Wry Heat

Biosphere 2, that grand experiment with a checkered history, is being readied for new research conducted by the University of Arizona. Tuesday evening, Dr. Travis Huxman discussed plans for the facility with a group of about 30 people at the Cushing Street Bar.

Huxman, who has a doctorate in biological sciences, and is an associate professor of ecology and evolutionary biology at the U of A, is the new director of the Biosphere 2 research program.

For those who may be unfamiliar with Biosphere 2, here is some background. The concept was to construct a self-contained biosphere to investigate what would be needed to colonize other planets, such as Mars. The main structure, built near the town of Oracle, AZ, is a 3.15 acre greenhouse which was to be a self-sustaining ecosystem containing several plant biomes and an “ocean” to grow fish. The facility was built with $150 million in private funds in the late 1980s.

In September of 1991, a group of “biospherians” (four men and four women) entered the greenhouse for a planned two-year stay. It was intended that they depend only on what was inside the enclosure. As noted in a Wikipedia article: “All seven ecosystems of Earth exist within the confines of Biosphere II. They are a rainforest, a desert, a savanah, a marsh, a farmland (in an area called the Intensive Agriculture Biome), and a ‘human habitat’.” [I guess the ocean makes seven.] “Thus, it contains soil, air, water, animals, and plants. About 4,000 plants and animals were introduced to Biosphere II, and the ocean contained 900,000 gallons of water. It was hoped that these provisions would give the ecosystems enough material to be self-sustaining.”

As with many experiments, things didn’t go as planned. One of the main problems was that organic-rich soil consumed too much oxygen. The original oxygen content of 20.9% dropped to 14.5% after 18 months. That’s the equivalent of an altitude of 13,400 feet, and the biospherians suffered from high-altitude effects. Because they were in a greenhouse, the daily fluctuation of carbon dioxide was about 600ppm (current atmospheric concentration is about 390 ppm). During the day, with strong sunlight, plants revved up photosynthesis and used up carbon dioxide, but respired it back at night. There was also a seasonal variation in carbon dioxide, and wintertime levels reached about 4,000 ppm.

This first phase ended in September, 1993 as planned. After a 6-month transition, another group of seven people entered the greenhouse, but injuries and social problems caused abandonment of the project in 1994.

Columbia University took over in 1995 and operated the facility until 2003. Columbia “broke the seal” and formed a flow-through system to test effects of carbon dioxide among other things.

Through all of this, the facility was open for tours and derived much of its operating revenue from visitors. By 2006 the property was zoned for urban development and in 2007 sold to a developer who had planned houses and a resort hotel. However, the University of Arizona took over management responsibilities in June, 2007. And that brings us back to Huxman.

Huxman said that U of A research will “focus on environmental challenges of the day.” And by that he meant they would study initially, at least, the relationship between carbon, water, and energy, essentially photosynthesis, and how it can be applied to current issues.

Huxman mentioned solar power and the smart grid system since apparently Biosphere 2 gets some of its electricity from solar collectors. He said that with a smart grid system, the power company can turn off an individual’s solar system, which might generate power to the common grid in order to protect workers doing repairs on the lines. Biosphere 2 will not be a participant in the smart grid system so as to prevent such power outages. This will allow researchers to better control variables and also test software that manages smart grids.

Huxman says that under U of A management, Biosphere 2 will be better committed to a relationship between science and society, and that even now visitors can watch graduate students conducting experiments.

One of the planned projects is to build a model of a watershed to study the dynamics of how water gets to plants and how soil structures evolve. He wants to know how water gets into the aquifers. (A geologist could tell him that most aquifer recharge occurs at the mountain front.) After the “naive” model is working, they will introduce plants to see how that changes the soil structure. Once they learn from the model, they plan to try it outside in the real world.

They will also study ways to stabilize mine tailings.

Who is paying for all this? According to Huxman, major funding is coming from the facility owners and foundations. Much of the operating budget will come from visitor admissions; a minor part comes from the University and from corporations.

Will they be successful? Only time will tell. You can visit Biosphere 2. You can get information from www.B2science.org , email to info@B2science.org or call 520-838-6200. Currently admission price is $20 for adults. Lower prices are available for seniors and children.

