In what is called ‘attribution science’ climate scientists are getting better at analysing how much climate change has influenced particular extreme weather events.
In short, it is no longer a question of weather there is an influence, rather how much.
It would be useful to know, for example, whether the kind of storm that hit South Australia is still a once in 50 years event. Continue reading Climate clippings 185
The latest Morgan Stanley report is bullish about the growth of battery storage in the Australian market. They think we’ll have 6.6GWh of battery storage in Australia by 2020, which is what the Australian Energy Market Operator last week predicted for 2035. Continue reading Climate clippings 176
The orders came from across the globe even though the car isn’t scheduled for sale until late in 2017.
Most existing solar panel owners will need to obtain a new inverter to connect with the grid. Continue reading Climate clippings 163
The momentum at present is with lithium-iron batteries, which are being used in devices from mobile phones to electric cars. Since the technology was commercialised in 1991 its performance has improved immensely – design tweaks have tripled the energy stored in a given volume. Continue reading Lithium-ion batteries and other electricity storage news
Shrink That Footprint has published 11 charts to help understand climate change. Here are two of them. Continue reading Climate clippings 142
1. Quiggin reckons Tesla battery can solve climate change Continue reading Climate clippings 138
1. Unburnable Carbon: Why we need to leave fossil fuels in the ground
That’s the title of a new report from the Climate Council.
To have a 75% chance of meeting the 2°C warming limit, at least 77% of the world’s fossil fuels cannot be burned.
1. Will Hillary Clinton be too weak on climate change?
Campaign chair John Podesta tweeted:
Helping working families succeed, building small businesses, tackling climate change & clean energy. Top of the agenda.
Yet she herself has mentioned it only obliquely since announcing that she’s running. From the past we have this:
At the National Clean Energy Summit in September of last year, in her first major domestic policy address since stepping down from the state department, Clinton described global warming as “the most consequential, urgent, sweeping collection of challenges we face as a nation and a world”. Continue reading Climate clippings 136
1. Hot and cold
My sister in Toronto tells us how cold it has been. She can’t remember the last time it reached -5°C.
Yet NASA finds that Feb 2014 to Jan 2015 was the hottest 12 months on record. The picture tells the story:
2. Record megadroughts predicted
The American Southwest and the great Plains could experience the worst megadroughts in ancient and modern times.
According to the findings, future droughts in both regions will be more severe than even the hottest, driest megadroughts of the 12th and 13th centuries, which are believed to have contributed to the fall of ancient Native American civilizations that inhabited the Southwest, such as the Pueblo Indians.
Climate Central gives the odds.
The chances of a megadrought (lasting 35 years or longer) are up to 50%.
The odds of a decade-long drought are around 90%.
There’s also a 5-10 percent chance that parts of the region could see a state of “permanent” megadrought lasting 50 years or longer under the highest-warming scenario, a greenhouse gas emissions path we’re currently on.
3. New era of climate action and hope
Christiana Figueres reckons 2015 is going to be a transformational year in climate change action. She of course is the boss-person of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) which is sponsoring the Paris talks in December.
Amongst other things she mentions the June Live Earth concerts initiated by Al Gore and Kevin Wall (reviving their 2007 effort) to be held in New York, South Africa, Australia, China, Brazil and Paris.
She also plugs the UNFCCC’s Momentum for Change initiative, including Lighthouse Activities.
4. UK parties in pact on climate change
David Cameron, Nick Clegg and Ed Miliband have agreed to work together to tackle climate change, as they warned it posed a threat to national security and economic prosperity.
In what might be seen as a surprising move in the run-up to the general election, the three party leaders have pledged to work “across party lines” to agree cuts to the UK’s carbon emissions.
They have also signed up to seeking a “fair, strong, legally binding” international climate deal, set to be negotiated in Paris at the end of the year, to limit global temperature rises to below 2C – the level beyond which “dangerous” climate change is expected.
And they pledged to move to a low-carbon economy, ending the use of coal without technology to capture and store its emissions for power generation. (Emphasis added)
Tesla will start production in about six months, all going well.
“We are going to unveil the Tesla home battery, the consumer battery that would be for use in people’s houses or businesses fairly soon.”
“Some will be like the Model S pack: something flat, 5 inches off the wall, wall mounted, with a beautiful cover, an integrated bi-directional inverter, and plug and play.”
Thanks to Geoff Henderson who linked to this one recently at Saturday Salon. Yes, it could indeed be a game changer.
6. Laser ignition to replace spark plugs
A team at Princeton Optronics working on replacing conventional spark plugs with laser igniters has produced a running engine and they claim that replacing spark ignition with lasers could improve the efficiency of gasoline powered engines by 27%. Considering that the basic design of the spark plug hasn’t really changed in over a century, this would be a revolutionary step, frickin’ lasers or not.
Because the spark plug is located on the edge of the combustion chamber, not all of the fuel is combusted. Laser ignition can be directed to the centre of the chamber, or in fact to multiple parts of the chamber in extremely rapid succession. Ignition can also be more accurately timed in relation to the movement of the piston. The result is a more complete burn and greater fuel efficiency.
7. Climate oscillations and the global warming faux pause
Michael Mann posts on research he was conducted, with others, on multidecadal climate oscillations in the Pacific and the Atlantic Oceans. They found that the Pacific dominates and was the predominant cause of a slight slowing in predicted warming over the past decade-and-a-half or so.
