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Are India’s clean energy investments slowing the march of coal?

by KennethU81 Posted on October 19, 2015

Are India’s clean energy investments slowing the march of coal?

By on 19 Oct 2015commentsShare

Chinese investment in the Indian renewable energy sector has skyrocketed recently, and construction equipment manufacturer Sany Group is the latest to join the push. The company announced last week that it will direct $3 billion toward the development of at least two gigawatts of renewable energy capacity in India, largely in the states of Maharashtra and Andhra Pradesh. That’s a lot of cash and a lot of capacity, and announcements like these check a solid handful of other sustainable development boxes: expansion of renewables, money flowing between developing countries, private sector partnerships — chalk it up to a win for the climate.

Right?

Stories of clean energy investment tend to be good news for environmentalists, but in this case, there’s the danger of missing the forest for the banyan trees. The key here is understanding the difference between climate action and pure economic development motives. India currently has upwards of 250 million people without electricity. It would take somewhere on the order of 225 terawatt hours annually to bring them online — making the projected 4.8 terawatt hours from Sany Group’s two gigawatts seem like relatively small potatoes. When it comes to energy policy, the main goal is shrinking that 250 million figure as quickly as possible. Which is exactly what coal power can do.

But wait! With substantial investment, couldn’t rural India leapfrog coal and satisfy climate aims and development goals at the same time? Presumably, the answer rests on the affordability of decentralized solar power. Over at Scientific American, though, Gayathri Vaidyanathan tells a different story:

The fallacy in this position, others argue, is that solar microgrids do not address climate change. The microgrids do not displace coal use because the target villages were never hooked to the central grid in the first place. In fact, in parts of India, microgrids have become a stopgap solution for the energy-poor while they wait for the central grid.

“I’d agree 100 percent this is primarily a development solution, not a climate solution,” said Justin Guay, climate program officer at the David and Lucile Packard Foundation who was previously with the Sierra Club.

That more renewable energy doesn’t necessarily imply fewer emissions is a central truth that’s easy to forget. After China and the United States, India is the third-highest carbon emitter globally, and Prime Minister Narendra Modi has expressed no intention of changing that.

In the run-up to the Paris climate negotiations, India submitted a pledge to develop 175 GW of renewable energy capacity by 2022. For reference, the entire world’s 2014 renewable capacity was 181 GW. And vis-à-vis the previous point, renewable energy capacity isn’t necessarily a marker of climate action. Over roughly the same time period, India is expected to build between 170 and 200 GW worth of coal power capacity. Sany Group’s investment is expected to prevent close to 4 million tons of carbon emissions annually, but India is expected to triple its emissions to 5.8 billion tons by 2030. Modi has previously said that he will not announce a peak emissions date for the country.

Of course, India’s per capita emissions are drastically lower than those of most developed and several developing countries. Morally (and financially) speaking, nobody really expects India to stop its coal-driven development unless someone else is picking up the tab. Sany Group’s announcement is a suggestion that China is trying to do exactly that, but China isn’t enough — and Sany Group is presumably investing in India’s renewable sector for economic, not environmental, reasons.

All told, it’ll take at least $2.5 trillion worth of investment for India to meet its energy goals, and these are goals that ultimately have very little to do with a decrease in the country’s carbon emissions. In India, coal is still king, and its reign is far from over.

Source:

Coal Trumps Solar in India

, Scientific American.

China’s Sany Group To Invest $3 Billion In Renewable Energy In India

, CleanTechnica.

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Are India’s clean energy investments slowing the march of coal?

