CEJournal

A picture is worth a thousand words — never more true than with these disturbing images.

This satellite image, courtesy of DigitalGlobe, was captured Wednesday morning. It clearly shows devastating damage to containment buildings at the Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear power station. (Click on the image for a larger version.) The containment building for Unit 1 is at the extreme right. The first explosion to strike the complex occurred there.

Next in the line of buildings is Unit 2, where an explosion on Monday was thought to have caused damage to the reactor’s suppression pool. (Part of the cooling system, the pool is a large torus-shaped structure at the base of the reactor.) Steam or smoke is seen rising from a hole punched into the side of that building. Steam is also escaping from the very heavily damaged unit #3. Radioactivity from that plume forced evacuation of workers from the plant on Wednesday morning, local time. They have since returned to the plant. And last in the line is Unit 4, also heavily damaged. A second fire broke out there on Wednesday, but it is said to be controlled now. Authorities are particularly worried about the spent fuel pool at this unit. The water in the pool must be replenished to prevent a potentially massive release of radiation.

This is the first image I’ve seen from inside the Fukushima Dai-ichi complex. It shows nightmarish damage to units 3 and 4. The picture was released by the Tokyo Electric Power Co. (Source: AFP via The Australian)

Damned if we do, and damned if we don’t?

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As I write this, a third explosion has occurred at the  stricken Fukushima Dai-ichi complex in Japan, and radiation levels are climbing to the highest levels recorded since the crisis began. Associated Press is reporting that authorities are working frantically to prevent a catastrophic release of radiation. And the story quotes a “top Japanese official” as saying that fuel rods in three reactors at the facility appear to be melting.

Meanwhile, in an interview with National Public Radio, Dale Klein, the former chairman of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission and an associate director of the Energy Institute at the University of Texas sketched out a scenario by which there could be a large release of radioactivity: If enough molten uranium and other material collected at the bottom of the reactor’s containment vessel, it could manage to burn through the thick steel.

If that should happen, nukes could be off the table for quite some time. But nuclear experts quoted by NPR say the odds of a total meltdown and breach of containment are low. So if the containment vessels really do what the name suggests — contain whatever molten mess of radioactive material accumulates inside — then we can eventually expect renewed calls for a nuclear renaissance.

Already, some in government are saying that the events in Japan should not put a long-term crimp in plans to expand nuclear energy. And Deputy Secretary of Energy Daniel B. Poneman is saying the Obama administration is still committed to nukes. In an interview with NPR, he said, “We view nuclear energy as a very important component to the overall portfolio we’re trying to build for a clean energy future.”

Let’s hope and pray that the containment vessels at Fukushima do their job. Assuming that they do, and nuclear power is not so thoroughly discredited as to remove it from consideration, just how much of a contribution could it make — and SHOULD it make — toward reducing our carbon emissions? Nuclear proponents are sure to offer a very rosy assessment, while opponents will argue that it should be taken off the table.

Continue reading “Nuclear power and the decarbonization challenge” →

And the story in Grist with that headline is what yellow journalism looks like

Explosions at industrial facilities like the one pictured above in Ichihara, Japan; a destroyed village inundated by water; cars and boats swept by a rampaging wave into buildings and bridges — all of this, the editors of Grist would have you believe, “is what climate change looks like.”

That headline is for a story by Christopher Mims. The theory he sketches out is that shifts in the Earth’s crust triggered by melting ice sheets and glaciers “could already be causing more earthquakes, tsunamis, and volcanic activity.”

This may well be scientifically plausible. But using the threat of earthquakes and tsunamis as a way to bludgeon people into believing that they’d better do something about climate change strikes me as terribly wrong-headed. There are plenty of sensible reasons for tackling climate change. This is not one of them. And making this particular connection simply invites disbelief, disdain — and worse.

Moreover, the magnitude 8.9 temblor that struck Japan was a subduction zone earthquake. It was caused by the inexorable movement of the Pacific tectonic plate as it thrusts underneath Japan at the Japan Trench. (Check out Joel Achenbach’s explanation at the Washington Post.) The Pacific plate is moving at a rate of about four inches per year, but in some places it gets stuck. When it comes unglued, a massive earthquake like the one Japan suffered through is the result.

Could melting ice cause crustal shifts that would help a plate get unglued at a subduction zone? Who knows? Grist’s story doesn’t come even remotely close to providing the evidence to back up such an astonishing claim. As a result, this is terrible, irresponsible journalism.

In fact, I would even go as far as to say that it is yellow journalism.

