Climate Change in Australia (Part 1)

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1662

Is climate change responsible for record-setting extreme weather events?

Date: April 25, 2017
Source: Stanford University

Summary:
After an unusually intense heat wave, downpour or drought, climate scientists inevitably receive phone calls and emails asking whether human-caused climate change played a role.

FULL STORY

In the past, scientists typically avoided linking individual weather events to climate change, citing the challenges of teasing apart human influence from the natural variability of the weather. But that is changing.

After an unusually intense heat wave, downpour or drought, Noah Diffenbaugh and his research group inevitably receive phone calls and emails asking whether human-caused climate change played a role.

“The question is being asked by the general public and by people trying to make decisions about how to manage the risks of a changing climate,” said Diffenbaugh, a professor of Earth system science at Stanford’s School of Earth, Energy & Environmental Sciences. “Getting an accurate answer is important for everything from farming to insurance premiums, to international supply chains, to infrastructure planning.”

In the past, scientists typically avoided linking individual weather events to climate change, citing the challenges of teasing apart human influence from the natural variability of the weather. But that is changing.

“Over the past decade, there’s been an explosion of research, to the point that we are seeing results released within a few weeks of a major event,” said Diffenbaugh, who is also the Kimmelman Family Senior Fellow at the Stanford Woods Institute for the Environment.

In a new study, published in this week’s issue of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Diffenbaugh and a group of current and former Stanford colleagues outline a four-step “framework” for testing whether global warming has contributed to record-setting weather events. The new paper is the latest in a burgeoning field of climate science called “extreme event attribution,” which combines statistical analyses of climate observations with increasingly powerful computer models to study the influence of climate change on individual extreme weather events.

Climate change fingerprints

In order to avoid inappropriately attributing an event to climate change, the authors began with the assumption that global warming had played no role, and then used statistical analyses to test whether that assumption was valid. “Our approach is very conservative,” Diffenbaugh said. “It’s like the presumption of innocence in our legal system: The default is that the weather event was just bad luck, and a really high burden of proof is required to assign blame to global warming.”

The authors applied their framework to the hottest, wettest and driest events that have occurred in different areas of the world. They found that global warming from human emissions of greenhouse gases has increased the odds of the hottest events across more than 80 percent of the surface area of the globe for which observations were available. “Our results suggest that the world isn’t quite at the point where every record hot event has a detectable human fingerprint, but we are getting close,” Diffenbaugh said.

For the driest and wettest events, the authors found that human influence on the atmosphere has increased the odds across approximately half of the area that has reliable observations. “Precipitation is inherently noisier than temperature, so we expect the signal to be less clear,” Diffenbaugh said. “One of the clearest signals that we do see is an increase in the odds of extreme dry events in the tropics. This is also where we see the biggest increase in the odds of protracted hot events – a combination that poses real risks for vulnerable communities and ecosystems.”

The Stanford research team, which includes a number of former students and postdocs who have moved on to positions at other universities, has been developing the extreme event framework in recent years, focusing on individual events such as the 2012-2017 California drought and the catastrophic flooding in northern India in June 2013. In the new study, a major goal was to test the ability of the framework to evaluate events in multiple regions of the world, and to extend beyond extreme temperature and precipitation, which have been the emphasis of most event attribution studies.

Test cases

One high-profile test case was Arctic sea ice, which has declined by around 40 percent during the summer season over the past three decades. When the team members applied their framework to the record-low Arctic sea ice cover observed in September 2012, they found overwhelming statistical evidence that global warming contributed to the severity and probability of the 2012 sea ice measurements. “The trend in the Arctic has been really steep, and our results show that it would have been extremely unlikely to achieve the record-low sea ice extent without global warming,” Diffenbaugh said.

Another strength of a multi-pronged approach, the team said, is that it can be used to study not only the weather conditions at the surface, but also the meteorological “ingredients” that contribute to rare events. “For example, we found that the atmospheric pressure pattern that occurred over Russia during the 2010 heat wave has become more likely in recent decades, and that global warming has contributed to those odds,” said co-author Daniel Horton, an assistant professor at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois, and a former postdoc in Diffenbaugh’s lab who has led research on the influence of atmospheric pressure patterns on surface temperature extremes. “If the odds of an individual ingredient are changing – like the pressure patterns that lead to heat waves – that puts a thumb on the scales for the extreme event.”

Diffenbaugh sees the demand for rigorous, quantitative event attribution growing in the coming years. “When you look at the historical data, there’s no question that global warming is happening and that extremes are increasing in many areas of the world,” he said. “People make a lot of decisions – short term and long term – that depend on the weather, so it makes sense that they want to know whether global warming is making record-breaking events more likely. As scientists, we want to make sure that they have accurate, objective, transparent information to work with when they make those decisions.”

Story Source:

Materials provided by Stanford University. Original written by Ker Than. Note: Content may be edited for style and length.

