Here is my headline:  “Study: Hottest Decade on Record Would Have Been Even Hotter But for Chinese Coal Plant Sulfur Pollution.”

Here is the Reuters headline:  “Asia pollution blamed for halt in warming: study.”

“This is the worst food crisis of the 21st Century and we are seriously concerned that large numbers of lives could soon be lost.”

That’s from Jane Cocking, Oxfam’s Humanitarian Director, who along with the Save The Children organization, is calling for $144 million in aid to malnourished East Africans.  “Aid agencies are calling it the worst drought in 60 years,” reports ClimateWire/NYT.

“… drought remains a major threat with no likelihood of improvement until early 2012. Millions of people in danger from drought plaguing East Africa.”

A joint report by the Famine Early Warning Systems Network (FEWSNET), World Food Program (WFP) and the UN Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) sounded the call for action on the dire social and environmental crisis:

“The cumulative effects of the failed October to December 2010 rains and the insignificant contribution of early 2011 rains means that food security in lowland and pastoral areas will be classified at emergency levels in the coming months until the next rainy season between October and December 2011.”

The epicentre of the drought has hit the poorest people in the region in an area straddling the borders of Kenya, Ethiopia and Somalia where families rely heavily on livestock for survival. In some parts of the region, up to 60 percent of their herds have already died while the remainder are either sick or dangerously underweight. The price of animals has plummeted by half while the cost of cereals has soared. In Somalia the price of a main staple sorghum has risen by a massive 240 percent since this time last year.

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Our guest blogger is Alexis Bonogofsky, Tribal Lands Senior Coordinator for the National Wildlife Federation. She lives on a goat ranch along the Yellowstone River, which was contaminated by a major oil pipeline spill late Thursday night. Her post originally appeared on NWF’s Wildlife Promise blog.

The pipe ruptured Thursday night at around 11:30. I woke up around 7:45 a.m. Friday and went outside to do chores — let goats out to graze, feed and water chickens, let horses out, etc. I walked down to our bottom pasture because the river was supposed to flood and I wanted to see if it had come over its banks. Sure enough, there was about two feet of water in the pasture. I got this overwhelming smell of hydrocarbons — a very distinct smell, especially around here because there are three refineries. I checked our local paper and saw that a pipeline had ruptured. Even though this had been going on for over seven hours, and we are right on the river, we received no call, no warning…nothing. I had to find out about it by seeing it in our pastures. Apparently they evacuated people further up stream that were closer to the pipeline.

I spent all day yesterday calling our Montana Department of Environmental Quality who told me to call my local Department of Emergency Services. When I called DES, I got an answering machine that said they were on vacation. I was told repeatedly to call an Exxon hotline where the people that answered knew nothing about cleanup, if the oil is hazardous (which it is), and what was going on. They were just there to “take our information.” I called our County Health Department because they told people that the oil was just an “irritant.” When I talked to the lady there, she told me they were taking their information directly from Exxon and had done no independent research on the health effects of exposure to crude oil or the chemicals in it.

I saw birds trying to take off that couldn’t because of oil on their wings, I saw a spiny soft shell turtle dive into a glob of oil.

The government is telling us that Exxon is going to take care of everything and that they are doing oversight. I have seen no indication of this. I have called so many people that I know more than our government does about what is going on. We finally got a public relations person from Exxon to call us and he wouldn’t tell us what chemicals are in the oil or if any had been added. He told us to stay away from it and that we shouldn’t document the effects on the property “just to be safe” and yet no health warning has gone out to the public. They also told me “off the record” that I should move my livestock away from where the spill has impacted our farm.

Insurance agents for Exxon are already trying to get a hold of people to prevent people from organizing. Our summer pastures are ruined.

