Consensus Emerging on 2012

The scientific community is slowly waking up to the reality that this current collapse of long term sea ice, unless reversed and that is also no small trick now, is going to be complete as early as five years or by 2012. It took them a year from my own postings last year, but then it was reasonable to see what happened this year. What happened is that there was no significant reversal.

We may now be about to embark on a decadal strong chilling of the northern hemisphere but that is the minimum requirement to reverse what is going on. If not and with only a normal climate as of the past twenty years, we can expect to see the majority of the long term ice to be gone by 2012.

Meanwhile, this year as of a few days ago, both the Northwest Passage and the Northeast Passage opened up for navigation for the first time ever. I am pleased to see that the Northeast Passage opened. This was a normal year in terms of winds and the like and I had despaired of this passage ever been opened. In fact the map as of Sunday showed the Northeast Passage cleared back from land by huge distances and taking the presence of a major island whose name I have not checked to partially present a risky choke point if the winds were to shift.

http://www.socc.ca/seaice/seaice_current_e.cfm

This could mean that we are entering an era in which it will become normal for both passages to open up for a month or so. This fact has not been lost on ship owners who are contemplating a short direct route between the Atlantic and the Pacific for the first time.

Some of the more enthusiastic are calling for an ice free Arctic. I do not see that at all. I expect to see winter ice driven into packs that survive the summer and then migrate and get broken up the next summer. What we have lost is stable areas of accumulating sea ice that become very thick and steel like.

Actual navigation to the area of the North Pole will continue to be an adventure while the two passages can become busy and successful ocean routes.

While the areal extent is still likely slightly more than last year, it is distributed more normally this year and I have little reason to think that the loss of gross perennial ice is not continuing.

In the meantime we continue to get opining over the fate of the Greenland ice cap. My answer to that is nothing much. It did not disappear during the Bronze Age which was warmer for two thousand years, although that may also reflect the persistence of extensive remnants of the Laurentide ice sheet in the Arctic. If that is in fact the case, then perhaps we need to worry.

However, it looks more stable than that and the most we need fear is a modest retreat of the glaciers which we are in fact seeing. And again, the only way that the sea level is going to rise is if we see an abrupt collapse of a major part of the Greenland ice cap. We are nowhere near that.

This winter promises to be major test of competing ideas about global temperatures and the next five years will determine a lot about the relationship to sunspot activity. We will need to revisit this theme, but in the meantime we can enjoy the last days of the arctic summer.

Arctic ice may melt completely within ten years.

Tags: arctic ice, sea level

There are worrying reports that the Arctic sea ice is melting at a faster rate than last year, despite the colder weather. Information from the US National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC) shows that the year began with ice covering a larger area than at the beginning of 2007. However by the beginning of summer the ice had diminished to the same levels as June last year – breaking the records for sea ice loss. The ice is melting easily as it is so thin and scientists are now predicting that the Arctic seas may be ice-free during the summer within five to ten years.

“We had a bit more ice in the winter, although we were still way below the long-term average,” said Julienne Stroeve from NSIDC in Boulder, Colorado. “So we had a partial recovery. But the real issue is that most of the pack ice has become really thin, and if we have a regular summer now, it can just melt away”.

Despite NASA’s reports in March, that the area covered by sea ice had increased slightly from 2007, most of the ice is thin, formed during the previous winter. It is more fragile than the thicker, less saline floes that have been around for several years.A few years ago, scientists were predicting that the Arctic ice would have melted in the summer by about 2080. Then computer models started projecting earlier dates, around 2030 to 2050. In the summer of 2007 the Arctic sea ice reduced to the lowest amount ever recorded; 4.2 million sq km from 7.8 million sq km in 1980. By the end of last year, a research group had predicted the ice melting entirely as early as 2013.

“I think we're going to beat last year's record melt, though I'd love to be wrong,” said Dr Stroeve. “If we do, then I don't think 2013 is far off any more. If what we think is going to happen does happen, then it'll be within a decade anyway.”

Despite this eminent loss off ice being environmentally catastrophic, countries surrounding the Arctic are seizing up the economic opportunities that melting ice could expose. Canada and Russia are exploring sovereignty claims over tracts of Arctic seafloor, while President George Bush has recently encouraged more oil exploration in US waters, possibly with intent to extend the exploration to reserves off the Alaskan coast.

In their rush to maximize the situation economically, countries are not reflecting enough upon the climatic problems this will cause. Greenland has already lost ice into the ocean, contributing to the gradual rise in sea levels. The Arctic ice cap could increase sea levels globally by about seven metres if it all melted. Natural climatic cycles such as the Arctic Oscillation play a role in year-to-year variations in ice cover. Many scientists feel that the ice is now so thin there is little hope of preventing the melting cycle.

“If the ice were as thick as it was in the 1970s, last year's conditions would have brought a dip in cover, but nothing exceptional. But now it's so thin that you would have to have 0an exceptional sequence of cold winters and cold summers in order for it to rebuild,” said Dr Ian Willis, from the Scott Polar Research Institute in Cambridge. This does not bode well for the future of the Arctic ice.

For the first time in human history, the North Pole can be circumnavigated

Melting ice opens up North-west and North-east passages simultaneously. Scientists warn Arctic icecap is entering a 'death spiral'

By Geoffrey Lean, Environment Editor

Sunday, 31 August 2008

Open water now stretches all the way round the Arctic, making it possible for the first time in human history to circumnavigate the North Pole, The Independent on Sunday can reveal. New satellite images, taken only two days ago, show that melting ice last week opened up both the fabled North-west and North-east passages, in the most important geographical landmark to date to signal the unexpectedly rapid progress of global warming.

Last night Professor Mark Serreze, a sea ice specialist at the official US National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC), hailed the publication of the images – on an obscure website by scientists at the University of Bremen, Germany – as "a historic event", and said that it provided further evidence that the Arctic icecap may now have entered a "death spiral". Some scientists predict that it could vanish altogether in summer within five years, a process that would, in itself, greatly accelerate.

But Sarah Palin, John McCain's new running mate, holds that the scientific consensus that global warming is melting Arctic ice is unreliable.

The opening of the passages – eagerly awaited by shipping companies who hope to cut thousands of miles off their routes by sailing round the north of Canada and Russia – is only the greatest of a host of ominous signs this month of a gathering crisis in the Arctic. Early last week the NSDIC warned that, over the next few weeks, the total extent of sea ice in the Arctic may shrink to below the record low reached last year – itself a massive 200,000 square miles less than the previous worst year, 2005.

Four weeks ago, tourists had to be evacuated from Baffin Island's Auyuittuq National Park because of flooding from thawing glaciers. Auyuittuq means "land that never melts".

Two weeks later, in an unprecedented sighting, nine stranded polar bears were seen off Alaska trying to swim 400 miles north to the retreating icecap edge. Ten days ago massive cracking was reported in the Petermann glacier in the far north of Greenland, an area apparently previously unaffected by global warming.

But it is the simultaneous opening – for the first time in at least 125,000 years – of the North-west passage around Canada and the North-east passage around Russia that promises to deliver much the greatest shock. Until recently both had been blocked by ice since the beginning of the last Ice Age.

In 2005, the North-east passage opened, while the western one remained closed, and last year their positions were reversed. But the images, gathered by Nasa using microwave sensors that penetrate clouds, show that the North-west passage opened last weekend and that the last blockage on the north- eastern one – a tongue of ice stretching down to Russia across Siberia's Laptev Sea – dissolved a few days later.

"The passages are open," said Professor Serreze, though he cautioned that official bodies would be reluctant to confirm this for fear of lawsuits if ships encountered ice after being encouraged to enter them. "It's a historic event. We are going to see this more and more as the years go by."

Shipping companies are already getting ready to exploit the new routes. The Bremen-based Beluga Group says it will send the first ship through the North-east passage – cutting 4,000 nautical miles off the voyage from Germany to Japan – next year. And Canada's Prime Minister, Stephen Harper, last week announced that all foreign ships entering the North-west passage should report to his government – a move bound to be resisted by the US, which regards it as an international waterway.

But scientists say that such disputes will soon become irrelevant if the ice continues to melt at present rates, making it possible to sail right across the North Pole. They have long regarded the disappearance of the icecap as inevitable as global warming takes hold, though until recently it was not expected until around 2070.

Many scientists now predict that the Arctic ocean will be ice-free in summer by 2030 – and a landmark study this year by Professor Wieslaw Maslowski at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, California, concluded that there will be no ice between mid-July and mid-September as early as 2013.

