Climate Clippings - August 16

 New and noteworthy for the week of August 16, 2010

Going, going, gone in the tropics

Glaciers in one of the world's last tropical ice caps will be gone within a matter of years, rather than the decades thought previously, according to an Ohio State University researcher who has spent his career probing the world's ice fields.

When they go, a unique record of the El Niño-Southern Oscillation phenomenon that drives climate patterns in the tropics could disappear, too, glaciologist Lonnie Thompson said.

The cap, perched on a 16,000-foot-high mountain ridge in Indonesia, "was riddled with crevasses and lacked any substantial snowfall," Thompson said of his most recent trip, earlier this summer.

During that trip a research team pulled three cores from the cap. They were shorter than other cores from some of Thompson's previous 57 expeditions to 16 countries from China to Peru. But a similarly short core from Africa's Mount Kilimanjaro helped the team reconstruct 11,700 years of climate history.

That history is melting away.

Radioactivity from atomic bomb tests in the 1950s and 1960s provide time markers that help date ice. Cores recently collected from Himalayan ice fields lacked these radioactive layers, indicating the glaciers are losing mass from the surface down, destroying key time markers.

The Indonesian ice fields near Punkak Jaya are tiny. Together they total barely 1.7 square kilometers (0.6 square miles), an area very similar to the current 1.8 square kilometers (0.7 square miles) on the summit of Mount Kilimanjaro in Africa.

But this is the region, on the fringe of the world's warmest ocean, that generates El Niño and drives weather from India's monsoons to Sierra Nevada droughts. The Punkak Jaya glaciers may store an archive of that climate history.

The expedition almost returned empty-handed, through no fault of global warming: Near the trip's end, local tribe members broke into the freezer where they thought the cores were stored, intent on destruction, according to the university. 

"They believe that the ice is their god's skull, that the mountains are its arms and legs and that we were drilling into the skull to steal their memories," Thompson said in a statement. "In their religion they are a part of nature, and by extension they are a part of the ice, so if it disappears, a part of their souls will also be lost."

But team members, preparing for the worst, had moved the ice to a different facility hours before the attack. The team later hosted a public forum to address concerns, and after more than four hours of discussion tribes conceded and let researchers ship the cores to Ohio State.

An analysis of the first of the cores is expected by December, the researchers said.

Charging up as the breeze blows by.

In a quest to store wind energy and move it to the grid, Xcel Energy has reported a milestone in its preliminary tests of a battery-storage system: It works.

A one-megawatt battery system connected to an 11-megawatt wind farm in Luverne, Minn., shows the utility can successfully store power generated at night - when the wind blows strongest - for delivery during the day - when demand is highest. It also helps smooth out bumps in wind power that give grid managers fits, the company reported.

"We have proved that this technology can perform the functions of storage that we were looking for to help us manage the variability of wind energy on our operating system," Frank Novachek, Xcel Energy's director of corporate planning, said in a statement. "The success of this technology is important, ... and we are greatly encouraged by these results."

Collectively, the 20 50-kilowatt battery modules are roughly the size of two semi trailers and weigh approximately 80 tons. They are able to store about 7.2 megawatt-hours of electricity. Fully charged, the battery could power 500 homes for more than 7 hours. 

From water and air, power.

German chemists have extracted energy using just water and oxygen in an off-the-shelf fuel cell that normally requires methanol to generate power.

The breakthrough, researchers reported, could potentially open the door to safer electricity generation for low-power applications.

Reporting their findings in the journal Energy and Environmental Science, the researchers said they could generate power using little more than entropy to drive a chemical reaction.

Liquid water was fed into the cell and vapor escaped. Since vapor is more disordered than liquid, the entropy increases and the chemical reaction moves forward. In the process, electrons are forced through a circuit, making electricity.

The findings could help solve one of the drawbacks of fuel cells: In many cases, conventional cells are powered by a fuel that is already refined - hydrogen from natural gas, for instance - or that generates harmful byproducts. Methanol, a common fuel, produces formaldehyde, a cancer-causing chemical.

But there are caveats: Because evaporation is critical to the process, the researchers suggest the technology would be most effective in dry, windy areas. And a water-powered cell needs more space and material to generate power, upwards of 100 times less dense than would be practical for most applications.

The performance, though, is similar to fuel cells that produce electricity from microbial activity, making the cell adequate to power sensors or wireless transmitters. And further research could increase efficiency.

Read the full summary in EnvironmentalHealthNews.org, sister publication to DailyClimate.org

Crafting the invisible, virtually immaterial, chair

The thinkers at New York design shop Decker Yeardon are a bit alarmed at the amount of material and energy that goes into our everyday furniture: 64 billion BTUs in the United States alone, equal to the total power consumption of New York City for six weeks, according to the studio. 

So they came up with a solution that provides all the function of a chair with none of the material.

Called the OOoo Chair, the idea has an elegant economy of means: Two disks are cut out of the floor, lined with high-density polyethylene (ubiquitous as #2 recyclable plastic), and placed back in the floor. Pull the disks out, insert your legs into the two holes in the floor, and voilá! A chair. Replace the disks and the chair is gone and the floor intact. "The project intends to provoke a change in our behavior, and in our way of thinking about our furniture," the designers explain. "The chair concept is almost as simple as sitting on the floor."

We can't wait to see the OOoo Couch.

Compiled by Douglas Fischer. Photos courtesy Ohio State University; design sketch courtesy Decker Yeardon.

DailyClimate.org is a nonprofit news service covering climate change.