Back in May, a major study, California’s Energy Future — the View to 2050, was released by an independent state science and technology advisory panel.  It had two central findings:

• California can achieve emissions roughly 60% below 1990 levels with technology we largely know about today if such technology is rapidly deployed at rates that are aggressive but feasible.
• We could further reduce 2050 greenhouse gas emissions to 80% below 1990 levels with significant innovation and advancements in multiple technologies that eliminate emissions from fuels. All of these solutions would require intensive and sustained  investment in new technologies plus innovation to bridge from the laboratory to  reliable operating systems in relatively short timeframes.

This report is an incredibly strong endorsement of the “deploy, deploy, deploy, research & develop, deploy, deploy, deploy,” strategy that I and others have been advocating.  In fact, the report explicitly states that failing to adopt “Aggressive efficiency measures for buildings, industry and transportation” and “Aggressive electrification to avoid fossil fuel use” would “significantly increase the 2050 emissions.”

Amazingly, Revkin asserts the exact opposite in “A Reality Check on Ambitious Climate Targets.”  Certainly misreporting on energy and climate in the NY Times is legion, as we’ve seen.  But Andy Revkin’s latest head-exploding post easily wins the “Charlie Sheen” award.

A leading journalist and climate expert, Robert Collier, debunked Revkin’s “real spinning of the report” — see “Sticking the long knives into energy efficiency” (reposted below).  It’s worth spending some time on this because the report’s actual conclusions and implications are very important to understand.

I have long asserted that it is not possible to make a positive contribution to the climate debate if you don’t spell out what your emissions or temperature target (or range) is.  Revkin’s post proves that conclusively, as I will show.

Revkin’s glass-is-one-tenth-empty caption: “An analysis finds that California will not meet its climate target for 2050 even with a wartime-scale push on energy efficiency and installing non-polluting technologies like these solar panels in a housing subdivision in Rocklin.”

Revkin claims in his post:

Given that California is a best-case scenario* compared to other states (and, of course, countries) far more dependent on coal, Long’s piece and the underlying report pose a strong challenge to those calling for a “deploy, deploy, deploy” approach to cutting climate risks.

This is a link to – and swipe at — me, needless to say.

Blunder number one is for Revkin to assert the report challenges the aggressive deployment strategy for meeting ambitious climate targets.  Quite the reverse.  The report makes clear that without aggressive deployment, the target can’t possibly be reached.

Revkin added the asterisk (*) because, buried way, way at the bottom of his post is this Postcript,

In a Twitter reaction, Alan Nogee, the former clean-energy program director for the Union of Concerned Scientists, noted that California’s lack of coal dependence makes it more a worst case than a best case, because it doesn’t have a lot of coal emissions that might be relatively easily displaced.

Duh.  Rather than an asterisk, Revkin should simply remove his misleading error.

The fact is that California has been pushing efficiency and low-carbon electricity aggressively since the 1970s.  It is considerably more efficient in its use of energy than almost every other state.  For a long time now the CO2 intensity of its electricity (CO2/Mwh) has been nearly half that of the rest of the nation.  So obviously the rest of the country — which is far more coal-intensive and inefficient — has considerably more low-hanging fruit for emissions reductions.

That’s blunder two.

Blunder three is really the most amazing and amusing.

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In August, agronomists showed that the historic drought in Texas had caused a stunning $5.3 billion in losses in the agricultural sector. Two months later, even with some rain finally coming to the state, Texas farmers are being crippled by a drought that could stretch beyond next summer.

As the economic losses pile up, they are having an impact on global commodities like cotton and beef — stretching this crisis well beyond the state of Texas, and showing just how “global” the problem of global warming truly is. Kate Galbraith reported on the “catastrophic drought” for the New York Times:

Some of the farthest-reaching effects may be on world cotton markets. Texas produces about 50 percent of U.S. cotton, and the United States in turn grows between 18 and 25 percent of the world’s cotton, according to Darren Hudson, director of the Cotton Economics Research Institute at Texas Tech University. This year, however, yields even from irrigated crops have fallen about 60 percent on the high plains where the bulk of Texas’s cotton crop grows, Mr. Hudson said. Farmers have given up on their “dry-land,” or unirrigated, cotton crops.