To stem supply disruptions from Libya and to disrupt the grip of nonconsumer oil speculators, the U.S. Department of Energy announced the sale of 30 million barrels of crude as part of the International Energy Agency’s effort to release 60 million barrels into the global oil market. The sale of oil from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve, as well as the suggestion from the Obama administration that more sales could be announced in the future, has already lowered the price of crude. As the Baker Institute’s Amy Myers Jaffe has noted, the release sends a “signal that should keep rampant speculation at bay.”

However, as Bloomberg reported last week, “some of the oil being released from the U.S. Strategic Petroleum Reserve to bring down prices may be held by traders for later sale rather than sent directly to refiners for processing into gasoline or other fuels.” Some of the purchasers have claimed that they will immediately refine the SPR crude. But many banks and large oil speculators looking to purchase the oil may intend to simply hoard it:

Representatives of trading companies including JPMorgan Chase & Co., Morgan Stanley (MS), Hess Trading Company and Koch Supply & Trading LP joined Valero Energy Corp. (VLO) and Statoil ASA in questioning Energy Department officials June 28 about shipping options and requests for waivers of the Jones Act.

The Jones Act “restricts the shipment of goods between U.S. ports to American-flagged vessels.” Because most oil tankers are foreign-flagged ships, the traders looking to store in the oil offshore must request Jones Act waivers.

Argus Media reports that Koch Industries has already shown interest in leasing super tankers for storage of crude in the Gulf of Mexico. The Economist points out that the small rebound in oil prices have already provided an incentive for oil traders to store, rather than refine, the oil: “If a trader was able to purchase West Texas Intermediate—the oil held in America’s Strategic Petroleum Reserve (SPR)—at the spot price on June 24th, they would already be sitting on a tidy profit.”

In December 2008, when oil prices crashed from a record high to $33 a barrel, speculators with the capability to store massive quantities of crude oil bought in bulk and stored the oil for later sale. As Fortune magazine reported, the rush to store oil instead of refining it pushed prices for consumers back up. Now, the contango — a market situation when the spot price is much lower than the future price of oil — is less significant than back in 2008.

Nevertheless, its not clear what oil traders will do. In Europe and Japan, much of the oil released as part of the IEA effort was sent directly to industry. In the U.S., the release was entirely crude with less strings attached. “Our inventories are in good shape and our markets are well supplied here in the United States,” Rayola Dougher, an economic adviser with the American Petroleum Institute, the largest oil lobbying group, told Reuters. “It may be that our refiners are buying it to store up.”

Late last week, Rep. Mike Kelly (R-PA) held a town hall meeting in Meadville, Pennsylvania where constituents challenged the freshman congressman on his support for subsidies to oil and gas corporations. Earlier this year, Kelly joined every House Republican in voting to protect the $4 billion in subsidies that go to oil and gas companies every year. However, unlike many of his House colleagues, Kelly has a significant personal financial stake in the matter.

A constituent from Erie asked Kelly how he can “justify continuing subsidies for oil companies with record profits while cutting vital services for working families?” The Pennsylvania congressman first responded by citing American Petroleum Institute talking points and argued that we need to help oil companies because they are in many pension plans and retirement portfolios. Kelly then went on to decry what he saw as “class warfare” before being shouted down by constituents who were incredulous that the Pennsylvania congressman was a “rich millionaire” but he wouldn’t end oil subsidies and “fix the tax code”:

MODERATOR: This question is from Joshua from Erie. How can you justify continuing subsidies for oil companies with record profits while cutting vital services for working families? Oil companies don’t need subsidies and working families shouldn’t have to pay for them with…

KELLY: First of all, let me just ask one thing. Is there anybody in here that has a pension? Anybody have a portfolio? I want you to very carefully look at those portfolios. Those are usually made up by profitable companies.

CONSTITUENT: Why are we subsidizing them?

KELLY: If you really want to understand the whole thing, I would say that, number one, we want companies to be profitable. I said earlier about the class warfare, if we’re going to start classifying, “they’re too rich, they’re too wealthy, they’re too greedy. We don’t get enough, we need more, and we need to have rich people putting more money in. We need, we need, we need, we need, we need, we need, we need.”

