The S-Curve of technology advancement is explained in my new video, by Tony Seba and Jonathan Koomey, both energy experts. But the idea is not a new one. See below video.
Many people suggest that rates of new product introduction and adoption are speeding up, but is it really, across the board? The answer seems to be yes. An automobile industry trade consultant, for instance, observes that “Today, a typical automotive design cycle is approximately 24 to 36 months, which is much faster than the 60-month life cycle from five years ago.” The chart below, created by Nicholas Felton of the New York Times, shows how long it took various categories of product, from electricity to the Internet, to achieve different penetration levels in US households. It took decades for the telephone to reach 50% of households, beginning before 1900. It took five years or less for cellphones to accomplish the same penetration in 1990. As you can see from the chart, innovations introduced more recently are being adopted more quickly. By analogy, firms with competitive advantages in those areas will need to move faster to capture those opportunities that present themselves.
New Video: Climate Action is our Moon Shot
May 25, 2021
On this day, 60 years ago, May 25, 1961, John Kennedy challenged America to put a man on the moon before the end of that decade.
Though the technologies needed to achieve that goal had only been envisioned, not yet built, bold expert engineers thought the goal was within reach, and that the alternative, of ceding Cold War technological supremacy to the Soviet Union, was not acceptable.
Similarly today, President Biden has set goals for climate action that some feel are too optimistic. In our case the technologies needed are fully available already, with more improvements sure to come.
I bagged a long sought after interview late last March, with Jeff Severinghaus (we have a connection I’ll explain tomorrow) of Scripps Oceanographic Institute.
Big Ice guy.
Jeff has some current research that I’ll be examining in coming videos, but as I spoke to Jeff he was just returning from a stay in Antarctica, so I asked him to summarize the best assessments.
Then of course, Covid hit, and my county in Michigan got devastated by a dam failure, and a whole load of the madness that is 2020 got in the way – but I finally came back around to this.
I matched Jeff’s clips with some from Richard Alley and Eric Rignot, well known to readers here. They spoke to me in New Orleans in 2017.
I had also talked to Susheel Adusumilli, also of Scripps, and I featured prominently the new work from Stef Lhermitte, of Delft University of Technology. Then I wrapped it with a summary from Twila Moon of the National Snow and Ice Data Center.
My Yale Climate Connections colleague Karen Kirk also had a pass at this research as well, her @CC_Yale piece:
Karen Kirk in Yale Climate Connections:
Read the rest of this entry »
Climate researchers have long monitored ice sheet dynamics in the Amundsen Sea, focusing specifically on the Thwaites and Pine Island glaciers. The two sit side by side on Antarctica’s western peninsula covering an area roughly the size of nine U.S. coastal states stretching from Maine to Maryland. The two glaciers alone store ice that could account for about 4 feet (1.2 meters) of global sea level rise. Their “seaboard” location may help bring increased public attention and interest to the West Antarctic Ice Sheet, which if it melted could raise seas by a catastrophic 11 feet (3.4 meters).An international effort led by the British Antarctic Survey recently published two papers (Hogan et al. and Jordan et al.) showing the first detailed maps of the seafloor at the edge of the Thwaites Glacier. The team mapped deep submarine channels that have been funneling warm water to this vulnerable location. High-resolution imagery pinpoints the pathways that allow warm water to undermine the ice shelf. Lead author Kelly Hogan of the British Antarctic Survey says the findings will improve estimates of sea-level rise from Thwaites Glacier. “We can go ahead and make those calculations about how much warm water can get under the ice and melt it,” Hogan said.
The other researchers, led by Stef Lhermitte, found stark visual confirmation of glacier disintegration using decades of time-lapse satellite imagery. Their work sheds light on the accelerating feedback process, wherein the rapid loss of ice is opening the door to ever-increasing melting.
“Michael & Me” Just went Boom
May 12, 2020
UPDATE: There is more on this story that you can read here.
You can read my own account of meeting Moore, long before he was “the”
Michael Moore, here.
