India Must Stop Global Warming

[babbajoe]

http://heatisonline.org/contentserver/objecthandlers/index.cfm?id=7610&method=full

Europe Plans Grid for Array of Renewable Sources

Sun, wind and wave-powered: Europe unites to build renewable energy 'supergrid'

• North Sea countries plan vast clean energy project

• €30bn scheme could offer weather-proof supply

The Guardian (U.K.), Jan. 4, 2010

It would connect turbines off the wind-lashed north coast of Scotland with Germany's vast arrays of solar panels, and join the power of waves crashing on to the Belgian and Danish coasts with the hydro-electric dams nestled in Norway's fjords: Europe's first electricity grid dedicated to renewable power will become a political reality this month, as nine countries formally draw up plans to link their clean energy projects around the North Sea.

The network, made up of thousands of kilometres of highly efficient undersea cables that could cost up to €30bn (£26.5bn), would solve one of the biggest criticisms faced by renewable power – that unpredictable weather means it is unreliable.

With a renewables supergrid, electricity can be supplied across the continent from wherever the wind is blowing, the sun is shining or the waves are crashing.

Connected to Norway's many hydro-electric power stations, it could act as a giant 30GW battery for Europe's clean energy, storing electricity when demand is low and be a major step towards a continent-wide supergrid that could link into the vast potential of solar power farms in North Africa.

By autumn, the nine governments involved – Germany, France, Belgium, the Netherlands, Luxembourg, Denmark, Sweden and Ireland and the UK – hope to have a plan to begin building a high-voltage direct current network within the next decade. It will be an important step in achieving the European Union’s pledge that, by 2020, 20% of its energy will come from renewable sources.

"We recognise that the North Sea has huge resources, we are exploiting those in the UK quite intensively at the moment," said the UK's energy and climate change minister, Lord Hunt. "But there are projects where it might make sense to join up with other countries, so this comes at a very good time for us."

More than 100GW of offshore wind projects are under development in Europe, around 10% of the EU's electricity demand, and equivalent to about 100 large coal-fired plants. The surge in wind power means the continent's grid needs to be adapted, according to Justin Wilkes of the European Wind Energy Association (EWEA). An EWEA study last year outlined where these cables might be built and this is likely to be a starting point for the discussions by the nine countries.

Renewable Energyis much more decentralised and is often built in inhospitable places, far from cities. A supergrid in the North Sea would enable a secure and reliable energy supply from renewables by balancing power across the continent.

Norway's hydro plants – equivalent to about 30 large coal-fired power stations – could use excess power to pump water uphill, ready to let it rush down again, generating electricity, when demand is high. "The benefits of an offshore supergrid are not simply to allow offshore wind farms to connect; if you have additional capacity, which you will do within these lines, it will allow power trading between countries and that improves EU competitiveness," said Wilkes.

The European Commission has also been studying proposals for a renewable-electricity grid in the North Sea. A working group in the EC's energy department, led by Georg Wilhelm Adamowitsch, will produce a plan by the end of 2010. He has warned that without additional transmission infrastructure, the EU will not be able to meet its ambitious targets. Hunt said the EC working group's findings would be fed into the nine-country grid plan.

The cost of a North Sea grid has not yet been calculated, but a study by Greenpeace in 2008 put the price of building a similar grid by 2025 at €15bn-€20bn. This would provide more than 6,000km of cable around the region. The EWEA's 2009 study suggested the costs of connecting the proposed 100GW wind farms and building interconnectors, into which further wind and wave power farms could be plugged in future, would probably push the bill closer to €30bn. The technical, planning, legal and environmental issues will be discussed at the meeting of the nine this month.

"The first thing we're aiming for is a common vision," said Hunt. "We will hopefully sign a memorandum of understanding in the autumn with ministers setting out what we're trying to do and how we plan to do it."

