Month: March 2017

Uncategorized 29 Mar 2017

Oh, please: ‘Weather whiplash’ triggered by changing climate will degrade Midwest’s drinking water

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From the UNIVERSITY OF KANSAS, and the “department of creative doom labels” comes this fine example of Tabloid Climatology™ that is total busted, if you just check a little history.

LAWRENCE — One consequence of global climate change is the likelihood of more extreme seesawing between drought and flood, a phenomenon dubbed “weather whiplash.”

Now, researchers at the University of Kansas have published findings in the journal Biogeochemistry showing weather whiplash in the American Midwest’s agricultural regions will drive the deterioration of water quality, forcing municipalities to seek costly remedies to provide safe drinking water to residents.

“As rainfall patterns change with climate change, it’s predicted there will be more times of drought, and more times of excessive rainfall — really big storms,” said Terry Loecke, assistant professor of environmental studies at the University of Kansas and lead author of the new investigation.

Loecke and co-author Amy Burgin, associate professor of environmental studies, said the extreme flux between drought and rainfall changes the storage of nutrients in the agricultural landscape — nitrogen used in fertilizing farms most importantly.

“Farmers put on their normal amount of fertilizer, but when we have a drought, plants don’t grow as big and don’t take up as much nitrogen,” Loecke said. “Instead of going into the plants, which would be harvested, it stays in the soil — and no water is flushing it away.”

But when floods occur, nitrogen is washed into surface waters such as tributaries that feed into rivers.

“The soil is like a sponge, and when it’s dry the nitrogen stays put,” Burgin said. “But as soon as you wet it, like when you wring a sponge, the nitrogen can flood into the rivers.”

Because many of these rivers supply drinking water for communities throughout middle America, remediating high loads of nitrogen will stress taxpayers as water departments are forced to build new facilities to eliminate nitrogen from municipal water supplies.

The KU researchers, along with Diego Riveros-Iregui of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Adam Ward of Indiana University, Steven Thomas of the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, Caroline Davis of the University of Iowa and Martin St. Clair of Coe College, analyzed data from the U.S. Geological Survey and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration as well as other sources.

The team took a close look at a 2012-2013 drought and flood cycle that affected much of the Midwestern U.S., leading to a nitrogen spike in surface waters.

“We looked at observations of the 2012 drought that ended in a flood and asked how frequently that has occurred across upper Midwest across in the last 10-15 years,” Loecke said. “We found that the connection between drought-to-flood conditions and high nitrate was pretty common.”

Indeed, skyrocketing nitrate levels in the Des Moines and Raccoon rivers forced the Des Moines Water Works to construct a $4.1 million nitrate removal plant that costs $7,000 per day to operate.

“The drinking water is a real problem, especially in Des Moines,” Burgin said. “It has one of most expensive nitrate-removal facilities that we know about. In recent years, they’ve been running it from 25 to 150-plus days each year. That’s really adding up, because the money isn’t in the budget they have to spend to get clean drinking water to citizens.”

Recently, the water utility sued several farm-dense Iowa counties upriver from the city to recoup its denitrification costs.

According to Loecke and Burgin, who both also serve as scientists with the Kansas Biological Survey, surface-water nitrate spikes like the ones plaguing Iowa will occur more widely throughout the agricultural Midwest as weather whiplash becomes more commonplace in the region.

“The average person will pay more to have clean drinking water, like in the city of Des Moines,” Loecke said. “A city can’t predict how many days they’ll have to run a nitrate-removal facility. When they run it a lot, it’s a huge hit to their budget, and they have to pass it on to their citizens, and it will spread out to rest of the Midwest. Midwesterners will have to pay more for drinking water going forward.”

Loecke and Burgin said they hoped their research could help inform farmers, policymakers, water departments and the general public.

“Municipal water services should be paying attention,” Burgin said. “Iowa is the bull’s-eye of this problem, and it’s going to spread out from there — this might not be at the forefront of a lot of Kansas minds right now. But given it’s an agricultural state, it’s a matter of time before we’re in same boat. In Iowa, now it’s hitting smaller municipalities. According to analysis by the Des Moines Register, 30 percent of them will have this problem — and most don’t have the tax bases to support huge nitrate-removal facilities.”

###

The National Science Foundation supported this work.

