Tip of the hat to my dad for the story of tiny Benson, Minnesota - turkey production capital of the Upper Midwest - which has put turkey waste to work. A power plant, built by Fibrominn, a part of Fibrowatt LLC, uses 700,000 tons of turkey litter - a combination of droppings and bedding material such as wood chips - to produce 55MW of electricity.

Minnesota raises 45 million turkeys each year, with 2 million tons of turkey litter produced. The electricity produced at the Benson plant is enough to power 50,000 homes. For reference, Swift County, where Benson is located, has a population of 11,956, in 4,821 housing units.

Is burning that biomass a good thing, or does it contribute pollution and greenhouse gases to the atmosphere? Burning the waste material does not produce any more pollution than simply letting it decompose, and the ash that is leftover after the material is burned is a 0-17-13 fertilizer with micronutrients such as sulfur and zinc. North American Pres. Randy Tersteec says that 400 pounds of the ash will provide the same amount of nutrients as four tons of the regular poultry litter.

Elliot Abrams has added a new entry to the Global Perspectives blog, this one on the issue of wind shear and hurricanes. You may remember my entry on this subject. Katie also briefly mentioned it in Headline: Earth. The University of Illinois has a web site with a brief animation that shows how decreased wind shear aids tropical cyclone development while increased wind shear suppresses it.

Again, any comments on Elliot's blog entry can be made here.

What's a utility company to do? Demand for their product is ever increasing, yet the regulations they know are coming eventually from the government have not yet been established. Utilities are facing decisions on how to invest money - money from shareholders and ratepayers - to best meet the combined needs of increased demand for power along with regulated greenhouse gas emissions that they know are coming in the future.

The article I linked above covers a variety of strategies utility companies can employ to meet these demands, from the kinds of new plants to build to what to do with old, dirty coal burning plants. Renewable energy solutions and conservation are touched on as well.

It seems likely that eventually America will have some variation of "cap and trade" scheme, similar to that used currently by the European Union, in place. Many power companies have embraced the idea. How that is managed, from the number and value of carbon permits to who gets what incentives for new technology, remain to be established. For utility companies, the faster the government makes these decisions, the better - at least they'll know how best to plan for the future.

Quite frequently, I've gotten comments here from people who bring up warming on other planets as an argument that what's going on here on Earth is just part of a natural cycle. Russian astronomer Habibullo Abdusamatov agrees, according to National Geographic News. I've commented on Abdusamatov's ideas on Earth's climate here before. The Earth's climate is complex enough for me, I don't have much time for learning about what is going on in other parts of the solar system. Just the basic fundamentals of what can affect climate, shape of orbit, length of year, angle of axis - all these things that are pretty much basic parts of our understanding of our climate - how many of us can describe any of those things for another planet? I know I cannot.

The April 5 issue of Nature featured an article titled Global warming and climate forcing by recent albedo changes on Mars (abstract available free, full article is subscription or pay only). The article described how dust storms on the planet's surface change the albedo, or reflectivity, of the surface. In the 20-year period between the Viking mission in the 1970s and the Mars Global Surveyor (MGS) mission around 2000, imagery shows that many areas of the planet darkened. This darkening reduced the reflectivity and brought the potential for a ~0.65 K rise in temperature over that 20 year period. A Kelvin degree is the same size as a degree Celsius, the scale starts at absolute zero, a hypothetical temperature where all molecular movement stops. That darkening explains most, though not all, of the loss of CO2 ice in the southern polar ice cap.

One thing that was very clear from the article is that many Martian climate processes are not well understood. In my opinion, making claims about Earth's climate based on what is going on in other parts of the solar system is treading on thin ice.

Researchers at Washington University in St. Louis have developed a new, more efficient method for using solar energy to split water molecules into hydrogen and oxygen.

The process uses oxide materials in nanostructures sandwiched together. Researchers say one of the benefits to this process is that it can be scaled up to produce larger structures in a cost-effective manner.

Headline: Earth turns its attention to science policy this week as Katie Fehlinger visits the Pew Center on Climate Change and interviews Judi Greenwald, Director of Solutions Programs.

Katie also features some of the week's global warming headlines.

The Summary for Policymakers for volume 3 of the IPCC's 4th Assessment Report has been release. This one is on Mitigation of Climate Change. This summary is a little longer than the past two at 35 pages. It's also dense with economics and statistics.

The summary is divided into sections, key sections in terms of content are labeled Greenhouse gas emission trends, Mitigation in the short and medium term (until 2030), Mitigation in the long term (after 2030), Policies, measures and instruments to mitigate climate change and Sustainable development and climate change mitigation.

The report highlights a number of different scenarios for stabilizing carbon dioxide concentrations in the atmosphere and touches on what can be done within different sectors, among them industry, transportation and agriculture. Among the solutions it describes is the implementation of more nuclear power generation, although it says more work needs to be done to ensure safety of the plants and of their hazardous wastes.

In honor of Queen Elizabeth's visit to the U.S., a story from East Anglia today. The story is from the New York Times, so free registration may be required. It seems that the erosion which has been occurring along the coast of East Anglia for the past century has been picking up speed in recent years. Many scientists say this is a result of global warming.

The article goes on to say "to make matters worse for coastal farmers, the government has stopped maintaining large parts of the network of seawalls that once protected the area." This raises a question for me - how much of a role do the un-maintained sea walls play in the increase in erosion rate? The article states that governments around the globe have taken on a policy of "managed retreat," in which they decide fighting all the effects of climate change isn't worth taxpayer money. Doesn't it seem logical that in those areas where measures that had been taken to prevent something like erosion are discontinued, there's going to be an increase in the rate of the erosion? It would be interesting to see a timeline showing the increase of the erosion rate and highlighting the point at which the government chose to stop maintaining the sea walls.

