As climate change makes the regions of the West, Southwest, and Great Plains warmer and drier, water demand will continue to increase, and the combined effect will place an ever greater burden on the country’s fresh water supplies — possibly completely draining important reservoirs in those areas, under some scenarios. That’s according to a new study authored by researchers with Colorado State University, Princeton and the U.S. Forest Service, and flagged yesterday by Summit County Citizens Voice.

This is consistent with other studies on the risk of future water shortages: The Department of the Interior is anticipating that by 2060 the gap between river supply and water demand in the states of the Colorado River Basin will be 3.2 million acre feet due to climate change. Research published in Environmental Science and Technology found that by 2050 one third of U.S. counties could face “high” or “extreme” risk of water shortage. And the International Energy Agency determined that if current policies remain in place, fresh water use by the energy industry alone could more than double — from 66 to 135 billion cubic meters annually by 2035.

Climate change, substantially driven by global warming and humanity’s carbon emissions, is anticipated to lead to more weather extremes in various areas — longer periods of low precipitation and water shortage in many areas, interspersed with greater deluges. And, of course, higher average temperatures to bake the same regions as they dry out. The Forest Service study used a number of different scenarios in its models, assuming different levels of future population growth, economic growth, and temperature increases:

[F]uture climate change will increase water use for agricultural irrigation and landscape maintenance in response to rising plant water requirements, and at thermoelectric plants to accommodate rising electricity demands for space cooling. Including these effects, per-capita withdrawals are projected to drop only moderately for the next few decades and then level off as the effects of climate change become greater, and total withdrawals are projected to rise nearly continuously into the future. Projected withdrawals differ across the global emissions scenarios examined, especially in the latter decades of the century.

Although precipitation is projected to increase in much of the United States with future climate change, in most locations that additional precipitation will merely accommodate rising evapotranspiration demand in response to temperature increases. Where the effect of rising evapotranspiration exceeds the effect of increasing precipitation, and where precipitation actually declines, as is likely in parts of the Southwest, water yields are projected to decline. For the United States as a whole, the declines are substantial, exceeding 30% of current levels by 2080 for some scenarios examined.

Here’s just one example of several permutations the study did, laying out the changes in future water yields in 2020, 2040, 2060 and 2080. The A1B scenarios were relatively middle-of-the-road, assuming medium population growth, high economic growth, and medium temperature increases in the future:

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The Guardian Environment Blog is giving two new bloggers a chance. They both deserve a shout out.

John Abraham, a University of St. Thomas scientist with the Clmate Science Rapid Response Team, has a column whose headline I borrowed. Here’s an excerpt:

But do the tar sands really matter that much? The answer is clearly yes. Alberta has 1.8tn barrels of oil contained within the tar sands. Extracting and burning all of that tar will cause a global temperature increase of about 0.4oC (0.7oF). That is about half of the warming that humans have already caused. For perspective, according to a recent study, the amount of oil-in-place in the Alberta tar sands is approximately seven times that of Saudi Arabia’s proven reserves.

But wait, it gets worse. One of the byproducts of tar-sand extraction is a substance that is like coal … only dirtier. That byproduct, petroleum coke (affectionately called Petcoke), emits more carbon dioxide than even coal.

Click here to read the rest.

And Dana Nuccitelli, one of our favorite Skeptical Science bloggers, has a column on Kansas and renewables:

Is the ‘Saudi Arabia of wind’ willing to sacrifice the economic benefits of clean energy for the sake of the coal industry?

To date, 29 states in the US have set standards requiring a certain percentage of electricity production to be met by renewable sources. Soon that number may fall to 28.

In 2009, Kansas passed legislation establishing a renewable energy standard requiring 10% of the state’s electricity production to come from renewable sources by 2010, and 20% by 2020. The state, the “Saudi Arabia of wind”, met the 2010 requirements by exploiting its wind powerpotential, which is second only to Texas in the US.