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Is the West Antarctic ice sheet collapsing? These scientists want to go find out

by FerminFish Posted on September 30, 2015

Is the West Antarctic ice sheet collapsing? These scientists want to go find out

By on 30 Sep 2015commentsShare

Let’s play a game. It’s called “Hollywood or Real Life?” The rules are self-explanatory:

In a world where technology is cutting people off from the natural world, scientists are treated like conspiracy theorists, and government officials can’t agree on what to do about climate change, humanity is in danger. A huge swath of the West Antarctic ice sheet nearly 75 miles wide is on the verge of collapse, and if it takes the rest of the ice sheet with it, global sea levels could rise by a catastrophic four feet. To make matters worse, scientists don’t know when or how this doomsday scenario could unfold, and the only way to find out is to travel to a remote and treacherous part of the ice sheet known as Thwaites Glacier, nearly 2,500 miles from McMurdo Station. Will the U.S. government support such a dangerous mission? Will world leaders ever get their act together? Or will Mother Nature just say “F**k it,” and wipe the slate clean?

You guessed it — this is real life. People have been worrying over the imminent collapse of the West Antarctic ice sheet ever since researchers published two papers last year warning that glaciers along the Amundsen Sea were not only retreating, but also unlikely to stop due to the “retrograde,” or increasingly downhill, nature of the seabed below them.

But much of what scientists know about this area comes from satellite data. Thwaites and other nearby glaciers are so hard to get to and have such dangerous weather conditions that only a handful of scientists have ever actually made the journey. Now, because of the potentially catastrophic consequences of ice sheet collapse, a group of Antarctic researchers are asking the National Science Foundation to support a more aggressive research approach. Here’s more from The Washington Post:

That means a great deal more research and direct measurements in this extremely remote environment. It isn’t research on the moon or at the ocean’s greatest depths, but in terms of work on or near the surface of Earth, it’s about as tough as it gets.

To understand the difficulty of the scientific task, consider this — one key problem will be figuring out exactly what is going on at the ground level beneath over a mile of ice. A key unknown involves precisely what kind of terrain the base of Thwaites glacier rests upon, and what it is composed of – which will affect just how much resistance there is to the glacier’s movement.

The late climate scientist John Mercer first alerted the scientific community about the instability of the West Antarctic ice sheet back in 1978. At the time, Mercer thought that warming air temperatures would cause the collapse, but scientists now understand that warm water melting the ice from below is the real threat. Still, there are a lot of unanswered questions about how the collapse could play out:

“There has been a pendulum in this community in the last 20 years, from, ‘we’re sure the West Antarctic Ice Sheet is going to collapse,’ to ‘actually we’re not,’ to ‘oh yes we are,’ to ‘oh, it’s happening now,’” says Eric Steig, a University of Washington glaciologist. … “I think that many of the ideas that people came up with for why it won’t collapse have been disproven,” Steig says – although he emphasizes that there is still a great deal of scientific uncertainty about the matter.

Scientists don’t know, for example, how soon a rapid collapse could begin — 900 years? 200 years? Sooner? And they don’t know whether the ice sheet collapsed before during a previous period of warming about 120,000 years ago — something they could find out if they can get ice core samples.

Now, given our short attention span and complete inability to grasp the true existential threat that is climate change, most people will forget about this terrifying drama playing out at the bottom of the Earth within 24 hours, go see The Martian this weekend, and then spend an excessive amount of time pondering the possibility of humans visiting Mars. Which is why, in the interest of getting people to give a shit, someone really should just turn this into a frivolous two-hour blockbuster hit. Picture it:

Lily Tomlin and Danny Trejo play a husband and wife team of Antarctic researchers leading an expedition to Thwaites. They bring along two graduate students — one a wise-cracking source of comic relief played by Jerrod Carmichael, the other a brooding and sarcastic voice of pessimism played by Mae Whitman. A grumbling member of the British Antarctic Survey (Peter Capaldi) joins the expedition, along with his young protege (Parminder Nagra), who’s pretty quiet but vlogs about the whole trip. Roland Emmerich of The Day After Tomorrow and Independence Day fame will direct, of course, and the movie will probably be called something minimalist and dramatic like Thwaites.

Source:

Scientists declare an “urgent” mission – study West Antarctica, and fast

, The Washington Post.

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Is the West Antarctic ice sheet collapsing? These scientists want to go find out

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Study asks: What would it take for a nuclear-powered world?

by ShennaMcmullin Posted on September 14, 2015

Study asks: What would it take for a nuclear-powered world?