It is possible that the downturn in the PMO [Pacific Multidecadal Oscillation] itself reflects a “dynamical response” of the climate to global warming. Indeed, I have suggested this possibility before. But the state-of-the-art climate model simulations analyzed in our current study suggest that this phenomenon is a manifestation of purely random, internal oscillations in the climate system.
This has implications for the future.
Given the pattern of past historical variation, this trend will likely reverse with internal variability, instead adding to anthropogenic warming in the coming decades.
The “false pause” may simply have been a cause for false complacency, when it comes to averting dangerous climate change.
Reminder Climate clippings is an open thread and can be used for exchanging news and views on climate.
Biodegradable packaging has been made from mushrooms for use as foam, insulation and the like.
The article doesn’t say whether it is cost competitive.
A new study finds that wheat yields drop on average by 6% for every degree Celsius rise in temperature.
Global production of wheat was 701 million tonnes in 2012, but most of this is consumed locally. Global trade is much smaller, at 147 tonnes in 2013.
The loss of production per degree equates to 42 million tonnes, with obvious implications for shortages and prices. Year-to-year variability is likely to increase.
An obvious strategy is to develop and use heat tolerant varieties. My understanding is that there has been a reduced research capacity generally in agriculture across the world.
Worldwide, solar energy has continued to grow even when economies were shrinking. By 2013, almost 138.9 gigawatts (GW) of photovoltaic (PV) had been installed globally, states the European Photovoltaic Industry Association in the report Global Market Outlook for Photovoltaics 2014-2018.
From the bottom, blue is Europe, brown is Asia Pacific, purple is the Americas and orange is China.
The pdf is here.
Europe added almost 11 GW, second only to wind.
In the US alone, there are now about 174,000 jobs linked to solar energy, with 36,000 new jobs expected by the end of this year.
India’s plans to build a solar PV modules manufacturing plant over the next three years worth US$4 billion and 20,000 new jobs.
Giles Parkinson tells how the costs of solar will fall a further 40% in the next two years, reaching grid parity in 80% of global markets.
4. Australia could become manufacturing hub of battery storage
The International Renewable Energy Agency (IRENA) met in Abu Dhabi last weekend, ahead of the World Energy Future Conference in the same venue. Australia thumbed its nose by sending an embassy staffer rather than a minister, as a country genuinely interested in renewables would have done.
Australia is increasingly being seen as a “no-hoper” and an “outlier” in terms of large scale renewable energy.
No-one seems to have told Donald Sadoway, a professor from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who is seeking to strike up research partnerships with Australian universities and secure funding of $50 million for a pilot manufacturing plant of the liquid flow batteries.
Sadoway thinks Australia would provide a strong home market, ideal for remoter population centres difficult to serve with a high quality grid.
The LMBs [liquid metal batteries] are being hailed as a potentially low cost option for utility-scale battery storage. That is because the nature of the technology means that they can cycle – or discharge – thousands of times without having its capacity reduced.
The batteries could last for 300 years.
No doubt the minister for industry will quietly tell him that we don’t do large scale renewables, or manufacturing, in Australia.
5. Inconvenient truths hit the cutting room floor
Inconvenient words about climate change and torture were snipped out of President Obama’s State of the Union speech when posted on the (Republican) Speaker’s official site. Words like this:
The best scientists in the world are all telling us that our activities are changing the climate, and if we do not act forcefully, we’ll continue to see rising oceans, longer, hotter heat waves, dangerous droughts and floods, and massive disruptions that can trigger greater migration, conflict, and hunger around the globe.
Pathetic!
6. Republican opinion on climate change
Meanwhile the Republican-controlled US Senate has voted 98-1 to say the climate change is real and not a hoax. However, that doesn’t mean that humans are the cause. After all the Bible tells of climate change and it’s just arrogance to think humans are the cause!
At least Mitt Romney thinks humans are the cause and thinks (again) that we should do something to stop it. How arrogant is that?!
A recent Yale study identifies four different kinds of Republicans – liberal, moderate, conservative and Tea Party. While overall only 44% of Republicans think global warming is happening, the sub-groups vary considerably:
Yet overall 56% think CO2 should be regulated as a pollutant, again with vast variations of opinion:
7. Ocean warming accelerating
The story about 2014 being the hottest year has upstaged a more important fact – ocean warming is off the charts:
2014 heat referred to surface temperature. Since about 93% of additional heat resulting from global warming ends up in the oceans, they give a better indication of changes in the Earth’s energy system.
John Abraham at The Guardian links to a thorough review of ocean heat measurement methods.
These posts are intended to share information and ideas about climate change and hence act as a roundtable. Again, I do not want to spend time in comments rehashing whether human activity causes climate change.
This edition is completely about implementation issues and is largely based on a number of links drawn to my attention by John D, for which gratitude and thanks. I’ve restricted the offering to six items to make it more digestible.
A German company is developing relatively large scale battery storage (up to 10MW-sized battery parks) which could “stabilise the grid faster, cheaper and with greater precision that conventional generation.”
It says that these systems can substitute 10 times the capacity from conventional generation – coal, nuclear and gas – and at a fraction of the cost. According to Younicos spokesman Philip Hiersemenzel, each battery park can be installed at around € 15 million, which means that for an investment of €3 billion, conventional generation in Germany’s 80GW would no longer be needed – at least for frequency and stability purposes. Continue reading Climate clippings 88
