Tag Archives: Climate Change

Everything you need to know about Global Warming in 5 Minutes

Unlike Warren Buffett, Jeremy Grantham, chairman of Grantham Mayo van Otterloo, GMO.com, is not a “celebrity investor.” And also unlike Buffett, Grantham is an environmentalist. Jeremy and his wife, Hannelore, established the Grantham Foundation for the protection of the environment, and The Grantham Research on Climate Change and the Environment at the London School of Economics. Like Buffett, Mr. Grantham talks to investors who hire him, and via his investments, charities, and other work, he talks to the world.  Mr. Grantham recently wrote “Everything you want to know about Global Warming in 5 minutes“,

Two ideas stand out:

Climate warming involves hard science. The two most prestigious bastions of hard science are the National Academy in the U.S. and the Royal Society in the U.K., to which Isaac Newton and the rest of that huge 18th century cohort of brilliant scientists belonged.  The presidents of both societies wrote a note recently, emphasizing the seriousness of the climate problem and that it was man-made. …  Both societies have also made full reports on behalf of their membership stating the same.  Do we believe the whole elite of science is in a conspiracy?  At some point in the development of a scientific truth, contrarians risk becoming flat earthers.

Conspiracy theorists claim to believe that global warming is a carefully constructed hoax driven by scientists desperate for … what?  Being needled by nonscientific newspaper reports, by blogs, and by right-wing politicians and think tanks?

The full text is below:

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Wall Street and Climate Change

At Deutsch Bank, one of the world’s largest banks, there are some very bright people who understand that climate change is problem. An Internet search on “Deutsche Bank Climate Change” brings up links to Deutsche Bank Climate Change Advisors, which features a carbon counter,  showing the tons of Carbon Dioxide in the atmosphere, 3.6659 trillion metric tons.  Before the start of the “Industrial Revolution” there were approximately 2.5 trillion metric tons.  The question for the scientists is “What are the effects of shifting all this carbon from under the ground into the atmosphere?” For the citizens and policy makers, “Is this good or bad, and if bad, what should we do?”

What should Obama do? What is Celebrity Investor and Adviser to Presidents Warren Buffett doing?

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Earth Day For the Future

Earth from Space, Courtesy NASA

In 100 years our descendants will not be burning coal, oil, natural gas or using nuclear fission.  They might be using terrestrial nuclear fusion.  They will be using solar, wind, geothermal, marine current hydro, tidal energy systems – clean, renewable, sustainable energy systems. No fuel: No Waste. No mines, mills, wells, spills. No arsenic, lead, mercury, selenium, thorium – no fly ash to be contained or to leak.

We have started.  California and New Jersey lead the U. S. Germany and Spain lead Europe. Boeing and Richard Branson’s Virgin Atlantic want to build aircraft that run on biodiesel.  We need to move forward in a big way – to 100% clean energy in 10 years, to retrain coal miners and oil rig operators to build and run solar arrays and wind turbines, and dig deep geothermal systems.

Sustainability and Carbon Sequestration

Abstract. By burning fossil fuels we have put 3.6 trillion tons of Carbon Dioxide, CO2 in the atmosphere1 in the last 200 years – most in the last 60. This has changed the concentration of atmospheric CO2 from 270 parts per Million, ppm, to 390 ppm, an increase of approximately 31%. This increase of atmospheric CO2 is resulting in changing precipitation and rising temperatures, from the equator to the poles.

The typical modern reductionist approach is to simplify the problem to develop a solution:

“Burning coal, oil, and natural gas puts CO2 into the atmosphere. All we need to do to solve the problem is modify the machines so they burn fossil fuel without releasing CO2 into the atmosphere. How do we do that? We should capture the carbon dioxide, and the arsenic, mercury, other heavy metals, radionucleotides, etc, and store it somewhere.”

But we need to remember that we are burning coal, oil, and natural gas for a reason: to generate heat, hot water, electricity and transportation. There are alternative energy technologies, including nuclear, solar, and wind.

Coal with Carbon Sequestration is estimated to cost $10 to $15 Billion per gigawatt, without considering the costs of mining, processing and transporting the coal, cleaning up after mining, and isolating the arsenicals, mercury, and radionucleotides released from burning coal.  Solar is estimated to cost $6.5 Billion per gigawatt – with no fuel and no wastes. Wind $2 to $3 Billion per gigawatt – with no fuel and no wastes.

We at Popular Logistics think, feel and believe that we need to replace coal with solar and wind immediately.

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God, Keynes, and Clean Energy

Columbia University

Columbia University

NY. Jan. 25. Mark Fulton, “Climate Change Strategist” Deutsche BankAsset Management, spoke at Cary Krosinsky’s class in Sustainable Investing at the CERC, the Center for Environmental Research and Conservation, Earth Institute, Columbia University.

