Guest Writer's Climate Chronicles

By Jerome a Paris

Recent statistics have been published showing that Europe has now installed over 2,000 MW of offshore wind capacity, with more than a quarter installed in the past year and lots more to come in the next few years.

I discussed these numbers in more detail here, but wanted to give you here some insights on what these numbers mean on the ground.

I recently visited the port site in Zeebrugge, Belgium, where the foundations for the Belwind offshore wind farm (the financing of which I worked on) were stored before their installation. This is a good opportunity to give you a glimpse of the kind of logistics involved, and what kind of problems can happen (and how they are solved), on offshore wind installations.

Follow me for a tour of a small bit of Europe's fastest growing heavy industry.

By Kunda Dixit, Himal

Namgye Chumbi was weeding his potato garden in the village of Phakding in Nepal’s Khumbu region below Mount Everest on the morning of Aug. 4, 1985. Because of the monsoon season, there were not too many trekkers hiking up the trail towards Namche Bazaar. It was a brilliantly clear day, unusual for the monsoon season, and he was working by the banks of the Dudh Kosi River.

True to its name, the river was milky white and frothing, as the water tumbled noisily over boulders. Yet around 2 in the afternoon, the river suddenly became strangely silent. The water level went down, and Namgye sensed danger.

Much in the same way as coastal dwellers saw the sea recede before the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami, the Dudh Kosi was about to reveal its terrifying avatar.

by Lutz Weischer, WRI

Recently there have been some questions in the media (see Green Inc. and Washington Post articles) and in the U.S. Senate about stimulus grants for wind energy projects going to foreign countries. On March 3rd, a group of Senators called for the suspension of the renewables grant program until “Buy American” rules had been passed that made sure projects used American components and labor.

But there is more to that story than meets the eye.

Empirical evidence demonstrates that predictable support for wind power improves local manufacturing capacity and creates local jobs. Consistent support in the form of the stimulus and long term programs such as a Renewable Energy Standard will give investors the certainty they need to plan and create jobs in the United States.

By Smita Nakhooda, WRI

The prospect of a $3.75 billion World Bank loan to support the Medupi Supercritical coal plant in South Africa has raised questions about the future of development assistance in a warming world.

The coal plant, part of the national South African utility Eskom’s program to expand generation capacity, is expected to provide 4,800 MW of electricity. Construction of the plant has already begun, and contracts for key components have been signed. Yet Eskom’s longer-term electricity expansion program may have problematic implications for environmentally and socially sustainable development in South Africa.

By Donald A. Brown

This post identifies 20 questions that the press has failed to ask opponents of proposed U.S. climate change policies and that should be asked if climate change raises civilization-challenging ethical issues.

To understand why these questions should be asked, it is first necessary to review the kinds of arguments that have usually been made in opposition to U.S. climate change policies, programs and legislation and why these arguments fail to deal with the profound ethical questions raised by the threat of human-induced climate change.

Since international climate change negotiations began in 1990, the United States has yet to adopt meaningful greenhouse gas emissions reduction legislation. For almost 20 years, arguments against U.S. climate change legislation or U.S. participation in a global solution to climate change have been made that have almost always been of two types:

In his Feb. 10 article "Obama: The Making of a Clean Coal President," David Sassoon wrote about the U.S. president's creation of a task force to develop a national carbon capture and storage strategy, calling it as a victory for the coal industry and describing how the backing of green groups had helped to cement Obama's support for CCS technology.

NRDC Climate Programs Director David Hawkins wrote the following response.

By David Hawkins

Let me offer a few thoughts on why I believe this task force actually is a step forward for all of us who want to put an end to investments in new polluting coal plants, increase our reliance on energy efficiency and renewable energy, and prevent disastrous climate disruption.

Our community uses several tactics to block new polluting coal plants. We intervene in permit proceedings and bring lawsuits to challenge coal plant permits. NRDC has actively used this tactic, joining the outstanding efforts by the Sierra Club and others. Another tactic, that NRDC also has pursued, is advocacy with Wall Street investors to convince them that investments in new polluting coal plants are a bad bet. A third is advocacy for performance standards that would make it legally impossible for new polluting coal plants to be built. NRDC worked hard to get such a law enacted in California and is seeking such standards in federal legislation. A fourth is to create a broad consensus that no new coal plant should be built unless it captures its carbon.

This last approach, which NRDC has pursued as well, is controversial in our community because it does not call for an absolute bar on new coal plants regardless of environmental performance and it lends legitimacy to carbon capture and storage (CCS) technology.

By RealClimate

Currently, a few errors — and supposed errors — in the last IPCC report (AR4) are making the media rounds, together with a lot of distortion and professional spin by parties interested in discrediting climate science.

Time for us to sort the wheat from the chaff: Which of these putative errors are real, and which are not? And what does it all mean, for the IPCC in particular, and for climate science more broadly?

By Kenneth Hewitt, China Dialogue
Part III of a three-part series

Glaciers and their immediate environs present many dangers for humans, such as crevasses and glacier mills into which one might fall, heavily crevassed ice falls, snow and ice avalanches from the side walls and, along the flanks, dumping of great boulders, ponding and floods from melt water. For these reasons, there are hardly ever permanent settlements on or right beside the ice. These are hazards mainly to mountaineers, hunters, travelers and military expeditions.

The more serious dangers arise from processes in the glacial environment that may extend their impacts beyond existing glacial areas. The more serious tend to involve ponding of water that leads to glacial outburst floods, or releases that generate debris flows.

By Kenneth Hewitt, China Dialogue
Part II of a three-part series

As we saw in part one, climate change is obviously having different consequences in different mountain areas of Asia. The situation in the Karakoram must represent some distinctive conditions.

Three features of the regional environment seem critical. The first two relate to snowfall and the nourishment of these glaciers. They are intermediate in type between the summer accumulation (snowfall) glaciers of the greater Himalayas, and the winter accumulation glaciers of, say, the Caucasus and European Alps to the west. In each of the latter, more or less strong glacier retreat is reported.

Second, the zone of maximum precipitation in the Karakoram is much higher than in these and most other mountain ranges. It is also entirely within the accumulation zones of the glaciers. This relates to the third factor, the exceptional elevations and, especially, elevation range of these ice masses.

By Kenneth Hewitt, China Dialogue
Part I of a three-part series

Glaciers are quite sensitive to climate change and, recently, there have been many reports of major changes in the Himalaya and other parts of High Asia; mostly of glaciers retreating fast. Impacts of a range of glacier hazards, and on the reliability of water resources, are of concern at local, national and transnational scales.

However, there is also a growing recognition that glacial conditions in the region are very diverse, and so are their responses to climate change.

There are some very different implications in different societal contexts, not least in relation to rapid socio-economic changes, water resource projects and security crises. The latter are often more urgent or immediate problems that disrupt or undermine peoples’ capacities to adapt to environmental change.