And it’s not just cotton. A terrible peanut crop will soon result in significantly higher costs for peanut-butter products; pumpkin prices have also spiked due to a shortage from Texas; and beef prices are likely to rise due to the crisis:

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by Sue Sturgis, in an Institute for Southern Studies repost

This week, in a courtroom in Prince William County, Virginia, a hearing will take place that could have implications for the privacy rights of scientists at colleges and universities across the country.

It’s part of a lawsuit brought by the American Tradition Institute, a free-market think tank that wants the public to believe human-caused global warming is a scientific fraud. Filed against the University of Virginia, the suit seeks emails and other documents related to former professor Michael Mann, an award-winning climate scientist who has become a focus of the climate-denial movement because of his research documenting the recent spike in earth’s temperature.

By suing the university, the American Tradition Institute wants to make public Mann’s correspondence in an effort to find out whether he manipulated data to receive government grants, a violation of the state’s Fraud Against Taxpayers Act.

But a Facing South investigation has found that the Colorado-based American Tradition Institute is part of a broader network of groups with close ties to energy interests that have long fought greenhouse gas regulation. Our investigation also finds that ATI has connections with the Koch brothers, Art Pope and other conservative donors seeking to expand their political influence.

‘A Hostile Environment’

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By Tom Kenworthy, Senior Fellow, Center for American Progress Action Fund.

President Obama on Tuesday will for the first time exercise his broad land conservation authority under the 1906 Antiquities Act by naming a Civil War-era military fort in Virginia a national monument.

The designation of Fort Monroe will make history in several ways: honoring the location of a Civil War landmark that served as a haven for African Americans, as well as the Union general who sheltered them; creating the first national monument in Virginia; and making President Obama the latest in a long line of presidents from both parties who have embraced the Antiquities Act as a means to protect treasured American landscapes and historical places for future generations to enjoy. As Stephanie Meeks, president of the National Trust for Historic Preservation, said:

The action taken by President Obama will ensure that this important event in American history will get the recognition it deserves. Fort Monroe stands as a testament to the personal courage of thousands of Americans, including the enslaved people who bravely took control of their destinies there during the Civil War, as well as the courage of the Union general who ensured their safety. Together, their heroic actions heralded the beginning of the end of slavery in America.

The president is expected to make the formal announcement on Tuesday at 2 p.m. at the White House, capping an effort that drew broad support among Virginia officials and local residents in the Hampton Roads area at the mouth of the Chesapeake Bay. The designation will protect several hundreds of acres which will be managed by the National Park Service.

Established in the early 19th Century, Fort Monroe was a strategic military base, serving most recently as a training center for the U.S. Army. But it earned its place in American history more broadly during the Civil War, when three African American slaves escaped the Confederate Army and fled to Fort Monroe. They were seized as “contraband of war” by the Union Army commander, which kept them from being returned to their owners. More than a half million African Americans later followed the lead of the three slaves, finding freedom in the contraband camp near Hampton Roads and becoming a self-contained African American city.

The recognition of this little known but vital piece of American history comes as House Republicans are pushing several pieces of legislation that would limit or end the presidential authority to designate national monuments. Almost every president has used the authority since Theodore Roosevelt, including President George W. Bush.

As noted by Center for American Progress president and CEO John Podesta, the ability of presidents to use the Antiquities Act is a vital authority that ensures our long tradition of protecting public lands and helps “revitalize and strengthen local communities.”

Conservative columnist George Will has offered a bizarre and hypocritical new attack on the GOP front runner.  In a Sunday WashPost op-ed, “Mitt Romney, the pretzel candidate,” Will writes:

Romney, supposedly the Republican most electable next November, is a recidivist reviser of his principles who is not only becoming less electable, he might damage GOP chances of capturing the Senate: Republican successes down the ticket will depend on the energies of the tea party and other conservatives, who will be deflated by a nominee whose blurry profile in caution communicates only calculated trimming.

