By S. T., on August 23rd, 2009
It’s Happening: Huge carbon traps of methane are melting in the Arctic.
Methane is a far more potent greenhouse gas than CO2, and it’s being released from previously-frozen methane slush on the seafloor. “250 Methane plumes have been discovered rising from the Arctic Ocean seafloor near west Spitzbergen. The most likely cause is warm water entering the Arctic, destabilizing methane clathrates – “methane slush” – on the seafloor.”
The release of methane from clathrates like these has been hypothesized to be the trigger of the Paleocene thermal maximum, the warmest climate since the Mesozoic, the age of the dinosaurs.” The oceans have been warming rapidly. Ocean temperatures broke the all time record for warmth for July. The global ocean surface temperature for July 2009 was the warmest on record, 1.06 degrees F (0.59 degree C) above the 20th century average of 61.5 degrees F (16.4 degrees C). This broke the previous July record set in 1998. The July ocean surface temperature departure of 1.06 degrees F from the long-term average equals last month’s value, which was also a record. Warming waters are entering the Arctic. The largest sea surface temperature anomalies are in the Arctic.
Methane clathrates are not just found in the cold deep Arctic. Enormous quantities of methane clathrates are located in the Carolina trough offshore of the Carolinas. Warming oceans could destabilize these huge methane deposits. The quantities of methane stored in clathrates are massive.
Read more here.
More news:
- New findings show increased ocean acidification in Alaska waters — (ScienceCentric) The same things that make Alaska’s marine waters among the most productive in the world may also make them the most vulnerable to ocean acidification. According to new findings by a University of Alaska Fairbanks scientist, Alaska’s oceans are becoming increasingly acidic, which could damage Alaska’s king crab and salmon fisheries. Oceanographer Jeremy Mathis returned from a cruise armed with seawater samples collected from the depths of the Gulf of Alaska last spring. When he tested the samples’ acidity in his lab, the results showed that ocean acidification is likely more severe and is happening more rapidly in Alaska than in tropical waters. The results also matched his recent findings in the Chukchi and Bering Seas. ‘It seems like everywhere we look in Alaska’s coastal oceans, we see signs of increased ocean acidification,’ said Mathis. Often referred to as the ‘sister problem to climate change,’ ocean acidification is a term to describe increasing acidity in the world’s oceans. The ocean absorbs carbon dioxide from the air. As the ocean absorbs more carbon dioxide, seawater becomes more acidic. Scientists estimate that the ocean is 25 percent more acidic today than it was 300 years ago.
- Moving Forward On Smart Grid (Greenbiz.com) Today’s power grid in America is a relic of the 20th Century. The idea behind smart grid is to inject a two-way information layer into the electricity distribution process. Smart grid components include advanced home meters, new grid management techniques and software. At the home or business, smart grid can aid conservation by showing customers their power usage and offering real-time choices about when they use electricity. Scaling up, smart grids allow utility managers to constrain peak load requirements through a combination of consumer incentives and accurate diagnosis of demand. Ultimately, smart grid technologies can open the door for more plug-in electric cars and vehicles. Click here to download the Smart Grid study PDF.
Continue Reading → Futurism Now Climate and Energy News
By S. T., on August 21st, 2009
 Secretary of Hypocrisy OK, enough! Tar sands oil is being forced down the throat of the American people by our government, and the most vulnerable people are the ones who will suffer from its extraction, processing, transportation, and its use.
Secretary Clinton has signaled the world that climate change is no big deal to her, and this week she has OK’ed the Alberta Clipper dirty oil sands pipeline. This is especially ironic in the face of her climate change talks with other countries, and it’s the height of hypocrisy from Secretary Clinton. It’s clearly a “Do as we say, not as we do” signal to the world, and if I lived in India, or China, I don’t think her pleas about climate change would hold much weight in the future. Way to go, Secretary Clinton, you have let us down again. As a message to the world on climate change, this stinks.
Clinton has not exactly been impressing anyone as Secretary of State, and on the issue of clean energy diplomacy, she is a failure (to date). We’ll see if the Chinese or Indians feel like taking climate change advice from someone who doesn’t practice what she preaches. Most people expected Clinton to take a strong stand against climate change. After all, during the campaign for president, she talked about what a serious problem climate change was, and how we needed an Apollo Program to deal with it. Instead she pisses off very environmentalist in the country and allows the expansion of the dirtiest oil to be used and disseminated by the United States.
This pipeline will come through my state of Minnesota, messing up ecosystems, polluting the environment, and crossing a large American Indian land; the Leech Lake Band of Ojibwe. Many of them have protested this pipeline but of course, when you are a native American up against a powerful Secretary of State, people don’t tend to listen to you. People don’t tend to listen to anyone on this issue who doesn’t have clout or connections. Mrs. Clinton has also demonstrated that you don’t need to know much about the environment to go about seriously destroying it, even as you tell people that global warming is important. To her, it’s obviously not. According to some environmental groups, a court challenge is being prepared to overturn decision. Good. This story is from Dirty Oil Sands.
Flying in the face of a growing host of military experts and research showing the contrary, Secretary Clinton decided that Enbridge’s Alberta Clipper dirty oil sands pipeline is in the U.S. national interest. Presidential Executive Order 11423 allows the Secretary to permit the pipeline ONLY if she judges it’s in the national interest.
The Alberta Tar Sands is the world’s largest energy project, ultimately covering an area the size of Florida. And it produces the world’s dirtiest, most expensive, and arguably most dangerous oil. And if the Alberta Clipper pipeline is actually built, 450,000 more barrels of it, per day, will be burned in the U.S. – releasing five times as much greenhouse gas as conventional oil.
