By Dana Nuccitelli via Skeptical Science.

A new study of ocean warming has just been published in Geophysical Research Letters by Balmaseda, Trenberth, and Källén (2013). There are several important conclusions which can be drawn from this paper.

• Completely contrary to the popular contrarian myth, global warming has accelerated, with more overall global warming in the past 15 years than the prior 15 years. This is because about 90% of overall global warming goes into heating the oceans, and the oceans have been warming dramatically.
• As suspected, much of the ‘missing heat’ Kevin Trenberth previously talked about has been found in the deep oceans. Consistent with the results of Nuccitelli et al. (2012), this study finds that 30% of the ocean warming over the past decade has occurred in the deeper oceans below 700 meters, which they note is unprecedented over at least the past half century.
• Some recent studies have concluded based on the slowed global surface warming over the past decade that the sensitivity of the climate to the increased greenhouse effect is somewhat lower than the IPCC best estimate. Those studies are fundamentally flawed because they do not account for the warming of the deep oceans.
• The slowed surface air warming over the past decade has lulled many people into a false and unwarranted sense of security.

The main results of the study are illustrated in its Figure 1.

The Data

In this paper, the authors used ocean heat content data from the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts’ Ocean Reanalysis System 4 (ORAS4). A ‘reanalysis’ is a climate or weather model simulation of the past that incorporates data from historical observations. In the case of ORAS4, this includes ocean temperature measurements from bathythermographs and the Argo buoys, and other types of data like sea level and surface temperatures. The ORAS4 data span from 1958 to the present, and have a high 1°x1° horizontal resolution, as well as 42 vertical layers. As the authors describe the data set,

ORAS4 has been produced by combining, every 10 days, the output of an ocean model forced by atmospheric reanalysis fluxes and quality controlled ocean observations.

Accelerated Global Warming
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LED light bulbs are the longest-lasting and most efficient mass-produced light sources to date. And now, they’re also among the most affordable, with some costing less than $10 per bulb — a drastic drop compared to their recent $50 price tag.

They’ll also do anything an incandescent or compact flourescent bulb can do, and more. Last week, the New York Times published a product review of LED bulbs from six manufacturers, several with features such as dimming, changing colors, and pulsing. Four of the bulbs reviewed can be controlled remotely: using an iPhone or Android app, users can control the brightness and colors of Philips Hue bulbs, and Greenwave Solution bulbs come with an online app that users can program according to their schedules — turning off all the lights at night or when they’re away.

The article’s author lauds the benefits of LED light bulbs, and with good reason. Even in 2012, when the bulbs cost closer to $50 instead of $10, an LED bulb saved consumers about $100 over its lifetime compared to an incandescent bulb. LED bulbs save energy — from manufacture to disposal, an LED bulb uses 5 times less energy than an incandescent one.

And LED bulbs are far more efficient than incandescent bulbs and last longer than both incandescent and compact fluorescent bulbs, as the NY Times points out:

LEDs last about 25 times as long as incandescents and three times as long as CFLs; we’re talking maybe 25,000 hours of light. Install one today, and you may not own your house, or even live, long enough to see it burn out. (Actually, LED bulbs generally don’t burn out at all; they just get dimmer.) You know how hot incandescent bulbs become. That’s because they convert only 5 to 10 percent of your electricity into light; they waste the rest as heat. LED bulbs are far more efficient. They convert 60 percent of their electricity into light, so they consume far less electricity. You pay less, you pollute less.

LED bulbs have been popular installations in flashlights and Christmas lights for the past few years, but maybe this recent price drop coupled with the high-tech features the bulbs boast of — along with the federal phase-out of some kinds of incandescent bulbs — will help spur more regular household use of LEDs — an important scenario to consider, given that electricity used to power homes, businesses and industry is the highest contributor of greenhouse gas emissions in the U.S.

By Bill Becker, via Huffington Post

On March 19, The American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE) released its new report card on the condition of America’s infrastructure. Overall, our infrastructure in 16 categories ranging from bridges to water systems earned only a D+. ASCE estimates the United States needs to invest $3.6 trillion by 2020 to bring America’s infrastructure up to good repair.

Among these systems are several that are critical to reducing the loss of life and property from the growing impacts of global climate change. Dams were graded D; levees earned only a D-; waste water and storm water control systems also were given a D. Drinking water and energy infrastructure — both vulnerable to extreme weather events — received a D and D+ respectively.

The bad news is that the cost of bringing these engineered systems up to par comes at a time when government budgets at all levels are strained, if not in crisis. The good news is that some of the services we receive from engineered systems can be provided instead by natural systems if we restore and protect them.

