Author Archives: ovehblog

Climate change: science’s fresh fight to win over the sceptics. Apology from Peabody?

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book coverHere is an interesting article on the role of big energy interests in exploiting the illegal hacking of e-mails from vindicated scientists such as Phil Jones. Notice the reference to the giant coal company Peabody.  If what is reported below is true, then one has to question the company’s ethics in terms of its involvement in this type of subversive activity.  And if true, one has to also confront the important question as to whether institutions like the University of Queensland should accept money from companies who behave like this?  By the way, the issue of the deliberate peddling of misinformation by special interest groups will be explored by the next Global Change Institute’s Insight Seminar Series speaker, Prof Naomi Oreskes.  Dr Oreskes will be speaking at the Abel Smith Lecture Theatre (Building 23) on the University of Queensland’s St Lucia campus at 5:30pm – 6:30pm on Tuesday (16 November, 2010).

Robin McKie, The Observer, Sunday 14 November 2010

Hacked emails from climate researchers at the University of East Anglia caused a storm last year. Now scientists say it’s even harder to convince the world of the reality of climate change.

This was simply “the worst scientific scandal of a generation” – a bid by researchers to hoodwink the public over global warming and hide evidence showing fossil fuels were not really heating up our planet. These were the dramatic claims made by newspapers, websites and blogs across the globe a year ago this week, following the hacking of emails from a computer at the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia.

Those emails – subsequently posted on a website via a Russian computer server – appeared to show that unit researchers, led by Professor Phil Jones, were working with scientists round the world to suppress data that proved global warming was not happening. One email in which the word “trick” was used by Jones was said to demonstrate he was hiding evidence while others were said to show that scientists were trying to prevent the publication of studies contradicting the idea that carbon emissions were heating up Earth.

The affair – inevitably dubbed climategate – caused considerable controversy at the Copenhagen talks that December. Many analysts believe its “revelations” were used by some delegates, including those from Saudi Arabia, to scupper a binding deal to limit global carbon emissions while Sarah Palin claimed the emails showed leading climate “experts” had “destroyed records, manipulated data and tried to silence their critics by preventing them from publishing”.

Public support for climate scientists was also harmed, with polls showing that trust in them dropped to 40%, from around 60%, in the UK. “By any measure, the leaking of those emails had a tremendous impact not only on Copenhagen but on all the international discussions that followed that meeting,” said John Abraham, a University of Minnesota researcher who last week launched a new US campaign to fight those who deny humans’ influence on climate. “All sorts of allegations were made and these still stick in people’s minds.”

Abraham’s remarks raise key questions. If climategate has had a major impact, how long will it last? Has it permanently damaged politicians’s hopes of controlling global carbon emissions? Or is there hope that the cause of climate science can be resurrected?

Answers to these questions are unexpected and disturbing. In the case of Jones and his colleagues, the impact of the affair was deeply unpleasant. They were inundated with abusive messages including death threats. Jones, one of the world’s most respected climate scientists, lost more than a stone in weight and entertained suicidal thoughts on several occasions, he later admitted. “I was shocked. People said I should go and kill myself. They said that they knew where I lived. They were coming from all over the world.”

Jones survived, however. After standing down as head of his unit, he was reappointed following publication of a series of independent UK reports which backed the integrity of his work and his behaviour and which concluded those examples of “scandal” had been cherry-picked and quoted out of context. Sir Muir Russell, the senior civil servant who led one inquiry, praised the “rigour and honesty” of the unit’s scientists, for example, while another inquiry, chaired by Lord Oxburgh, found “no evidence of any deliberate scientific malpractice”.

Even more stark were the findings of a separate inquiry in America by the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). This report not only endorsed the work of the East Anglian climate researchers, it also strongly attacked US politicians and energy groups who had tried to suggest that the leaked East Anglia emails revealed that humans were not playing a role in warming of the planet.

