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Future forests to be smaller, less majestic

by LorieDacre Posted on January 21, 2015

Fe Fi Fo Bummer

Future forests to be smaller, less majestic

By on 21 Jan 2015commentsShare

To the list of ways climate change is slowly but surely rewriting the world as we know it, add “making forests less awesome.” A new study suggests that since the 1930s California has lost half of its biggest trees — those with a trunk over two feet in diameter — even in forests protected from logging and development. The study corroborates earlier findings that Yosemite’s pines are growing to smaller average sizes.

The researchers believe climate change is a major factor. Dwindling snowpack and rising temperatures mean plants have unreliable water supplies during the dry season, and they also lose water at a higher rate. Less water means trees aren’t growing as big.

The study, which surveyed 46,000 square miles of Golden State woodlands, found especially steep losses in Southern California’s forests, where the water deficit was most serious. But even tracts along the state’s foggy northern coast and northern Sierra high country suffered: The latter saw more than half of its largest trees vanish. From National Geographic:

Large trees in general appear to be more vulnerable to a water shortfall, [lead author Patrick McIntyre] said. Though it’s not clear why, one reason may be that in large, tall trees the internal hydraulic system that pumps water from roots to leaves is more susceptible to failing when water is short. Another factor could be that many of those trees sprouted centuries ago, when California’s climate was colder, said Jim Lutz, a Utah State University forest ecologist and lead author of the Yosemite study.

Since the study relied on surveys taken before the ongoing four-year California drought began, it’s hard to say how bad things now look for the state’s famous postcard giants, the sequoias and redwoods. But it’s almost certainly worse — and that means more than just a loss of wow factor:

Beyond their romantic grandeur, big trees play an outsized ecological role. They produce more seeds, resist wildfire damage, and store more carbon than their smaller brethren; rare animals such as spotted owls and flying squirrels live in their cavities.

Climate change isn’t even necessarily the most immediate danger. Add the pressures of a growing population, ongoing development, and overzealous fire suppression that leaves many small trees all vying for resources that would sustain a few large ones, and you have a future with far fewer giants in it.

Source:
California’s Forests: Where Have All the Big Trees Gone?

, National Geographic.

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Future forests to be smaller, less majestic

Posted in alo, Anchor, FF, GE, LG, ONA, Pines, solar, solar panels, Sprout, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Future forests to be smaller, less majestic

Finally Some Good News About Clean Energy Investment

by DeannaColleano Posted on January 9, 2015

Mother Jones

Clean energy investment around the world is rebounding after a three-year decline, according to new figures released today by Bloomberg New Energy Finance. Globally, the total amount of clean energy investment jumped 16 percent in 2014, to $310 billion. That number is just shy of the record amount of investment set in 2011.

BNEF produces quarterly reports that track how much money governments and the private sector are pouring into wind, solar, biofuels and other green energy projects. In 2014, the United States enjoyed its biggest investments since 2012, but it was China that once again drove the numbers. China’s clean energy spending shot up 32 percent to a record $89.5 billion, cementing its place as the world’s top market for green investment. (You can get a sense of just how impressive Chinese investment is by peaking inside the the world’s biggest solar manufacturing factory, which is run by Chinese company Yingli.)

Solar is getting the lion’s share of investment around the world, according to the figures. Almost half the money spent on clean energy this year—just shy of $150 billion—was in the solar industry. Wind investment also reached record levels—$19.4 billion globally—thanks in part to offshore projects in Europe.

There was one darker patch in the numbers: Australia, where the government is trying to slash the country’s Renewable Energy Target, a policy that creates mandates for the amount of clean energy in the electricity mix. Bucking the global trend, investments there fell by 35 percent.

