CHRIS HORNER: Uncovering John Kitzhaber’s environmental connections
Environmentalists Shave Off Entire Mountaintops In The Name Of Environmentalism (Solar power)
Analysis: ‘Sea Level Goes The Way The Wind Blows…Wind, Pressure Play Major Roles’
Sea Level Goes The Way The Wind Blows…Wind, Pressure Play Major Roles
This is one of those posts about things noticed, remembered, and linked while surfing the web. It is well known that the local sea level is heavily influenced by wind speed and direction as well as barometric pressure. Most people are aware of storm surges associated with hurricanes, for example. The same thing happens on a near-global scale, and some of it is near-permanent. Here is a global map of sea level anomaly from the University of Colorado. Figure 1 is the sea level rise trend since satellite radar altimetry began. In Figure 1, the sea level in the Western Pacific has risen 10 or 12 mm per year, while the eastern Pacific, parts of the Southern Ocean, and a spot in the Atlantic, have fallen by 3 to 5 mm per year, over the satellite era. The next interesting map comes from the European Space Agency (ERA). This map is generated by taking the sea surface height as measured by satellite and subtracting the gravity model from GOCE. The result is the sea surface height over the geoid. Figure 2 is the sea surface height over the Geoid. Note the difference in height between the western Pacific and the Southern Ocean, about 3 meters. The difference in height between the western Pacific and the coasts of North and South America is over a meter. These height differences drive ocean currents. These differences are maintained by wind and pressure differences. If wind and pressure change, the sea level changes accordingly. Next are plots (Figures 3 and 4) from Garza et al 2012, of Sea Level Pressure (SLP), and wind changes over the 1980 to 2009 epoch. The SLP has increased over the eastern Pacific and decreased over the western Pacific. North of 10°N, easterly trade winds have increased in the eastern Pacific and south of 10°N, they have decreased. These small changes, along with thermal expansion, have changed the relative sea level between the two sides of the Pacific Basin by 1%, one centimeter out of one meter. My point is that not all of the western Pacific sea level rise is due to warming, a great deal of it is due to wind and SLP change. Do you remember the controversy last year about the trade winds? One paper had them increasing, due to global climate …
Five U.S. Electricity Myths Debunked
http://www.forbes.com/sites/judeclemente/2014/12/28/five-u-s-electricity-myths-debunked/…
Paper: New era of cheap oil ‘will destroy green revolution’
…UN summit rejects solar power as ‘too unreliable’ – Chose ‘diesel generators’ instead! Lima ‘organizers rejected powering the [summit] with solar panels on the grounds they were too unreliable’
At the Rio Earth Summit in 1992 the United Nations agreed to the “stabilisation of greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere at a level that would prevent dangerous anthropogenic interference with the climate system”.
The agreed science is clear: avoiding “dangerous” climate change requires warming to be kept within 2C above pre-industrial levels.
But more than two decades on, and few seem confident that this is close to being achieved. UN scientists say the world has already warmed by 0.85C and on current trends is set for 4C warming by the end of the century, as burning fossil fuels pumps carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.…
Why Google halted its research into renewable energy – It ‘wasn’t going to work out as planned’ – Now say: ‘Today’s renewable energy technologies won’t save us.”
Back in 2007, Google had a very simple idea for addressing global warming — we just need to take existing renewable-energy technologies and keep improving them until they were as cheap as fossil fuels. And, voila! Problem solved.
GOOGLE REALIZED ITS CLEAN-ENERGY PROJECT WASN’T NEARLY AMBITIOUS ENOUGH
That was the logic behind the company’s RE-C project, which aimed to produce one gigawatt of renewable electricity for less than the price of coal. The hope was to do this within years, not decades. Among other things, the company invested in new geothermal drilling R&D and put $168 million toward Brightsource’s Ivanpah solar tower in the Mojave Desert.
By 2011, however, Google decided that this energy initiative wasn’t going to work out as planned and shut things down. Unlike, say, Google Glass or self-driving cars, Google wasn’t interested in this particular moon shot.…