From left to right: Rep. Jared Polis (D-Colo.), Nancy Sutley, principal environmental advisor to President Obama, Phil Weiser, dean of CU-Boulder's Law School, and Patty Limerick, director of the Center of the American West, chaired a town hall meeting about the environmental aspects of President Obama's State of the Union address. Boulder, Co. Jan. 27, 2011. (Photo/Brendon Bosworth).

In his State of the Union address Tuesday, President Barack Obama made it clear that further expansion of natural gas drilling is a key part of the government’s vision for America’s energy economy.

“We have a supply of natural gas that can last America nearly 100 years,” said Obama. “And my administration will take every possible action to safely develop this energy. Experts believe this will support more than 600,000 jobs by the end of the decade.”

Speaking at a town hall meeting at CU-Boulder’s Wittemyer Courtroom Friday, Nancy Sutley, principal environmental advisor to President Obama, touted the government’s commitment to expanding natural gas development as playing a vital role in the transition to a new energy economy. Rep. Jared Polis (D-Colo.), Phil Weiser, dean of CU-Boulder’s Law School, and Patty Limerick, director of the Center of the American West, joined Sutley in chairing the meeting.

“Some have said the United States could be the Saudi Arabia of natural gas,” Sutley told the crowd. Cheap natural gas is generally very good for the economy and, as the president talked about, the U.S. is not going to cede leadership in this area to other countries, she said.

While greater reliance on natural gas as a fuel source has the ability to bring down energy costs and decrease greenhouse gas pollution, the federal government has to engage with states, communities and industry to ensure that natural gas exploration is done safely, she said.

Weiser also stressed the need for federal oversight. “Better than having lots of communities say ‘I don’t trust fracking I want to have a ban on any fracking’ — this technology that’s integral to natural gas — there’s an important discussion about what rules are necessary to protect public health,” he said.

In many cases, those in the natural gas industry are willing to cooperate because they have a long-term interest in a sustainable regulatory regime, he said.

As the president announced Tuesday, companies that drill for gas on public lands will soon be required to disclose the list of chemicals they use in the hydraulic fracturing process, which involves injecting a mixture of water, sand and chemicals into the earth to release gas and oil harbored deep underground. Texas and Colorado recently passed state laws that require such disclosure. The new laws will take effect in Texas in February and in Colorado in April.

During the question and answer session, Alice Madden, the Wirth Chair in Sustainable Development at the University of Colorado Denver’s School of Public Affairs, raised concerns about how a focus on natural gas expansion, and the affordability of natural gas, could detract from efforts to promote and sustain the development of renewable energy technologies.

A failure to renew the production tax credit available to wind energy companies (which expires at the end of the year), as well the tax credit for other renewables, could lead to a loss of jobs in the renewable energy industry, she said.

In his address, the president called for the creation of a clean energy standard and an extension of manufacturing and production tax credits for the renewables industry, Sutley replied. “We’re hopeful that congress will act on that,” she said.

Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-Minn.) is one House representative who challenged the Environmental Protection Agency last year. "I guarantee you the EPA will have doors locked and lights turned off, and they will only be about conservation," she told supporters at a rally in Iowa in Aug. 2011. (image via bachmann.house.gov).

(Post also appears at The Boulder Stand).

In 2011, the Republican-controlled House of Representatives voted 191 times to obstruct protection of the environment, earning it the title of the “most anti-environment House in the history of Congress,” according to a report prepared for representatives Henry Waxman (D-Calif.), Edward Markey (D-Mass.) and Howard Berman (D-Calif.).

On average, the House cast just over one anti-environmental vote for every day it was in session last year, according to the report. The report also highlights that, all told, during voting 94 percent of Republicans took an anti-environmental position, as opposed to Democrats — 86 percent of whom voted pro-environment.

Votes against the environment focused chiefly on stalling efforts to address climate change, stripping the Environmental Protection Agency of its ability to enforce certain Clean Air Act and Clean Water Act standards, allowing oil and gas development off the coasts of Florida and California instead of offshore drilling, preventing the Department of the Interior from identifying areas suitable for wilderness designations, and cutting funding for the Department of Energy, and its renewable energy endeavors, by 80 percent, according to the report.

The Environmental Protection Agency bore the brunt of most anti-environmental votes. Of the 191 votes against the environment, 114 targeted the EPA, 35 targeted the Department of the Interior, and 31 targeted the Department of Energy, according to the report.

“The House Republican assault on the environment has been reckless and relentless,” said Rep. Waxman in a press statement. “In bill after bill, for one industry after another, the House has been voting to roll back environmental laws and endanger public health.”

Read the full report, “The Anti-Environment Record of the U.S. House of Representatives 112th Congress, 1st Session” online.

(Photo/Brendon Bosworth)

Late afternoon at the Grand Canyon is a time of rare silence and explicit beauty. It is a time for reflection and introspection that leaves one greatly humbled. In these shots, taken during a recent trip to the South Rim, the sun catches portions of rock, highlighting the ancient contours with a numinous glow.

(Photo/Brendon Bosworth)

Scientists predict a daunting set of potential consequences of climate change. With the possibility of increased droughts, a higher frequency of wildfires, rising sea levels, the decimation of deep ocean sea creatures, and threats to global food security, the future of a warmer world appears bleak.

