A number of institutions across the country, including many military bases, are looking at insuring reliable, resilient and efficient electricity production in the age of peak oil and terrorism.  Above, a Sandia Lab video describes the concept.

This technology is being pioneered, like transistors, computers, microchips, jet engines, global positioning, the internet, and now renewable energy,  by the military, as a template for future wide civilian deployment.

Below, The University of California at San Diego demonstrates a working example.

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AtmosNews takes a lighthearted look at an unexpected analogy, explaining why some people call carbon dioxide (and the other greenhouse gases) the steroids of the climate system. Statistics and extreme behavior are involved, whether we’re talking about baseball or Earth’s atmosphere.

NCAR scientist Gerald “Jerry” Meehl explains why.

Climate Crocks goes from working class to Ivy League.

I’ve been invited to become a regular contributor to the Yale Forum on Climate Change and the Media, where my first video post appeared last week.  I’ll be posting there regularly about once a month, and I’ll make sure those posts appear hear shortly after debuting on the Yale site. The new video series, titled “This is Not Cool”,  will reside on the Yale Climate Forum Youtube account, and anyone is welcome to embed and spread.

The debut post features more of my interview with JPL Oceanographer Josh Willis, one of the world’s best known young ocean scientists, conducted at the American Geophysical Union conference in December.

I wish to thank Bud Ward and the Yale team for helping make this first time out so successful.

Comments on the Yale site, pro or con, are definitely welcome and encouraged.

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“For the past 18 years, the U.S./French Jason-1, Jason-2 and Topex/Poseidon spacecraft have been monitoring the gradual rise of the world’s ocean in response to global warming,” NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory said in a 2011 release.

“While the rise of the global ocean has been remarkably steady for most of this time, every once in a while, sea level rise hits a speed bump,” it continued. In 2011, “ it’s been more like a pothole” as global sea level fell by about a quarter of an inch, or half a centimeter between the summers of 2010 and 2011.”

“So what’s up with the down seas, and what does it mean?”

In the accompanying video by Peter Sinclair, independent videographer, NASA/JPL climate scientist Josh Willis points to the cycle of El Niño and La Niña in the Pacific.

Willis said that while 2010 had begun with a sizable El Niño, by year’s end it was replaced by one of the strongest La Niñas in recent memory. According to JPL, in Pasadena, Ca., that sudden shift in the Pacific changed rainfall patterns across the globe, bringing “massive floods to places like Australia and the Amazon basin, and drought to the southern United States.”

JPL pointed to data from the “Grace” spacecraft indicating that extra rain piled onto the continents in the early parts of 2011.

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I’ve written before on the technological “leapfrogging” that will spread renewable energy like wildfire in among the rural third world poor – just like the cell phone revolution vaulted billions into the technological age without the intermediate step of building huge, expensive and unwieldy networks of transmission wires. The comparison with old style central power plants and 21st century solar and wind is more than apt.

New Scientist:

SOLAR power has always had a reputation for being expensive, but not for much longer. In India, electricity from solar is now cheaper than that from diesel generators. The news – which will boost India’s “Solar Mission” to install 20,000 megawatts of solar power by 2022 – could have implications for other developing nations too.

Recent figures from market analysts Bloomberg New Energy Finance (BNEF)show that the price of solar panels fell by almost 50 per cent in 2011. They are now just one-quarter of what they were in 2008. That makes them a cost-effective option for many people in developing countries.

A quarter of people in India do not have access to electricity, according to the International Energy Agency’s 2011 World Energy Outlook report. Those who are connected to the national grid experience frequent blackouts. To cope, many homes and factories install diesel generators. But this comes at a cost. Not only does burning diesel produce carbon dioxide, contributing to climate change, the fumes produced have been linked to health problems from respiratory and heart disease to cancer.

Now the generators could be on their way out. In India, electricity from solar supplied to the grid has fallen to just 8.78 rupees per kilowatt-hour compared with 17 rupees for diesel. The drop has little to do with improvements in thenotoriously poor efficiency of solar panels: industrial panels still only convert15 to 18 per cent of the energy they receive into electricity. But they are now much cheaper to produce, so inefficiency is no longer a major sticking point.