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Finally Some Good News About Clean Energy Investment

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16 New Year’s Predictions That Are Not For 2015

by olikellopas Posted on January 3, 2015

Mother Jones

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I’m up early (thanks, dexamethasone!) and there’s not really any news in the morning papers that I’m just bursting to respond to. So, since predictions are the thing to do when a new year dawns, here are some predictions. Not for 2015, mind you—I’m not an idiot—but for the medium-term future, which in my book extends over the next 30 years or so for reasons given in prediction #1. Here you go:

  1. AI and robotics will continue to improve rapidly. We’ll have useful AI by 2025 and full AI by 2045. This will either transform the world or destroy it. Flip a coin. However, regardless of how the end point turns out, the transition period is going to be pretty brutal for the 90 percent of the population that occupies the middle classes and below. Note that this prediction is #1 on my list for a reason. The rest are randomly placed.
  2. At some point, we will reach a tipping point and medicine will be revolutionized. I’m guessing it starts around 2025 and really takes off over the ensuing decade or two. By 2030 or so nanobots will be involved. I know this has been predicted for about as long as nuclear fusion reactors have been “twenty years away,” but honestly, that’s not a strike against this prediction. It just means that lots of influential people are habitually starry-eyed about technology, something that’s always been true for reasons of either personality or simple business self-interest. But the medical revolution will come regardless. It will just take longer than the congenital utopians thought. Speed bumps along the way aren’t reasons for cynicism, they’re the signposts of progress.
  3. Climate change is going to start to seriously bite by 2030. This will have increasingly catastrophic results in equatorial zones, which rich countries will decline to do much about despite many pious promises. We’ll be too busy adapting ourselves.
  4. However, the big wild card on climate change is geoengineering. I think there’s at least a 50 percent chance that we’ll undertake some kind of major geoengineering project by 2035, either unilaterally or as a global initiative. It will almost certainly be something of a clusterfuck, but we’ll get better with experience and the continued development of AI.
  5. On the bright side, solar panels will keep getting cheaper. By 2020 they’ll be competitive with coal in many parts of the world. As early as 2030, solar could be providing a very substantial part of our energy production if we have the brains to get serious about reducing greenhouse gases and allow government regulation to speed the process of the free market. Unfortunately, I don’t have much faith that we’ll do this. But if we do, it will allow us to start our geoengineering experiment with more modest projects, which will be a very good thing indeed. Nuclear fusion remains unlikely but not impossible.
  6. The rich world will continue to age. Old people will continue to vote in large numbers. This will reach a critical point around 2025 or so, but I don’t really know how it’s going to resolve itself. Maybe we’ll just muddle along. Maybe old people will increasingly—and successfully—demand policies that steadily kill economic growth. Maybe the young will revolt. I’m just not sure.
  7. The surveillance state will continue to grow. Partly this is because technology simply can’t be stopped, and partly because terrorism will continue to increase and we will willingly trade privacy for security. By 2030 personal privacy will be all but dead, and everyone under 40 will simply accept it. The rest of us will remain uncomfortable but won’t put up much of a fight.
  8. Social media as we know it will slowly die out. It will be replaced by (a) ubiquitous surveillance, (b) instant, ubiquitous wireless communication, and (c) immersive virtual reality. This will happen in the rich world by, say, 2030, and in the rest of the world a decade or two later.
  9. Online retail will continue to grow. Duh. Partly this will happen for the obvious reasons, partly because the experience of truly trying out a new product online before you buy will get better and better. The kindergarten version of this is reading a sample of a book for free before you buy. The grownup version will be virtual versions of tech gadgets that you can play with as if they were in your hands, along with highly accurate online avatars that will let you try on virtual clothing and truly see what it looks like and whether it fits. Here in Irvine, a nearby shopping center is slowly being shut down and transformed into a medical office complex. I take this as a sign of things to come.
  10. Personal 3D printing? I’m still not sure if and when that becomes more than a toy. At an industrial level it will certainly become a big thing, allowing us far more routine customization of consumer products that we buy online.
  11. Real, honest-to-god driverless cars that can navigate essentially anywhere and respond to sophisticated voice commands, will become reality by 2025 or 2030. See #1 for why. This will change society as profoundly as the invention of the mass-market car itself.
  12. Manned space exploration will go nowhere. We will not colonize the moon. At most, we will eventually launch a manned mission to Mars, but it will find nothing of interest beyond what unmanned probes have discovered. We gave up on manned missions to the moon after seven flights. We’ll give up on Mars after one or two. FTL travel will continue to be impossible. Thanks a lot, Einstein!
  13. We will all have plenty of body implants by and by. Bionic eyes are an obvious possibility. Bionic limbs are already good enough that their continued success barely counts as a prediction anymore. Cognitive enhancement will become mainstream, which is a good thing since we’ll need it to keep up with AI development.
  14. Russia will decline. China will keep growing and will certainly become a major world power, but growth will slow down due mostly to inexorable consequences of demographics and the decay of labor costs as a competitive advantage. Over the long term, the United States will continue to outperform them both, as well as the EU and (maybe) South America. I’m not really sure about India.
  15. Nuclear warfare? Beats me. I’d say a major exchange is unlikely, but a few minor exchanges are certainly possible. The most likely spot is the tinder keg stretching from Morocco to India, which already contains three nuclear powers and will likely contain at least two more (Iran and Saudi Arabia) within two decades.
  16. There will also be some terrorist biological attacks, but nothing catastrophic. Thanks to ubiquitous surveillance and superior technology, the good guys will develop defenses faster than the bad guys can develop truly killer bugs. Whether the same can be said for natural pandemics is less clear.