What if the unpredictable effects of climate change arrive quicker than expected? Advocates of geoengineering, which involves manipulating the Earth’s climate with technological mechanisms, some of which, like blasting large mirrors into space to reflect sunlight, come straight from the annals of science fiction, argue that geoengineering could offer a last resort fix to save the planet. It could be used as a form of “insurance,” as Graeme Pearman of Monash University has put it.  Critics, however, worry that if climate quick fixes are on hand there will be little reason for nations to cut their carbon emissions and reduce the level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.

Earlier this month, the Bipartisan Policy Center, a Washington based think-tank, released a report that urges the U.S. government to implement an official geoengineering research program, overseen by the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, starting in fiscal year 2013.

So, what, exactly, is geoengineering? What does the report say? And what is the Bipartisan Policy Center?

What is Geoengineering?

Geoengineering involves manipulating the Earth’s climate to lessen the impacts of climate change. Ideas for how to do this fall into two camps.

Carbon Dioxide Removal (CDR) options focus on taking carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere, essentially cleaning up the mess made from burning fossil fuels since the Industrial Revolution. This could be done using machines that suck carbon dioxide out of the air. Another method, known as ocean fertilization, involves dropping loads of iron into the ocean to prompt the growth of carbon-eating plankton.

To cool the planet down, Solar Radiation Management (SRM) technologies could shield the Earth from incoming sunlight and bounce radiation back to space. Proposals include blasting tiny particles, or liquid droplets, into the stratosphere (the second major layer of the atmosphere) to deflect sunlight and making clouds more reflective by shooting seawater into the sky to “seed” them.

More audacious SRM strategies include putting space mirrors, or swarms of small refracting disks, into space. (This report from the Royal Society gives a good overview of such techniques).

What does the geoengineering debate look like?

Those advocating for research into the feasibility of geoengineering argue from a just in case perspective. Geoengineering might be an emergency measure if the “climate system reaches a ‘tipping point’ and swift remedial action is required,” according to the Bipartisan Policy Center report.

Since some countries, including the U.S., which has refused to ratify the Kyoto Protocol, have shown little commitment to cutting carbon emissions, advocates argue that geoengineering might just be a necessary evil.

“People aren’t doing this because they think, ‘Oh whoopee! We can change the Earth!’ They’re doing it because they just don’t see any progress [on CO2 emissions] and it just seems to be getting worse and they want options on the table,” Jane Long, associate director of the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and co-chair of the 18-person task force that compiled the report, told Yale Environment 360.

Some of the report’s authors said they “hoped that the mere discussion of such drastic steps would jolt the public and policy makers into meaningful action in reducing greenhouse gas emissions, which they called the highest priority,” reports The New York Times.

Opponents argue that instead of gambling on geoengineering technology to save the planet, the global community should focus on cutting greenhouse gas emissions instead.

“It’s as if the doctor says you have a disease that can definitely be cured by diet and exercise but you opt for expensive chemotherapy even though the doctor can’t guarantee the results but is pretty certain the side effects would be as bad as the disease,” writes Joe Romm, editor of Climate Progress and a fellow at the Center for American Progress.

Solar Radiation Management could have unintended consequences on rainfall patterns and droughts, and also raises serious questions regarding international law, policy and ethics. Tampering with the climate will result in changes that don’t respect international borders. Who has the right to start “the large-scale deployment of a climate intervention technology — and under what circumstances?” asks Mike Hulme, a renowned professor of climate change at the University of East Anglia, England.

As the Bipartisan Policy Center report emphasizes, if the impacts of climate change get bad enough countries that have the capacity for launching Solar Radiation Management technologies might do so out of self-interest, without a global consensus.

What’s happening with geoengineering research today?

Geoengineering research is still in its infancy, with the exception of seeding clouds to induce rain- and snowfall, which has been happening since at least the 1950s. This type of cloud-seeding is a multimillion dollar industry in the Western U.S. and occurs in 10 U.S. states and Canada, but is quite different to seeding clouds to make them more reflective.

Kilimanjaro Energy, a company of which Columbia University’s Klaus Lackner, a pioneer in the development of synthetic trees, is a director, is in the process of developing systems to remove carbon dioxide from the air. So too is Carbon Engineering, of which David Keith, who formed part of the task force for the Bipartisan Policy Center report, is president (see last section of this post: What is the Bipartisan Policy Center?).

Solar Radiation Management concepts have mostly been tested with computer models so far, although Russian scientists have done small field experiments to gauge how aerosol particles deflect sunlight at heights of up to 656 feet above the ground. Indian and German scientists, meanwhile, are experimenting with ocean fertilization.

Last year, parties to the UN Convention on Biodiversity asked for a cautionary approach to geoengineering. The parties recommended that with the exception of “small scale scientific research studies that would be conducted in a controlled setting” no large-scale geoengineering activities that may affect biodiversity take place without proper scientific justification and consideration of environmental, socioeconomic and cultural risks.

This month, Britain’s Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council put an experiment, which involved squirting water into the atmosphere via a 0.6 mile-long hose hung from a helium-balloon, on hold for six months. The delay would “allow time for more engagement with stakeholders,” according to the Council.

What does the Bipartisan Policy Center recommend the government do?

The report makes five recommendations to the federal government.

1) The government should start a coordinated research program on climate remediation (the report uses the softer term “climate remediation” as opposed to geoengineering).

