Green Energy | Research Paper Topics

Political Fractures Over Fracking

April 16, 2012 admin Leave a comment

The Delaware River Basin Commission (DRBC)—a five-member committee that governs the water resources around the Delaware River—was supposed to meet today to decide on whether hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, should be allowed in the river’s watershed. There’s currently a ban on drilling for natural gas within the 13,539 sq. mi Delaware Basin, which includes land bordering [...]

Greens Are Justifiably Mad About the Oil Sands Pipeline. But Sitting Out 2012 Elections Would Be Insane

April 16, 2012 admin Leave a comment

For the past week, hundreds of activists—from celebrities and scientists to ordinary citizens—have come to Washington to protest the proposed Keystone XL pipeline, which would bring up to 500,000 barrels of crude a day from western Canada’s oil sands. Scores of those activists have been arrested, but more keep coming every day, urging President Obama [...]

On Coal, Jobs and Regulations

April 14, 2012 admin Leave a comment

Jia Lynn Yang of the Washington Post has a nice piece this morning on the real impact of government regulations on employment, pivoting off the tightening environmental rules that have led some coal plants to close early. She finds that on the whole, regulations don’t have much impact on jobs: Some jobs are lost. Others are [...]

Why an Antarctic Glacier Is Melting So Quickly

April 12, 2012 admin Leave a comment

From the outside, the science of warming-related sea level rise doesn’t seem that complicated. Carbon enters atmosphere, planet warms up, land ice melts and runs into the oceans, sea level rises. Minus the greenhouse effect, you can pretty much see that reaction in action by heating an ice-cube over a stove.

In the real world, however, ice-sheet modeling is incredibly complex, which means it’s surprisingly difficult for scientists to predict just how quickly glaciers will melt—and sea levels will rise—as global temperatures increase. That’s one of the reasons that the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) put forward a rather conservative prediction for sea levels in its 2007 report, estimating that they would rise by just 7 to 23 inches by 2100. The models around polar ice sheets were so uncertain at the time that the IPCC decided to largely disregard the role they might play in sea-level rise over the next century—focusing instead on thermal expansion of water as the oceans themselves warm—even though melting is already underway.

We already know that Arctic ice is melting faster than expected, and that sea level rise will likely bust the IPCC predictions. Now, thanks to a new paper published yesterday in Nature Geoscience, we have a better idea of why. Researchers from the British Antarctic Survey (BAS) and Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory examined the Pine Island Glacier in West Antarctica—one of the frozen continent’s largest glaciers—and found that it was melting more than 50% faster than it had been just 15 years ago, when an earlier group of scientists visited it. The glacier is now losing 80 cu. km of ice a year, up from 50 cu. km in 1994.

(More from TIME: Unfrozen Tundra)

Though the water in Pine Island Bay has warmed by 0.2 C over the same amount of time, that heating alone isn’t enough to account for the accelerated melting. (I told you ice-sheet modeling was tricky.) The researchers sent an autonomous submarine—named, not very creatively, the Autosub—to explore beneath the ice shelf. The robot found an underwater ridge on the seafloor that they believe might have once slowed the glacier as it flowed into the sea. Once the glacier broke free of the ice shelf, however, warmer water from the depths of the ocean could flow into the underbelly of the glacier, opening up a cavity inside it. The more the cavity grew, the more warm water that could flow in, accelerating the melting and allowing the glacier to speed towards the sea. (Or at least, speed in the glacial sense.) Said study co-author Adrian Jenkins of the BAS in a statement:

The rate at which the ice shelf is melting has increased significantly, because more warm water is circulating in the cavity beneath it…The inner cavity didn’t exist at all before, so this is the most likely explanation for why a subtle change in temperature can have a huge effect.

Pay attention to the second part of Jenkins’ statement. Those who are skeptical of the scientific consensus on climate change often make use of the uncertainty inherent in climate models. If we can’t be sure of the weather a few days hence, how can we be sure of changes in the climates over decades or even longer? And who’s to say the uncertainty might flow the other way, that climate change might turn out to be much smaller than many of us thought.

(Photos from TIME: Greenland Odyssey)

It might—and let’s hope it does. But it seems more likely that uncertainty will flow the other way, that relatively small changes in the Earth’s temperature may have a large effect on the climate system, and the planet we live in. (If you really want to get scared, look at the possibility of positive feedback cycles in Arctic warming.) In his Rolling Stone essay last week—not all of which I agreed with—Al Gore summed up the state of climate science:

Scientists used to caution that we were increasing the probability of such extreme events by “loading the dice” — pumping more carbon into the atmosphere. Now the scientists go much further, warning that we are “painting more dots on the dice.” We are not only more likely to roll 12s; we are now rolling 13s and 14s. In other words, the biggest storms are not only becoming more frequent, they are getting bigger, stronger and more destructive.

