Carbon Capture Report

Kui juhtumisi pole juba läbi töötatud (Cinoomi poolt), siis üks teemakohane sait, kuhu jookseb hullult statistikat kokku, kus saab segaseks minemiseni  analüütikat teha...

http://www.carboncapturereport.org/about.html

About the Carbon Capture Report

The Carbon Capture Report (http://www.carboncapturereport.org/) is a free and open service of the University of Illinois devoted to being the preeminent global resource for tracking worldwide perception and developments in Climate Change, Carbon Capture, Carbon Credits, Alternative Energy, Renewable Energy, Green Energy, Biofuels, Geothermal, Hydroelectric, Natural Gas, Nuclear, Solar, Wind, Coal, and Oil. With subscribers in more than 80 countries the Report has become the go-to resource for daily insight into the global media discourse.

Contact

For questions or to contact the Carbon Capture Report, please email the Project Director, Kalev Leetaru at leetaru@illinois.edu.

Leadership

The Carbon Capture Report is overseen by an experienced leadership team with a combined half-century in media analysis and the energy industries. Meet the Leadership.

News Rethought

Learn more about this new technology platform from the University of Illinois that powers the Carbon Capture Report. About News Rethought.

Technology

The Carbon Capture Report builds on more than a decade of work at the University of Illinois and National Center for Supercomputing Applications (the birthplace of the modern web) leveraging some of the most powerful supercomputers in the world to synthesize the global news media and extract new meaning from it on behalf of industry and government. About the Technology.

The Illinois Advantage

It was at the University of Illinois that the modern web was born (Mosaic) and that many of today's social media concepts were invented (PLATO), while its National Center for Supercomputing Applications founded the United States academic supercomputing program. Illinois is therefore uniquely suited to advancing the state of the art in understanding public perception of energy in the global sphere, as the institution that brought much of the underpinnings that support this interaction to the world in the first place.

Revisiting Limits To Growth: Could The Club Of Rome Been Correct

Tänaseks juba surnud Matt Simmons kirjutab 40 aastat tagasi ilmunud uurimusest Limits To Growth

http://www.greatchange.org/ov-simmons,club_of_rome_revisted.pdf

Jeff Rubin ASPO-USA 2010 Peak Oil Conference

Jeff Rubin ASPO-USA 2010 Peak Oil Conference from ASPO-USA on Vimeo.

Jeff Rubin (born August 24, 1954) is a Canadian economist and author. He is a former chief economist at CIBC World Markets.

Rubin graduated from McGill University with a Masters in Economics after completing his Economics B.A. at University of Toronto. He began his career as an economist at the Ontario Government Treasury Department where he was responsible for projecting future interest rates. He moved on to the brokerage firm Wood Gundy which was taken over by CIBC and became first CIBC Wood Gundy and then CIBC World Markets. He has accurately predicted fluctuations in interest rates and the value of the Canadian dollar. In the early 1990s he came to prominence projecting a major decline in the Ontario real estate market. He was one of the first economists to accurately predict soaring oil prices back in 2000 and is now a popular commentator on oil depletion and its economic repercussions. Jeff writes a blog published every Wednesday for The Globe and Mail newspaper. He is an avid fisherman known for exotic trips to northern Canada (B.C. and Yukon) who frequently uses fishing analogies and references to his own fishing experiences, in his writings.^[1]

Rubin had worked at CIBC World Markets and its predecessors since 1988, and served as chief economist from 1992 to 2009, when he resigned.^[2]

He authored the best selling 2009 book Why Your World Is About to Get a Whole Lot Smaller: Oil and the End of Globalization.^[3][4]

The physics of climate modeling

Climate is a large-scale phenomenon that emerges from complicated interactions among small-scale physical systems. Yet despite the phenomenon's complexity, climate models have demonstrated some impressive successes.

Gavin A. Schmidt

January 2007, page 72

1991 eruption of Mount Pinatubo

Climate projections made with sophisticated computer codes have informed the world's policymakers about the potential dangers of anthropogenic interference with Earth's climate system. Those codes purport to model a large part of the system. But what physics goes into the models, how are the models evaluated, and how reliable are they?

The task climate modelers have set for themselves is to take their knowledge of the local interactions of air masses, water, energy, and momentum and from that knowledge explain the climate system's large-scale features, variability, and response to external pressures, or "forcings." That is a formidable task, and though far from complete, the results so far have been surprisingly successful. Thus, climatologists have some confidence that theirs isn't a foolhardy endeavor.

Climate modeling derives from efforts first formulated in the 1920s to numerically predict the weather. However, it wasn't until the 1960s that electronic computers were able to meet the extensive numerical demands of even a minimal description of weather systems. Since then, ever more components have been added to climate models—land, oceans, sea ice, and more recently, interactive atmospheric aerosols, atmospheric chemistry, and representations of the carbon cycle. Indeed, a significant part of the interdisciplinary work needed to understand climate change is being driven by climate model development. Today's models are flexible tools that can answer a wide range of questions, but at a price: They can be almost as difficult to analyze and understand as the real world.