According to the EPA, these people had “routinely misunderstood or mis-characterised the scientific issues, drawn faulty conclusions, resorted to hyperbole, impugned the ethics of climate scientists in general, and characterised actions as ‘falsifications’ and ‘manipulation’ with no basis or support.” Such individuals had also cherry-picked the language of the emails without looking deeper into the issues or providing corroborating evidence to assert that improper action had occurred. As a summation of climate scientists’ disdain for global warming deniers, these words could hardly be bettered.

Among those who had petitioned the EPA to change US environment regulations, using the East Anglia emails as evidence of meteorological fraud and manipulation, was Peabody Energy, the world’s largest private coal company. Its executives were so confident that climategate could be exploited as a global scandal that it even sent a memo to the UK House of Commons Science and Technology Committee when it began to deliberate the affair this year, accusing the unit’s scientists of “suppressing dissenting views”. (The committee disagreed and vindicated the unit.)

The fact that companies like Peabody have exploited the East Anglia emails is revealing. As Bob Ward, policy director at the London School of Economics’ Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change, pointed out: “It is clear the leaked emails have been used by companies and groups with large financial interests in oil and coal production in order to oppose the regulation of greenhouse gas emissions”. The reverberations of climategate run deep and hard.

For those who believe carbon emissions pose a serious threat of triggering devastating temperature rises by the end of the century, the controversy has been a dispiriting experience. However they should not despair completely. For one thing, it would wrong to blame the leaked emails for the failure of the Copenhagen climate talks last year.

“They certainly influenced the atmosphere of the talks,” said Michael Jacobs, who, as Gordon Brown’s special adviser on climate change, participated in all the high-level talks at Copenhagen. “They were mentioned by the Saudi Arabian delegation, for example, and got widespread coverage in the US. But they weren’t decisive. Countries’ negotiating positions had been formed over the previous two years and were based on the accepted science. They could not be altered by a single new controversy.”

In fact, since the talks ended, most countries have continued to pursue the goals they set for themselves before the meeting. Only the US and Australia have deviated from their decisions to take some action against global warming. Most other countries, including Britain and its European neighbours, have continued to build wind farms and establish ambitious renewable energy goals. “There has not been a massive rowing back of measures to counter climate change,” added Jacobs.

This view was backed by Gavin Schmidt, a Nasa climatologist and founding member of RealClimate, a pro-science blog on climate issues. “The climate and global warming are not top issues on world news agendas at present. But you cannot expect those issues to be topping agendas all the time. There are spikes and troughs.”

The illegal leaking of the East Anglia emails may have helped push aside global warming as a topic of popular appeal but that lack of interest will not continue for ever. Public concern will return. “There is growing underlying trend of concern about climate change,” Schmidt insists. “The next spike of interest will be higher than the last and that background trend of concern will go on.”

In other words, all is not lost for climate sciene – though the tasks facing its practitioners should not be underestimated, a point stressed by Professor Trevor Davies, pro-vice-chancellor at the University of East Anglia and a former director of its climate-research unit. “This affair has showed just how difficult it is to get over rational, objective arguments to people who are just not prepared to listen. It is going to be very, very difficult to engage and converse with some of these people.”

Nevertheless, climate researchers will have to do just that in the coming years. The one criticism levelled by those groups who investigated and reported on climategate was their concern that its researchers had failed to answer properly the many requests for information that they had received from the public and from climate-change deniers. “We are going to have deal with that. We accept that,” said Davies. “In future we will have to be utterly transparent in our undertakings. We will have to go out and engage with the public and justify our stance. That is the real lesson of this affair.”

Vicky Pope, head of climate-change advice at the UK Met Office, agreed. “We are currently collecting vast sets of data for our studies of the climate and we are going to have make these available in forms that can be used by interested groups. They can then see for themselves that our analyses are sound and correct. It means a lot of extra work but if that is the price for making sure we demonstrate the dangers posed by climate change then we will have to pay it.”

PM needs something to say: What about focusing on something strategic like the Coral Triangle Initiative of President SBY?

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  • Gillard tripDennis Atkins; From:The Courier-Mail; November 06, 2010 11:23AM

    • THE market research department of Party Games did some unscientific opinion sampling this week, asking people whether they knew Prime Minister Julia Gillard was in South-East Asia and what she was up to.

