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Friday, September 5, 2008
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We started a large publishing process yesterday evening, republishing the Colorado Water category. Pages published in August were missing the blogroll. The process had not finished as of this morning. If you're reading this then things are back to normal.
6:29:45 AM 
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From The Denver Post: "The federal Bureau of Land Management on Thursday issued a final environmental plan to open 2.4 million acres in Colorado, Utah and Wyoming to oil-shale and tar-sands development. The 1,800-page environmental-impact statement immediately drew fire from officials in Colorado -- where 360,000 target acres in BLM's "preferred" approach are located."
More from the article:
Local officials had pressed the BLM to delay any action until such questions as what technologies would be used to extract the oil and how much water and power would be needed are answered. But BLM officials said that some of those questions can't be answered and that the agency needs to move ahead. The BLM's goal, said agency director Jim Caswell, is to "promote economically viable and environmental sound production of oil shale."
Getting at the oil will require more power -- likely the construction of a 1,500- to 2,400-megawatt power plant -- and about three barrels of water for every barrel of oil produced, according to the BLM plan. The federal Environmental Protection Agency and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service raised questions about the plan because the technologies to extract the oil are still experimental, making it difficult to know the real impact. It did not appear those questions were answered, said Amy Atwood, an attorney with the Center for Biological Diversity in Portland, Ore. "It looks what they did is remove the word 'draft' and replace it with the word 'final,' " Atwood said. Despite Thursday's release of the final environmental-impact statement, extraction of oil shale won't happen anytime soon. The BLM is still blocked by congressional moratorium from issuing a plan to actually lease the land, and it could be years before the technology to actually extract the oil is perfected.
More coverage from The Glenwood Springs Independent. They write:
The Bureau of Land Management has finalized a plan that would open up about 359,800 acres in northwest Colorado to potential commercial oil shale leasing. About 2 million acres in Colorado, Wyoming and Utah would be available for oil shale leasing under a land-use plan described in a programmatic environmental impact statement (PEIS), which was published in the Federal Register on Thursday. Colorado's oil shale deposits are concentrated in Garfield, Rio Blanco and Mesa counties. The BLM will wait at least 60 days after publication of the PEIS before it issues a record of decision approving those land-use changes.
More Coyote Gulch coverage here.
"cc"
5:38:52 AM
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From Scientific American: "Greenland, the world's largest island, holds enough ice to raise global sea levels by 23 feet (seven meters). Add the ice sheets of Antarctica and the oceans would deepen more than 200 feet (60 meters). Satellite measurements from space and speed measurements on land confirm that Greenland's glaciers are melting and on the move. And although the picture is less clear in Antarctica, the global warming seems to be having an impact there, too. So the question is: How much--and how soon--will sea level rise? New research from glaciologist Tad Pfeffer of the University of Colorado at Boulder and colleagues published in Science attempts to better estimate the possible sea level rise over the next century by measuring the speed at which the world's glaciers--in Greenland and Antarctica but also the many mountain ice sheets throughout the globe--are actually speeding to the sea as well as how swiftly they may melt."
More from the article:
"What would the flow velocities of the ocean-ending outlet glaciers have to be," if Greenland alone was to raise sea level by just six feet (two meters)? "The answer turned out to be huge: about 49 kilometers [30 miles] per year, 70 times faster than those glaciers move today," Pfeffer says, "and three times faster than we've ever observed an outlet glacier to move." Given that Greenland's glaciers are not presently moving anywhere close to that pace--Kangerdlugssuaq Glacier, the fastest, reached speeds above nine miles (14 kilometers) per year in 2005--the researchers also looked at ice that could contribute from the rest of the world. Assuming that the largest remaining ice shelves in East Antarctica--Filchner-Ronne and Ross--will remain intact, sea level rise from all other melting ice and the expansion of seawater as the weather gets warmer over the next century would be somewhere between 2.6 feet (0.8 meter) and six feet (two meters)[~]or nearly twice as much as projected last year by the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). This does not take into account how much sea level might swell from the metldown of the numerous small glaciers in Alaska, Argentina, Canada and Russia, which already contribute 60 percent of sea level rise from glacial melt. (In fact, Pfeffer notes that they are melting faster and therefore adding to sea levels more rapidly than Greenland and Antarctica combined currently do.) Nor is it clear whether something might suddenly occur to change that upper estimate. "If those two big ice shelves [in Antarctica] go out, then it's an entirely different situation," Pfeffer says. "But there's no good evidence that that's going to happen over the next century."
Based on this historical record and the fact that the Laurentide melted away under summertime temperatures similar to those expected in Greenland by the end of this century, Carlson and his colleagues forecast glacial melting that contributes somewhere between 2.8 inches (seven centimeters) and 5.1 inches (13 centimeters) of sea level rise per year, or as much as a 4.3-foot (1.3-meter) increase by 2100. Current rates are just 0.1 inch (3 millimeter) per year--and Greenland is contributing roughly 0.02 inches (0.4 millimeters) of that rise annually. Pfeffer notes that the Laurentide and other ice sheets that disappeared in the past had an easier path to the sea than the glaciers in Greenland or Antarctica. "The analogies between those past climates and today aren't strong enough to say anything specific about the rate of sea level rise in the next century," he says. The bottom line: sea levels will rise much more than predicted by the IPCC, based on both present understanding of current glacial melt as well as evidence from the geologic record. [ed. emphasis ours] "The IPCC noted that their estimates should be seen as minimum estimates," Carlson notes, "and they are right."
From Canwest News Service:
Ice cover in the Arctic Ocean retreated by nearly 2.5 million square kilometres last month - the single biggest August melt observed by scientists, according to the latest satellite measurements released late Thursday by the U.S. National Snow and Ice Data Center. During a month highlighted by the collapse of more than 200 square kilometres of ancient ice shelves off the coast of Ellesmere Island - nearly a quarter of the total area covered by these rare features when the summer began - the Colorado-based centre recorded "the fastest rate of daily ice loss that scientists have ever observed during a single August." The unprecedented August thaw happened at an average rate of 78,000 square kilometres a day - 15,000 square kilometres faster even than last August, during a summer when the Arctic experienced its all-time greatest loss of sea ice.
"cc"
5:28:13 AM
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© Copyright 2009 John Orr.
Last update: 3/15/09; 2:38:08 PM.
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