Category: Climate

The West Without Water Dr. B. Lynn Ingram is a professor in the Department of Earth and Planetary Science at UC Berkeley, California. The primary goal of her research is to assess how climates and environments have changed over the past several thousand years based on the geochemical and sedimentologic analysis of aquatic sediments and archaeological deposits, with a particular focus on the US West. She is the co-author of “The West without Water: What Past Floods, Droughts, and Other Climatic Clues Tell Us about Tomorrow” together with Dr. Frances Malamud-Roam, which received great reviews. In this interview, Dr. Ingram shares her thoughts on the current drought in the US Southwest within the larger climate record and potential implications for the future. E. Tavares: Thank you for sharing your thoughts with us today. Your research focuses on long-range geoclimatic trends using a broad sample of historical records. In this […]

Click here to view full article at peakoil.com

Part 1: A Reuters analysis finds that flooding is increasing along much of the nation�� coastline, forcing many communities into costly, controversial struggles with a relentless foe. WALLOPS ISLAND, Virginia ��Missions flown from the NASA base here have documented some of the most dramatic evidence of a warming planet over the past 20 years: the melting of polar ice, a force contributing to a global rise in ocean levels. The Wallops Flight Facility�� relationship with rising seas doesn�� end there. Its billion-dollar space launch complex occupies a barrier island that’s drowning under the impact of worsening storms and flooding. NASA’s response? Rather than move out of harm�� way, officials have added more than $100 million in new structures over the past five years and spent $43 million more to fortify the shoreline with sand. Nearly a third of that new sand has since been washed away. Across a narrow […]

Click here to view full article at www.reuters.com

WASHINGTON, DC, Sept. 3 09/03/2014 Governments and businesses trying to develop tight oil and gas resources could face intense competition for water that would be used in hydraulic fracturing , the World Resources Institute said in a recent report. It found that 38% of the world’s tight shale resources face high to extremely high water stress or arid conditions. The Sept. 2 report, “ Global Shale Gas Development: Water Availability ,” is the first publicly available water availability analysis across shale gas and tight oil resources worldwide, the environmental organization said. Its research also indicated that water availability could limit shale resource development on every continent except Antarctica. “With 386 million people living on land above shale plays, governments and business face critical choices about how to manage their energy and water needs,” said WRI Pres. Andrew Steer. “Energy development and responsible water management must go hand in hand.” […]

Click here to view full article at www.ogj.com

http://www.rigzone.com/news/oil_gas/a/134840/WRI_Insufficient_Water_Might_Curtail_Fracking_in_Some_Countries Hess To Form MLP For North Dakota Oil, Gas Transport Assets A global resources institute finds that many countries might not have enough water to practice hydraulic fracturing. While fracking has been of great benefit to the United States’ economy, other countries have been slow to move away from more traditional methods of production. However, political circumstances and economics have accounted for much of the delay from other countries in following in the tracks of the United States, according to an April 7, 2013 article in Forbes. And now, one issue – that of inadequate water supply – could derail other countries’ fracking efforts before they even leave the station, a new report by the World Resources Institute (WRI) suggests. The amount of hydrocarbon resources that might not be realized unless the challenge of inadequate water supply is solved is significant, the WRI said in a report called […]

Click here to view full article at www.rigzone.com

Water Shortages Will Limit Global Shale Gas Development, Especially in China If all the world’s theoretically recoverable shale gas could be developed, our supply of clean-burning natural gas would expand 47 percent—lowering both greenhouse gas emissions and energy prices, according to estimates from the Washington-based World Resources Institute. The hitch is that the process for extracting shale gas, called hydraulic fracking, sucks up as much as 25 million liters (6.6 million gallons) of water for each well. A report from WRI (PDF), “Global Shale Gas Development: Water Availability and Business Risks,” released on Tuesday, shows that roughly 38 percent of the world’s shale gas and oil lies buried beneath water-stressed regions. This means that extraction efforts will be difficult and expensive, as well as economically and environmentally risky. China has the world’s largest estimated deposits of shale gas (1,115 trillion cubic feet), according to studies by the U.S. Energy […]

Click here to view full article at peakoil.com

Page added on September 3, 2014 2014 Is the Year of the Energy-Water Nexus 2014 is shaping up to be the year of the energy-water nexus. First, the United Nation’s World Water Day centered on this topic. Then, the U.S. Department of Energy released a 250-page report on the energy-water nexus and indicated that it will be included in its Quadrennial Energy Review . And, this week, the biggest international water conference, World Water Week , is taking on the nexus. Held every year in Stockholm, Sweden, World Water Week is led by the Stockholm International Water Institute (SIWI) and serves as a platform for over 200 collaborating organizations and 2,500 participants from 130 countries around the world to discuss global water and development issues. In choosing the energy-water nexus as this year’s theme, SIWI and its supporters are affirming – on a global stage – what policy experts […]

Click here to view full article at peakoil.com

Guy Ryder, director general of the International Labor Organization, and Christiana Figueres , executive secretary of the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change, issued a joint statement on the economic benefits of a low-carbon economy. Ahead of the climate summit scheduled later this year in New York City, the leaders said they were putting momentum behind the narrative in response to questions about the job prospects. "If properly managed, environmental sustainability can lead to more and better jobs, poverty reduction and social inclusion," they said Wednesday. "In fact, the transition to the green economy could generate up to 60 million additional jobs over the next two decades." A draft report published this week from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change finds emissions are falling in most Western countries because of an increased use of low-carbon energy resources and improvements in energy efficiency. The rising industrialization of Asian economies, however, […]

Click here to view full article at www.upi.com

WASHINGTON — The Obama administration is working to forge a sweeping international climate change agreement to compel nations to cut their planet-warming fossil fuel emissions, but without ratification from Congress. In preparation for this agreement, to be signed at a United Nations summit meeting in 2015 in Paris, the negotiators are meeting with diplomats from other countries to broker a deal to commit some of the world’s largest economies to enact laws to reduce their carbon pollution. But under the Constitution, a president may enter into a legally binding treaty only if it is approved by a two-thirds majority of the Senate. To sidestep that requirement, President Obama’s climate negotiators are devising what they call a “politically binding” deal that would “name and shame” countries into cutting their emissions. The deal is likely to face strong objections from Republicans on Capitol Hill and from poor countries around the world, […]

Click here to view full article at www.nytimes.com

A young Indian man walks across Upper Lake, Asia’s largest artificial lake, west of Madhya Pradesh state capital Bhopal on May 27, 2009. Built by Raja Bhoj during his tenure as a king of Malwa (1005-1055), the lake once served around 40 percent of the surrounding area’s residents with nearly 30 million gallons per day but now lies completely dried up due to a lack of rains for the past three years. AFP PHOTO/STR South Asian economies will be badly squeezed by climate change within a few decades if no action is taken to reduce the greenhouse gas emissions responsible for global warming, according to a report published on Tuesday by the Asian Development Bank. The report calculates that the six countries studied – India, Bangladesh, Nepal, Sri Lanka, Bhutan and the Maldives – would on average lose 1.8 per cent of their gross domestic product by 2050 and […]

Click here to view full article at www.ft.com