2) The White House Office of Science and Technology Policy should be responsible for coordinating this program.

3) The White House should create a new advisory commission to help guide research into climate remediation. This commission should include lawyers, social scientists, natural scientists and engineers, and it should report to the director of the Office of Science and Technology Policy.

4) The government should integrate research across the natural and social sciences for research in particular climate remediation areas.

5)  The U.S. should start working with nations that have the scientific, technological and financial capacity to establish common norms and expectations for climate remediation research.

The report relays a sense of urgency and suggests that the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy and the Office of Management and Budget should propose the program for the president’s 2013 budget.

The authors of the report emphasize that geoengineering should come second to mitigation and adaptation strategies, and that researching geoengineering does not mean geoengineering will definitely be used in future. The “task force has not recommended deployment of climate remediation technologies, because far more research is needed to understand the potential impacts, risks, and costs associated with specific technologies,” according to the report.

What is the Bipartisan Policy Center?

Former Senate Majority Leaders Bob Dole (Kansas), Howard Baker (Tennessee), Tom Daschle (South Dakota) and George Mitchell (Maine) founded the Bipartisan Policy Center in 2007. The Center makes policy recommendations on issues including homeland and national security, healthcare and economic policy.

The Center’s funders include various foundations, such as the Rockefeller Foundation and Carnegie Corporation of New York. It also gets money from corporations, including Dow Chemical, DuPont and The Clean Energy Group, as well as individual donors. Players in the fossil fuels industry, Chesapeake Energy Corporation, Chevron and Shell among them, form part of the Center’s leaders’ council.

[A full list of funders and leaders’ council members appears in the Bipartisan Policy Center’s 2010 annual report.]

The 18-member task force [see full list on page 2 of report] that compiled the geoengineering report includes leading geoengineering researchers Ken Caldeira, of the Carnegie Institution, and Harvard’s David Keith.

Caldeira and Keith administer the Fund for Innovative Climate and Energy research, which provides grants, drawn from a pool of Bill Gates’ personal cash, to researchers involved in climate science, geoengineering and the development of clean fuels. Gates has put $4.6 million into the fund since 2007.

Keith is the president of Carbon Engineering, a company working to build the “world’s first air capture plant,” which will suck carbon dioxide out of the air. He envisions selling carbon dioxide to oil companies for use in enhanced oil recovery or combining the gas with hydrogen to create carbon-neutral fuels, reports CNN.

Ethicist Stephen Gardiner removed himself from the task force in March this year. “It became clear to me that there wasn’t going to be movement on some of the report’s recommendations, and I wouldn’t be able to endorse them,” he told Climate Progress.

The weather in Denver was miserable on Saturday morning. But the steady rain and slate grey sky didn’t extinguish close to three hours of colorful, nonviolent protest. About 300 to 400 people joined Occupy Denver, a group showing solidarity with Occupy Wall Street and Occupy Together, and marched through the city’s wet streets.

Signs and placards gave indications of marchers’ sentiments.

“We are victims of reverse bank robbery,” read one sign, in the glove-clad hands of a woman who looked to be in her forties.

“The wrong people are in jail; the wrong people are in power,” read another, held by a man in a black jacket, with hood drawn, wearing a Guy Fawkes mask, like those associated with hacker group Anonymous. Next to him another masked protester held a sign above his head: “There is no flag large enough to cover the shame of killing innocent people.”

Protesters wearing Guy Fawkes masks hold signs on the side of Broadway Street at Civic Center Park. Photo: Brendon Bosworth

The marchers started at noon by filing up the steps of Colorado’s capitol building and chanting “we are the 99 percent” against the blare of horns from passing motorists on Broadway Street. A mix of people gathered at the capitol: anarchists, students, mothers with children, the old and the young.

After a briefing on the importance of following the law and sticking to the sidewalk, especially since the group did not have a permit for the march, as well as impassioned speeches from speakers who vented their frustrations against corporate greed and the ability of corporations to fund political campaigns, the procession streamed down Colfax Avenue.

Protesters hold the American flag on the steps of Colorado’s capitol building. Photo: Brendon Bosworth

A woman in a Guy Fawkes mask outside the capitol building. Photo: Brendon Bosworth

Marchers on the steps of the capitol building. Photo: Brendon Bosworth

As protesters passed the glowing signs of fast food mainstays, McDonald’s and Wendy’s, and other stores various mantras echoed down the line. Marchers energetically repeated “People united will never be divided,” “Occupy Denver, occupy Wall Street, occupy America,” and “Banks got bailed out we got sold out.”

“Tell me what democracy looks like. This is what democracy looks like,” also bounced back and forth between marchers.

The police followed closely. Officers on bicycles glided on the periphery. At some intersections police parked their cars and stopped traffic to let the marchers pass. Some motorists honked their horns, seemingly to show support, but not all were pleased.

“Hurry the fuck up,” floated from the window of an SUV idling at a crossing, its driver impatient to get going, unwilling to waste precious weekend minutes.

The procession turned around at the Ogden Theater, took to the other side of the street, and filed back to the capitol building. At this point shoes were sodden. After regrouping in front of the Capitol, the marchers took to the 16^th Street Mall, en route to the Denver branch of the Federal Reserve, where they eventually congregated. Some customers in the bars and restaurants on the popular downtown artery slipped out to take a look, while others peered through the windows, expressions hard to read. Encased in the Sheraton Hotel, five men in shirts and ties looked down from above – a warm, dry world away from the sopping protesters.

