy leader and one of the paper's co-authors. "It's important to know where the footprint is going to be..."

Tips to Avoid "Black Swan" Events

A few days ago Nassim Nicholas Taleb, author of the book "The Blacks Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable," penned a piece for The Financial Times on avoiding "black swan" events. 

Black swans in this context are very infrequent extreme events that have wide implication. (9/11, financial collapse, power grid failure, the internet, rapid climate change.) 

Taleb has posted the article on his website and it can be downloaded here as a PDF:  Ten Principles for a Black Swan-proof World. 

A few of the ten principles: don't let anything get "too big to fail," stop the socialization of losses and the privatization of gain, and do not give children sticks of dynamite, even if it comes with a warning. (In this context the "dynamite" is complex financial derivatives that no one understands.)

The term "black swan" comes from the mistaken assumption that all swans are white. In this context a "black swan" is a metaphor for something that cannot exist. Black swans were discovered in Australia in the 18th century, thereby proving false the assumption that all swans are white. In Taleb's context "black swans" are rare events beyond the realm of normal exprectation. Photo: Big Gray Mare/flickr

Signs From Earth: Turbulence in Our Midst

Next Platform: iPhone/Kindle Hybrid?

About a month ago I was involved in a two-day seminar discussion during journalism week at the University of Nevada-Reno. (Invited by my friend Larry Dailey, we met years ago at the Missouri Photo Workshop.) 

This think tank was organized to envision the shape of journalism and how we will access it in the years ahead. (Maybe in the months ahead, if the surge in newspaper bankruptcy filings continues apace.)

After two days of discussions we all gathered for dinner one evening, and almost as if on cue about half a dozen of the assembled journalist conferees whipped out their iPhones and began animatedly comparing the cool location-based tools, internet radio programs, carpenter's levels, flashlights, and family pictures each had stored in their handheld internet-connected computers that also happen to be a phone. 

As they marveled over their new mobile friends, I pointed out that the future delivery platform for journalism, at least a bright harbinger, already had been invented. It was in their hands. This was the first time in the two days I saw people so engaged, intrigued, and excited about information and how they were getting, organizing, and using it.

 

Conventional websites and dead trees newspapers seemed so ancient by comparison. (And I still subscribe to three print newspapers a day.) 

And now we also have the second-generation Kindle, an electronic book reader from Amazon. Just as the desktop computer, the internet-connected laptop, and the mobile phone have all changed the way we access information and each other, my money is on a vast explosion of mobile internet-connected computing devices that hybridize the best of the iPhone/iPod Touch platform and the somewhat larger Amazon Kindle. Each intrigues but neither fully satisfies.

The iPhone/iPod Touch offers a great screen with wonderful color fidelity, the Kindle's is bigger and easier for reading but is only grayscale and not backlit. Like the iPhone, the Kindle is net connected via its SprintNet cellular modem, which allows downloading of books, but also any Acrobat PDF or Word.doc file you email it. Little touted, this for me is Kindle's killer feature.

Atafu Atoll, Tokelau, Southern Pacific Ocean

From NASA Earth Observatory, an awesome Image of the Day taken by the crew of the International Space Station: 

"At roughly eight kilometers wide, Atafu Atoll is the smallest of three atolls and one island (Nukunonu and Fakaofo Atolls to the southeast and Swains Island to the south are not shown) comprising the Tokelau Islands group located in the southern Pacific Ocean. 

"The political entity of Tokelau is currently a territory of New Zealand. In recent years, public referendums on independence within the islands have been held, but have not received sufficient support to move forward.

"The primary settlement on Atafu is a village located at the northwestern corner of the atoll—indicated by an area of light gray dots in this astronaut photograph. The typical ring shape of the atoll is the result of coral reefs building up around a former volcanic island...."

Young Ice Dominates Arctic Ocean

Credit: From the National Snow and Ice Data Center, courtesy J. Maslanik and C. Fowler, University of Colorado

Data released April 6 from the National Snow and Ice Data Center shows that the age of ice in the Arctic Ocean is declining. Ice less than a year old dominates the Arctic ice cap as the melt season begins. 

The deep red color in the top right map shows the extent of multi-year ice, which has fallen to about 10 percent of the ice total according to NSIDC. The red color in the map at top left shows the average extent of multi-year ice for the period 1981-2000, when multi-year ice made up about 30 percent of the total. 

There has been a small uptick in the volume of ice 1-2 years old (orange color) and it is possible some of this juvenile ice and ice less than a year old could survive the summer melt season, thereby slowly adding to the stock of more hardy multi-year ice. Or it could not survive.

The melting of Arctic Ocean ice has increased in recent years. In the period from 1979 to 2005 about 20 percent of the ice cap melted in summer, but in summer of 2007 another 20 percent disappeared. Ice cap melting in 2008 was not as severe as in 2007, but last summer's melt still left the ocean with the second-lowest sea ice extent on record.

Implications from loss of Arctic Ocean ice in summer revolve around potential changes in wind patterns and ocean circulation. As the white-colored heat reflecting sea ice disappears, more dark heat-absorbing water dominates the ocean, causing even further water temperature increases. 

This unfolding change in Arctic Ocean ice cover could impact wind, weather, and precipitation patterns in northern hemisphere mid-latitudes, where hundreds of millions of people live and depend on reliable supplies and timing of rainfall for drinking and the growing of food crops.

Washington Post: New Data Show Rapid Arctic Ice Decline

Wall Street Journal: Polar Ice Cap Shrinks Further and Thins