By on 14 Sep 2015commentsShare

If renewable energy sources were characters from The Big Lebowski (stay with me here), solar would be The Dude — an insufferably chill ringleader whose reliability and good nature make him the obvious hero. Wind would be Donny — a well-intentioned naif just doing his thing in the face of non-stop criticism. And nuclear would be Walter, a fear-inducing loose cannon who puts everyone on edge but is ultimately the guy you’d want by your side when shit hits the fan.

And, folks, shit is hitting the fan. The world is burning, ice sheets are melting, and delusional narcissists are trying to take control of the country. So in a study published in the journal PLOS One, two researchers mapped out what exactly it would take for the world to go completely nuclear. Scientific American has the scoop:

“If we are serious about tackling emissions and climate change, no climate-neutral source should be ignored,” argues Staffan Qvist, a physicist at Uppsala University, who led the effort to develop this nuclear plan. “The mantra ‘nuclear can’t be done quickly enough to tackle climate change’ is one of the most pervasive in the debate today and mostly just taken as true, while the data prove the exact opposite.”

Qvist and his colleague Barry Brook, a professor of environmental sustainability at the University of Tasmania, studied the rapid adoption of nuclear energy in Sweden and France to make their projections. Sweden started researching nuclear power back in the ’60s as a way to reduce its need for foreign oil and protect its rivers from hydroelectric dams. Within 24 years, the country was generating half of its electricity from nuclear power. France, also wanting to rely less on foreign fuels, built 59 reactors in the ’70s and ’80s, and now, 80 percent of the country’s electricity comes from nuclear power, Scientific American reports.

Here’s what that means for the rest of the world:

Based on numbers pulled by the research team from the experience of Sweden and France and scaled up to the globe, a best-case scenario for conversion to 100 percent nuclear power could enable the world to stop burning fossil fuels and start fissioning uranium for electricity within 34 years. Requirements for this shift of course would include expanded uranium mining and processing, a build-out of the electric grid as well as a commitment to develop and build fast reactors—nuclear technology that operates with faster neutrons and therefore can handle radioactive waste, such as plutonium, for fuel as well as create its own future fuel. “No other carbon-neutral electricity source has been expanded anywhere near as fast as nuclear,” Qvist says.

But this doesn’t seem like a very likely scenario, given the current state of nuclear power around the world. Here in the U.S., nuclear power is on the decline because natural gas and wind power are so cheap, Scientific American reports, while nuclear power in Japan is still limping back to life after the Fukushima disaster. Germany, meanwhile, is phasing out nuclear power completely, and although China is actively growing its nuclear fleet, the country is still drowning in coal power.

Of course, economics aren’t the only reason nuclear is on the decline in so many places. Safety concerns, which can be overblown, also play a major role, Brook told Scientific American:

“As long as people, nations put fear of nuclear accidents above fear of climate change, those trends are unlikely to change,” Brook adds. But “no renewable energy technology or energy efficiency approach has ever been implemented on a scale or pace required.”

And so here we are, at a crossroads, where we must ask ourselves: Is it time to deploy Walter? Sure, in a perfect world, The Dude would get the job done on his own without any drama, and we’d all live happily ever after. But The Dude’s running out of time, and while Walter has had some Fukushimas of his own, he won’t hesitate to beat the shit out of some nihilists if we ask him to. And should The Dude ultimately fall down on the job and get an ominous warning in the form of a severed toe, good ole’ Walter will always be there to pick up the pieces:

Source:

The World Really Could Go Nuclear

, Scientific American.

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Study asks: What would it take for a nuclear-powered world?

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Can Poop Save Us From the Next Global Epidemic?

by ZWMKlarazzttn Posted on August 25, 2015

Mother Jones

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About a quarter of deaths around the world are caused by infectious diseases—a number that is expected to increase with rising rates of antibiotic resistance. In the race to catch these diseases before they spread, international disease surveillance systems typically rely on reporting from doctors after infections occur, which can lead to dangerous delays and even more transmissions.

But a group of scientists have suggested a new way to quickly detect diseases: poop. More specifically, poop collected from international flights.