As you’ve noticed, I have no predictions for art or culture, which I know little about. In any case, these subjects are far too nonlinear to say anything useful about. Not too much about politics either, though the political implications of many of the predictions are fairly obvious. Economics will undergo a sea change for the same reason it’s gone through sea changes before: the underlying world of trade and money will fundamentally change. It’s not clear if the political class will pay much attention to this, but at some point I suppose they won’t have much choice.

The corporate world, despite the endless predictions of the techno-utopians and the equally endless kvetching about slacker Millennials, won’t really change much. There will be more telecommuting, more consolidation into gigantic multinationals, and ever more sophisticated marketing, but no revolutionary changes to the basic structure of business. (The marketing part of this prediction relies largely on the fact that although big data may look like crap right now, it won’t forever, and it will intersect with ubiquitous surveillance to become either revolutionary or sinister depending on your worldview.) Patent law will either be seriously reformed or will become perhaps the most dominant and most oppressive feature of corporate R&D. Not sure which.

Media will continue to be 95 percent entertainment subsidizing a small amount of serious news, just as it’s been for centuries. Only the tech will change. Books will continue to be books. English will continue to take over the world (see #14), though it’s possible the development of accurate, idiomatic, real-time translation AI will make this a moot point. The revolution of medical tech may or may not come soon enough to affect the treatment of multiple myeloma.

Obviously I’m missing lots of stuff. Some of it is due to ignorance, some is because I’m genuinely skeptical that certain much-hyped trends are likely to pan out. However, I’m not going to tell you which is which. This will allow me to plausibly deny ignorance for anything big that I’ve stupidly left off my list.

You should feel free to offer to bet me on any of these trends, but they’re all far enough out that you’ll likely have to badger my estate for payouts. Good luck with that. This is deliberate on my part, so let’s skip the whole betting thing, OK?

Continued here: 

16 New Year’s Predictions That Are Not For 2015

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Nike, Starbucks, and other big businesses step up to support Obama’s climate rules

by NZDAurelio Posted on December 3, 2014

Nike, Starbucks, and other big businesses step up to support Obama’s climate rules

By on 3 Dec 2014 12:34 pmcommentsShare

Obama’s plan to regulate carbon dioxide emissions from power plants “is a dagger in the heart of the American middle class, and to representative Democracy itself,” said a poetic-feeling Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) back in June. He went on to claim the plan would mean “higher costs, fewer jobs, and a less reliable energy grid.”