Read the rest of this entry »I was not going to step into this mess, which many people have contacted me about over the last couple weeks. But because of my anti-nuclear background and my familiarity with all that went down in Midland, this one particularly pained me. So I am breaking my silence. I was involved in the research and fact checking process for various of Michael’s film, TV and book projects from the 1990s through 2007. During that period, Michael cared enough about the accuracy of his films that he complied when others told him he had to make changes to reflect facts and reality. I personally factually annotated some of these films and put entire “fact check bibles” on film websites. I dealt with studio lawyers doing fact and libel checks until they were satisfied. Believe me, by the time these projects saw the light of day, they were airtight. The director of this new film was someone we never let near the fact checking process. In my experience, he seemed attracted to conspiracy theories and information that was not factual, and I believed his influence on Michael could be damaging to his films. I cannot speak to what happened to Michael’s films after I stopped helping to ensure their accuracy but it is excruciating to see what has happened now – although it is not surprising. People disturbed by inaccuracies in this film are not “haters.” They, like I, are pained by them. The factual errors should never have happened.
How Delusional is Lamar Smith?
December 1, 2015
Citing unnamed, (ie nonexistent) “experts”, Inquisitor Lamar Smith of the House Science Committee engages in hallucinatory arm waving in attempting to convince Miami residents that the water around their ankles is completely normal.
Office of Lamar Smith, Chairman, House Committee on Science, Space and Technology:
Dec 1, 2015Press ReleaseWashington, D.C. – Science, Space, and Technology Committee Chairman Lamar Smith (R-Texas) today released the following statement after President Obama delivered a speech this morning before the U.N. climate change conference in Paris blaming climate change for recent flooding in Miami, Florida. The president stated, “You go down to Miami and when it’s flooding at high tide on a sunny day, the fish are swimming through the middle of the streets, there’s costs to that.”
Chairman Smith: “The president’s statement that Miami flooding is linked to climate change is entirely false and in fact disputed by meteorologists at the National Weather Service. The experts have reported that the lunar cycle and wind patterns are to blame for unusually high floods in Miami, not climate change. The fact is there is little evidence that climate change causes extreme weather events. The president is ignoring the facts and misleading the American people in order to advance his extreme climate change agenda.”
2000 years of sea level: Kemp et al
New Video: What is Right? Climate as a Moral Question.
October 14, 2015
Pope Francis’ visit to the US catalyzed the growing sense across the country, and across the globe, that climate change is, above all, a moral issue.
More and more scientists have realized that speaking to this moral dimension is far more persuasive than speaking the language of science and fact, as compelling as those are. Most people simply respond better to an issue that is framed in moral terms.
The emerging story of what Exxon knew, and when they knew it, shows that the differences have never really been about the science questions – even the major oil companies knew the basic science truths 4 decades ago. They simply made a moral decision that the lives of the next ten thousand generations of human beings were not as important as their own profits, and we are now witnessing the early impacts of that decision.
Dr. Jeff Masters: Support Dark Snow Project
April 27, 2013
Figure 1. Over the course of several years, turbulent water overflow from a large melt lake carved this 60-foot-deep (18.3 meter-deep) canyon in Greenland’s Ice Sheet (note people near left edge for scale). Image credit: Ian Joughin, University of Washington.
Jeff Masters at Weather Underground:
“There’s no place on Earth that is changing faster–and no place where that change matters more–than Greenland.” So said 350.org founder Bill McKibben, in a 2012 Rolling Stone magazine interview. As Earth Week 2013 draws to a close, I want to draw your attention to a unique effort to learn more about why Greenland is melting so fast–a crowd-funded research project that anyone can contribute to, which aims to answer the “burning question”: How much does
wildfire and industrial soot darken the ice, increasing melt? The Dark Snow Project, the first-ever Greenland expedition relying on crowd-source funding, hopes to raise $150,000 to mount a field research campaign to find out. The project is the brainchild of Dr. Jason Box, Professor at the Geological Survey of Denmark and Greenland (GEUS), and one of the world’s leading experts on Greenland’s glaciers. He has set up a website called darksnowproject.org to help raise the funds for the field campaign, and has raised about half of the needed amount as of mid-April.
