Blue Marble

Blue Marble - April 2013

Watch: Crack-Up of Sea Ice in the Arctic Ocean

| Fri Apr. 5, 2013 3:15 AM PDT

$Gigantic area of sea ice caught in the process of fracturing in the Arctic Ocean$ Gigantic area of sea ice caught in the process of fracturing in the Arctic Ocean off northern Alaska beginning in late January 2013: NASA image courtesy of NASA Earth Observatory | Jesse Allen using VIIRS day-night band data from the Suomi National Polar-orbiting Partnership.

As I reported last week, sea ice in the Arctic Ocean reached its maximum growth for the winter on about 13 March and is now losing more ice than it's gaining. The National Snow and Ice Data Center initially reported that 2013 was the sixth lowest sea ice extent on record. NASA has revised that to an even more dismal fifth-lowest sea ice extent on record.

In the image above—and even more so in the video time-lapse below—you can see the tremendous dynamism at work in this frozen ocean. Jostled by monster winds and ocean currents, sea ice sheets constantly shift, crack, and grind against one another.

And that's what's happening on the left side of the video (above) in late January, according to NASA's Earth Observatory. A high-pressure weather system parked over the region produced warmer temperatures and winds flowing in a southwesterly direction. Those winds drove the Beaufort Gyre clockwise. And that gyre pulled pieces of sea ice west past Point Barrow, Alaska's northwestern-most point.

The crack-up began in late-January and spread west toward Banks Island throughout February and March 2013. A series of February storms passing over central Alaska exacerbated the fracturing. By the end of February large pieces of ice had borken all the way to the western coast of Banks Island, a distance of ~600 miles (1,000 kilometers).

It's fascinating for me to see this area of the Arctic Ocean—particularly the Beaufort Sea part of the Arctic Ocean—which I sailed through in its entirety last October (more on that here) and saw not one speck of sea ice then. So all of the ice cap breaking up here is likely young, first-year ice.

Here's NASA's two-minute explainer on the Arctic winter of 2013, amid the mega-changes underway so far this century. Chilling.

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Ohio State Senator Leading Review of "Stalinist" Renewable Energy Standards

—By Ryan Jacobs

| Fri Apr. 5, 2013 3:05 AM PDT

This is your energy on communism.

Bill Seitz, a Republican state senator from Ohio, recently told the Wall Street Journal that his state's renewable energy and energy efficiency standards are reminiscent of "Joseph Stalin's five-year plan."

Seitz, who is also on the board of the shadowy corporate-government allegiance known as the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), made this charmingly ahistorical claim just a week after inviting the climate-change-denying Heartland Institute to testify against the standard before the Ohio Senate Public Utilities Committee. He has taken it upon himself to determine whether Ohio should amend or repeal its clean energy law, which requires utilities to institute energy efficiency measures and to draw at least 12.5 percent of energy from renewable sources by 2025.

The Ohio legislature approved its clean energy standard almost unanimously in 2008. Since then, wind and solar companies have created 8,000 new jobs, and efficiency programs have netted rate payers $1 billion in savings, according to the non-profit Union of Concerned Scientists and the Ohio Public Utilities Commission. But in late February, Seitz introduced legislation that aims to overhaul the law.

Seitz maintains that he has launched the review because the current policies were based on the assumption that wind and solar prices would go down faster than they have over the past five years. He says the state has already deployed the "low-hanging fruit" energy-saving measures, and utilities and their industrial customers are reticent to implement the more expensive technologies that might be necessary to reach the goals set in 2008. "Nobody is for more carbon emissions than you need to have, but at the same time the question is, well, what does it cost?" Seitz told Mother Jones in an interview.

The senator's record and alliances are probably some indication of the direction he'll take his review process. In 2011, Seitz cosponsored a bill to repeal the renewable energy requirement entirely. He also sits on the board of ALEC, a public policy group that brings together corporate interests and conservative lawmakers to push industry-friendly bills in state legislatures, and coauthored the group's model renewable energy standard repeal bill known as the "Electricity Freedom Act." Another ALEC member, the Ohio-based American Electric Power Company Inc. (which stands to lose money due to the law's efficiency standards), was the third largest donor to his 2012 campaign, according to campaign finance data. Other big utilities, including FirstEnergy Corp. and Duke Energy, have been consistent supporters of Seitz.

