Windmill saves ski resort $450k/year

More land-using organizations should start putting up wind turbines, if the results from Jiminy Peak Mountain Resort in Hancock MA is any indication. Putting up a single turbine is saving them $450,000 per year, around 1/3 of their energy bill. Fortunately for them, the windmill produces the most electricity during the winter when it's the most windy, and seeing as they're a sky resort it's also when they use the most electricity (primarily due to their snow-making machines). (I can't help but think that if more companies used turbines, that we'd slow global warming and ski resorts wouldn't need to make fake snow as much.)

Also interestingly during the summer months the turbine produces more electricity than the Jiminy Peak uses. It appears they have not actually worked out a buy-back program for the excess electricity (where their utility company would actually pay *them* if they produced more electricity than they used), so instead the excess power goes into the grid - where it is then used up by local residents, reducing their reliance on the power company, on fossil fuels (coal burning is the primary source of electricity even in the Northeast US), and even their electricity bills. So this project has helped not only the ski resort, but also the local community.

Just don't tell the bats - the action of the turbine results in extremely low pressure air behind the turbine, which then results in internal bleeding. Shame that every improvement in one field leads to a problem in another. Time will tell whether the net good outweighs the net bad.

Greenhouse calculator

Made by the Aussies, it's a greenhouse gas calculator - it determines how much CO_2 you produce in a year (3 tonnes per year per person is the sustainable amount, 24 is the average Aussie), and therefore when you should kill yourself so you don't use more than your fair share.



I produce 15.0 tonnes of CO_2 per year (according to their calculator), and therefore I should die at age 15.4. At least I'm better than average! :-P

First steps of US on Global Warming

After a week of heated argument (and "boos") with other countries in Bali, US Under Secretary of State for Democracy and Global Affairs Paula Dobriansky finally agreed to an amended compromise statement. According to the NY Times,

The agreement notes the need for "urgency" in addressing climate change and recognizes that "deep cuts in global emissions will be required." Still, it does not bind the United States or any country to commitments on reducing greenhouse pollution.

CNN:

The EU wanted an agreement to require developed countries to cut their emissions by 25 to 40 percent of 1990 levels by 2020. The United States opposes those targets, along with Japan and Canada. The latest draft of the agreement removes the specific figures and instead, in a footnote, references the scientific study that supports them.

BBC:

The US and the EU earlier agreed that industrialised countries would not set firm emissions targets at this stage. The "Bali roadmap" initiates a two-year process of negotiations designed to agree a new set of emissions targets to replace those in the Kyoto Protocol.
...
The document coming out of the meeting, the "Bali roadmap", contains text on emissions cuts, the transfer of clean technology to developing countries, halting deforestation and helping poorer nations protect their economies and societies against impacts of climate change such as rising sea levels and falling crop yields. The roadmap sets the parameters and aims for a further set of negotiations to be finalised by the 2009 UN climate conference, to be held in Denmark.

So as far as I can tell, this is again an agreement with no teeth. The US has agreed to no tangible results whatsoever. It's progress in that we've agreed that Something Needs To Be Done and therefore are acknowledging that global warming is taking place, but all we've agreed to so far is to continue talking. Well, better that than nothing.

Why to Take Action

Summary: We can't ever know for sure what the future holds. What we can know is the worst case scenario. If that scenario is bad enough, then we MUST take action to reduce that risk, regardless of what the chances are.



Let's say you're handed a gun with six chambers. You have no clue how many bullets are in the chambers. You are told we have to put the gun to your head and pull the trigger. You have the choice to either (A) do it now, or (B) first pull the trigger once while pointing at the wall, then spin the chamber and point the gun at your head. Which do you do? Of course you should fire at the wall first - if it was an empty chamber you spin it and then point it at yourself, losing nothing; if it was a full chamber you have emptied it, spin it, and then point it at yourself and have gained one additional empty chamber.

What if you were told you could either (A) pull the trigger now, or (B) take 10 lashes, empty one chamber, and then point it at your head? I would still take choice (B). 10 lashes will not kill me. I have no clue how many bullets are in those six chambers, it could be that they're ALL full and my only chance of survival is emptying one of them in exchange for the lashes. It's not worth that risk of my life, so long as the cost (10 lashes) is not enough to kill me either.

That's what this guy is arguing about climate change - even if we had no clue about whether it was happening, the cost of trying to reduce it just in case is so much less than the potential consequences, that we must take that choice.

And there's his various replies here.

Hawking survives Vomit Comet

That is such a relief. He did 8 of the free-fall parabolas, grinning the whole time. His motivation? Not just release from his everyday hum-drum life of a preeminent mathematician / theoretical physicist at Cambridge University, probably not even release from his wheelchair and MS, but to "encourage public interest in space". Life on Earth he says, is at risk from global warming and other threats, and "the human race has no future if it doesn't go into space."

Letter to the Editor, Arkansas Democrat Gazette

Daylight exacerbates warning

You may have noticed that March of this year was particularly hot. As a matter of fact, I understand that it was the hottest March since the beginning of the last century. All of the trees were fully leafed out and legions of bugs and snakes were crawling around during a time in Arkansas when, on a normal year, we might see a snowflake or two. This should come as no surprise to any reasonable person. As you know, Daylight Saving Time started almost a month early this year. You would think that members of Congress would have considered the warming effect that an extra hour of daylight would have on our climate. Or did they ? Perhaps this is another plot by a liberal Congress to make us believe that global warming is a real threat. Perhaps next time there should be serious studies performed before Congress passes laws with such far-reaching effects.

CONNIE M. MESKIMEN / Hot Springs

Climate Change Report

I recently wrote an email to a colleague with whom I've been debating global warming. We both agree that it's happening, but he thinks we do not have sufficient evidence to conclude it's manmade (via CO_2) rather than solar variation.

My email:

FYI, here's a link to a summary of the IPCC report on global warming from Wikipedia.
And here's the full text.

The summary is in a nice bulleted format with section headers, so you can skip to the parts you're most interested in. The report includes data stating that

1) atmospheric CO_2 and methane levels are higher than at any other time in the past 650,000 years, and

2) since 1750, human activities have resulted in "radiative forcing" of 1.6 W/m^2, while solar variations have resulted in only 0.12 W/m^2.

Page 11 of the full text has a graph, Figure SPM-4, which compares the observed temperature increase since 1900 with computer models assuming only natural sources, and natural plus antropogenic sources - search through the full document on the word "solar" to find relevant sections.

I don't have permission to repost his reply, so I'll try and reword it at another time.

See also this paper on ice ages, this discussion of that paper, and this discussion of that discussion.