Abstract:

Excess nitrogen (N) impairs inland water quality and creates hypoxia in coastal ecosystems. Agriculture is the primary source of N; agricultural management and hydrology together control aquatic ecosystem N loading. Future N loading will be determined by how agriculture and hydrology intersect with climate change, yet the interactions between changing climate and water quality remain poorly understood. Here, we show that changing precipitation patterns, resulting from climate change, interact with agricultural land use to deteriorate water quality. We focus on the 2012–2013 Midwestern U.S. drought as a “natural experiment”. The transition from drought conditions in 2012 to a wet spring in 2013 was abrupt; the media dubbed this “weather whiplash”. We use recent (2010–2015) and historical data (1950–2015) to connect weather whiplash (drought-to-flood transitions) to increases in riverine N loads and concentrations. The drought likely created highly N-enriched soils; this excess N mobilized during heavy spring rains (2013), resulting in a 34% increase (10.5 vs. 7.8 mg N L⁻¹) in the flow-weighted mean annual nitrate concentration compared to recent years. Furthermore, we show that climate change will likely intensify weather whiplash. Increased weather whiplash will, in part, increase the frequency of riverine N exceeding E.P.A. drinking water standards. Thus, our observations suggest increased climatic variation will amplify negative trends in water quality in a region already grappling with severe impairments.

Paper: http://ift.tt/2obwnR5

This is nothing more than one of the worst examples Tabloid Climatology.

For example, USGS reports that this drought-flood cycle has been going on in Kansas as long as there were humans around to record it. In the paper done by KU researchers, the oldest data they appear to consider is from 1970 onward, while focusing on a single weather event in 2013.

“We looked at observations of the 2012 drought that ended in a flood and asked how frequently that has occurred across upper Midwest across in the last 10-15 years,” Loecke said. “We found that the connection between drought-to-flood conditions and high nitrate was pretty common.”

Well, duh, you could learn this was pretty common just by looking at climate history. It took me less than 5 minutes to locate this reference, but these KU researches didn’t do the same due-diligence. Bold mine.

KANSAS — Floods and Droughts

By Ralph W. Clement, U.S. Geological Survey,
L. Dean Bark, Kansas State University, and
Thomas C. Stiles, Kansas Water Office

U.S. Geological Survey National Water Summary Water Supply Paper 2375

Located in the central plains, Kansas is affected by the same weather patterns that affect adjoining States. These patterns are dominated by major weather systems that move from west to east across the State. The flow of moisture is seasonal. During winter, moisture originates over the Pacific Ocean and precipitates over the Rocky Mountains; the remaining moisture moves into the State from the northwest and west. Kansas tends to receive less precipitation during winter than summer. During summer, southerly winds move moisture originating over the Gulf of Mexico into the State. Occasionally, remnants of tropical cyclones, including hurricanes originating in the Gulf, move into the State and produce considerable quantities of precipitation.

The nature of these moisture-delivery systems results in numerous, severe floods and long, severe droughts. Since the flood of 1844, the most severe and widespread flood was in July 1951. The 1951 flood, which affected almost one-half of the State, resulted from an intense storm in early July that was preceded by greater than normal rainfall during May and June. Peak discharges in the Kansas, Marais des Cygnes, and Neosho Rivers generally had recurrence intervals greater than 100 years, were greater than any previous discharges, and have not been equaled since. Other significant floods occurred on the Republican River in 1935, the Arkansas River in 1965, the Solomon River in 1973, and the Verdigris River basin in 1976. Although the storm near Great Bend in 1981 did not affect a large area, its intensity caused severe flooding and considerable damage.

Five severe droughts-determined by analysis of streamflow data-have occurred in Kansas since 1900. All affected the entire State. The most severe droughts were during 1929-41 and 1952-57.

…

Full paper: http://ift.tt/2obo0Vq

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March 29, 2017 at 04:44AM

Uncategorized 29 Mar 2017

Has China Faked Its Coal Data?

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By Paul Homewood

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From Radio Free Asia:

China has claimed big gains in energy efficiency for 2016 despite coal and steel production that covered cities in smog during the second half of the year.

Official figures from the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) have offered a murky mix of partial data, unexplained results and apparent discrepancies in accounting for the country’s energy use in a year of lower economic growth.

In its statistical communique released this month during China’s annual legislative sessions, the NBS said that energy use per unit of gross domestic product dropped by a substantial 5 percent last year, although several key indicators rose.

The measure of energy intensity fell almost as much as the 5.6-percent improvement recorded for 2015. But electricity consumption increased by 5 percent in 2016 compared with a much weaker gain of 0.9 percent a year before, according to the National Energy Administration (NEA).