Renewable energy advocates are not optimistic about Seitz's "review" of the renewable energy standard. "For Senator Seitz to create an appearance of a fair process given his close alliance with ALEC and its powerful interests is disingenuous," said Steve Frenkel, the Midwestern director of the Union of Concerned Scientists. Seitz, on the other hand, doesn't think his campaign donations have any influence on his decision-making. "I'm term-limited. I could give a damn," he said, noting that he's "done" when his term ends in 2016.

Despite Seitz's allusions to Soviet centralized planning, recent polling shows that more than 65 percent of Ohio voters support the renewable energy benchmarks, and a majority of respondents said they would be willing to pay more for power from clean sources. "Ohioans know that their economy and their environment are benefiting from investing in clean energy technologies," Frenkel said. "And Senator Seitz is just out of step with the people of Ohio in recognizing the important clean energy transition that the state's already making."

Frackers Are Losing $1.5 Billion Yearly to Leaks

—By Tim McDonnell

| Fri Apr. 5, 2013 3:00 AM PDT

Of all the many and varied consequences of fracking (water contamination, injured workers, earthquakes, the list goes on) one of the least understood is so-called "fugitive" methane emissions. Methane is the primary ingredient of natural gas, and it escapes into the atmosphere at every stage of production: at wells, in processing plants, and in pipes on its way to your house. According to a new study, it could become one of the worst climate impacts of the fracking boom—and yet, it's one of the easiest to tackle right away. Best of all, fixing the leaks is good for the bottom line.

According to the World Resources Institute, natural gas producers allow $1.5 billion worth of methane to escape from their operations every year. That might sound like small change to an industry that drilled up some $66.5 billion worth of natural gas in 2012 alone, but it's a big deal for the climate: While methane only makes up 10 percent of greenhouse gas emissions (20 percent of which comes from cow farts), it packs a global warming punch 20 times stronger than carbon dioxide.

Courtesy WRI

"Those leaks are everywhere," said WRI analyst James Bradbury, so fixing them would be "super low-hanging fruit."

The problem, he says, is that right now those emissions aren't directly regulated by the EPA. In President Obama's first term, the EPA set new requirements for capturing other types of pollutants that escape from fracked wells, using technology that also, incidentally, limits methane. But without a cap on methane itself, WRI finds, the potent gas is free to escape at incredible rates, principally from leaky pipelines. The scale of the problem is hard to overstate: The Energy Department found that leaking methane could ultimately make natural gas—which purports to be a "clean" fossil fuel—even more damaging than coal, and an earlier WRI study found that fixing methane leaks would be the single biggest step the US could take toward meeting its long-term greenhouse gas reduction goals.

[Read more]

The Environmental Movement’s Greatest Hits, All in One Documentary

—By Joanna M. Foster

| Thu Apr. 4, 2013 12:56 PM PDT

Rena Schild/Shutterstock

This story first appeared on the Grist website and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

Mark Kitchell didn't want to make your standard here's-a-really-important-issue, be-the-change-you-want-to-see-in-the-world, bleeding-heart environmental documentary. Kitchell, best known for his award-winning documentary Berkeley in the Sixties, doesn't even consider himself an environmentalist. But the story of the environmental movement was too much for him to resist.

"It doesn't get any bigger than this, in terms of a social movement," he says. "Especially when you think about what's at stake and the kind of transformation of society that needs to take place."

What Kitchell ended up producing was a kind of greatest hits of the environmental movement from its early days fighting over the building of dams in the West, to Love Canal, the first Earth Day, and the birth of Greenpeace, to the mother of all environmental issues—and maybe all issues, period—climate change. A Fierce Green Fire is now rolling out at a series of film festivals and theaters across the country.

