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Forever changing

the climate.

It seems that potential new Shale oilfields in Argentina, Russia and Algeria also hold giant reserves of expensive, hard-to-get, difficult-to-refine, sludge to pout in our gas tanks.

Analysis by IHS published on Tuesday morning suggests fields including the Vaca Muerta of Argentine, the Bazhenov shale of Siberia and the Silurian shales of north Africa could produce more than the Bakken shale of North Dakota and the Eagle Ford of Texas.

However, the research group’s findings also show that costs for extracting “tight oil” reserves, held in shales and other challenging rocks, are significantly higher in other countries than in North America, suggesting they will need a higher oil price to be commercially viable.

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Choice of Words

We all make these choices constantly, but the terms and context of the way people describe certain things always bares some unpacking.

Example: Canada’s natural resources minister, Joe Oliver, in Washington, D.C., trying to drum up support for the Keystone XL pipeline and criticizing NASA’s James Hansen for the dramatic terms he uses to frame opposition to the project –

In Oliver’s view, however, the scientist has had no business to keep speaking out as he has. “He was the one who said four years ago that if we go ahead with development of the oil sands it’s game over for the planet,” Oliver told the audience at the Centre for Strategic and International Studies. “Well, this is exaggerated rhetoric. It’s frankly nonsense. I don’t know why he said it but he should be ashamed of having said it.”

It’s not clear why Oliver was so vehement. The minister launched his attack on Hansen just 48 hours after a report from the Environmental Protection Agency essentially reaffirmed the climate scientist’s concerns about the development of the tar sands.

Emphasis mine, and the words before the quote are the Guardian‘s, but this whole idea about whose business it is to do what is, um… interesting. People opposed to the further opening of yet another carbon spigot, one that could also accidentally poison the aquifer beneath the world’s breadbasket, have no business using vehement rhetoric to emphasize their opposition. But fossil oil interests are perfectly within their rights when they assure the public that this project will create jobs, is environmentally sound and will decrease gas prices.

All of these claims are demonstrably false. What’s really revealing and worth looking into is why the First Nations are opposed to the pipeline – after all, it would be much easier for TransCanada, and closer to China, if they just went west with tar sands crude to Vancouver.

As much as we are surrounded by euphemism and Orwellian doublespeak, people still reveal just what they mean by the words they use.

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The 2nd Law of Thermodynamics and change

Our societies are built to move slowly, says Bill McKibben in the Guardian. And that’s the difficulty with climate change:

We’re talking about a fight between human beings and physics. And physics is entirely uninterested in human timetables. Physics couldn’t care less if precipitous action raises gas prices, or damages the coal industry in swing states. It could care less whether putting a price on carbon slowed the pace of development in China, or made agribusiness less profitable.

Physics doesn’t understand that rapid action on climate change threatens the most lucrative business on Earth, the fossil fuel industry. It’s implacable. It takes the carbon dioxide we produce and translates it into heat, which means into melting ice and rising oceans and gathering storms. And unlike other problems, the less you do, the worse it gets. Do nothing and you soon have a nightmare on your hands.

What are the dimensions to understanding climate change? He lists them, but what do you tell yourself that you have to know? More importantly, and this is the sticky part, what do you tell yourself so that you don’t have to think about it? This gets ugly, quickly, but it’s not like a +4 degree C is going to be a walk in the park.

I think we’ve figured out one of the key metrics – 350 PPM. Get down to that, charge people for the carbon we pump into the atmosphere and the problem… at least begins to change.

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The Ocean-Carbon Cycle

I just heard about this yesterday, from a marine scientist working on modeling the associated feedback loops as the pace of climate change alters the extent to which giant green zones in the deep ocean are sucking up some of our bulging CO2 inventory. Because of the ‘nature’ of our stupid discourse about climate change, no one hears about this at all. But that doesn’t mean it isn’t, you know, still happening:

Evidence suggests that the past and current ocean uptake of human-derived (anthropogenic) CO2 is primarily a physical response to rising atmospheric CO2 concentrations. Whenever the partial pressure of a gas is increased in the atmosphere over a body of water, the gas will diffuse into that water until the partial pressures across the air-water interface are equilibrated. However, because the global carbon cycle is intimately embedded in the physical climate system there exist several feedback loops between the two systems.