Researchers from the Technical University of Denmark argued in a piece recently published in the journal Scientific Reports that airports could identify infectious diseases immediately by analyzing the bacterial DNA from the waste collected in the tanks beneath on-board lavatories.

“What we did was take a single sample from the entire mixed toilet waste from each plane, purified the DNA, and sequenced everything,” says Frank Møller Aarestrup, who heads the Research Group for Genomic Epidemiology. After sequencing poop samples from 18 international flights, the scientists were able to compile plane profiles that showed the prevalence of common pathogens and the how many antibiotic-resistant bacteria were also onboard.

Aarestrup says the process requires just one lab analysis, and he and his team are now recommending that airports have their own sequencers, which he estimates would cost around $150,000 in equipment and one full-time employee. “Not so much, the impact considered,” he adds.

It sounds like a great solution, but it may not be as easily implemented as Aarestrup and his team suggest.

Jonathan Eisen, a professor at the Genome Center at the University of California-Davis, says he doesn’t think the science is quite there yet. “Yes, people may shed various pathogens that go into the sewer system,” he says, “but we still don’t know what to look for and how to detect at these organisms at low levels.”

Though the data showed promise, Eisen says, there are still many unknowns and far too much complexity involved in trying to drill down into this kind of information to have a functioning surveillance system. And there are are a series of other obstacles that still have to be considered.

“There are issues of privacy that they didn’t address at all or issues of false-positive correlations that you might detect,” he explains. “It is really cool to get data from global populations, and I think it is going to be really useful for some purposes. But I don’t see screening sewage systems in airport facilities as a proven avenue for doing that.”

Unfortunately for now, Eisen says, successful poop surveillance is just an exciting hypothetical.

“It is interesting—really interesting actually,” he says. “But I think right now it is a research project. A cool, fun project on microbial diversity and the human environment that is unquestionably worth doing—but without any obvious use yet.”

More: 

Can Poop Save Us From the Next Global Epidemic?

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Pope’s climate encyclical divides American opinion

by Aiden1130odf Posted on July 24, 2015

Pope’s climate encyclical divides American opinion

By on 24 Jul 2015commentsShare

A clear-cut majority of swing-state voters agreed in a recent Quinnipiac poll: Pope Francis was right to call on the world to do more to address climate change. There is, however, a deep divide along party lines – Democrats and Republicans split on the topic by a margin of more than 40 percent in every state polled.

Overall, 62 percent of voters polled in Colorado, 65 percent in Iowa, and 64 percent in Virginia said they supported the pope’s encyclical on climate change. It’s likely more than a coincidence that those percentages matched up almost identically with the percentage of voters that Quinnipiac found accept the scientific consensus on human-caused climate change.

But broken down by party, the gap was stark. In Colorado, for example, 93 percent of Democrats agreed with the pope’s climate message, but only 38 percent of Republicans.

Other polling by Gallup released this week shows that the pope’s favorability rating among Americans dropped from 76 percent in February 2014 to 59 percent this month. He said a lot of things during that time that could rub conservatives the wrong way, including embracing aspects of evolution. But his strongest campaign yet, which has come to the fore in recent months, is for action on climate change. It got the angrier aspects of the Republican base worked up; Rush Limbaugh labeled the encyclical a “Marxist climate rant.” Francis’ unfavorability rating increased from 9 percent in 2014 to 16 percent this month, according to Gallup.

The pope is not a politician, so he doesn’t really have to worry about polls. But in theory, his encyclical and other pro-climate-action stances by Christian groups have the power to make inroads with conservatives who are more likely to put the opinions of their faith leaders over those of both scientists and politicians. That, at least, is what many climate hawks have hoped — but the party split observed by the Quinnipiac folks raises questions about whether that will work.

The pope is coming to the U.S. in September to speak before Congress and tour the Northeast. That could put some Catholic climate deniers in a tricky spot, especially prominent Republican ones. Don’t bet on that visit mending the gap between Republicans’ and Democrats’ views of his activism.

