December 3, 2010 - Two days before Thanksgiving the NY Times ran a story by Leslie Kaufman about a street in Norfolk, Virginia where residents take note of the tides when choosing spots to park their cars. Kaufman writes:

"If the moon is going to be full the night before Hazel Peck needs her car, for example, she parks it on a parallel block, away from the river. The next morning, she walks through a neighbor’s backyard to avoid the two-to-three-foot-deep puddle that routinely accumulates on her street after high tides. For Ms. Peck and her neighbors, it is the only way to live with the encroaching sea."

Higher water is coming to Norfolk. The marshland on which the city is built is compacting and sinking while the neighboring sea is rising (or maybe not as some people believe). The residents in Ms. Peck's neighborhood lobbied the city to fix the problem and the city has responded with a plan to invest $1.25 million to raise a small stretch of road and turn a section of park into wetlands. The question people in Norfolk are asking is whether this investment going to fix the problem and maintain property values or is it a waste of money?

If it's just a matter of sinking marshland the question can be viewed in one dimension. The land is sinking, how much needs to be added to the top of it to keep it dry? But then there's the other dimension. The one that can be tagged with buzzwords like "global warming" and "climategate".

Is the sea level rising? Most scientists believe it is. Or is it not,as many politicians and certain TV and radio personalities maintain? And if it IS rising, how much do we believe it will rise in X years? It's impossible to make wise infrastructure investment decisions for streets in Norfolk or sewage treatment facilities on Cape Cod unless the question that opens this paragraph is answered.

Regardless of how politicians and pundits answer the question, people on the ground are worried about ending up in the water. On December 1st Old Dominion University in Norfolk unveiled an initiative to become a national hub for research, teaching and expertise in rising sea levels related to climate change. University President Broderick said, "We are forced to take very seriously the scientific evidence that predicts the ocean's rise of 2 feet or more before the end of the century... It's as if we live in a climate-science fishbowl here on the Virginia coast."

Read more at:
NYTimes
HamptonRoads.com

November 25, 2010 - On Monday the Massachusetts Department of Public Utilities (DPU) announced approval of a 15-year contract with utility National Grid to buy power from Cape Wind at a price that's about double current market prices. The contract is for roughly half of Cape Wind's projected output. Regulators denied Cape Wind's petition to sell a second power-purchase agreement for its remaining output because it did not specify a buyer.

National Grid expects the purchase of Cape Wind's output to raise consumers' bills by 1% to 2%. In its decision, the DPU wrote: "[I]t is abundantly clear that the Cape Wind facility offers significant benefits that are not currently available from any other renewable resources. We find that these benefits outweigh the costs of the project." Massachusetts requires that 3.5% of the state's power be generated from clean power sources. The agreement with National Grid helps to meet those regulations. Initial price for the power is set at 18.7 cents per kilowatt hour in 2013. That may rise by 3.5% a year over for the life of the agreement. The agency said the price for Cape Wind power can go up if the developer is unable to tap into federal subsidies, but prices may fall if financing costs are reduced.

Cape Wind plans to begin installation of 130 wind turbines in Nantucket Sound next year. The building of the project may create 1,000 local jobs. After completion, 162 jobs are expected to remain for the life of the contract.

When approving the lease for Cape Wind's Nantucket Sound location the US Department of the Interior said that the wind farm may ultimately generate enough power for 200,000 homes while reducing CO2 emissions from coal powered energy by 700,000 tons a year - the equivalent of removing 175,000 cars from the road.

"This is a major victory for renewable energy in the United States," said attorney Matthew Pawa, who represented Clean Power Now, in the DPU proceedings. "We are particularly pleased that the DPU agreed with our position that it should include in its analysis the future cost benefits of complying with the state global warming law and that it rejected the Attorney General's argument to ignore those cost benefits as speculative," Pawa said.

