Arctic Sea Ice to Disappear by 2030

More evidence of just how serious the situation is:


"Sea ice in the Arctic is melting at a record pace this year, suggesting warming at the north pole is speeding up and a largely ice-free Arctic can be expected in summer months within 30 years.

The area of the Arctic ocean at least 15% covered in ice is this week about 8.5m sq kilometres – lower than the previous record low set in 2007 – according to satellite monitoring by the US National Snow and Ice Data Centre (NSIDC) in Boulder, Colorado. In addition, new data from the University of Washington Polar Science Centre, shows that the thickness of Arctic ice this year is also the lowest on record.

In the past 10 days, the Arctic ocean has been losing as much as 150,000 square kilometres of sea a day, said Mark Serreze, director of the NSIDC.

'The extent [of the ice cover] is going down, but it is also thinning. So a weather pattern that formerly would melt some ice, now gets rid of much more. There will be ups and downs, but we are on track to see an ice-free summer by 2030. It is an overall downward spiral.'"
The Entire Article

More Awards for the Chevy Volt

Best Caption from a contest by Filmark:
Dear Chevy Volt Owners, Please be courteous and buy a gallon of gas a couple times a year if you desire to continue to use our facilities to clean your windshields. Thank you, The Management.”

Since its introduction, the Chevy Volt has won just about every Automotive award available to it.

Here's one more:

MOTORWEEK NAMES CHEVROLET VOLT 2011 DRIVERS’ CHOICE “BEST OF THE YEAR”

CHICAGO, IL -- Delivering a practical electric car for the masses, the Chevrolet Volt eclipsed the competition to capture MotorWeek’s coveted “Best of the Year” 2011 Drivers’ Choice Award. The honor was announced at the 2011 Chicago Auto Show by MotorWeek, television’s longest running and most respected automotive series.

It's All a Hoax...

A Victory for Climate Science

Exxonmobil Finally Cuts Financing to Deniers

From The Guardian:

according to Greenpeace’s research director, Kert Davies, ExxonMobil has sharply reduced its funding for groups that dispute that global warming is under way.


Greenpeace used a Freedom of Information Act Request to obtain extensive records and e-mails from the Smithsonian regarding Dr. Soon’s research funding. It discovered, for example, a $55,000 grant from ExxonMobil in 2007-8 for research on “Arctic climate change.”

For more than a decade now, climate scientists and their allies have linked Exxon money to groups that promote skepticism of the science underlying global warming. The links brought Exxon some negative press. Then in 2008, the company promised shareholders it would stop financing groups that had become a “distraction.”

Many climate groups wondered if it would follow through. But recent evidence indicates that it has to a significant extent. Alan Jeffers, an ExxonMobil spokesperson, says the company and its foundation are no longer disbursing grants to Dr. Soon, for example.

Greenpeace said that Exxon’s most recent annual worldwide giving report, released this week, confirmed that it was not financing Dr. Soon. Numerous other groups that are critics of climate science and longtime Exxon beneficiaries — the Frontiers of Freedom and the Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow, for example — have also been dropped, according to that report.

In total, Greenpeace found Exxon has reduced its donations to such groups from a peak of $3.4 million in 2005 to less than $800,000 for 2010.

Now if we can just do something about the Koch brothers...

Actually, this fits with my own observations - there is just less going on in the Denier camp this year - the extreme weather around the world has driven many to silence. Denialism is not going to disappear soon, but it looks like Mother Nature has driven them for cover for a while.


The most Ironic bit is that Sen. James Inhofe, the biggest Denier in the US Senate, has had to cancel his participating in the Heartland Climate Denial Conference because he's "Under the Weather"... It turns out he went swimming in algae infested water - algae brought on by Warming...

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The Answer for Cow Farts?

One item contributing to Global Warming that always gets a laugh from Deniers is Cow farts - the methane being produced by cattle. Deniers seem to think this proves that Mother Nature is in charge, and there's nothing we can do about it, completely overlooking the fact that those are OUR cows..