“Nope,” said Nike, Starbucks, and 221 other companies on Tuesday in a letter to President Obama. (I’m paraphrasing).

The plan, which would cut carbon pollution from power plants by 30 percent over 2005 levels, will, the EPA estimates, cost between $7.3 billion and $8.8 billion to implement, but will save between $55 billion and $93 billion in public health and climate change–related costs. (It will also save thousands of lives, if you want to factor that into the equation.)

The letter, signed by other major household names like Ikea, Kellogg’s, and Nestle, and organized by the sustainable investment group Ceres, frames the plan as good fiscal policy. It explains that these 200-plus companies’ support is “firmly grounded in economic reality. We know that tackling climate change is one of America’s greatest economic opportunities of the 21st century and we applaud the EPA for taking steps to help the country seize that opportunity.” It continues:

The new standards will reinforce what leading companies already know: climate change poses real financial risks and substantial economic opportunities and we must act now. We applaud your administration for its commitment to tackling climate change and we encourage your timely pursuit of the finalization and implementation of these standards.

So what was these companies’ motivation for taking a stand? Many of them, the letter explains, have set a goal of getting more energy from renewable sources or decreasing their carbon footprint. “In short, a majority of the world’s largest companies are investing in clean energy and reducing emissions,” the letter says. “Today’s rules will help spur investment and provide the long-term certainty necessary for our businesses to thrive and to meet these goals.” So, if the administration helps the economy become less carbon-dependent through regulation, these companies are for it. (Nike, Starbucks, and a number of these same companies also backed the Waxman-Markey climate bill that passed the House in 2009 but failed to move forward in the Senate.)

This declaration of support for the EPA and the president is a rebuke to those in Congress who, like McConnell, have been echoing the fossil fuel industry’s claim that regulating CO2 from power plants will simply demolish America’s economy. In fact, the administration’s plan poses a threat to only a handful of companies — mostly those that are dependent on mining, moving, or burning coal — whose interests elected politicians seem disproportionately concerned with protecting. If this interest group’s many challenges to the power-plant rules are unsuccessful, the EPA plans to have it finalized by next summer.

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Nike, Starbucks, and other big businesses step up to support Obama’s climate rules

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We’re hooked on this map of industrial fishing

by TammaraRuggieri Posted on November 15, 2014

We’re hooked on this map of industrial fishing

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15 Nov 2014 8:31 AM

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We’re hooked on this map of industrial fishing

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We’ve written before how the best tools to fight overfishing at sea may be found in the skies – but this past Wednesday, proof-of-concept came in the form of a satellite-tracked map of all the journeys made by 25,000 large fishing vessels between 2012 and 2013.

The system is called Global Fishing Watch, and it was conceived by ocean-hugger nonprofit Oceana, developed by our favorite eye-in-the-sky watchdog SkyTruth, powered by satellite company SpaceQuest, with technical support from Google. Those are some heavy hitters to throw their weight behind the problem of illegal fishing — and they could actually make a difference. Here’s Wired‘s take:

Although the system currently displays voyages from nearly a year ago, “the plan is that we will build out a public release version that will have near-real-time data,” said Jackie Savitz, Oceana’s VP for U.S. oceans. “Then you’ll actually be able to see someone out there fishing within hours to days,” fast enough to act on the information if the fishing is happening illegally, such as in a marine protected area.

Here are the nuts and bolts: Large boats at sea are required to declare their positions by an automatic identification system, whose signals can be picked up by satellite. By feeding all these IDs and movements through some (read: a lot of very complicated) analysis, the Fishing Watch system can identify fishing boats. And, by omission, those boats who do not claim to be fishing but nevertheless behave as though they are.

So now we’re one step closer to catching fish criminals red-herring-handed.

Source:
The Plan to Map Illegal Fishing From Space

, Wired.

