Environmental News, Articles & Information | Global Warming News | EcoWorld

Scuttling in the crevices of every home are a variety of pests that seem to thrive on making the human inhabitants miserable. One of the most hated pests are cockroaches, which are almost impossible to eliminate. It does not matter how clean a house is; one inseminated female roach can explode into an infestation within a matter of weeks. Miniscule amounts of food, such as splattered grease, sugar that lands behind the cupboard or even glue is enough to keep the population going. Trails of ants crawling throughout the house, a single chirping cricket serenading you in the middle of the night and slugs eating up your prized garden are no fun either.

Borates have long been used as a safer alternative to highly volatile, synthetic chemical pesticides (Photo: Nisus Corporation)

Pesticides are the easiest solution, but are not a pleasant option to users concerned about their pets or the birds that make the outdoors so enjoyable. This is where the Nisus Corporation comes into play. Based in Tennessee, Nisus manufactures a variety of environmentally friendly pest control products.

Their granular bait product, sold under the name “Niban”, works unlike other pesticides because it isn’t a real poison. Compared to table salt in toxicity, Niban actually works by altering an insect’s digestive process. After insects ingest Niban, they are unable to absorb the nutrients from the delicious glue, wood or table scraps they had been feasting on before, and starve to death. Humans, pets, birds, fish and amphibians who accidentally eat some of the granules are not affected.

The main ingredient in Niban is Boron, formulated with other ingredients that attract pests. According to Nisus, “Niban poses very low impact to the environment…since boron is already found in virtually all ecosystems…as the Niban granules dissolve, the borates simply become part of the background levels of boron [which is an essential micronutrient for plants and animals].”

Just because the bait is environmentally friendly, does not make it less effective: The Niban Jug just needs a quick shake to deposit the granules on the ground while you walk the perimeter of the building. Smaller granules are available for placement inside the smaller nooks and crannies inside the home. These granules can handle up to 4 inches of rain, are not prone to mold, and don’t degrade with exposure to the sun.

The ominous sound of the shaking Niban jug , should send pests running for the hills.

On a side note: Nisus also developed termiticides made with their patented Borate solution for pre-treatment of building areas. This is a greener alternative and provides long term protection against termites.

In a story today in the Los Angeles Times entitled “To slow global warming, install white roofs,” author Margot Roosevelt reports on a recent study that concludes, if you take it at face value, that all we have to do is paint all of our urban rooftops and pavements white and “the global cooling effect would be massive.”

“According to Hashem Akbari, a physicist with the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, a 1,000-square-foot roof — the average size on an American home — offsets 10 metric tons of planet-heating carbon dioxide emissions in the atmosphere if dark-colored shingles or coatings are replaced with white material… Globally, roofs account for 25% of the surface of most cities, and pavement accounts for about 35%. If all were switched to reflective material in 100 major urban areas, it would offset 44 metric gigatons of greenhouse gases.”

It would be interesting to understand exactly what Akbari means by this. Is this 44 metric gigatons per year? If not, over what period of time would reflective roofs collectively offset these 44 gigatons? Considering all the nations of the world combined are still emitting somewhat less than 30 gigatons per year, this is a very impressive statistic, no matter how you slice it.

Dr. Akbari’s study isn’t what one should necessarily question, however. We have always insisted the role of land use changes are greatly underestimated when assessing regional climate trends; from tropical deforestation to enhanced thermal absorption due to aquifer depletion to urban heat islands. More pertinent is why the role of urban heat islands – dismissed by the press as a Crichtonian fabrication – has never had credibility, but suddenly the global cooling potential of urban cold islands is cause to legislate? Read the IPCC’s 4th Summary for Policymakers (watch out, it’s 3.6 MB) – you will note the role of land use in causing global warming is minimized, and the role of urban heat islands is negligible. Can you have it both ways?

Another interesting paradox here is the following statement from the report “Globally, roofs account for 25% of the surface of most cities, and pavement accounts for about 35%.” Well maybe if we let people have yards again instead of cramming them into cluster homes, there would be enough land for people to plant trees and create an urban canopy. And if our cars are all soon to run on wind and solar power, maybe we should quit trying to force people out of them and into government operated light rail, busses, and “jitneys.”