The numbers pose a puzzling question with several implications for China’s economy and the environment.

How could the country have made such an advance in energy efficiency at a time when power consumption climbed by such a large amount and GDP grew by 6.7 percent, the slowest pace in 26 years?

Other energy figures from the NBS may only add to the mystery.

According to the official data, consumption of crude oil also rose 5 percent and natural gas increased 8 percent, but coal use fell 4.7 percent in a big decline for China’s main fuel.

The reported reduction in coal use for the third year in a row has been hailed by environmentalists, raising hopes that consumption may have peaked in 2013.

On March 17, the Paris-based International Energy Agency (IEA) credited China’s reduction in coal demand for helping to avoid an increase in global greenhouse gas emissions for the third consecutive year.

China’s carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions fell 1 percent in 2016, while U.S. emissions were down by 3 percent, the IEA said.

The major drop in coal consumption accounts for China’s official calculation that total energy use rose by only 1.4 percent, far less than GDP, allowing the NBS to claim greater efficiency.

Source of confusion

But the coal numbers by themselves have been a source of questions and confusion.

In reporting the percentages for coal, oil and gas, the NBS has provided no actual tonnage or volume figures, making the rates impossible to check or compare.

In an analysis, the environmental group Greenpeace cited conflicting readings of the data on China’s low-quality coal.

While the NBS reported a 4.7-percent drop in coal use based on undisclosed tonnage, it also claimed that coal’s share of total energy use fell from 64 percent in 2015 to 62 percent last year.

The share numbers imply that coal consumption fell 1.3 percent based on the energy content of the fuel rather than physical tonnage, Greenpeace calculated.

"The difference can be due to either a major improvement in coal quality or data discrepancies," the Greenpeace analysis said.

The NBS has not explained why it reported percentage figures without the tonnage or volume details.

The uncertainty casts doubt over the validity of the efficiency figures.

The NBS estimates may also be in conflict with what actually happened in the coal market last year.

Government agencies have acknowledged missteps in pursuing cuts in coal production overcapacity too aggressively last year, leading to sudden shortages and a price spike before the winter heating season began.

After berating coal companies for moving too slowly on closing excess mining capacity, the National Development and Reform Commission (NDRC) reversed course and authorized more production as supplies ran low and prices climbed by more than 70 percent.

Similar moves in the steel industry spurred smelters to restart idled production as price incentives took hold, adding to coal demand and urban smog.

While the effects on market prices and air quality were evident, official reports of coal production and consumption continued to show declines.

A study released by Greenpeace’s East Asia affiliate in February found that publicized cuts in the steel industry included previously-closed plants. Production capacity actually rose as smelters reopened to profit from higher prices, the study said.

Inspectors from the Ministry of Environmental Protection (MEP) and the State Administration of Work Safety (SAWS) have reported numerous violations by manufacturers operating in spite of shutdown orders.

A Chinese worker sorts coal on a conveyor belt near a coal mine in Datong, northern China’s Shanxi province, Nov. 20, 2015. Credit: AFP

Doubts about estimates

Although actual coal use is hard to quantify from such anecdotal evidence, the reports also raise doubts about NBS estimates that coal production last year fell by a whopping 9.4 percent.

If production had declined at double the rate of the drop in consumption, it would imply much tighter supplies.

China energy experts have been unable to substantiate the official figures.

"Those coal consumption numbers certainly don’t make sense on the surface, and I’m not completely sure how to interpret them," said David Fridley, staff scientist for the China Energy Group at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California.

"Nor can I account for the source of the decline. Cement, steel and thermal power were all up in 2016, and they were the main sources of decline in 2015," said Fridley by email.
Fridley noted that the NBS communique is a "flash," or early, estimate and may be subject to revisions.
He also suggested that coal consumption could have fallen in sectors and uses such as district heating that have yet to be reported, although the frequency of winter smog alerts argues otherwise.
"I guess the only thing for certain is that China reported another year of coal consumption decline—period," said Fridley.
http://ift.tt/2nYipBi

This is not the first time doubts have been raised about the accuracy and integrity of China’s energy and emission statistics, for instance here and here.

And there is an additional problem, in that the regions in China cannot always be relied upon to send truthful statistics to the Central Government.

What is clear is that the Chinese Communist Party only has the interests of the country, and ultimately itself, at heart, and will do all it can to further them.