Local farmers and landowners are the losers in this situation, as some locations lose swaths of land 30 feet wide to the sea each year.

A new discovery from NASA scientists at the Goddard Space Flight Center reveals we still have a lot to learn about our atmosphere. Previously unknown "in-between" particles in the air around clouds add a new layer of complexity to modeling weather and climate. Scientists believe what they're seeing is a transitional zone where clouds are forming or dying away. This zone can take up as much as 60 percent of the atmosphere previously labeled as cloud-free.

What is unknown is what effect these particles have - water vapor is a potent greenhouse gas which traps the sun's energy, while clouds reflect incoming solar radiation.

"The effects of this zone are not included in most computer models that estimate the impact of aerosols on climate," said lead author Ilan Koren of the Weizmann Institute of Science, in Israel. "This could be one of the reasons why current measurements of this effect don't match our model estimates."

The Japanese government has contributed $100 million to the Asian Development Bank to fight global warming. Two funds will be established, the Investment Climate Facilitation Fun and the Asian Clean Energy Fund.

The goal of the funds is twofold - to fight climate change and also to "ensure sustainable development in the region."

Who is Reid Bryson? Emeritus Professor and founding chairman of the University of Wisconsin Department of Meteorology (now the Department of Oceanic and Atmospheric Sciences), identified by the British Institute of Geographers as the most frequently cited climatologist in the world, the "father of the science of modern climatology."

Bryson was one of the first climatologists to suggest a connection between human activity and climate change, 40 years ago. At the time, his ideas were laughed at. Bryson wasn't talking about carbon dioxide as a means of changing climate, but rather land use changes. Doctor Bryson doesn't believe CO₂ is driving climate change. He believes that the data fed into computer models overemphasizes carbon dioxide and handles water vapor poorly. Is he right? Certainly he's not in line with the "consensus." That's okay. The science of AGW can withstand challenges if it's accurate, and if it's not, it needs to be challenged.

Carbon credits, or offsets, which are marketed as a means for an individual, organization or corporation to become "carbon neutral." But do they work? An investigation by the Financial Times has found few environmental benefits from carbon credit projects that have collected millions of dollars.

The FT has found multiple examples of corporations selling carbon offsets for projects which are either inherently profitable or inexpensive to complete. A carbon credit purchased from a company which has already benefitted from a project hardly seems legitimate.

Any type of business where you the consumer pay money for an intangible benefit, the potential exists for abuse. This is not to say that all companies providing carbon credits are operating scams, but how exactly is a consumer supposed to sort out the options and determine where their money will be put to good use? People who have faith in the system as it stands will lose that faith as stories of fraud surface. People who believe AGW is a scam will point to examples of fraud as evidence that they are right, though the carbon offsetting companies rarely if ever have any connection with climate scientists.

I've been watching an episode of PBS' Nova titled Saved by the Sun, about the resurgence in interest in solar power. It's interesting stuff, but still so expensive that on a consumer level, a person has to be devoted to environmentalism to invest in the technology. To provide even most of the electricity needed for a typical home, you are looking at a significant cost. The Nova site includes the story of the conversion of a typical '60s tract home in Southern California to solar power; the family purchased 6-kW of photovoltaic power, 2-kW more than a typical home needs, because they also power an all-electric Toyota RAV4. The initial cost of the solar system? $36,000 - almost half of which was covered by rebates and tax incentives. Other energy improvements the homeowners made - new windows, new roof, added insulation - the full cost to the homeowners added up to $43,000. The system will pay for itself in just over 7 years.

The Nova program also led me to Maine's solar house - an interesting site for anyone who wants to learn more about designing and building a home powered by the sun. This home uses a 4.2-kW array of photovoltaics has a separate array of solar hot water panels that generate heat for the home through radiant heating - the heated water passes through tubing under the floors.

Googling "carbon dioxide scrub" had some interesting results. First on the list was a blog entry from last October that was an eye-opener. Algae bioreactor scrubs CO2 from power plant smokestacks to produce biofuels. I've written about algal oil here before, once in February and once before that in an entry that's been lost somewhere in cyberspace. That entry was based on oilgae.com, a very thorough site on the production of biodiesel fuel from algal oil.

So how does this idea work? According to Greenfuel Technologies Corporation, you take flue gas, or some other gas stream rich in carbon dioxide, and introduce it into a bioreactor, a plastic tank filled with nutrient-rich media and algae. The algae use that carbon dioxide and photosynthesis to grow. Some of the media is withdrawn continuously and the algae is harvested through a drying process. The oil is then extracted from the algae and converted into biodiesel fuel. Ethanol, methane and hydrogen are also potential products from the downstream processing process.

To me, this makes more sense than pumping carbon dioxide into geologic formations as most carbon dioxide sequestration plans call for. Use the gas as we can and get a benefit from it, rather than putting it underground and crossing our fingers, hoping it stays there.

I couldn't pass up that headline, though the potential change is tiny. Seems that researchers at Germany's Max Planck Institute for Meteorology analyzed the IPCC's predictions for oceans and found that rising sea levels and a redistribution of ocean waters will "likely" affect the Earth's rotation and the length of days. How much? Well, by the end of the 22nd century, days could be shortened by approximately 0.12 milliseconds.