The International Energy Agency (IEA) released its annual Medium-Term Oil Market Report (MTOMR) today. I doubt if it will surprise anyone who has been paying attention to the energy markets, but the report’s main assertion is that: The supply shock created by a surge in North American oil production will be as transformative to the market…
Eminent Domain in Montana – The Montana House Fails Landowners
Now that the Montana legislative session is over, here is my tally is on what landowners got out of the session regarding private property rights and specifically those rights related to merchant transmission lines: – HB 417: this bill requires that a condemnor provide landowners a final written offer prior to initiating a condemnation complaint….
Temperature Change Over The Last 100 Years – Fastest on Record For Past 11,000 Years
A team of scientists just published a record of global temperatures in the journal Science that dates back to the end of the last ice age, about 11,000 years ago. As summarized in a brief note on National Public Radio, this global temperature compilation gives us a jolting view of temperature change over the last…
Montana Senate Bill 180 Goes To The House
Montana rural landowners are gearing up to push Senate Bill (SB) 180 through the Montana House. SB 180 will repeal the power of eminent domain granted via the Montana Major Facility Siting Act (MFSA) as legislated in the 2011 session under House Bill 198. I’ve spent much time since the last Montana legislative session delving…
China’s Coal Appetite Continues To Grow
“Chinese financial website Finet quotes Phil Ren, chief of the China Coal Importers Association, as saying at an industry conference in Singapore, China’s coal imports may reach 400 million – 500 million tonnes within three years. That would constitute massive growth from current levels.” – from Mining.com, 29 January 2013. The statement made by Phil…
First Intact Samples Collected From An Antarctic Subglacial Lake
The Whillans Ice Stream Subglacial Access Research Drilling (WISSARD) field team drilled through 800 m of ice and intersected Subglacial Lake Whillans on 28 January 2013 at 0500 h. The team sampled mud and water from the floor of the subglacial lake, making this the first time that clean whole samples have been recovered from…
Climate Change News
In reading through the torrent of recent news on climate change, I’ve come across a few events that stand out. Following is a brief summary of each taken from the original source: Nicholas Stern: ‘I got it wrong on climate change – it’s far, far worse’ by Heather Stewart and Larry Elliott, The Observer, guardian.co.uk…
Montana’s Legislative Response to Secretary Chu’s Use of Power Marketing Administrations to Upgrade the Electric Grid
Last Saturday, the Montana Senate unanimously adopted Senate Resolution (SR) 2 in response to the Department of Energy (DOE) Secretary Steven Chu’s March 16, 2012, memorandum that outlined his plan to upgrade the electric grid using power marketing administrations. The plan would utilize the nation’s four power marketing administrations (PMAs) – the Bonneville Power Administration,…
Climate Change Impact on Earth Surface Systems
As Congress continues to stonewall on climate change legislation, I think that a recent article published in the Perspectives section of Nature Climate Change, The impacts of climate change on terrestrial Earth surface systems, is worth contemplating. The authors, Jasper Knight and Stephan Harrison, argue that “… at present, governments’ attempts to limit greenhouse-gas emissions…
2012 – Warmest Year on Record
NOAA’s National Climate Data Center (NCDC) announced today that 2012 was the warmest year on record for the contiguous U.S in over a century of record keeping. The average temperature for 2012 was 55.3°F. This is 3.2°F above the 20th century average and is 1.0°F above the previous 1998 record. Other temperature notables for 2012…
Constructing A Paleotemperature Record As A Check On Global Surface Thermometer Records
An independent global surface (GST) temperature record was recently compiled from several geological and historical sources. David Anderson, of the National Ocean and Atmospheric Administration’s National Climate Data Center, USA, and several colleagues constructed a Paleo Index which is based upon 173 temperature-sensitive proxy time series. As noted by Anderson and others in their paper…
Coal Could Overtake Oil As Number 1 Global Energy Source By 2017
I watched a coal unit train zip through the Belgrade-Bozeman, Montana, area yesterday. The Montana Rail Link unit train was 125 cars in length and presumably bound for Pacific Northwest seaports. The coal is sourced from the Powder River Basin, an approximately 20,000-acre part of Wyoming that supplies about 40 percent of U.S. coal. An…
Largest Ice Calving Event Caught on Video
As part of the filming for the documentary,Chasing Ice, two filmmakers caught a massive calving event of a Greenland glacier (see the accompanying YouTube video, via The Guardian, inserted below). One of the filmmakers, James Balog, said the event is like seeing “Manhattan breaking apart in front of your eyes”. Chasing Ice chronicles climate change’s impact on Arctic…
Mississippi River Water Wars
Water levels in the lower stretch of the Mississippi River are so low that the U.S. Coast Guard closed a stretch of the river today after a barge tow ran aground south of Memphis. Considering that water levels are projected to continue dropping due to the worst U.S. drought in 56 years over part of…
2 Degrees Celsius – An Inevitable Global Average Temperature Increase?
The Global Carbon Project’s recent analysis on current carbon dioxide emissions published in the latest issue of Nature Climate Change underscores the necessity for action in emission reduction. The commentary’s authors concluded that the rapid growth in fossil fuel emissions makes a global average temperature increase of 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) inevitable. It…