The tipping point, experts believe, was the record loss of ice last year, reaching a level not expected to occur until 2050. Sceptics then dismissed the unprecedented melting as a freak event, and it was indeed made worse by wind currents and other natural weather patterns.

Conditions were better this year – it has been cooler, particularly last winter – and for a while it looked as if the ice loss would not be so bad. But this month the melting accelerated. Last week it shrank to below the 2005 level and the European Space Agency said: "A new record low could be reached in a matter of weeks."

Four weeks ago, a seven-year study at the University of Alberta reported that – besides shrinking in area – the thickness of the ice had dropped by half in just six years. It suggested that the region had "transitioned into a different climatic state where completely ice-free summers would soon become normal".

The process feeds on itself. As white ice is replaced by sea, the dark surface absorbs more heat, warming the ocean and melting more ice.

David Evans Recants

This article out on the clear lack of any linkage between CO2 and global warming can hardly be starker. David Evans direct involvement in the science and data gathering around the global warming – CO2 hypothesis put him in the position of been an informed apologist for the theory. Thus his recanting any support for the position is very important. It is always difficult to pry oneself loose from a position that you have loyally supported in good faith. It was surely difficult for him.

Again, shifting global temperatures and rising CO2 is not disputed. The idea that they are linked is in question as I have always maintained in this blog.

What this article adds that I find new is that a CO2 causation hypothesis as with any other hypothesis must have a hotspot that is a direct result of the predicted behavior. As he makes very clear, that signal is completely missing.

This does not take away from the fact that the environment has failed to suck up all the CO2 that we have produced or that responsible husbandry means that we do something about it. Which over the next generation we certainly can.

The globe, and let us be a little more precise and say the northern hemisphere, has warmed about a half degree to a degree over the last one hundred years. Our unreliability over land measurements creates an error range that could even account for this apparent gain.

The only fact that we can be sure does not simply fit inside the historical range of conditions over the two hundred years, is that the severe cold of the little ice age has now fully abated. Growing grapes in England is surely once again an option and once the permafrost is gone in Greenland, the dairy industry can restart.
The loss of perennial sea ice fits this scenario very nicely.

In the meantime our satellites have observed a recent temperature drop of .6 degrees. They had observed a modest rise since they began back in 1979. This will be worth monitoring over the next year to see how responsive it really is and how sustained this drop is.

I do not want to sound suspicious, but one of the most insidious problems with computer supported continuous data gathering is that baseline algorithms that are updated without independent correction systems can accumulate rounding errors. This usually leads to a positive or negative trend line that eventually leads to a recalculation and an abrupt reset.

Of course I do not have the data to look at, so we have assumed this abrupt change is real. Is it sustainable? Why is such an abrupt change possible? Where did the heat go?

The only thing that we can be sure of this year is that the perennial sea ice is continuing its collapse. The press is now starting to call it a death spiral which it is. Unless that purported .6 degree temperature decline turns into a three to four degree drop in the Arctic, there is nothing to halt this trend. We shall see.

I had thought that the historical land temperature work up had been largely settled, including the urban island problem. However, we have already had recent corrections that put the current regime on a par with the 1930’s. He does reopen the issue and I would like to see more on it. A corrective fudge factor could produce a lot of error all by itself.

Why I recanted

'There is no evidence to support the idea that carbon emissions cause significant global warming'
David Evans, Financial Post Published: Saturday, August 30, 2008

I devoted six years to carbon accounting when I built models for the Australian Greenhouse Office. I am the rocket scientist who wrote the carbon accounting model (FullCAM) that measures Australia's compliance with the Kyoto Protocol, in the land use change and forestry sector.

FullCAM models carbon flows in plants, mulch, debris, soils and agricultural products, using inputs such as climate data, plant physiology and satellite data. I've been following the global warming debate closely for years.
When I started that job in 1999 the evidence that carbon emissions caused global warming seemed pretty good: CO2 is a greenhouse gas; the old ice core data; no other suspects.

The evidence was not conclusive, but why wait until we were certain when it appeared we needed to act quickly? Soon governments and the scientific community were working together and lots of science research jobs were created. We scientists had political support, the ear of government, big budgets and we felt fairly important and useful (well, I did anyway). It was great. We were working to save the planet.

But since 1999, new evidence has seriously weakened the case that carbon emissions are the main cause of global warming, and by 2007 the evidence was pretty conclusive that carbon played only a minor role and was not the main cause of the recent global warming. As Lord Keynes famously said, "When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do, sir?"

There has not been a public debate about the causes of global warming and most of the public and our decision makers are not aware of the most basic salient facts:

1. The greenhouse signature is missing. We have been looking and measuring for years, and cannot find it.

Each possible cause of global warming has a different pattern of where in the planet the warming occurs first and the most intensely. The signature of an increased greenhouse effect is a hot spot about 10 km up in the atmosphere over the tropics. We have been measuring the atmosphere for decades using radiosondes: weather balloons with thermometers that radio back the temperature as the balloon ascends through the atmosphere. They show no hot spot. Whatsoever.

If there is no hot spot then an increased greenhouse effect is not the cause of global warming. So we know for sure that carbon emissions are not a significant cause of the global warming. If we had found the greenhouse signature then I would be an alarmist again.

When the signature was found to be missing in 2007 (after the latest IPCC report), alarmists objected that maybe the readings of the radiosonde thermometers might not be accurate and maybe the hot spot was there but had gone undetected. Yet hundreds of radiosondes have given the same answer, so statistically it is not possible that they missed the hot spot.

Recently the alarmists have suggested we ignore the radiosonde thermometers, but instead take the radiosonde wind measurements, apply a theory about wind shear, and run the results through their computers to estimate the temperatures. They then say that the results show that we cannot rule out the presence of a hot spot. If you believe that you'd believe anything.

2. There is no evidence to support the idea that carbon emissions cause significant global warming. None. There is plenty of evidence that global warming has occurred, and theory suggests that carbon emissions should raise temperatures (though by how much is hotly disputed) but there are no observations by anyone that implicate carbon emissions as a significant cause of the recent global warming.

3. The satellites that measure the world's temperature all say that the warming trend ended in 2001, and that the temperature has dropped about 0.6 degrees Celsius in the past year (to the temperature of 1980). Land-based temperature readings are corrupted by the "urban heat island" effect: urban areas encroaching on thermometer stations warm the micro-climate around the thermometer, due to vegetation changes, concrete, cars, houses.

Satellite data is the only temperature data we can trust, but it only goes back to 1979. NASA reports only land-based data, and reports a modest warming trend and recent cooling. The other three global temperature records use a mix of satellite and land measurements, or satellite only, and they all show no warming since 2001 and a recent cooling.

4. The new ice cores show that in the past six global warmings over the past half a million years, the temperature rises occurred on average 800 years before the accompanying rise in atmospheric carbon. Which says something important about which was cause and which was effect.

None of these points are controversial. The alarmist scientists agree with them, though they would dispute their relevance.

The last point was known and past dispute by 2003, yet Al Gore made his movie in 2005 and presented the ice cores as the sole reason for believing that carbon emissions cause global warming. In any other political context, our cynical and experienced press corps would surely have called this dishonest and widely questioned the politician's assertion.

Until now, the global warming debate has merely been an academic matter of little interest. Now that it matters, we should debate the causes of global warming.

So far that debate has just consisted of a simple sleight of hand: show evidence of global warming, and while the audience is stunned at the implications, simply assert that it is due to carbon emissions.

In the minds of the audience, the evidence that global warming has occurred becomes conflated with the alleged cause, and the audience hasn't noticed that the cause was merely asserted, not proved.

If there really was any evidence that carbon emissions caused global warming, don't you think we would have heard all about it ad nauseam by now?

The world has spent $50-billion on global warming since 1990, and we have not found any actual evidence that carbon emissions cause global warming. Evidence consists of observations made by someone at some time that supports the idea that carbon emissions cause global warming. Computer models and theoretical calculations are not evidence, they are just theory.

What is going to happen over the next decade as global temperatures continue not to rise? The Australian Labor government is about to deliberately wreck the economy in order to reduce carbon emissions. If the reasons later turn out to be bogus, the electorate is not going to re-elect a Labor government for a long time. When it comes to light that the carbon scare was known to be bogus in 2008, the ALP is going to be regarded as criminally negligent or ideologically stupid for not having seen through it. And if the Liberals support the general thrust of their actions, they will be seen likewise.

The onus should be on those who want to change things to provide evidence for why the changes are necessary. The Australian public is eventually going to have to be told the evidence anyway, so it might as well be told before wrecking the economy. - David Evans was a consultant to the Australian Greenhouse Office from 1999 to 2005.