Republican congressman Dennis Hedke, the chairman of the Kansas Congressional joint committee on energy and environmental policy –who has ties to the oil and gas industry – arranged for his committee to hear arguments to delay or eliminate these requirements. This Thursday, the commitee has its final hearing on the subject.

Click here to read the rest.

Here’s hoping they both become regulars.

Conserving key to energy independence concludes geologist David Hughes

By Andrew Nikiforuk via The Tyee

Governments and financial analysts who think unconventional fossil fuels such as bitumen, shale gas and shale oil can usher in an era of prosperity and energy plenty are dangerously deluded, concludes a groundbreaking report by one of Canada’s top energy analysts.

In a meticulous 181 page study for the Post Carbon Institute, geologist David Hughes concludes that the U.S. “is highly unlikely to achieve energy independence unless energy consumption declines substantially.”

Exuberant projections by the media and energy pundits that claim that hydraulic fracturing and horizontal drilling “can provide endless growth heralding a new era of ‘energy independence,’ in which the U.S. will become a substantial net exporter of energy, are entirely unwarranted based on the fundamentals,” adds Hughes in a companion article for the science journal Nature.

Moreover it is unlikely that difficult and challenging hydrocarbons such as shale oil can even replace the rate of depletion for conventional light oil and natural gas.

Since 1990, says Hughes, the number of operating wells in the U.S. has increased by 90 per cent while the average productivity of those wells has declined by 38 per cent.

The latest panaceas championed by industry and media talking heads are too expensive and will deplete too rapidly to provide either energy security or independence for the United States, concludes the 62-year-old geologist who worked for Natural Resources Canada for 32 years as a coal and gas specialist.

To Hughes shale gas and shale oil represent a temporary bubble in production that will soon burst due to rapid depletion rates that have only recently been tallied.

Taken together shale gas and shale oil wells “will require about 8,600 wells per year at a cost of over $48 billion to offset declines.”

“The idea that the United States might be exporting 12 per cent of its natural gas from shale is just a pipe dream,” Hughes, a resident of Cortes Island in British Columbia, told The Tyee.

‘Tough’ energy’s tough downsides

Unconventional fossil fuels all share a host of cruel and limiting traits says Hughes. They offer dramatically fewer energy returns; they consume extreme and endless flows of capital; they provide difficult or volatile rates of supply overtime and have “large environmental impacts in their extraction.”

Most important, bitumen, shale oil and shale gas, by definition, are much lower quality hydrocarbons and therefore can’t fund business as usual. They simply do not provide the same energy returns or the same amount of work as conventional hydrocarbons due to the energy needed to extract or upgrade them, says Hughes.

At the turn of the century it took just one barrel of oil to find and produce 100 more. Now the returns are down to 20. The mining portion of the tar sands offers returns of five to one while the steam plant operations barely manage returns of three to one, says Hughes. “And that’s an extremely conservative estimate.”

“Moving to progressively lower quality energy resources diverts more and more resources to the act of acquisition as opposed to doing useful work.”

A society that progressively spends more and more capital on acquiring energy that does less and less work will either exhaust the global economy or cannibalize national ones as consumers redirect larger portions of their household budgets to energy costs, says Hughes.

“To view them (unconventional hydrocarbons) as ‘game changers’ capable of indefinitely increasing supply of low cost energy which has underpinned the economic growth of the past century is a mistake.”

The exploitation of shale oil and gas (and Hughes reviewed the data for 60,000 wells for the report) may have temporarily reversed declines in conventional resources but they show dramatic limitations often excluded from the mainstream press.

Drilling into a mirage

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The ramp up in biofuel production has thus far been a major misfire in the fight against climate change. By driving up the price of corn and other biofuel sources, standards passed in the United States and Europe requiring a certain level of biofuel use have encouraged producers to dedicate more corn to ethanol production and less to food supplies.

Meanwhile, production of biofuel crops is displacing production of food crops on available land, and encouraging deforestation in the developing world. All of which in turn intensifies the problem of global food insecurity.