And, by the way, the Cushing Street Bar has Guinness on tap.

“Obama’s federal government can weatherize your home for only $57,362 each.” That was the headline in a Los Angeles Times story yesterday, based on numbers from the GAO. Nobel prize wining energy secretary Steven Chu blames government red tape. Who would of thought it? The Energy Department disputes GAO figures.

Read the Story: http://tinyurl.com/y8dxvgw

Here’s some of the news that our Main Stream Media didn’t report.

Russian IEA claims CRU tampered with climate data – cherrypicked warmest stations

“On Tuesday, the Moscow-based Institute of Economic Analysis (IEA) issued a report claiming that the Hadley Center for Climate Change based at the headquarters of the British Meteorological Office in Exeter (Devon, England) had probably tampered with Russian-climate data. The IEA believes that Russian meteorological-station data did not substantiate the anthropogenic global-warming theory. Analysts say Russian meteorological stations cover most of the country’s territory, and that the Hadley Center had used data submitted by only 25% of such stations in its reports.”

Source: http://en.rian.ru/papers/20091216/157260660.html Scroll about half way down the page.

Global weather dataset being systematically corrupted

“For the past six days, several climate scientists have discovered an alarming trend: clear evidence of alteration of historical data at weather stations around the world, in order to support the contention of anthropogenic global warming (AGW). The changes appear to affect the Global Historical Climate Network (GHCN), a project of the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration’s National Climate Data Center.”

Source: http://tinyurl.com/yat5tgo

Antarctic GHCN uses single warmest station instead of whole dataset

“Of all the stations available in the antarctic, GHCN has chosen to use a single station on the Antarctic Peninsula to represent an entire continent of the earth for the past 17 years. But it’s not just any station, it’s a special one. Rothera Point has the single highest trend of any of the adjusted station data.”

Source: http://tinyurl.com/ydbr4ag

Computer programmer makes case that release of files from CRU was an inside job.

See: http://www.smalldeadanimals.com/FOIA_Leaked/

How Wikipedia’s green doctor rewrote 5,428 climate articles

See: http://tinyurl.com/yf6r9l3

Politicians take note: It could be that all the sound and fury over climate change is based on bad data. For traders in carbon credits: the house of cards is beginning to fall and your market may be the next multi-billion dollar bubble to burst.

In my previous post on the global warming industry, I mentioned the names of several companies that I thought had a vested interest in maintaining the myth that carbon dioxide is a major driver of temperature.

Yesterday, I received some feedback from one of those companies : I represent Hara and wanted to clarify a sentence you wrote: “Al Gore’s venture capital firm, Hara Software which makes software to track greenhouse gas emissions, stands to make billions of dollars from cap-and-trade regulation.” My intention is not to dispute your opinion, but rather to make clear a fact: Hara is one of Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers portfolio companies. Al Gore is a partner at KPCB, but Hara is not his VC firm.

The KPCB website says to “Think of it as relationship and venture capital.” So KPCB is a venture capital organization and Al Gore is a partner. The Hara website says “Hara was originally funded in 2008 by Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers.” That means to me that Hara is a firm founded by a venture capital investment from Al Gore and his partners. Glad we cleared that up.

Hara sells, among other things, software to track greenhouse gas emissions. From the Hara website I learned, that the City of Palo Alto, California, has a “Climate Protection Team” and a “Sustainability Team” and that with Hara software “each employee can enter commute and other data that impact overall City emissions.” I bet the city employees love that.

Note: The City of Tucson has a Climate Change Advisory Committee. Maybe they are potential customers for Hara.

Upon looking at KPCB’s website, under “initiatives” I found this statement: “At the same time we face climate crisis.” Recent events show the “crisis” is manufactured, see here and here.

KPCB’s next statement: “Atmospheric CO₂ levels are at an all-time high, with accelerating growth,” is wrong on two counts. Atmospheric carbon dioxide has, for most of the history of this planet, been more than 10 times current level. According to the NOAA Mauna Loa Observatory, carbon dioxide levels are increasing but not accelerating. See graphs below.