Watch it, courtesy of Americans United for Change (beginning at 1:40):

Kelly’s defense of oil and gas subsidies is bad enough on the merits, but it is all the more troubling given that he owns up to $6.25 million in oil and gas companies. Kelly’s holdings include the following:

– Up to $5 million in Phillips Resources Inc., an oil and gas drilling company that is exploring major drilling expansions in the area of western Pennsylvania that Kelly represents

– Up to $1 million in TWP Gas and Oil, a natural gas company in western Pennsylvania

Both companies were bought last week by ExxonMobil, which plans to expand its fracking operations in the Marcellus Shale basin.

As oil companies reap sky-high profits, outraged citizens are demanding to know why they continue to receive billions in taxpayer subsidies. Kelly, who owns millions in oil and gas money and personally profits from their success, is only the latest defender of corporate giveaways. It is sad but unsurprising that the Pennsylvania Republican would disparage those who call for an end to subsidies as engaging in “class warfare,” while at the same time arguing that taxpayers should support the very oil and gas companies he’s invested in because “we want companies to be profitable.”

Research reveals decade of global warming from China’s coal power stations has partly been offset by ‘cooling’ effect of sulphur pollution

That’s the UK Guardian headline for a half-clever new study, “Reconciling anthropogenic climate change with observed temperature 1998–2008.”

Last decade was easily the hottest on record, as were the 1990s and, before that, the 1980s — all part of a multi-decadal trend driven primarily by human-caused emissions.

We’ve known for a while that warming appeared to slow over a short, cherry-picked time frame of 1998 to 2008 because:

1. The starting year (1998) was a very strong El Niño, which temporarily boosts global temps, and the ending point (2008) was a moderate La Niña, which lowers them.
2. The end point was near the bottom of “the deepest solar minimum in nearly a century.”
3. One key global temperature dataset, the Hadley/CRU one used by the UK’s Met Office, had numerous flaws that led to a slower warming trend than most of the others.

Even so, as we’ll see the land and the oceans just kept warming.  It is just hard to stop the radiative forcing of the CO2 humans have put in the air, which equals 1 million Hiroshima bombs a day.

What’s clever about the new Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences study is it demonstrates that sulfur pollution from China’s massive buildup of coal plants also helped slow the warming:

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While Americans celebrated U.S. history on the Fourth of July yesterday, a company in Spain celebrated an historic moment for the solar industry: Torresol’s 19.9 MW concentrating solar power plant became the first ever to generate uninterrupted electricity for 24 hours straight.

The plant uses a Power Tower design which features a field of 2,650 mirrors that concentrate sunlight onto a boiler in a central receiver tower. The plant also utilizes molten salt as a heat-transfer fluid that allows the plant to generate electricity when there’s no sunlight. Recharge News reported on the milestone:

After commissioning in May, the plant was finally ready to operate at full-blast in late June and benefited from a particularly sunny stretch of weather, according to Diego Ramirez, director of production at Torresol.

“The high performance of the installations coincided with several days of excellent solar radiation, which made it possible for the hot-salt storage tank to reach full capacity,” Ramirez explains.

Torresol says that the plant will provide electricity for about 20 hours each day on average, with numerous days in the summer seeing 24-hours of supply. How does that compare with a similar-sized PV plant? The 21.2 MW Photovoltaic Solarpark Calaveron in Spain generates about 40 GWh a year. This smaller 19.9 MW power tower plant will generate about 110 GWh per year.

Yesterday’s news is a big milestone for Power Tower technology, which is still a very nascent technology compared to the more-mature parabolic troughs. There are only a few operating commercial-scale plants around the world, and Torresol’s is the only one with a 15-hour molten salt storage capability.

Further Reading:

• Concentrated solar thermal power — a core climate solution
• Reframing the energy debate, part 1: Time to stop using the phrase “renewable energy”

 

Below are the earlier comments from the Facebook commenting system:

Michael Dunkley

yessss!