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March 29, 2017 at 03:30AM

Uncategorized 29 Mar 2017

Purely Energy

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Higgs boson event as seen in the Compact Muon Solenoid detector at the Large Hadron Collider. This one high-energy collision illustrates the power of energy conversion, which always exists in the form of particles.

Ethan Siegel provides an informative primer on energy physics: Is There Any Such Thing As Pure Energy? It is useful background for anyone interested in energy and climate science. Some excerpts below.

What is the nature of Energy?

Energy plays a tremendous role, not only in our technology-rich daily lives, but in fundamental physics as well. The chemical energy stored in gasoline gets converted into kinetic energy that propels our vehicles, while the electrical energy from our power planets gets converted into light, heat and other forms of energy at our homes. But this energy always seems to exist as merely one property of an otherwise independently-existing system. Must it always be so? Alex from Moscow writes in with a question about energy itself:

“Does pure energy [exist], maybe very shortly before turning into a particle or a photon? Or is it just a useful mathematical abstraction, an equivalent that we use in physics?”

At a fundamental level, energy can take on many forms.

Mass = Energy

The simplest, most familiar form of energy of all is in terms of mass. You don’t normally think in terms of Einstein’s E = mc2, but every physical object that’s ever existed in this Universe is made of massive particles, and simply by having mass, these particles have energy.

E. Siegel The known particles in the Standard Model. These are all the fundamental particles that have been directly discovered; with the exception of a few of the bosons, all particles have mass.

Mass in Motion = Kinetic Energy

If these particles are moving, they have an additional form of energy as well: kinetic energy, or the energy of motion.

Particles Linked Together = Binding Energy

Finally, these particles can link together in a variety of ways, forming more complex structures like nuclei, atoms, molecules, cells, organisms, planets and more. This form of energy is known as binding energy, and is actually negative in its effect. It reduces the rest mass of the overall system, which is why nuclear fusion, taking place in the cores of stars, can emit so much light and heat: by converting mass into energy via that same E = mc2. Over the 4.5 billion year history of the Sun, it’s lost approximately the mass of Saturn from simply fusing hydrogen into helium.

The theory of asymptotic freedom, describing the strength of the quark interactions inside a nucleus, was worth a Nobel Prize for Wilczek, Politzer and Gross. Wikimedia Commons user Qashqaiilove

Massless Particles in Motion = Restless Kinetic Energy

The Sun itself gives another example of energy: light and heat, which comes in the form of photons, which are different from the forms of energy we’ve considered so far. There exist massless particles as well — particles with no rest energy — and these particles, like photons, gluons and (hypothetically) gravitons, all move at the speed of light. However, they do carry energy in the form of kinetic energy, and, in the case of gluons, are responsible for the binding energy inside atomic nuclei and protons themselves.

NASA / Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO) The Sun, shown here, generates its energy by fusing hydrogen into helium in its core, losing small amounts of mass in the process. Over its lifetime, it’s lost approximately the mass of Saturn by this process.

Energy is Always Conserved

Energy comes in a variety of forms, and some of those forms are fundamental. A particle’s rest mass energy doesn’t change over time, and in fact doesn’t change from particle to particle. It’s a type of energy that is inherent to everything in the Universe itself. But all the other forms of energy that exist are relative. An atom in an excited state has more energy than an atom in a ground state, and that’s due to the difference in binding energy. And if you want to make that transition to the lower-energy state? You have to emit a photon to get there; you cannot make that transition without conserving energy, and that energy needs to be carried by a particle — even a massless one — in order to make that happen.

In this illustration, one photon (purple) carries a million times the energy of another (yellow). Fermi data on two photons from a gamma-ray burst fail to show any travel delay, showing the speed of light’s constancy across energy.

Energy is Relative to the Observer

Perhaps an oddity of this is that photon energy, or any form of kinetic energy (i.e., the energy of motion), is that its value is not fundamental, but rather is dependent on the motion of the observer. If you move towards a photon, you’ll find its energy appears greater (as its wavelength is blueshifted), and if you move away from it, its energy will be lesser, and it will appear redshifted. Energy is relative, but what’s interesting that for any observer, it’s always conserved. No matter what the interactions are, energy is never seen to exist on its own, but only as part of a system of particles, whether massive or massless.

Dark Energy

There is one form of energy, however, that may not need a particle at all: dark energy. The form of energy that causes the expansion of the Universe to accelerate may very well be energy inherent to the fabric of the Universe itself! This interpretation of dark energy is self-consistent and matches the observations of distant, receding galaxies and quasars that we see exactly. The only problem? This form of energy, as far as we can tell, can neither be used to create or destroy particles, nor can it be inter-converted to and from other forms of energy. It seems to be its own entity, disconnected from interacting with the other forms of energy present within the Universe.

