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Comment by Plinius on September 30, 2017 at 5:49am

Not my best picture, but you can see the windpark..

Comment by Plinius on September 30, 2017 at 5:48am

Most of the time we have wind from the west, and the windparks there are busy enough. The oil industry still wants to drill in the North Sea, but the fight goes on...

Comment by Joan Denoo on September 29, 2017 at 4:07am

I know you have a strong commitment to ecology and your choices you make gives me hope and encouragement to keep on keeping on. If I understand the climate of The Netherlands, strong wind currents flow in from and out to the N Sea and give the windmills a big workout. If the windmills pump water out of the low country to protect the land from the sea, the same wind could be used to generate energy.  

Do I understand the weather of the northern coast of Europe, or am I wrong? 

Earth: a global map of wind, weather, and ocean conditions

This map shows a high off-continent current into the North Sea. I wonder if environmentalists are robust enough to successfully get wind and wave power to replace the oil industry? 

Is there still efforts to drill in the N. Sea? That just seems crazy to me.

A lot of what happens these days seems crazy to me.

 

Comment by Plinius on September 29, 2017 at 3:14am

Joan, I live as eco-friendly as possible, but we've had a liberal government for 8 years now. In this country liberal means right-wing, non-religious and following the trickle-down idea: if it's good for the big companies, everyone will profit in the end. Which isn't true. All this favouring big companies has meant a set-back for the environment. The government likes to show novel ideas, like a solar path, or a method to clean the seas, but I'm afraid that's all. Solar power and windpower are not made popular and progress is hampered by NIMBYs. There isn't much room in this country where we can keep the windparks out of sight.

We had elections in March and the liberals mostly won, but they didn't get a big majority so they're still bickering about the new coalition. No one wants to take impopular measures when we all know how necessary they are - so we'll be some time before adequate measures are taken. And I have my doubts about the objectives agreed to...

Comment by Joan Denoo on September 28, 2017 at 6:48pm

@Plinius 

Plinius, I'm sorry to learn of the oil industry fires and having to give up your roof garden for food production. I enjoyed your descriptions of what you did and all the things you were able to grow. I liked your pictures, too.

Did these fires provide an incentive to get off of oil? I looked for up-to-date reports and the most recent one I found was 

NETHERLANDS LAGGING BEHIND MOST EU COUNTRIES ON RENEWABLE ENERGY
By Janene Pieters on March 31, 2016 - 07:44

"The Netherlands is still far from reaching the objectives agreed to in the European guideline for Renewable Energy 2020. Of all the EU countries, only France is performing worse, according to figures released by Statistics Netherlands on Thursday."

You know the disgrace of U.S. pulling out of the agreement and there is still hope for meeting our goals if this report is accurate.

"The plummeting cost of renewable energy means even if Donald Trump pulls the US out of the Paris climate change accord, America will still meet its commitments in the agreement, a new report has said.

"Analysts at investment company Morgan Stanley say prices for clean energy will soon sink to lower than more polluting sources.

~ US will meet Paris accord commitments even if Donald Trump withdraw...

I recently read an article about Sweden's goal to use Renewable Energy. 

"The continued push towards the development and implementation of green technologies has enabled Sweden to become the first country in Europe to meet the renewable energy targets set by EU for 2020. Eight years ahead of schedule.

"Sweden being the first country to reach the EUs renewable energy targets is partly due to industry demand and the rapid adoption of new technologies.

"Renewable technologies are being used in Sweden across all sectors, and there is a strong correlation between economic growth and reductions in waste and greenhouse gases, the optimum use of natural and human resources, and the production and conservation of energy through ongoing innovation."

Comment by Joan Denoo on September 27, 2017 at 3:57pm

Lake Erie Bloom 

Comment by Joan Denoo on September 27, 2017 at 3:53pm

Lake Erie Abloom

"On September 26, 2017, the Operational Land Imager (OLI) on the Landsat 8 satellite captured these natural-color images of a large phytoplankton bloom in western Lake Erie.

"According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the bloom contains microcystis, a type of freshwater cyanobacteria. These phytoplankton produce toxins that can contaminate drinking water and pose a risk to human and animal health (skin irritant, respiratory distress) when there is direct contact.

"A few days earlier, the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) on NASA’s Terra satellite captured a wider view of the lake. Blooms tend to thrive in Lake Erie during summer, sustained by warm water temperatures and nutrients from farm runoff. This year, the bloom has been ongoing since mid-July.

• References

• NASA Earth Observatory (2017, September 26) Bloom Persists in Lake Erie.
• NOAA Great Lakes Environmental Research Laboratory (2017, September 25) Great Lakes Harmful Algal Blooms (HABs) and Hypoxia. Accessed September 25, 2017.

NASA Earth Observatory image by Joshua Stevens, using Landsat data from the U.S. Geological Survey. Caption by Kathryn Hansen.

Instrument(s): 

Landsat 8 - OLI"

Comment by Joan Denoo on September 19, 2017 at 7:56pm

Humans' Great Filter

“Peter Ward, a charismatic palaeontologist among those responsible for discovering that the planet's mass extinctions were caused by greenhouse gas, calls this the 'Great Filter': 'Civilizations rise, but there's an environmental filter that causes them to die off again and disappear fairly quickly,' he told me. 'If you look at planet Earth, the filtering we've had in the past has been in these mass extinctions.'

“The mass extinction we are now living through has only just begun; so much more dying is coming.”

~ Peter Douglas Ward, paleontologist and professor at the University of Washington, Seattle, and Sprigg Institute of Geobiology at the University of Adelaide.

"Scientists are currently debating whether we are now in the midst of the Earth's sixth mass-extinction event or approaching it. Either way, the situation is dire — the existential risks posed by a worst-case climate-change scenario are real.

"If those risks become serious enough to act as humans' Great Filter, it may be too late for us to communicate with anyone else in our universe."

~ Kevin Loria, Independent,  17 July 2017

Comment by Ruth Anthony-Gardner on September 19, 2017 at 7:09pm

Thanks for the refusing to stand for the national anthem link, Joan. About our 30 year existential threat, it's funny how class, race, and gender injustice issues have become inextricably entangled with climate concerns. I don't see us coming out of this Great Filter climate destabilization situation without embracing equality. 

Sometimes I imagine that if scientific models predicted existential threat next month, 95% wouldn't give it enough credence to embrace more than comfortable incremental change. Certainly not solutions that include class, race, and gender equality.

As Ken Ward put it,

At a moment when we should be striding forward with the strength of prophets proved right, we wander ... without effective plan, purpose or voice.

Tragically, those who have been concerned (but not too concerned) about climate change demanded this arrangement, voting for chipper milquetoast "climate solutions" with each donation. Our organizations responded.

Comment by Joan Denoo on September 19, 2017 at 6:25pm

Scripps says climate change may represent "existential" threat to h...

"Other people have used the word catastrophic, but I have resisted doing so until now,” said the study’s lead author, Veerabhadran Ramanathan, a renowned climate scientist who helped influence Pope Francis to urge the world to fight global warming in 2015.

“I changed my mind because, over the past five years, I have gone back and reviewed data that we began collecting from satellites in the 1980s and data from aircraft and changes in the intensity of storms, and studies about the possible health affects of rapid global warming."

"The school published a paper that said there is a 5 percent chance of catastrophic change within roughly three decades, and a smaller chance that it would broadly wipe out human life."

~ Scripps Institution of Oceanography,  UC San Diego.

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