A Green Degree Blog: New Angles On Sustainability

September 9th 2012

Shell Gets The Arctic Green Light & Melting Ice Paves The Way For Offshore Madness

What a summer we’ve had eh, not just here in the UK where it was terrible, but globally; a season where weather went mad and Arctic ice caps took a long-awaited vacation from their comfy ocean abodes, whisked into the atmosphere by a warming world and natural craziness that literally none of us saw coming. Considering the summer isn’t actually even over yet, the impact of these factors is made all the more potent, and is much of the reason for such fervour in the media over drought, floods and food prices. What next?

Well for one thing, more ignorant foolishness is on the horizon, in the form of offshore drilling, perhaps the most lucrative and most idiotic fossil fuel resource we [apparently] have easy access to. Whose leading the revolution at sea? Why Shell of course, with backing by the American Interior and Obama’s government.

As we all have undoubtedly heard via the blaring sirens of the news outlets and internet aggregators, summer Arctic ice hit some pretty fancy milestones last month; let’s go over them quickly to put this post into context.

The level of melt reached its peak last August, on the 26th, falling to levels not seen for 30 years of recording, and a full 3-4 weeks before the usual point at which summer temperatures drive the highest reductions in ice, around mid-September. Not only was this melt way off the charts in terms of rapidity and severity, but it has now been touted as a rate so ‘amazing’ that it is considered by Dr Hansen, the famed climate scientist, to be unprecedented in scale in at least as much as 1,500 years, let alone 30, and that we as polluters should be trembling in our boots.

Carrying on with this theme, Hansen recently released a video detailing data for Northern Hemisphere average temperatures, where he compares 1951-1980 ranges to 2000-2011 records, and there’s an obvious contrast. The most common peak temperatures are a whole standard deviation away from the 1951-1980 means, and altogether the data shows deviations of up to 5 towards warmer temperatures, effectively stating that as we’ve progressed as a society, the past decade has seen more N Hemisphere warming than the whole 30 year period studied prior. It’s not a huge leap of logic to see that these massively pumped up temperatures, only set to increase, are likely responsible for most, if not all of the accelerated ice-melt being experienced in the Arctic.

Posted at 9:19am and tagged with: oil, drilling, exploration, offshore, oil rig, Shell, BP, tar, disaster, money, politics, science, arctic, ice, melting, record, warming, temperature, climate, global, wind, energy, independence, obama, EPA, US, summer, Hansen, government, election,.

August 28th 2012

We’ve Got The Wrong Idea Of Nuclear; It’s One Of The Good Guys

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I have always been an advocate of nuclear energy, both of the potential behind the fissioning of uranium atoms and the possibilities of replacing fossil fuel generation with a mixture of this and renewables. Despite the seemingly final drawing of the curtain on nuclear and the industry, the ‘multiple disasters’ and the almost complete shunning of it in much of the public’s eye, I’ve kept to my original path and not wavered from the idea.

My reasons for this continued attraction? It’s a combination of many things, including those two mentioned in the opening sentence, alongside factors such as what I perceive as a hugely over-exaggerated waste issue, poor economic and political structure leading to the demise of nuclear which could be rectified, and a simple but strong belief that it could be a big solution to the biggest of our problems, climate change and energy security.

It was with glee then that I came across the book ‘Sustainable Energy: Without The Hot Air’ by David Mackay, a gloriously down-to-earth scientific guide to the entire sustainability debate, written by the chief science advisor to DECC and a Cambridge professor. In it, he thinks of every conceivable part of the energy puzzle, such as renewable production and everyday consumption, decarbonising and electrifying, but with a view I’ve yet to see replicated prior to and since my find. Mackay takes the highest level approach he can to the subject, sparing all the bull**** you normally find in policy and debate, giving you the bare facts in kWh and daily use, comparing heat pumps to freight transport and more, all the while tallying up a chart detailing the chances of us (he focuses on the UK but covers much of the world in examples) powering our Western lives on renewables alone. The verdict…not so good, unless some radical but obvious solutions are observed and carried out.

Within this wonderful book, and forgive my plugging, but it really is good and free to download at that, one chapter really jumped out at me from the pages; this was the nuclear chapter.

Both fission and its lesser mentioned but God-like cousin fusion are covered, with the same no-crap analysis which is sorely missing from much of the science and public dialogue. Throughout the rest of this post, I would like to pick some of the most powerfully simple and shocking pieces of data which will hopefully make you think twice the next time you hear about nuclear in the media, a media which often skews the information to their own devious ends. Of course, when you see such words and numbers, all credit is to David Mackay and his book, in which he urges anybody to use his data to send a message, something I plan on doing here.

Posted at 9:30am and tagged with: nuclear, energy, fission, fusion, uranium, nuke, waste, thorium, fast-breeder, reactor, plant, carbon, heat, fuel, climate, protest, fukushima, chernobyl, 3-mile island, disaster, radiation, radioactive, UK, britain, world, money, deaths, coal, oil, gas,.

July 27th 2012

How Long Will We Continue Denying Climate Change’s Link To Weather?

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There’s no denying the weather has been really quite screwed up of late, and this isn’t just on a local scale but a global one, affecting small and large nations alike.

Currently, large parts of SE Asia such as Beijing and Japan are suffering horrendous flooding after record-breaking precipitation falls for weeks on end, and there have been similar historical rains in many areas of Europe, the UK in particular. Alongside this, intense drought and insolation has been baking most of the entire United States for weeks, severely damaging crops across the agricultural belt of the continent and knocking food prices up globally, stirring fears of yet another food crisis if the weather is to continue.

