Here's one of those things that Carl Jung would call synchronicity, but is really just an example of how scientific research tends to converge on certain ideas. Item 1, which arrived in my email in box this morning in the form of a press release from the DC-based Institute for Governance & Sustainable Development, discusses what attendees at a side-event to the Poznan climate negotiations heard about the the dangers of "black carbon," an important contributor to global warming. Here's the paragraph that got my attention:
"Black carbon is extremely bad news because it contributes to climate change in two ways: it absorbs heat from above and contributes to warming, but then as it falls on snow and ice it darkens the ground and reduces the albedo, or reflective ability," said Durwood Zaelke, President of the Institute for Governance & Sustainable Development. "As a major contributor to snow and ice melt, this is especially troublesome for places such as the Tibetan Plateau, which is a critical tipping point. If this ice mass disintegrates, millions of people will lose their drinking water and irrigation for agriculture, leading to famine and possible national security threats over natural resources."
That got my attention because the day before I came across item 2, a new paper in Geophysical Research Letters titled "Mass loss on Himalayan glacier endangers water resources" by a long list of of researchers from all over the place. From the abstract:
If climatic conditions dominating the mass balance of Naimona'nyi extend to other glaciers in the region, the implications for water resources could be serious as these glaciers feed the headwaters of the Indus, Ganges, and Brahmaputra Rivers that sustain one of the world's most populous regions.
Not that this is news. Anyone who's ever attended one of the climate change presentations by Al Gore or any of his team (including me) will know that glaciers are melting, and the Himalayan plateau supplies a huge percentage of the world's population with fresh water -- a sixth of the world's population, according to the paper at hand. What's interesting about this paper is the findings regarding one particular glacier, known as Naimona'nyi (photo at right, from Phys.org) Stringing together some more excerpts from the paper and we learn that
Most glaciers worldwide preserve a radio-isotopic signal that is a remnant of a global pulse of 36Cl injected to the atmosphere by the 1952-1958 marine nuclear weapons tests in the South Pacific ... Naimona'nyi is very anomalous as its ice cores do not contain horizons with elevated beta radioactivity.... The virtual absence on Naimona'nyi of any ice or snow strata containing beta radioactivity including 3H and 36Cl from post-1950 thermonuclear tests provides strong evidence for a net negative mass balance from 1950 to the present.
No increase at all since 1950. Hmmm.
That's just one glacier. But Naimona'nyi is, at 6,050 meters above sea level, the highest glacier that's losing losing mass. So the same thing is probably happening to lower-elevation glaciers. One more excerpt.
Estimates of the impact of Himalayan glacier retreat on water resources have not accounted for mass loss through high elevation thinning such as is currently occurring on the Naimona'nyi ice field. If Naimona'nyi is characteristic of other glaciers in the region, alpine glacier meltwater surpluses are likely to shrink much faster than currently predicted with substantial consequences for approximately half a billion people.
Presumably the other half a billion who rely on meltwater from the region will also be affected, though perhaps less dramatically and rapidly.
So it's not just Micronesian island states with maximum elevations of just a few centimeters above sea level who stand to lose big if the climate keeps warming, although not too surprisingly, the Federated States of Micronesia was a co-sponsor of the Poznan side event that generated the press release. Someone tell the Dalai Llama he's got bigger problems than the Chinese to worry about.
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Natalie M. Kehrwald, Lonnie G. Thompson, Yao Tandong, Ellen Mosley-Thompson, Ulrich Schotterer, Vasily Alfimov, Jürg Beer, Jost Eikenberg, Mary E. Davis (2008). Mass loss on Himalayan glacier endangers water resources Geophysical Research Letters, 35 (22) DOI: 10.1029/2008GL035556
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Dear James,
I am sure that you will be interested in my wind project.
My esteemed friend Dr. Paul Curto recently ran his own numbers on my project.
Paul has among other things, worked as a NASA patent evaluator.
These are his results;
To whom it may concern:
My colleague, Mike Fallwell, has produced an extraordinary invention that shows great promise as a breakthrough in wind energy technology. His idea of using a glider flying on a tether at near right angles to the wind, much as a sailboat tacks at an angle to the wind, takes advantage of the flight characteristics to amplify the power extracted from the air mass. Simply stated, a typical windmill is slaved to a cross section of the air mass limited by the diameter of the blades. An aerial wind system, running on a tether, is limited by the product of the wingspan and the length of the tether that is used to traverse the air mass.
Typical wind turbines, like those from Vestas, have a diameter of 80 meters and produce 1.8 MWe. They take up nearly a square kilometer of land and rise nearly 110 meters in height. Most of the components are built abroad and shipped for assembly here to the US from Vietnam, China, Denmark, and Germany. Each one costs well over $4 million. The energy costs, without subsidies, range from 4 to 12 cents per kilowatt-hour (kWh).
The commercial scale version that would compete with wind farms might have a one kilometer flight range and a 40m winsgpan. Such a system would produce 4 MWe at 8 m/s (~15 MPH) average windspeed). This may sound unremarkable, but the actual ground speed of the wind would be half that of the wind at the altitude of the glider. The standard wind turbine would be stuck on the ground, where the windspeed may be below 4 m/s, and is only producing at a few hundred kilowatts at the same time.
In production sufficient to build just one typical wind farm, the 4 MWe Fallwell Flyer configuration would cost probably less than $400,000, or $100 per kilowatt. Its annual output at a typical wind site would have a much higher capacity factor than a Vestas system, at least 60%. It would average over 5000 hours at peak power each year, or 20,000 MWHe annually.
Therefore, its capital cost would be 20 times less than a Vestas and its energy cost as much as 40 times less -- less than two-tenth of a cent per kWhe.
Alvin Weinberg once bragged that nuclear power would be too cheap to meter. This time, it may be true, but the creator is Skypower -- The Fallwell Flyer!
--Dr. Paul A. Curto
CCLLC Senior Consultant
Potomac, MD 20854
[contact details removed]
web site: http://paul20854.110mb.com
Shouldn't all the options be explored?
Mike Fallwell
PS.
Just a few days ago the FAA made a ruling that these systems
would be classed as permanent structures
that can be treated like any other wind turbine.
If the glacier melted completely, the people dwelling below it will have no water any more? Now, consider the glacier stays as it is now which is much the same situation as above, where do the people get their water from? Hope it will not grow...
I was interested to find this blog. 20 years ago I had a book published on different economic concepts to point the way to a sustainable world economy. Someone who liked the book contacted me this year to suggest that I update and re-publish it as a blog. She set up the blog, and the book is now complete on the blog in a series of postings. There are now also additional pieces on global warming and other subjects. Here is the link:
http://www.economicsforaroundearth.com
With all good wishes,
Charles Pierce
stop stop stop... People plese remember that people live there.
thankyouu
thank you