    The bad news for the Government is most people didn’t know she was away, and of those who did, the one thing they remembered was she travelled with her de facto spouse Tim Mathieson. This is what happens when leaders fail to construct a narrative to fit what they’re doing.

    Government officials say Gillard is still introducing herself on the world stage – she’s off on her third rapid-fire piece of summitry to the G20 in Seoul next week – but the Prime Minister needs to start telling the story of her leadership and Government, at home and abroad.

    During her trip to Hanoi, Kuala Lumpur and Jakarta, Gillard spent most of her time talking publicly about asylum seekers and her proposed regional refugee processing centre in East Timor.

    She also touched on education issues in Vietnam and Indonesia – opening a campus for Melbourne’s RMIT university in the former and handing over a $500,000 schools grant in the latter.

    Governments in South-East Asia do not like talking about asylum seekers, which makes Gillard’s emphasis on this topic look like what it was, pitching to an Australian audience.

    Another research arm of Party Games went looking for something that might capture the imagination of people in the region and also be of interest to people in Australia. We found something after a handful of phone calls.

    It’s to do with the Coral Triangle – one of the world’s most precious and richest marine environments, covering an area that has as its three corners the ocean above the northern tip of the Philippines, the eastern edge of Java and the Solomon Islands.

    It’s an area of about 650 million hectares which is home to about 3000 species of fish and the richest concentration of marine biodiversity on the planet.

    As well as a seafood bowl for the world, the triangle supports and feeds local communities which are as culturally diverse as the marine life – 126 million people representing 2000 separate language groups. What unites them is a historical, cultural and spiritual connection with the sea.

    Because of over-fishing and other development pressures, much of this region is under threat, which is why the six countries most closely involved and dependent on the triangle – Indonesia, the Philippines, Malaysia, Papua New Guinea, East Timor and Solomon Islands – four years ago started work to halt the decline in available resources and diminish the threat to its future.

    There is also the associated social and political risk to the stability of not just the region but the internal cohesion of individual nations, particularly the Indonesian archipelago.

    Led by Indonesian President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono, this initiative is aimed at galvanising international attention on the problems and to muster global resources – particularly scientific expertise and financial aid  to help a group of nations that includes some of the poorest.

    While the US has been supportive of the initiative – stumping up $40 million to get the program going – Australia has been slow and miserly in giving attention to such an urgent need on its doorstep. So far, apart from lip service, Australia has tipped in just $2 million, half of which is spent on administrative support in Canberra.

    Australia could assist its nearest neighbours by helping them address some of the most fundamental development challenges, boost regional security and balance the widespread perception in these countries that Australia is only interested in its own problems, particularly border protection.

    The Coral Triangle neatly encompasses all of Foreign Minister Kevin Rudd’s stated goals for Australia to embrace and enlarge its place in the Asia-Pacific region.

    That we have been invited by the countries makes this a unique opportunity to make a real difference.

    According to Canberra sources, interest in the initiative never got beyond lip service because of the bigger-picture ambitions of Rudd when he was prime minister – his plans for a new Asia-Pacific community group and getting a seat on the United Nations Security Council.

    But this looks to be a low-cost, high-impact initiative (and sources say Australia would get plenty of brownie points for $10 million or so) that Gillard could talk about. She needs something.

    Report: Global Warming Issue From 2 Or 3 Years Ago May Still Be Problem

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    Climate change – something that is possibly worth some consideration?

    WASHINGTON—According to a report released this week by the Center for Global Development, climate change, the popular mid-2000s issue that raised awareness of the fact that the earth’s continuous rise in temperature will have catastrophic ecological effects, has apparently not been resolved, and may still be a problem.

    While several years have passed since global warming was considered the most pressing issue facing mankind, recent studies from the Center for Atmospheric Research, the National Academy of Sciences, NASA, the Pew Center on Global Climate Change, and basically any scientific report available on the issue confirmed that it is not only still happening, but might also be worth stopping.