There were no incidents or arrests, Denver police spokesman Sonny Jackson told the Denver Post on Saturday. Jackson confirmed this statement in a telephone interview on Sunday morning.

Since marchers complied with traffic rules and didn’t march in the street or take over intersections they did not engage in illegal activity, Jackson explained when asked if the march was illegal since Occupy Denver had no permit.

People have a right to walk anywhere they want in the city, as long as they obey the rules, he said.

If a protester injured somebody else that would put them on the wrong side of the law, he explained.

Jackson declined to say how many police officers were deployed to monitor the march, citing public safety reasons.

A man in orange jacket holds a sign outside the Denver branch of the Federal Reserve. Photo: Brendon Bosworth

“To try and keep it legal and to try and stay on the good side of the police we want to try and follow the laws, said Law Johnston, who volunteered to work with the safety team for the march.

Johnston, who is part of We Are Change Colorado, a 9-11 truth group, was standing outside the Federal Reserve, after most marchers had returned to Civic Center Park. He wore a black leather jacket, with orange (Occupy Denver’s color of solidarity) tape on the shoulders, like epaulettes, and black, fingerless gloves. A loudhailer, with a sticker – “live free or die” – was slung over his shoulder.

Keeping people out of the street was a safety issue and it was important to show the police that marchers could proceed with dignity and honor, he said.

The police did a “great job,” said Johnston. “We really appreciate what they’ve done to help us out here.”

When asked to comment on whether the Occupy movement was lacking fixed goals, he replied, “the one goal that everybody is after is freedom, really – it’s economic freedom.”

Johnston gave a version of a conspiracy theory that blames a core of European elites, who allegedly control the world economy and the Federal Reserve, for engineering economic collapses throughout history.

“We have a foreign occupying force that controls our economic system from the top to the bottom and we, the people, know who you are and we are coming after you and there is nowhere you can hide,” he said.

A man holds one corner of the American flag outside the Denver branch of the Federal Reserve. Photo: Brendon Bosworth

Holding a hand-written sign on the side of Broadway Street, next to Civic Center Park, where Occupy Denver has erected its headquarters, Julie DonCarlos said she did not join the march, but was showing her support for the movement. After working in marketing for various corporate clients for 25 years, she now runs her own business, booking bands for weddings. She was an Obama delegate in 2008, she said.

DonCarlos laughed when asked about one impact she’d like to see come from the Occupy movement. For her, many changes need to be made in the U.S.

“We need to keep money out of politics,” she said, in reference to the corporate funding of politicians. “Elections are bought and sold.”

DonCarlos also said healthcare should not be a for-profit industry and that banks need to be better regulated.

“The U.S. needs to stop invading other countries,” she said.

Also on the roadside was Robert Chase, a 52-year old medical marijuana activist from the Colorado Coalition for Patients and Caregivers. A member of the Colorado Triple Nine Society, a group whose members have tested at, or higher than, the 99.9th percentile on various adult intelligence tests, Chase described himself as a socialist.

Chase said he had been waving a sign that read “End corporate personhood now.”

He referred to the Supreme Court’s Citizens United v. Federal Electoral Commission decision (which, last year, gave corporations the right to spend unlimited cash on political campaigns) as a “disaster for the independence of American elections.”

All images: Brendon Bosworth

How to engage with the police was a prickly topic at Occupy Denver’s general assembly last night.

About 60 to 70 people attended the 7 p.m. meeting at Civic Center Park on Broadway Street. Gathered in a circle in front of Colorado’s capitol building, flanked by a makeshift kitchen – the “thunder dome”­– which served free dinner to participants, members of the loose-knit collective, which formed thirteen days ago in solidarity with Occupy Wall Street, aired their views on engaging with the police and other issues.

Dressed in jeans and a black sweater and carrying a loudhailer, a speaker who introduced himself as Hector, a longtime activist, alleged that many community activists in Denver are boycotting Occupy Denver because people have snitched on other activists to the police.

After the death of street preacher Marvin Booker (who died in July last year at the Denver jail after five deputies held him down, administered a choke hold, and tasered him for eight seconds) activists would not feel safe with a pro-police leadership that accepts snitching, he said.

Another speaker, Kim, dismissed the allegations of snitching as based on rumor.

If the occupation begins to threaten the status quo then the role of the police is to stifle dissent, said another member. “If they don’t want to stifle that dissent they will lose their jobs.”

City and state police have communicated with Occupy Denver “regularly and respectfully” and “respect and have no intentions of interfering or interrupting [the] occupation,” according to a post, dated October 4, on the group’s website.

“If this is going to work we have to remember it’s not us against them; this is the time to unite not divide,” quipped another speaker.

According to Occupy Denver’s Eight Rules, “security forces/police should be seen as potential recruits to movement, not as adversaries. Ultimately they are accountable to the people.”

Derik DaSilva, 23, the facilitator for Wednesday evening’s general assembly, said Occupy Denver will meet on Friday to discuss concerns members had raised about police.

People are misinterpreting the difference between cooperating and collaborating with the police. Collaborating means working with them like you’re an agent, he said during an interview after the meeting.