I’ve emailed Roger Bilham, one of the world’s most renown earthquake experts, to ask him for his perspective on this. I’ll update this post with what he says.

UDPATE: No sooner had I hit the return key to post this piece than Roger Bilham responded. In an email message, I had asked him this question: “Is there any possible way that a subduction zone earthquake like the one in Japan could be connected to such crustal shifts?” (Caused by melting ice.)

Roger is no doubt very busy right now, so he sent me just a two word response, from his iPhone: “Not possible.”

Perhaps there are other scientists who disagree. I don’t know because I haven’t done the reporting. But the point is that Christopher Mims has not done the reporting either.

Before publishing this story, a responsible journalist would have solicited a variety of scientific perspectives on the subject and provided a balanced view of expert scientific opinion. (Actually, given Bilham’s response, I would have simply spiked it.) And responsible editors would not have exploited the misery of others with such a sensational headline and pictures — and all on the basis of such flimsy reporting.

The unmasking of our little secret — the Environmental Journalism Coven — began with Randy Olson’s comments at DotEarth:

The media were irrelevant and largely blameless in Climategate. The whole incident was a case study in the absence of effective leadership in both the science and environmental communities.

Next, Michael Tobis sprang into action:

Like it or not, honest scientists are constrained to tell the truth and the whole truth and nothing but the truth. The truth is plenty scary enough. Not only that, but most of the uncertainties just add to the ominousness of the present landscape.

(Constrained? Never mind…)

With artful misdirection, Keith Kloor asked:

So Randy, for the benefit of the activists and bloggers who want to communicate a clear and consise climate change message with just enough wiggle room to remain true to the various uncertainties of climate change, how about some examples of how it’s done?

(I know the chronology is confused here, but witches are comfortable in a universe of fragmented time)

Never missing an opportunity to rise to a challenge, Randy came back with:

I don’t think you quite get my comment about scientists being “mumblers.”  That’s what they are, in essence, when it comes to broad communication.  They are the guy at the party over in the corner mumbling the truth as the loudmouthed fools in the middle blabber on and on about topics they know nothing about but have read of on blogs.

The self-styled Bunny then used the F-word in a post:

Continue reading “The Coven” →

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Melting of ice sheets in Antarctica and Greenland is accelerating, according to a new study to be published this month in Geophysical Research Letters. According to the research, this acceleration is three times faster than what is being observed for mountain glaciers and ice caps.

From the study:

The magnitude of the acceleration suggests that ice sheets will be the dominant contributors to sea level rise in forthcoming decades, and will likely exceed the IPCC projections for the contribution of ice sheets to sea level rise in the 21st century.

According to the new research, if melting of ice sheets continues at the current rate for the next 40 years, sea level rise from that source alone would equal 15 centimeters, or 5.9 inches by the year 2050. With ice loss from glaciers, ice caps and thermal expansion of the oceans also factored in, sea level could come up by a total of 32 centimeters, or 12.6 inches, by mid-century, according to the new research.

There is a caveat:

Continue reading “Sobering news from Greenland and Antarctica” →

Global warming debate in Congress almost seems like a sex addiction

Here we go again . . .

The price for benchmark West Texas crude crested just shy of $107 a barrel in electronic trading today, the highest in more than two years.

By the close of trading, the price had pulled back somewhat. But analysts suggest we could easily be heading to $120 or more — and it could stay there for awhile.

The immediate trigger, of course, is instability in the Middle East. But oil prices were already trending upward, and even before the uprisings, the U.S. Energy Information Administration was forecasting an average price of $93 per barrel this year, and $98 next.

The long-term problem is one of simple supply and demand. As The Economist notes:

With the world economy growing strongly, oil demand is far outpacing increases in readily available supply. So any jitters from the Middle East will accelerate and exaggerate a price rise that was already on the way.

The situation is now stoking fears that the world economy could be oil-shocked back into recession, and perhaps inflation too. The Economist points out that we’ve been here before:

Continue reading “No serious energy policy in sight” →

Do we really need psychologists to explain it?

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The other day, Chris Mooney wrote an excellent post about climate change and blizzards that’s well worth reading. In it, he attributed the public’s confusion over possible connections between huge snowstorms and global warming to a few factors.

First, he wrote, “people confuse climate and weather endlessly.” True enough.

And also this:

Psychologists studying climate communication make two additional (and related) points about why the warming-snow link is going to be exceedingly difficult for much of the public to accept: 1) people’s confirmation biases lead them to pay skewed attention to weather events, in such a way as to confirm their preexisting beliefs about climate change (see p. 4 of this report); 2) people have mental models of “global warming” that tend to rule out wintry impacts.

