A major glacier in Greenland might be breaking apart. That’s the buzz this week in the polar science community after a big new iceberg emerged at Petermann Glacier in far northwest Greenland. Scientists first spotted an extensive network of cracks in Petermann earlier this year. The worry is that those cracks may widen during the next few weeks, the warmest part of the short Greenland summer.
Petermann is one of the largest and most important glaciers in the world, with a direct connection to the core of the Greenland ice sheet. That means that even though this week’s new iceberg at Petermann is just 1/500th the size of the massive one that broke off the Larsen C ice shelf in Antarctica earlier this month, it could eventually have a much bigger effect on global sea levels. Scientists believe that if Petermann collapses completely, it could raise the seas by about a foot.
Major breakups also happened at Petermann in 2010 and 2012, but the location of the current cracks suggests the glacier could soon shrink to its smallest size in recorded history. Research conducted in the last two years has shown that it’s melting from both below and above, speeding up its eventual collapse. Another recent study showed that meltwater from Greenland is now the leading cause of global sea-level rise, increasing more than five-fold since 1993. Not good.
Read more at Cracked
For two days in early August 2014, the 400,000 residents in and around Toledo, Ohio, were told not to drink, wash dishes with, or bathe in the city’s water supply. A noxious, pea green algae bloom had formed over the city’s intake pipe in Lake Erie and levels of a toxin that could cause diarrhea and vomiting had reached unsafe levels.
The bloom, like the others that form in the lake each summer, was fed by the excessive amounts of fertilizer nutrients washed into local waterways from surrounding farmland by spring and summer rains. Efforts are underway around the Great Lakes — as well as other places plagued by blooms, like the Gulf of Mexico and Chesapeake Bay — to reduce nutrient amounts to control the blooms, which can wreak havoc on the local ecology and economy.
But new research shows that climate change is going to make those efforts more and more difficult. As warming temperatures lead to increases in precipitation, more nitrogen, one of those nutrients feeding the blooms, will be washed into the nation’s waterways, the work, detailed in the July 28 issue of the journal Science, finds.
The biggest increases in such nitrogen loading will likely come in the Midwest and Northeast, areas already seeing the biggest uptick in heavy downpours.
The findings show the urgency of coming up with policies to reduce nutrient overloads, and the importance of keeping climate change in mind when devising them.
Read more at Climate Change Means More Fuel for Toxic Algae Blooms
In July 2017 District Court Judge Manish Shah, U.S. District Court of Northern Illinois, handed a decisive victory to nuclear energy supporters and plant owners in a case that challenged Illinois’s right to choose the mix of fuels used to produce power inside its borders.
The plaintiffs opposed the “Future Energy Jobs Act” recently passed by the Illinois legislature and signed into law by the governor. That statute awards Zero Emission Credits (ZEC) to three specific nuclear generating units (two at the Quad Cities station and one at Clinton).
The ZECs could be worth as much as $235 M each year. That additional revenue is designed to be sufficient to allow the owner – currently Exelon – to continue effectively operating the units despite unprofitably low prices at their respective power delivery points. A provision in the law requires the computation of a “Price Adjustment” based on realized wholesale prices over the course of each year.
The price adjustment can reduce or eliminate the value of the ZEC if electricity market prices rise to a level at which the plants are profitable without the subsidy payment.
This provision was inserted to keep the program from charging ratepayers to provide unnecessary levels of support that would only serve to provide a more lucrative return to stockholders.
Read more at Clean Nuclear Energy Handed Decisive Win in U.S. District Court
U.S. senators have rejected efforts by the White House to slash funding for energy and scientific research, calling the cuts “short-sighted” in a report published by the Senate Appropriations Committee.
The report, written by the Senate appropriations subcommittee on energy and water development, recommends continuing funding for most programs at or near current levels, including for the Department of Energy and the Interior Department — contradicting calls from the White House and the House of Representatives to drastically cut budgets for science, energy, and environmental research, Science magazine reported.
In its May budget request, for example, the White House proposed eliminating the Department of Energy’s Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy (ARPA-E), which works to advance basic research into new energy technologies. Senate appropriators, led by Republican Lamar Alexander of Tennessee and Democrat Dianne Feinstein of California, rejected the plan, proposing an 8 percent boost to the agency’s budget instead. “The Committee definitively rejects this short-sighted proposal,” the Senators wrote. They also expressly forbade the Department of Energy from terminating ARPA-E, calling the agency a “transformational program.”
The White House proposed cutting the DOE’s budget for biological and environmental research by 43 percent to $349 million. Instead, Senators called for a 3 percent increase, raising its budget to $630 million. The White House proposed reducing the Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy’s budget from $2.1 billion to $636 million for the 2017-2018 fiscal year. The Senate appropriations subcommittee on energy and water development proposed reducing it to $1.94 billion instead.
Read more at Senators Reject Budget Cuts to Science and Energy Programs
A new report shows through documents and testimony how utilities researched climate change and determined in the 1970s that they could force a shift away from coal.
A study issued Tuesday by an energy watchdog group offers important new insights into the fossil fuel industry's extensive early understanding of climate change and the risks it poses.
This time, it's the electric utility sector that's under the microscope.
The detailed study, backed up by reams of archival documents, was issued by the Energy and Policy Institute, an environmental advocacy and research group that favors the use of clean energy over fossil fuels.
Forty years ago, the documents show, industry officials told Congress that the looming problem of climate change might require the world to back away from coal-fired power—something that is only now beginning to happen.
The research presents a distinct echo of an investigation of Exxon's climate record published by InsideClimate News almost two years ago, and casts significant new light on the duration and depth of industry's climate research—and how electric companies that use fossil fuels responded to the emerging science from the 1960's onward.
The 66-page report unearths research documents and testimony published but then largely forgotten decades before the climate crisis emerged as a key public issue.
And in this episode of the nation's climate history, once again the same industry that foresaw the ultimate end of coal as a main fuel for power generation later supported actions to cast doubt on the science and to stave off policies to address the problem, funding groups that deny the scientific consensus and joining the main industry group that opposed participation in the first climate treaty. To this day, there are few federal limits on emissions of carbon dioxide by utilities, one of the biggest sources of greenhouse gases.
Read more at Like Exxon, Utilities Knew about Climate Change Risks Decades Ago