Thanks to humans, polar melting may be ready to go to 11—even faster than we expected.

The Next Great Extinction Could Be Coming Sooner Than You Think

April 10, 2012 admin Leave a comment

Panther chamelon Credit: Art Wolfe/Getty

It’s no secret that wildlife around the world is under severe stress. The most recent Red List from the International Union for the Conservation of Nature estimated that 33% of the species evaluated by the group are at least threatened. The causes are many—hunting, disease, habitat loss, invasive species, even climate change—but they mostly boil down to one main reason: us.

The good news is that we have confirmed extinction for just a handful of species that we know of—though scientists have only been able to formally assess less than 3% of the world’s 1.9 million named species. (And keep in mind that the actual number of species on the planet is certainly far greater than that.) That’s where the good news ends. Conservationists increasingly believe that a warmer, more crowded planet could be headed for a great extinction wave, one that could wipe out more than three-quarters of the species on the planet. And according to a new study published in Nature, that extinction wave could occur in as little as 300 years.

A little history is in order first. Over the course of more than 4.5 billion years, the world has seen five great extinction events—defined as the loss of more than 75% of estimated species. The greatest (or worst) of all was the Permian event, also known as the Great Dying, which ended 451 million years ago and resulted in the loss of 96% of estimated species. The most recent event was the death of the dinosaurs 65 million years ago. All the great extinction events are believed to be due to rapid climate change—perhaps from massive volcanic activity during the Permian event, or an asteroid collision leading to global cooling, which seems likely to have killed off the dinosaurs.

Great extinction events are, by their definition, extremely rare—those five disasters are the only ones to occur over the past 540 million. The Nature study—led by Anthony Baronsky, a professor of integrative biology at the University of California-Berkeley—looked at the rate of historical extinction in the fossil record for mammals and found that less than two species go extinct per million years. That can be considered the normal or background rate. The problem is that in the modern age, mammals have been going extinct at a much faster rate—at least 80 over the past 500 years, out of an estimated 5,570 mammal species. That’s a rate that looks a lot closer to what likely happened during the mass extinction events, which means we seem to be losing species much faster than they disappeared before modern humans came on the scene. In the decades and centuries to come, if the extinction rates hold, we could be entering another great extinction wave without even knowing it, as Barnosky said:

If you look only at the critically endangered mammals – those where the risk of extinction is at least 50 percent within three of their generations – and assume that their time will run out, and they will be extinct in 1,000 years, that puts us clearly outside any range of normal, and tells us that we are moving into the mass extinction realm.

If currently threatened species – those officially classed as critically endangered, endangered and vulnerable – actually went extinct, and that rate of extinction continued, the sixth mass extinction could arrive within as little as 3 to 22 centuries.

The researchers point out that since we’ve only lost a small percentage of total species so far, we do have the chance to turn things around—if we try hard enough. But we’re facing an uphill battle, thanks mostly to the presence of human beings, as the authors write:

It may be of particular concern that this extinction trajectory would play out under conditions that resemble the ‘perfect storm’ that coincided with past mass extinctions: multiple, atypical high-intensity ecological stressors, including rapid, unusual climate change and highly elevated atmospheric CO2. The huge difference between where we are now, and where we could easily be within a few generations, reveals the urgency of relieving the pressures that are pushing today’s species towards extinction.

Can we get there? While some progress has been made—including the agreement by governments around the world last year to reduce the rate of species loss—a warming planet headed towards 9 billion richer human beings is one that may be hostile to most species. (Right on cue, federal wildlife officials yesterday declared that the Eastern mountain cougar was almost certainly extinct.) Our could be to preside over a planet that is fit for human beings, and very little else.

Green Jobs Vs. Brown Jobs

April 6, 2012 admin Leave a comment

President Obama will be making his much-anticipated speech on job creation this evening—though, fortunately, he won’t be interfering with the kickoff of the NFL season. But he still has to answer the question—where will those jobs come from? In the early months of his Presidency, Obama had an answer: the jobs of the future would [...]