Basic physics, emergent behavior

The physics in climate models can be divided into three categories. The first includes fundamental principles such as the conservation of energy, momentum, and mass, and processes, such as those of orbital mechanics, that can be calculated from fundamental principles. The second includes physics that is well known in theory, but that in practice must be approximated due to discretization of continuous equations. Examples include the transfer of radiation through the atmosphere and the Navier–Stokes equations of fluid motion. The third category contains empirically known physics such as formulas for evaporation as a function of wind speed and humidity.

For the latter two categories, modelers often develop parameterizations that attempt to capture the fundamental phenomenology of a small-scale process. For instance, the average cloudiness over a 100-km² grid box is not cleanly related to the average humidity over the box. Nonetheless, as the average humidity increases, average cloudiness will also increase. That monotonic relationship could be the basis for a parameterization, though current schemes are significantly more complex than my example.

Given the nature of parameterizations among other features, a climate model depends on several expert judgment calls. Thus, each model will have its own unique details. However, much of the large-scale behavior projected by climate models is robust in that it does not depend significantly on the specifics of parameterization and spatial representation.

The most interesting behavior of the climate system is emergent. That is, the large-scale phenomena are not obvious functions of the small-scale physics but result from the complexity of the system. For instance, no formula describes the Intertropical Convergence Zone of tropical rainfall, which arises through a combination of the seasonal cycle of solar radiation, the properties of moist convection, Earth's rotation, and so on. Emergent qualities make climate modeling fundamentally different from numerically solving tricky equations.

Climate modeling is also fundamentally different from weather forecasting. Weather concerns an initial value problem: Given today's situation, what will tomorrow bring? Weather is chaotic; imperceptible differences in the initial state of the atmosphere lead to radically different conditions in a week or so. Climate is instead a boundary value problem—a statistical description of the mean state and variability of a system, not an individual path through phase space. Current climate models yield stable and nonchaotic climates, which implies that questions regarding the sensitivity of climate to, say, an increase in greenhouse gases are well posed and can be justifiably asked of the models. Conceivably, though, as more components—complicated biological systems and fully dynamic ice-sheets, for example—are incorporated, the range of possible feedbacks will increase, and chaotic climates might ensue.

Testing climate models

Model assessment occurs on two distinct levels—the small scale at which one evaluates the specifics of a parameterization and the large scale at which predicted emergent features can be tested. The primary test bed is the climate of the present era, particularly since 1979, when significant satellite data started to become readily available.

The 1991 eruption of Mount Pinatubo provided a good laboratory for model testing (see the figure). Not only was the subsequent global cooling of about 0.5 °C accurately forecast soon after the eruption, but the radiative, water-vapor, and dynamical feedbacks included in the models were quantitatively verified.

More than a dozen facilities worldwide develop climate models, whose ability to simulate the current climate has improved measurably over the past 20 years. Interestingly, the average across all models almost invariably outperforms any single model, which shows that the errors in the simulations are surprisingly unbiased. Significant biases common to most models do exist, however—for instance, in patterns of tropical precipitation.

Climate modelers are particularly interested in testing the variability of their models. Some variability is intrinsic, but modelers also study variability caused by changes in external forcings, such as in Earth's orbit or in solar activity. Those studies are complicated by incomplete observations, the nature of satellite data, uncertainties in the forcings, and other issues.

The most comprehensive comparison of models ever conducted is now under way using simulations that were performed in 2004 and 2005 for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Those simulations for the 20th century and beyond are being examined by hundreds of independent teams who will assess the robustness of the results and help illuminate persistent problems.

Many challenging climate questions remain unanswered. Examples include how climate conditions influence El Niño; how responses can be predicted at the regional scale; and how simulations of rare, extreme events such as hurricanes and heat waves can be validated. Such issues may require better encapsulations of, for example, the turbulent behavior of the near-surface atmosphere, the effects of ocean eddies, or the microphysics of clouds and aerosols. The implementation of more sophisticated parameterizations and the ongoing increases in resolution as computer resources increase suggest that models will continue to improve. However, many results, such as the warming effect of increasing greenhouse gases that was first demonstrated in much simpler models decades ago, have proved extremely robust.

Climate models are unmatched in their ability to quantify otherwise qualitative hypotheses and generate new ideas that can be tested against observations. The models are far from perfect, but they have successfully captured fundamental aspects of air, ocean, and sea-ice circulations and their variability. They are therefore useful tools for estimating the consequences of humankind's ongoing and audacious planetary experiment.