Krosinsky, Vice President of Trucost, recently co-edited and wrote the book Sustainable Investing: The Art of Long Term Performance with Nick Robins of HSBC. He is an Advisory Board member of the Association of Climate Change Officers (ACCO) and founder director of InvestorWatch. Trucost has built and maintains the world’s largest database of carbon emissions and other environmental impacts as generated by the world’s largest public and private companies. Their data and expertise is used by leading global fund managers and asset owners to manage carbon risk. Continue reading →

El Nino Batters Southern California

Evidence of Climate Change?

Floods in Los Angeles, California, Jan. 2010.

Over 300 residents of Los Angeles were ordered to evacuate because of the threat of mudslides from the rains. These rains are related El Niño, a warm ocean current from the South Pacific, according to CNN meteorologist Chad Myers  (click here). The effects of El Nino and the Southern Oscillation are amplified by the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and the oceans, which has increased from approximately 250 parts per million to 390 ppm in the last 150 years, due primarily to burning coal, oil, and other fossil fuels.

Clouds and Rain over Los Angeles, California
Clouds and Rain over Los Angeles, California

City and county officials warned Tuesday that significant rainfall on already saturated soil could cause mudslides and debris flows, especially below the steep slopes that burned last year.

Evacuations in La Canada Flintridge, La Crescenta and parts of Glendale were scheduled to begin Wednesday, Jan. 20, 2010. Officials hope to have everyone out of danger by the time the third storm in as many days hits Southern California.

For details on El Nino and the Southern Oscillation on the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, NOAA web-site click here . For an overview on Popular Logistics, click here and here . Refer also to William James Burroughs’ reference text, Climate Change, A Multidisciplinary Approach, 2nd Edition, 2007, Cambridge University Press, 2007, ISBN 978-0-521-87015-3 or 978-0-521-69033-1.

California Brown Pelicans in an IBRRC shelter. Photo courtesy IBRRCThe rains are also stressing the California brown pelican. Bird rescue experts at the International Bird Rescue Research Center, IBRRC, are fighting to save over 100 cold, wet California Brown Pelicans, as more hypothermic birds keep coming. Their Waterproof feathers usually allow pelicans to float and stay insulated from weather changes, the current massive runoff from storms has brought even more grease, car oil sheen, fish oils and other forms of surface pollution into the coastal areas where these birds feed.  “Many brown pelicans have been found soaking wet and in a critical condition,” says IBRRC Director Jay Holcomb, “and since the storms kept coming, one after another, the wet birds did not have time to dry off and feed, and are becoming weak and hypothermic.

Evidence of Climate Change?

Is the drought of the last few years, followed by this years heavy rain and flood a shift in the weather or a change in the climate?

Copenhagen, India, China, the US, and GAIA

I’m beginning to think that Copenhagen was what it had to be, what it could only be. It fulfilled its Buddha-nature. Thus, I don’t consider it a failure. Nor do I consider it a success. It was what it was, what it could have been, what it had to be:

A gathering of emissaries from the 64 corners of the earth.

Courtesy of NASA

Earth From Space, Copyright NASA

Isaac Asimov observed in Foundation (ISBN: 978-0553293357) that “diplomacy, is the art of speaking for a long time without saying anything.” Most of the diplomats in Copenhagen had multiple agendas. Unfortunately for billions of the world’s poorest, the public agendas of sustainability and the abstract “Gaia Hypothesis” were distant fourth and fifth behind the private agendas of power, money, and influence.

The inconvenient truth is that much of Bangla Desh, California, Louisiana, Southern Florida will disappear, submerged, like the mythical Atlantis. China will continue to build 2 coal plants per week. And people will die.

But disregarding this notion, a Chinese diplomat Continue reading →

Copenhagen, Climate Change, China, and Dessert

Sea IceEarlier today one of my friends handed me a copy of some satire published in the New York Post, a tabloid in the tradition of the London rags, on the subject of “Climate-Gate.”  At about the same time, Roger Saillant, co-author of Vapor Trails, who heads the Fowler Center for Sustainable Value at Case Western Reserve University pointed me to Elizabeth May’s post on the hacked computers and stolen e-mails at East Anglia University. Ms. May leads Canada’s Green Party.