Martin Roscheisen updates Nanosolar

This is just out from Nanosolar. For the record, I have never seen such a level of financial support from such significant players this early in a corporation’s development. The investor’s ability to both complete due diligence and to do back up research is a given and is surely at play here. This company is moving forward on a mountain of cash even perhaps more vigorously than Google did (the owners of Google are major investors here). I have no doubt that the IPO will be a gimme.

As a reminder, they produce a tool for $2,000,000 that produces sufficient solar cells in a year to replace one nuclear power plant at an initial selling price of $1.00 per watt. This means that they can surely produce it down to a price of $0.25 per watt. I have no doubt that the installed cost of this energy will fall below all other sources of energy.

Even more important, as you can see from the rest of the company blog, they are building small in order to intercept the transmission system itself just before it reaches the customers. This will eliminate the need for high voltage transmission which is responsible for huge unavoidable energy losses. I was not joking when I have written in the past that a dollar bill is sitting at the top of the dam while as little as $.15 actually reaches the application point. Now perhaps a dollar of collected solar energy will deliver fifty cents to the application point.

These numbers that I am throwing around are not refined but you get the idea and we are not too far off.

The advent of cheap solar energy now pushes the low cost hydrogen production that we have recently posted on and will push the development of an efficient hydrogen storage technology. It is obvious that surplus solar energy needs to be stored and doing it with hydrogen is as obvious provided the turn around is fairly cheap. I do not have precise details as yet but the enthusiasm at MIT suggests that that is now nicely solved.

We still have to store it all but there are plenty of methods if we need them for lack of a great solution. Even a large balloon full of gas works. I suspect that we will see some of the metal hydrides dusted off again.

For those who follow this blog, we have generally commented on any and all alternatives that pop up. They all have their champions and are all worthy if the cost of energy is high or inconvenient. Breezing into the middle of the boreal forest with a balloon wind power generator makes eminent sense compared to any and all alternatives.

However there occasionally comes along a technology that can put any and all others out of business forever.

Printed solar cells are about to do just that. This means that any and all alternatives need to be financed in such a way that closure upon payout is a practical option. I cannot make this any more clearly. Grid power is now obsolete.

The world that we are shortly entering will ultimately use ethanol for long haul transportation because of the convenience of onboard fuel storage and the ease of production as an engineered alga product or several viable alternatives. Everything else will use solar energy directly with hydrogen acting as a storage system.

This means also that we have the option of ending all oil production and natural gas production with what likely will be a much cheaper alternative even at ten dollars a barrel.

Nanosolar Ups Funding to $1/2 Billion; Partners Strategically for Solar Utility Power

As part of a strategic $300 million equity financing, Nanosolar has added new capital and brought its total amount of funding to date to just below half a billion U.S. dollars.

Last December, we introduced the Nanosolar Utility Panel(TM) to enable solar utility power — i.e. giving utility-scale power producers the solar panel technology to build and operate cost efficient solar power plants.

The tremendous demand for our unique product was matched by the desire to support us in scaling its availability even more rapidly and ambitiously.

Today we are pleased to announce that we have received strategic backing by partners ideally suited to accelerate the implementation of this business — in the form of product supply agreements, strategic collaboration, and equity investments.

As part of the transaction, the boards of directors of AES Corporation (one of the world's largest power companies), the Carlyle Group, EDF (the world's largest electric utility), and Energy Capital Partners signed off on investments into Nanosolar through Riverstone Holdings, EDF Renewables, and simultaneously formed AES Solar. A fraction of the oversubscribed Nanosolar equity round also included financial investors such as Lone Pine Capital, the Skoll Foundation, and Pierre Omidyar's fund as well as returning investors including GLG Partners, Beck Energy, and Conergy founding investor Grazia Equity. The transaction closed in March 2008.

The alliance for solar utility power is the outcome of a year long effort on behalf of our strategic partners examining the solar industry, investigating virtually every solar company on the planet, and conducting one of the most thorough due diligence efforts on our manufacturing operation, our scale-up capabilities, and our readiness for the level of cost efficiency demanded by solar utility power. We are honored to have been selected as the company of choice to partner with by such a distinguished and sophisticated group.

The new capital will allow us to accelerate production expansion for our 430MW San Jose factory and our 620MW Berlin factory. (Earlier, Nanosolar secured a 50% capex subsidy on its Germany based factory.)


Going All-Electric August 7, 2008 By Martin enRoscheis, CEO

The following is one of my favorite charts: How far a car can drive based on either of the following forms of energy, each produced from 100m x 100m (2.5 acres) of land: (cut for this post)

How come that biofuel does not really cut it? Electric cars are about four times more energy efficient than fuel based cars. This is because fuel engines mostly creates heat and thus wastes the majority of the energy units available. Combine this with biofuel plants not being very efficient solar energy harvesters relative to semiconductor based solar electricity, and the result is this huge difference.

In other words, it is clear that if the goal is to maximize energy efficiency, the end point to go after is all-electric cars everywhere. Moving all of transportation to all-electric would essentially cut in half our overall energy consumption without compromising on distance to go.

I for one have vowed that the Prius I bought six years ago will have been the last fuel powered car I'd buy in my life. (Given that I may very well own the highest-mileage Prius on the planet, this presumably reflects my confidence in the quality of this vehicle and the near-term readiness of electric car technology…) Presently, it is baking in the sun all day while I'm at work. My future all-electric car would charge up while idling under a solar carport.

Nanosolar Receives U.S. Senate Environment Award // Getting a Federal RPS Right

U.S. Senator Barbara Boxer and her staff today visited Nanosolar to tour our factory and present us with the U.S. Senate Conservation Champion award. We are honored to be awarded this recognition — thank you very much!

During our meeting with the U.S. Senator, we discussed the importance of getting a Federal RPS right in 2009.

Getting a Federal RPS Right

The state level Renewable Portfolio Standards (RPS) we have today are limited in a key way: They are primarily geared towards large-scale, centralized generation, i.e. power plants of larger than 50MW in size. That's the old mindset — preferring one 300MW plant over thirty 10MW plants.

But a lot of today's action and opportunity in renewables is in decentralized 1-10MW generation, including municipal solar power plants and other forms of power generation at the local level. No well-designed RPS should have a built-in bias against small & medium sized power generation.

For instance, in California, we have one policy framework (the California Solar Incentives, CSI) for sub-1MW solar installations, connected locally; and we have an RPS that works for >20MW power generation, connected to transmission lines. In between we have a policy gap for renewable generation of one to twenty MW in size, which is often directly connected into the municipal grid, i.e. without having to use transmission lines:

No federal energy policy should favor big power plants over medium sized ones; and the state level policies should be reworked in this regard too.

Specifically, by avoiding the substantial expense and energy loss associated with transmission infrastructure, small and medium sized power plants have an economic benefit to the public, and this ought to be reflected as a corresponding commercial benefit.

Another key element to get right in the next generation of RPS is better transparency and project pipeline predictability. Only a predictable environment will be an investible one. One way of achieving good predictability are standard contracts which the utilities have to accept.

Bill Quigley's Post on Katrina

This sad posting is circulating through the internet and is self explanatory. It is an ongoing picture of a classic failure of political leadership that has now unfolded for three full years and has yet to be arrested and corrected by the federal government.

Without question Katrina overwhelmed and initially swamped the available standby resources. And the errors that made New Orleans so vulnerable were known and largely ignored. None of that matters.

When a major disaster strikes, it is the responsibility of the federal Government to get on a war footing immediately and move heaven and earth to quickly resolve the disaster. It is the final insurance. And resolving the disaster means immediate and quick action.

The simple matter of clearing condemned buildings should have been an immediate response. In fact, major burn outs should have been conducted to largely reduce the debris to remove and to also partially sterilize the soils. It is not pleasant but this happens when the city is already fully abandoned and before any significant population returns. The alternative was to convert the bulk of the city into an open uninhabitable garbage dump perpetuating an unimaginable environmental disaster.

This was also the time to recognize that the city needed to abandon all land that was below sea level for residential occupation and to throw it open to commercial usage or parkland, In the case of New Orleans, that left little of the city to work with but still salvaged the old city.

Residential could then be established miles away on high ground and linked by rapid transit to the old city as has been done by a growing number of cities who have recognized the virtue of such multiple city centers. Transferring ownership rights from the city to such new centers is easy and final.

This all took leadership. There was none and there certainly was no sign of a contingency plan for this completely predictable event. It is obvious that a proper evacuation was not even possible had the decision been made in time.

