The Fun Department
On www.energybulletin.net there is an item entitled “Don’t Need No Stinkin’ SUV.” You need a little pick-me-up for your day, find it. Not a tough job. The site has a search engine. Give it the title (having pulled up a cup of the beverage of your choice) and be ready to be charmed and amused. You wouldn’t believe what can be totted on a two-wheeler. A full-sized refrigerator on a bike? And they aren’t fooling. Those are real people going about real business. This energy and climate change business is generally cheerless but not this. A couple dozen or so photographs, each a particular delight of the you-wouldn’t-believe-it type.

Good News . . . I Think
10,000 scientists employed by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency have filed a petition with the U.S. Congress to get off its butt and do something about global warming. My, is this administration losing its grip on the hearts and minds of subordinates or what?

Dr James Hansen
We share the planet with a sleeping monster. Unhappily, the monster shows signs of awakening. Because we are poking him.

Without energy arriving daily the earth it would become too cold to be liveable. If the earth accepted all the energy arriving it would be too hot to be liveable. A balance must necessarily be achieved. Out of balance wakes the monster whereupon the monster deepens the imbalance. It has been happening every hundred thousand years or so from natural causes. Not this time.

Dr. James Hansen is a radiative climatologist, a professor at Columbia University, and Director of the Goddard Space Institute of NASA. His research consists of looking at that necessary balance. He has at his disposal ice cores from Antarctica. They provide more than a half-million years of climate history — temperatures, precipitation, pollutants, and a surprise for me, accurate carbon dioxide data. Seems air is trapped when snow lays its fluffy blanket down, and remains trapped in the annual layers through time. Ice cores count years just like tree rings. Neat, hunh?

About a year ago the administration noticed Dr. Hansen was saying things that weren’t in agreement with administration policy. They told him get with the program or shut up. He told them they were out of line and out of luck. Dr. Hansen is a great hero in the scientific community and he hasn’t shut up yet. He has all kinds of good stuff on his web page which is definitely worth peeking at on www.columbia.edu/~jeh1/ . Or look up the review of one of his recent lectures on www.energybulletin.net on 11/28. Showed up on ‘The Oil Drum’ which publishes some doggone good stuff. One of their reporters attended a Hansen lecture and reported on it, which occasioned 208 comments which in themselves were worth the price of admission.

Ice core history shows ten degree centigrade temperature variations over the past half million years from about six degrees colder to about four degrees warmer, either of which is too extreme for most life forms. It has to do with the reflectivity of the planet. High reflectivity throws the energy back into space, highly absorptive gobbles the energy up. Snow and ice are best reflectors. Note that energy and heat are synonymous for our purposes. Open seas are the terrific absorbers. Cloud cover is a good reflector, if not quite as good as ice. To verify, just look at a photo of the earth from space. What is white or bright is reflective, what is darker is absorptive.

Presumably, past ice ages have resulted in something forming a reflective shield in the upper atmosphere. When Krakatau self-destructed in the 19th century it darkened the surface of the earth with dust clouds. Temperatures did decline a few degrees until the dust settled out of the atmosphere. If that reflective layer had lasted longer greater ice formation could have resulted, leading us into an ice age. Didn’t happen that way. But you melt masses of ice you’ve robbed the earth of an essential controlling mechanism. That’s what we’re doing with carbon in the atmosphere. Carbon has not in the past led to global warming but humanity has figured out how to apply it to the purpose, albeit accidentally. Carbon and carbon compounds are absorptive and are heating the earth, therefore melting the ice therefore heating the earth even more. Once the process has well begun it is unstoppable until the ice is gone. That’s the monster.

How long before he is firmly awake and running the show? Dr. Hansen makes so bold as to claim Al Gore doesn’t know what he’s talking about. You don’t have two decades, says Hansen, you’ll be lucky to have even one decade to get your house in order. Otherwise, try another planet.

Oregonian
I might also note that www.energybulletin.net not only noted two Thanksgiving articles in the Eugene newspaper (previously noted in this column), but carried a big story on 11/27 from the Oregonian on climate change. A quite splendid article. The Oregonian is really getting with it in this regard. They were good enough to give me the address of the Union of Concerned Scientists, which apparently supplied much of their material. That address is www.ucsusa.org. Excellent material there, including a chart listing the average carbon emissions per country and per resident of each country. Needless to say, we are the piggiest both individually and nationally. China is making a huge run at becoming the filthiest nation.

Speaking of which is a report, again by the Oregonian, which discussed power plant emissions in China, which has never bothered with clean air legislation. Their plants pump particulates and sulfurous compounds into the air with gay abandon – and they are adding a new power plant every week. An estimated 400,000 people a year are presently killed by exposure to their air.

And The Global Carbon Project issued a report that said that carbon emissions “were rising by less than 1% annually up to the year 2000, but are now rising at 2.5% a year” Boy, does humanity know how to address a problem or what????.

Green Power
And continuing to report reports, The Register-Guard had a splendid article on Eugene’s municipal power company, EWEB. This utility offers customers the opportunity of becoming ‘green’ by paying a bit extra to ensure that their consumption is from wind power. The number of patrons who took advantage are reported to have increased substantially after the showing of “An Inconvenient Truth”. EWEB found their present wind power capacity nearly sold out, so they’ve began a new program, adopting the recommendations of the Governor to increase their sourcing of renewable energy to 25% in the near future. If hydro counted, EWEB would be way ahead of the game. But dams which block fish migration don’t count.

Of great satisfaction to EWEB customers: EWEB reports only 5% of its power comes from fossil fuel plants — coal burners and natural gas turbines. Way to go, guys. Thanks, R-G, for a feel-good edition. They aren’t always easy to come by.

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