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Pope’s climate encyclical divides American opinion

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Food Irradiation: Great Technology, Lousy Name.

by LynnTruscott Posted on July 6, 2015

Mother Jones

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Roberto Ferdman interviews Jayson Lusk, an agricultural economist at Oklahoma State University, about why the public’s aversion to GMO foods has stayed strong even as the scientific consensus has become nearly unanimous that GMO foods are safe. Toward the end, though, he finally get to my hot button food issue:

Can you think of other forms of technology that have overcome consumer fears?

A perfect example is pasteurization in milk. At first it was very strange to people, and no one knew what to think about it. But today it’s widely accepted and viewed as improving the safety of milk.

Another one is microwaves. Everyone has them in their home today, but back in the 1970s it was close to zero. It took a bit for them to catch on, for people to warm up to them.

But then there are things like food irradiation that are perfectly safe but people seem to be permanently skeptical of.

Food irradiation! Dammit, Lusk is right: despite the fact that it includes the word “radiation,” food irradiation is completely harmless. It’s also really effective at killing the pathogens that cause all those periodic outbreaks of food poisoning you hear so much about. Irradiate your hamburger and you can safely cook it medium rare if you want. Irradiate your lettuce and worries about e. coli are a thing of the past. I wish someone made a cheap, personal food irradiation machine. I’d irradiate everything I ate. Unfortunately, irradiation machines tend to be the size of a dump truck and cost several million dollars, so that’s not in the cards.

Maybe the Japanese should get in on this. They’re pretty good at miniaturizing things; they’re pretty good at selling consumer tech; and they’ve got a huge domestic market of people who are gadget and technology crazy and probably aren’t afraid of irradiated food. Although I could be wrong about that, what with Hiroshima in their past and Fukushima in their present.

Anyway, food irradiation. It’s cheap on an industrial scale, totally harmless, and makes your food safer. What’s not to like?

Originally from: 

Food Irradiation: Great Technology, Lousy Name.

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Ocean acidification: Not just for oceans anymore!

by ChanceBallou Posted on July 1, 2015

Ocean acidification: Not just for oceans anymore!

By on 30 Jun 2015commentsShare

Move over, ocean acidification — or don’t, actually. “Freshwater acidification” doesn’t have quite the same ring to it, though it is happening, thanks to the same carbon emissions currently souring the seas. And apparently fish are feeling the burn already, according to a study in Nature on juvenile pink salmon. From Scientific American:

The study was among the first to look at how different CO2 levels could affect fish larvae in fresh water, according to the lead author, Michelle Ou, a former master’s student at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver.

“We didn’t actually expect to see so many effects,” she said. “We were just poking around to see what we could find.”

Pink salmon seemed like a good species to start with. Not only are the fish abundant and economically important, but they also serve as a keystone species … Although pink salmon spend their adulthood in the open ocean, their first weeks of life are in freshwater streams.

It turns out that, while adult fish do pretty OK with changing water chemistry, larvae exposed to elevated CO2 levels showed some significant changes:

They found that not only were they smaller and lighter, but the fish’s senses were also impaired. The pink salmon larvae were more bold around new objects and did not seem to be afraid of alarm cues in the water that would normally prompt fish to flee.

The fish also had an impaired sense of smell that prevented them from recognizing specific amino acids associated with the streams where they were born. This was significant because recognition of those amino acids is believed to play an important role in the fish’s navigational ability, said Ou.

If you know much about what salmon have to do — namely, navigate from the open ocean back to the exact tributary of the exact stream in which they were spawned — you will recognize that this is potentially A Very Bad Thing. But just how acidic are rivers going to get in the future? Since bodies are freshwater are typically smaller than the ocean (no, duh) pH levels are likely to wobble around more depending on immediate conditions. Still, way, way more research is needed.

So get on it, science. Meanwhile, I’m gonna go ahead and guess we should try to stop this runaway carbon emissions thing, how’s that sound?

Source:
Pink Salmon Struggle as Freshwater Becomes Acidic

, Scientific American.