Patrick Michaels, of the Competitive Enterprise Institute, which is really a public relations arm of Exxon Mobil, was once a scientist at the University of Virginia.  He is famous for giving testimony attacking Dr. James Hansen to the U.S. Senate. However, when interviewed by Elizabeth May on Canada’s CBC Sunday Morning’s “Kyoto on Trial” in 2002, Michaels admitted to redrawing Hansen’s graph to make it wrong. Michaels, who has traded the scientific method for Stanislavsky’s acting method, admitted to perjury in his testimony before the United States Senate.

The graph shows the amount of sea ice from July thru November from 1979 to 2000, then in 2005, 7, 8, and July thru Sept., 2009. It is from the National Snow and Ice Data Center, Boulder Colorado (here) published Oct. 6, 2009. The dark gray line shows Arctic sea ice from 1979 to 2000. The gray band shows 2 standard deviations from the mean. The colorful lines show that Arctic sea ice is at or well below two standard deviations from the mean levels of 1979 to 2000.  Clearly there is less ice in the Arctic then there used to be. Continue reading →

Myth and Science on Global Warming

Seven Answers to Climate Contrarian Nonsense

This article presents and debunks myths about climate change.

Evidence for human interference with Earth’s climate continues to accumulate

By John Rennie, Scientific American, November 30, 2009

“On November 18, U.S. Sen. James R. Inhofe (R–Okla.) took the floor of the Senate and proclaimed 2009 to be “The Year of the Skeptic.” Had the senator’s speech marked a new commitment to dispassionate, rational inquiry, a respect for scientific thought and a well-grounded doubt in ghosts, astrology, creationism and homeopathy, it might have been cause for cheer. But Inhofe had a more narrow definition of skeptic in mind: he meant “standing up and exposing … the costs and the hysteria behind global warming alarmism.”

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Business News That's Fit To Print

There’s a lot in these articles, and a lot to read between the lines in these articles from the New York Times

– Business Section. (Between the Lines Concept 1

– the Business Section, not the Science

section.)

From E.U. Plan to Curb Carbon Dioxide Would Favor Solar Power

By James Kanter.

07energy_190“The European Commission is expected to introduce a plan to reduce greenhouse gas emissions that directs the largest slices of €50 billion available for research and development to solar power and capturing and burying emissions from coal plants.”

“But the plan also signals the need for a reordering of the bloc’s priorities by requiring governments to spend significantly greater sums of money on clean energy even as the world emerges from a deep financial crisis.”

  • 16 Billion Euros for Solar.
  • 13 Billion Euros for emissions capture and storage.
  • 11 billion Euros for enhanced urban efficiency.
  • 7 billion Euros for improving nuclear energy – produce less radioactive waste, minimize proliferation.

Between The Lines Concept 2: Euros 13 Billion for Emissions Capture and Storage – that’s a lot of money. Assuming they can make it work – Carbon Capture and Storage has never been done, and other coal waste storage is expensive and difficult. Kingston, Tennessee Coal Ash Spill – Nasa / National Geographic / Popular Logistics 1 / Popular Logistics 2

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The Great Ocean Conveyor

The “Seven Seas” are really one big interconnected ocean. While many people may have been unconscious of this fact, we, meaning humanity, have known this since 1522, when, led by Juan Sebastian Elcano, the 18 remaining members of Ferdinand Magellan’s 237 man crew completed the circumnavigation of the earth, begun in 1519.  This lesson has been reinforced by images from aircraft, spacecraft, and satellites.  We have also known about the “Southern Oscillation (SO) since the 1920’s. As described by Sir Gilbert Walker, “When pressure is high in the Pacific Ocean, it tends to be low in the Indian Ocean from Africa to Australia.”

conveyorWe also now are beginning to understand that the there is a tremendous current, the Great Ocean Conveyor Belt, which traverses the Pacific, the Indian, and the Atlantic, which interacts with winds, which maintains the Gulf Stream, and transports energy towards the poles. For more on this, including the image, above, see the National Weather Service and NOAA web pages . The red band is warmer water near the surface; the dark blue band is denser, colder, water that runs deeper.

A global circulation which extends to the depths of the sea called the Great Ocean Conveyor. Also called the thermohaline circulation, it is driven by differences in the density of the sea water which is controlled by temperature (thermal) and salinity (haline).

The Gulf Stream is part of the Great Ocean Conveyor, which is why the waters off the Jersey Shore are always warm in September. How does this effect climate change and climate stabilization? And how do El Nino and La Nina effect the Great Ocean Conveyor? I don’t know. I think the Great Ocean Conveyor serves to dampen the magnitude of fluctuations in weather and changes in the climate. However, I also think there is evidence to suggest that El Nino and the Southern Oscillation (ENSO) have been more pronounced in recent years, and these may have be related to the earthquakes that triggered the tsunamis that hit Indonesia in 2004 and 2009.

Stay tuned.