Thanks to a new study from South Dakota State University, we can add another negative from biofuel policy: Accelerated destruction of grasslands in America’s Western Corn Belt (WCB) region — North Dakota, South Dakota, Nebraska, Minnesota, and Iowa.

According to Christopher Wright and Michael Wimberly, the study’s authors, conversion of grassland to corn and soy production between 2006 and 2011 has proceeded at a pace comparable to deforestation rates in Brazil, Malaysia, and Indonesia. In Iowa alone, the losses are approaching 12 million hectares (almost 30 million acres) of tallgrass prairie.

In sum, we found a net decline in grass-dominated land cover in the WCB totaling nearly 530,000 hectares (approx. 1.3 million acres). This change was concentrated in two states, South Dakota and Iowa, with the majority of grassland conversion occurring in the WCB’s three western states relative to the core corn/soy growing areas in Iowa and Minnesota.

Grassland loss from 2006 to 2011

As Brad Plumer at the Washington Post notes, a number of converging factors are driving this change: Subsidized crop insurance, as well as insufficient rewards for preserving grassland from conservation programs, are contributing along with the price boost in biofuels. But the latter is especially ironic, given that grasslands are themselves able to store carbon from the atmosphere better than cropland. So expanding biofuel crop production into grasslands specifically further dilutes biofuels’ already dubious benefits.

The destruction of grasslands is also part of the poor overall land management and climate change that’s contributing to the threat of “dust-bowlification” in the western and plains regions of the United States. As warming drives higher temperatures, heat waves, and more extremes between deluge and drought, that area of the country is increasingly left drier for longer. The loss of grasslands leave soil more vulnerable to erosion, and less able to hold and buffer water flows. That creates the possibility of a repeat of the Dust Bowls of the 1930s is growing, with all the attendant threats to food security.

In fact, Wright and Wimberly include the ominous note rates of grassland conversion this high “have not been seen in the Corn Belt since the 1920s and 1930s.”

A new research initiative is designed to lead to unprecedented 36-hour forecasts of incoming energy from the Sun, thereby helping utilities obtain energy more efficiently from solar energy power plants. Credit: NCAR.

National Center for Atmospheric Research News Release

BOULDER—Applying its atmospheric expertise to solar energy, the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) is spearheading a three-year, nationwide project to create unprecedented, 36-hour forecasts of incoming energy from the Sun for solar energy power plants.

The research team is designing a prototype system to forecast sunlight and resulting power every 15 minutes over specific solar facilities, thereby enabling utilities to continuously anticipate the amount of available solar energy. The work, funded primarily with a $4.1 million U.S. Department of Energy grant, will draw on cutting-edge research techniques at leading government labs and universities across the country, in partnership with utilities, other energy companies, and commercial forecast providers.

Much of the focus will be on generating detailed predictions of clouds and atmospheric particles that can reduce incoming energy from the Sun.

“It’s critical for utility managers to know how much sunlight will be reaching solar energy plants in order to have confidence that they can supply sufficient power when their customers need it,” says Sue Ellen Haupt, director of NCAR’s Weather Systems and Assessment Program and the lead researcher on the solar energy project. “These detailed cloud and irradiance forecasts are a vital step in using more energy from the Sun.”

The project takes aim at one of the greatest challenges in meteorology: accurately predicting cloud cover over specific areas. In addition to helping utilities tap solar energy more effectively, detailed cloud predictions can also improve the accuracy of shorter-term weather forecasts.

The project expands NCAR’s focus on renewable energy. NCAR designed a highly detailed wind energy forecasting system with Xcel Energy that saved Xcel ratepayers an estimated $6 million in a single year. The center is also creating advanced prediction capabilities to enable wind farm developers to anticipate wind energy potential anywhere in the world.

“Improving forecasts for renewable energy from the Sun produces a major return on investment for society,” says Thomas Bogdan, president of the University Corporation for Atmospheric Research, which manages NCAR on behalf of the National Science Foundation. “By helping utilities produce energy more efficiently from the Sun, we can make this market more cost competitive.”