    “Global warming, if you remember correctly, was the single greatest problem of our lifetime back in 2007 and the early part of 2008,” CGD president Nancy Birdsall said. “But then the debates over Social Security reform and the World Trade Center mosque came up, and the government had to shift its focus away from the dramatic rise in sea levels, the rapid spread of deadly infectious diseases, and the imminent destruction of our entire planet.”

    “Last year’s federal budget included more than $200 million in funding for the Office of Personnel Management,” Birdsall said. “Since nobody really knows what that is, we suggest that money perhaps be spent making sure the oceans don’t turn into acid.”

    I’ll let you read the rest of the article over the Onion (of course).

    EPA Issues Guidance on New Emissions Rules

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    From the NYT:

    Seeking to reassure major power plant and factory owners that impending regulation of climate-altering gases will not be too burdensome, the Environmental Protection Agency emphasized on Wednesday that future permitting decisions would take cost and technical feasibility into account.

    Under the Obama administration, the E.P.A. declared that gases that contribute to global warming are a danger to human health and the environment and thus must be regulated under the Clean Air Act. The agency is starting with the largest sources of such emissions — coal-burning power plants, cement factories, steel mills and oil refineries — and then will extend the regulations to smaller facilities.

    Utilities, manufacturers and oil companies have challenged the new rules, saying that the E.P.A. arbitrarily chose the plants it will regulate and that the Clean Air Act never envisioned limitations on carbon dioxide, a ubiquitous substance that is not in itself toxic or hazardous to health. The State of Texas has said it will not abide by the greenhouse gas regulations no matter how the E.P.A. decides to define or enforce them.

    Gina McCarthy, the head of the E.P.A. office of air and radiation, said on Wednesday that the agency was simply following the law by beginning the process of regulating greenhouse gases, and that the facilities that will need to obtain permits starting in January were already complying with clean air rules for other pollutants.

    She said the agency was taking a moderate approach to the regulation, allowing states and other bodies that grant air pollution permits to consider cost and available technology as factors to be considered when requiring modifications of plant operations.

    Industry groups have argued that meeting the new requirements will be so costly and time-consuming that they constitute a de facto moratorium on construction of new plants or major expansions of existing ones.

    Ms. McCarthy said that such fears were overblown.

    “We are fully prepared to issue permits,” she said at a news conference. “Make no mistake about it: this does not present an opportunity for any construction moratorium. E.P.A. and the states are fully prepared to take this on.”

    She also stressed that today’s guidance was not a new regulation, but merely a set of steps that regulators will take in deciding how and when to grant new permits. She said that many facilities would be able to meet the law by adopting more efficient means of producing energy, thus reducing overall emissions. Many such modifications will pay for themselves, she said.

    The new guidance allows for the substitution of biomass — wood waste, switchgrass or other agricultural products — for fossil fuels as a way to meet the new air quality rules. Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack said that would generate new income opportunities for American farmers and forestry companies while reducing global warming emissions.

    Environmental advocates generally praised the new guidance because it allows companies and states flexibility in meeting the new greenhouse gas standards.

    “Energy efficiency is one of the best ways to reduce pollution and save money, particularly in the manufacturing sector,” said Mark MacLeod, director of special projects at Environmental Defense Fund. “Today’s guidance will prepare companies for the permitting process and help them find ways to cut pollution while saving money for themselves and their customers.”

    William Becker, executive director of the National Association of Clean Air Agencies, a collection of state air pollution regulators, said in a statement: “E.P.A.’s guidance will provide industry greater certainty, quicker permitting decisions and a smoother path toward greenhouse gas implementation. This should put to rest the exaggerated claims of some stakeholders that greenhouse gas permitting will have disastrous economic consequences.”

    If you hate big government, try global warming on for size

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    Awesome new op-ed in the WaPost on climate change and political conservatism:

    By Bracken Hendricks

    Sunday, November 7, 2010

    Don’t believe in global warming? That’s not very conservative.

    Few causes unite the conservatives of the newly elected 112th Congress as unanimously as their opposition to government action on climate change.

