The commenter “Max-42″ counters that El Niño is responsible for the record-breaking ocean temperatures, and he’s partly right. El Niño is playing an important role, but so is climate change. Joseph Romm has an excellent post explaining how the two have worked in tandem. I encourage you to check it out.

And, as always, read the original post.

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One trend that seems to be applied to more and more problems today is underestimation. We as Americans seem to want to deny most of our large issues. Climate change, oil spills, deforestation of rain forests, many environmental conflicts and issues fall into this category, along with the most recent British Petroleum oil leak in the Gulf.  

When the initial explosion occurred off the coast of Louisiana, rough estimates and conjectures determined that the leaks weren’t concerning and it would be fixed promptly. More than a month later, we’re seeing the serious environmental impacts of the oil as well as the efforts used to stem its spread. From 5,000 barrels a day to more than 25,000, the course of time has only underscored the fact that people are willing to overlook serious factors in order to maintain a more optimistic outlook for a very serious problem.

While the timeline is much different, similar problems have plagued the movement against climate change. Though the issue is much more complex, the dilemma has only been hindered by controversial science, calculations, and estimates. The real problem is our own inability as a society to take responsibility for the full brunt of any given complication.

As I’ve stated in the past, to get American citizens to take charge of their own impact on our environment is hard enough, but to take responsibility and be honest about an issue that could potentially change a small economy, entire industries, the survival of dozens of species and ecosystems is hard to imagine — let alone our entire planet and global society.

While animals and plants are dying, people losing their jobs and entire regions being impacted in the Gulf, I think each and every one of us needs to consider what a difference each one of us can make. By simply taking responsibility for our own choices and actions, we can all determine our own futures, including that of our planet.

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Over time, these spaces came to hold meaning for us, and we desired to make them more permanent. As we began to form societies and changed from nomadic hunter-gatherers to farmers and eventually expanded to citizens of cities, our architecture became more constructed, invasive. Architecture began to allow mortals to leave an indelible mark upon the earth: the Egyptians and their pyramids, the Greeks and their temples, and the Gothic artists and their cathedrals. There are structures that have lasted thousands of years—and will stand for thousands more.

I don’t want this post to simply be a history lesson. But to understand where architecture is going and what it needs to do, we have to see what it has done.  

Today, while we have almost infinite technological advances at our fingertips, many architects are not changing the real substance of architecture. We’ve been using the same construction methods for over 100 years. While many say that they advocate sustainability, they are not doing enough to innovate their field.

I think that Werner Sobek would agree with me. I had the privilege of seeing Sobek speak at Penn about 2 years ago, and he discussed several of his sustainable projects. He has started a program that he calls Triple Zero, which translates to zeros in each of the most important parts of a building: energy, emission, and waste. Each building (6 to date, all residences) can support itself by creating its own energy, uses materials and construction methods that do not create negative emissions, does not create any waste in construction, and if it’s demolished, can be completely recycled.

This is a relatively radical concept in the field of architecture: creating a building that has virtually no footprint during and after its use.

Others are starting to understand this concept on a larger scale. I just read a review of an exhibit at the MoMA that is a collection of proposals for how the city of New York will deal with the rising water levels in the next century. They foresee a city that has replaced much of its permanent infrastructure with new materials and formats, creating an environment that is largely permeable.

Some designers are now seeing that in order to be more sustainable, we need to be more harmonious with nature. This seems obvious, but there are many cues that we can take from the design of natural things in order to improve the performance of our buildings and environments. If you do the Google search for “biomimicry architecture“, you’ll be surprised at how much comes up. As of yet, it’s mostly an academic and theoretical ideal, but I think that this is where architecture will end up going in the next 50 years.

While the changes that we’re making now are helping us little-by-little to decrease our impact on the Earth, we have to radically shift our modes of thought on how we design and construct our built environment. It’s not enough to merely use thin veneers of sustainable materials. We must rethink the entire precedent of planning, architecture, and design that has gone before us for thousands of years. This is not an easy task, yet we are very capable. We just need to be willing.

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A new program called Earth Aid, however, seems to be a well-planned, well-designed, and well-thought-out program that is simple and easy-to-use, and encourages people to make an impact.  

Two summers ago, I had the privilege to work with a non-profit in Philadelphia called the Energy Coordinating Agency. It seemed to me almost the epitome of the sustainable non-profit. It was housed in an old brownstone building on Arch Street, had many dedicated workers, and was in a fairly consistant struggle for survival. They spearheaded many energy-saving programs in the city by using local, state and federal funds. When I left, they were even working on creating a Green Collor Jobs center to diminish unemployment in the area while also providing a base for sustainable jobs in the future.