Clouded forecasts

More than half of all states in the U.S. have mandated that utilities increase their use of renewable energy as a way to reduce dependence on fossil fuels such as coal, oil, and natural gas, which affect air quality and release greenhouse gases associated with climate change. But the shift to energy sources such as solar or wind means relying on resources that are difficult to predict.

Because large amounts of electricity cannot be stored in a cost-effective manner, power generated by a solar panel or any other source must be promptly consumed. If an electric utility powers down a coal- or natural gas-fired facility in anticipation of solar energy, those plants may not be able to power up fast enough if clouds roll in. The only option in such a scenario is to buy energy on the spot market, which can be very costly.

Conversely, if more sunshine reaches a solar farm than expected, the extra energy can go to waste.

But predicting clouds, which form out of microscopic droplets of water or ice, is also notoriously difficult. Clouds are affected by a myriad of factors, including winds, humidity, sunlight, surface heat, and tiny airborne particles, as well as chemicals and gases in the atmosphere.

Solar energy output is affected not just by when and where clouds form, but also by the types of clouds present. The thickness and elevation of clouds have greatly differing effects on the amount of sunlight reaching the ground. Wispy cirrus clouds several miles above the surface, for example, block far less sunlight than thick, low-lying stratus clouds.

To design a system that can generate such detailed forecasts, NCAR and its partners will marshal an array of observing instruments, including lidars (which use laser-based technology to take measurements in the atmosphere); specialized computer models; and mathematical and artificial intelligence techniques. Central to the effort will be three total sky imagers in each of several locations, which will observe the entire sky, triangulate the height and depth of clouds, and trace their paths across the sky.

The team will test these advanced capabilities during different seasons in several geographically diverse U.S. locations: the Northeast, Florida, Colorado/New Mexico, and California. The goal is to ensure that the system works year round in different types of weather patterns.

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According to researchers at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, a combination of rising heat and humidity is likely to cut the world’s labor capacity to 80 percent during summer months by 2050 — twice the effect observed today. [Climate Central]

That one-two punch has already cut the world’s working capacity by 10 percent since humans began burning large amounts of oil, gas, coal and other fossil fuels at the start of the Industrial Revolution, found the analysis, which was published Sunday in the journal Nature Climate Change….

“The planet will start experiencing heat stress unlike anything experienced today,” said study co-author Ron Stouffer, a climate modeler at NOAA’s Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory. “The world is entering a very different environment, and the impact of that on labor will be significant.”

Those calculations don’t take into effect the relief offered by air conditioning. They do assume people will take other measures to beat the heat — working or exercising in early morning, early evening or even nighttime, seeking shade and wearing clothing that helps maximize their ability to stay cool.

Opening statements are set to begin Monday in the maritime trial of the century, as British oil giant BP defends itself against billions of dollars in damages sought by the U.S. government and states affected by the 2010 Gulf of Mexico spill disaster. [Fuel Fix]

The sequester would likely cut $100 million from the Environmental Protection Agency’s air program, and another $64.5 million from its enforcement budget. 20 percent of those cuts would be to funds for state and local governments to monitor air pollution levels, administer permits for industrial facilities, and other key aspects. [ALA]

A study by the South Carolina Department of Natural Resources, outlining the damage climate change will do to the state, has been kept secret by agency officials for more than a year. [The State]

Some of the West’s biggest reservoirs could dry up completely as the region gets warmer and drier in coming decades, according to a new study. [Summit County Voice]

Two-thirds of California voters believe global warming is a threat and measures need to be taken to stop it, but the level of concern has dropped significantly over the past six years. [SFGate]

Economic crisis has bought time to tackle unreliable and costly European power, but raised the risk no one will spend the 1 trillion euro ($1.3 trillion) needed to improve the supply network, a new report has found. [Reuters]

Apples produced in the Himalayan state of Arunachal Pradesh are now gradually losing their taste and even turning sour as a result of climate change. [ZeeNews]

Showa Shell has predicted its solar unit Solar Frontier will be able to cut production costs of its solar modules by half in the next few years. [Renew Economy]