What gives me pause is that I see little evidence of preparedness anywhere for such a disaster. Imagine a ten foot tsunami breaching on the waterfront of Los Angeles. Or a magnitude eight earthquake in the Mississippi Valley to match the new Madrid quake of 1812. Or Mount Rainier or Mount Baker evaporating and putting several cubic miles of ash in the air. How about a ten foot tsunami rolling up the Hudson? The point is that these are all rather unlikely but actually possible. There surely are a lot more possibilities we have absolutely no evidence of, let alone a warning.

It took the war of 1812 for the USA to discover the value of professional soldiers and quit appointing political friends to handle life and death situations. We need to broaden the mandate of the military to include direct management of a disaster zone. They alone have the immediate call on the resources needed and the planning and preparation culture needed. It is foolish duplication to create an alternative organization. After all, war is a managed disaster inflicted preferably on your enemy.

Katrina Pain Index: New Orleans Three Years Later
by: Bill Quigley, t r u t h o u t Perspective
Truthout Original - Tuesday 26 August 2008
http://www.truthout.org/article/katrina-pain-index-new-orleans-three-years-later

Katrina hit New Orleans and the Gulf Coast three years ago this week. The president promised to do whatever I took to rebuild. But the nation is trying to fight warsin several countries and is dealing with economic crisis. The attention of the president wandered away. As a result, this is what New Orleans looks like today.

0. Number of renters in Louisiana who have received financial assistance from the $10 billion federal post-Katrina rebuilding program Road Home Community Development Block Grant - compared to 116,708 homeowners.

0. Number of apartments currently being built to replace the 963 public housing apartments formerly occupied and now demolished at the St. Bernard Housing Development.

0. Amount of data available to evaluate performance of publicly financed, privately run charter schools in New Orleans in 2005-2006 and 2006-2007 school years.

.008. Percentage of rental homes that were supposed to be repaired and occupied by August 2008 which were actually completed and occupied - a total of 82 finished out of 10,000 projected.

1. Rank of New Orleans among US cities in percentage of housing vacant or ruined.

1. Rank of New Orleans among US cities in murders per capita for 2006 and 2007.

4. Number of the 13 City of New Orleans Planning Districts that are at the same risk of flooding as they were before Katrina.

10. Number of apartments being rehabbed so far to replace the 896 apartments formerly occupied and now demolished at the Lafitte Housing Development.

11. Percent of families who have returned to live in Lower Ninth Ward.

17. Percentage increase in wages in the hotel and food industry since before Katrina.

20-25. Years that experts estimate it will take to rebuild the City of New Orleans at current pace.

25. Percent fewer hospitals in metro New Orleans than before Katrina.

32. Percent of the city's neighborhoods that have less than half as many households as before Katrina.

36. Percent fewer tons of cargo that move through Port of New Orleans since Katrina.

38. Percent fewer hospital beds in New Orleans since Katrina.

40. Percentage fewer special education students attending publicly funded, privately run charter schools than traditional public schools.

41. Number of publicly funded, privately run public charter schools in New Orleans out of total of 79 public schools in the city.

43. Percentage of child care available in New Orleans compared to before Katrina.

46. Percentage increase in rents in New Orleans since Katrina.

56. Percentage fewer inpatient psychiatric beds compared to before Katrina

80. Percentage fewer public transportation buses now than pre-Katrina.

81. Percentage of homeowners in New Orleans who received insufficient funds to cover the complete costs to repair their homes.

300. Number of National Guard troops still in City of New Orleans.

1,080. Days National Guard troops have remained in City of New Orleans.

1,250. Number of publicly financed vouchers for children to attend private schools in New Orleans in program's first year.

6,982. Number of families still living in FEMA trailers in metro New Orleans area.

8,000. Fewer publicly assisted rental apartments planned for New Orleans by federal government.

10,000. Houses demolished in New Orleans since Katrina.

12,000. Number of homeless in New Orleans even after camps of people living under the bridges have been resettled - double the pre-Katrina number.

14,000. Number of displaced families in New Orleans area whose hurricane rental assistance expires in March 2009.

32,000. Number of children who have not returned to public school in New Orleans, leaving the public school population less than half what it was pre-Katrina.

39,000. Number of Louisiana homeowners who have applied for federal assistance in repair and rebuilding who still have not received any money.

45,000. Fewer children enrolled in Medicaid public healthcare in New Orleans than pre-Katrina.

46,000. Fewer African-American voters in New Orleans in 2007 gubernatorial election than in 2003 gubernatorial election.

55,000. Fewer houses receiving mail than before Katrina.

62,000. Fewer people in New Orleans enrolled in Medicaid public healthcare than pre-Katrina.

71,657. Vacant, ruined, unoccupied houses in New Orleans today.

124,000. Fewer people working in metropolitan New Orleans than pre-Katrina.

132,000. Fewer people in New Orleans than before Katrina, according to the City of New Orleans current population estimate of 321,000 in New Orleans.

214,000. Fewer people in New Orleans than before Katrina, according to the US Census Bureau current population estimate of 239,000 in New Orleans.

453,726. Population of New Orleans before Katrina.

320 million. Number of trees destroyed in Louisiana and Mississippi by Katrina.

368 million. Dollar losses of five major metro New Orleans hospitals from Katrina through 2007. In 2008, these hospitals expect another $103 million in losses.

1.9 billion. FEMA dollars scheduled to be available to metro New Orleans for Katrina damages that have not yet been delivered.

2.6 billion. FEMA dollars scheduled to be available to State of Louisiana for Katrina damages that have not yet been delivered.

[Bill is a human rights lawyer, a law professor at Loyola University New Orleans and author of the forthcoming book, "STORMS STILL RAGING: Katrina, New Orleans and Social Justice." A version with all sources included is available. Bill's email is quigley77@gmail.com.

For more information see the Greater New Orleans Community Data Center and Policy Link. http://www.gnocdc.org/index.html]

Shifting Economic Winds

We are heading into the last four months of the year, a time which usually sees an increase in investment activity and generally improving economic strength. That means we can expect a rebirth in investor optimism to offset the barrage of negative press we have been subjected to this past year. It is truly necessary this time around.

The subprime disaster has shrunk the capital base of our banking system both here and globally. The huge amount of excess liquidity pumped into the economy has been sponged up through direct losses. We now have a chastened financial sector that has perhaps caught the religion of financial prudence.

That leaves one pending problem. A massive wave of bad paper has worked its way through the system almost choking it. Various newsletters have reported that a much greater wave of refinance paper will be coming due over the next eighteen months. Accepting this as true, we face the most serious financial crisis since the Great Depression that could handily reduce the value of assets to dimes on the dollar and collapse the money supply. If true, the only escape will be my prescription of refinancing by a mark to market strategy. And I doubt if anyone is listening.

The true question is how true is this? I am skeptical. The fact is that Cleveland and those developer paradises in the west were the sweet spot for debt promotion. They loaded up fast and rather quickly ran out of participants. Those chickens came home to roost and have now been handled the hard way.

A lot of asset debt was then put out to folks who had a creditable plan for paying it back as is still happening. That is actually business as usual. The only difficulty is that their assets are now priced at a level that forces them to pay of those loans the old fashioned way and most will.

The equity markets have been reduced by twenty percent over the past year while this scary news was absorbed. It is now absorbing the impact of expensive energy which will take most of the next twelve months. This may squeeze another ten percent out of the market.

That will then be followed by an explosive bull market in equities driven by the rapid conversion of industry to low cost alternative energy regimes. The solutions already exist and the tooling up has begun.

For those who like predictions, I expect static power to soon drop below $1.00 per watt and I expect us to vacate the oil trade causing that price regime to drop well below $50.00 a barrel. In ten years I expect oil to be under $10.00 a barrel because we will have quit using it as a fuel and static power to be at the price equivalent of pennies per watt. That is were we are going.

We just have a little turmoil to go through in lieu of good planning. The conversion is totally feasible now and direct action can make it all very quick. The problem, if any, is the efforts of special interests to push their doubtful solution into the regulatory environment. This is the history of the corn ethanol mess. It never made any sense, but that never stopped anyone.

As I have discovered, wetland cattail starch production can bury us in ethanol at a rate that is likely ten times more productive than any dry land crop. And we have unlimited wetlands to work with that actually need the attention. Then we can enter the boreal forest if we ever need more land. If ethanol can be produced from corn at $1.00 to $2.00 per liter from corn, it is a cinch to produce it a lot cheaper from cattail starch while producing unlimited supplies of cattle fodder from the non starch component.

And then we have our modified alga that just cranks out sugar and easily convertible cellulose.

