greenswitch – climate change and cleantech solutions

Good q&a piece by the New York Times. The question: “How do they weigh greenhouse gas emissions?”. The answer: follow the link.

New York Times: While it is possible to weigh a quantity of gas, by comparing the weight of an evacuated container to one filled at a known pressure, climate scientists do not rely on direct measurements. Instead, they use estimates based on the molecular weight of carbon dioxide; the weights of other greenhouse gases are converted to their greenhouse impact as compared with that of a ton of carbon dioxide.

The EU commisssion is preparing a new report — called “green book” — on the impacts of climate change on coastal cities. The report proposes massive safety measures and considers even the relocation of cities close to the coast. The source below is in German. To get a rough idea try the Google translation attempt.

Sonnenseite: Eine Anpassung an den Klimawandel sei unvermeidbar, selbst wenn sich der Temperaturanstieg durch C02-Reduktionen bremsen lasse. Erstmals listet die EU-Kommission auf, was die Mitgliedsstaaten in den nächsten Jahrzehnten leisten müssten. „Relativ einfach und billig“ sei die bessere Isolierung von Wohnungen gegen Hitze und Veränderungen in der Landwirtschaft wie der Einsatz von Pflanzen, die Dürre aushalten.

„Hart und teuer“ wird dagegen der Schutz gegen Überflutung durch den Anstieg des Meeresspiegels. Nötig seien höhere Dämme und womöglich die Verlagerung von Häfen, Fabriken und ganzen Städten. 50 Prozent der deutschen und 85 Prozent der belgischen und niederländischen Küste lägen relativ niedrig.

There is a really insightful thread in The Oil Drum on predictions on the impact of the cyclone Gonu. The thread has been updated several times. The Oil Drum and Chuck Watson of KAC/UCF are forecasting, based on their damage models, that the Qalhat (Sur) LNG terminal will be out for 20-30 days and the Mina al Fahal oil terminal will be down for 10-20 days–all of this assuming they are built to US standards. Read the entire thread for more information.

The Oil Drum: Why might Cyclone Gonu matter? Well, that answer begins with the fact that the world production of petroleum plateauing around 85 mbbl/day, so any slight blip in supply or exporting could be quite noticeable on the world markets–as a sizeable portion of the world’s petroleum exports go through the Gulf of Oman.

Particularly, Oman also matters in this because it produces 743,000 bbl/day; Oman is also a net exporter, non-OPEC, whose production peaked earlier in the decade.

Of course, this storm also has the potential to affect petroleum exports from Iran and the UAE for that matter–mainly because of shipping disruptions in the Straits of Hormuz, but there could also be some real effects on infrastructure and assets depending on storm surge, track and landfall. There are also refining and other production assets in Southern Iran that could be affected depending on the strength of Gonu.

What will a climate change bring: rain or humidity? Scientists at Remote Sensing Systems in California looked at looked at satellite records from between 1986 and 2005 to see if the climate models’ predictions of a correlation between increased temperatures and reduced rainfall could actually happen in reality. Their assumption: hotter air can retain more humity.

NewScientist: “The satellite data for the last 20 years shows an increase in rainfall that is three times what the models predicted,” says Wentz. “This represents one of the first tests of the models used for the predictions of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. The results show a significant discrepancy between model and observations.”

Wentz and his colleagues admit that the reasons for the discrepancy are not clear. One possible explanation is that two decades is too short a time to detect a real trend, a criticism that has already been levelled at the study by several climatologists.

The increase in precipitation between 1986 and 2005 could have been greater than it will be when averaged over longer time scales.

RealClimate – Climate science from climate scientists – explains why global climate models do not give a realistic description of the local climate. This article has already generated over 80 comments — which means there is lots of room for discussions.

RealClimate: Yet, whereas the global climate models (GCMs) tend to describe the global climate statistics reasonably well, they do not provide a representative description of the local climate. Regional climate models (RCMs) do a better job at representing climate on a smaller scale, but their spatial resolution is still fairly coarse compared to how the local climate may vary spatially in regions with complex terrain. This fact is not a general flaw of climate models, but just the climate models’ limitation.

The real climate blog offers a good starting page on climate change sites for beginners and experienced.

Also, have a look at renewable energy access for more energy related starting points.