On Tuesday, Oct. 27, my westside neighborhood experienced approximately 30 short power outages during the very windy day and evening. Each would last from 30 seconds to five minutes. That made work on a desktop computer very difficult. By the way, my neighborhood has all underground utilities.

I inquired of TEP to see what was happening and what they were doing about it.

This morning I received a call from TEP spokesman Joseph Barrios. He said that overhead lines leading into the neighborhood carry both high-voltage transmission lines and lower-voltage distribution lines. Slack in the lines caused them to touch and short out, tripping circuit breakers. The breakers would automatically reset.

Barrios said that if this happens more than four times, the TEP crews search out the cause. Apparently over time, the lines stretch, resulting in too much slack. Barrios said that crews have now tightened the lines and installed “separators” which hopefully will prevent future problems, at least for a while.

Although the power outages were inconvenient, I appreciate that TEP crews got to work to identify the problem and that Mr. Barrios telephoned me with an explanation.

A new study claims that Arctic temperatures have risen 2.2 degrees Fahrenheit over the last decade, bringing to an end a 2000-year cooling trend. The study authors claims that human CO₂ emissions are the cause.

The authors claim: “Our reconstruction shows that the last half-century was the warmest of the last 2,000 years. Not only was it the warmest, but it reversed the long-term, millennial-scale trend toward cooler temperatures. The cooling coincided with the slow and well-known cycle in Earth’s orbit around the sun, and it should have continued through the 20th century.” “The evidence was found by generating a 2,000-year-long reconstruction of Arctic summer temperature using natural archives of climate change from tree rings, glacier ice and mostly from lake sediments from across the Arctic, a region that responds sensitively to global changes.”

Why did they use proxy data for the last 100 years when they could have just looked at thermometer records? Oh, but thermometry shows that is was warmer in the 1930s and 1940s.

The new study presents a curve which is reminiscent of the thoroughly debunked “Hockey Stick” of Michael Mann. The new proxy reconstruction fails to show the well-documented Medieval Warm period of 1,200 yeas ago when temperatures were higher than now. It appears that authors of the new study are using the same statistical malfeasance and cherry-picking of data that were used for the old hockey stick.

Steve McIntyre of Climate Audit discusses the new study. “The problem with these sorts of studies is that no class of proxy (tree ring, ice core isotopes) is unambiguously correlated to temperature and, over and over again, authors pick proxies that confirm their bias and discard proxies that do not.”

Records from the Danish Meteorological Institute show no warming since 1958 and that the 2009 temperature variation is almost identical to 1958. DMI says that the Arctic was warmer in the 1940s than now.

A Duke University-led analysis of available records shows that while the North Atlantic Ocean’s surface waters warmed in the 50 years between 1950 and 2000, the sub-polar regions cooled at the same time that subtropical and tropical waters warmed. This pattern can be explained largely by the influence of a natural and cyclical wind circulation pattern called the North Atlantic Oscillation (NAO)

A 2008 study by Håkan Grudd of Stockholm University’s Department of Physical Geography and Quaternary Geology, found that “The late-twentieth century is not exceptionally warm in the new Torneträsk record: On decadal-to-century timescales, periods around AD 750, 1000, 1400, and 1750 were all equally warm, or warmer. The warmest summers in this new reconstruction occur in a 200-year period centred on AD 1000. A ‘Medieval Warm Period’ is supported by other paleoclimate evidence from northern Fennoscandia.”

Besides the controversy over temperatures, there is also media attention given to Arctic sea ice extent. For instance, news media made much of the fact that during the summer of 2007, Northern Hemisphere sea ice area was at a historic minimum (2.92 million sq. km). What was little reported, however, was that in 2007, Southern Hemisphere sea ice extent broke the previous maximum record of 16.03 million sq. km and reached 16.26 million sq. km. (August, 2007). [Source: The Cryosphere Today, a publication of The Polar Research Group, University of Illinois]

To put things in further perspective, consider these reports:

“A considerable change of climate inexplicable at present to us must have taken place in the Circumpolar Regions, by which the severity of the cold that has for centuries past enclosed the seas in the high northern latitudes in an impenetrable barrier of ice has been, during the last two years, greatly abated.”

“2000 square leagues [approximately 14,000 square miles] of ice with which the Greenland Seas between the latitudes of 74 and 80 N have been hitherto covered, has in the last two years entirely disappeared.”