“Perceptions of the implications of lots of snow for the existence of climate change are like the results from a Rorschach test,” writes Janet Swim, a psychologist at Penn State who headed up an American Psychological Association task force report on psychology and climate change.

All of this sounds perfectly reasonable.

But might there be an equally important reason for confusion and doubt among the public?: Despite the certitude shown by some activists in attributing all manner of weird weather to global warming, the climate system simply IS incredibly complex and difficult to pin down scientifically — and therefore naturally confusing to non-scientists.

As NASA’s Gavin Schmidt pointed out in a recent post at Real Climate:

Continue reading “Confusion on global-warming link to snowstorms” →

How we know CO2 in the atmosphere is increasing — and it’s our bad

Note: This is a cross-post of a story I wrote on assignment for Climate Central. You can read the piece there and see additional graphics by clicking here.

In winter, snowshoes are one good way to negotiate the steep, snow-covered road up Niwot Ridge in Colorado’s Front Range. But if you’re Duane Kitzis, and the job for the day is to haul metal cylinders up the mountain, what you really need is a snowcat.

On a blustery morning last December, I joined Kitzis for the climb up the ridge, sharing the snowcat’s flatbed with the cylinders, which he was taking up to a scientific station at 9,973 feet on the mountain, and his trusted assistant, a 95-pound Airedale terrier named “Little Bear.”

With the clanking tank treads of the cat, and smelly exhaust spewing from the back, a passing snowshoer could be forgiven for not guessing that this is one of the most important environmental jobs on the planet. The air samples Kitzis collects in cylinders like these help scientists around the world determine how much carbon dioxide is accumulating in the atmosphere — and thus how the climate might change as a result.

Kitzis, a scientist with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s (NOAA) Earth System Research Laboratory in Boulder, makes a crucial contribution to this effort.

“My personal stake in this is to create the best data possible,” he says.

Creating that data may seem straightforward. Capture samples of the atmosphere from an unpolluted site, measure their chemical makeup, and presto: you’ve figured out the concentration of CO₂ in the atmosphere, right? And if you do it over time, you’ve got the trend.

Not so simple. There are more than 140 sites worldwide — from the South Pole to the Arctic, and many places in between — where atmospheric monitoring is done. Sampling is also done by aircraft in more than 30 locations. So how can we be confident that the job is being done accurately and to the same exacting standards everywhere?

Helping to insure that accuracy is what Kitzis does for a living. He creates “standards” — samples of the atmosphere whose chemical makeup he determines with great accuracy. These are then sent to monitoring sites worldwide so everyone can make sure they are producing results to the same exacting standard.

Thanks to his efforts, scientists can say with great confidence that so much carbon dioxide has accumulated in the atmosphere that its concentration is now above 390 parts per million — and that this is our bad. They’ve also been able to chart with increasing precision the specific sources: for example, how much from fossil-fuel burning versus deforestation? (The answer might surprise you. Read on…)

Continue reading “In the curve” →

If you’ve been a regular reader of CEJournal, you’ve probably noticed that I’ve been gone for awhile. I should have hung a ‘gone fishin’ sign here to let people know where I was at . . .

Well, actually, I am on sabbatical from teaching at the University of Colorado. This has given me a fabulous opportunity to work on a number of projects that are bigger and more time-consuming than the blog, including a series of features for Climate Central (one of which I will be cross-posting here later today). I’m also working on a major Web site project. (More about that when there is something substantive to report.) And to be honest, I’ve been trying to unplug just a little from the reactive, Twitter mind-set and think about issues in a more deliberative way.

Oh, there’s also running. The spring racing season is just around the corner…

But as the headline says, I’m back. I may not post something every single day, but it’s my intention to get back into a regular rhythm here at CEJournal. I hope to see you here!

– Tom

Greenland experienced a record amount of melting in 2010.

New records were set during the year for surface melting, runoff of water, the number of days when bare ice was exposed due to melting snow, and the decrease in the total mass of Greenland’s ice sheets, according to a paper published Friday in Environment Research Letters.