2012: Unprecedented melting in Greenland
Watching the weather events of 2012 over Greenland made all seasoned climate watchers a little queasy. The vast ice sheet on the island holds enough water to raise global sea levels by 7.36 meters (24.15 feet) were it all to melt, and the ice melt season of 2012 gave notice that an epic melting of the Greenland Ice Sheet may be underway. According to NOAA’s 2012 Arctic Report Card, the duration of melting at the surface of the ice sheet in summer 2012 was the longest since satellite observations began in 1979, and the total amount of summer melting was nearly double the previous record, set in 2010 (satellite records of melting go back to 1979.) A rare, near-ice sheet-wide surface melt event melted 97% of the surface of Greenland’s ice sheet on July 11 – 12. While a similar melt event at the summit occurred 1889, but the 1889 event has no basis in the instrumental record from coastal Greenland. It’s instead likely that 2012 was Greenland’s warmest summer in at least 863 years, since the medieval warm period (see http://www.meltfactor.org/blog/?p=677 and http://www.meltfactor.org/blog/?p=725).
It would not be a surprise if this sort of summer began occurring regularly, since the ice sheet reached its darkest value on record in 2012. The darkened surface was due to below average summer snow, soot particles from pollution and forest fires, and record melting. A darker ice sheet absorbs more solar energy, in a vicious cycle that raises temperatures, melts more ice, and further darkens the ice sheet. The amount of melting that was caused by soot from forest fires is important to know, since global warming is likely to increase the amount of forest fires in coming decades. However, the amount of forest fire soot landing on the Greenland Ice Sheet is almost completely unknown, which is why Dr. Box is determined to find out, via the Dark Snow Project.
Thailand Flooding Aerial Footage
October 31, 2011
With a hat tip to the sharp eyed commenter who pointed me to this. I don’t think this is getting as much play in the US media as it should, considering the scale.
Description:
This footage was shot on board a Thai Army Bell Jet Ranger helicopter on 25 October 2011. They generally flew from central Bangkok near Victory Monument (not flooded) north over the Chao Phraya River (Main river going through Bangkok and threatening to flood it). They flew north to north west generally over Nonthaburi, Bang Bua Tong, Pathum Thani out to a remote village near Ayutthaya where they dropped relief supplies. Then they looped to the east slightly returning to Bangkok.
For more info, see the youtube page
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Especially note flooded agricultural land, starting about 3 minutes in.
When the Earthquake/tsunami closed down all of Japan’s nuclear power plants, I reported that wind was one of the only remaining reliable, tsunami proof sources of power.
Now, Dallas Morning News quotes ERCOT, the Electric Reliability Council of Texas, which manages the state’s electrical systems:
The Texas electrical grid operator began emergency procedures to prevent total blackout on Tuesday as the heat lead to record electricity demand, and told customers to brace for a repeat in the next few days.
The high temperatures also caused about 20 power plants to stop working, including at least one coal-fired plant and natural gas plants.
..such outages aren’t unusual in the hot summer, and Texas is getting some juice from surrounding states and from Mexico.
According to an ERCOT spokesman, conventional power plants suffer in this kind of heat.
“They can’t really efficiently condense the steam that’s used to make electricity, so that causes unit deratings that they can’t generate as much as they could if the lake were cooler.”
The American Wind Energy Association notes:
Meanwhile, some 1,800 MW of wind generation were available yesterday, more than double the 800 MW that ERCOT counts on during periods of peak summer demand for its long-term planning purposes. 1,800 MW is enough to power about 360,000 homes under the very high electricity demand seen yesterday.
Birth of a Crock
October 6, 2009
The observation that natural climate variability exists is not a new one.
Early in September 2009, at a gathering of experts on global climate change, one of the world’s most respected and experienced climate modelers, Mojib Latif, made some observations on climate, media and human nature.
The message seemed clear-
natural variations in the long term warming might be misinterpreted
by the media. out of ignorance, or malice.
Climate deniers were quick to take Latif’s remarks, and begin
doing exactly that.
Climate Denial Crock of the Week 