Scientists: We Want More Children

April 4, 2012 admin Leave a comment

We Ecocentric writers have the privilege of constant exposure to the most cutting-edge science research around – we’ve written about sexy birds, Arctic oil, paper solar panels, and countless other incarnations of the weird and wonderful. But sometimes it’s easy to overlook the hardworking folks behind these discoveries, and it looks like they’ve had to forget [...]

How Climate Change May Shrink Species

April 4, 2012 admin Leave a comment

The people of Soay Island, off the west coast of Scotland, have notice something strange. Over the years, their sheep have begun to shrink, as I wrote in 2009: Why? In short, because of climate change. Generally, the sheep’s life cycle goes like this: they fatten up on grass during the fertile, sunny summer; then [...]

The Four Horsemen of the Nuclear Apocalypse

April 1, 2012 admin Leave a comment

Former Secretary of State Kissinger with Obama

In 2007, four elder U.S. statesmen wrote an Op-Ed in the Wall Street Journal titled “A World Free of Nuclear Weapons.” Former secretaries of State Henry Kissinger and George Shultz, one-time Defense Secretary William Perry and former Senator Sam Nunn (D-Ga.) had, at various times in their careers, been deeply immersed in the nuclear weapons establishment, yet they united in a call to abolish the very weapons they once saw as projections of their nation’s power. Call it penance, or the desire for absolution, but the four horsemen had spoken, and warned of the continuing danger of nuclear apocalypse. (As I have written before, the exchange of even a limited number nuclear weapons would result in sudden and devastating climate change, and therefore the existence of atomic bombs is an environmental–as well as a security–issue.)

Unfortunately, those military and political leaders who still have nuclear weapons at their disposal are less willing to forsake them. And so Kissinger, Shultz, Perry and Nunn are still at it—continuing the steady drumbeat for nuclear disarmament in further Op-Eds at the Journal. One was published this week with the headline “Deterrence in the Age of Nuclear Proliferation.” One can’t help notice that these opinion pieces are becoming increasingly chastened and unambitious as time goes on.

(More on Time.com: See a roundtable discussion with Kissinger, Shultz, Perry and Nunn)

In this piece, the quartet barely make mention of abolition, instead focusing on the more immediate goal of convincing countries to minimize the role of nuclear weapons as a means of deterring attacks from hostile countries (since the cold war, the presence of atomic weapons has been justified on the grounds of deterrence and conflict prevention). But still, there’s some good stuff here.

The text of the Op-Ed can be found here, but the gist of the argument is that deterrence was tolerable (though very risky) in a Cold War context because it essentially involved two actors–the Soviet Union and NATO. But if weapons technology proliferates, “It is not possible to replicate the high-risk stability that prevailed between the two nuclear superpowers during the Cold War. …The growing number of nations with nuclear arms and differing motives, aims and ambitions poses very high and unpredictable risks and increased instability…Does the world want to continue to bet its survival on continued good fortune with a growing number of nuclear nations and adversaries globally?”

The piece goes on to call on America and Russia to set an example by stepping away from the nuclear brink–particularly by taking the bulk of its long-range missiles and bombers off hair-trigger alert, and removing short-range battlefield nuclear weapons from the countries’ arsenals. “”Continued reliance on nuclear weapons as the principal element for deterrence [by the U.S. and Russia] is encouraging, or at least excusing, the spread of nuclear weapons, and will inevitably erode the essential cooperation necessary to avoid proliferation, protect nuclear materials and deal effectively with new threats,” the statesmen wrote.

To which I say: yes sir! The piece also acknowledged that until regional confrontations and conflicts are addressed, new or aspiring nuclear states (read: India/Pakistan; Iran/Israel) will be reluctant to give up their nuclear weapons, so “we must therefore redouble our efforts to resolve these issues.” Again, yes sir!

The inspiring thing about nuclear disarmament efforts is that the spectre of nuclear annihilation can focus minds on making the world a more secure place. Realists and deterrence experts–of which Kissinger was once the doyen–might say that the only way to deter aggression without nuclear weapons is a massive conventional arms build-up. But that is assuming that a world free of nuclear weapons will be the same as it is today. But that can’t be the case. As the four horsemen write, “A world without nuclear weapons will not simply be today’s world minus nuclear weapons.” And thank god for that!

Bold, steady steps toward nuclear disarmament will help foster a more peaceful world by building trust. I am a nuclear abolitionist, but I have no precise idea how the world can get to zero nukes—no one does. Still, if we take urgent and drastic steps to cut global arsenals from the current level of 20,000 to around, say, 1000, we can then reassess. And you know what, we might find that we have created a new reality just by taking this (relatively) simple step. We need to change the global atmosphere—to dream big–precisely because nations currently tend towards distrust and enmity, and it is only major gestures that can overcome that.