The real take-away here is, once again, that there is very little certainty regarding the causes, the severity, or even the direction of climate change. The rhetoric and the conventional wisdom is way behind the latest science and observational data. The policymakers and pundits who have ridiculed the notion of an urban heat island are the same people who are uncritically reporting we must now make every road and roof reflective to mitigate this heat island. There’s nothing wrong with making rooftops reflective to save energy – but does every sensible green product have to incorporate avoiding doomsday in their marketing and lobbying strategy?

Climate change is not a trivial issue. Concern about climate change is nothing to be mocked. But if you removed from the alarmist coalition the people who condone this alarm because they like the side effects – bigger government, more funds for environmental groups, nonprofits and academia, more taxes so the public sector can avoid fiscal reform, more subsidies and regulations so large corporations can crush emerging corporations, and greater energy independence – the only good side effect on that list – you aren’t left with much. At the least, journalists and scientists should recover their innate skepticism, the lifeblood of their professions, and not abdicate their responsibility to point out this contradiction – the IPCC dismisses the heat island effect, yet today’s latest scientific study claims if we made our cities reflective “the global cooling effect would be massive.”

Even if California “only” ends up with 25% renewable electricity within the next decade or two, there is going to be a staggering amount of investment pouring into wind and solar power, and with intermittant sources of energy, massive storage infrastructure is just as necessary as the generating infrastructure. In our analysis of Prop. 7, California’s Proposition 7, the initiative that calls for 50% renewable energy by 2025, we estimated compliance would require about 500 gigawatt-hours of renewable electricity generating capacity per day. For wind power, based on installation costs of $2.5 million per megawatt ($2.5 billion per gigawatt), and yields of 17.5%, this would require a total investment of nearly $300 billion. The estimated total cost for solar, at today’s prices, was considerably higher than this (bear in mind the cost for solar energy is going to drop faster and further than the cost for wind energy in the coming years). But what about the cost for storage infrastructure?

California’s wind-rich areas

In a perfect world, parked electric cars will harvest intermittant energy – wind at night, solar during mid-day, and release that energy during the demand peak.

In a perfect world, 2nd and 3rd generation smart metering systems at homes will allow everyone’s car to act as a micro utility, an automated fiduciary, purchasing power when the spot price is low and selling power when the spot price is high.

In a perfect world, cars that store 10-50 kilowatt-hours of electricity will buffer intermittant sources, and storage infrastructure requirements will be reduced. Will electric cars proliferate as fast as intermittant generators? Will they always be parked and collecting power at the right times? Apart from electric cars performing this function, how much storage capacity are we going to need?

In California the demand peak is around 50 gigawatts, and the off-peak minimum can get as low as 20 gigawatts. The time of peak demand is between 5 p.m. and 10 p.m., when appliances are operating along with flat screen TVs and PCs. During this period, when the sun is down and the wind yields aren’t yet at maximum output, at least 25% of California’s daily electricity draw is consumed, about 250 gigawatt-hours. It is reasonable to assume most of the renewable energy used to fulfill this demand will have to come from stored wind, and stored solar. So what would it cost to store 100 gigawatt-hours of energy?

The sodium-sulphur battery

Yesterday we had the opportunity to speak briefly with David MacMillan, CEO of Megawatt Storage Farms, Inc., a company that is developing large scale electricity storage using NAS (sodium-sulphur) batteries. He claims that “not including site acquisition and preparation,” storage technology using NAS batteries would come to about $350,000 per megawatt-hour. This means the cost to load balance California’s grid, should 50% of her energy come from solar or wind sources, would probably run about $35 billion dollars. This figure doesn’t include transmission upgrades, nor does it include site acquisition and preparation, but it also doesn’t take into account the potential of electric vehicles (or other private decentralized storage solutions) to absorb some of the required storage capacity. Objections to renewable energy in general, and proposition 7 in particular, probably cannot rest on the storage and load balancing challenges, insofar as they only represent about 10% of the required investment.