All those involved also have an eye on the future, said Wilkes. "The North Sea grid would be the backbone of the future European electricity supergrid," he said. This supergrid, which has support from scientists at the commission's Institute for Energy (IE), and political backing from both the French president, Nicolas Sarkozy, and Gordon Brown, would link huge solar farms in southern Europe – producing electricity either through photovoltaic cells, or by concentrating the sun's heat to boil water and drive turbines – with marine, geothermal and wind projects elsewhere on the continent. Scientists at the IE have estimated it would require the capture of just 0.3% of the light falling on the Sahara and the deserts of the Middle East to meet all Europe's energy needs.

In this grid, electricity would be transmitted along high voltage direct current cables. These are more expensive than traditional alternating-current cables, but they lose less energy over long distances.

Hunt agreed that the European supergrid was a long-term dream, but one worth making a reality. The UK, like other countries, faced "huge challenges with our renewables targets," he said. "The 2020 target is just the beginning and then we've got to aim for 2050 with a decarbonised electricity supply – so we need all the renewables we can get."

A North Sea grid could link into grids proposed for a much larger German-led plan for renewables called the Desertec Industrial Initiative (DII). This aims to provide 15% of Europe's electricity by 2050 or earlier via power lines stretching across desert and the Mediterranean. The plan was launched last November with partners including Munich Re, the world's biggest reinsurer, and some of Germany's biggest engineering and power companies, including Siemens, E.ON, ABB and Deutsche Bank. DII is a $400bn (£240bn) plan to use concentrated solar power (CSP) in southern Europe and northern Africa. This technology uses mirrors to concentrate the sun's rays on a fluid container, the super-heated liquid then drives turbines to generate electricity. The technology itself is nothing new – CSP plants have been running in the United States for decades and Spain is building many – but the scale of the DII project would be its biggest deployment ever.

guardian.co.uk © Guardian News and Media Limited 2010

[Amrit79]

not happening in a country where cows + rocks are believed to be Gods

[babbajoe]

I thought there could be a way for India to join together with Bangladesh, Pakistan, Afganistan, China, Sri Lanka to take advantage of their unique geography

and develop a regional grid utilizing wind , solar, tidal, and hydro-electric.

[Amrit79]

I thought there could be a way for India to join together with Bangladesh, Pakistan, Afganistan, China, Sri Lanka to take advantage of their unique geography

and develop a regional grid utilizing wind , solar, tidal, and hydro-electric.

not killing each other would be enough rather then... working together,

[babbajoe]

see link for full story

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703481004574645873735073900.html?mod=WSJASIA_hpp_LEFTTopWhatNews

* JANUARY 8, 2010, 4:29 P.M. ET

India Car Sales Rise 40% in December

BY NIKHIL GULATI AND ANIRBAN CHOWDHURY

NEW DELHI -- India's local car sales continued to post robust gains, with a 40% jump in December as the low-sales base, easier availability of loans and year-end discounts lured more customers.

Sales in the past month climbed to 115,268 autos from 82,174 a year earlier, data issued Friday by local industry group, the Society of Indian Automobile Manufacturers, showed.

The growth in December follows a 61% growth in November, which was the fastest pace since February 2004.

"We have recovered better than most of the economies," SIAM president Pawan Goenka said at a news conference.

[babbajoe]

see link for story

www.heatisonline.org

C02 Levels Indicate Earth May Be Entering a New Pliocene Era

Comparing Earth's current warming to the Pliocene

The early Pliocene period might be the best analog for the warmer world scientists expect in the not-too-distant future.

Christian Science Monitor, Jan. 8, 2010

About 4.5 million years ago, during the early Pliocene period (3 to 5 million years ago), temperatures on Earth were some 3 to 4 degrees C (5.4 to 7.2 degrees F.) higher in the tropics, and perhaps 10 degrees C (18 degrees F.) warmer near the poles.

To get that much warming, current climate models have to pump up atmospheric carbon dioxide levels to between 500 and 600 parts per million — about twice the preindustrial level of 280 ppm.

We're currently around 387 ppm. And, given the lack of progress so far toward curbing fossil-fuel emissions, we'll be fortunate to stabilize atmospheric concentrations at 450 ppm.