    In September, the Center for American Progress Action Fund surveyed Republican candidates in congressional and gubernatorial races and found that nearly all disputed the scientific consensus on global warming, and none supported measures to mitigate it. For example, Robert Hurt, who won Tom Perriello’s House seat in Virginia, says clean-energy legislation would fail to “do anything except harm people.” The tea party’s “Contract From America” calls proposed climate policies “costly new regulations that would increase unemployment, raise consumer prices, and weaken the nation’s global competitiveness with virtually no impact on global temperatures.” Even conservatives who once argued for action on climate change, such as as Sen. John McCain (Ariz.) and Rep. Mark Kirk (Ill.), have run for cover.

    But it’s conservatives who should fear climate change the most. To put it simply, if you hate big government, try global warming on for size.

    Many conservatives say they oppose clean-energy policies because they want to keep government off our backs. But they have it exactly backward. Doing nothing will set our country on a course toward narrower choices for businesses and individuals, along with an expanded role for government. When catastrophe strikes – and yes, the science is quite solid that it will – it will be the feds who are left conducting triage.

    My economic views are progressive, and I think government has an important role in tackling big problems. But I admire many cherished conservative values, from personal responsibility to thrift to accountability, and I worry that conservatives’ lock-step posture on climate change is seriously out of step with their professed priorities. A strong defense of our national interests, rigorous cost-benefit analysis, fiscal discipline and the ability to avoid unnecessary intrusions into personal liberty will all be seriously compromised in a world marked by climate change.

    In fact, far from being conservative, the Republican stance on global warming shows a stunning appetite for risk. When faced with uncertainty and the possibility of costly outcomes, smart businessmen buy insurance, reduce their downside exposure and protect their assets. When confronted with a disease outbreak of unknown proportions, front-line public health workers get busy producing vaccines, pre-positioning supplies and tracking pathogens. And when military planners assess an enemy, they get ready for a worst-case encounter.

    When it comes to climate change, conservatives are doing none of this. Instead, they are recklessly betting the farm on a single, best-case scenario: That the scientific consensus about global warming will turn out to be wrong. This is bad risk management and an irresponsible way to run anything, whether a business, an economy or a planet.

    The great irony is that, should their high-stakes bet prove wrong, adapting to a destabilized climate would mean a far bigger, more intrusive government than would most of the “big government” solutions to our energy problems that have been discussed so far.

    Let’s start with costs. The investment needed to slow carbon pollution might total from 1 to 2 percent of global GDP each year for several decades, according to a 2006 study by the British government. This spending would pay for advanced technology, better land use and modern infrastructure. The same study put the cost of inaction – including economic harm from property damage and lost crops – at 5 to 20 percent of global GDP, lasting in perpetuity, with the risk of vastly higher catastrophic damage. You tell me which option is more fiscally responsible.

    But it’s not this cost-benefit arithmetic that should most concern conservatives. Their real worry should be what it will take to manage the effects of climate change as they are felt across the economy over the course of our lifetimes.

    The best science available suggests that without taking action to fundamentally change how we produce and use energy, we could see temperatures rise 9 to 11 degrees Fahrenheit over much of the United States by 2090. These estimates have sometimes been called high-end predictions, but the corresponding low-end forecasts assume we will rally as a country to shift course. That hasn’t happened, so the worst case must become our best guess.

    With temperature increases in this range, studies predict a permanent drought throughout the Southwest, much like the Dust Bowl of the 1930s, but this time stretching from Kansas to California. If you hate bailouts or want to end farm subsidies, this is a problem. Rising ocean acidity, meanwhile, will bring collapsing fisheries, catch restrictions – and unemployment checks. And rising sea levels will mean big bills as cash-strapped cities set about rebuilding infrastructure and repairing storm damage. With Americans in pain, the government will have to respond. And who will shoulder these new burdens? Future taxpayers.

    This is just the beginning. If conservatives’ rosy hopes prove wrong, who but the federal government will undertake the massive infrastructure projects necessary to protect high-priced real estate in Miami and Lower Manhattan from rising oceans? And what about smaller coastal cities, such as Galveston and Corpus Christi in Texas? Will it fall to FEMA or some other part of the federal government to decide who will move and when and under what circumstances? Elsewhere, with declining river flows, how will the Bureau of Reclamation go about repowering the dams of the Pacific Northwest?