ECA’s main goal was to help the citizens of Philadelphia save money and save energy at the same time. Earth Aid seems to have taken this a step in the right direction with their website. While ECA has been working for years in the field to interact with people and get the knowledge about energy savings out there, Earth Aid is now bringing energy savings into the homes of anyone with a computer by offering free energy tracking services for your home and providing easy access to financial incentives from the government for saving energy.

Though ECA provides many in-depth services that Earth Aid does not, I think Earth Aid has the opportunity to get a foot in the door for many homeowners. Once they see what small projects and additions can do to their energy bills, they will be more knowlegable and open to these energy-saving projects. Earth Aid even provides local service provider information once a member on their site.

It would be amazing if two companies such as Earth Aid and ECA could join forces. Not only would their customers have easy access and a great starting point to save energy, but they would have a direct line to people who can provide a wide array of services for those who wish to make a greater impact.

As I have said in many of my previous posts, people need incentives to work towards a more sustainable and energy-efficient world. If we can create services like Earth Aid that make energy saving not only easily understood but also financially smart, the new “green wave” will be a more educated and widespread movement.

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Today, you can check out my column explaining what that next challenge should be. (Yes, I’m back at the Hazleton Standard-Speaker, but only once a month.)

The challenge is energy reform. We need to be clearer about the words we use for this debate. When we talk about cap-and-trade or climate change, it tends to scare people away. It sounds big and complicated, and it gives the false impression that global warming is the only motivation for such legislation. But as my column explains, climate change is only half the problem. We also need to raise the price of carbon because of the economic and national security drawbacks of our dependence on foreign oil. And just like health care, the energy market has negative externalities that the government can reduce. Hence, energy reform.

If you follow the links in our “What to Read” series, none of the column should surprise you. If, on the other hand, you get most of your news from the mainstream media, it probably comes as a bit of cognitive dissonance. (That’s what I aim for. If I didn’t teach you something new, there wouldn’t be much point to writing my op-ed, would there?)  

Here are my main sources:

• Massive moisture-driven extreme precipitation during warmest winter in the satellite record — and the deniers say it disproves (!) climate science
• Global boiling: Freak storms on every continent
• We get more snow storms in warm years!
• Groundhog decade: We’re stuck on a bad movie, where it’s always the hottest decade on record
• Global cooling bites the dust: Hottest January followed by second hottest February. Now March is busting out.
• Red River rising: 18th consecutive year of flooding–why?
• The challenges ahead for world oil
• The future of intense winter storms
• A very productive Congress, despite what the approval ratings say
• Working harder and hard to keep oil production from falling
• Oil companies look at permanent refinery cutbacks

Some links are buried within those links. If, for example, you want to see exactly what the NOAA or NSO said, you’ll find links to their reports within the Climate Progress posts above. And if you have no idea what the NOAA or NSO are, read the column!

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Ecotect Example Output

This is my last semester at Penn, and in the architecture department, that usually means it will be the most difficult and time-intensive semester of your undergraduate career. So while my Econ-major friends are taking 3 credits and having fun on the weekends, I’m spending free time working in teams and learning how to use a new piece of software: Autodesk’s somewhat unknown Ecotect Analysis.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not bitter about the dichotomy of work vs. play; most of us architecture students would much prefer learning a new piece of software or discussing the latest smart building material over a night of drinking, so this is pretty exciting stuff. I had never heard of Ecotect prior to about a month and a half ago, and what I knew was very limited.  

At first glance, the software allows a designer to input a building model into the program and utilize it to calculate energy loads and see the effect of natural lighting upon the building. Even this limited interpretation of the program’s use is surprisingly important and useful: by simply using a computer program, a designer can make decisions about the efficiency of the building before it even leaves the drawing table. These simulations can allow the designer to make more careful decisions about window placement, sun shading, and other factors that effect the efficiency of the building in relation to its sun exposure.

But Ecotect is not only used for these limited applications. It can calculate wind directions and ventilation for a particular area, aid designers in placing artificial lighting, provide data for acoustical analysis, and it also works almost seamlessly with other modeling and designing programs.