Republicans may have found their Michael Dukakis, a technocratic Massachusetts governor who takes his bearings from ‘data’ …. Has conservatism come so far, surmounting so many obstacles, to settle, at a moment of economic crisis, for THIS?

Has conservatism come so far that it denounces someone because they supposedly follow data?

In fact, Romney isn’t driven by data or the facts — see Mitt Romney IS a Member of a Cult: Likely GOP Nominee Asserts, “We Don’t Know What’s Causing Climate Change.” He is a finger-in-the-wind politician.

But what’s even more pathetic is that anti-data Will wrote an op-ed in January bemoaning the fact that “the nation depends on nourishing [scientists] and the institutions that sustain them.”

I wrote about Will’s hypocrisy back then and will excerpt that post below.

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While fossil-fueled conservatives hypocritically deride clean-energy investment as a failure, millions of Americans have found good-paying work in green jobs, restoring their hope of a better future. Advanced battery manufacturer A123 Systems has created 1,000 jobs through the U.S. Department of Energy’s Advanced Technology Vehicle Manufacturing loan program, now under attack by House Republicans. The Energy Department helped one of the workers building the advanced batteries needed for electric and hybrid vehicles, Annette Herrera, tell her story. “Prior to coming to A123, I was unemployed. I was laid off for two and a half years,” she tells the camera from her station in the Romulus, MI, factory. When she heard about the plants opening, she applied and said she was willing to do any kind of work. She nearly broke into tears when she discussed how hard it is to find work in the depressed economy, crippled by conservative ideology:

There’s a lot of people still out there, and they want to work. And they need jobs. And this is a great start.

Watch it:

“It’s a step to the future,” Herrera concludes, enthused not only about finding a job but also about being part of the greater mission to repower our nation.

Sometime this week, the 7 billionth child will be born. And there’s a good chance that child will be living in energy poverty.

Even today, there are roughly 1.5 billion people living without access to modern electricity services, limiting education opportunities, health services and quality of life. And there are 2.5 billion people who only have access to biomass for indoor cooking — resulting in more deaths per year than Malaria, according to the World Heath Organization.

Expanding access to these billions of people in energy poverty is one of the most important global challenges of our time, says Kandeh Yumkella, director general of the United Nations Industrial Development Organization. And not doing it in a way that also addresses climate change will be “the biggest threat multiplier of all,” he says.

“The poor will play the biggest price if we continue business as usual. If countries impacted by climate change don’t have resilience capabilities, they become failed states,” says Yumkella. “We see this as the issue of the century.”

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A western Kentucky mine where two miners were trapped and killed by the collapse of a highwall Friday has been repeatedly cited for safety violations in the two years it has been operated by Armstrong Coal. The miners died at Equality Boot Mine in Centertown, Kentucky Friday after an unexcavated face of an exposed strip-mining site — known as a highwall — collapsed on their truck as they were driving.

In April, the Mine Safety and Health Administration cited Armstrong Coal for an incident involving the stability of a highwall at the same mine, the Associated Press reported Saturday. Though a company spokesman said that citation was unrelated to last week’s collapse, Armstrong Coal has a history of safety violations at the site. MSHA has cited Armstrong for at least 15 safety violations in the two years it has operated the mine, the Louisville Courier-Journal reports:

Armstrong has operated the Equality mine since December 2008 and has been producing coal there since 2010.

As of the end of September, the mine employed 129 people and had produced 1.5 million tons of coal for the year to date, MSHA records show.

The mine was cited for nine safety violations with $1,531 in penalties in 2010 and 6 violations carrying $1,394 in penalties this year, according to MSHA’s citation database.

Some of the citations were for violations of regulations governing the placement of materials on the tops of pits or highwalls and the operation of mining equipment, the records show.