These paragraphs, however, are not the latest scare story from the greenhouse industry, but extracts from a letter by the President of the Royal Society addressed to the British Admiralty, written in 1817 (Royal Society, London. Nov. 20, 1817. Minutes of Council, Vol. 8. pp.149-153).

 When this report was written, 192 years ago, the planet was in the midst of the Little Ice Age. How could the ice disappear in a Little Ice Age?

There is also the following story:

Could it be that carbon dioxide and global warming have nothing to do with it? Well, yes.

A study conducted by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, says unusual winds caused the 2007 Arctic minimum. Their press release says:

“Unusual atmospheric conditions set up wind patterns that compressed the sea ice, loaded it into the Transpolar Drift Stream and then sped its flow out of the Arctic. When that sea ice reached lower latitudes, it rapidly melted in the warmer waters.”

“The winds causing this trend in ice reduction were set up by an unusual pattern of atmospheric pressure that began at the beginning of this century.”

The fact that a 192-year-old report on Arctic ice is very similar to one today lends credence to the contention that changes in ice cover are natural cyclic phenomena and not due to the increase in atmospheric carbon dioxide.  AccuWeather says the changes in wind may be due to changes in the Arctic Oscillation (AO) and the North Atlantic Oscillation (NAO) which are large atmospheric circulations that have major impacts on the weather in certain parts of the world.

Perhaps reporters should do some investigation so they can report all of the news and put things in perspective. Ah, but only sensational headlines sell papers.

A front page story in the Arizona Daily Star today (9-2109) proclaims “World’s Oceans Warmer Than Ever.” Well, not exactly, it depends on which data set you are reading.  The graph below from NOAA (NOAA’s ERSST.v3b version) shows that past July ocean temperatures have exceeded current values.

To see an analysis of this Associated Press story, see http://tinyurl.com/mautss 

A solar updraft tower collects warm air that forms near the ground, funneled by a canopy, and sends it up a chimney. Turbines in the airflow produce electricity.

I was first made aware of this device from the blog of Dr. Roy Spencer, Principal Research Scientist at the University of Alabama in Huntsville and former Senior Scientist for Climate Studies at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center. 

Spencer says, “It’s a little like wind tower technology, but rather than just extracting energy from whatever horizontally-flowing wind happens to be passing by, the Solar Tower concentrates all of that warm air heated by the ground into the central tower, or chimney, where the air naturally rises. Even on a day with no wind, the solar tower will be generating electricity while conventional wind towers are sitting there motionless.” And it works at night.

“The total amount of energy that can be generated by a Solar Tower depends upon two main factors: (1) how much land area is covered by the clear canopy, and (2) the total height of the tower.” It also depends on the temperature difference between the power plant’s surroundings and the air underneath the canopy.

A prototype was built in Spain a few years ago.

See here for a You Tube demonstration of this project.

A private company, EnviroMission, is constructing a 200 Megawatt solar tower in the Australian outback.

This technology may be economically competitive with coal fired power plants, unlike current wind or solar generation schemes.

In the Spanish test, they expected that the ground under the canopy would be barren due to the very high temperatures. However, they found that the greenhouse effect (a physical barrier to cooling, unlike greenhouse gases) caused condensation at night and produced lush vegetation under the canopy. Perhaps special crops could be grown at these stations.

President Obama says he favors “Clean Coal.” Coal produces 49% of the electricity generated in the United States. But burning coal puts carbon dioxide into the atmosphere and that scares the politically correct and the carbon cultists, including Barack Obama and John McCain. Their solution is to capture carbon dioxide, transport it to a storage site, and bury it. That comes at considerable cost in both dollars and in additional coal burned to produce the energy needed for the process. But “clean coal” is now the political panacea, even though there is no evidence that CO₂ emissions significantly affect temperature. In fact, additional atmospheric CO₂ would be beneficial by making plant life more robust.