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China, Coal. Be Afraid. Be Very Afraid.

by KeiraFoulds Posted on June 5, 2015

Mother Jones

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The Guardian

Our Climate Desk partners at the Guardian have published a beautiful—and terrifying—multimedia story from deep inside China’s coal belt. It’s the third installment in the paper’s ongoing “carbon bombs” series: investigations into giant fossil fuel projects from around the world that are super-charging global warming, or that have the potential to do so. Today’s deep-dive into China’s ravenous use of coal is eye-opening not only because it explores the long-lasting impact of burning coal on the nation’s health, but also because it illustrates the country’s outsized impact on global climate change through coal-related emissions. Here are some highlights from the Guardian story (which you should also check out for the gorgeous video and graphics):

1. “Chinese miners last year dug up 3.87bn tonnes of coal, more than enough to keep all four of the next largest users—the United States, India, the European Union and Russia—supplied for a year.” I’m always amazed by just how much coal China produces and consumes. Here’s how China’s coal production compared to other countries:

The Guardian

2. “Air pollution in China, from its factories and power stations, has got so bad that it kills over half a million people a year.” The impact of coal on China’s air is something my colleague Jaeah Lee and I witnessed first-hand when we traveled to through China for our investigation into China’s fracking boom. Potentially lethal smog stalked us everywhere we went, but especially bad was the coal belt around Shijiazhuang, where smog reaches emergency levels one out of every three days each year—twice as often as in Beijing.

If nothing is done to slash the levels of toxic smog in China’s air, some 257,000 Chinese people could die over the next decade from pollution-related diseases, according to a study released in February by Peking University and Greenpeace. According to a separate Greenpeace study, 90 percent of 360 Chinese cities surveyed failed to meet the country’s national air quality standard in the first quarter of this year. Forty percent of the cities registered air pollution levels that were twice the national standard. Toxic smog billowing from China’s coal-fired power plants is even making snowstorms in the US worse.

This video we produced during our investigation attempts to capture some of the consequences of China’s extraordinary dependence of coal and its impact on air quality and health:

3. “The fuel China dug up last year alone will produce around 9bn tonnes of carbon dioxide as it burns, more than all the coal used around the world in 1990.” Constituting 70 percent of China’s energy supply, coal has allowed China to become the world’s second-largest economy in just a few decades, hauling millions of people out of poverty. But the cost is being felt around the world in the staggering amount of carbon pollution China generates. Again, here’s a Guardian graphic showing just how much China outstrips the rest of the world in terms of carbon emissions, driven by its addiction to coal:

The Guardian

4. There was a drop in Chinese coal demand last year for the first in more than a decade. But China won’t be making permanent cuts to its coal use for years. Instead, the Chinese government has proposed slowing the growth of its coal use by 2020. That promise followed the historic climate deal between the US and China announced in November last year, in which China promised to peak its emissions around 2030.

5. The Chinese government accepted the scientific evidence for global warming years ago. This might seem like a small point, but it’s significant when you consider just how much climate denial has a grip on US politics. No such political resistance exists in China, and that means China “is pushing harder on more fronts than any other government on Earth to develop other sources” of energy, according to Atlantic China expert James Fallows, who spoke to us as part of our fracking investigation. China has an enormous amount to gain from throwing everything at solving the problem—and a lot to lose if it attempts fail, including the goodwill of its people, who are fed up with putrid air and the health impacts on their kids. The results of China’s embrace of the scientific consensus about climate change can be seen most clearly in its booming solar industry, as our peak inside one of the world’s biggest solar company reveals:

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China, Coal. Be Afraid. Be Very Afraid.

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Predicting the climate is hard. So one scientist wants to cut corners

by GretcheHarold Posted on May 12, 2015

supermodel problems

Predicting the climate is hard. So one scientist wants to cut corners

By on 12 May 2015commentsShare

Computer scientist Krishna Palem says we should make climate models less “exact.”

Think of it like making a bed: You can meticulously even out, fold, and tuck everything in all the right places — or you can just roughly flatten the sheet and blanket before throwing on the comforter, and it all looks the same in the end. Right, mom?