So this is different from hypoxia zones in the Gulf of Mexico, as the shelf there is so shallow that the giant algal blooms just take up all of the oxygen, from everything. At greater depths, the rot has the chance to sink to the bottom and be absorbed by phytoplankton, eventually becoming some form of poop, settling to the bottom and working its way into the system (explanation below). This is why these giant expanses of green water in the open ocean are good things, even as they emanate from the Amazon River and cloud the pristine Caribbean. They are caused by the same forces that create biological dead zones in the Gulf of Mexico – the spewing of nutrient-rich effluent into ocean. But the rate they are changing from other forces, like the changing hydrologic cycle (warning: giant pdf) in the Amazon basin*, must go un- or under-discussed all because of the issue which must not be named, per the above mentioned discourse stupidity, which is more like cupidity than anything.

*The Amazon basin has experienced its worst droughts and its worst flooding in the last five years. Talk about naturally alarming. This is the kind of thing that needs to be reported on with the seriousness given to the pregnancy of a titular princess, mailed out and extensively unpacked, where you are left with the realization that you need to start walking to work now and forever more, saving your car trips for something special-er than buying lottery tickets or browsing at the mall. I have intentionally tried to offer a cursory explanation of the ocean-carbon cycle to demonstrate about how difficult it is to talk, which is one of the lower reasons that we don’t know more about it. No excuse, though it remains.

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I can see my house from here

Sorry, Ross. Check out these new images from NASA.

Earth, smaller

Massive version here.

So delicate, so just there, how would you think of defending the tiny blue band of atmosphere holding everything in place?

Hmmm? Hint: not fancy tanks or helicopters>

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That Sound You Hear, part MCMXLV

biff-21

This is, just, hilarious. If you think dumb is funny.

The cover story of this week’s National Journal takes a deeper dive into a question we’ve explored before: What happened to the Republican consensus on climate change?

Three years ago, prominent Republicans including Mitt Romney, Newt Gingrich, Rep. John Boehner (R-OH), Rep. Fred Upton (R-MI), Tim Pawlenty, and Sarah Palin all expressed belief in human-caused climate change. Several even voiced strong support for policies to cap and reduce carbon pollution. Today, all six of these leaders have joined the rest of the Republican Party in a sudden and near-unified retreat to silence or denial.

When contacted by the National Journal, only 65 out of all 289 GOP lawmakers in Congress would agree to be interviewed on the topic. Of those interviewed, only 19 said they believed that human activities are at least partly responsible for climate change. Of the 19, only five (or fewer than 2 percent of GOP lawmakers) attributed a “significant amount” of climate change to human activity.

So, what happened?

It’s not the science that has changed — it’s only gotten stronger. As Ralph Cicerone, president of the National Academy of Sciences and chair of the National Research Council, said: The level of scientific certainty that human-induced greenhouse gas emissions are causing climate change is comparable to the strength of our understanding that vaccines prevent measles and polio.

They don’t deserve to lead a line to the port-o-let.

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Ignore This

Don’t even think about the fact that 2010 saw the largest spike in global warming gases in 50 million years:

Harmful carbon emissions from burning fossil fuels made their biggest ever annual jump in 2010, according to the US Department of Energy’s latest world data released this week.

China led the way with a spike of 212 million metric tons of carbon in 2010 over 2009, compared to 59 million metric tons more from the United States and 48 million metric tons more from India in the same period.

“It’s big,” Tom Boden, director of the Carbon Dioxide Information Analysis Center Environmental Sciences Division at the DOE’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee, told AFP in an interview.

“Our data go back to 1751, even before the Industrial Revolution. Never before have we seen a 500-million-metric-ton carbon increase in a single year,” he said.

