Category: Environment

It seems that mere “climate change” was not nearly bad enough for the media scaremongers and the environmental activists so even the smallest upward blip in global average temperatures has became “catastrophic climate change”.

The increasing use of this pejorative term as well as “chaotic”, “irreversible”, and “rapid” climate change has altered the public discourse around climate change. So says Mike Hulme Director, Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research.

His commentary comes at an interesting point in environmental politics with protests mounting and a report presented to the UK government last week providing Tony Blair yet more ammunition and vote-building rhetoric than ever before.

The Guardian this year mentioned the phrase “climate porn” the apparent thrill of seeing new scientific results that protend natural disaster on a global scale. The media of course is almost entirely to blame for this state of affairs boulstered by anti-capitalist, anti-industry, and other misinformed groups, as well as the politicians hoping to make the most of their opposition’s positions.

Simon Retallack, the IPPR’s head of climate change, told The Guardian that “Currently, climate communications too often terrify or thrill the reader or viewer while failing to make them feel that they can make a difference, which engenders inaction.”

The spirit of his report is echoed by Hulme in this latest commentary.

There is no concensus on climate change catastrophic or otherwise. The South of England basked in the longest “Indian summer” on record this year, the warm spell that began as a warm but wet August faded into September didn’t entirely halt until the beginning of November. Is that an effect of global warming? Who knows? It’s been rather colder than you’d expect these last few days…perhaps there’s an ice age on the way. It’s a facile task to draw a straight line sloping one way then the other through a scatter of temperature plots in which the error margins are almost as wide as the problem being discussed. Couple the experimental issues with the limitations of computer modelling and throw in some oil company disinformation with a few ludicrous pronouncement from a Bush in denial (God moves in mysterious ways) and it’s no wonder the public is at once thrilled and scared sh*tless by all this hot air. The real catastrophe could be that in the confusion we continue to waste resources while whole nations and continents languish in poverty and disease. Whether or not climate change turns out eventually to be catastrophic or not is almost irrelevant when we are faced with so many other global ills.

Are we running out of oil? It’s a question that has vexed drivers the world over since the first major oil crisis three decades ago. Oil experts have been telling us for years that supplies are dwindling and that within another few decades the petrochemical legacy left by ancient life will have all but gone.

But, Eric Cheney economic geologist at the University of Washington thinks this notion is nonsense. “The most common question I get is, ‘When are we going to run out of oil,’ he says, “The correct response is, ‘Never!'” He says that there might come a point when we are paying $100 a gallon, that’s gallon, not barrel, but, he says, changing economics, technological advances and efforts such as recycling and substitution make the world’s mineral resources virtually infinite.

Is that a reasonable assumption? Recycling isn’t going to save us, it costs energy, and unless we have some kind of renewable power to drive the recycling “machines” that is almost always going to fall short of 100% efficiency and leave us with a net loss.

However, he does have a point about untapped oil deposits. Forty years ago, the technology did not exist to extract oil from tar sands, for instance, and organic matter or coal is now worth manufacturing. Of course, processing costs will rise, but that’s the price we will pay to drive our vehicles and power our industries.

“Mineral resources are vitally important to our industrial and service economy,” Cheney says, but speaking at the Geological Society of America annual meeting this weekend in collaboration with Andrew Buddington of Spokane Community College he will point out that gas prices today, adjusted for inflation, are about what they were in the early 20th century. Today’s prices seem inordinately high, he said, because crude oil was at an extremely low price, $10 a barrel, just eight years ago and now fetches around $58 a barrel and has been as high as $78.

As major economies, such as those in China and India, develop and are on the verge of greater demand for mineral resources because of increasing road use, he said, it is an opportune time for universities to train a new crop of resource geologists who can understand the challenges and help find solutions. He believes that popular but misguided notions about mineral resources might be hampering students from entering the field.

So that’s alright then. We can carry on pumping out exhaust gases to the contentment of our cars and concreting the countryside as long as we teach our students how to reach the unreachable.

A press release arrived yesterday from the American Chemical Society that said, “Japanese scientists have reported the discovery of an additive that can speed up the formation of methane hydrates, literally ice that burns.”

Literally ice that burns?

I know what they mean, but it’s not literally ice that burns is it? That would be a mythical substance composed of flammable frozen water, surely?

Anyway, these not-literally-ice-that-burns materials have some interesting properties not least because they could act as a potential new energy resource to boulster apparently dwindling fossil fuel supplies. Methane hydrates are found in vast natural deposits beneath the seafloor in coastal areas of the United States and certain other parts of the world. Estimates suggest that known hydrate deposits contain enough natural gas to meet demand for centuries. Of course, the carbon-containing component of methane hydrates is one of the most potent greenhouse gases we know, and climatologists have serious concerns about the release of vast quantities into the atmosphere as frozen stores begin to melt as global temperatures rise.

So, an additive to speed up their formation might be useful in helping us sequester enormous volumes of greenhouse gases.

But, how does this sit with the idea of using the stored methane in natural reserves as an alternative to other natural gas sources? Burning this aqueous methane will release its carbon content just as readily as burning methane without the aq. We’ll be able to propel our vehicles and heating our homes, of course, but we’ll be adding just as much carbon to the atmosphere as we would otherwise do with fossil fuel sources. With the added problem of having to build energy-intensive manufacturing plants to synthesise the “additive” to help is produce methane hydrates for burial at sea.