The point is that we can already bury the world in ethanol without using any food production land and do it at a low cost with modern farm technology and equipment.

The global conversion to the use of ethanol can soon be in full swing.

Arctic Calm

My favorite sea ice maps came up again after a three week absence. The winds have not done what they did last year and the sea ice is more broadly distributed this year. Therefore, it looks like any movement in the Northwest Passage is problematic this year. There is plenty of ice at various points that are usually clear by now. It is not tight packed but it is certainly a navigation hazard. It will take good luck this year to move anything large although small vessels may have no problem.

More interestingly only a negligible amount of the sea ice is showing one hundred percent coverage. That means that all that ice has also warmed up to ambient ranges for ice and little retains the steel like cold of winter that large blocks might be expected to do. I see no evidence that the annual loss of net ice mass has abated at all. The downward spiral is continuing. We unfortunately do not have a reliable proxy for ice mass but breaking the trend line now will need a very dramatic increase in the thickness of winter ice with a cool summer that retains a lot of that ice. In short we need a volcano to blow up.

In the meantime, I see little evidence that the discharge of atmospheric heat that took place between 2005 and 2007 is been replenished very fast if at all. The sunspot crowd would certainly argue against any replenishment whatsoever. In fact it is reported a couple of months back that global temperatures dropped three quarters of a degree. Whatever that meant, it has certainly silenced a lot of the run away global warming crowd.

What is becoming more evident to me is that the Earth’s heat engine is operating on far longer cycles than anyone gives it credit for. The reason for that conjecture is the measurable lag between the heating spell of the nineties and the heat discharge event of 2005 to 2007. Certainly the long warm spell has been followed by a protracted warming of the Arctic. This could be simply the result of a transfer mechanism that is not overly robust except in extremis.

Without question our atmosphere is very good at correcting local heat disturbances through mechanisms such as hurricanes. We should have anticipated a long period of low hurricane activity after the blowout of 2005. That was the historic record. And it all shows us that the resolution of our climate models is still hopeless.

In any event, we did not have a very warm summer. I wonder if the winter will be as surprising as last year’s.

The Arctic has had almost a hundred years free from major volcanic activity. The last such event was Novarupta/Katmai, in 1912 in Alaska. It was during this time that the Peace River area of Alberta was opened up to settlers and I have it on good report that the winters were unusually long and awful. The point is that there has been no forced cooling on the Arctic since. So perhaps it is not surprising that we now have enough surplus heat in the Arctic to maintain pressure on the sea ice every year.

As my readers are aware, I think that there is ample indication that the primary cooling mechanism for the Arctic outside of the normal seasonal cycle is the occasional injection of volcanic gas and dust directly into the polar zone. We certainly have a convincing culprit standing by.


In the meantime this news story is waxing somewhat more enthusiastic than I can justify with the areal maps of the fifteenth. Here is hoping that a nifty algorithm is at work and this is not simply journalistic license. Otherwise it is a good update on current coverage and we have plenty of eyeballs this year.

U.S. scientists sound alarm over Arctic ice as Harper poised for visit

Randy Boswell , Canwest News Service

Published: Monday, August 25, 2008

With an election-primed Stephen Harper poised to touch down Tuesday in Inuvik to begin a three-day visit to northern Canada, scientists tracking the ongoing Arctic meltdown are sounding new warnings about the state of the polar environment in an era of evidently rapid climate change.

The latest satellite analysis of this summer's sea-ice retreat, released Monday by the U.S. National Snow and Ice Data Center, showed a decline close to matching last year's record-setting thaw, and experts at the Colorado-based centre noted that key Arctic shipping routes have now opened in both the Canadian Arctic archipelago and in Russia's northern waters.

"Sea ice extent is declining at a fairly brisk and steady pace," the NSIDC said, reporting a total retreat to about 5.5 million square kilometres with up to three weeks of melting left to go.

Sea ice extent is declining at a fairly brisk and steady pace, the U.S. National Snow and Ice Data Center has warned.

Last year's retreat reached an all-time low of about 4.3 million square kilometres by mid-September, a melt that has stoked unprecedented international interest in Arctic shipping, tourism and oil and gas development.

"Amundsen's Northwest Passage is now navigable," the centre said, referring to the southerly route near the Canadian mainland first traversed by Norwegian explorer Roald Amundsen in 1906. "The wider, deeper Northwest Passage through Parry Channel may also open in a matter of days. The Northern Sea Route along the Eurasian coast is clear."

That news follows a series of reports in recent days highlighting the impact of rising temperatures across the world's northern latitudes - a newly discovered crack threatening a Greenland glacier; eroding shorelines in communities across the Canadian Arctic; and polar bears swimming in dangerously open waters of the Chukchi Sea north of Alaska, far from the safe harbour of any land or ice floe.

"There were some years when some bears may have had to swim as far as 100 miles," Steven Amstrup, the senior polar bear scientist with the United States Geological Survey in Alaska, told the New York Times this week. "Now the ice is much farther offshore, more consistently and for longer. So the possibility of long distances between land and sea ice is much greater."

Meanwhile, a U.S. study published Sunday in the British journal Nature Geoscience suggests thawing permafrost in polar regions will unlock up to 60 per cent more carbon dioxide than previously believed, potentially amplifying the greenhouse effect already widely blamed for the current Arctic warming.

Biochar Review and A.D.Karve Postings

A.D. Karve is an active contributor to the terra preta list and is a botanist by training. His observations and experiments are well worth reviewing. I have extracted a number of his postings on the subject of biochar.

It may be too early to suggest that a consensus currently exists, but it is fair to say that opinion is converging on several key points.

1 Biochar and by inference terra preta is typically produced in the mid temperatures (plus and minus around 350 degrees Fahrenheit). Production at other higher temperatures is also officious with less residual. It is produced primarily from non woody plant waste in order to provide a fine carbon powder with maximum yield in the all critical surface area. Wood charcoal is just as useful after crushing but normally has a fuel market and is diverted.

2 The powdered charcoal acts as a catalytic sponge for free ions in the soil. The use of the word catalytic is a bit unfair since all we expect is that the receptor sites in the charcoal will grab a free ion and hold it until such time as a biological agent removes it. However, it does get the idea across and I am hardly the first to overuse this word. This mechanism retains nutrients in the working soil while preventing nutrient loss through leaching.

3 The evidence to date suggests that this goes far beyond a mere retention usage. It appears to facilitate the rapid reconstruction of a high quality soil base even in wasted lands and even hostile soils with little remaining organic content. This was unexpected but it appears that we are going there. It is now possible to suggest that it is possible to construct a rich fertile soil many inches deep starting in the middle of the desert in a time span of perhaps twenty years. This is an apparently wild claim but every thing that I have seen combined with our limited knowledge earned to date supports this conjecture.

4 This actually makes total sense. The retention of nutrients particularly nitrogen, allows organic material to be reduced with a limited loss into the atmosphere as CO2. The soil can then be manufactured swiftly.

5 To date every problem soil this has been tried on has eventually generated positive results including land ruined by excess salinity. That is the most important problem where irrigation has wreaked the soils over thousands of years. In fairness, we are still in early days. In fact the work cited here is as good as it gets to date. However, we are approaching the point were hundreds and thousands will start working with these precepts.

6 The char is easily produced by either an earthen kiln, not unlike that used for indigenous charcoal making with waste wood, or the simple expedient of a sheet metal drum set on a bed of sticks to provide limited air flow with a lid to control the fire started on top of the charge. None of this is elegant but is will produce a satisfactory yield while disposing of all the farm waste at little new cost.

7 It is very easy to wax enthusiastic on this subject when a five thousand year field trial conducted by the Indios in Brazil supported a civilization of millions on the worst tropical soils ever. The reason it never found its way into other areas was simply that these other areas never produced enough plant waste to make a noticeable difference. Today that is easily solvable. I have posted on corn stover and bagasse as feedstocks. And the wood chipper is also producing a viable feedstock for the satisfactory production of biochar. Modern equipment will allow us to use our ingenuity to reduce all agricultural and woodland waste to biochar without an excessive expense.

8 It is a reasonable conjecture that the application of powdered charcoal to soils will eliminate the majority of fertilizer wastage now producing oceanic dead zones. It will also quickly reduce the need for fertilizer to vastly lower levels.

9 Vast tracts of well watered tropical and semi tropical lands are very suitable for this technology as well as those lands already been exploited for agriculture. Thus before any effort is expended on more arid lands, it appears that we can expect a massive increase in agriculture in these areas. For starters, the multi year slash and burn cycle will disappear forever.