Without dark energy, the Universe wouldn’t be accelerating. But there’s no way to access that energy via any other particles in the Universe.

Conclusion

So the full answer to the question of whether pure energy exists is:

For all of the particles that exist, massive and massless, energy is only one property of them, and cannot exist independently.
For all of the situations where energy appears to be lost in a system, such as through gravitational decay, there exists some form of radiation carrying off that energy, leaving it conserved.
And that dark energy itself may be the purest form of energy, existing independent of particles, but as far as any effect other than the expansion of the Universe, that energy is inaccessible to everything else in the Universe.

As far as we can tell, energy is not something we can isolate in a laboratory, but only one of many properties that matter, antimatter and radiation all possess. Creating energy independent of particles? It might be something the Universe itself does, but until we learn how to create (or destroy) spacetime itself, we find ourselves unable to make it so.

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March 29, 2017 at 03:13AM

Uncategorized 29 Mar 2017

Trump’s Executive Order On Energy: This Time, He Listened To The Lawyers

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By Paul Homewood

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From Forbes:

President Donald Trump’s executive order dismantling large chunks of Barrack Obama’s environmental legacy is a cleverly written document that avoids the pitfalls of Trump’s controversial orders on immigration. Unlike those orders, which have been suspended by federal courts, this one bears the clear stamp of experienced government lawyers and leaves the administration with a rich variety of tactical choices on how to eliminarte Obama-era regulations on fossil fuels.

The 7-page order released this afternoon reverses a string of Obama’s presidential orders, including findings on the dangers of human-induced climate change and methane emissions. It also orders federal agencies to examine all of their actions related to the previous administration’s scientific findings on climate change with orders to "suspend, revise, or rescind" rules and regulations or begin the notice and comment period to reverse them. These are all legal steps that will spawn lawsuits by states and environmental groups opposed to the Trump administration’s regulatory rollback, but are designed to capitalize on the broad discretion given to federal agencies to interpret the law under the so-called Chevron doctrine.

The order doesn’t rescind Obama’s Clean Power Plan, which has been suspended by the Supreme Court while a Washington appeals court considers its fate. But the order lays the groundwork for rescinding the CPP by instructing Environmental Protection Agency Chief Scott Pruitt to review and potentially "take legal action" to reverse the legal memorandum the Obama administration relied upon to justify the CPP’s sweeping controls on the electric utility grid. To accomplish that goal the EPA reversed a decades-old understanding of a tangled section of the Clean Air Act. The incoming administration can choose to reinterpret it again, and it can cite as a legal defense the fact that it is merely returning to a long-held understanding of the statute.

"The lawyers really had their way with this one," said said Thomas Lorenzen, a partner with Crowell & Moring in Washington and former assistant chief of the Justice Dept.’s environmental law section. "It is a very carefully constructed order."

Eliminating the previous administration’s legal memorandum could be a speedier way to get rid of the CPP, although it would still have to go through a notice and comment period as well as the inevitable legal challenges. The government wouldn’t have to delve as deeply into the scientific record, however, which the Obama administration provided in ample detail to justify its plan. Instead, the Trump administration would argue the CPP, which takes a systemwide approach toward reducing CO2 emissions, is based on an incorrect reading of federal law. The new EPA plan could return to "inside the fence" regulations on individual power plants, still holding them to strict efficiency standards that will be hard for coal plants to meet, but not eliminating them entirely. The CPP used "outside the fence" regulations imposed on entire regional electricity grids to effectively remove coal plants from the mix.

The order also calls for the elimination of the Interagency Working Group on Social Cost of Greenhouse Gases, as well as its findings on the cost of global warming, which it pegged at $42 a ton by 2020. Effective immediately, the administration will use Bush-era standards to judge the cost of carbon emissions.

The Trump administration still faces hurdles, including a federal appeals court ruling upholding the Obama administration’s findings on the dangers of CO2 emissions from automobiles. But the new administration can use Chevron deference to its advantage here as well, Lorenzen said: The court ruling, which the U.S. Supreme Court refused to overturn, says the Obama administration’s finding was reasonable. The EPA under Pruitt need only muster enough scientific evidence to show that its findings are also reasonable, a relatively low bar for an agency to get over.

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