For more information about utility scale electricity storage technologies, reference our posts Utility Electricity Storage, General Compression, Solar Thermal Storage, and Gridpoint’s Storage+, to name a few. For more information about sodium sulphur batteries, visit the technical specifications page for NAS Batteries on the website of NGK Insulators, Ltd., a major manufacturer of these batteries. For more information on how these batteries work, and where they are being deployed, read About Sodium-Sulfur (NaS) Batteries, on the excellent Fraser Domain Energy Blog (where have you gone?), or the USA Today report < href="http://www.usatoday.com/tech/products/environment/2007-07-04-sodium-battery_N.htm"a title="New battery packs powerful punch">New battery packs powerful punch.

In a post last week entitled “Debate vs. Demonization” we questioned the tendency on the part of global warming alarmists to demonize anyone who wishes to question the reality, the scope, the causes, or the prescriptions for global warming. We referenced one recent exchange between Dr. Roger Pielke Sr., a renowned climatologist who has raised such questions, and one of his detractors. In this exchange, the person who had attacked Pielke made the following statement:

“At the risk of talking science, Dr. Pielke takes specific exception to my reporting of the average global temperature over the past 10 years. I hate to get into duelling graphics, in part because it would encourage people to think that Pielke’s choice of graphs is relevant, but here is the UK MET office Hadley Centre’s most recent record of global average temperature. To the degree that this might be considered a discussion about science, I stand my ground.”

What if the earth is cooling, and we are planning for warming?

If you click on this link, the graph you see is not terribly ambivalent. Temperatures are shown to be rising, and if all you knew was how to read a bar graph, and had no reason to doubt the veracity of the data, it would be alarming. So I asked Dr. Pielke to provide background on the Hadley Centre’s data, and here is his response:

On the data plotted at the UK MET office Hadley Centre; they present land surface data back to 1850 with all of the problems (including warm biases) with such information as we summarized, for example, in our JGR paper, Pielke Sr., R.A., C. Davey, D. Niyogi, S. Fall, J. Steinweg-Woods, K. Hubbard, X. Lin, M. Cai, Y.-K. Lim, H. Li, J. Nielsen-Gammon, K. Gallo, R. Hale, R. Mahmood, S. Foster, R.T. McNider, and P. Blanken, 2007:
Unresolved issues with the assessment of multi-decadal global land surface temperature trends.
J. Geophys. Res., 112, D24S08, doi:10.1029/2006JD008229.

Also refer to our GRL paper, Lin, X., R.A. Pielke Sr., K.G. Hubbard, K.C. Crawford, M. A. Shafer, and T. Matsui, 2007: An examination of 1997-2007 surface layer temperature trends at two heights in Oklahoma.
Geophys. Res. Letts., 34, L24705, doi:10.1029/2007GL031652.

On the ocean surface temperatures, there are also a set of problems as reported recently, for example, by David Thompson and in the CCSP report on surface and tropospheric temperature trends.

More importantly for your discussion, is the absence of further temperature increase (even with the warm biases with the surface data) in the last 7 years.

A more robust data set is:

http://www.ssmi.com/msu/msu_data_description.html

[Figure 7] which accurately diagnoses the tropospheric temperatures back to 1979. In Figure 7 see, for example, the plot for TLT where there is even a global cooling recently.

Anyone who thinks the truth about climate change matters should take a look at sources Pielke references; especially the data on the SSMI website (above), Figure 7 in particular, which will appear if you scroll about 3/4 of the way to the bottom of the page. In Figure 7 there are four graphs of temperature data, each of them corresponding to a given altitude, including a trend line for each. The first two graphs depict temperature sensor data for the Lower Troposphere (altitudes up to 5,000 meters) and Middle Troposphere (5,000 to 10,000 meters), and show a warming trend of .169 C/decade and .096 C/decade, respectively. This equates to a 1.0 C temperature rise every 60 years in the lower troposphere and every 104 years in the middle troposphere. But both of these graphs show a significant drop in temperatures in the last few years.

The next two graphs depict temperature data and trend lines for the lower stratosphere (15,000 to 25,000 meters) and the troposphere/stratosphere (10,000 to 15,000 meters). The graph for the lower stratosphere shows a cooling trend of -.019 C/decade, and the graph for the troposphere/stratosphere shows a cooling trend of -.334 C/decade. Returning to Pielke’s response:

The discussions of the global surface temperature trend issue by Roger Pielke Jr. are also insightful:

Visually Pleasing Temperature Adjustments

Real Climate on Meaningless Temperature Adjustments

Does the IPCC Main Conclusion Need to be Revisited?