Essentially, a designer can work with this software in order to create a building that is environmentally sensitive with little to now extra work on their part. It will save energy costs in the long run and saves headaches when it comes to construction. This leaves us no excuses for not factoring in these environmental indicators that will help make better living and working spaces and lessen our footprint on the earth.

Ecotest Example Output

I can understand, however, that there is some sticker shock to buying the software: $2400(+/-)  for most firms is a lot to ask. If you’ve read some of my earlier posts, you could probably deduce that I’m a proponent for higher governmental involvement in sustainable building and design. It’s therefore probably easy to understand my solution to this problem: There are plenty of small government subsidies for sustainable projects in both residential and commercial sectors (in PA you can get funding for anything from PV panels to efficient windows), so it’s logical that some sort of subsidy could be set up to help firms pay for this software. In the long run, the efficacy of using this software is well worth its up-front cost, but as always, the issue comes down to motivation: Architecture and design firms need a reason to pay for it.

In the technological age that we live in, we really have no more excuses for not building and living sustainably. It’s really just a matter of choice.

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…according to the National Snow and Ice Data Center, global glacier thickness has declined every year for the past 4+ decades. The most recent academic research I’ve seen was published 2 months ago, and it concluded that Antarctic ice loss has been vaster and faster than the IPCC predicted. Another paper published around the same time found that, based on historical evidence, Antarctica is more sensitive to greenhouse gases than previously thought.

When many people hear “glaciers,” they think of the Himalayas. One of the most startling predictions of the 2007 IPCC report was that this gorgeous region in South and East Asia will lose all its glaciers by 2035. If you trace that claim back to its original source, you find quotes in New Scientist and Indian magazine Down to Earth by Syed Hasnain, who studied the Himalayan glaciers for the International Commission on Snow and Ice. Hasnain, it turns out, made the prediction based on “speculation,” not evidence.

Let’s be clear about what this means: Nothing.  

Okay, it means something, but not nearly as much as the media might lead you to believe. It was a blunder, to be sure, and it requires an apology, a correction, and a full review of all melting ice and sea level rise predictions in the report. To its credit, the IPCC is not covering it up; it made an immediate public retraction.

Here’s what does matter, if you’re trying to form an opinion about climate change:

1. The Himalaya prediction was not based on evidence. All three of the research conclusions I cited yesterday (above) about ice melt are based on hard evidence: glacier thickness measurements and Antarctic ice measurements. All are facts about what happened, not predictions about what will happen.

2. One region does not represent global trends. To make that mistake is to fall prey to “selection bias,” which we talked about a couple days ago, or similarly, “small sample bias.” Statistical no-nos.

3. Courtesy of climate expert Joseph Romm, here is the latest evidence-based research:

Satellite data stunner: “Our data suggest that EAST Antarctica is losing mass…. Antarctica may soon be contributing significantly more to global sea-level rise.”

Nature: “Dynamic thinning of Greenland and Antarctic ice-sheet ocean margins is more sensitive, pervasive, enduring and important than previously realized.”

Large Antarctic glacier thinning 4 times faster than it was 10 years ago: “Nothing in the natural world is lost at an accelerating exponential rate like this glacier.”

De-Icer: USGS report details “recent dramatic shrinkage” in U.S. glaciers, matching global decline

The Arctic Ocean is full of rotten ice

World’s Glaciers Shrink for 18th Year

4. Just because the prediction is wrong doesn’t mean the trend is. The Himalaya glaciers may not disappear by 2035—and thank goodness for that—but they are melting, and if that trend doesn’t stop…well, they will disappear eventually.

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The potential exists for the climate to reach a “tipping point,” if it hasn’t already done so, beyond which radical and irreversible changes occur.

They are very careful about not predicting too much, but their statement is 180 degrees different from Coleman’s video clip.

Coleman’s disagreement with the scientific consensus on climate change has been known for some time. As a result, he has said many things that are flat wrong. (Click here for examples.)  

How can such an eminent meteorologist make such egregious errors? It helps to understand—and this is in no way an insult toward meteorologists–he is not a climate scientist. That may not sound like a big difference, but it is. Meteorologists certainly understand weather patterns better than the average person, but they are not expert researchers. They can interpret and report daily trends, but they are not experts on climate change by any stretch of the imagination. A couple analogies from climate scientist Joseph Romm make the difference very clear:

Asking a meteorologist to opine on the climate — or even the cause of recent extreme weather – is like asking your family doctor what the chances are for an avian flu pandemic in the next few years or asking a mid-West sheriff the prospects for nuclear terrorism. The answer might be interesting, but not one I’d like to stake my family’s life on.