Storms and hurricanes are of much higher magnitudes, striking with little warning to those in their paths, and regions of the globe so comfortably used to heavy snowfall and consistently cold winters are enduring some of the driest, mildest and frankly oddest seasonal variations seen in decades, perhaps centuries.

One theme slashes through all of these freak events like a warm knife through butter; the frequency and rapidity in which our weather systems are flipping from one extreme to the other is unprecedented in this day and age, and wouldn’t even fit into normal life some centuries past. Torrential rain which may have sat in place for weeks will be abruptly interrupted by beaming sunshine and glass-clear skies for yet more weeks, before thunderstorms and intense winds complete the freaky cycle. The fact these events are occurring within the same month, let alone the same season is reason to worry enough, and in many parts of the world, many are winning gold medals in trumping historical weather readings from as far back as records began.

Only recently NASA has posted studies demonstrating how far this weather screwing has gone. At some point during mid-July, the Greenland ice sheet, one of two major ice bodies on the Earth’s surface, the other being the Antarctic, experienced thawing of up to 97% of the entire ice mass, that’s 97%. For context, normal values read around 50% for the same time of year. This happens due to warming of and melting of the much thinner coastal ice and glaciers as summer comes round, and despite rates increasing steadily over recent decades, this year more than ever data fly through the roof. What makes this event so shocking, is that the normally impregnable central ice, which exceeds two miles thick in many places, melted just like any other part of the sheet, albeit to much shallower depths.

This scared scientists and followers alike as it not only flags up warnings in regards to future sea level rise and glacier loss, but such injections of fresh water can set up yet more complex and potentially devastating feedbacks in the ocean-atmosphere system, making things exponentially worse. Although much of the central meltwater will refreeze before long, it shows clear signs that the extreme weather we’ve been seeing can and potentially is having a direct effect on ice sheets globally, and the results can be incredibly quick and powerful. After further study, it’s suggested some 70% or more, perhaps even 95% of the melting can be attributed to climate warming and it’s associated impacts on weather systems.

However, it is necessary to note that this sort of abnormal melting does seem to occur in 150 year cycles, with the last in 1889, and therefore some of the alarming data can be tempered with this in mind, but this should not take away from a few key points. The fact that this sheet has experienced melt like this in the past, when man-made warming could not have been in effect, is important, but not absolute; if we see this melting occurring more commonly over the next few years, we’re seeing clear signs of breaking the natural flow of things. Even if we don’t, it’s a stark reminder of what could easily happen to the ice sheets globally if we continue to pump GHGs into the atmosphere. To ignore this, natural or not, would surely be foolish?

Posted at 11:31am and tagged with: climate, science, news, greenland, melting, change, warming, global, america, UK, europe, freak, weather, storms, rain, flooding, disaster, nature, humans, emissions, carbon, fossil fuel, denial, NASA, UN, IPCC, data, antarctic, extreme, chaos theory,.

July 9th 2012

Fukushima All Down To Human Error, Not Nature’s Wrath

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http://02varvara.wordpress.com/2011/03/29/a-photo-essay-two-weeks-after-the-japanese-tsunami-the-russian-report/04j-tsunami-two-weeks-later-29-03-11-fukushima-npp-fukushima-prefecture-tohoku-region/

With Japan turning on the first of potentially many nuclear reactors shut down in the wake of the horrendous Fukushima disaster, the entire ordeal has come round full-swing and back under public scrutiny once again. Many of the Japanese public have rallied against this switching back on, of what is deemed as crucial supplies of electricity with the coming warm summer, and the whole country has been experiencing protests and demonstrations the likes of which are rarely, if ever, seen within the kooky nation.

Unfortunately, the flipping of the nuclear switch could not have come at a worse time in terms of global public opinion, with the release of the final report from the Japanese government pertaining to why and how Fukushima came to not only lose all power including backup, but to explode in quite an impressive fashion, spraying the surrounding landscape with nuclear fallout, albeit resulting in no deaths or serious injury, at least up until now. The conclusion of the investigation was brutal and to the point - nature was not to blame, but poor regulation, collusion between multiple governing bodies, safety issues and a complete lack of any effort to solidify the plant against possible disasters. In short, it was manmade.

(http://www.treehugger.com/energy-disasters/fukushima-disaster-declared-manmade-final-report.html)

Going further, the report finds that since 2006, the plant executives and safety managers knew full-well that a large tsunami had the potential to severely damage the plant and shutdown the seawater pumps which lead to the hydrogen release and explosion. When the disaster struck, they were “quick to blame the tsunami and that further investigation into the earthquake impact was needed”.

In the end, it was seen that a lack of care for public welfare and an apparent focus on mitigating risk to the organisations involved ultimately led to poor handling of the situation both before and after the incident, with safety protocol and radiation measures all but ignored in the proceeding weeks. So all in all, it was a haymaker to the face of all those governing bodies tasked with dealing with Fukushima, and any talk of nature being the prime suspect were all but swept under the rug in an instant. Silly, naughty Japanese government.

Personally, I feel this report, of which I’m sure was extremely professionally handled and undoubtedly raises some serious questions over safety and nuclear regulation worldwide, still takes the issues far too deeply into the human end of things. Yes, safety measures were weak and outdated with little likelihood of being updated, and the ridiculous amount of dotted lines and red tape the nuclear fission process has to go through almost certainly leads some to cut corners, but there are other issues afoot.

When the earthquake struck, it was far beyond even the most extreme projections the Japanese officials had tested, hitting a whopping 9.0 on the Richter Scale, making it not only in the top five world’s largest quakes, but the largest Japan has ever recorded. Combine this with the shallow depth at which it struck, just 20 miles below sea level and only 43 miles off the coast, and the tsunami produced reached heights only Hollywood movies could conceive. In effect, it was a perfect storm of natural disasters.