Coal-fired plants are much cleaner than they were in 1970 when Congress passed the Clean Air Act Amendments. Since that time, coal-fired electrical generation increased by 180% while SO₂ emissions decreased by 80% and NO_x decreased by 70% (in pounds per megawatt-hour) according to the EPA. According to the Department of Energy’s National Energy Technology Laboratory, a new pulverized coal plant (operating at lower, “subcritical” temperatures and pressures) reduces the emission of NO_x by 86 percent, SO₂ by 98 percent, and particulate matter by 99.8 percent, as compared with a similar plant having no pollution controls.

Carbon Capture Technology

The most promising technology for CO₂ capture is called Integrated Gasification Combined Cycle. But the cost of building a power plant with this technology to capture 90% of the CO₂ generated is 47% higher than that for a traditional power plant, according to a 2006 study by the EPA.

According to the Department of Energy (DOE), existing capture technologies are not cost-effective when considered in the context of sequestering CO₂ from power plants. Most power plants and other large point sources use air-fired combustors, a process that exhausts CO₂ diluted with nitrogen. Flue gas from coal-fired power plants contains 10%-12% CO₂ by volume, while flue gas from natural gas combined cycle plants contains only 3%-6% CO₂. For effective carbon sequestration, the CO₂ in these exhaust gases must be concentrated and separated.

CO₂ is currently recovered from combustion exhaust by using amine absorbers and cryogenic coolers. The cost of CO₂ capture using current technology is on the order of $150 per ton of carbon – much too high for carbon emissions reduction applications according to DOE. Analysis performed by SFA Pacific, Inc. indicates that adding existing technologies for CO₂ capture to an electricity generation process could increase the cost of electricity by 2.5 cents- to 4 cents/kWh depending on the type of process. That would about double the cost of natural gas and coal produced electricity, making it almost as expensive as electricity produced from wind energy.

The EPA, which usually underestimates costs, says that capturing CO₂ imposes a cost of about $24 per ton, much less than DOE. Even at that lower estimate, however, the largest U.S. power plant which emits about 25 million tons of CO₂ annually, would incur an extra cost of $600 million per year. For all U.S. coal-fired power plants, which emit a total of more than 2.2 billion tons annually, the cost would be $52 billion per year. Passing along the capital and operating costs to consumers would raise electricity prices by almost 40% according to the EPA.

Carbon Storage

The capture cost is only part of the story. The gas must be compressed, transported, and buried.

Where would it be stored? Several types of geological reservoirs theoretically provide sufficient storage capacity. According to the National Energy Technology Laboratory (NETL), “more than 88 billion metric tons of geologic storage potential exists in 9,667 oil and gas reservoirs distributed over 27 states and 3 Canadian provinces.”

Unmineable coal seams can be drilled to collect the methane for use in energy applications. Once the methane is recovered, CO₂ could be pumped into the wells, where it is preferentially stored in the coal, releasing additional methane. “More than 180 billion metric tons of CO₂ sequestration potential exists in unmineable coal seams…distributed over 24 states and 3 provinces,” according to NETL.

Deep saline formations could provide another storage option. An analysis by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2006 showed that wells deep underground consisting of porous rock, such as limestone or sandstone, saturated with saltwater, would form an effective trap for injected CO₂. Geologically, over time, some CO₂ would react with rock minerals to form solid carbonates, further immobilizing it. Deep saline aquifers could potentially store between 3,300 to more than 12,200 billion metric tons of CO₂, according to NETL.

Pipe Dreams

In theory, there appears to be plenty of potential underground storage for captured carbon dioxide, but the theoretical is different from the practical. Location relative to the power plants makes much of these reservoirs impractical to actually use.

Getting the carbon dioxide from the power plants to the storage areas is problematic and expensive. And, of course, Greenie extremists are likely to oppose construction of the many high-pressure pipelines that would be required. A report from the nonpartisan Congressional Research Service (CRS), entitled “Pipelines for Carbon Dioxide (CO₂) Control: Network Needs and Cost Uncertainties” (Jan. 10, 2008) shows several hypothetical examples of CO₂ pipelines running from the 11 largest CO₂ emitters in Indiana, Kentucky, Maryland, Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and West Virginia — all coal-fired electric power plants emitting over 9 million metric tons of CO₂ annually — to potential regional sequestration sites.