Temperature and Carbon Dioxide Since the Last Ice Age

For those of you who have watched the video and are (rightly) confused or concerned or convinced, here are some facts that may help you sort out the truth:

Coleman argues that the relative proportion of carbon dioxide emitted by fossil fuel burning is negligible compared to the natural cycle. The carbon dioxide emitted in the natural carbon cycle (by animals exhaling, for example) is then absorbed one-to-one (by plants inspiring, as Coleman acknowledges). Thus there is a natural balance. The planet does not emit any more carbon dioxide than it can absorb, and the net balance of carbon dioxide hanging around in the atmosphere stays the same. Until humans came along. The data is undeniable: For thousands of years, atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide stayed relatively flat. Since the Industrial Revolution, it has increased exponentially.

Temperature Change and Carbon Dioxide Change

Coleman looks at a graph of global temperature going back through several Ice Ages and concludes, from a quick glance, that the current warming is part of a natural cycle. Four problems: (1) If you actually study the data mathematically, it predicts that Earth should currently be in a cooling period, which means that something is breaking the natural cycle. (2) All the previous warming jumps occurred once every 100,000 years. Today’s jump is far too fast to fit the previous cycle. (3) Coleman cleverly ignores the fact that all those cycles occurred in almost perfect lockstep with the variation in carbon dioxide. (4) All those past warming increases occurred back when the Earth was on a slightly different orbit, so they are not comparable to today’s situation. Given our current orbit, the present warming increase is not natural.

Coleman claims that Arctic ice really isn’t melting. I’m not sure where he’s getting his data from, but according to the National Snow and Ice Data Center, global glacier thickness has declined every year for the past 4+ decades. The most recent academic research I’ve seen was published 2 months ago, and it concluded that Antarctic ice loss has been vaster and faster than the IPCC predicted. Another paper published around the same time found that, based on historical evidence, Antarctica is more sensitive to greenhouse gases than previously thought.

Coleman also claims that solar activity explains the rise in global temperature. Again, I don’t know where he gets his data from, but according to the World Radiation Center, solar irradiance has not increased one iota over the past 30 years.

Coleman points to a mid-20th-century flatline in global temperatures, amid strong economic growth, as proof that industrialization doesn’t cause warming. However, a climate scientist could tell you that that flatline occurred because of an increase in human particulates and aerosol pollution, which counteracted the carbon dioxide. After pollution regulations and better technology reduced these factors, the trend continued as before.

I won’t spend any time refuting his casual reference to the Climategate emails. The scientific consensus on climate change is still very strong and fact-based. For details, click here, here, and here.

Meanwhile, NASA reported November 2009 as the hottest November on record and 2009 as the second-hottest year on record. Two independently published papers found, focusing on different periods in our distant past, that the current consensus may significantly underestimate the potential temperature increase from man-made climate change. The World Meteorological Association found the 2000s to be the warmest decade on record. The latest research suggests that sea levels may rise 3 times more than the IPCC predicted. More than 100 of Europe’s leading marine scientists released a report showing that ocean acidification has increased 30% since the Industrial Revolution; if left unchecked, this trend would be disastrous for marine life and food supplies.

As for how it all affects you—and mind you, I’m just giving you a taste from the very latest research—economists find a significant negative relationship between temperature and income (despite what John Mackey might tell you) and predict dangerous effects of climate change for the economy. International relations scholars find a significant link between temperature variation and conflict and use quantitative evidence to predict a 54% increase in armed conflict incidence by 2030. And a joint commission between The Lancet medical journal and University College London found that carbon-related pollution is responsible for 2.5 million premature deaths every year. “Climate change,” they concluded, “is the biggest global health threat of the 21st century.”

There is still a lot of uncertainty in all of these predictions, and I am not predicting anything myself. Climate change is a complex issue, and it may well turn out to be much milder than the consensus expectation. The evidence, however, does not support John Coleman’s extreme denial.