NOAA is also out with its annual Arctic report card for 2010, which among other things summarizes what was observed in Greenland this past year:

Greenland climate in 2010 is marked by record-setting high air temperatures, ice loss by melting, and marine-terminating glacier area loss. Summer seasonal average (June-August) air temperatures around Greenland were 0.6 to 2.4°C above the 1971-2000 baseline and were highest in the west. A combination of a warm and dry 2009-2010 winter and the very warm summer resulted in the highest melt rate since at least 1958 and an area and duration of ice sheet melting that was above any previous year on record since at least 1978. The largest recorded glacier area loss observed in Greenland occurred this summer at Petermann Glacier, where 290 km² of ice broke away. The rate of area loss in marine-terminating glaciers this year (419 km²) was 3.4 times that of the previous 8 years, when regular observations are available. There is now clear evidence that the ice area loss rate of the past decade (averaging 120 km²/year) is greater than loss rates pre-2000.

Juliete Elperin of the Washington Post has a good article about the new findings, with quotes from Marco Tedesco, the ERL paper’s lead author and the director of the Cryosphere Processes Laboratory at the City College of New York.

The events in Greenland are illustrated very clearly in the following graphics. The first one is a modified version of a graphic published in the ERL paper. (I removed one of the graphs and inserted the explanatory text.) The others are from the Arctic Report Card.

Duration of melting of standardized melting index:

Continue reading “Graphics tell the story of record melting in Greenland” →

By Brendon Bosworth

Picture two snowmen standing side by side beneath a spring sun. One is pristine white, the other has been coated with rusty brown dust. As the day wears on, a pool of water collects beneath the dusty snowman. He will dissolve long before the untarnished snowman loses his head.

The dusty snowman’s rapid demise occurs because the dark color decreases snow’s ability to reflect sunlight. The particles absorb it and conduct heat to the snowman’s body.

The same process appears to have been playing out on a larger scale for 150 years in the mountains of the Upper Colorado River Basin, the birthplace of the Colorado River.

Rust colored desert dust, blowing in from the desert and falling on the snowpack, has been causing snow to melt on average three weeks earlier than it did before human activities in the West disturbed its pristine ecosystem, around the middle of the 19th century, according to a study by researchers from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory and the University of Colorado’s Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences (CIRES). (For a CIRES press release on the research, go here.)

Continue reading “The great water heist” →

By Brendon Bosworth and Tom Yulsman

Climate change research offers little reason to believe that the gloriously snowy start to the year in the mountains of the Colorado Basin are a harbinger of wetter times to come.

To begin with, some research suggests that changes to the climate, thanks in part to rising concentrations of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, are already responsible for at least a portion of the drought that has been plaguing the region since 2000.

During the past few decades of rapid growth in water use, “the hydrological cycle in the region began to change,” write Tim Barnett and David Pierce of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, in a 2009 study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

“Snowpack declined in the western mountains, temperatures increased, and many streams gradually shifted their peak flow to earlier in the year,” they continued. “It has been shown, with very high statistical confidence, that a substantial portion of these changes are attributable to human-induced effects on the climate.”

But Brad Udall, director of the Western Water Assessment of the University of Colorado, is a bit more cautious: “The way science and statistics work is that there’s a really high bar set to say, ‘Okay, this particular event is actually climate change and not just natural variability.’ In fact that bar is so high, frequently all you can say is, ‘hey, this is consistent with what we think climate change will bring.’ I think this is in many ways is where we are in the Colorado River.”

Regardless of whether the recent drought has a man-made component or not, computer modeling of the climate system is not reassuring about the future. It indicates that the Colorado River basin will become warmer and more arid in coming decades. In fact, this is one of the more robust findings shared among most of the climate models.

Continue reading “Western water: running toward empty part 2″ →

Roger Bilham

This morning I interviewed Roger Bilham, an earthquake expert here at the University of Colorado, for KGNU radio’s How on Earth Science Show. Toward the end we got into the fact that fairly sizable earthquakes are overdue along the Himalayan front in Pakistan, India, Bhutan and other countries.

A few hours later, an earthquake estimated by the U.S. Geological Survey at 7.2 magnitude occurred in Baluchistan, Pakistan. It struck near Pakistan’s nuclear test site, Bilham told me in an email message. The test site is near Chāghai, and I believe the epicenter of the earthquake is a bit south of there.

He says the intensity of shaking at the site should be low. “The predicted shaking is intensity six — accelerations less than 10% g at the site (whose location is not well known). So I doubt anything bad has happened.”

But that probably is not the case for civilians.  ”Villagers in adobe structures in the epicenter may have been killed,” Bilham says.