Scientists are therefore quite interested in what the world looked like during the early Pliocene, and why. At least in terms of atmospheric CO2 concentrations, that seems to be where we're headed.

A new paper in Nature Geoscience concludes that we may, in fact, already be there. According to current climate models, with each doubling of CO2, Earth warms around 3 degrees C (5.4 degrees F.). Scientists have deduced, therefore, that atmospheric CO2 concentrations during the Pliocene must have been between 500 and 600 ppm.

But according to this study, the fossil evidence doesn't support that assumption. Carbon dioxide concentrations in the early Pliocene, as inferred from several sources, were more likely between 365 and 415 ppm. We're already well within that range.

The implications are (at least) two-fold: 1. It takes a lot less CO2 to warm Earth than previously thought. 2. Earth's climate may be more sensitive to increases in CO2 than current climate models assume.

"[T]he Earth-system climate sensitivity has been significantly higher over the past five million years than estimated from fast feedbacks alone," write the authors.

Antarctic ice cores allow us to directly measure earth's air going back 800,000 years. Beyond that, we have to infer atmospheric CO2 concentrations from other sources.

The authors of this paper looked at isotopic signatures in organic compounds called alkenones. Alkenones are produced by phytoplankton, photosynthetic ocean-dwelling organisms with unpronounceable names like coccolithophorids and prymnesiophytes.

These organisms, like all photosynthesizers, take the carbon atom from CO2 in the air, freeing the two oxygen atoms. Scientists can infer from the ratio of carbon carbon 13 to carbon 12 isotopes in their tissues — and the alkenone that remains behind in ocean sediments — what the concentration of CO2 was in the ocean's surface layers.

There are some caveats with this approach, as an accompanying article points out. But temperature reconstructions from at least one other source — the ratio of boron to calcium in fossilized shells — support the basic finding: Atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations during the early Pliocene were significantly lower than previously assumed. They were just 90 to 125 ppm more than preindustrial levels of 280 ppm — in other words, about where we are now.

What do these findings mean? They indicate that the Pliocene might be the best analog for the world in the not-too-distant future. They also imply that our climate models, which account for short-term feedbacks like water vapor and sea-ice formation, but don't include feedback cycles that take place on a longer time scales — receding ice sheets and vegetation changes, for example — significantly underestimate CO2's impact on Earth's climate.

As models improve and scientists have more proxy reconstructions of paleoclimate at their fingertips, this seems to be a recurring theme.

Last year,scientists looked at the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum (PETM) — a spike in temperatures that occurred about 55 million years ago. The PETM was warmer than the Pliocene, and, on average, about 7 degrees C warmer than today. Palm trees grew in Antarctica and alligators inhabited swamps above the Arctic Circle.

In models, these researchers also couldn't reproduce the warmer PETM conditions by increasing just CO2. When they put in the CO2 they know existed, they got only about half the warming they know occurred.

As a result, they concluded that Earth's climate was much more sensitive to changes in atmospheric CO2 concentration than was commonly assumed. They faulted as-yet-unidentified positive feedbacks other than carbon dioxide for this added warmth. One of their more intriguing conjectures was the probability of a greater number of swamps in a warmer world. Swamps produce lots of methane, and methane is more than 20 times more effective at trapping heat than CO2.

http://www.csmonitor.com/Environment/Bright-Green/2010/0108/Comparing-Earth-s-current-warming-to-the-Pliocene

[babbajoe]

2 reads for the uneducated and uneducable

1st read

http://climateprogress.org/2010/01/16/hansen-global-warming-cooling-nasa-gisstemp/#more-17560

Hansen wants your feedback on “If It’s That Warm, How Come It’s So Damned Cold?”

Essay by four NASA scientists explains why 2005 (not 1998) was the hottest year, what caused recent cold snap, and the source of the "gullibility" of those "so readily convinced of a false conclusion, that the world is really experiencing a cooling trend"

January 16, 2010

2nd read

http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn18383-major-antarctic-glacier-is-past-its-tipping-point.html