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Bob Bingham Blog page.

A series of opinion pieces on, mostly climate change and related subjects to do with New Zealand.

Back to home page.

New Zealand emissions.

21/12/2014

5 Comments

 
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At the recent Lima climate talks New Zealand did not do very well and the minister for climate change Tim Groser made a poor job of explaining why we had such a poor performance.

The perception within NZ is that the National government is only playing lip service to climate change by promoting ourselves as clean and green while continuing to promote fossil fuels with road transport and oil exploration.


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.The root of the problem is that NZ does not burn coal to make electricity and has 85% renewable energy, with gas as a quick top up to balance supply and demand. Our transport uses oil for fuel and here we are the same as most other nations. 
The area we have problems with is our seven million dairy farming cows, three point five million beef cattle and thirty million sheep so that we have ten million cattle against a population of four million people and it is an expanding industry.
Unless we are going to stop dairy farming or can find a way to export their methane emissions with the dairy products and meat, we are stuck with it..

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The only area left to make savings is in our transport. The National government has bought some electric trains for Auckland but has no idea what to do with the rest of the extensive railway network.  The network is not in very god condition so it needs serious money spending to modernise it as, currently, it moves a few logs to ports and that is about it.

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The electrical generating companies and the government  should have a big interest in transport as their business is on a plateau and they need new markets. NZ has an oil import bill of five billion a year and oil is a diminishing resource with a volatile price which makes it vulnerable to competition.

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If the electrical generating companies joined forces and collectively bought the railways operations and, with the involvement of the government, converted the network to electricity we could achieve several objectives. 
We could reduce our dependence on oil as our sole fuel for transport, reduce our CO2 emissions, reduce our oil import bill and the electricity companies would open up a whole new market.

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We do not need to worry about our oil companies as oil will be needed for many years and its price will increase as its scarcity and cost of extraction increases.

Electric cars have an increasingly important future and some countries are trialling hire cars at rail terminals so that the commuter can reach his destination quickly and independently.


There is a whole new transport system in its infancy, in Europe in particular, and we need to be making the first steps to embrace it. 


5 Comments

Refugees from Sea Level rise.

20/12/2014

6 Comments

 
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A recent map from NASA shows in startling clarity how a one meter rise in sea levels will displace millions of people in highly populated countries in the West Pacific.

It seems ironic that Australia, which
 is  very sensitive to refugees, is a major coal producer and therefore is one of the countries most responsible for producing greenhouse gasses  that cause rising sea levels.
Australia will probably be a destination of safety for millions of desperate people seeking food and shelter for their families.


6 Comments

Methane Hydrate release.

12/12/2014

2 Comments

 
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An interesting post in Science Daily from research at Washington University shows that as the top 700 metres  of the ocean warms, it is releasing the large stores of methane hydrates on the ocean floor. Methane  hydrates collect at between 700 metres and 2000 metres where the water is 2C or cooler and is held in its frozen form by cold temperature and pressure. It is formed either microbially or where methane was formed by thermal decomposition of organic matter.
There are vast stores of frozen methane on the ocean floor and as the sea warms the methane is unfrozen and the gas is released into the sea, either to bubble to the surface or be absorbed into the water.  Methane is a powerful greenhouse gas and is 20 times stronger than CO2 over 70 years. It is claimed to be one of the main forcing agents that increases the worlds temperature in a natural multiplying action.

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The release of methane is a similar process to the raising level of the tree line on mountains.  As the atmosphere warms the point of freezing rises and in a mirror event as the sea warms, methane melts at deeper levels.
Oceans all round the world, from Siberia to Antarctica are reporting the release of methane from the continental shelf and such large releases of this very powerful greenhouse gas is of considerable concern to the future of life on the planet.


2 Comments

Soil Loss.

9/12/2014

0 Comments

 
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We take the soil of our planet as a natural feature and an endless resource but it takes 1000 years to make 3 mm of topsoil and we are losing it very quickly. 


Maria-Helena Semedo of the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) told a forum marking World Soil Day.

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Due to a combination of industrialised farming, land clearance and soil erosion plus land for cities and climate change within 60 years there will only be a quarter of the soil left compared to 1960.

When the increasing population is considered together with loss of food production due to increasing temperatures and rising sea levels inundating farmland with salt water the future is looking fairly bleak.


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In my own region of North East New Zealand which is a temperate region without heavy industrialised farming or big cities, the estuaries are filling with soil from the streams, spoiling the marine nurseries for fish reproduction and shell fish life.
Even in an area of reducing precipitation erosion from flood damage can be increasing.

0 Comments

CO2 Emissions. Man versus Nature.

7/12/2014

2 Comments

 
A recent report in Science Daily caught my attention as it dealt with the natural release of CO2 into the atmosphere at a critical time in the world’s climate 14,500 years ago. This was when we were emerging from an ice age into the current warm Holocene period.

This is a brief summary of what geoscientists and climate researchers Dr. Peter Köhler and Dr. Gregor Knorr from the Alfred Wegener Institute found.

‘One of the most abrupt rises in the carbon dioxide concentration in the atmosphere at the end of the last ice age took place about 14,600 years ago. Ice core data show that the CO2 concentration at that time increased by more than 10 ppm (parts per million, unit of measure for the composition of gases) within 200 years. This CO2 increase, i.e. approx. 0.05 ppm per year, was significantly less than the current rise in atmospheric CO2 of 2-3 ppm in the last decade caused by fossil fuels.’

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This chart shows the world’s temperature for the last 14,000 years and illustrates the reaction to that very slow increase in CO2. The mid-section of the graph shows how the world was cooling as we drifted towards the next ice age. On the extreme right the chart shows the temperature reaction to the massive pulse of CO2 in the modern era.
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The above chart show how the world has slowly cycled through ice ages and warm periods and how CO2 drives the temperatures and sea level over thousands of years. For a detailed explanation of how CO2 drives temperature see here.

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The Keeling curve shows how we have increased CO2 in the atmosphere by 80 parts per million in 60 years. We are producing CO2 at the rate of 40 billion tons a year with 50% going into the oceans and the atmospheres share is increasing by 2 or 3 points a year.

During a critical period in the world’s climate when the permafrost was melting naturally and releasing CO2 at the maximum rate it increased by 10 ppm in 200 years and we can do that in 5 years.
The human lifespan is relatively short in world terms but even so we are seeing changes within our lifetime. The next thirty to fifty years should see some big changes and many of them will be unexpected.

Weather is only the local expression of the climate and we are making huge changes to the climate. Expect some huge changes to the weather.


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On a more speculative area.

Two recent reports on normally reliable blogs are so extreme that I have to question their validity but will pass them on because they sound credible and even if they are found to be short lived, we can expect similar unexpected events. 
Just as we were not expecting the jet stream to slow down and bring big changes to the weather in the northern hemisphere so other events will come out of nowhere.

The first by Robert Scribbler shows how Greenland has created its own cold wind circulation because the North Pole is so warm that it has become dysfunctional and so the extreme cold of the high Greenland plateau has taken its place.


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The second by Peter Sinclair of Climate Crocks shows a cool patch in the Gulf Stream. If this were to continue Northern Europe  would be plunged into freezing conditions and it would be a disaster.

it’s just one of those events that everyone keeps looking for because it has happened before and may happen again.


2 Comments

    Bob Bingham 

    Occasional blog posts on topical news items concerning the climate.  Please click the RSS feed to receive updates.

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