July 6 at 3:22am

Jeffery Green

A small change would be to hook up natural gas and the plant uses fossil fuels only when needed.

July 9 at 12:32pm

J Peter Lynch

Congratulations. Storage is a subject that has generally been avoided, especially with PV systems, for years. We need breakthroughs in BOTH solar technologies and in storage to allow distributed solar systems to work…..great job…

July 7 at 10:09am

Earl James

This is the kind of thinking and experimenting that we humans are capable of, and that could mitigate the doomsday meltdown rushing towards us! Too bad we have to deal with right wing greedheads in Congress who won’t move off the dime (or off their cash) and let human ingenuity have free rein. So “We can, but we won’t?” quote from my new novel Bella Coola: The Rainforest Brought Them Home, available on Amazon by July 25, 2011.,

July 6 at 1:37pm

Chuck Woolery

Very Freakin cool! Thanks for the info!

July 6 at 1:43pm

Chuck Woolery

Very Freakin cool! Thanks for the info!

July 6 at 1:43pm

Kurt Heinze

Energy storage is a key component of wind, solar, wave, tidal, etc… energy sources. We have generally been missing this point and making it easier for conservatives to dismiss “renewable” energy technologies like the aforementioned ones, allowing them to promote “clean coal” instead. All novel energy generating sources need to be coupled with energy storage or better yet a diversified portfolio of wind, solar, etc… that feeds into central/regional energy storage facilities might be a better approach. Once at the storage facility, the energy can be transferred into the grid when the demand it there. The question remains how much storage and what storage technologies are best. Unfortunately, this will not happen unless there are drastic changes made to our energies policies. Over subsidizing the fossil fuel industry will not allow for innovation, and without innovation, there will be no change. Society has come to a crossroad and needs to make a decision that will not only affect us but future generations. “I took the [road] less traveled by [a]nd that has made all the difference.” – Robert Frost from The Road Not Taken. I’m jumping down off my soapbox now.

July 17 at 7:03am

Ryan Scarrow

YES! This is my favorite renewable technology – I mean seriously, they’re melting salt into frickin’ lava. Combine this with more efficient buildings, photovoltaic panels, wind farms with flywheel storage, and natural gas turbines and you’ve got yourself the foundation for getting rid of coal altogether.

July 5 at 11:26am

Nicholas Jordan

The technology has never been the problem. Ford’s 1st car ran on hemp, which would be much easier to export to 3rd world countries than this solar tech. Hemp could easily replace dozens of environmentally hazardous industries. Which is why it is illegal.

http://www.hempcar.org/for​d.shtml

July 5 at 11:57am

Paul Klemencic

Ryan, the salt stays molten all the time. This isn’t phase change material (PCM) storage. The molten salt mixture degrades at temperatures over 1050 deg F, and freezes at around 550 deg F. So a cold tank holds salt near the lower temperature, and the hot tank at the higher temperature. Molten salt acts both as a heat transfer fluid in the solar thermal collection system and as the thermal storage medium.

However, the costs of collecting heat in the solar thermal collection system can be beat by direct steam generation (DSG) systems. The use of the salt for thermal energy storage (TES) makes this system able to compete with the less expensive DSG systems.

July 10 at 8:12pm

Daniel Clark Orey

This is a great start… expensive now, but as thigns improve… every little bit helps… I wish there was a way to cover the roofs of big box stores and parking lots… again, every little bit helps…

July 5 at 1:30pm

Pierre Bull

Thanks for the heads up, Stephen, on this big milestone. One question for clarification: I’m not understanding the difference in total annual energy comparison? If the grid is able to handle production from a facility w/out storage, wouldn’t it still have an equal total generation to a plant w/ storage?

July 5 at 2:00pm

Stephen Lacey

My bad. The other plant was PV — I accidentally left that out. I’ve put that in the story for clarification.