See also the discussions of this issue at:

Do IPCC Projections Falsify?, and

IPCC Central Tendency of 2C/century: Still rejected

as well as Lucia’a other postings on this on her website:

http://rankexploits.com/musings/.

The question is, will anyone read this material if they already have made up their minds?

Cows are notorious for lazily standing around, nonchalantly chewing their cud while staring into space. Ambitious cows may also spend some time swatting the occasional fly with their tails. It is a simple life, constantly inundated with bouts of flatulence and burps. In fact, the global cattle population is the largest contributor of methane gases in the atmosphere: The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) estimates that cattle “account for about 28% of global methane emissions from human related activities”.

There are 1.2 billion cows in the world, each equipped with four stomachs full of flora that release gases during the digestive process. Each cow emits over 600 liters of methane created when bacteria in their gut break down all the fibers swallowed by the animal. Globally, livestock produces 80 million metric tons of methane annually! That is a whole lot of gas.

How will small family owned dairies be able to afford the state-certified consultants to track animal emissions, fill out mandatory reports, and meet their methane-offset obligations?

Argentina’s National Institute of Agricultural Technology conducted a unique study that tested the amount of methane released by individual cows. Methane is a concern, since it is 23 times more effective than carbon dioxide at absorbing heat.

Researchers attached plastic inflatable packs to the cows. Once the cows adjusted to having a red balloon strapped to their backs, they began eating as usual and provided researchers with the required data: The ‘balloon’ backpacks soon filled up with gas collected by an attached tube than ran from the device to the cows’ stomachs. This gas was then analyzed, allowing researchers to determine that an average 550 kg cow released over 800 liters of methane daily. This is much more than expected and provided evidence that cows could account for 30% of methane emissions in Argentina

In order to reduce to the amount of methane released, cows are occasionally fed grasses that are easier to digest than grains like alfalfa. Gramina, an Australian biotechnology company, is even engineering a special grass that will help cut down on all the bovine burping.

Burping is considered rude at the dinner table, but who knew it was such a big environmental issue?

Check out more info at the Epa’s ruminant livestock page

Related article can be found at Reuters

At the risk, yet again, at incurring the wrath of the true believers, it is time to continue the debate regarding the cause of climate trends, and indeed, the direction of the trends themselves. But conducting a debate on this most sensitive issue invites more than civil debate. The issue of climate change has been succesfully framed as a moral issue, and debate is no longer politically correct. To persist in debating this issue, despite mounting evidence – both scientific and economic – that debate is vital, is to risk being marginalized and demonized.

Our favorite climate website, Climate Science, is operated by Dr. Roger Pielke, Sr., a climatologist at the University of Colorado. We highly recommend anyone who wants to see just how little we still know about climate to visit this website regularly. Pielke asserts climate change is real, but mostly regional in nature, and anthropogenic influences such as aerosol emissions and changes in land use, if anything, are more significant than CO2 emissions.

Pielke’s main conclusions, might be summarized as follows:

1. Climate change study should focus more on regional and local scales.
2. Global surface temperature trend assessments are flawed.
3. Global warming is not the equivalent to climate change.
4. Ocean heat content change is the most significant factor in diagnosing and monitoring global warming and cooling.
5. The role of CO2 in climate change is overstated.
6. Global climate models have not made accurate predictions to-date.
7. Controlling CO2 is an inadequate policy to influence regional climate trends.

This is a crude distillation of Pielke’s conclusions and one should read his website and read the more detailed summaries he has compiled to make a fair assessment of his position. But if you study his conclusions, and follow his updates, it is clear this is the work of someone who is both highly qualified and nuanced in his outlook. But qualified and nuanced isn’t enough for the true believers.

Questioning the role of anthropogenic CO2 in climate change has nothing to do with whether or not one cares deeply about environmental values.

For his refusal to simply adhere to global warming alarmism, Pielke has now earned the ire of desmogblog, a website that states “we’re here to clear the pollution that clouds the science on climate change.” In their post criticizing Pielke, entitled Roger Pielke Sr. Attacks Messenger, Injures Self, author Richard Littlemore takes issue with a recent post on Climate Science where Pielke criticizes reporting on hurricanes. In this post, entitled “Hurricanes and Global Warming – A Disconnect,” Pielke cites a recent example to illustrate his point that mainstream media tends to reinforce the perception that hurricane intensity is on the rise because of rising global temperatures.

