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What’s HOT in Global Warming?

Professor Bruce E. Johansen

Need a little incentive to park that SUV and take up bicycling? Here are a few news bulletins from a brave new globally warmed world. The year just concluded was the warmest on record in the United States, a combination of El Nino and greenhouse gases. I read that the bears in the Moscow (Russia) Zoo didn’t fall asleep until after Christmas — it was too warm for that — when they used to begin hibernating in early November. New York City is extending its record for latest seasonal snowfall as I write (January 10), and Omaha set a record in the same category before we received a few sloppy inches the last week of December. Even in Denver, with its blizzards, the December average temperature was a degree and a half F. above average. Ice fishing is suffering on the Great Lakes because they no longer freeze over. However, as I write a big slab of frigid arctic air is surging south, and we may have some real Nebraska winter at least for a time as this edition of the Nebraska Report is put to bed.

Greenhouse-gas Levels Continue to Increase

The Environment News Service reports that ice core records from Antarctica show that current levels of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere are higher now than at any time in the past 800,000 years and increasing at an unprecedented rate. Global emissions of the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide have more than doubled since 1990 and the rate of increase is accelerating, according to information gathered and analyzed by the Australian government research service. The scientists say this trend, based on data collected over the past 30 years, indicates that recent efforts to cut back on emissions have had little impact on emissions growth (“Growth of Global Greenhouse Emissions Accelerating,” 11/29/06). Marine and atmospheric scientist Mike Raupach, who co-chairs the Global Carbon Project at Australia’s Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization (CSIRO) told a meeting of scientists in Tasmania that 7.9 billion metric tons of carbon were emitted into the atmosphere as carbon dioxide in 2005 and the rate of increase is quickening. “From 2000 to 2005, the growth rate of carbon dioxide emissions was more than 2.5 percent per year, whereas in the 1990s it was less than one percent per year,” he said. Paul Fraser, also with CSIRO Marine and Atmospheric Research, says that atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide grew by two parts per million in 2005, the fourth year in a row of above-average growth. “To have four years in a row of above average carbon dioxide growth is unprecedented,” said Fraser, who is program manager for the CSIRO Measurement, Processes & Remote Sensing Program.

China To Become World’s Leading Source of CO2

China will surpass the United States in 2009, ten years ahead of previous forecasts, as Earth’s biggest national source of carbon dioxide — and not because U.S. emissions are declining, according to a forecast by the International Energy Agency. China’s rise is fueled heavily by coal and is exempt from the Kyoto Protocol’s requirements for reductions in emissions of global warming gases. Unregulated emissions from China, India and other developing countries probably will comprise most of an anticipated 50 per cent increase in global carbon-dioxide emissions during the next quarter-century if present trends continue. China has rejected greenhouse-gas limits. “You cannot tell people who are struggling to earn enough to eat that they need to reduce their emissions,” said Lu Xuedu, the deputy director general of Chinese Office of Global Environmental Affairs. (“China to Pass U.S. in 2009 in Emissions,” New York Times, 11/6/06.)

Starving North Sea Seabirds Eat Their Own Young

Seabirds’ vulnerability to climate change has been illustrated by an unprecedented breeding crash of United Kingdom North Sea seabirds during 2004, according to the World Wildlife Fund. The direct cause for the breeding failure of common guillemots, Arctic skuas, great skuas, kittiwakes, Arctic terns and other seabirds at Shetland and Orkney colonies was a shortage of their prey, a small fish called sandeels. Warming ocean waters and major shifts in species that underpin the ocean food web are believed to be behind the major sandeel decline. Great skuas on the Shetland Islands have been struggling with climate change. As a result, the nearly 7,000 pairs of great skuas in the Shetlands produced only a few chicks and WWF reports that starving adult birds ate their own young (“Climate Change Pushing Bird Species to Oblivion,” Environment News Service, 11/14/06).

Hydropower in the Tropics Increases Methane Emissions

Hydropower has gained a reputation as an alternative source of electric power because it uses no fossil fuels. However, the flooding of vegetated land behind dams can increase emissions of methane. During the 1980s, for example, about 2,500 square kilometers of Amazonian forest were flooded behind the Balbina dam to supply the Brazilian city of Manaus, part of the more than 80 percent of Brazil’s domestic energy that is produced by hydropower. While hydropower uses no fossil fuels directly, “the global-warming impact of hydropower plants can often outweigh that of comparable fossil-fuel power stations” (“Methane Quashes Green Credentials of Hydropower,” Nature, 11/30/06). Large amounts of organic matter are trapped behind a dam when land is flooded. This is especially notable in warm climates, where organic matter quickly decays, giving off methane and carbon dioxide. The Balbina dam has been analyzed, and found to be worse for emissions than a fossil-fuel plant generating the same amount of power. In some cases, hydropower can release four times the methane as fossil-fuel plants per amount of energy generated. That ratio is open to debate. These debates bear on implementation of the Kyoto Protocol, which allows Clean Development Mechanism credit for some hydroelectric development.