Some extreme "Warmists" are almost as, bad, also assuming there's nothing we can do about cows. Their only solution is to ban cattle - something confirmed carnivores such as myself will never accept.

So what CAN we do?

"Earth facing mini-ice age!!" say the media. Now for the science....

How Climate Science Grew

The following is an interactive tool develped by the Bloggers at Skeptical Science that shows how many papers have been issued on the subject, year by year. The bigger the bubble, the more papers there were:

Climate Science History

Fascinating...

Postponement

Are You Ready for More?

From Newsweek:

Joplin, Missouri after the tornado that hit on May 22

Joplin, Mo., was prepared. The tornado warning system gave residents 24 minutes’ notice that a twister was bearing down on them. Doctors and nurses at St. John’s Regional Medical Center, who had practiced tornado drills for years, moved fast, getting patients away from windows, closing blinds, and activating emergency generators. And yet more than 130 people died in Joplin, including four people at St. John’s, where the tornado sucked up the roof and left the building in ruins, like much of the shattered city.

Even those who deny the existence of global climate change are having trouble dismissing the evidence of the last year. In the U.S. alone, nearly 1,000 tornadoes have ripped across the heartland, killing more than 500 people and inflicting $9 billion in damage. The Midwest suffered the wettest April in 116 years, forcing the Mississippi to flood thousands of square miles, even as drought-plagued Texas suffered the driest month in a century. Worldwide, the litany of weather’s extremes has reached biblical proportions. The 2010 heat wave in Russia killed an estimated 15,000 people. Floods in Australia and Pakistan killed 2,000 and left large swaths of each country under water. A months-long drought in China has devastated millions of acres of farmland. And the temperature keeps rising: 2010 was the hottest year on earth since weather records began.

From these and other extreme-weather events, one lesson is sinking in with terrifying certainty. The stable climate of the last 12,000 years is gone. Which means you haven’t seen anything yet. And we are not prepared.

The "Temp Leads Carbon" Crock: Updated

I'm A Climate Scientist

Renewable Energy CAN Work!

Copied from Climate Progress, by Stephen Lacey:

Throughout my years covering clean energy, I’ve found that people involved in the field generally fall into two camps. The first camp – typically made up of investors, engineers and developers in the business of renewable energy – argues that clean energy can scale to high penetrations with current technologies. The second camp – made up of a diverse group of doubters, spin artists, cautious supporters and high-minded futurists – believes that we can only bring renewables to scale with dramatic breakthroughs in technology.


Of course, the latter group’s view is not completely wrong: We certainly need continued technological progress in order to bring down the cost of manufacturing, increase efficiencies and make installation easier. However, their arguments often lead to the perception that renewables are not ready today – which is completely false (see Pro-geoengineering Bill Gates disses efficiency, “cute” solar, deployment).

Saying that clean energy can’t scale without significant breakthroughs is like saying we shouldn’t bother with the internet because all we have is desktop computers and DSL, rather than powerful mobile devices and a 4G network. The fact is we are in the middle of an important period of technological progress today, and saying that we need to wait for something “game-changing” to take action is wrong and downright dangerous.

We Have a Winner!!! 4470 MPG!

I haven't published much about the Volt recently, (just one article) as I was very enthusiastic originally, and have seen no reason to change my opinion in any way since.

But DonC, an owner commenting in the "WindingRoad" site, seems to have hit the Jackpot!

People who compare the Volt to the Prius are delusional. If you look at ride and handling and quietness and weight and safety, a Volt is more comparable to a Mercedes E550 (check out the specs on Road & Track and you'll find that the Volt only loses on the 0-60 time and cabin space). A Prius? You have to be kidding! I've given rides in my Volt to a couple of Prius owners. "Stunned" is the word that best describes their reaction. One guy said: "In my Prius I can't even hear my daughter if she's in the back seat. In this car it would be like she was whispering in my ear". Basically it's unfair to compare a noisy econobox to a Zen car. At some point you get what you pay for.