Journal Reference:

Noah S. Diffenbaugh, Deepti Singh, Justin S. Mankin, Daniel E. Horton, Daniel L. Swain, Danielle Touma, Allison Charland, Yunjie Liu, Matz Haugen, Michael Tsiang, Bala Rajaratnam. Quantifying the influence of global warming on unprecedented extreme climate events. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 2017; 201618082 DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1618082114

1663

New method to create the next fuel-efficient renewable energy developed

Using methanol, scientists aim to generate energy cells that move cars, warm houses and help produce food

Date: April 19, 2017
Source: University of Southern California

Summary:

The fossil fuel fight goes on for scientists as they develop a new method for creating reversible hydrogen storage based on methanol, with no carbon emissions, in the last major paper co-authored by USC’s first Nobel laureate, the late George Olah.

FULL STORY

USC scientists have found a way to tap hydrogen fuel from methanol without producing concurrent carbon.
Credit: G. K. Surya Prakash
Scientists have long struggled with generating and storing hydrogen, the kind that might one day provide the backbone for renewable energy fuel cells that make our cars move, warm our houses and help produce food, in a way that also won’t hasten climate change or otherwise harm the environment.

In research published earlier this year in the Journal of the American Chemical Society, chemists at the USC Loker Hydrocarbon Research Institute outlined a carbon-neutral method for doing just that, with a little help from the simplest alcohol known to man: methanol.

Senior author G. K. Surya Prakash, 1994 Nobel Prize in Chemistry winner Olah in his last major paper and their team at the USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences devised a way to produce and store hydrogen from methanol, without concurrent production of either carbon monoxide or carbon dioxide, by trapping it in organic derivatives of ammonia called amines.

The well-known steam reforming process usually used to extract hydrogen from methanol, called the methanol reformer, traditionally produces carbon monoxide and carbon dioxide as part of this extraction process. Carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas that causes global warming and ocean acidification.

The research demonstrates just one more way carbon has been freed from the cycle of creating and storing fuels via methanol, supporting Olah and Prakash’s long-standing vision of a completely renewable “methanol economy.”

Reducing reliance on carbon-emitting fossil fuels

“The Methanol Economy” is a concept that the Olah-Prakash team first began refining in the mid-1990s, right after the time Olah became USC’s first Nobel laureate for his contributions to carbocations, the name that Olah himself coined for ions that have a positively charged carbon atom.

According to Olah and Prakash, the goal of a methanol-based economy would be to develop renewable sources of energy, led by methanol, that could mitigate the problem of climate change caused by carbon emissions, as well as the U.S. dependence on other countries for energy, particularly oil.

The need to offset crude oil consumption has only grown in the intervening decades since Olah and Prakash began their research. At that time, global consumption of oil was around 70 million barrels; that number is expected to be about 100 million as early as next year.

Countries like China have already begun the transition away from petroleum. At the beginning of the century, methanol use there was negligible but now accounts for more than 500,000 barrels each day, though much of it is coal-based, which can create its own problematic carbon runoff.

The research of Prakash, Olah and their team has been focused on finding a way to extract hydrogen fuel from methanol in ways that are not only carbon-neutral, but can even be carbon-positive.

The roots of a carbon-free future

Methanol, sometimes called “wood alcohol,” is the simplest alcohol that can be produced, requiring only water, carbon dioxide and energy.

While methanol stores half the energy of traditional petroleum-based gasoline, the light that burns half as bright also burns more cleanly, with no soot, particulates or other residue. According to the Environmental Protection Agency, the combustion of methanol also generally produces less deleterious greenhouse gases in the form of nitrogen oxides.

Methanol quickly biodegrades. It has traditionally been produced from natural gas and can be corrosive to older automobile tubing and casing, though much less so to newer generations of automobiles. Methanol is a more efficient fuel to replace gasoline or diesel, but it provides fewer miles to the gallon because of its lower energy density.

Methanol has also long been prized by race car drivers for its higher octane on shorter tracks and because it produces clearer smoke, preventing pileups. Also, unlike typical petroleum-based gasoline, water is effective in fighting methanol-based fires, though those clean-burning fires often appear invisible in daylight. However, additives can also easily be added to methanol to increase visibility.

Methanol is also already employed in the raw chemical production of all petroleum-based chemicals and products.

In a testament to its elegance, simplicity and ubiquity, methanol naturally occurs in small amounts in Earth’s atmosphere, and there are even huge clouds of it floating in the star-forming regions of space. Olah, Prakash and colleagues published research last year examining the differences between the formation of methanol both terrestrially and extraterrestrially.

Prakash, who worked with Olah for more than 40 years, said “Olah was a giant of a chemist and a great visionary who had a prophetic approach to solve tough problems. He had remarkable memory and was quite intuitive. He was very well-read, he knew history and philosophy and appreciated music and the arts. He was a voracious reader. He can be described as a Renaissance man.”

Story Source:

Materials provided by University of Southern California. Note: Content may be edited for style and length.

Journal Reference:

Jotheeswari Kothandaraman, Sayan Kar, Raktim Sen, Alain Goeppert, George A. Olah, G. K. Surya Prakash. Efficient Reversible Hydrogen Carrier System Based on Amine Reforming of Methanol. Journal of the American Chemical Society, 2017; 139 (7): 2549 DOI: 10.1021/jacs.6b11637

1664

The inevitable rise in electricity prices caused by the increased percentage of renewable power is political? I thought it was economic.