Bird Flu Move Over: Melting Ice May Release Old Flu Viruses

Dormant strains of influenza that lace ice could be set free by melting ice and then spread by migrating birds, according to Professor Scott Rogers, Chair of Biology at Bowling Green State University near Toledo, Ohio. “We’ve found viral RNA in the ice in Siberia, and it’s along the major flight paths of migrating waterfowl,” whose pathways take them to North America, Asia and Australia, and interconnect with other migratory paths to Europe and Africa, explains Rogers. The virus that Rogers and his collaborators have found is closest to a strain that circulated from 1933-38 and again in the 1960s” (“Melting Ice May Release Frozen Influenza Viruses.” Environment News Service, 11/ 27/06). Rogers’ research was published in the December, 2006 Journal of Virology. Rogers said that viruses may be housed in ice for long periods, then released many years afterwards, when human immunity has lapsed. Survivors of the worldwide flu pandemic of 1918 had immunity to the responsible strain, called H1N1, but that immunity has died with them, meaning a recurrence “could take hold as an epidemic,” said Rogers. He points out that it remains to be demonstrated that the frozen viruses are still alive. But “we think they can survive a long time” in ice, he reiterates, saying that “tomato mosaic virus has been found in 140,000-year-old ice in Greenland.” (Environment News Service, 11/ 27/06).

Allstate Insurance Decides to Quit Writing Residential Policies for New York City

Fearing that a Category 3 hurricane could drive a gigantic storm surge straight northward through New York Harbor, pushing a wall of water perhaps 15 feet tall up Broadway toward the second-story windows of Wall Street, Allstate has decided not to write new homeowners insurance in the five boroughs of New York City — Manhattan, Brooklyn, the Bronx, Queens and Staten Island — plus Westchester County, just north of the city, and the counties that make up Long Island — Nassau and Suffolk. In the most vulnerable parts of that market, the company is also refusing to renew existing insurance (“A Dream Blown Away: Climate Change Already Has a Chilling Effect on Where Americans Can Build Their Homes,” Washington Post, 12/2/06).

A New Solar Power Technology

On the hopeful side of the ledger, the Wall Street Journal carried news of an innovative and powerful solar-power technology. A 380-foot concrete tower surrounded by 600 huge mirrors near Seville, Spain is part of a new solar-power technology called “concentrating solar power” (CSP) to produce sun-derived energy that is commercially viable on a large scale. In this case, the power station, constructed by Abengoa SA, can supply about 6,000 homes (“Sun Reigns on Spain’s Plains: Madrid Leads a Global Push to Capitalize on New Solar-power Technologies.” Wall Street Journal, 12/5/06). Spain and other European countries are subsidizing CSP and other solar technologies to move away from fossil fuels. According to the consulting firm Emerging Energy Research, 45 CSP projects are being planned around the world, including a few in the United States. The Spanish government has set a goal of 500 megawatts of solar power by the year 2010. Spain is presently subsidizing CSP development, requiring utility companies to buy their power at above-market rates. Abengoa plans to eventually build enough CSP capacity to supply all of Seville, about 180,000 homes.

The CSP technology is much more powerful than photovoltaic cells. A roof-top photovoltaic complex might power a small office building, while the complex near Seville can generate 11 megawatts, enough electricity for a small town. The CSP mirrors track the sun and concentrate its power on single points, generating steam that spins a powergenerating turbine. Some of the heat also is stored in solutions of oil or molten salt to run the turbine after sunset or when clouds obscure the sun. Such new technologies may increase the potential of solar power and reduce its cost, now 12 to 15 cents per kilowatt-hour, compared to an average of 4 cents for coal-fired energy. Japan’s Sony Corp. has developed technology for embedding solar-power cells in roof tiles, some of which are now being installed in Japan, Germany, and in parts of California. A day is coming when adroit energy conservationists will be able to watch their electric meters run backward, as they feed excess power into the grid. This is not science fiction. At the science-fiction level is nanotechnology that may someday use nearly any building surface that faces the sun (window panes, for example) to generate solar power.

Frederick W. Kayser Professor of Communication at the University of Nebraska at Omaha, Johansen is the author of the three-volume “Global Warming in the Twenty-First Century” (Praeger, 2006).