Speaking of paying, if you go to the Toyota web site and configure a Prius so it is similarly equipped to a Volt the price is somewhere between $35K and $38K. Not very different than a fully equipped Volt at $35k - $36K after the federal rebate.

As for gas mileage, no comparison there either. After 1028 miles and three and a half weeks I've used .23 gallons of gas. That's a decimal point followed by a "23". If you do the math you find that's a real world MPG of 4469.57. Eat your heart out Prius owners. (And yes I had to use electricity. In fact I used 308 kWh @ $.06/kWh at a total cost of $18.52. Like I said, eat your hearts out Prius owners! )
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Northern Canada Glaciers Melting Faster than in Alaska

FAIRBANKS — The glaciers and ice fields of Canada’s far-north islands have lost enough water over the last few summers to fill three-quarters of Illiamna Lake, Alaska’s largest. This news comes just a few years after typical melting from the same region would have only filled one quarter of the same lake each year.

“It was a massive increase between these two periods (2004 to 2006 and the record warmth of 2007 to 2009),” said glaciologist Gabriel Wolken, coauthor of a new paper in which scientists claim that glacial ice of the Canadian Arctic Archipelago contributes more to sea-level rise than any regional group of ice outside Greenland or Antarctica.

Hell and High Water, Part II

From AccuWeather.com

TEXAS HELL

“This is a situation of historic proportions,” said Victoria Koenig, public information officer with the Texas Forest Service, in a phone interview with AccuWeather.com Tuesday. “The fuels are so dry. The winds are astronomical. The behavior of the winds is a perplexing situation. It’s never been like this before.”

Koenig added, “When you put all the ingredients together, you’re getting close to having the ‘perfect fire storm‘.”

That’s Accuweather meteorologist Heather Buchman writing about “a never-before-seen wildfire situation in Texas has led to the scorching of nearly 1 million acres and destruction of hundreds of homes and buildings.

Texas is in the midst of one of the worst droughts, in terms of the depth and expanse of drought conditions, since the early 1900s.

Energy Dept. says U.S. on track for 1M electric cars by 2015

From Greenbeat:

Nissan Leaf and Chevy Volt Charging - One Owner!

U.S. President Barack Obama’s goal to have more than 1 million plug-in electric cars on U.S. roadways by 2015 is well on its way to being completed, according to Assistant Energy Secretary David Sandalow.


Sandalow’s statement comes as delays of the Nissan Leaf and other concerns have fanned scrutiny of how the commercial viability of electric cars. Pike Research estimates that U.S. electric vehicle supply in 2015 will be closer to 841,000 cars. Sandalow made the statements at a meeting with the Society of Automotive Engineers in Detroit today.

The government released a report saying its the electric car supply in the U.S. will total 1.2 million cars by “conservative” estimates for 2015. The report doesn’t include key automakers like Toyota, which has the plug-in Prius planned for 2012, and startup Coda, which says it wants to sell an ambitious 14,000 of its electric sedans in its first year of production.

But the report projects supply of the Nissan Leaf in the U.S. this year to be 25,000 cars. By the DOE report’s account, 300,000 of the expected 1.2 million electric cars in 2015 will be Nissan Leafs, meaning the government expects Leafs to account for one in every four electric cars available by 2015. Nissan has to date only brought 453 leaf vehicles stateside. The company has about 20,000 reservations, and reportedly 40 percent of those reservations have become purchases. And Nissan seems to face a setback in the Leaf’s production every time it turns around — whether it’s a glitch in the system or a massive earthquake that stalls the car’s production line.

While General Motors seems to be faring better with production of the Chevy Volt — which will account for around half of the electric vehicles on the road, according to the report — the actual sales numbers this year for the Nissan Leaf will be anyone’s guess. But the Department of Energy seems confident enough — even though there isn’t any hard evidence that Nissan will be able to ramp up production to meet U.S. demand for the electric car.
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Oil Shortages and Environmental Decline Could Create "Global Quagmire" - Cdn Military

KINGSTON, Ont. — The planet is running out of oil and heading toward a future that could trap Canada in a violent spiral of decline in the economy and the environment, a special research unit within the Canadian military is predicting.