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Let’s look at where the money and research has gone for electricity generation as of late:

Source: The Business Insider

From the Bank of America/Merrill Lynch graph above, we see that wind and solar make up about 81% of the capital investment in renewable technologies recently. And because of this capital investment, wind and solar technology have become quite impressive in terms of the efficiency (relative to a few years ago) and the number of seriously interested parties and installations.  There, however, is one, fairly large, problem that both technologies exhibit: The wind ain’t always blowing, and the sun ain’t always shining. This characteristic has been a killer drawback for both technologies. Consumers want electricity when they demand it, not just when the wind is blowing or the sun is shining, and therefore nearly all wind and solar technologies, with current technology, can’t be used for base load electricity generation, they can only be used as an auxiliary source. A power company still needs to have enough coal-fired generation plants, nuclear plants, natural gas plants, or hydro plants to provide that minimum base load of electricity to consumers and only use that renewable technology when it’s generating power and is demanded. As things stand, it’s pretty inefficient.

But this is where storage comes in. If the wind is blowing, turning the wind turbines and generating electricity in west Texas all night and this electricity can be stored in some big battery type device until the following afternoon when it is actually needed to cool the office building and homes in Houston, then wind energy is looking a lot better and a lot closer to a viable base load technology versus an auxiliary one. The case is the same for solar, if the electricity generated on one hot sunny day can be stored and used on a rainy one, solar is looking a lot better too. Storage is indeed the Holy Grail of cleantech.

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Source: Bloomberg

To preface this post, I’d like to say that I am not attempting to fully answer the question of why natural gas prices are lower as of recently, nor am I predicting where they are going, but I’d like to provide some perspective to some of the technical factors that have driven prices down lately.

First, some fundamental information about natural gas. Not surprisingly, natural gas (at typical terrestrial temperatures) is in gas form. Now this is quite trivial given the commodity’s name but has very important implications for natural gas, especially when comparing it to its good friend crude oil (which is a liquid). Since natural gas is in a gaseous state, the way in which it can be transported is much different than oil. With most kinds of sweet light oil (the stuff that’s traded at WTI prices), you can effectively flow in a pipeline directly from a well into a tanker and then to anywhere in the world.

Natural gas, however, is a very different story. Natural gas is in gaseous state; therefore it cannot be transported as easily as crude oil. This is because it takes up a lot more room and more importantly is dangerously volatile. To transport natural gas it must be done through a pipeline or on a liquefied natural gas (“LNG”) tanker (compressed natural gas exists as well, but plays a minor role currently). To utilize LNG, infrastructure has to be in place that will liquefy the natural gas, which means that there needs to be a facility that will cool the gaseous commodity to -162°C. And, as is obvious, to pipeline something the location must be “pipeline-able” (as I like to call it). Essentially that means that you can’t build a pipeline across the Atlantic ocean (well you can, but it’d be pretty silly), but you can from Alberta, Canada to the Chicago or from the Gulf of Mexico to Galveston. The pictures below show you oil and gas movement in the world.

Oil Trade

Source: BP Statistical Review of World Energy 2009

Natural Gas Trade

Source: BP Statistical Review of World Energy 2009

Since natural gas has historically been a regional commodity, the supply and demand characteristics are also regional. This is one of the main reasons why we see the wide variances in natural gas prices around the world, whereas oil prices are pretty closely tied together (generally, differences in price are due to differences in quality of the oil). Up until just recently, things were looking pretty dismal for the United States on the natural gas front. There were diminishing US supplies but increasing demand—and no real in-country way of adding supply to offset the rising demand.

As of recently, though this problem has been solved by new technologies that can tap into in-country natural gas resources which previously were unrecoverable—which is another way of saying that with current technology and  prices the natural gas was either uneconomic or technologically impossible to recover —are now recoverable. These resources are known as shale natural gas. Previously, shale did not have the permeability to let natural gas flow in a manner that was economic and technologically possible to produce. New technologies, most notably the hydraulic fracturing of a well, can make the previously uneconomic shale economic by increasing the permeability. Essentially what fracturing a well does is create cracks in the rock formation in which the natural gas is present so that the natural gas can flow through the rock and above to the surface. These cracks are created by pumping a fluid with grains of sand or rock (to hold the fracture open) into the well at high pressure forcibly breaking the rock formations and increasing permeability making the natural gas recoverable. This technology has been and continues to be industry-changing.

In June of this year, the Potential Gas Committee reported that estimated natural gas reserves increased by 35% over the past year to 2,074 trillion cubic feet in 2008 (up from 1,532 trillion cubic feet in 2006). This is the biggest increase in 44 years. The massive increase in prospective supply has had a profound impact on the market for natural gas in the United States and has contributed, from a technical perspective, significantly to the drop in the price of natural gas.

This technological advancement once again reminds us that we’re not running out of fossil fuels by any means; we just need to find more clever ways of producing what are now unrecoverable resources.

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