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1665

IThat article has zero mention of climate change. If it said power is going to rise 400 bucks a year because of renewables which we have to put in place because coal is ■■■■■■■ the planet. Then sure it has a place in this thread. But the economics of renewables vs the ecological impact of coal is not being mentioned. Therefore you may as well be posting about nbn in here. Nbn cost more than adsl. But we needed better internet.

Sure have a debate on how you believe the short term benefit to the economy of fossil fuel pose is better than the long term future of the planet. That has a place in here.

sorfed Is more concerned with saving 4k over the next 10 years than he is about the carbon PPM in 10 years reaching critical mass killing 1/3 of all life on earth.

That’s what your saying right? Seeing as you posted that in here?

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1666

Where do you get this stuff from?

Note the CO2 content and temperature in the era of dinosaurs, probably the most prolific abundance of plant life the worlds history.

With the increase in CO2 the planet is greening and there is more food available.
Nominate what level of CO2 you think is desirable and give me an estimate of the number of people that will starve to death.
While you are at it tell me what temperature the world is currently at and what temperature it should be.

One more, all references to the amount temperatures have risen use the “Industrial Age” as a starting point, Why? Could it possibly be because 1803 was in the middle of the Little Ice Age, the coldest period in 8500 years.

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1667

Thanks for bringing this back on topic.

If I genuinely answer this, will you read what I write with an open mind to have your opinion changed? Or are you really in your heart of hearts not interested?

Also know that I’m not just googling ■■■■ to suit a narrative. I have direct access to some of the countries leading people on this. 1 point your making is very misinformed, about the greening. My wife is literally the counties leading expert on increased Co2’s impact on egronomy. So I can easily lean over and ask the best person in Australia to provide me a lot of detail to share on just how wrong that is.

How in depth would you like me to go? If your up for it?

In fact, I’m willing to go next level in this and we can meet you face to face to take you thought the data (not modelling btw, imperical evidence) to illustrate how even the current rate of Co2 in the atmos is severely damanging our countries food security.

I know people here think your trolling but I’m of the belief that turning around people with current mind set on this will actually create one of the biggest advocates for action on climate change.

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1668

Wouldn’t bother Ben.

Fool me once, shame on you, etc . . .

It’s like trying to teach reason to a briquette.

1669

Now your’re talking, there was an efficient heat source, 16 of them into a slow combustion stove at 11pm kept the house warm on the coldest of nights and provided 400 litres of hot water.

1670

Great, for a start perhaps she can explain the economics and evironmental sense of the Drax power station in the UK that I have previously posted here.
Recap.
Shut down a mine of dead wood under your feet, convert a power station to nominally burn agricultural refuse and wood waste, cut down living Deadwood forests in the USA, turn the trees into wood pellets ship them across the USA the Atlantic and Britain to burn.Tell me how that is environmentally sensitive. Living forests for dead, all made possible with the help of carbon credits.

As for Wind and solar power do not get confused between Nameplate power and the actual power produced AT ANY ONE TIME.

Please don’t say batteries. Victoria needs 6,000 Mw per hour or 100Mw per minute, at Dan Andrews planned 30% of renewables a 1Gw battery system woud barely be enough to cook you breakfast.

1671

Wow, ask about the economics of a power station in the U.K to an environmental egronomost from Australia?

Right

I might ask the bloke at the chicken shop too about the best way to prepare fish

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1672

Btw sorfed you have inadvertently answered the question about how you have no interest in listening to reason on this.

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1673

Hate to say I told you so, but . … .

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1674

No point in engaging with them. The agenda is that fuel sources must not change. Everything else talked about is extrapolated back to this.

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1675

Seeing as she is an expert in the field I thought it was quite a reasonable question, we are talking about GLOBAL warming aren’t we, that’s why we are trying to save the planet, right? Principles hold firm no matter your location, correct?
Notice you pulled the old lefty stunt of concentrating on one issue and ignoring the other two. Not the first time you have done that.

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1676

Fuel sources can change and renewables have a place, but not more than the 10% the power system can handle.
Sweden for example has 1900 hydro plants that turn out half their electricity, only 7% wind but rely on nuclear for 35% and biomass and oil for the rest. Sensible mix, minimise wind and use hydro with a nuclear baseload. Not many droughts in Scandinavia.

Our lunatic politicians on the other hand are pushing for 50% wind, total madness.

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1677

50% hydro, 35% nuclear. Not exactly going to happen here, is it. Business as usual, then? Well, shoot. How about that.

1678

She is an expert in the effects of climate change on agriculture. You asked about how I was so certain on climate change.

Then starting prattling on about power stations

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1679

You’d better show your wife that geological chart. Could be groundbreaking.

1680

Presumably farmers are and have been seeing the effects. Why aren’t they putting more pressure on the Nats?

1681

They’re wedged by the water entitlement issue. A lot of them are aware of the carbon problem but the next season and availability of irrigation takes precedent.

Edit: which makes it all the more confused by water being entangled with the same problem. The Nats say they’ll fight for their water making it a single issue which puts the main problem at a distance.

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