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We’re hooked on this map of industrial fishing

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Philae Is Now Asleep

by Posted on November 15, 2014

The lander’s solar panels aren’t getting enough light and the batteries will die, but we already have some fantastic images and data

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Philae Is Now Asleep

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Philae Bounced Twice And Didn’t Quite Stick the Landing

by Posted on November 14, 2014

The lander’s solar panels aren’t getting enough light and the batteries will die, but we already have some fantastic images and data

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Philae Bounced Twice And Didn’t Quite Stick the Landing

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Why clean energy might be cheaper than you think

by Tawanna55K Posted on October 14, 2014

Why clean energy might be cheaper than you think

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14 Oct 2014 1:15 PM

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Why clean energy might be cheaper than you think

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Wind and solar power often get a bad rap for being more expensive than energy produced from fossil fuels. But what happens when you factor in, say, the health costs of people breathing smoggy air? Or the financial impact of climate change’s effect on ecosystems and precious resources like water?

Those are some of the questions the European Commission sought to answer. A new report written for the EC includes those environmental costs and more in calculations of the total costs of producing electricity from various renewable and nonrenewable sources. The result? Wind and water are the best bargains for making megawatts.

The study says wind turbines on dry land cost about $115 per megawatt-hour (MWh), while the total cost of solar panels is around $125 per MWh and falling fast. By contrast, bigger environmental costs push electricity produced by burning natural gas over $160 per MWh, and coal-fired power can approach $200 per MWh.

Hydropower is by far the cheapest way to make electricity, at less than $50 per MWh, according to the report. Although building new mega-dams has become taboo (for good reasons), the results show that run-of-the-river projects can produce smaller amounts of energy at smaller detriment to nature.

Climate change, energy resource depletion, and airborne particulate matter are the biggest “external” expenses calculated, but the study also includes monetary estimates for impacts like human toxicity, radiation, water depletion, even using land that could otherwise grow valuable food.

Sounds like a W for clean energy advocates, right? Well, converting such “external” costs into monetary values is pretty controversial: How does one appraise a stable climate? What’s the value of not having lung cancer? Can you really put a price on nature?

Yet from a purely pragmatic standpoint, translating health, ecosystems, and the climate into the language of economic decision makers — i.e. money — might help them act like such things matter. Focusing more resources on wind, water, and solar power would be a good start.

Source:
Wind power is cheapest energy, EU analysis finds

, The Guardian.

http://ec.europa.eu/energy/studies/doc/20141013_subsidies_costs_eu_energy.pdf

, European Commission.

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Why clean energy might be cheaper than you think

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Don’t ‘Tax the Sun,’ Says Petition Author to Energy Company

by KelleMacklin Posted on October 3, 2014

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Don’t ‘Tax the Sun,’ Says Petition Author to Energy Company

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Bad News For Obama: Fracking May Be Worse Than Burning Coal

by FletcheBrandow Posted on September 8, 2014

Mother Jones

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If you’re a politician, science is a bitch; it resists spin. And a new set of studies—about, of all things, a simple molecule known as CH4—show that President Obama’s climate change strategy is starting to unravel even as it’s being knit. To be specific: most of the administration’s theoretical gains in the fight against global warming have come from substituting natural gas for coal. But it looks now as if that doesn’t really help.

In a very real sense it’s not entirely the president’s fault. When Obama took office in 2008 he decided to deal with health care before climate change, in essence tackling the biggest remaining problem of the 20th century before teeing up the biggest challenge of the 21st. His team told environmentalists that they wouldn’t be talking about global warming, focusing instead on ‘green jobs.’ Obama did seize the opportunity offered by the auto industry bailout to demand higher mileage standards—a useful move, but one that will pay off slowly over the decades. Other than that, faced with a hostile Congress, he spent no political capital on climate.

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Bad News For Obama: Fracking May Be Worse Than Burning Coal

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