The quake occurred on the Arabian tectonic plate, which is subducting under the Asian plate. As it plunges into the Earth’s interior, it bends. And according to Bilham, the plate apparently broke at that bending point. Here’s a graphic that explains it:

In my interview with Bilham this morning, I mentioned his research showing that large earthquakes were overdue along Himalyan front, and I brought up Pakistan. Here’s what he said in the interview this morning:

In India, Pakistan, Bhutan, and so on, there is a real problem with earthquakes. The very largest earthquakes, magnitude 8.8 and larger, have not occurred in recent history. In fact, the last great earthquake in the Himalaya was probably in 1505. And since then, enormous changes in building style have occurred, and the infrastructure that has been constructed has only recently been constructed with earthqake resistance in mind. So there is a huge pool of buildings just waiting to fall in the next earthquake. Now we need to ask when will the next earthquake be?

The very large earthquakes probably have return times on the order of 1,000 years, according to Bilham. But smaller ones, of magnitude 7.5 to 8 probably recur at 100-year intervals.

We’re now well into the cycle when these will occur. We believe there are earthquakes overdue between Kashmir and the western part of India, and also in the Assam region. And I think this is probably where we’re first going to hear about disasters from these Himalayan earthquakes.

I’ve asked him by email whether the tectonic setting is different for the Pakistan quake that just occurred. I’ll report on that when I hear from him.

UPDATE: Roger has answered this question:

The Arabian plate is moving slightly slower northward than the Indian plate.  Both are colliding with Asia.

The big difference is that the India collision is two continents colliding whereas this is a collision between an oceanic plate and a continental one.  THe result is that volcanoes continue to be active.  The last big earthquake Mw=8 occurred in 1945 south of the recent earthquake on the surface between the descending Arabian plate and the upper Asian plate.

By Tom Yulsman & Brendon Bosworth

Heading toward an uncertain future? A snow-covered track in Colorado's Front Range. Copyright Tom Yulsman

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In recent weeks, water managers, skiers and farmers, if not city folk, from California all the way to Colorado were breathing a little easier with the news that storms have significantly boosted both mountain snowpack and the water supply outlook in the Colorado River Basin.

As of January 6, the average snow water equivalent for most of the basin was at 141 percent of the long-term average. (Snow water equivalent is the depth of the water you’d collect if you melted a given amount of snow instantaneously). This is the very best start to the year since 1997, according to the Colorado Basin River Forecast Center.

Most importantly, it is a dramatic — but not necessarily permanent — turn-around from the situation as it looked last October. At that point, 11 long years of debilitating drought in the region, combined with growing demand on the river, had helped drain Lake Mead, the giant reservoir on the lower Colorado near Las Vegas, to a record low level. (For the current level of Lake Mead, click here.) Now, with early winter storms, the lake level has come up by a foot. Water managers view this as a hopeful sign, but one that does not by itself indicate a more durable turnaround.

They are scraping for every inch they can get to keep the reservoir’s surface higher than 1,075 feet above sea level. Should it fall below that marker, the federal government would be forced to declare a shortage, requiring Arizona and Nevada to cut back on their use of Colorado River water.

Continue reading “Western Water: Running toward empty?” →

Were they linked to global warming? Two news outlets offer different answers

Update: After reading this post, some readers might conclude that I think we should wait to take action to reduce our vulnerability to climate change. Nothing is further from the truth. I believe we have enough knowledge right now to justify reducing carbon emissions, and taking action to adapt to climatic disruptions — which are obviously occurring, right now.

Have a look at the ABC News evening news broadcast above, and the network’s more in-depth article here. It’s extraordinary these days for American television news to cover climate change in any way, as the recent analysis by Robert Brulle of Drexel University has shown. So it’s heartening to see at least one network news division wake up again to what still is a huge story.

That said,, the broadcast unequivocally tied the flooding in Australia, as well as in Brazil and Sri Lanka, to global warming. And in its headline on the web, ABC also made no bones about it:”Raging Waters in Australia and Brazil Product of Global Warming.” That’s as strong a cause and effect statement as you could make.

Reuters wouldn’t go quite so far, as this dispatch carried by MSNBC on the web shows:

SINGAPORE — Climate change has likely intensified the monsoon rains that have triggered record floods in Australia’s Queensland state, scientists said on Wednesday, with several months of heavy rain and storms still to come.

But while scientists say a warmer world is predicted to lead to more intense droughts and floods, it wasn’t yet possible to say if climate change would trigger stronger La Niña and El Niño weather patterns that can cause weather chaos across the globe.

Which story is more accurate?

Continue reading “Brisbane floods: a tale of two stories” →