It is interesting to read the exchanges between DeSmogBlog & Pielke. We’re well familiar with these guys because they decided to launch an assault on EcoWorld a few months ago entitled “EcoWorld – A Website Officially Unconcerned with Accuracy.” In this masterful hit piece, Littlemore highlights a disclaimer we include on EcoWorld – a disclaimer that is standard issue for any website that includes in their content financial analysis, and makes this disclaimer the centerpiece of their attack. Without going into the details of their attack, nor our response, it is obvious Littlemore and his colleagues at DeSmogBlog are skilled professionals. As Littlemore states in his recent exchanges with Pielke:

“The DeSmogBlog has only a passing interest in science and (as previously demonstrated, sometimes painfully) no avowed scientific expertise. Our interest AND our expertise is in public relations – particularly in the manipulation of the public climate change argument by people who have abandoned science in favour of advocacy…”

We are not interested in attacking DeSmogBlog. But we are interested in defending people like Dr. Pielke Sr., who themselves, in our view, are challenging bias with at least as much integrity as Mr. Littlemore. It is time for people to look for hidden agendas on both sides of this debate over climate change; the scope, the causes, and the proposed policies we support as a result. And it is time to stop demonizing people who are willing to question the conventional wisdom; time to stop saying “the debate is over.”

There are environmental challenges of undeniable urgency – dead zones along our coastlines, tropical deforestation, depleted aquifers, collapsing fisheries; the list goes on. And this focus on reducing CO2 emissions, which may well have nothing to do with anything, will almost certainly take the spotlight away from these other environmental issues. And to attempt to marginalize the work of Roger Pielke Sr., who is uncovering valuable information about various causes of regional climate change, is counterproductive, to put it mildly.

All organisms have the amazing ability to process all kinds of substances that enter their bodies-separating food into smaller components to be absorbed in the blood stream as energy, while the useless particles are eventually excreted. Our bodies try and make the most out of everything that passes through, turning any possible nutrient into a useful component. Food and minerals entering the body are transformed into proteins, energy or the ever popular; fat. Bedminster Industries named an integral part of their patented carbon-reducing technology the ‘digester’ that separates garbage into non-renewable waste and carbon-rich compost, thus mirroring the effect of any digestive system.

According to their homepage, Bedminster Bio-Conversion (1970 to 1999) and Bedminster AB (1999 to 2003) developed the Bedminster Technology as a waste to compost solution for municipalities in the USA, Australia and Japan.

Garbage arrives at a facility and is transferred to the Bedminster Digester. The Digester dutifully separates this waste into non-biodegradable and biodegradable portions. Just like any digestive process, the Bedminster Digester first breaks down the biodegredable materials with the help of natural enzymes and mechanical motions. It takes about two days for the final biomass (or compost) material to form. The output materials then run over a sifter (or trommel) where the smaller compost materials easily pass through the grid while the unchanged materials,such as bottles, plastic bags, and other non-biodegradable items, are too large to do the same. The materials that fall through the trommel are called “unders”.

Bedminster explains that “the now homogenized organic rich “Unders” are formed into windrows in the fully enclosed Maturation Hall. Here the material spends 21 days being aerated and systematically turned. Monitoring ensures that the material is turned at least 3 times at no less than 2 days intervals attaining a minimum temperature of 60°C (140°F) between turnings to ensure that the final compost is fully sanitized.” A final screening stage occurs where a vibrating screen removes any inorganic particles like pebbles and glass and a magnet separates out the metals for further recycling.

The digester is extremely efficient, separating 95% of the biomass found in the delivered waste. By diverting this waste from landfills, Bedminster reduces greenhouse gas emissions and obviously ensures that precious energy isn’t wasted. Energy generated by the facility is also sold and offsets the CO2 generated at a power-plant: The biogas formed in the digester when the biomass is heated is stored in tanks and fed to turbines and engines that power electrical generators.

Companies like Bedminster are increasingly successful in a world where fuel is a valuable resource and environmentally friendly alternatives appeal to investors.