Ecosystems perform a wide variety of important services for free. Trees provide shade, purify air and water, and store carbon. Wetlands regulate flooding. Coastal marshes buffer communities from storm surges. Forests and soils store carbon as well as water. Many of these ecosystems have been degraded or destroyed by human development. Now, communities need to put nature back to work.

I asked three of the United States’ premier experts on ecosystem services about these issues. The first is Keith Bowers, president of Biohabitats Inc. in Baltimore. Mr. Bowers is working on conservation, restoration and regenerative design projects across the United States, from Fairbanks, Alaska to the Big Cypress Swamp in Florida. The second expert is Dr. Bob Costanza, the ecological economist who coauthored one of the first assessments of the economic value of global ecosystem services. The third expert is Prof. Ed Barbier, a prolific author and blogger on the topic and a professor of economics at the University of Wyoming. Because of the length of the interview and the importance of the topic, I’ll post it in two parts.

Q: It has been our practice in the United States not to value things we can’t count — particularly things we don’t think have monetary value. A great deal of work has been underway in recent years to express the value of ecosystem services in monetary units so we can quantify their benefits in terms that everyone understands. What’s the status of that work?

Costanza: In 1997, several colleagues and I made the first attempt to do this at global scale. We synthesized existing studies and produced an estimate significantly larger than global GDP. We estimated the global value of ecosystem services expressed in monetary units to be in the range of $15 to $47 trillion per year in 1995 dollars. That estimate has attracted considerable attention and discussion.

We are now finishing work to update those estimates based on the significant amount of new data, methods and research that has accumulated. These new estimates are significantly larger, indicating that the more we learn about ecosystem services the more comprehensive our estimates or their values become.

What do these analyses tell us? First, the ecosystem services concept makes it abundantly clear that the choice of “the environment versus the economy” is a false choice. If nature contributes significantly to human well being, then it is a major contributor to the real economy. The choice becomes how to manage all our assets, including natural and human-made capital, more effectively and sustainably.

Second, we should be clear that expressing the value of ecosystem services in monetary units does not mean that they should be treated as private commodities that can be traded in private markets. Most ecosystem services are public goods that cannot or should not be privatized. Their value in monetary units is an estimate of their benefits to society expressed in units that communicate with a broad audience. It’s also possible to express these same tradeoffs in other units, such as land area, energy, or time.

However, using monetary units to express the value of ecosystem services can help to raise awareness of their importance to society and serve as a powerful and essential communication tool to inform better, more balanced decisions regarding trade-offs with policies that enhance GDP but damage ecosystem services.

Barbier: Another important point here is how we define ecosystem services. A key contribution of natural resource economics has been to treat the environment as a form of capital asset, or natural capital. But it has been long argued that the concept of natural capital should not be restricted just to those natural resources, such as minerals, fossil fuels, forests, agricultural land and fisheries, that supply the raw material and energy inputs to our economies. Nor should we consider the capacity of the natural environment to assimilate waste and pollution the only valuable “service” that it performs.

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On going through my old draft posts, I came across this unexpectedly accurate story in the Wall Street Journal from January:

More Droughts, Floods, Extreme Weather Expected With Warming Climate

Rising temperatures in the U.S. already have brought more frequent heat waves, droughts, floods and other extreme weather and scientists expect more of the same as a result of climate change, according to a government study released Friday.

Average U.S. temperatures have risen by about 1.5 degrees Fahrenheit since 1895, with most of the increase occurring in the past 30 years, according to a draft of the National Climate Assessment.

Climate Progress covered the story at the time with this headline “End Climate Silence Now: Draft Climate Assessment Warns Of Devastating 9°-15°F Warming Over Most Of U.S.”

If you are wondering how Rupert Murdoch’s WSJ, home of the worst opinion page on climate in the country, could  get the story right, well, it was a wire story from Dow Jones.

And, purely coincidentally, the author’s name was Cassandra Sweet, which all too well suggests how Journal editors view all such prescient warnings:

• Error-Riddled Matt Ridley Piece Lowballs Climate Change, Discredits Wall Street Journal. World Faces 10°F Warming.
• Bjorn Legacy: Lomborg Urges Climate Inaction With Misleading Stats In Murdoch’s Wall Street Journal
• The Wall Street Journal Does It Again: Another Whopper Of A Lie On Climate Science

Long-time readers remember Paul Gilding, former executive director of Greenpeace International, from Tom Friedman’s 2009 column on how the global economy is a Ponzi scheme. More recently, he joined The Post Carbon Institute, which led to this memorable headline:  ”Obscure Expert Joins Little Known Think Tank To Battle Issues Most Prefer To Ignore.”