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CHART: Withering Drought Still Plaguing Half of America

—By James West

| Thu Apr. 4, 2013 7:00 AM PDT

Click here for a larger version. James West

The $50 billion drought that bedeviled the country last Summer—the worst since the Dust Bowl of the 1930's—still has its fingers around half the country. And if predictions are to be believed, it's only going to get worse for many in the coming months.

Weekly drought figures released Thursday by the US Drought Monitor, a joint project of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the USDA and several other government and academic partners, show the situation has worsened slightly from last week, with nearly 52% of the continental US now suffering from a moderate drought or worse. Below-average winter snow pack and rainfall are keeping much of the country in a holding pattern. No measurable precipitation fell on most of central and northern Illinois, southern Wisconsin, central and northern Iowa, southwestern Minnesota, and the Louisiana Bayou last week. Rain that fell in the West did nothing to alleviate the drought there; in fact, parts of western Oregon and southwestern Washington have reported their driest start to a calendar year on record. The forecast for the next two weeks? Dry and dry again.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's climate prediction center warns today that drought is likely to persist for much of the West and expand across northern California and southern Oregon. Although the numbers are more optimistic across eastern Kansas and Oklahoma, with some rain on the way, drought still has a strong grip on much of Colorado, New Mexico, Utah, Nevada, and Arizona due to low snow-water (around 75% of normal) heading into spring and early summer. That is just the latest in a battery of warning signs that show another brutal summer on its way: California experienced its driest January-February period on record, and average winter temperatures across the contiguous US were 1.9°F above the 20th century average.

These figures come on the back of the spring outlook from NOAA released two weeks ago that point to hotter, drier conditions coming up across much of the US, and with that, flooding.

In many parts of the country, drought in fact never loosened its grip, imperiling the winter wheat crop that sustains much of the US wheat industry.

Invasive Crab Restoring Cape Cod's Dwindling Salt Marshes

—By Julia Whitty

| Wed Apr. 3, 2013 7:51 AM PDT

European green crab, at juvenile stage where it appears green: Photo by Luis Miguel Bugallo Sánchez at Wikimedia Commons

The European green crab—an invasive species in North America and one of the "worst 100" invaders on the Global Invasive Species Database—may not be the utter evil we once thought. A couple of new papers (here and here) from a team at Brown University detail how they're actually helping the dwindling salt marshes of Cape Cod recover. It's a fascinating detective story—from the frontlines of an emerging field known as historical ecology—and it's rife with plot twists and red herrings, which begins like this:

People built mosquito ditches into Cape Cod's salt marshes in the 1930s to drain flooded mosquito breeding habitat
Which resulted in the appearance of corridors of low marsh cordgrass in areas formerly dominated by high marsh plants
Coastal development ramped up big-time after World War II, with the permanent human population on the Cape doubling every 20 years from 1939-2005

Purple marsh crab: Photo courtesy of Mark Bertness

Enter a mysterious die-off of Cape Cod low marsh cordgrasses that began decades ago. Researchers eventually traced the culprit to the native purple marsh crab, photo above, which was eating through the cordgrasses at alarming speed.

But why had this good crab suddenly gone bad? The researchers kept researching. Turns out that predators of those crabs—blue crabs and striped bass—were being overfished by recreational fishers. In the course of 337,000 fishing trips to Cape Cod annually, these fishers had triggered a trophic cascade.

That's when the removal of predators messes up the ecosystem two or more trophic links removed. In other words, a system-wide meltdown of a functioning ecosystem. And one unlikely to recover its former state.

Turns out the mosquito ditches, which had seemed more or less harmless since their installation decades earlier, were accomplices in this trophic cascade. That's because the ditches had facilitated corridors of low marsh cordgrasses. As striped bass and blue crabs were being overfished, purple crabs were experiencing a fourfold increase in population. Suddenly these corridors of low marsh cordgrasses became superhighways for hungry purple crabs to eat themselves into a novel state of hyperabundance.