“I feel that the ideal of Occupy Denver, Occupy Wall Street, Occupy everywhere is that we’re not here to snitch – we’re not out here to say ‘oh I like this person but I don’t like this person.’ We are here as a body – the 99 percent,” he said.

Individuals, not the movement, are responsible for issues like snitching, he said.

DaSilva, a junior at Denver’s Metro State College, majoring in theater, wore an orange vest to signify his role as a member of Occupy Denver’s security committee. The committee, made up of about six people, is responsible for responding to emergency situations, he explained.

The general assembly wasn’t all about law enforcement. One member proposed joining with the Denver Zombie Crawl, since zombies are a good metaphor for corporate greed. Representatives from the Colorado chapter of the American Indian Movement and the Transform Columbus Day Alliance also announced their intentions to protest against genocide, Columbus and imperialism this Saturday.

Occupy Wall Street and its offshoots emerged as a statement against corporate greed and economic equality. For Jon Martinez, 32, from Colorado Springs, the movement’s ethos is key.

If people knew about how the banks work they’d be appalled, he said during an interview after the meeting.

“They loan out money they don’t even have and charge people interest on it. If you and I did that we’d go to jail,” he said. “These bankers get to do it, at really our expense.”

“The interest on imaginary money is just killing us as a country, it’s killing us individually, it’s eating us alive and keeping us slaves to our jobs,” he said.

Martinez said he studied economics at college and continues to read broadly on the subject. He sees his role in Occupy Denver as one of educating others about why they’re “getting screwed” and offering potential solutions for regaining control of the money supply.

When people are struggling financially it leads to social problems as well, said Sabrina Stevens, 25, a communications consultant and education activist.

“With all these unfair tax cuts and advantages that have been given to corporations, to the one percent at the expense of the 99 percent, we’re seeing this unprecedented attack on public education,” she said.

Stevens, who was wearing a blazer, said she is not anti-capitalist or particularly non-mainstream.

“I happen to agree with this because we have a system that’s set up to benefit the few at the expense of the many, so I feel a responsibility to be here,” she said.

Image: A wildfire in southern Montana, August 2007, captured from space by astronauts docked to the International Space Station. Credit: NASA Johnson Space Center via Flicker – NASA Goddard Photo and Video.

In March I ran a post about a NASA wildfire model that predicts increased fire activity in the Western U.S., along with other parts of the world, in future as a result of rising global temperatures. This feature (published at New West) expands on the earlier post, with insights from NASA scientist Olga Pechony (who built the NASA model with colleague Drew Shindell) and Anthony Westerling, an expert on wildfires in the West, based at the University of California’s Sierra Nevada Research Institute.

[Feature first published at New West]…

A NASA global wildfire model does not cast happy projections for the forests of the West in future. As global temperatures increase and the West becomes drier, fire activity in the region could increase by 30 percent to 60 percent from present day levels by the turn of the century, according to NASA scientist Olga Pechony, who designed the model with colleague Drew Shindell.

At the same time, Pechony and Shindell expect that the wetter, eastern half of the country will experience a drop in wildfires as warmer temperatures lead to more humid conditions there.

Increased wildfire activity would continue a trend that has been playing out over the past 30 years due to warmer and drier conditions in the West making fuel for wildfires more flammable, Peter Hildebrand, director of the earth sciences directorate at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, said at the Conference on World Affairs at the University of Colorado in April.

As the earth heats up circulation systems are changing and the winter storm track is being pushed further north. This results in less precipitation, higher temperatures and more evaporation in the Rocky Mountain West, Hildebrand explained.

“I want you to think a little bit of fire as a metaphor for the many things that climate change holds for us,” Hildebrand told the crowd in Boulder.

In terms of adapting to increased fire activity, it’s important for people living in fire-prone areas to think about home construction, the vegetation around their homes, and the location of homes, he said.

Projecting Into the Future

The NASA model simulates worldwide wildfire and climate conditions dating back to the year 850. The model projects fire activity across the world as far ahead as 2100. The projections are based on three of the International Panel on Climate Change’s scenarios for predicted future greenhouse gas emissions, population growth, economic development and temperature rise. Under all three scenarios, rapidly rising temperatures and regional drying result in an increase in global fire activity after about 2050, according to Pechony and Shindell’s model.

Wildfire activity does not increase all over the planet, however. Along with the Western U.S., the model predicts elevated fire activity in southern Europe, India, central Asia, Siberia, southern Africa and Australia. On the other hand, the model predicts that Northern Europe, equatorial Africa and parts of South America will experience a drop in fire activity, along with the Eastern U.S.

To test the model’s accuracy Shindell and Pechony compared the model’s results to records from charcoal layers harvested from lake sediments around the world, which researchers have used to reconstruct historical fire activity dating back 2,000 years.

“The model really corresponds pretty well to what we see in the charcoal record, so that was quite a relief and a success,” said Pechony in a telephone interview.

At the same time, Pechony and Shindell used current satellite data to check the model’s results against present day fire activity. By using available precipitation, temperature, relative humidity and vegetation density data, they could estimate the flammability and availability of wildfire fuels, Pechony explained.