In the least expensive scenario, it would take an estimated $66 million to build pipelines each with a capacity of 10 million tons of CO₂ annually from the 11 plants to a nearby geological formation called Rose Run. Unfortunately, as the CRS points out, Rose Run may not have the capacity to accept all the CO₂ produced, and injecting pressurized CO₂ may cause minor earthquakes. While the earthquakes may create additional capacity for CO₂, they may also produce permanent conduits for leakage.

Unmineable coal beds in the same general area as Rose Run are another option but their capacity falls far short of Rose Run’s.

The 10 largest local depleted oil and gas fields have an average capacity of 251 million tons of CO₂, but the 30-year CO₂ output of the 11 plants is estimated to range from 270 million tons to 491 million tons at current emission levels. Not only is their capacity lacking, but the oil and gas fields pose a significant risk of leaking.

A final option considered by CRS is piping the CO₂ hundreds of miles west to a geological area in Michigan, Indiana and western Ohio known as the Mt. Simon formation. The average cost of building each pipeline would be $150 million.

That’s a bargain, however, compared to a geographically disadvantaged area like North Carolina. A Duke University study estimated it would cost $5 billion to transport CO₂ from North Carolina’s electric utilities to sequestration sites in other states.

The CRS report emphasized an August 2007 decision by the Minnesota Public Utilities Commission to reject a 450-mile pipeline to a Canadian oil field costing over $635 million as “not in the public interest.”

According to the Business & Media Institute, Stanford Professor Ken Caldeira, an IPCC Report Author, estimates that the annual cost to capture carbon from power plants worldwide, will be $800 billion.

Another study by Xina Xie, University of Wyoming, and Michael Economides, University of Texus, The Impact of Carbon Geological Sequestration, says that carbon capture sequestration for just Kyoto Protocol-type CO₂ cuts in the U.S. would require the drilling of 161,429 injection wells by 2030 at a cost of 1.61 trillion dollars — and there’s no guarantee that the CO₂ would stay sequestered, much less accomplish anything for the climate.

Boon or Boondoggle

While carbon capture and storage may be technologically possible, it makes no sense either economically or scientifically. It is a solution seeking a problem; it is utter wastefulness. But bureaucrats, politically correct and stupid politicians, and industry, will suck up to the trough of public money to promote these wasteful schemes in an attempt to quell the phantom menace of carbon dioxide. Raising the cost of electricity 50% to 100% should make us feel all warm and fuzzy since “clean coal” will assuage our carbon guilt.

And just to make it interesting, the Center for Biological Diversity has just formed a new law institute in San Francisco with the goal of stopping all electrical generation from use of fossil fuels. I hope they will not be hypocrites and actually use fossil-fuel-produced electricity during their campaign.

President Obama is a proponent of a “smart grid” to better distribute electricity between producers (including all those windmills he wants to build) and consumers. I agree that we need to update our infrastructure with more power plants and transmission lines. However, the following excerpt from a press release of a Maryland utility seems ominous.

BALTIMORE, Jul 13, 2009 (BUSINESS WIRE) — Baltimore Gas and Electric Company (BGE) today announced it has filed with the Maryland Public Service Commission (PSC) a comprehensive and advanced Smart Grid initiative, including the planned installation of 2 million residential and commercial smart meters, that could potentially save BGE electric and gas customers in excess of $2.6 billion over the life of the project. In an extensive pilot program that began in 2008, smart meters and a new pricing plan proved that customers can reduce peak electricity usage by about a third and enjoy significant savings. BGE is seeking prompt action by the Maryland PSC and federal approval of stimulus dollars to position the utility to move to the next phase of this potential smart grid investment.

BGE claims benefits to consumers of about $5 per month.

I have a time-of-use electric meter on my house. I can choose when to run appliances, such as the washer or drier, to make sure it is in off-peak times, and thus save money. The operative phrase here is “I can choose.”

However, the “smart meters” used by BGE operate “through a robust…two-way communications network…” That means the utility company can decide when and how much gas and electricity you can use at any given time. The ultimate purpose of the meters is to allow local utilities to ration electricity as demand rises faster than supply, a situation caused in part by enviros blocking construction of new power plants and transmission lines.

To find out more about U.S. electricity generation, see: Obama clueless on energy, part 1.