March 2012
1 post
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I’m finding it a bit hard to fit regular blogging into my assistant professor lifestyle, so I’m going to try a different approach: Twitter, backed up with occasional exegesis here. So please follow me…
February 2012
1 post
1 tag
Is natural gas leaky enough to offset its carbon...
Nature News article on an in-press JGR story be Petron et al.:
Led by researchers at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and the University of Colorado, Boulder, the study estimates that natural-gas producers in an area known as the Denver-Julesburg Basin are losing about 4% of their gas to the atmosphere — not including additional losses in the pipeline and distribution...
December 2011
7 posts
1 tag
Mitigating California's greenhouse gas emissions
Williams et al. examine the challenges of mitigating emissions of heat-trapping gases in developed economies, via a case study of California’s goal of reducing emissions 80% below 1990 levels by 2050:
Three major energy system transformations were necessary to meet the target (Fig. 2). First, energy efficiency had to improve by at least 1.3% yr−1 over 40 years. Second, electricity...
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Milankovitch was right!
Peter Huybers statistically evaluates the contribution of the Earth’s ~20 thousand year precession cycle to deglaciations over the last million years, and concludes that both obliquity (how tilted the Earth’s axis is) and precession (the orientation of the tilt) play a role:
Ice sheets tend to collapse in response to unusually large maxima in insolation forcing that result from the...
2 tags
Synchronizing Antarctic and Northern Hemisphere...
Weber et al. examine the timing of the retreat of the Antarctic and Northern Hemisphere ice sheets at the end of the Last Glacial Maximum (LGM):
A long-standing hypothesis for ice-sheet synchronization invokes sea-level forcing of Antarctic grounding lines driven by fluctuations of NH ice sheets (41, 42), but until now the chronology of the Antarctic ice sheets has been too limited to evaluate...
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Carbon dioxide and Antarctic glaciation
Pagani et al., writing in Science:
The decline in the partial pressure of atmospheric carbon dioxide during the [Eocene-Oligocene] climate event was substantial, but absolute CO2 concentrations depend on the value of εf applied. Collectively, CO2 estimates calculated by using U37K’ and TEX86 SST estimates and a range of εf values indicate that CO2 decreased ~40% from 35.5 to 32.5 million...
Bruce Babbit, Geophysicist →
Former Interior Secretary Bruce Babbit, who is now apparently spending his time promoting road-less isolation of oil and gas production in the Amazon basin, has a master’s degree in geophysics, and did his thesis with Keith Runcorn, a paleomagnetist who played a key role in the establishment of plate tectonics. Who knew?
1 tag
On the origin of animals
Erwin et al. review the fossil and molecular record of early animal evolution:
Molecular estimates suggest that the origin and earliest diversification of animals occurred during the Cryogenian Period. We estimate that the last common ancestor of all living animals arose nearly 800 Ma and that the stem lineages leading to most extant phyla had evolved by the end of the Ediacaran (541 Ma). Most...
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Don't count on air capture
House et al., writing in PNAS, suggests that directly removing CO2 from the atmosphere may cost in excess of $1,000/tonne, based on their techno-economic analysis:
Our empirical analyses of operating commercial pro- cesses suggest that the energetic and financial costs of capturing CO2 from the air are likely to have been underestimated. Specifically, our analysis of existing gas separation...
November 2011
10 posts
1 tag
The future of science
Colin Macilwain in Nature:
Those involved in science policy sometimes seem to me to be sleep-walking through the greatest crisis to afflict the West since the Second World War. True, from the point of view of the scientist at the bench, grants continue to flow and results continue to be published. Perhaps this is why wider discourse about science’s role in society has hardly budged an...
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Optimizing energy R&D investments
A new Harvard Belfer Center report makes four recommendations:
(1) The U.S. government should dramatically expand its investment in energy RD&D, focused on a broad portfolio of different energy technologies and stages of innovation.
(2) The U.S. federal government should implement policies that create market incentives to develop and deploy new energy technologies, including policies that...
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Loan guarantees
The whole Solyndra pseudo-scandal is absurd. The DOE loan guarantee program is supposed to facilitate clean energy investments that are too risky for the private sector to undertake alone. It’s supposed to have a high-risk portfolio. DOE’s web site indicates that it’s currently supporting $36 billion of loans, so Solyndra constitutes about 1.5% of the total program. If even 5% of...
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Ozone lesson: do your cost-benefit analysis...
Today’s New York Times has a front page article on the White House’s decision to reject an EPA proposal to tighten ground-level ozone rules prior to the regularly scheduled 2013 update. The article insinuates that the White House decision was driven primarily by Bill Daley and secondarily by Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA) chief Cass Sunstein, and primarily by...