    And while we’re busy at home, who will help Pakistan or Bangladesh in its next flood? What will the government do to secure food supplies when Russia freezes wheat exports? Without glaciers, what will become of Lima, Peru, a city dependent on melting ice for drinking water? Will we let waves of “climate refugees” cross our borders?

    As the physicist and White House science director John Holdren has said: “We basically have three choices: mitigation [cutting emissions], adaptation and suffering. We’re going to do some of each. The question is what the mix is going to be.”

    Today’s conservatives would do well to start thinking more like military planners, reexamining the risks inherent in their strategy. If, instead, newly elected Republicans do nothing, they will doom us all to bigger government interventions and a large dose of suffering – a reckless choice that’s anything but conservative.

    Bracken Hendricks is a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress and a co-author, with Rep. Jay Inslee (D-Wash.), of “Apollo’s Fire: Igniting America’s Clean Energy Economy.”


    Naomi Oreskes and the Merchants of Doubt

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    Naomi Oreskes will be in Brisbane next Tuesday the 16th November at the University of Queensland to give a free public lecture about her new book, ‘Merchants of Doubt – How a handful of scientists obscured the truth on issues from tobacco smoke to global warming’

    Here’s the official blurb:

    Famous for her research on the historical development and understanding scientific knowledge and dissent, Naomi Oreskes will  roll back the rug on the dark corner of the American scientific community, showing how ideology and corporate interests, aided by a too-compliant media, have skewed public understanding of some of the most pressing issues of our era.

    The renowned professor from the University of California San Diego will discuss her latest book “Merchants of Doubt”, which tells the story of how a loose-knit group of high-level scientists and scientific advisers, with deep connections in politics and industry, ran effective campaigns to mislead the public and deny well-established scientific knowledge over four decades.

    Make sure to RSVP to ensure your seat.

    First evidence of BP oil spill damage to corals

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    From the NYT: A survey of the sea floor near BP’s blown-out well in the Gulf of Mexico has turned up dead and dying coral reefs that were probably damaged by the oil spill, scientists said on Friday.

    The coral sites lie seven miles southwest of the well, at a depth of about 4,500 feet, in an area where large plumes of dispersed oil were discovered drifting through the deep ocean last spring in the early weeks after the spill.

    The large swaths of darkened coral and other damaged marine organisms were almost certainly dying from exposure to toxins, scientists said.

    The corals were discovered on Tuesday by scientists aboard a National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration research vessel, using a submersible robot equipped with still and video cameras and sampling tools.

    The documented presence of oil plumes in the area, the close proximity of BP’s well and the recent nature of the die-off make it highly likely that the spill was responsible, said Charles Fisher, a marine biologist from Penn State University who is the chief scientist on the gulf expedition, which was financed by the federal government.

    ‘I think that we have a smoking gun,” he said. “The circumstantial evidence is very strong that it’s linked to the spill.”

    read the full story here

    Heron Island Climate Change Observatory video

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    [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nKPNcQyljds&w=560&h=340]

    It is not often you get to work with someone as remarkable as Sir David Attenborough.  Earlier this year, we worked with the BBC to capture the installation of our Free Ocean Carbon Enrichment experiment on the reef crest at Heron Island.

    This is a challenging experiment which is a collaboration between our lab, Stanford University and the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute in which we are trying to chemically alter water flowing over a living and intact coral reef.  We want to do this for relatively long periods of time.  This is part of our push to establish unrivalled facilities on Heron island for studying the impact of climate change and ocean acidification on coral reefs.

    The project it has been led by one of our postdoctoral fellows, Dr. David Kline.  Have a look at the film and I think you understand what a remarkable task of this has been!

    Here is a recent press release: The Coral Reef Ecology Lab of the Global Change Institute has developed the world’s first climate change observatory on Heron Island.

    Researchers from the Hoegh-Guldberg/Dove Coral Reef Ecology lab, have installed a new experimental system on the Heron Island reef flat to study the impacts of future predicted levels of CO2 on coral reef communities. The Heron Island Climate Change Observatory was funded by an ARC LIEF grant to examine the impact of rising CO2 levels in the coral reef environment for the first time.