The problem with current climate models is that they already take an insane amount of computing power, and they’re still inadequate. The most meticulous, high-powered number crunching is still unable to capture local, small-scale processes like cloud formation. So the basic idea of Palem’s “inexact computing” is that, in certain circumstances, computers can afford to skimp on accuracy in order to save on time and energy. Here’s more from The New York Times:

Current climate models used with supercomputers have cell sizes of about 100 kilometers, representing the climate for that area of Earth’s surface. To more accurately predict the long-term impact of climate change will require shrinking the cell size to just a single kilometer. Such a model would require more than 200 million cells and roughly three weeks to compute one simulation of climate change over a century.

What scientists really need to run such absurdly large simulations are entirely new supercomputers — ones that can handle a billion billion calculations per second:

Such machines will need to be more than 100 times faster than today’s most powerful supercomputers, and ironically, such an effort to better understand the threat of climate change could actually contribute to global warming. If such a computer were built using today’s technologies, a so-called exascale computer would consume electricity equivalent to 200,000 homes and might cost $20 million or more annually to operate.

Well, shit … what was that about corner-cutting alternatives?

Dr. Palem says his method offers a simple and straightforward path around the energy bottleneck. By stripping away the transistors that are used to add accuracy, it will be possible to cut the energy demands of calculating while increasing performance speeds, he claims.

His low-power crusade has recently attracted followers among some climate scientists. “Scientific calculations like weather and climate modeling are generally, inherently inexact,” Dr. Palem said. “We’ve shown that using inexact computation techniques need not degrade the quality of the weather-climate simulation.”

Indeed, in a paper published last year, Palem and his colleagues showed that a mini model of atmospheric dynamics still worked when they ran it with inexact computing. Palem is now looking for money to test the method on full-scale climate models.

Of course, some people will always insist that inexact computing — like half-assedly made beds — is inadequate. Here’s hoping climate saboteurs stick with their “I’m not a scientist” schtick on this one and resist taking cheap shots at something they truly don’t understand.

Source:
A Climate-Modeling Strategy That Won’t Hurt the Climate

, The New York Times.

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Chipotle Says It’s Getting Rid of GMOs. Here’s the Problem.

by JonathaPFX Posted on April 28, 2015

Mother Jones

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Chipotle announced this week that it will stop serving food made with genetically modified organisms. The company wants you to think the decision is “another step toward the visions we have of changing the way people think about and eat fast food,” apparently because GMOs are regarded with at best suspicion and at worst total revulsion by lots of Americans.

There’s data to support that notion: A Pew poll released earlier this year found that less than 40 percent of Americans think GMOs are safe to eat.

Here’s the thing, though: GMOs are totally safe to eat. Eighty-eight percent of the scientists in that same poll agreed. As longtime environmentalist Mark Lynas pointed out in the New York Times recently, the level of scientific consensus on the safety of GMOs is comparable to the scientific consensus on climate change, which is to say that the disagreement camp is a rapidly diminishing minority. Lynas also made the equally valid point that so-called “improved” seeds have a pretty remarkable track record in improving crop yields in developing countries, which translates to a direct win for local economies and food security. (Although there is evidence that widespread GMO use can lead to an increased reliance on pesticides.)

But there’s an even more important reason why Chipotle’s announcement is little more than self-congratulatory PR, even if you think that GMOs are the devil. As former MoJo-er Sarah Zhang pointed out at Gizmodo:

For the past couple of years, Chipotle has been getting its suppliers to get rid of GM corn and soybean. Today’s “GMO-free” announcement comes as Chipotle has switched over to non-GMO corn and soybean oil, but it still serves chicken and pork from animals raised on GMO feed. (Its beef comes from pasture-fed cows.) A good chunk of the GM corn and soybeans grown in America actually goes to feed livestock, so a truly principled stance against GMOs should cut out meat from GM-fed animals, too.

The same caveat applies to soda, which is also made mostly from corn.

Original article – 

Chipotle Says It’s Getting Rid of GMOs. Here’s the Problem.

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