When looking at sources of fire ignitions, satellites provide lightning data from the 1990s onward. However, humans’ role in starting and extinguishing wildfires is the “most unknown” variable, Pechony said. To estimate the effects of humans on wildfire activity, Pechony and Shindell used land-use and population density reconstructions from the History Database of the Global Environment.

Using this data, they calculated global fire activity between 2005 and 2008 and checked the results against global fire data from two satellites over the same period. The model results and satellite data corresponded well, Pechony explained.

They also checked seasonal changes in global fire distribution and found the model’s results to be very close to the satellites’ records, she said. Using another satellite that gives 20 years’ worth of global average fire activity, Pechony and Shindell found that the model also reproduced interannual variations in fire activity, Pechony said.

Pechony and Shindell identify different drivers of global fire activity over time. From 850 up to the time of the Industrial Revolution, precipitation levels largely dictated fire levels around the world. But from the industrial age onward, rapid population growth led to humans becoming the main drivers of fire activity, according to their report. During this time people cleared tracts of forested land to make space for farmland and cattle pastures, which cut back on the amount of fuel that could burn. Around 1900, Pechony and Shindell identify a sharp drop in wildfire even though global temperatures were increasing and precipitation was on the decline, which they put down to humans successfully suppressing more fires.

And while humans have been in the driving seat when it comes to global fire activity since the Industrial period, by 2050 Pechony and Shindell predict that rapidly warming temperatures will play the major role in dictating fire activity around the world.

At some point temperatures rise so rapidly and the environment becomes so flammable that fire suppression efforts are no longer sufficient to curb trends in fire activity that should have been increasing but have been dampened by human activity, Pechony explained.

However, Pechony does not discount the possibility that future fire management and developments in firefighting techniques could improve, allowing humans to override the impacts of temperature rise. “This is something we can’t know or predict or rely on,” she said.

Northern Rockies Show Greatest Increase in Wildfire Activity in Recent Decades

While large wildfire activity in the West has increased since the mid-1980s when compared to the 1970s and first half of the 1980s, the greatest spike in wildfire activity in recent decades has taken place in mid-elevation forests in the Northern Rockies, according to a study by Anthony Westerling and his colleagues. Westerling is an associate professor at the University of California’s Sierra Nevada Research Institute.

Using federal fire records, Westerling and his co-authors found that large wildfires (those larger than 400 hectares) burned more than six and a half times more forest in the West between 1987 and 2003 than from 1970 to 1986. At the same time, large fires blazed about four times more frequently between 1987 and 2003 than they did in the previous 17 years. Fires in the forests of the Northern Rockies, a stretch of the Rockies running from the Canadian border to the Utah-Idaho border and lying within parts of Idaho, Montana, Wyoming, Oregon and Washington, accounted for 60 percent of the increase in large fires, according to the study. During this time average spring and summer temperatures increased by 0.87 Celsius.*

At the same time, the average length of the wildfire season increased by 78 days between 1970 to 1986 and 1987 to 2003, according to the study.

Since the West is fairly arid, the densest forests are found in the coolest, wettest places, which are in higher elevation areas that get snow, Westerling explained. These dense forests foster high-severity, stand-replacing fires (those that kill off most trees so that new ones replace them), he said.

In the mountain areas Westerling studies topography – the lay of the land – and its role in generating precipitation when air masses move over mountain ridges, plays an important role in determining the location of forests and fire regimes, he explained. Since the NASA model covers the whole world at a coarse scale, it’s probably unable to capture these topographic effects on climate and fire regimes, he said.

“When I look at the Western U.S. – I’m looking, you know, in the last, say, 40 years – there’s been a very dramatic response to temperature already,” Westerling said.

Most of the increase in wildfire activity has happened in higher elevation forest areas where a short summer dry season is extended when snow melts earlier in spring, which increases the flammability of fuels, he explained.

The biggest increase in fire area burned has been in parts of the Western U.S. where fire management has not had the same effect as it has elsewhere, Westerling said.

Commenting on the NASA model, Westerling said: “I think the broad outline of what they’re saying is true, in the sense that as you warm things up temperature is going to overwhelm other effects like management and precipitation.”

“The only quibble I would have – I would say temperature is already a dominant driver for the fire regime in a large part of the Western United States,” he said.

Westerling’s paper, published in Science, was not intended to show that the increase in fire activity in the West was evidence of climate change, he said.

“We already know from other peer-reviewed research, including things covered in the International Panel on Climate Change’s reports, that we expect temperature to increase because of human-caused changes in the atmospheric constituents. And we have observed changes in temperature that have been conclusively attributed to human alteration of the climate system in the peer-reviewed literature and we expect that to continue in the future,” he said.

Understanding how current fire regimes respond to temperature changes allows researchers to use models that project forward to see how today’s fire regimes would respond under future climate conditions, Westerling explained.

In a 2009 paper (PDF), which Westerling co-authored, model projections show that warmer temperatures cause the average area burned each year in the West to spike by 54 percent by the 2050s compared to present day levels. Rocky Mountain forests are hardest hit, with 175 percent more area set to burn, according to the paper.

*The original post erroneously put this figure at 33.5 degrees Farenheit. Error corrected on June 14, 2011.

Photo courtesy Flickr user vaxomatic under CC license.