Bloomberg New Energy Finance:

Investment in India out-paces the rest of the world, thanks to the improving cost-competitiveness of wind and solar

New Delhi, London and New York, 2 February 2012 – Clean energy investments in India reached $10.3bn in 2011, some 52% higher than the $6.8bn invested in 2010. This was the highest growth figure of any significant economy in the world. There is plenty of room for further expansion – in 2011, India accounted for 4% of global investment in clean energy.

The large growth was driven by a seven-fold increase in funding for grid-connected solar projects: from $0.6bn in 2010 to $4.2bn in 2011. Solar almost reached the same level of investments as wind, which totalled $4.6bn.

Ashish Sethia, head of India research at Bloomberg New Energy Finance, said: “There was concern at the beginning of last year that increasing lending rates might hit investment. Policy measures like the Jawaharlal Nehru National Solar Mission, and renewable energy’s increasing cost competitiveness, have made this a record year.”

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Because for Oil companies, its always, all about the children….

Egypt Insider:

Environmentalists blame Shell and other foreign oil firms for polluting the country’s oil-rich Niger Delta. Some environmentalists say as much as 550 million gallons of oil poured into the delta during Shell’s roughly 50 years of production in Nigeria — a rate roughly comparable to one Exxon Valdez disaster per year. An estimated 11 million gallons was released during the 1989 Exxon Valdez spill in Alaska.

Shell in recent years has said most of the spills in the delta are caused by militant attacks or thieves tapping into pipelines to steal crude oil, which ends up sold into the black market or cooked into a crude diesel or kerosene. Company statistics kept by Shell show spills have dropped as militant attacks in the region subsided, though this single spill at Bonga roughly doubles the amount of oil spilled by Shell this year.

Talking Points Memo:

A Shell deepwater drilling site off the Nigerian coast that the company reported leaking on Wednesday may have spilled up to 2.4 million gallons, according to nonprofit environmental satellite monitoring group SkyTruth.

If so, that’s far worse than indicated in statements made so far by Royal Dutch Shell, which has put the amount of oil leaked at the Bonga offshore site at “less than 40,000 barrels,” (1.7 million gallons).

“That could mean anything from 1 gallon to 1.7 million gallons,” John Amos, founder and president of satellite-imaging nonprofit SkyTruth told TPM.

Imagine these in every mall parking lot in the US.

The following is a letter written by Kevin Trenberth and signed by a distinguished group of Earth and Atmospheric scientists in response to last week’s ridiculous “Don’t Panic over Climate Change” Op-Ed in the Wall Street Journal.

A tired and recycled shibboleth dear to the hearts of aging climate deniers, as clueless about agriculture as they are about climate  -  “CO2 is good for plants…”  - covered in the video above.  The real world continues to provide tangible evidence of how wrong headed this is….

The Economic Times:

PARIS: More intense heat waves due to global warming could diminish wheat crop yields around the world through premature ageing, according to a study published Sunday in Nature Climate Change.

Nature Asia-Pacific:

Extreme heat can accelerate wheat aging — an effect that reduces crop yields and is currently underestimated in most crop models — according to a study published online this week in Nature Climate Change. These findings imply that climate warming presents even greater challenges to wheat production than current models predict.

An important source of uncertainty in anticipating the effects of climate change on agriculture is limited understanding of crop responses to extremely high temperatures. David Lobell and co-workers used satellite measurements of wheat growth in northern India to monitor the rates of wheat aging — known as senescence — following exposure to temperatures greater than 34 °C (93.2° F)

New Scientist: 

In India’s breadbasket, the Ganges plain, winter wheat is planted in November and harvested as temperatures rise in spring. David Lobell of Stanford University in California used nine years of images from the MODIS Earth-observation satellite to track when wheat in this region turned from green to brown, a sign that the grain is no longer growing.

He found that the wheat turned brown earlier when average temperatures were higher, with spells over 34 ºC having a particularly strong effect. [...]

Lobell’s work suggests losses could be sooner and greater. “This is an early indication that a situation that was already bad could be even worse,” says Andy Challinor of the University of Leeds, UK.

Meanwhile, the New York Times is reporting on a separate Indian study with similar implications.

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Dave Roberts is a staff writer for Grist:

During Obama’s State of the Union speech, Democracy Corps ran a dial-test focus group. Fifty swing voters were given devices that let them register approval or disapproval continuously throughout the speech. Two results in particular are worth highlighting.