Mm Hmm. So there’s at least two levels here: what you are doing personally to address this fact (it counts) plus what are the useless politicians who represent you doing. Unless I’m mistaken (and/or you’re reading this from another country), that’s two levels of apathy. Blaming China and India isn’t going to do anything about your commute, your inefficient house, the amount of waste you generate. Find some place that seems just beyond manageable and start there. At first, it seems true; you can’t do anything. Until you start doing something, even a little, and wanting to do more. Nothing to gain but a little superiority and the transferable right to bitch.

via Juan Cole.

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Climate Debate: Over

In a quadruple over-time thriller that went so far past the wire it might be too late to do anything, climate change deniers are now providing evidence that climate change is actually happening and the scientific community was actually, uh, right:

In the press release announcing the results, Muller said, “Our biggest surprise was that the new results agreed so closely with the warming values published previously by other teams in the US and the UK.” In other words, climate scientists know what they’re doing after all.

The BEST report is purely an estimate of planetary warming, and it makes no estimate of how much this warming is due to human activity. So in one sense, its impact is limited since the smarter skeptics have already abandoned the idea that warming is a hoax and now focus their fire solely on the contention that it’s man-made. (And the even smarter ones have given up on that, too, and now merely argue that it’s economically pointless to try to stop it.) Still, the fact that climate scientists turned out to be careful and thorough in their basic estimates of temperature rise surely enhances their credibility in general. Climategate was always a ridiculous sideshow, and this is just one more nail in its coffin. Climate scientists got the basic data right, and they’ve almost certainly gotten the human causes right too.

Graphs and other keys to the idiocy at the link.

Well-funded liars = still liars.

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Back at the Front, part MCMLXVI

We diddle about whether there is anything to do anything about, meanwhile Australia (highest per capita carbon emissions) passes a tax on carbon.

The legislation would force about 500 of the biggest polluters to pay for each tonne of carbon dioxide they emit.

The tax is central to the government’s strategy to combat climate change, but the opposition says it will cause job losses and raise the cost of living.

Australia is the world’s largest coal exporter and one of the biggest per capita greenhouse gas emitters.

“Today is a significant day for Australians and the Australians of the future who want to see a better environment,” Prime Minister Julia Gillard said before the vote.

It can be done and people (and people fromerly known as companies) will adjust. As they will to a tax on trading stocks, bonds and derivatives.

The jobs’ bill filibuster… look into it and you’ll see how completely captured our (odd pronoun choice, more needed) legislators are to the will and wishes of corporate interests. They can’t even discuss voting on a jobs bill, much less a carbon tax.

But Australia did. Maybe they decided to put the sharks back in the water where they belong.

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Killing ‘carbon-capture’ Softly

You often hear – and I often write – about the unfashionable ‘need for more government regulation.’ Whether it is exotic financial instruments or greenhouse gas emissions, there is really no other entity who can handle reigning in our excesses at the scale of their own destructive impacts. The discussion is often set up as a public vs. big business, easy-to-understand (if not swallow) debate. But what gets less attention is how much big business needs sustained government policies, too.

American Electric Power, a huge utility company providing electricity mainly in the Midwest, is postponing or killing plans to build a full-scale “carbon capture” facility at its Mountaineer plant, in West Virginia.

Then Fallows hits on the implications:

Companies can’t do this without a sustained government policy. AEP, which is by no means a pinko organization — it is running acampaign now of complaint about burdensome EPA regulations — said the reason it was calling off the plans was governmental failure to set a clean energy/climate policy. By definition, any “cleaner” form of using coal will be more expensive than the current dirty approach, at least in the short run. This is true “by definition” because if the cleaner approaches were cheaper, the utilities would already have switched to them; because the cleanup technology is still in its developmental phase; and because in many places cleaner systems mean new capital investment.

You should also read his cover story on our future with coal, but this is an important addendum to it. It’s the other side of the story of companies needing to know what the regulations will be in order to plan. And whatever they are, companies will adapt. That means even if they hate it, which they will, they will still find a way to profit. Hint to EPA, Congress and the WH: go ahead and do something.