It just doesn’t add up. Faced with a putatively worsening greenhouse trend and dwindling fuel supplies, shouldn’t we be looking for sustainable energy resources that neither add to our carbon emissions nor require us to find complex routes to lock them down?

I guess the methane hydrate factory could be powered by wind turbines and solar cells, but that’s not the point is it?

If you’re planning a holiday in the Canary Islands sometime in the next 10000 years you can rest assured that there isn’t likely to be a devastating collapse of the volcanic island of La Palma and an ensuing tsunami.

According to researchers in the Netherlands, La Palma is a lot more stable than is generally assumed. Jan Nieuwenhuis and his colleagues have cast doubts on pessimistic estimates of the effects of a collapse of the southwestern flank of La Palma caused by a volcanic eruption. Geologists had previously calculated that such a collapse would cause a mega tsunami that might roar across the Atlantic wreaking havoc on the US eastern seaboard, Europe, and Africa, with waves initially 650 metres high moving at 800 kilometres per hour. A tsunami on this scale could wipe New York, Boston, Lisbon, and Casablanca from the face of the map.

The findings are likely to cause something of a row among geological researchers a faction of which believe La Palma could collapse into the sea very soon indeed causing a tsunami big enough to engulf the US eastern seaboard, the exposed North African coast and countless Portuguese ports.

You can read the full story in my Spotlight column on Intute.

Julia Seymour, Assistant Editor at the Virginia-based Business and Media Institute emailed to tell me that despite blasting senator James Inhofe, CNN had him on ‘American Morning’ on October 3 in a debate with anchor Miles O’Brien.

According to the BandMI write-up on this debacle, “The spirited debate with Inhofe allowed viewers to get a rebuttal to O’Brien’s charge on the September 28 ‘American Morning’ that Inhofe was waging a ‘lonely battle’ against the ‘overwhelming’ evidence of global warming.”

Climate change has been a threat to sanity for decadeas, as long ago as 1895 people were warned of the coming ice age, by the 1920s a warm spell suggested the earth was getting warmer, by the 1950s, once again the earth was to be frozen. As late as 1975 we were all going to freeze according to the media hype. Global warming was on the cards as of 1981 but with a new twist, it could cause changes in the Gulf Stream as melting icebergs broke away from the frozen north and cooled the Atlantic leading to a mini ice age across the British Isles and Europe.

Today, every change the weather is blamed on global warming, every natural disaster including very dubiously earthquake-driven tsunami and even volcanic activity, and perhaps less dubiously the strength of hurricanes. By the way, if it’s a trend, why wasn’t there another Katrina this year? Could it be that Katrina wasn’t actually as powerful as it seemed and that most of the harm done was caused by inadequate defences against flooding?

AAAS is organising an online climate change debate this week. I’ve posted my questions online in advance and will report back on the results.

In his climate-change ain’t happening State of the Union speech of Sept. 25th, Sen. James Inhofe (R-OK) makes the claim that climate change “skeptic” scientists do not get a fair share of media coverage. But, according to DeSmogBlog a quick infomart media search of US papers shows there have been more than 350 mentions of Fred Singer, Willie Soon, Sallie Baliunas, William Grey, Roger Pielke, Richard Linzen and Patrick Michaels.

It seems the infamous gang of climate change “skeptics” got mentioned, on average, once every 5 days in North American major print outlets.

I’m not sure how that compares to the non-skeptics, they don’t say, so I asked Richard Littlemore of DeSmogBlog to expand:

“I presume the argument here is that people who recognize the overwhelming evidence of climate change are getting an unfair amount of media coverage,” he told me, “while the skeptics are being bullied into silence. Woefully, this is pretty much the opposite of what is truly happening.”

He points to a peer-reviewed paper from Boykoff and Boykoff [link is now dead] that wades into the subject in some detail. The short version, according to Littlemore is this: “The climate change discussion in peer-reviewed scientific journals includes no papers whatsoever challenging the theory of anthropogenic global warming (check Oreskes in Science Magazine), while in the mainstream press, cranks like Singer and Soon get their [allegedly] unscientific denials mentioned in more than half the stories.”

UPDATE APRIL 2009: If you’re after news on the Icelandic volcano Eyjafjallajoekull, or Eyjafjöll, which is currently belching out masses of ash into the atmosphere and grounding planes across Northern Europe, check out our report on SciScoop.

You can find a regularly updated list of recent volcano eruptions here.

Given the number of Sciencebase visitors looking for information on recent volcano eruptions and currently erupting volcanoes, it seemed sensible to set up a page that would provide the latest information on that very subject. By syndicating the latest announcements and alerts on recent eruptions from the University of North Dakota website (Volcano World), Sciencebase provides a quick route to the information you need in this explosive area.

Volcano World is a collaborative higher education, K-12, and public outreach project of the North Dakota and Oregon Space Grant Consortia administered by the Department of Geosciences at Oregon State University. Thanks to them for making their updates available as a newsfeed for syndication.

We also have information about the 2010 Haiti earthquake disaster.