Gavin Schmidt is a research scientist at the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies (http://www.giss.nasa.gov) in New York.

Additional resources

• Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, Climate Change 2001: The Scientific Basis, [LINK].
• IPCC Model Output, [LINK].
• National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory, [LINK].
• National Center for Atmospheric Research, [LINK].
• RealClimate Blog, [LINK].

Soojenemise loogika

The NOAA State of the Climate 2009 report is an excellent summary of the many lines of evidence that global warming is happening. Acknowledging the fact that the planet is warming leads to the all important question: What’s causing global warming? To answer this, here is a summary of the empirical evidence that answer this question. Many different observations find a distinct human fingerprint on climate change:

1. Humans are currently emitting around 30 billion tonnes of CO2 into the atmosphere (CDIAC). Of course, it could be coincidence that CO2 levels are rising so sharply at the same time so let’s look at more evidence that we’re responsible for the rise in CO2 levels.
2. When we measure the type of carbon accumulating in the atmosphere, we observe more of the type of carbon that comes from fossil fuels (Manning 2006).
3. This is corroborated by measurements of oxygen in the atmosphere. Oxygen levels are falling in line with the amount of carbon dioxide rising, just as you’d expect from fossil fuel burning which takes oxygen out of the air to create carbon dioxide (Manning 2006).
4. Further independent evidence that humans are raising CO2 levels comes from measurements of carbon found in coral records going back several centuries. These find a recent sharp rise in the type of carbon that comes from fossil fuels (Pelejero 2005).
5. So we know humans are raising CO2 levels. What’s the effect? Satellites measure less heat escaping out to space, at the particular wavelengths that CO2 absorbs heat, thus finding “direct experimental evidence for a significant increase in the Earth’s greenhouse effect”. (Harries 2001, Griggs 2004, Chen 2007).
6. If less heat is escaping to space, where is it going? Back to the Earth’s surface. Surface measurements confirm this, observing more downward infrared radiation (Philipona 2004, Wang 2009). A closer look at the downward radiation finds more heat returning at CO2 wavelengths, leading to the conclusion that “this experimental data should effectively end the argument by skeptics that no experimental evidence exists for the connection between greenhouse gas increases in the atmosphere and global warming.” (Evans 2006).
7. If an increased greenhouse effect is causing global warming, we should see certain patterns in the warming. For example, the planet should warm faster at night than during the day. This is indeed being observed (Braganza 2004, Alexander 2006).
8. Another distinctive pattern of greenhouse warming is cooling in the upper atmosphere, otherwise known as the stratosphere. This is exactly what’s happening (Jones 2003).
9. With the lower atmosphere (the troposphere) warming and the upper atmosphere (the stratophere) cooling, another consequence is the boundary between the troposphere and stratophere, otherwise known as the tropopause, should rise as a consequence of greenhouse warming. This has been observed (Santer 2003).
10. An even higher layer of the atmosphere, the ionosphere, is expected to cool and contract in response to greenhouse warming. This has been observed by satellites (Laštovi?ka 2006).

In order to refute the theory of human-caused global warming, you would not merely have to come up with an alternate explanation for all of the above observed changes. You would have to figure out what unknown factor was blocking or negating greenhouse gases from causing them.

Norwegian Company Designs Giant 10MW Wind Turbine

The size demands an entirely new offshore wind design

A majority of the wind farms in the United States use 2.5 megawatt wind turbines, and recent technology has introduced even larger turbines at 5 megawatts. Europe, on the other hand, is racing ahead of the game with the largest wind turbine yet - 10 megawatts. And it may be changing the way wind turbines are designed altogether.  
Europe has seen a lot of advantages to building larger wind turbines, such as avoiding environmental issues by using larger turbines in deeper waters. There is less of a risk of encountering environmental problems the further offshore the turbines are located. Europe seems to build larger turbines as the water grows deeper, as well. 
Another advantage to building larger turbines is the cost. The cost per megawatt decreases as the the size of the wind turbine increases, which is a helpful advantage when building a wind turbine that is equivalent to a 30 story building in size.
The 533 foot tall wind turbine was designed by Sway, a Norwegian turbine developer, and will have 476 foot long blades. Sway has been working on the design since 2004, but the company is not working on Europe's largest turbine alone. It is partnering with Norwegian state utility Enova and UK-based Clipper Marine to bring the 10 megawatt monster turbine to life.
The giant turbine certainly dwarfs the 2.5 megawatt and the newer 5 megawatt turbines being used now. In fact, it is so large that it requires a whole new offshore wind design. 
The new design does not attach the wind turbine to the sea floor like smaller models. This 10 megawatt turbine, while giant in size, will be lightweight enough to "sway" around a fixed base and float in the ocean. It also has the ability to swivel on this base to produce energy when the direction of the wind changes.
"This is pioneering stuff," said Feargal Brennan, head of offshore, process and energy engineering at Cranfield University. "I believe 10MW turbines are right on the limit of our knowledge; they may even prove to be over the limit. We may find that they work for several years and then start to develop problems. Will 10MW turbines still be working after 10, 15, 20 years of operation?"
In an attempt to answer that question, developers will use a smaller turbine to test the fixed base design. This "smaller" turbine will be 5 megawatts, which is still large in terms of what is being used today. If the test proves that this new system will work for the larger 10 megawatt wind turbine, this could be a new beginning for offshore wind energy. These systems would be far enough off shore to where they would not be noticed from land, send electricity to land through cable lines at the sea floor, just like internet cables.
While Sway, Clipper Marine and Enova are on their way with this development, they're not the only ones. According to other reports, British company Wind Power Limited has recently exposed the details its new 10 megawatt offshore wind generator, called Aerogenerator X. This unit is expected to reach completion by 2013 or 2014, and will generate enough electricity for 5,000 - 10,000 homes. 