10 I have accepted a long soil gestation cycle as a reasonable assumption. In fact there is no evidence to suggest that is the case. The first application of biochar should establish good production if not immediately, certainly by the next season as the soil responds. Ten to twenty years of continuous cropping and biochar application should produce a thick rich soil that then requires no further biochar. Field trials may end this process a lot sooner. The remote fields of the Indios were named terra mulato because the charcoal content was present but visibly lower but still significant. I do not have a grade yet, but since one initial season of corn culture can produce respectable carbon content (one to two tons per acre) it is very possible that the direct manufacture of a remote field was a one time effort that paid off for years.

The one point that we should recognize is that all other soils will also need extensive field testing before the local advisory agencies can get fully behind its universal implementation. It is not that we already know the answers – we do – it is just that a field test establishes best local practice and any noteworthy anomalies. Even after all that is said, every farmer will want to run his own test plot in order to both see the results on his ground but also to learn methodology. The good news, is that we are now approaching this threshold of activity.






Dear List,
a former colleague of mine conducted a study of the slash and burn agriculture in the Western Ghats mountain range in India. The farmers generally cultivate a plot for about 5 years. Every year the yield is lower than in the previous year. The plot is abandoned after 5 years becasue the yield is down to unacceptably low level. Weeds, wild herbs and grasses take over the ababdoned land. Some woody plants also establish themselves in this plot of land. After a fallow period of about 10 years, the vegetation on the land is again destroyed by slashing and burning and the land is again brought under cultivation. My colleague conducted soil analysis before and after every crop, and he found that the soil analysis did not change over the five year period of cultivation, and yet the yield dropped every year. He explained this phenomenon by the fact that it was not the soil fertility that diminished over the years, but that the soil was washed away by heavy rains and also because the land sloped. Thus, at the end of the fifth year, hardly a couple of inches of soil was left in the field.
Yours


Dear List,
soil micro-organisms need the same elements as green plants. In soils that are phosphate deficient, the phosphate solubilizing bacteria have a distinct advantage over others because they have the ability to get phosphorus out of phosphatic compounds that are normally insoluble and therefore not available to organisms in the soil. Whenever one applies an organic nutrient compound to the soil, the soil micro-organisms multiply by feeding on the organic nutrient, which primarily provides them with carbon. The mineral ions and molecules are obtained by them from the soil solution. But if the soil solution is deficient in phosphorus, application of an organic nutrient to the soil would automatically lead to a selective increase in the population of phosphate solubilizing bacteria, because only the PSB have the ability to multiply in such soils. Two of my students are currently conducting experiments to test if this hypothesis is correct.
Yours

Dear Mr.Astrupgaard,
when I used the word carbon source, I meant food containing carbon. Please note that nobody can use charcoal as food. The green plants use carbon dioxide as their carbon source. The non-photosynthetic organisms use digestible organic substances like carbohydrates, organic acids etc. as their carbon source. So rotting vegetation and compost also form a part of their food. The nitrogen fixing bacteria need energy to fix nitrogen, to conduct their own metabolism and also to multiply. This energy comes from the carbon in the food that they consume. The carbon gets converted into carbon dioxide in this process. That is why they all, including all animals, need a carbon source in the form of an easily digestible organic compound. As long as they live, the N-fixing organisms do not give the nitrogen fixed by them to any other organism, but use it in their own metabolism and reproduction. The molecules and ions (nitrogen, phosphorus, potash, iron, boron, etc.) in their cells become available to other organisms only when they die. Animals generally need ready made proteins, fats, vitamins etc. for survival. The micro-organisms generally need only a good source of carbon like sugar or a polysaccharide. They can synthesize their own proteins, vitamins etc. using inorganic salts containing the essential minerals.
Yours

Dear Sean,
the azotobacter are free living bacteria and as long as they have a carbon source available to them, they go on multiplying and utilizing the fixed nitrogen for their own metabolism and reproduction They die when the carbohydrates and other sources of carbon available to them are exhausted. In fact that is the basis of my application of 25 kg sugar per ha to the soil once every three months. The sugar increases the number of micro-organisms in the soil, and when the sugar is exhausted, they die. The nutrients released from the dead cells become available to the green plants. The nitrogen fixing microbes do not provide nitrogen to others as long as they are living. The case of rhizobium is altogether different. They are held captive in the root nodules and work like a part of the plant itself. They are fed by the green plants and the green plants extract amino acids from them. In the case of cyanobacteria, the ntrogenous compounds are stored in special perennating organs called heterocysts. Even when the Cyanobacteria die, the heterocysts survive in the dry soil as propagules, from which the next generation of cyanobacteria arises the next year. I am not saying that phytohormones can substitute nitrogenous fertilizers. I was only trying to explain the 10 to 15 % higher yield that is recorded whenever the cyanobacteria are applied to rice fields and I also gave my interpretation of the ecological significance of why the Cyanobacteria promote the growth of rice. There are enough reports in literature of 10 to 15% yield increase caused by substances like triacontanol (a C30 alcohol), organophosphatic insecticides, etc. which have growth promoting effect. Even urea spreayed as 2% solution gives similar effect. It is not caused by the nitrogen in the urea but it is due to the growth stimulating effect of urea.
Yours


Dear List,
there is a school of thought that believes that the free living nitrogen fixing organisms do not give any nitrogen to other organisms, Fixing atmospheric notrogen requires huge expenditure of energy (e.g. look at Haber-Bosch process). When an organism spends that much energy on fixing atmospheric nitrogen, why should it give it to other organisms? In India, cyanobacteria are recommended to be applied to rice fields. There are enough data to show that this treatment causes about 10 to 15% yield increase in rice. Assuming that the cyanobacteria do not give nitrogen to rice, but that they promote growth of rice through plant growth promoting substances, I conducted experiments in which I germinated seeds of barley in a culture filtrate of cyanobacteria and demonstrated that such a filtrate did actually have plant growth promoting property. The plant growth promoting property of cyanobacteria was demonstrated by us even in the case of kidney beans and wheat. Most of the growth promoting substances work at concentrations of 5 to 10 p.p.m. Therefore, plant growth promoting substances are used in quantities that can be measured in grams per hectare, whereas nitrogen being a fertilizer chemical is required in kilogram quantities. So, if the soil micro-organisms want the green plants to grow more vigorously, it makes sense for them to exude phytohormones into their environment than lose to the environment the nitrogen fixed by them so laboriously. It costs them much less energy to produce phytohormones. The question now arises as to why the microbes should promote the growth of green plants. As far as the cyanobacteria in rice paddies are concerned, if the rice plants developed a thick canopy, the growth of green algae would be restricted, because the photosynthetically active radiation would be absorbed by the leaves of rice. Thus, by promoting the growth of rice, the cyanobacteria eliminate the competition from green algae. In the case of other plants, the bacteria may be getting more sugar or more root exudates if the green plants grew more vigorously.
Yours

Dear Martin,
I really do not know, how much char is to be applied per hectar. But I can tell you how to make char out of your burnable organic waste. The simplest device is a top-lit updraft kiln. It consists of a vertical cylinder, having relatively small holes near its base for primary air. You fill the cylindrical body of the kiln with the material to be charred and then light it from the top. Once the fire gets going, you place a lid on the cylinder. There is a chimney built into the lid. The lid does not sit flush on the kiln, but there is a gap between the lid and the kiln. The draft created by the chimney sucks secondary air into the chimney, where it gets mixed with the pyrolysis gas to burn it. The biomass burns downwards, leaving a layer of charcoal on top. As the primary air comes upwards, it meets the burning front which traverses downwards. The burning biomass utilises all the oxygen in the primary air, so that the air going up through the layer of char has only carbon dioxide, carbon monoxide, nitrogen and the pyrolysis gas left in it. As there is no oxygen left in the updraft air, it cannot burn the char that has formed above the burning biomass.The pyrolysis gas and carbon monoxide burn in the chimney, because of the secondary air that is sucked in through the gap between the chimney and the kiln. You have to find out by trial and error, how long it takes to char the material loaded in the kiln. After that much time is over, you remove the lid, and extinguish the fire by sprinkling water over the burning material. This particular device is portable and manually operated. There are larger charring kilns, based on the oven and retort process. Prof. Yuri Yudkevich, a Russian scientist, has made them for charring useless material generated by the timber industry in Russia. We are already using both types of kilns under field conditions in India for charring agricultural waste as also urban waste. We have a video CD that describes the kilns and you can fabricate them by watching the video CD. I have not used Prof. Antal's kiln and have absolutely no idea how it operates. Our web site
www.arti-india. org would show you how to get our CDs by paying us through Pay Pal.

