Replacing Coal with Solar

From the DOE online reference, CO2 Emissions Report, Table 1, you will see that in 1999 in the USA there were nearly 1.8 million metric tons of CO2 emissions from the burning of coal to create electricity, which yielded nearly 1.9 million kilowatt-hours of power.  This means in that year in the USA, for each megawatt-hour of coal-fired electric power, there were .95 tons of CO2 ejected into the atmosphere.  It is likely the global efficiency of coal-fired electricity plants in the USA in 2008 exceeds this standard, but for the sake of a numerically clear argument suppose for every megawatt-hour of coal-fired power, 1.0 ton of CO2 enters the atmosphere.

In the space of two weeks, Hurricane Gustav has caused an estimated $3 billion in losses in the U.S. and killed about 110 people in the U.S. and the Caribbean, catastrophic floods in northern India have left a million people homeless, and a 6.2-magnitude earthquake has rocked China's southwest, smashing more than 400,000 homes.

If it seems like disasters are getting more common, it's because they are. But some disasters seem to be affecting us in worse ways — and not for the reasons you may think. Floods and storms have led to most of the excess damage. The number of flood and storm disasters has gone up 7.4% every year in recent decades, according to the Centre for Research on the Epidemiology of Disasters. (Between 2000 and 2007, the growth was even faster, with an average annual rate of increase of 8.4%.) Of the total 197 million people affected by disasters in 2007, 164 million were affected by floods.

It is tempting to look at the lineup of storms in the Atlantic Ocean (Hanna, Ike, Josephine) and, in the name of everything green, blame climate change for this state of affairs. But there is another inconvenient truth out there: We are getting more vulnerable to weather mostly because of where we live, not just how we live.

What was done
An uninterrupted 1100-year history of March mean temperature at Kyoto, Japan, was developed from phenological data on the times of full-flowering of cherry trees (Prunus jamasakura) acquired from old diaries and chronicles written at Kyoto, which data were calibrated against instrumental temperature measurements obtained over the period 1881-2005, after which the results were compared with the sunspot number history developed by Solanki et al. (2004).

Reference
Domingues, C.M., Church, J.A., White, N.J., Gleckler, P.J., Wijffels, S.E., Barker, P.M. and Dunn, J.R. 2008. Improved estimates of upper-ocean warming and multi-decadal sea-level rise. Nature 453: 1090-1093.

What was done
Domingues et al., as they describe it, derived "improved estimates of near-global ocean heat content and thermal expansion for the upper 300 meters and 700 meters of the ocean for 1950-2003, using statistical techniques that allow for sparse data coverage and applying recent corrections to reduce systematic biases in the most common ocean temperature observations."

What was learned
In describing their results, the seven scientists say they "show a slight increase from 1950 to about 1960, a 15-year period to the mid-1970s of zero, or slightly negative trend and, after the 1976-1977 climate shift, a steady rise to the end of the record," noting that their "ocean warming and thermal expansion trends for 1961-2003 are about 50 percent larger than earlier estimates but about 40 percent smaller for 1993-2003, which is consistent with the recognition that previously estimated rates for the 1990s had a positive bias as a result of instrumental errors."

The U.S. public, while aware of the deteriorating global environment, is concerned predominantly with local and national environmental issues, according to results from a recent survey. "The survey's core result is that people care about their communities and express the desire to see government action taken toward local and national issues," said David Konisky, a policy research scholar with the Institute of Public Policy and assistant professor in the Truman School of Public Affairs at the University of Missouri, who conducted the study. "People are hesitant to support efforts concerning global issues even though they believe that environmental quality is poorer at the global level than at the local and national level. This is surprising given the media attention that global warming has recently received and reflects the division of opinion about the severity of climate change."

Konisky recently surveyed 1,000 adults concerning their attitudes about the environment. The survey polled respondents about their levels of concern for the environment and preferences for government action to address a wide set of environmental issues.

1. Temperatures have been cooling since 2002, even as carbon dioxide has continued to rise.
2. Carbon dioxide is a trace gas and by itself will produce little warming. Also, as CO2 increases, the incremental warming is less, as the effect is logarithmic so the more CO2, the less warming it produces.
3. CO2 has been totally uncorrelated with temperature over the last decade, and significantly negative since 2002.
4. CO2 is not a pollutant, but a naturally occurring gas. Together with chlorophyll and sunlight, it is an essential ingredient in photosynthesis and is, accordingly, plant food.
5. Reconstruction of paleoclimatological CO2 concentrations demonstrates that carbon dioxide concentration today is near its lowest level since the Cambrian Era some 550 million years ago, when there was almost 20 times as much CO2 in the atmosphere as there is today without causing a “runaway greenhouse effect.”
6. Temperature changes lead, not lag, CO2 changes on all time scales. The oceans may play a key role, emitting carbon dioxide when they warm as carbonated beverages lose fizz as they warm and absorbing it as they cool.