    The Coral Proto Free Ocean Carbon Enrichment (CP-FOCE) system was designed to add low pH water into experimental chambers on the reef to stimulate pH levels predicted to occur on coral reefs in the next 50-100 years. The experimental system has four chambers that will be used for well replicated, long term studies of climate change impacts on coral reefs. Additionally the system includes a network of over 20 high precision instruments that will allow the monitoring of the already changing water chemistry conditions on coral reefs. The development of this climate change observatory is being led by Prof. Hoegh-Guldberg along with Dr. David Kline, Aaron Chai and Thomas Miard of the Hoegh-Guldberg/Dove lab and Malcolm Marker from UQ engineering

    Free Ocean Carbon Enrichment experimentClimate change and ocean acidification are widely recognized as key threats to Australia’s natural ecosystems, yet we are currently ill-equipped to respond due to poor knowledge of the scale/nature of the impacts. The Heron Island Climate Change Observatory will establish key infrastructure that will rapidly improve our understanding of the impacts of ocean acidification which is important to local communities and the nation given that coral reefs support over $6 billion in revenue (and employ 60,000 people) each year. This critically important information is essential to the management and protection of Australia’s coral reefs, including the Great Barrier Reef.

    Featured in the BBC documentary by Sir David Attenborough “Death of the Oceans”

    http://www.wwfblogs.org/climate/content/videos-death-oceans

    Blue Carbon Around the World

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    Steven Lutz of Blue Climate Solutions has a great post on the intersection between the 350.org movement and the growing blue carbon movement here.

    On October 10, 2010, people all over the world joined in what’s been described as the biggest day of environmental activism in history. Groups from 188 developed and developing nations participated in more than 7,000 activities as part of 350.org’s annual “Global Work Party” to mobilize action on climate change and address greenhouse gas pollution.

    The 10/10/10 Global Work Party was not only intended to publicize the need to combat climate change but also to do something about it.

    read the whole post here.

    California to build world’s largest solar plant

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    From the LA Times:

    October 25, 2010 |  2:51 pm  Tiffany Hsu

    What’s the sunny equivalent of “when it rains, it pours”? Because that’s what’s happening in Southern California, as yet another massive solar plant cleared the permitting process Monday.

    This time, it’s the Blythe Solar Power Plant, backed by German company Solar Millennium and planned for more than 7,000 acres in Riverside County. The project would be the largest solar installation in the world, doubling the amount of solar electricity the U.S. can produce.

    The Blythe installation is the sixth in recent months to be approved for public land. Several proposed solar plants have been fast-tracked through the permitting process as they race to meet the December deadline for federal stimulus funds. One of those, the Ivanpah Solar Electric Generating System, is breaking ground Wednesday near Primm, Nev.

    Winning final clearance to start construction from the Bureau of Land Management on Monday, after getting the go-ahead from California authorities last month, makes Blythe the first proposal of its kind to be approved for federal public land.

    The installation will deliver 1 gigawatt of power using parabolic trough technology. The process involves curved mirrors that gather the sun’s rays, heating liquid that creates steam to run generators.

    The multibillion-dollar Blythe project will consist of four separate, 250-megawatt sections that together would be able to power more than 300,000 average homes -– even up to 750,000 residences by some estimates.

    The groundbreaking should happen by the end of the year, Solar Millennium said. But first, the company is in “advanced discussions” with the Department of Energy as it attempts to land $1.9 billion in government debt financing for the first two portions of the project, as several other solar projects have done.

    Construction is expected to create more than 1,000 direct jobs, as well as thousands more throughout the supply chain, the company said. Once built, the plant will support nearly 300 permanent jobs.

    The project, however, will have its share of impact on the environment. So, to mitigate any potential damage, regulators are requiring that Solar Millenium cough up funding to support more than 8,000 acres of habitat for native species such as the desert tortoise, the Western burrowing owl, the bighorn sheep and the Mojave fringe-toed lizard.