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Goodbye, Steve!
Via Nature News, Steve Koonin, currently DOE’s Undersecretary for Science, will be departing for the Institute for Defense Analysis on November 18. Koonin’s office just recently finished DOE’s first Quadrennial Technology Review.
Koonin’s departure leaves DOE with vacancies in both of the main Undersecretary positions, the Undersecretary for Energy and the Undersecretary...
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Key take aways from the International Energy...
I haven’t had a chance to go through the full report, but from the executive summary:
Consistent with the Oak Ridge CDIAC analysis mentioned earlier:
Although the recovery in the world economy since 2009 has been uneven, and future economic prospects remain uncertain, global primary energy demand rebounded by a remarkable 5% in 2010, pushing CO2 emissions to a new high. Subsidies that...
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Making up for lost time (new carbon emission...
Via Joe Romm, Seth Borenstein of AP reports on new preliminary estimates of 2009 and 2010 world emissions of carbon dioxide from fossil fuel and industrial sources.
Some discussion after the fold.
Tom Boden and T. J. Blasing of Oak Ridge’s Carbon Dioxide Information Analysis Center note:
These estimates show that 2010 was by far a record year for CO2 emissions from fossil-fuel...
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Searching for extraterrestial light pollution
Via Nate Berg at The Atlantic Cities, a newly submitted study by Avi Loeb of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics and Edwin Turner of Princeton University proposes searching for artificial lighting as a way of looking for extraterrestrial civilizations, though notes:
For this signature to be detectable, the night side needs to have an artificial brightness comparable to the natural...
2 tags
Law and probability
Norman Fenton on the use of Bayesian reasoning in legal arguments:
Proper use of probabilistic reasoning has the potential to improve the efficiency, transparency and fairness of the criminal justice system. Bayesian reasoning can help experts to formulate accurate and informative opinions; courts to determine the admissibility of evidence and identify which cases should and should not be...
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RTP on Keystone XL
Ray Pierrehumbert, writing at RealClimate:
Commentators who argue that the Keystone XL pipeline is no big deal tend to focus on the rate at which the pipeline delivers oil to users (and thence as CO2 to the atmosphere). To an extent, they have a point. The pipeline would carry 500,000 barrels per day, and assuming that we’re talking about lighter crude by the time it gets in the pipeline that...
October 2011
6 posts
1 tag
America's decaying infrastructure
American Society of Civil Engineers president Kathy Caldwell weighs in on the need for infrastructure investment:
When the ASCE issued its 2009 Report Card for America’s Infrastructure, it gave the cumulative grade of “D” to the condition and performance of 15 of the country’s infrastructure systems. Among the worst were roads and drinking water. The United States not only loses...
2 tags
Feeding a crowded, wealthier planet
Foley et al. examine the challenge of feeding a densely population and increasingly wealthy planet that already devotes 38% of its ice-free land area to agriculture:
Increasing population and consumption are placing unprecedented demands on agriculture and natural resources. Today, approximately a billion people are chronically malnourished while our agricultural systems are concurrently...
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In defense of progress
Steven Pinker defends human progress and Enlightenment thinking (though he never mentions the Enlightenment directly):
Is there any evidence that enhancements in thinking can make us less violent? Cognitive neuroscience suggests that morality is driven not just by the limbic circuits underlying emotion but also by parts of the prefrontal cortex that underlie abstract thought. And the historical...
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A new tracer of the Great Oxidation Event
Konhauser et al., writing in the Oct. 20 issue of Nature, employ chromium(III), which is leached from ultramafic source rocks and soils through acid weathering, as a tracer of planetary oxidation during the Great Oxidation Event. They find increasing concentrations, which they tie to aerobic bacterial oxidation of pyrite, over the period of 2.48 to 2.32 billion years ago. The highest...
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Reading this week's Science
Accompanying his news article on efforts to move toward a self-sustaining fusion reaction at Lawrence Livermore’s National Ignition Facility, Daniel Cleary reviews ongoing research into inertial confinement fusion and related techniques. There’s a lot more work on fusion going on outside of ITER and NIF than I was aware of, and the National Academy of Sciences is conducting a review....
Welcome to my tumblelog!
I’m an Earth historian, climate scientist, geobiologist, and energy policy wonk. I’m based at Rutgers, where I’m an assistant professor and Associate Director of the Rutgers Energy Institute. You can read more about what I do at my main website.
This is my first attempt in several years at keeping a blog (I believe the first post-grad school). I think the semi-microblog format...