July 5 at 2:18pm

Jeff Auxier

I am a big solar advocate. Equating this technology with “Solar can be baseload!” is a stretch.

July 5 at 4:02pm

Prokaryotes

So 24h delivery is not enough, huh?

July 5 at 5:40pm

Daniel Alós

Gran avance en energía solar!

July 5 at 2:14pm

A round-up of climate and energy news. Please post other stories below.

Debris and Heavy Flow of Water Hamper Cleanup of Oil in Yellowstone River

Specially trained crews streaming into this refinery town to clean up tens of thousands of gallons of oil that spilled into the Yellowstone River from a ruptured Exxon Mobil pipeline over the weekend have found their efforts hampered by a muddy, raging river filled with debris.

The Yellowstone River has its origins in the famous park and normally peaks in mid-June but is not expected to crest until the middle of July because of the heavy snows and late runoff. Crews that continue to arrive have had difficulty sopping up oil and putting oil booms around slicks because the river is so active.

“The situation is very challenging,” said Gary Pruessing, president of the Exxon Mobil Pipeline Company, a division of Exxon Mobil, who added that the river was four times its usual flow for this time of year. “Because the river is outside its banks, it’s flowing into areas that don’t normally flood. Yesterday, we saw the tops of fence posts in the river, and we just can’t wade into there and start working.”

River banks are unstable, and there are snags, or large dead trees in the water. So cleanup workers, wearing orange life vests and hard hats, are working the mosquito-infested shoreline.

Investigators trying to determine the cause of the spill have not been able to get on boats or get close to where the leak occurred late Friday night.

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Simplicity is a beautiful thing. While companies developing advanced metering technologies awkwardly try to plug into a “dumb” utility system, Opower is reaching out to customers the old fashioned way: through the mail.

And it’s working.

Opower analyzes utility data and produces residential energy reports to show ratepayers how much energy they’re using, how it compares with others nearby, and also gives advice on reducing energy use specifically tailored to the customer using behavioral science. The energy reports are mailed out in envelopes that look like they come from the utility.

It’s a simple, capital efficient way to get customers thinking about energy use. So far, Opower has reduced residential electricity consumption by 380,000 megawatt-hours – the rough equivalent to 38,000 homes. The company says its on track to reduce consumption by 1 million MWh by the end of next year, mostly by sending letters in the mail.

If the smart metering companies are focused on using data to empower the consumer, Opower is more focused on helping the utility reduce demand and meet state-level efficiency standards. But this also has a powerful impact on ratepayers. If Opower can meet the 1 million MWh target next year, it says it will cumulatively save consumers $100 million on bills.

In a culture so wrapped up in the digital world, who knew snail mail could be so effective?

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The debate may be fiery, but it’s also phony. AAP

The Conversation wraps up its climate series with a statement from leading Australian acientists:  The debate is over. Let’s get on with it.

Over the past two weeks The Conversation has highlighted the consensus of experts that climate change caused by humans is both real and poses a serious risk for the future.

We have also revealed the deep flaws in the conduct of so-called climate “sceptics” who largely operate outside the scientific context.

But to what extent is the “science settled”? Is there any possibility that the experts are wrong and the deniers are right?

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Amos Coal Power Plant, Raymond, West Virginia 2004

Photographers worldwide are turning their lenses on green issues like climate change and sustainability. There are international competitions between photographers who best illustrate the tragedies and successes in the battle against climate change, and even a global effort to photograph and measure the retreat of glaciers and ice sheets. So dust off your cameras as we examine the big themes and big names of environmentalist photography.

New green photography features more than traditional nature photos. It focuses on the interaction between humans and the environment, the problems with how we use global resources, and documents the changes happening on our planet due to climate change.

Instead of breathtaking vistas or close-ups of endangered animals, think Chris Steele-Perkins’s wide-lens shot of an oil refinery with Mount Fuji in the background:

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