This post is part of blog action day. Those participating in blog action day are supposed to “Publish a post on their blog which relates to an issue of their own choice pertaining to the environment.” Blogging about the environment shouldn’t be too hard; most of my posts are about the environment. What can I blog about today? Hmm… Al Gore won some award for doing nothing. But everyone and their mom has already blogged about that. Maybe European Cities Tackling Climate Change? Sounds too much like a football game. No, I’ll be taking on a slightly larger problem. I’m going to solve the world’s energy problems with this single blog post. Sound too good to be true? Read on.

The population of the world is increasing incredibly fast, as seen below. With the addition of more people to the planet, our energy demands also increase. In and of itself, an increase in energy demand is not a big problem. The problem lies in the fact that a large percentage of our energy supply is in the form of non-renewables such as coal and oil. There seems to be a lot of politics with respect to the issue of peak oil, but sooner or later we’re going to run out. If that time comes before an alternative form of energy is found, it won’t be pretty. I’m going to suggest solar power, and will show here basic, “back-of-the-envelope” calculations regarding solar power.

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This is my comment at Stoat about sea level rise at Tuvalu and its relation to An Inconvenient Truth (AIT).

It’s been awhile since I’ve seen AIT, so I needed to look at an unofficial transcript to see where Gore mentioned Tuvalu. And according to that transcript, he doesn’t. (I am unsure as to the accuracy of the transcript, but it is probably better than my memory.) The unofficial transcript does have him saying “That’s why the citizens of these pacific nations had all had to evacuate to New Zealand” at the end of the section about the Antarctic Peninsula Sea Ice.

Assuming he’s talking about the people of Tuvalu, I find these references, some from popular press, some from peer-reviewed journals, and some from non-peer reviewed journals.
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Last week Dr. John Reagan gave a seminar talk about the CALIPSO Lidar and Airborne HSRL aerosol measurements. He presented an overview of the satellite, covered its launch, and discussed its products. CALIPSO is a satellite remote sensing instrument in a polar sun-syncronous orbit designed to measure aerosols and aerosol influences in the atmosphere. CALIPSO carries aboard the Cloud-Aerosol Lidar with Orthogonal Polarization (CALIOP) instrument. This is an active remote sensing device. A passive system which measures the reflected sunlight or emitted thermal infrared radiation. Therefore, an active system directs radiation towards the ground and measures the attenuated backscatter. This works good during the nighttime hours, but not so well during the daytime. This is due to thermal instability; when the sun’s radiation hits the satellite, it heats up and causes unknown changes in the optics, sensor, or electronics. This leads to issues with calibrating the sensor.

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Uncertainty in the sensitivity of Arctic sea ice to global warming in a perturbed parameter climate model ensemble

Abstract: The retreat of Arctic sea ice is a very likely consequence of climate change and part of a key feedback process, which can accelerate global warming. The uncertainty in predictions in the rate of sea ice retreat requires quantification and ultimately reduction via observational constraints. Here we analyse a climate model ensemble with perturbations to parameters in the atmosphere model. We find a large range of the sensitivity of Arctic sea-ice retreat to global temperature change, from 11 to 18% per °C. This is placed in the context of the uncertainty obtained by alternative model ensembles. Reasons for the different sensitivities are explored and we find that differences in the amount of ocean and atmospheric heat transported from low to high latitudes dominates over local radiative contributions to the heat budget. Furthermore, we find no significant relationship between the uncertainty in sea ice response to climate change and climate sensitivity.

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