Armstrong isn’t the only coal company to experience a fatal accident at a mine where it had been repeatedly cited for safety violations. Massey Energy amassed thousands of safety violations at its Upper Big Branch mine near Beckley, West Virginia, before an explosion there killed 29 miners in 2010. Days later, two miners died in a roof collapse at the Dotiki Mine in Providence, Kentucky. Federal inspectors had cited owner and operator Alliance Resource Partners with 840 safety violations in the 16 months preceding the accident.

Still, many of Kentucky’s politicians continue to look the other way when it comes to enforcing and strengthening mine safety laws. After the 2010 accidents, Sen. Mitch McConnell (R) and other Kentucky politicians largely avoided questions about the efficacy of the nation’s mine safety laws. Just days after the Dotiki explosion, Gov. Steve Beshear (D) appeared at the opening of another Kentucky mine owned by Alliance but made no mention of mine safety or of Alliance’s shoddy safety history. Before that, Beshear fired Ron Mills, head of Kentucky’s mining permit agency, for refusing dozens of Alliance’s permits, and Beshear also appointed one of Alliance’s top safety officials to the Kentucky Mining Board, despite the fact that at least nine miners have died at Alliance-owned mines since 2005.

Most infamously, Sen. Rand Paul (R) — who issued a statement on the accident Friday — suggested during his 2010 campaign that the coal industry should be able to regulate itself, as ThinkProgress noted at the time:

“The bottom line is: I’m not an expert, so don’t give me the power in Washington to be making rules,” Paul said at a recent campaign stop in response to questions about April’s deadly mining explosion in West Virginia…“You live here, and you have to work in the mines. You’d try to make good rules to protect your people here. If you don’t, I’m thinking that no one will apply for those jobs.”

Federal investigators determined that both the Upper Big Branch and Dotiki disasters could have been prevented, and given the recent safety violations, a similar verdict at Equality would not be a surprise. Still, little has emerged from those tragedies to improve mine safety laws, with political leaders instead using industry-wide talking points to decry others of waging a “War on Coal.” It’s enough to beg the question: Are Kentucky’s political leaders putting their Big Coal campaign donors ahead of actual human lives?

After ThinkProgress Green publicized Mitt Romney’s latest flip into global warming denial, his comments were a hot topic of discussion over the weekend. “My view is that we don’t know what’s causing climate change on this planet,” Romney said on Thursday in Pittsburgh, just months after telling New Hampshire voters, “I believe that humans contribute to that.”

On Fox News Sunday, after host Chris Wallace played the clip of Romney’s remarks from ThinkProgress, conservative commentator Brit Hume slammed Romney for his flip-flopping behavior, saying the presidential candidate and former Massachusetts governor has “exhausted his quota” of changed positions:

I think that it’s his single biggest problem, really. Because of the flips and positions that he’s flipping from is positions from the left to where the core of the Republican party is, people don’t trust him as a conservative. People usually like it if you change positions and come towards your position. You are only allowed a certain number of flips before people doubt your character. Romney exhausted his quota sometime back. And these fresh ones I think are over the limit, and I think they hurt, and I don’t think the fact that he’s flipping in the direction that Republicans like will help very much, because I think they don’t trust him.

Watch it:

Hume did not comment on the fact that man-made global warming is real.

“If he thought it was good to say the sky was green and the grass was blue, to win an election, he’d say it,” Obama campaign adviser David Plouffe added on Meet the Press.

by Cole Mellino

There’s a heated debate among proponents of urban agriculture about whether vertical farming is truly feasible. Most people agree that it would solve many of our current agricultural problems, such as land and water use, heavy reliance on chemical inputs, fertilizer runoff and soil erosion, and carbon emissions from transportation.

However, real estate is expensive in cities. And no one has yet figured out a way to get sunlight into a skyscraper so that the plants grow evenly.

But innovators like as John Edel, owner and developer of the Chicago Sustainable Manufacturing Center, appear have found solution. Edel built a mini-vertical farm, called The Plant, in a former meat-packing facility complete with an aquaponics farm and a food business incubator that offers low rent, low energy costs, and a licensed shared kitchen.