Molasses do have some minerals in them, but the idea that I am propagating is, that one provides the soil microbes only with a carbon source and that they take up the rest of the minerals from the soil solution. I had mentioned in a previous communication, that the water of guttation of many plants contained sugar (e.g. sorghum) or organic acids (e.g. chickpea). Water of guttation is the water oozing out from the leaves during the night. I had already mentioned that the amount of minerals dissolved in the soil solution has a constant value depending upon the solubility of the concerned mineral. Therefore, when the micro-organisms remove the mineral molecules and ions from the soil solution, they are replaced by more of the molecules and ions getting dissolved in the soil solution in order to maintain the equilibrium. When the carbon source has been exhausted, the micro-organisms die, releasing the minerals sequestered in their cells. The green plants and the microbes need the same mineral elements. Therefore when the micro-organisms die, the minerals released from their cells become available to the plants. This symbiosis between the soil microbes and green plants evolved when the green plants came out of the sea and occupied land. Aphids seem to be a part of this symbiosis, because they suck out sugar from the green plants and exude it out of their bodies. The water of guttaion washes off this sugar and drops it on the ground. The fact that plants drop their leaves and flower petals on the ground can also be looked upon as a part of this symbiotic relationship, because these organs feed the soil micro-organisms. It is a known fact that most of the useful minerals are retracted by the plants from the leaves before they are shed. I am trying to mimic the behaviour of the plants in order to develop techniques of growing crops without using chemical fertilizers.
Yours

Dear Greg,
Most of the reactions on externally applied organic matter take place in the top layer of the soil and they are therefore aerobic. Alcohol is formed under anaerobic conditions. Sugar is directly ingested as food by most micro-organisms and it is used by them as carbon source. In the case of plants and also most micro-organisms in the soil, almost 95 per cent of the weight is constituted by carbon, hydrogen, oxygen and nitrogen, all of which are obtained from air. Only 5% come from minerals in the soil. These minerals are absorbed from the soil solution. Whenever an organinc substance with high nutritive value is applied to the soil it causes the number of micro-organisms in the soil to increase. When the carbon source has been exhausted, the microbes die, releasing the sequestered mineral ions and molecules back into the soil solution, making them available to the plants. This is of course just a hypothesis, on which I am working. Literally thousands of farmers are applying today unrefined raw sugar to their fields at the rate of 10 kg per acre or 25 kg per ha, once every 3 months. They are getting good yield from their crops. I am only trying to find out the scientific reason behind this phenomenon.
Yours

Dear Mr. Haard,
ploughing in green plants is called green manuring. It provides soil micro-organisms with high calorie nutrition. In the normal green manuring practice, the green crop is grown on the entire field and ploughed in, after about 45 days. Because of the availability of a carbon source in such abundance, the microbes multiply very fast and take up and bind all the minerals in the soil solution in their own cells. Then you wait for at least a month before planting your crop, becasue otherwise your crop would not get any mineral nutrients from the soil. After a month, a part of the microbes are dead and have released the mineral molecules back into the soil. You therefore lose about 45 days in growing the green cover and another month in allowing it to rot in the soil, Green manuring is therefore not popular with farmers, because they lose a complete season. Under rainfed cropping in India, it means losing the entire year. That is why I recommend applying just 125 kg green leaves per ha along with the seed. While the seedlings are growing, he microbes multiply their numbers by eating the leaves, but because the leaves have been applied in just a small quantity, the nutrition is exhausted very fast by the soil microbes and they start to die, releasing the nutrients sequestered in their cells. By this time, the crop plants have developed their own root system and they are ready to absorb these nutrients. This is just a hypothesis. All that I have observed is that I get high yield whenever I apply about 125 kg green leaves per ha to my crop, right at the beginning of the season. I am trying to find out how and why this practice works so beneficially.
Yours


Dear Mr. Haard,
this refers to your request about my reaction to the observations of Dr. Makoto Ogawa. I am a botanist who used to work as the Research Director of a seed company in India. I worked mainly in the fields of plant physiology and plant breeding. I am now 72 and I head a voluntary organization founded by me for rural development through application of science and technology. I was made aware of the topic of Terra Preta by Ron Larson and Tom Miles and so I became a member of the Terra Preta discussion group. I developed interest in this topic because I had developed some theories of my own about plant nutrition, and agriculture without the use of chemical fertilizers. In the course of my research I found that by feeding the soil bacteria with high calorie, non-composted organic matter such as sugar, starch or cellulose, one not only increased the number of the soil microbes but also the yield of the crops. Just to test my hunch, I applied just 125 kg green leaves to a hectare of land owned by me, and got higher yield from this land than I used to get by applying chemical fertilizers. Now I have started a series of pot experiments in which the pots containing 1 kg soil each received 500 mg sugar, no sugar and a dose of chemical fertilizers. The pots are kept in a randomized complete block design, so that the data can be statistically analysed. After I started talking to my colleagues about charcoal being added to soil, some of them applied char made from sugarcane leaves to plants raised in pots and they reported that the plants in pots with char grew better than the ones not receiving this treatment. These experiments were not conducted very scientifically and they should be treated as anecdotal evidence.

Realising, that I did not know anything about soil science, I recently purchased a book on this subject and have started reading it. Although this book makes reference neither to Terra Preta nor to plant nutrition, the knowledge about soil minerals, their genesis and their metamorphosis under different climatic conditions is helping me greatly in understanding many aspects of plant nutrition. I feel that this knowledge would eventually be useful to me also in understanding Terra Preta. When I gain an insight into this topic, I shall certainly share it with this group.
Yours

IPCC Analysis Mathematically Flawed

You know folks; this article gives me and every other commentator a problem. I always found the IPCC position seriously suspect. This work shows that the work is not just suspect but surely manipulated by chaps lacking talent but determined to generate a result to conform to their thesis. I am not going to call it fraud but Enron has nothing on this nonsense.

The climate got warmer up to ten or so years ago. It may or may not be associated to more solar output. It has been cooling off slightly since. I surmise that the heat accumulation does not dissipate as quickly as we have assumed. I think it is first collected in the oceans and then slowly transferred into the atmosphere for transport into the north for eventual final disposition. It is a slow and imperceptible process. Recall that the North Pole has a conveyor that moves heat from the tropics in the form of the Gulf Stream and the atmosphere is inclined the same way.

Let me add another core assumption to this mix. The atmosphere is almost static over heat retention in the tropics. It is already maxed out and cannot pick up the slack generated by solar variation. Any surplus heat must be absorbed by water or reflected into space. The water or increased humidity must then be transported out of the tropics. This takes time. This is why heat is still washing into the Arctic from the previous decade and it still has not cooled down very much.

In fact, it is likely that the incoming solar energy is still much higher than the historic average although the recent abrupt drop if sustained at all could now change all this. Don’t you wish any of this was settled?
This article has shown the IPCC model to be rubbish.

As my readers know, I have been a strong advocate of the removal of CO2 from our waste streams. In fact my mandate for this Blog was to promote ways and means and we have gone a long way down that road successfully. The global warming linkage conjecture was controversial and is coming a cropper. It was never relevant to the core problem of managing our environment.

Disproof of Global Warming Hype Published

R. F. Gay / F. William Engdahl

A mathematical proof that there is no “climate crisis” has been published in debate on global warming in Physics and Society, a scientific publication of the 46,000-strong American Physical Society.

Christopher Monckton, who once advised Margaret Thatcher, demonstrates via 30 equations that computer models used by the UN’s climate panel (IPCC) were pre-programmed with overstated values for the three variables whose product is “climate sensitivity” (temperature increase in response to greenhouse-gas increase), resulting in a 500-2000% overstatement of CO2’s effect on temperature in the IPCC’s latest climate assessment report, published in 2007.

The article, entitled Climate Sensitivity Reconsidered demonstrates that later this century a doubling of the concentration of CO2 compared with pre-industrial levels will increase global mean surface temperature not by the 6 °F predicted by the IPCC but, harmlessly, by little more than 1 °F. Lord Monckton concludes –

“… Perhaps real-world climate sensitivity is very much below the IPCC’s estimates. Perhaps, therefore, there is no ‘climate crisis’ at all. … The correct policy approach to a non-problem is to have the courage to do nothing.”

Larry Gould, Professor of Physics at the University of Hartford and Chair (2004) of the New England Section of the American Physical Society (APS), has been studying climate-change science for four years.