This "global quagmire" is one of four possible future scenarios advanced by the six members of the team who are developing a plan for the army of tomorrow based on existing scientific research and analysis.

In a best-case scenario, they predict that Canada could be at the forefront of a prosperous green economy, in which clean energy and environmental protection are priorities and living standards improve around the world.

Two other scenarios fall in between, but all four alternatives conclude that energy security and global environmental change are the most serious and unpredictable factors that could radically alter society as well as the role of Canada's army.

"It all depends on what kind of steps are taken today that could lead to various futures," Peter Gizewski, a strategic analyst on the team, told Postmedia News.

Members of the team said that climate change in particular could have a wide range of consequences, as well as oil shortages in a world with no alternative sources of energy.

The team has also noted that the world is now consuming oil faster than it's being discovered. "Globally, we find more (oil) all the time, but we haven't actually found as much as we've used in a given year since 1985," said Maj. John Sheahan, another member of the research team.

From the long (term) view, it's guaranteed that something else will take over (as an energy source), we just don't know what or when. . . . Nobody has yet come up with the solution (so) that we can (continue to) do the things we do now and have done for decades. So it is possible that the time line is against us."

The global quagmire scenario predicts a world ravaged by climate change and environmental degradation in which "markets are highly unstable" and there are high risks of widespread conflicts involving ownership and access to oil, water, food and other resources.

Deniers Do Their Own Research

Borrowed Liberally from Climate Progress:

I should point ot that this Group isn't the Wild Eyed Idiots (DENIERS) who would Deny their own mother if she suggested there was anything to AGW - these are people who had genuine doubts, and didn't trust the usual Climate Scientists.

The goal of the Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature Study was to assemble some clever scientists and statisticians “to resolve current criticism of the [global] temperature analyses, and to prepare an open record that will allow rapid response to further criticism or suggestions.”

A Very Important Development

A new announcement as of today, from the BBC:


Islay to get major tidal power scheme

A major tidal energy project is to be built in the Sound of Islay off the west coast of Scotland.

The Scottish government has approved plans for 10 tidal turbines, which will generate enough electricity to power more than 5,000 homes.

Scottish Power Renewables is behind the scheme. It put forward plans to invest £40m installing the turbines in the waters off Islay, which offer strong tidal flows and shelter from storms. The required grid capacity to handle the array is also available in the area.

Finance and Sustainable Growth Secretary John Swinney said: "With around a quarter of Europe's potential tidal energy resource and a tenth of the wave capacity, Scotland's seas have unrivalled potential to generate green energy, create new, low carbon jobs, and bring billions of pounds of investment to Scotland.

"This development - the largest tidal array in the world - does just that and will be a milestone in the global development of tidal energy."

Keith Anderson, chief executive of Scottish Power Renewables, said: "Today's announcement moves the whole marine renewables industry forward in Scotland and the UK. "It is a first in terms of Marine Scotland approval for a tidal project in Scotland, and also a world first for an array of tidal power machines.

"The understanding we develop from Islay will be essential in delivering the larger planned projects in the Pentland Firth. The Islay project now looks set to be the world's first tidal power array and, once built, will triple the current capacity of marine energy projects in the UK.”

Islay could soon be dwarfed by that much larger scheme planned for the Pentland Firth, where there are proposals for 1,600 megawatts of production in the coming years, compared to Islay's 10-megawatt array.

Islay is important to me personally, as that's my family's homeland....

Canada’s Arctic, a Hotspot for Earthquakes

Here is an item I've been expecting for some time:

Scientists see a link between warming and earthquakes

In the aftermath of March 11’s devastating earthquake and tsunami in Japan, some are already asking if there’s a link between earthquakes and climate change.

In the polar regions, scientists have noted that earthquakes are on the rise, and that some of these may be associated with global warming.

That’s because the pressure of glaciers suppresses earthquakes, so when this ice melts, the pressure release can trigger earthquakes in a movement known as postglacial rebound.

The Entire Article
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