http://www.dailytech.com/Norwegian+Company+Designs+Giant+10MW+Wind+Turbine/article19275.htm

Küsiltus

Palun täitke see küsitlus ja kirjutaga oma vastuse variandid.

This survey is part of an investigation of general public opinion concerning a variety of social issues.
You will probably find that you agree with some of the statements, and disagree with others, to varying
extents. Please indicate your reaction to each statement on the line to the left of each item according
to the following scale:

Write down a -4 if you very strongly disagree with the statement.
Write down a -3 if you strongly disagree with the statement.
Write down a -2 if you moderately disagree with the statement.
Write down a -1 if you slightly disagree with the statement.
Write down a +1 if you slightly agree with the statement.
Write down a +2 if you moderately agree with the statement.
Write down a +3 if you strongly agree with the statement.
Write down a +4 if you very strongly agree with the statement.

If you feel exactly and precisely neutral about an item, write down a “0."

Important: You
may find that you sometimes have different reactions to different parts of a statement. For example,
you might very strongly disagree (“-4") with one idea in a statement, but slightly agree (“+1") with
another idea in the same item. When this happens, please combine your reactions, and write down how
you feel on balance (a “-3" in this case).

___ 1. The established authorities generally turn out to be right about things, while the radicals
and protestors are usually just “loud mouths” showing off their ignorance.
___ 2. Women should have to promise to obey their husbands when they get married.
___ 3. Our country desperately needs a mighty leader who will do what has to be done to destroy
the radical new ways and sinfulness that are ruining us.
___ 4. Gays and lesbians are just as healthy and moral as anybody else.
___ 5. It is always better to trust the judgment of the proper authorities in government and
religion than to listen to the noisy rabble-rousers in our society who are trying to create
doubt in people’s minds
___ 6. Atheists and others who have rebelled against the established religions are no doubt every
bit as good and virtuous as those who attend church regularly.
___ 7. The only way our country can get through the crisis ahead is to get back to our traditional
values, put some tough leaders in power, and silence the troublemakers spreading bad ideas.
___ 8. There is absolutely nothing wrong with nudist camps.
___ 9. Our country needs free thinkers who have the courage to defy traditional ways, even if this
upsets many people.
___ 10. Our country will be destroyed someday if we do not smash the perversions eating away at
our moral fiber and traditional beliefs.
___ 11. Everyone should have their own lifestyle, religious beliefs, and sexual preferences, even if
it makes them different from everyone else.
___ 12. The “old-fashioned ways” and the “old-fashioned values” still show the best way to live.
___ 13. You have to admire those who challenged the law and the majority’s view by protesting
for women’s abortion rights, for animal rights, or to abolish school prayer.
___ 14. What our country really needs is a strong, determined leader who will crush evil, and take
us back to our true path.
___ 15. Some of the best people in our country are those who are challenging our government,
criticizing religion, and ignoring the “normal way things are supposed to be done.”
___ 16. God’s laws about abortion, pornography and marriage must be strictly followed before it is
too late, and those who break them must be strongly punished.
___ 17. There are many radical, immoral people in our country today, who are trying to ruin it for
their own godless purposes, whom the authorities should put out of action.
___ 18. A “woman’s place” should be wherever she wants to be. The days when women are
submissive to their husbands and social conventions belong strictly in the past.
___ 19. Our country will be great if we honor the ways of our forefathers, do what the authorities
tell us to do, and get rid of the “rotten apples” who are ruining everything.
___ 20. There is no “ONE right way” to live life; everybody has to create their own way.
___ 21. Homosexuals and feminists should be praised for being brave enough to defy “traditional
family values.
___ 22. This country would work a lot better if certain groups of troublemakers would just shut up
and accept their group’s traditional place in society.