He’s got a new piece on his blog, “Victory at Hand for the Climate Movement?” Here’s an excerpt:

There are signs the climate movement could be on the verge of a remarkable and surprising victory.  If we read the current context correctly, and if the movement can adjust its strategy to capture the opportunity presented, it could usher in the fastest and most dramatic economic transformation in history. This would include the removal of the oil, coal and gas industries from the economy in just a few decades and their replacement with new industries and, for the most part, entirely new companies. It would be the greatest transfer of wealth and power between industries and countries the world has ever seen….

To summarise:

- The science shows how we are not just failing to slow down climate change, but are in fact accelerating towards the cliff.
- In response, mainstream organisations focused on the global economy are becoming increasingly desperate in their calls for action, fearing the economic consequences if we don’t.  They are arguing that the only way the world can avoid the risk of breakdown is to transform the economy urgently and dramatically.
- Our capacity to do so is now real and practical, with the technologies required already being deployed at very large scale and at competitive cost. The size of the business opportunity now on offer is truly breathtaking.
- In response, the financial markets are waking up to the transformation logic – if the future is based in renewables and these are price competitive without subsidy, or soon will be, the transformation could sweep the economy relatively suddenly, even without further government leadership.
- This then puts in place an enormous and systemic financial risk – in particular investments in, or debt exposure to, the multi-trillion $ fossil fuel industry.
- This risk is steadily being increased by activist campaigns against fossil fuel projects (worsening each projects’ financial risk) and arguing for fossil fuel divestment (putting investors reputation in play as well).
- In response investors and lenders will reduce their exposure to fossil fuels and hedge their risk by shifting their money to high growth renewables.
- This will then reinforce and manifest the very trend they are hedging against.
- Thus it’s game on.

Is that it? Can we now sit back and expect the market deal with this?

Most definitely not….

You can read the whole thing here.

In a sharp contrast to the Bush administration’s eager embrace of commercial oil shale development, the Department of Interior today unveiled a final plan that calls for careful research into the feasibility and environmental issues surrounding oil shale, and opens about only half as much federal lands to potential leasing for commercial development.

“This plan maintains a strong focus on research and development to promote new technologies that may eventually lead to safe and responsible commercial development of these domestic energy resources,” said Interior Secretary Ken Salazar in announcing the final plans. “It will help ensure that we acquire critically important information about these technologies and their potential effects on the landscape, especially our scarce water resources in the West.”

Oil shale, not to be confused with shale oil in places like North Dakota which is actual oil trapped in underground rock formations, is actually a sedimentary rock containing kerogen. It must be heated and put under high pressure, either underground or after being mined and brought to the surface, to produce a petroleum liquid. Successful commercialization of oil shale in the U.S. has been an unrealized dream for many decades.

The Obama administration plan finalized today makes available about 700,000 acres of land in Colorado, Utah and Wyoming for potential oil shale leasing. That compares to 1,340,774 acres in the Bush plan.

One of the key controversies surrounding oil shale development in arid areas of the West that are already being hit hard by drought is its high water demands. The Government Accountability Office in 2010 estimated that oil shale development could require between one barrel and 12 barrels of water for each barrel of oil. The agency said more precise estimates were not possible because the technologies are so unproven.

“Rather than gamble our water on costly oil shale speculation, this plan protects our farms and our food,” said Bill Midcap of the Rocky Mountain Farmer’s Union.

— Tom Kenworthy is a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress Action Fund

Related Post:

• Climate-destroying shale: Shale is a clay-like rock containing very little energy — per pound, it has one tenth the energy of crude oil, one fourth that of recycled phone books, one-third that of Cap’n Crunch. Turning it into a usable liquid fuel would require a massive amounts of energy and probably release more CO2 than even liquid coal.

 

It will be very difficult for the public to access the public comments filed for and against the final decision on the Keystone pipeline. [InsideClimate News]

When the State Department hired a contractor to produce the latest environmental impact statement for the controversial Keystone XL pipeline, it asked for a Web-based electronic docket to record public comments as they flowed in each day. Thousands of comments are expected to be filed by people and businesses eager to influence the outcome of the intense international debate over the project.

But the public will not find it easy to examine these documents.

A summary of the comments will be included in the final version of the environmental impact statement when it is released, said Imani J. Esparza of the Office of Policy and Public Outreach in State’s bureau of oceans, environment and science.

But the only way to see the comments themselves is by filing a request under the Freedom of Information Act, or FOIA, a process that can take so long that the Keystone debate could be over before the documents are made available. The public will not be able to access the full electronic docket on line.

President Obama said last month that “This is the most transparent administration in history.”

NASA is cutting back on education and outreach efforts due to sequestration. [NBC News]

Life after oil and gas is not only possible, but economical. [New York Times Sunday Review]

The AP on what President Obama is likely to do about climate change: take some steps but not nearly enough. [AP]

By 2030, half the world could face water scarcity, according to the UN Secretary-General. [Washington Post]

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