At developed sites with increased accessibility and fishing pressure (a), the purple marsh crab (S reticulatum, [c]) is released from predatory control (eg blue crab [Callinectes sapidus] and striped bass [Morone saxatilis], [b]) and consumes cordgrass (S alterniflora, [d]) along creek and ditch banks

At developed sites with increased accessibility and fishing pressure (a), the purple marsh crab, [c]) is released from predatory control (eg blue crab and striped bass, [b]) and consumes cordgrass , [d]) along creek and ditch banks: TC Coverdale, et al. Frontiers in Ecology and Evolution. DOI:10.1890/120130

But wait. The story's not over. Enter the introduction of an invasive species, the European green crab with a reputation for biological badassness. According to the findings of the researchers, just published in Ecology, these unwanted invaders (they probably got to Cape Cod as stowaways on ships) discovered the banquets of incredibly yummy (okay, I surmised that part) purple crabs that almost no one else was eating. Nature being what it is, the badass crab struck hard.

Hard enough to begin to reverse the decades'-long decline of Cape Cod's salt marshes. Which, BTW, keep the Cape from eroding off into the Atlantic Ocean. The authors write:

Our results show that, despite previous evidence of negative impacts on native species throughout its introduced range, [the European green crab] is well suited to accelerate the recovery of heavily degraded salt marsh ecosystems in New England.

The effect of the invasive crab doesn't even have to involve actually eating all that many native purple crabs, lead author Mark Bertness tells me. "Fear of being eaten can be a stronger ecosystem effect than being eaten, because predation happens one event at a time whereas a single predator can scare away dozens of prey yielding much larger ecological effects." Though he adds this caution: "Marsh recovery driven by fear of green crabs is superficial and doesn't replace the centuries of accretion and carbon sequestration taken to build Cape Cod marshes."

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The Drought Is Drying Up All Our Ethanol

—By Tim McDonnell

| Wed Apr. 3, 2013 3:00 AM PDT

Bill Pracht has bad memories of last summer. "The drought was so bad here that the corn was just decimated," he recalls of the farm country around Garnett, Kan., where he oversees East Kansas Agri-Energy, an ethanol plant. "Many fields were zero."

In August, corn prices hit their highest level ever, driven mainly by the severe drought that crippled America's corn belt. By October, Pracht could see that he was spending more on corn than he could make with ethanol, and with no relief in sight, he began to have doubts about keeping the plant open.

"We knew we'd be wasting money," he says.

So, he pulled the plug, shuttering the plant and laying off twenty employees until conditions improve enough to make churning out what was until recently one of the nation's fastest-growing fuel sources profitable again. And as the EPA nears a final decision on new regulations that would require oil companies to use more ethanol in their gasoline mixes, Pracht's story illustrates a risk of increasing reliance on corn-based fuels in a warming world.

Pracht isn't alone: Over the last year, nearly 10 percent of the nation's ethanol plants have shut down. Annual corn yields came in almost a third lower than projected, according to the USDA, driving record-high corn prices that are likely to continue to rise into 2013, up to 19 percent higher than 2011-2012 averages. Overall, 2012 was the first year since 1996 (another drought year) in which total ethanol production decreased (by 4.5 percent), reversing a trend of exponential growth that's lasted almost a decade, according to the federal Energy Information Administration:

Tim McDonnell

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ADHD Diagnoses Increased More Than 50 Percent in a Decade

—By Maggie Severns

| Tue Apr. 2, 2013 3:00 AM PDT

Monkik/Shutterstock

In 2011, eleven percent of school-age children had been diagnosed with ADHD That's a sixteen percent more than in 2007 and 53 percent more than a decade ago, according to a New York Times analysis of new data from the Center for Disease Control.