He said:

“I was impressed by an hour-long academic lecture which criticized claims about ‘global warming’ and explained the implications of the physics of radiative transfer for climate change. I was pleased that the audience responded to the informative presentation with a prolonged, standing ovation. That is what happened when, at the invitation of the President of our University, Christopher Monckton lectured here in Hartford this spring. I am delighted that Physics and Society, an APS journal, has published his detailed paper refining and reporting his important and revealing results.

“To me the value of this paper lies in its dispassionate but ruthlessly clear exposition – or, rather, exposé – of the IPCC’s method of evaluating climate sensitivity. The detailed arguments in this paper, and, indeed, in a large number of other scientific papers, point up extensive errors, including numerous projection errors of climate models, as well as misleading statements by the IPCC. Consequently, there are no rational grounds for believing either the IPCC or any other claims of dangerous anthropogenic ‘global warming’.”

Lord Monckton’s paper reveals that –

► The IPCC’s 2007 climate summary overstated CO2’s impact on temperature by 500-2000%;
► CO2 enrichment will add little more than 1 °F (0.6 °C) to global mean surface temperature by 2100;
► Not one of the three key variables whose product is climate sensitivity can be measured directly;
► The IPCC’s values for these key variables are taken from only four published papers, not 2,500;
► The IPCC’s values for each of the three variables, and hence for climate sensitivity, are overstated;
► “Global warming” halted ten years ago, and surface temperature has been falling for seven years;
► Not one of the computer models relied upon by the IPCC predicted so long and rapid a cooling;
► The IPCC inserted a table into the scientists’ draft, overstating the effect of ice-melt by 1000%;
► It was proved 50 years ago that predicting climate more than two weeks ahead is impossible;
► Mars, Jupiter, Neptune’s largest moon, and Pluto warmed at the same time as Earth warmed;
► In the past 70 years the Sun was more active than at almost any other time in the past 11,400 years.

Wind Power For the American Yeoman

I grabbed this off Jerry Pournelle’s site and the link provided gives us a good update as to what is accruing at the small operator level. It is all quite encouraging. This will never be a major component of the energy equation but it can be very important on almost any farm operation.

The farm industry has a long history of using windmills to operate water wells in particular. When I grew up, they were ubiquous.

Technology has now advanced to make a number of strategies profitable. A simple efficient offset to grid power is a good start. It does not have to be running perfectly, it just needs to take over the farm load as often as possible. Because it is linked to the farm load directly, the incentive is in place to closely mange it.

The advent of grid acceptance of surplus power could eliminate the need for battery support, although it is simply not that easy. The industry is going there though. Ideally the farm will have a matching load like water pumping that makes it all easy.

It is clear that many designs are been experimented with and that modern fabrication methods are been deployed. Small vanes using foam core technology is many times stronger and lighter than historic methods. Combined with electronic control systems it becomes possible to have a very efficient system that is very robust and easily repaired.

This technology is not pushing the limits of material strength as the major systems are.

I am sure that there is now a market for fabricated wind vanes by themselves. The hardware and generator could also be almost off the shelf. All of this can be quite cheap and Mark is quite right. The Chinese have a huge internal market to feed and cannot be far behind on this.

This requires a low capital cost basis for it to be broadly adopted and likely the Chinese can meet that. After all, the water pumps were displaced by rural electrification.

At least this time around we are producing electric power. That also opens the market for many other applications. Fifty windmills mounted on the roof of a factory is a good idea if the cost is within a range similar to grid power. The space is clearly available and the load is also available to maximize efficiency.

The fact that so many amateurs are now doing it tells me that it is only a matter of time until such operations spring up almost everywhere that a wind can be found.

The farm that I grew up on was in Midwest Ontario. As the full heat of summer hit, we got a steady and persistent wind blowing from the west that likely was clipping along at fifteen miles an hour. It was the only reason that it was possible to do field work in the afternoon at the time of maximum heat. Using that particular energy source to carry the local residential air conditioning load would be a very good idea. A case of the best source of temporary energy surplus been paired with temporary maximum demand.

This must be largely true in the whole Midwest and just about other any area of continental weather.

This suggests that towns need to take advantage of local diurnal wind conditions in order to offset diurnal peak loads associated with air conditioning in particular. A city that practically goes off grid when the temperature is warmest is never going to have to apologize for their air conditioning load and the place will become very attractive to builders and new owners. It is also something that a town can implement.

Wind Power For The American Yeoman

Dear Jerry,

Here's a starting point for those too impatient to wait for Sam's Club to stock Chinese-made import wind turbines:

http://www.otherpower.com/otherpower_wind.html

There's a wealth of information about it and examples of small'uns and middlin' size ones up to 5 Kw, all built with widely available materials and construction equipment.

Want something more aerodynamically efficient than hand carved wood blades, and more durable than injection molded plastic? Foam core composites aren't just for Stealth bombers any more. Burt Rutan pioneered the use of do it yourself composites in the early 1970s with his homebuilt experimental aircraft designs. Time marched on, techniques improved and costs dropped. Scaled Composites itself graduated to using multi-axis CNC machines to cut their foam.

The determined American Yeoman can follow Burt's lead in both places with suitable low cost equipment:

http://www.solsylva.com/

Best Wishes,

Mark


Wind power can be an excellent complement to a solar power system. Here in Colorado, when the sun isn't shining, the wind is usually blowing. Wind power is especially helpful here in the winter to capture both the ferocious and gentle mountain winds during the times of least sunlight and highest power use. In most locations (including here) wind is not suitable as the ONLY source of power--it simply fills in the gaps left by solar power quite nicely.

OPTIONS FOR GETTING STARTED IN WIND POWER

Build your own!

Building a wind generator from scratch is not THAT difficult of a project. You will need a shop with basic power and hand tools, and some degree of dedication. Large wind generators of 2000 Watts and up are a major project needing very strong construction, but smaller ones in the 700-1000 Watt, 8-11 foot range can be built fairly easily! In fact, we highly recommend that you tackle a smaller wind turbine before even thinking about building a large one. You'll need to be able to cut and weld steel, and a metal lathe can be handy (though you could hire a machine shop that turns brake rotors do do some small steps for you).

In most locations, GENTLE winds (5-15 mph) are the most common, and strong winds are much more rare. As you'll see by examining our latest machines, our philosophy about designing wind turbines is to make large, sturdy machines that produce good power in low wind speeds, and are able to survive high wind events while still producing maximum power. The power available in the wind goes up by a factor of 8 as the windspeed doubles.

Other critical factors are rotor size and tower height. The power a wind turbine can harvest goes up by at least a factor of 4 as you double the rotor size. And making a tower higher gets you above turbulence for better performance and substially increased power output. Putting a wind turbine on a short tower is like mounting solar panels in the shade!

Before you jump into building your own wind turbine or buying a commercial one, do your homework!

There are certain things that work and certain things that don't, and you can save hours and dollars by learning from other people's successes and mistakes. Some recommended reading:

DanF's series on Small Wind Turbine Basics, published in the Energy Self Sufficiency Newsletter:

Part 1 -- How wind turbines work, power available in the wind, swept area, average wind speed and what it really means. The basic essentials!

Part 2 -- High wind survival mechanisms, wind turbine types, drag vs. lift machines, HAWTs vs. VAWTs, tip speed ratio, blade design, and lots of cool pictures and diagrams.

Part 3 -- Choosing a site, good and bad site examples, anemometers, tower types, lightning protection, power regulaton, birds and bats.

Our article The Bottom Line About Wind Turbines is an essential introduction to wind power. It covers the basics of how wind comes to us, how much power different size wind turbines can make in different wind regimes, and has a very handy section on detecting wind turbine scams.

Otherpower.com's Wind Turbine User's Manual should also be considered essential reading, especially BEFORE you take the plunge and buy or build a wind turbine. It will fill you in on exactly what you are getting yourself into with wind power, including towers, installation, controllers, and troubleshooting. It can be downloaded for free from that page, and is available in printed form through our Online Store.

Wind power information from homebrew wind power guru Hugh Piggott's website. We've learned a BUNCH from Hugh.

Hugh Piggott's book Windpower Workshop is an indispensable reference for anyone that's thinking about building a wind turbine. His Axial Flux Alternator Windmill Plans are very detailed and highly recommended.

Homebrew wind power infomation from Ed Lenz's Windstuffnow.com, a highly informative website.

Read the Renewable energy FAQs on the Otherpower discussion board, and Search the Otherpower.com discussion board. It's highly active and populated by windpower experts and hobbyists worldwide. If you still can't find and answer, by all means please join the board and ask your question there!
Join the AWEA mailing list for more discussion with wind power experts worldwide.
Explore other wind power websites from worldwide on our Links page.