Located in the economically distressed Back of the Yards neighborhood in Chicago, the Plant was relatively cheap to buy. That solved the property cost problem. As for the issue of evenly-dispersed sunlight, The Plant utilizes indoor grow lights that are operated as part of an off-grid net-zero energy system, run by an anaerobic digester and a combined heat and power system. The digester consumes food waste produced in the facility and by neighboring manufacturers, meeting the energy needs of the entire building. So not only does The Plant produce net-zero energy, but it also produces net-negative waste by turning those waste products into energy.

Here’s a diagram of The Plant’s remarkable industrial ecology:

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Scientist:  “The warm extremes kept trending just as one would expect in a period of accelerating global warming.”

Locations where the seasonal “severe cold index” (blue circles) or “severe heat index” (red circles) fell above the 95% confidence interval of the North Atlantic Oscillation regression for (a, c) Winter 2010 and (b, d) Winter 2011.

JR:  Here is a little-covered news release from the American Geophysical Union from last month.  The study itself is here (subs. req’d).   I never got around to posting it but for some reason the study seems appropriate today:

Last two winters’ warm extremes more severe than their cold snaps

During the last two winters, some regions of the northern hemisphere experienced extreme cold not seen in recent decades. But at the same time, the winters of 2009-10 and 2010-11 were also marked by more prominent, although less newsworthy, extreme warm spells.

New research examines daily wintertime temperature extremes since 1948 The study finds that the warm extremes were much more severe and widespread than the cold extremes during the northern hemisphere winters of 2009-10 (which featured an extreme snowfall episode on the East Coast dubbed “snowmaggedon”) and 2010-11.  Moreover, while the extreme cold was mostly attributable to a natural climate cycle, the extreme warmth was not, the study concludes.

“We investigated the relationships between prominent natural climate modes and extreme temperatures, both warm and cold. Natural climate variability explained the cold extremes; the observed warmth was consistent with a long-term warming trend,” says Kristen Guirguis, a postdoctoral researcher at Scripps Institution of Oceanography, UC San Diego and lead author of the study, which is set to be published in the journal Geophysical Research Letters, a publication of the American Geophysical Union.

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Other stories below: Countries Must Plan for Climate Refugees; Rivals Hammer Romney for Global Warming Uncertainty

Global Warming: Middle East’s Vital Wet Winters are Disappearing

Winter droughts have become increasingly common in the Mediterranean region, particularly over the past 20 years, and a new study finds that global warming has driven at least half of the change.

Drought conditions in this politically explosive region are expected to grow more severe over the course of the century unless countries begin to significantly reduce their emissions of heat-trapping greenhouse gases, particularly carbon dioxide, many researchers say.

Those emissions come from burning fossil fuels, as well as from land-use changes.

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Rep. Rob Bishop (R-UT) placed blame for sagging education funding on a peculiar source: insufficient oil and gas drilling.

Bishop, who serves as chairman of the House Resources Subcommittee on National Parks, told the Western Republican Leadership Conference this month that disparities among Western states’ education funding could be placed squarely at the feet of regulations preventing unrestrained drilling and mining. “You want to fund education and help our kids?” Bishop asked the Republican audience. “You have to do the resources.”

BISHOP: Everything in red are the states that have the hardest time funding their education systems. The states that have the slowest growth, and it’s almost a 2-to-1 growth. The states in yellow increase their funding by education by 92 percent, the rest of them by 56 percent. [...] The fact that our land is not in our control means we don’t get property tax for it, we don’t have the development of it which produces income tax or severance tax. [...] Let me show you the difference between Wyoming and Montana. The blue is what Wyoming was able to pay their teachers in every one of those classes, the red is what Montana did. I promise you the difference between what Wyoming and Montana is Wyoming has resources and they actively develop them. You want to fund education and help our kids? You have to do the resources.

Watch it:

Bishop’s concern for education funding is somewhat spurious, considering his record of consistently voting against education funding during his five terms in the House. Just last fall, in fact, Bishop voted against a $26 billion state aid bill designed to prevent thousands of teachers from being laid off.