THE FIGHT IS NOT OVER
Although this permit is definitely a setback — both in the fight against dirty oil and for the clean energy economy, the fight is by no means over for the Alberta Clipper or against dirty oil sands.
Continue Reading → Shortsighted Hillary Clinton Permits New Tar Sands Pipelines
By S. T., on February 22nd, 2009
 Hillary Clinton visits power plant in Beijing Secretary of State Hillary Clinton visited the Beijing Taiyanggong Gas-fueled Thermal Power Co., Ltd. (Taiyanggong Power Plant) of the Beijing Energy Investment Co., Ltd. in Beijing, capital of China on February 21. She also visited the Chinese president the same day, especially to reassure him that China’s investments in the U.S. were safe (that must have been a hard sell) and that we will work together to makes our economies strong again, according to a report by the CBC. You can see that and other world news reports on my old Civilianism articles site. (The news there is up to date).
Clinton said she had “very good meetings” with Chinese officials during her visit, which she called the beginning of “a new era” of China-U.S. relations characterized by positive cooperation. China owns a lot of our economy so they were mainly interested in meeting with Sec. Clinton on economic matters. The purpose of Clinton’s visit was to work on general relations with China, economic issues, and climate change/energy issues.
“BEIJING, Feb. 21 (Xinhua) — China and the United States on Saturday agreed to establish a dialogue on strategic and economic issues and pledged to work together to tackle the global financial crisis and climate change. The agreement came out of a flurry of meetings between Chinese leaders and visiting U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton on Saturday. “Now it is more important than anytime in the past to deepen and develop China-U.S. relations amid the spreading financial crisis and increasing global challenges,” Chinese President Hu Jintao told Clinton. Saying the relations were “among the most important bilateral relations in the world,” Hu proposed both countries work closely to address international financial crisis and tackle climate change and other global challenges so as to seek a sound and smooth growth of bilateral ties. . . . . . “
We’d better hope China is enthusiastic about working with us on climate issues. Last year, Science reported that China’s C02 emissions could equal the whole world’s emissions today, by 2030. They were constructing new coal plants at the rate of about two per week in 2008, with no serious signs of stopping in 2009. According to the journal Science in 2008: “China is completing two new coal plants per week. That power is being used to drive an enormous manufacturing expansion. China has increased steel production from 140 million tons in 2000 to 419 million tons in 2006, the authors report.” The U.S. has basically stopped opening new coal plants and the EPA’s decision on new coal plants and whether to tie them to the Clean Air Act is expected before April 2nd. The news source Xinhuanet also reported:
“On climate changes, Yang and Clinton agreed to work for a successful Copenhagen conference scheduled for December 2009. “The cooperation on energy resources and environmental protection is significant to the bilateral ties,” Yang said. Clinton said the U.S. and China will build “an important partnership” to develop clean energy technologies and speed up the transition to a low carbon economy. Later Saturday, Clinton visited a clean thermal power plant built with General Electric and Chinese technology, which Clinton hailed as “an example of Chinese and American cooperation to produce heat and energy from a new technique that reduce much less emission.”
If China is opening coal plants that often, they will probably need more than a meeting in December to get them to stop and transfer their energy to alternative methods, as the U.S. has begun doing.
By S. T., on January 28th, 2009
On Monday, January 26, 2009, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton announced the appointment of Special Envoy for Climate Change, Todd Stern. This is great news! We have never had a special envoy working on climate change issues around the world before. Another first for the Obama administration. Mr. Stern comes from the Center for American Progress, also the home of John Podesta, a leader in President Obama’s transition team. He was a senior fellow at CAP before joining the State Department.
 These were the opening remarks of both.
SECRETARY CLINTON: “Thank you. Thank you very much. Well, welcome to the State Department, but really, many of you work here and work at USAID and do the important business of our country, and I’m so pleased that you could join us today, because it is with great enthusiasm that I am naming today a Special Envoy for Climate Change.
As should be evident by now, the President and I believe that American leadership is essential to meeting the challenges of the 21st century. And chief among those is the complex, urgent, and global threat of climate change. From rapidly rising temperatures to melting arctic icecaps, from lower crop yields to dying forests, from unforgiving hurricanes to unrelenting droughts, we have no shortage of evidence that our world is facing a climate crisis.
You can read the rest of this here. He’s going to be a great addition to the State Department and it’s amazing that we even have a new special envoy like this. This would have never happened in the previous Bush regime.
And let’s be clear. A world in crisis goes well beyond the air we breathe, the food we eat, the water we drink. It is at once an environmental, economic, energy and national security issue with grave implications for America’s and the world’s future. A quick scan of the globe vividly conveys the human toll. Competition for scarcer resources like food and water will lead to further migrations of populations, regional conflicts, and greater disparities between the rich and poor. Reliance on foreign sources of oil and gas influence our way of life here at home and continues to compromise our national security.
So the urgency of the global climate crisis must not be underestimated, nor should the science behind it or the facts on the ground be ignored or dismissed. The time for realism and action is now. And President Obama and I recognize that the solutions to this crisis are both domestic and global, that all nations bear responsibility and all nations must work together to find solutions. Under President Obama, America will take the lead in addressing this challenge, both by making commitments of our own and engaging other nations to do the same. . . . . “
Mr. Stern: “As the President and Secretary Clinton have made clear, climate change poses a profound threat to our future. If our deepest obligation in life is to care for our children and leave a better world for them and those who follow, then we must confront climate change now with an entirely new level of commitment, energy, and focus. Our scientists are telling us, emphatically, that the rate at which we are warming the planet is unsustainable and will cause vast and potentially catastrophic damage to our environment, our economy, and our national security.”
Read the full text of the speeches here.
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