[Article published at New West]

About 25 years ago Utah inventor Gary Lee was growing frustrated with his snowmobile’s gearbox. Far too often when he was out riding the transmission would get really hot and burn out the rubber belt inside the gearbox. This got Lee thinking about how to design a more durable transmission. After years of work he’s designed a prototype of a recently patented transmission that he claims could make wind power profitable and help the industry move away from subsidies.

The poor reliability of gearboxes is a challenge for the wind power industry and the high cost of replacing busted gearboxes is a chief expense, according to the American Wind Energy Association. While wind turbines are designed to operate for 20 years, estimates for the life of an average gearbox are in the six-to-10-year range, although this can vary, Jeroen van Dam, an engineer with the National Renewable Energy Laboratory’s Gearbox Reliability Collaborative, said in an email. The collaborative, which includes wind turbine manufacturers, owners, operators and research institutes, has found that gearbox problems are an industry-wide issue and not tied to a particular wind turbine or gearbox manufacturer, he added.

The fixed gearboxes currently used in wind turbines are vulnerable to spikes in wind speeds, Lee said in a telephone interview. High-speed gusts apply a lot of torque (the force that spins the turbine’s shaft) to the transmission, placing it under stress. Sometimes, the wind doesn’t hit the turbine straight on and might catch just one of the blades, which can bend the gears, Lee said.

“If you look at windmills, you’ll see quite often that several of them are not turning and that’s because they’re broken,” he said.

Lee’s invention, the Universal Transmission, has the capacity to absorb the shock of variable winds and keep the turbine’s generator, which creates electricity, spinning at a constant speed, explained Dick Wilson, CEO of VMT Technologies, the 12-person Provo company, where Lee works, that holds the patent for the Universal Transmission. The company has built and tested a metal bench-scale prototype of the transmission, which has not yet been tested inside a wind turbine or vehicle.

The Universal Transmission could improve wind turbine efficiency by five to 20 percent, said Wilson. This figure is based in part on the expectation that turbines will not need a power converter (which converts the fluctuating electrical frequency generators that work at variable speeds produce to a frequency compatible with the electric grid) if fitted with the Universal Transmission. The transmission would also be pared with a synchronous generator, which improves efficiency, he explained.

The Universal Transmission would bring down maintenance costs for wind turbine operators, Lee added. Removing the problem of torque spikes would allow turbines to produce more electricity and with individual turbines functioning more efficiently operators would have to put up fewer wind towers, he said.

There’s a very good chance the technology can make wind power profitable so that the industry can function without subsidies, Lee said.

As the name suggests, Lee designed the Universal Transmission with a broad range of uses in mind. The technology could be used in trucks, SUVs, vehicles with diesel engines, tractors, and farm and mining equipment, Wilson said.

How It Works

The Universal Transmission is an adaptation of what’s known as a continuously variable transmission. Standard transmissions, such as those found in cars, allow drivers to shift between a fixed number of gear ratios, with each gear change being like a step up or down a set of stairs. A continuously variable transmission, however, is more like an escalator in that it can change between an infinite number of ratios that fall between a minimum and maximum ratio, Lee explained.

Traditionally, these systems use a metal or rubber belt between two pulleys. In a car one pulley is connected to the engine, while the other is attached to the drive shaft, the part that spins the drive wheels.

Continuously variable transmissions use friction to transmit the engine’s torque, Lee explained. The Universal Transmission, however, uses a metal chain with teeth that is always engaged with the gears to which it’s attached and is therefore always engaged with the engine. It does not rely on friction, which means more torque can be applied to the transmission without it heating up and melting, he said.

Continuously variable transmissions are already used in some cars, but unlike VMT’s product cannot be used in bigger trucks because they can’t handle high torque, Wilson said.

If a trucker were driving up a hill with the Universal Transmission, the trucker would not have to push in the clutch and drop gears, which makes the truck lose power, Lee explained. The Universal Transmission, which works without a clutch, would automatically keep the engine working in its “sweet spot,” which improves fuel efficiency, he said.

Next Steps

VMT is a research and development company that is looking for partners to manufacture and commercialize the transmission. These partners would assist in funding so that the Universal Transmission could be tested inside wind turbines and vehicles, Wilson said. While marketing the Universal Transmission in the U.S., VMT is going to promote the technology to the wind power industry in China, which last year surpassed the U.S. to become the world leader in wind power, Wilson said. VMT also has a representative in Korea, where one company has agreed to engineer a prototype of the Universal Transmission and another company has agreed to build and test the prototype in vehicles, at a cost of $500,000 to each company, he said.

Electric vehicle manufacturers have shown interest in the product and VMT has received purchase orders from two manufacturers: Vision Motor Cars, based in Kentucky, and Leo Motors in Korea. Vision, which manufacturers an electric small pick-up truck, smart car and sports car, has put through $348 million in purchase orders for the transmission system.

Vision’s vehicles, which are sold in Europe and are awaiting Federal Motor Vehicle Safety Standards certification in the U.S., are fitted with manual transmissions, said Brooks Agnew, president of Vision Motor Cars, in a telephone interview.

Traditional automatic transmissions are not suitable for electric cars because they’re inefficient and require fluid pumps, which drain the batteries, Agnew explained. In future, the Universal Transmission will allow Vision to offer drivers an automatic transmission that meets his company’s design criteria, he said.