As such, many might view the Utah Republican’s supposed concern for education funding as little more than a stalking horse to open up more western lands and public parks to drilling. Indeed, at the same conference, Bishop told the audience about his belief that federal control of public lands is unconstitutional. He also told ThinkProgress afterward of his desire to mine an area around the Grand Canyon the size of the state of New Jersey.

Drilling is not the answer for education funding woes. Prioritizing education is.

by Kiley Kroh and Michael Conathan

In the predawn hours last Friday, the National Polar-Orbiting Operational Environmental Satellite System Preparation Project satellite (let’s just call it NPP for short) was launched from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California, five years after its originally scheduled launch date.  The SUV-sized satellite, a joint effort between NASA and NOAA, features five new instruments that will collect more detailed information about Earth’s atmosphere, land, and oceans and contribute to both weather and climate forecasting.

While the NPP launch should be applauded by scientists, forecasters, and anyone who relies on accurate weather and climate data, it’s important to note the NPP is just a stopgap– the satellite is designed to test new monitoring instruments and serve as a bridge between NOAA’s current polar orbiting satellites and the next generation, the Joint Polar Satellite System (JPSS), which is tentatively scheduled for launch in 2017 pending funding. But that is a huge unknown.

As we’ve elucidated here, here, and here, many of the weather satellites currently in orbit are aging beyond their life expectancies and experiencing technical problems. Unless the JPSS is fully funded, our ability to predict and prepare for extreme weather events will be compromised. NPP is designed with a life expectancy of just five years, meaning NOAA still expects there to be a gap in coverage:

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Bombshell epidemiology analysis finds, “Only quick, aggressive attacks can stave off the doomsday scenario”

A must-read study in Infectious Disease Modelling Research Progress, “When zombies attack!: Mathematical modelling of an outbreak of climate zombie infection” concludes:

In summary, a zombie outbreak is likely to lead to the collapse of civilisation, unless it is dealt with quickly. While aggressive quarantine may contain the epidemic, or a cure may lead to coexistence of humans and zombies, the most effective way to contain the rise of the undead is to attack hard and attack often. As seen in the movies, it is imperative that zombies are dealt with quickly, or else we are all in a great deal of trouble.

As has been widely reported in the NZM (non-zombified media), a growing portion of the GOP political class has fallen victim to a zombie apocalypse (see “Attack of the climate zombies!” and “Dawn of the brain-dead Senate” and links below that I repeat in the event that our efforts fail and the distant descendants of the survivors try to reconstruct the course of the epidemic in order to save humanity using time-travel a la 12 Monkeys).

The question all uninfected Americans are asking is, what is the best way to deal with the climate zombies?  Thankfully, some Canadian mathematical modelers have analyzed the situation and offered their optimal strategy.

First, some background on zombies.  I recommend starting with the new AMC TV documentary series, The Walking Dead.  Shrewdly, AMC no longer runs stuff like Casablanca and Shane, but focuses on what really matters to humanity now.   Wikipedia explains in its entry on zombie apocalypse:

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We have learned two important things from the Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature Study (BEST):

1. Denier claims that prior scientific analysis of the key land surface temperature data OVER-estimated the warming trend were not merely wrong, but the reverse was true.  Warming has been high and accelerating.
2. The Deniers and Confusionists and their media allies can never be convinced by the facts and will twist themselves into pretzels to keep spreading disinformation.

We also learned that BEST’s Judith Curry still would rather be a confusionist than a scientist  — but that ain’t news (see “Judith Curry abandons science“).

The decadal land-surface average temperature using a 10-year moving average of surface temperatures over land. Anomalies are relative to the Jan 1950 – December 1979 mean. The grey band indicates 95% statistical and spatial uncertainty interval.

Recall the foundation of the phony Climategate charge.  Somehow the climate scientists at the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) at the University of East Anglia, led by Phil Jones, were manipulating the data and the peer review process as part of a grand conspiracy to convince the public the earth has been warming faster than it really is.  A key point is that “the CRU compiles the land component of the record and the Hadley Centre provides the marine component.”

