A Green Degree Blog: New Angles On Sustainability

July 30th 2012

Why Germany Should Show Off It’s Dominant Renewable Economy

Germany’s renewable share for the first half of 2012 has recently been released, and guess what, they’re thrashing the majority of EU nations comfortably, reaching 26% overall, a staggering increase from 20.5% during the same period last year. That means that over a quarter of the energy filling the German grid was produced purely by renewable means, and that is something they should be seriously proud of, and rubbing in our faces, as I’ll explain below.

What is even more interesting about this event, is the specific mix of renewables used in accomplishing this task. Wind sits in gold medal position with 9.2%, with biomass (surprisingly) taking second with 5.7%, whilst solar PV follows closely behind with 5.3%, expanding by over 40% in comparison to last year. That alone is an impressive stat to contend with, and was no doubt bolstered by Germany’s generous FiT, which although was recently slashed to save on funding, has been highly successful in generating consumer interest in solar as a viable energy alternative.

Hydropower boosted 25%, up to 4% in the overall mix, with all other renewables completing the lineup.

It’s no surprise that wind energy takes pole on the list given how perfectly flat, large and windy Germany as a landscape is, and their heavy involvement with the cheapest of all renewable technologies. Many have attributed the extra-impressive results to the weather this region of Europe has been experiencing over the past 6 months, with abnormally high winds spinning up the turbines country-wide, torrential rains over-powering the hydroelectric dams, and in the later parts of the year, intense solar radiations and clear skies bathing the abundant solar panels in beaming energy.

Then again, attempting to diminish the feats achieved by the German renewable grid by stating it ‘was the weather which made it so damn good’ is a tad cheeky, considering the very point of many clean energy sources is that the sun and weather itself drives the production. If we have optimal weather, then they’re working exactly as planned.

What was surprising is the biomass share, which was much more than I thought had been invested in, with this form of energy generally not so high on a country’s energy list. I’m assuming that good recycling programs and clever biomass burning policies mean that Germany’s energy production is relatively high here, although actual year-on-year growth has been the smallest in this sector, just 7.5%.

Posted at 10:11am and tagged with: energy, germany, EU, america, renewable, solar, wind, PV, biomass, clean, technology, hydroelectric, UK, economy, politics, news, electricity, grid, 2012, weather, climate, sun, france, spain, green, jobs, investment, morals, psychology, global,.

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 18th 2012

Japan Has Reached Tether’s End, But Can It Afford To Fall Apart Now?

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Japan has always been a nation that many others look up to in their strives towards achieving a society that is happy and content with its position in things, which can stand up to most problems and smash right through them without a second thought. As a country, the Japanese are renowned for their extreme politeness, obedience and determination in doing what is expected for their proud country, a trait some see as borderline subservience, and others as the key to a successful government and industrial powerhouse.

However, it’s easy for us to forget the Japan has been through some tragically harsh times in its history, especially in recent times. I feel it a shame that, in many cases, we ignore these facts because of the developed status that Japan holds, sitting high as one of the most technically and economically advanced countries in the world, which can cloud reality. Japan has experienced horrible conflicts, extreme natural disasters and serious economic downturn, the last of which many of us had the pleasure of partaking in too, and now more than ever is this the case. Even so, despite their hardships, the Japanese people sure now how to rise from the ashes, more powerful than before and with an even stronger resolve to live on; it’s something of a personality that the entire world recognises. This however, seems to be changing.

The past two years have been undoubtedly hard for the humble nation. Recovering from poor economic climates, Japan was hit by one of the biggest ever recorded earthquakes, only to be followed up with an equally record-breaking and devastating tsunami. As the Fukushima-Daiichi plant blossomed radiation, thousands were relocated in an instant from the huge quarantine area imposed by the government, and even now many are not allowed back to their homes and see no hope of that changing anytime soon. Whilst this happened, horrendously high numbers of people were killed by the quake and tsunami, a combination of nature frightening in its ability to trash whole towns and render the landscape unrecognisable.