I was at NOAA recently for its Global Monitoring Annual Conference. One of the highlights was experiencing NOAA’s Science On a Sphere. In a dark room four projectors beam animations onto a solid sphere, 6 foot in diameter, that hangs from the roof. There are over 300 animations available, including a model of the propagation of the December 26, 2004 Indian Ocean Tsunami. The animation of global air traffic made me appreciate all the air traffic controllers out there. There are so many planes buzzing around the world!

I took some pictures (with my mac’s built-in camera) so though I’d post them here.

Watching the sphere in action made me think how many more kids would get into geography and earth sciences if these spheres were installed in classrooms. It’s a truly interactive way to learn about the planet.

[Article first published at New West]

Naturally occurring uranium and the radioactive products it forms as it breaks down over time cannot be seen, tasted, or smelled in water. This lesson hit home for some residents in southwest Montana recently, when laboratory testing showed their well water contained high concentrations of radioactive material.

In the first week of May the U.S. Geological Survey released the preliminary results of an analysis of 128 residential wells in seven counties in southwest Montana. The USGS sampled 40 of the wells in a 2007 study and tested the other 88 wells from November 2009 through September 2010. USGS scientists found concentrations of radioactive contaminants at levels greater than the Environmental Protection Agency’s safe drinking water standards in 29 percent of the wells. The water from each well had some level of radioactive material in it.

In response to the USGS study, Megan Bullock, sanitarian at the Environmental Health Department in Jefferson County, Montana, tested some reverse osmosis systems to see how effective they were at removing certain radionuclides. She hoped to better inform residents about filter systems to treat contaminated well water.

Bullock tested nine point-of-use systems, which attach to individual faucets or are installed beneath the sink, and can be bought from local home improvement stores or water treatment companies. The filter systems cost between $147 and $1,000. Bullock also tested a $3,000 whole-house system that treats water as it enters the home.

Most of the filter systems removed uranium, radium and gross alpha and beta particles (the radiation emitted at various stages during the uranium decay process) to below detectable levels, Bullock explained. The systems that didn’t remove the radioactive constituents to non-detectable limits reduced the levels to below the EPA’s drinking water standards, she said.

“We were basically just checking to see if a person could go to a home improvement store and buy one off the shelf and do a point-of-use application on their kitchen faucet,” said Bullock.

“The intent was to show people that they could go purchase a system for a couple hundred dollars and it was effective: it would do what they were wanting it to do,” she said.

Bullock’s study did not analyze the removal of radon, a radioactive gas that is a by-product of uranium decay, since the point-of-use devices she tested are not sufficient to curb radon contamination. In her report, Bullock recommends that people with high indoor radon levels should consider whole house, point-of-entry devices to remove radon from all water that enters the house.

Potential Health Effects

Some people who drink water that contains radionuclides in excess of the EPA’s maximum contamination levels over a lifetime may have an increased risk of cancer, according to the EPA. Because it is also a toxic heavy metal, uranium in drinking water may cause damage to the kidneys.

The way the EPA calculates the risk level for uranium consumption means that if 10,000 people drank two liters of water containing uranium at the EPA’s maximum contamination level each day for 70 years, about one of those people might be at risk of getting fatal cancer. This risk factor could be compared to the general risk of contracting cancer. American men have slightly less than a one in two chance of developing cancer in their lifetime, while for women the risk is a little more than one in three, according to the American Cancer Society.

Uranium Rich Rocks Increase Background Levels

It is not unusual to find uranium in groundwater, since uranium occurs at low levels in virtually all rock, soil, and water, according to the EPA. Likewise, radon exists in almost all rock and all soil and water. However, the Boulder batholith, a 2,300 square mile chunk of igneous rock that lies in Jefferson County and reaches into Silverbow, Lewis and Clark, and Powell counties, is known to have uranium deposits in some areas.

Fifty-eight of the wells draw their water from rocks that form part of the batholith.Thirty-eight of these wells had levels of radioactive constituents in excess of the drinking water standards, according to the USGS. However, the batholith did not account for all the contamination. Eleven of the 70 wells outside the batholith region had levels of radioactive material higher than at least one of the EPA’s drinking water standards.

The concentration of radioactive constituents in groundwater depends on how the water flows through fissures in underground rock and whether it comes into contact with zones that have elevated uranium minerals, said Rod Caldwell, a USGS scientist.

“It’s highly variable. We had wells side by side that one may have been above a drinking water standard and the next door neighbor may have been below,” he said.

Since private wells are unregulated it’s up to individuals to have their drinking water tested, Caldwell said. He recommended sampling a few times, at different times in the year, to ensure that contaminant levels don’t vary over time.

The Montana Department of Public Health and Human Services Environmental Laboratory does drinking water analyses. A list of certified private laboratories is available through the University of Montana.

While the reverse osmosis systems Bullock tested are effective at removing radionuclides, her report recommends that users test their treated water periodically to make sure the systems are working properly.

Reverse Osmosis Systems Tested in the Study

Bullock recommends NSF-approved treatment systems, but stressed she is not endorsing any of the brands tested.

GE Profile PXRQ15F, $279
Ideal Choice RO3500, $270
Whirlpool WHER25, $147
Challenger Conqueror, $672 (installation included)
Kinetico 2040S OD, $1,000
Watts Premier ZRO-4, $530
Challenger Conqueror 4, $400
Vitasalus Whole House Oxidation-Filtration System, $3,000 (installation included).