The BEST team vindicated climate science — see Koch-Funded Berkeley Temperature Study Does “Confirm the Reality of Global Warming.” Equally important, if you read the key paper, they found:

we find that the global land mean temperature has increased by 0.911 ± 0.042 C since the 1950s….  our analysis suggests a degree of global land-surface warming during the anthropogenic era that is consistent with prior work (e.g. NOAA) but on the high end of the existing range of reconstruction.

D’oh!  The BEST data shows considerably higher warming in recent years than HadCRU (the red line above).

Of course, this isn’t news to anybody who actually follows this issue.  Two years ago, the Met Office released an analysis concluding that “The global temperature rise calculated by the Met Office’s HadCRUT record is at the lower end of likely warming.”

As an aside, Muller, in a March 2010 talk (near the end) clearly states that if warming is on the high range, then humanity should be more concerned because we have “less time to react.”

What’s even more worrisome is that the study clearly shows that the warming trend is accelerating.  First, “Our analysis technique suggests that temperatures during the 19th century were approximately constant (trend 0.20 ± 0.25 C/century).”  No big surprise there.

But then as human emissions kick into overdrive, things heat up:

The trend line for the 20th century is calculated to be 0.733 ± 0.096 C/century, well below the 2.76 ± 0.16 C/century rate of global land-surface warming that we observe during the interval Jan 1970 to Aug 2011.

That is, in the past 40 years, the land has warmed nearly 4 times faster than it did in the last century.  This really kills the denier meme that the observed data suggests we will see only a small amount of warming this century.

In fact, even the high and accelerating warming of the past 4 decades was reduced by human and volcanic aerosol emissions and the general lags between emissions and warming.  Thus, it is now patently obvious that if we stay on our current emissions path, the acceleration of warming will continue as greenhouse gas concentrations continue rising.  That’s without even considering the amplifying carbon-cycle feedbacks.

Another mini-bombshell in the paper, which has led co-author Curry to (try to) frag team leader Muller, is this conclusion:

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by Sean Pool and Lauren Simenauer, in a Science Progress cross-post

Too often, when talking about research and innovation on clean energy technologies, policymakers, pundits, and the media tend to assume that the biggest breakthrough will come from a completely novel technology. The discovery of some new and sexy clean energy technology will suddenly change the game and make clean energy abundant and affordable overnight.

In practice that rarely happens (see “The breakthrough technology illusion“). A more likely scenario is that humble, behind-the-scenes “process innovations” will continue to increase the efficiency and drive down the costs of manufacturing the technologies we already know work.

The Department of Energy has recently completed testing on just such a humble breakthrough. The Optical Cavity Furnace is a new piece of equipment for making solar cells that is about to rock the photovoltaic industry by slashing costs and increasing efficiency. The news should not just excite tech nerds—by reducing the cost of producing solar cells by nearly three-quarters, this new technology represents another big step on the path to making clean energy the cheap kind of energy.

Here’s how it works.  By using optics to more efficiently focus visible and infrared light, the Optical Cavity Furnace can heat silicon wafers used in solar cell production much more precisely and uniformly than previous forms of solar cell manufacture. The resulting solar cells are stronger, more efficient, and have fewer impurities. The National Renewable Energy Lab, or NREL, the DOE office responsible for the research, and a corporate partner AOS Inc. are now working to bring this technology to scale. The partners plan to build an industrial-scale Optical Cavity Furnace capable of producing 1,200 highly efficient solar cells per hour. NREL has cooperative research agreements with many of the country’s biggest solar cell producers.

Even better, in addition to producing solar cells more reliably, quickly, and therefore cheaply, the Optical Cavity Furnace itself is cheaper than traditional equipment used to produce cells. As the cost of manufacturing solar cells goes down, elementary economics suggests the accessibility of solar cells will soar.  Then it’s a matter of harnessing their power in a myriad of other industries in a clean energy domino effect.

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