This comes out to a grand total 6.4 million children in the US, up to 4 million of whom have prescriptions for Adderall, Ritalin, or other medication, a class of drugs that brings in an estimated $9 billion in sales annually. The Times found that boys, particularly teenage boys ages 14-17, have the highest rates of diagnosis, though no one knows why:

The New York Times

The director of the CDC told the New York Times that "The right medications for A.D.H.D., given to the right people, can make a huge difference. Unfortunately, misuse appears to be growing at an alarming rate." The CDC estimates that we spend $31.6 billion annually in health care and work absence costs for children and adults with ADHD and their families.

Clearly, more and more kids are being diagnosed with ADHD. What the new study doesn't tell us is whether more and more kids actually have it. Another recent CDC study, that both surveyed parents and screened children, suggested doctors are over-diagnosing ADHD in some kids while overlooking the condition in others. The survey, which focused on South Carolina and Oklahoma, found that of children taking ADHD medication, only 40 percent in South Carolina and 28 percent in Oklahoma actually met the diagnostic criteria for ADHD.

In other words, the current system for diagnosing kids with ADHD is probably not working very well. Meanwhile, as another recent story in the Times demonstrated, concerns over the potential side effects of ADHD medications—which can include addiction and anxiety—are mounting.

Keystone XL: The Science, Stakes, and Strategy Behind the Fight Over the Tar Sands Pipeline

—By Chris Mooney

| Tue Apr. 2, 2013 3:00 AM PDT

tarsandsaction/Flickr

On February 17, more than 40,000 people rallied in Washington to convince the president to reject the Keystone XL, a proposed 875-mile pipeline running from the Canadian border into Nebraska and slated to transport oil from tar sands (which is 17 percent more greenhouse gas intensive than standard crude oil). The crowds outside the White House provided overwhelming proof that opposing Keystone has mobilized a new and powerful grassroots constituency.

But in the US Senate, the mood was different. In a nonbinding vote, 62 Senators—including 17 pro-Keystone Democrats—voted to approve the pipeline. Just 37 Senators voted against it. In fact, the amendment was co-sponsored by four Democrats, including Max Baucus of Montana and Heidi Heitkamp of North Dakota.

So are activists' efforts all in vain? What will happen to the environmental movement if President Obama ultimately lets Keystone go forward?

And more broadly: What does this say about the best strategy for fighting climate change? Does compromise, horse-trading, and winning industry allies ultimately work best—or do you have to push the limits of the possible? You're invited to the next Climate Desk Live event—hosted by myself—for a debate and discussion between some of the leading voices on this issue:

David Roberts, Grist magazine, who has been covering Keystone regularly and recently wrote about the "Virtues of Being Unreasonable on Keystone."

Michael Levi, director of the program on Energy Security and Climate Change at the Council on Foreign Relations, and author of the new book The Power Surge: Energy, Opportunity, and the Battle For America’s Future (Oxford, May 2013), where he writes that combating climate change will require "doing deals [with those] who want to expand production of oil and gas."

Michael Grunwald, senior national correspondent for Time magazine, author of The New New Deal: The Hidden Story of Change in the Obama Era, who recently declared that on Keystone, "I'm with the Tree Huggers!"

Invention of the Day: A Bladeless Windmill

—By Henry Grabar

| Mon Apr. 1, 2013 12:48 PM PDT

Mecanoo

This story first appeared on the Atlantic Cities website and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

It may look like a giant airplane window strung with Venetian blinds, but this structure, designed by Dutch architecture firm Mecanoo and installed at the Delft University of Technology this month, is a model of a machine that would convert wind to energy without any moving parts.

Any mechanical moving parts, at least: the technology, developed by the Electrical Engineering, Mathematics and Computer Science faculty at Delft, uses the movement of electrically charged water droplets to generate power. How does this work? A handy video explains:

The prototype of the EWICON (Electrostatic Wind Energy Converter), as envisioned by Mecanoo, has the potential to change the use of wind technology. The EWICON absorbs little wear and tear, requires hardly any maintenance, but most importantly, it makes no noise and casts no moving shadows, two of the principal complaints that hinder windmill installation in the United States.

This, Mecanoo believes, makes it the ideal feature for urban environments -- they've already incorporated them into their design for a project in Rotterdam.

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