Despite this, the Japanese, although wounded, did what they do, and began to rise from the rubble, the composed and determined people we are used to seeing. We applauded them for their courage, and vilified their government. Now more than ever, the effects of this are being rapidly unwound. With all nuclear reactors shutdown in Fukushima’s wake, a shortfall of 30% in the nation’s electricity generation capacity was instantly apparent, and fears of blackouts nationwide set in.

May 4th 2012

Will A Warming World Screw With Our Hydroecletric Capacity?

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Whilst fooling around yesterday trying to avoid doing work and reading up on the world’s news via Twitter etc, a question popped into my head and sat there like an itch I needed to scratch, an itch to do with climate change and a very widespread, but often neglected form of green energy - hydropower.

As my mind wandered, I began thinking about what effect a globally warming world, with its extreme weather events, climate weirding and melting ice, would have on the frankly massive industry of hydroelectric generation. Would it act to reduce the effectiveness of dams, or actually aid in powering them up; after all, climate change has done some pretty unexpected things in its time, and we are only just scratching the surface of weather system interactions and seasonal skewing.

I decided the best course of action would be to check out a few published papers/journals (of which links are available to at the end of this post) and garner a simple answer to the question, in turn informing anyone who reads this of the conclusions I came to.

I went into this with two polarising thoughts. One, was that climate change, in this instance the global increase of temperatures over the next century or so, would act to reduce the effectiveness of hydropower through the evaporation of reservoirs, rivers and water sources, as well as a reduction in flow of the rivers/system feeding the dams. On the other hand, it may actually increase the power of HE, or at least cause no change at all, by increasing snow-melt, thawing seasons and rainfall, all of which would lead to higher river discharges and a larger water source for energy. So these were my two hypotheses so to speak.

From the three top-cited papers I checked out, there arises a conclusion common in the scientific world, one that I have seen many times over; it’s variable. Now I know this is not enough for a rigorous answer to be put forward, but these papers are at least some of the top in the field of study, and if anything I am attempting to urge further study into it by readers and myself alike, so a future post may probe further, but for now, I’m taking these as a starting point.

Posted at 12:07pm and tagged with: iceland, hydropower, HE, hydroelectric, energy, cimate change, warming, weather, extreme, electricity, ice, melt, global, science, journals, models, Alps,.

April 18th 2012

Reblogged from plantedcity|2 notes |#

A quote from a recent article in The Guardian, ’Extreme weather events increased over past decade, study says’. You can check out the study here.

(Graphic credit: Nature Climate Change via Climate Progress)

Money spent on cleaning up after these disasters could easily be invested into cleaner technologies so that we can avoid further damage in the future; these weather events are only going to get worse if temperature keeps rising.

We just know so little about the climate system as a global entity.

Posted at 2:00pm and tagged with: weather, storms, climate, science, rainfall, extreme weather, floods, hurricanes,.

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Extreme weather events over the past decade have increased and were “very likely” caused by human-induced global warming, according to a study in the journal Nature Climate Change.

Scientists at Germany’s Potsdam Institute for Climate Research used physics, statistical analysis and computer simulations to link extreme rainfall and heatwaves to global warming. The link between warming and storms was less clear.

“It is very likely that several of the unprecedented extremes of the past decade would not have occurred without anthropogenic global warming,” said the study. The past decade was probably the warmest globally for at least a millennium. Last year was the eleventh hottest on record, the World Meteorological Organisation said.

Extreme weather events were devastating in their impacts and affected nearly all regions of the world. They included severe floods and record hot summers in Europe; a record number of tropical storms and hurricanes in the Atlantic in 2005; the hottest Russian summer since 1500 in 2010 and the worst flooding in Pakistan’s history. In 2011 alone, the United States suffered 14 weather events which caused losses of over $1bn each.

The high amount of extremes is not normal, the study said. Even between 13 and 19 March this year, historical heat records exceeded in more than 1,000 places in North America.

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