Overall, there was a striking degree of unanimity, quite in contrast to the polarization in Washington. Reactions to the speech split along party lines on only a few issues. The most interesting split came during the section of the speech on energy:

This section received the highest sustained ratings of the speech from Democrats and independents, but it was also one of the few polarizing sections as Republicans reacted negatively to the President’s call for more support of clean energy (independents, like Democrats, responded very favorably). Overall, Obama gained 22 points on the issue, one of his biggest gains on the evening, as these voters endorsed his appeal to end subsidies for oil companies and instead focus those resources on expanding clean energy in America. [my emphasis]

It seems the Republican attempt to drag clean energy into the culture war has reached only the conservative base. Independents outside the Fox-Limbaugh loop still favor it.

In other words, this is a powerful wedge issue that favors Democrats.

With the Wall Street Journal editorial page beating its chest, Politico making sweet, sweet love to the Solyndra non-scandal, and the Chamber of Commerce dumping money into attack ads, Democrats have gotten unduly spooked. They’ve started believing John Boehner’s trash talk, that energy is a wedge to divide unions from greens.

It’s an empty threat. The fact is, overwhelming majorities of Americans — across party, age, and regional lines — support clean, modern energy. A poll conducted by ORC International in November found that 77 percent of Americans, including 65 percent of Republicans, believe that “the U.S. needs to be a clean energy technology leader and it should invest in the research and domestic manufacturing of wind, solar, and energy efficiency technologies.” Last February, a Gallup poll offered a list of actions Congress might take. The most popular option, with an incredible 83 percent support, was “an energy bill that provides incentives for using solar and other alternative energy resources.”

Americans love clean energy. When they hear about green energy infrastructure, according to the focus-group results …

… participants immediately make the connection between new energy and new jobs. They say, “Alternative energy — good jobs, local jobs — I think we have a tremendous opportunity here — it’s about creating goods and services — invest in infrastructure.”

The new George Lucas movie “Red Tails” is doing unexpectedly boffo box office, much to the chagrin of Hollywood observers who predicted that the lack of a big name white star in the cast would doom the film to a niche audience.

MTV Movie News:

Lucas appeared on “The Daily Show With Jon Stewart” earlier this month and claimed that major studios showed no interest in the film when he went to pitch it.

“It’s because it’s an all-black movie,” he said. “There’s no major white roles in it at all. It’s one of the first all-black action pictures ever made.”

“We’ve come a long way from when Martin was marching in the streets and getting rocks thrown at him. We’ve come a very, very long way,” Ne-Yo said. “However, even with that being said, we got a long way to go. As a black person, period, we’re kinda constantly in a state of proving, which is something that I came to wraps with a long time ago.”

Despite the studios’ lack of interest in the film, Ne-Yo decided to let the success of “Red Tails” speak for itself. “At the end of the day, you complain about it, or you prove them wrong,” he said. “I feel like this was a matter of just proving them wrong.”

Why is this relevant?

Because today, the military is once again leading the nation in a critically important way, by being early adopters of renewable technology that is saving money, and soldiers lives, by decreasing reliance on fossil fuels.  President Obama doubled down on this theme in his State of the Union address.

Examiner.com 

Another major point President Obama stated in his speech is that the U.S. Department of Defense, the world’s largest consumer of energy, will make one of the largest commitments to clean energy in history, with the Navy purchasing enough capacity to power a quarter of a million homes a year. He did not offer any specifics, but it is possible that he is setting a more aggressive renewable portfolio standard for the military, which currently is set at 25 percent of its power consumed to be derived from renewable energy sources by 2025.

The U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) has a tradition of accelerating technological advancements, serving as early adopters and impacting the broader commercial market in such areas as aviation, computing and GPS. For the past several years, the DoD has been playing this same role in the renewable energy space.

The spiritual heirs of the Bull Connor racists who resisted integration of the military are today’s tea-party-troglodyte climate deniers.  A little googling will show the current tea party line is “Clean energy is being Shoved Down the Military’s Throat”. (always the sexual innuendo – its a template that speaks volumes)

They are being pushed back and proved wrong on a daily basis, but history shows ignorance has never ceded  ground without a fight. It won’t happen unless all of us are willing to let our voices be heard above the small, bigoted and backward minority.