Sources for this story:
Bloomberg
Reuters
WSJ

November 1, 2010 - In a research paper published online Saturday in the Journal of Geophysical Research Oceans, a publication of the American Geological Union (AGU), scientists reported the southern Baffin Bay off West Greenland has continued warming since wintertime ocean temperatures were last effectively measured there in the early 2000s. Temperatures in the study were collected by narwhals, medium-sized toothed Arctic whales, during NOAA-sponsored missions in 2006 and 2007. The animals were tagged with sensors that recorded ocean depths and temperatures during feeding dives from the surface pack ice to the seafloor, going as deep as 1,773 meters, or more than a mile.

Scientists have had limited opportunities to measure ocean temperatures in Baffin Bay during winter months because of dense ice and harsh conditions. Cost is also a factor — it requires millions of dollars to mount a conventional expedition using an ice-breaking vessel and other specialized equipment and people. As a result, for the past decade, researchers used climatology data consisting of long-term historical average observations rather than direct ocean temperature measurements for winter temperatures in the area.

The published study reported that highest winter ocean temperature measurements in 2006 and 2007 from both narwhals and additional sensors deployed using helicopters ranged between 4 and 4.6 degrees Celsius (39.2 and 40.3 degrees Fahrenheit). The study also found that temperatures were on average nearly a degree Celsius warmer than climatology data. Whale-collected temperatures also demonstrated the thickness of the winter surface isothermal layer, a layer of constant temperature, to be 50 to 80 meters less than that reported in the climatology data.

“Narwhals proved to be highly efficient and cost-effective ‘biological oceanographers,’ providing wintertime data to fill gaps in our understanding of this important ocean area,” said Kristin Laidre from the Polar Science Center in the University of Washington’s Applied Physics Laboratory. “Their natural behavior makes them ideal for obtaining ocean temperatures during repetitive deep vertical dives. This mission was a ‘proof-of-concept’ that narwhal-obtained data can be used to make large-scale hydrographic surveys in Baffin Bay and to extend the coverage of a historical database into the poorly sampled winter season.” Tagged narwhals.

Greenland’s coast is a gateway for fresh water from melting polar ice flowing south to the Labrador Shelf, ultimately reaching the North Atlantic Current. The Arctic flow’s effect on the current is critical for understanding the impacts of a changing Arctic on the transference of heat globally from the equator to higher latitudes.

Laidre was lead scientist on the NOAA-sponsored missions and is lead author of the paper. “Continued warming will likely have pronounced effects on the species and ecosystem in Baffin Bay and may eventually affect sea ice coverage in the region, which in recent years has already retreated significantly,” she said. “The timing of the break-up of spring sea ice is ecologically important for many marine species and is linked to primary production that forms the base of the food chain.”

NOAA’s Office of Ocean Exploration and Research funded the missions in 2006 and 2007 to tag and track narwhals as they made a fall migration from northwest Greenland to their wintering grounds in Baffin Bay. During that time and in an earlier mission, 14 adult narwhals were tagged with sensors to record date and time, ocean temperature and depth information. The data were automatically sent to a satellite when the narwhals surfaced for air between cracks in the sea ice. Tagging was carried out in accordance with the University of Washington’s Animal Care Guidelines and a permit issued by the Government of Greenland. Each sensor tag provided up to seven months of data before falling off the animal. Helicopter.

Laidre worked in Baffin Bay with colleagues and co-authors Mads Peter Heide-Jørgensen from the Greenland Institute of Natural Resources in Nuuk, Greenland, and Wendy Ermold and Michael Steele also from the Polar Science Center, University of Washington.

The NOAA-sponsored narwhal missions are chronicled online and include lesson plans at three grade levels that align with National Science Education Standards.

Source: NOAA

October 23, 2010 - Canada's Hydro-Quebec currently provides about 8.5 percent of New England’s power; the utility wants to bump that up to around 10 to 12 percent. Much of that power would be imported through a long-planned $1.1 billion transmission line through New Hampshire. Hydro-Quebec is building more dam complexes in Quebec. But state officials and environmentalists are struggling to decide how green large-scale hydropower really is. Hydropower is inexpensive, making it attractive in Massachusetts, a state with some of the nation’s highest electricity rates, but there is debate over whether it should be eligible for state financial incentives awarded to renewable energy projects. Here's the full story from Beth Daley Boston.com.