And can I allow myself to hope and dream a little further? Can I imagine that in the trust and cooperation fostered by a massive disarmament project, we might find an atmosphere more conducive to tackling other serious global threats, such as climate change?

Nuke Plant Crisis Worsens as Radiation Levels Rise

March 31, 2012 admin Leave a comment

[UPDATE: 5:59 PM ET: The evacuation zone around the power plant has been increased to 10 km, or 6.2 mi.]

[UPDATE: 5:46 PM EST: Japanese authorities announced that radiation inside the stricken Fukushima power plant control room has risen to 1,000 times its normal level. Some has leaked outside of the plant, prompting calls for further evacuations beyond the 3,000 people who have been cleared out already in a 1.8-mi. radius. Additionally, the planned release of radioactive steam to bleed off pressure has been delayed due to a failure in the electrical systems required to execute the venting.]

There is no country in the world that’s better than Japan at designing nuclear power plants to be earthquake-resistant. It’s thus a measure of how serious yesterday’s quake was that several of the country’s nuke facilities are in such precarious shape today.

The hardest hit, of course, is the Fukushima Daiichi plant in Onahama City, 170 miles northeast of Tokyo. All six of the plant’s functioning reactors have been shut down—though some reports suggest that three of them were already inactive as they underwent routine inspections. The three that were operating are the ones that have been causing the worry. For one thing, there is insufficient coolant to keep the reactors at a safe temperature. But, as my colleague Eben Harrell reported earlier, even if there were enough on hand, a lack of electricity and a breakdown in a diesel pumping system is limiting the ability to circulate the coolant where it’s needed.

For much of the day, pressure in the plant had been reported to have risen to 1.5 times its normal level, prompting officials to evacuate residents in a 1.2 to 1.8- mi. radius.“We launched the measure so we can be fully prepared for the worst scenario,” Chief cabinet Secretary Yukio Edano told the press. “We are using all our might to deal with the situation.”

An evacuation zone that size is bad, but not awful. In the case of Chernobyl—history’s worst nuke plant nightmare—residents living as far as 18 miles away were ordered to pack up.

“I think this sounds like a low-level alert,” said nuclear scientist Ron Chesser, director of Texas Tech University’s Center of Environmental Radiation Studies. Chesser knows a thing or two about crises like this: he was the first American scientist allowed inside the Chernobyl exclusion zone in 1992.

But Chesser spoke before Fukushima officials made their next announcement at about 1 PM ET, acknowledging that they had had to release a small amount of what’s being referred to as “slightly” radioactive vapor to keep pressure at safe levels. The country’s nuclear safety agency insists that the vapor will have no ill effect on the health of either people or the environment, which may indeed be true. Chernobyl taught officials the importance of candor in such matters and in any event, simply taking radiation readings of the Fukushima surroundings will confirm if the authorities are telling the truth. The greater problem—an unknown unknown—will occur if the pressure cannot be brought under control and more steam needs to be bled off.

The U.S. is pitching in, shipping more coolant to the stricken plant. But if the pumps can’t get up and running it will do little good. Chesser, who toured one other, smaller, Japanese plant before the quake, is still sanguine. “I was very much impressed with the amount of attention to safety, especially regarding potential earthquakes,” he said. But he does concede to being “a little it surprised” that the Fukushima plant is nonetheless in such trouble. One thing that weighs in the plant’s favor: unlike the Chernobyl reactors, those in Fukushima are covered iwith containment vessels, which should help minimize any potential damage.

While Fukishima gets all the attention, at least three other nuclear plants have been shut down in what the government is calling an atomic power state of emergency.The International Atomic Energy Agency reports that a fire broke out at the Onagawa plant, but that it was quickly extinguished. Four million people in the Tokyo area alone are now without power, though that may be the least of the nuclear power grid’s problems—and will be until the Fukushima plant is brought under control.

“Any time you have a nuclear facility that size that is not meeting its requirements for cooling,” says Chesser, “you have a real emergency on your hands.”

Research Paper Topics

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Political Fractures Over Fracking

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Greens Are Justifiably Mad About the Oil Sands Pipeline. But Sitting Out 2012 Elections Would Be Insane

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On Coal, Jobs and Regulations

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Why an Antarctic Glacier Is Melting So Quickly

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Nuke Plant Crisis Worsens as Radiation Levels Rise

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