How the US Navy is Leading the Charge on Clean Energy and Climate Change

Damn the do-nothing Congress. The Navy is going full steam ahead on green energy.

USNS Henry J. Kaiser delivers a 50-50 blend of advanced biofuels. Official U.S. Navy Imagery/Flickr

Increasingly, the US Navy is leading the charge towards clean energy, which can in turn impact national security and even climate change. Through investments in biofuels, construction of a more energy-efficient fleet, forward thinking about issues like rising sea levels and a melting Arctic, and commitments to reduce consumption and reliance on foreign oil, the Navy is leading the charge of a vast energy reform effort to "change the way the US military sails, flies, marches, and thinks."

Please join host Chris Mooney for the next installment of Climate Desk Live on Wednesday February 27 at 9:30a.m, where he'll discuss the Navy's charge towards energy independence with Dr. David W. Titley, retired naval officer who led the US Navy's Task Force on Climate Change, Capt. James C. Goudreau, Director, Navy Energy Coordination Office, and Julia Whitty, environmental correspondent for Mother Jones whose cover story on this topic appears in latest issue of the magazine.

Event Details:

Date: February 27, 2013, 9:30 a.m.

Location: University of California Washington Center, 1608 Rhode Island Avenue, NW, Washington, DC

Please RSVP to cdl@climatedesk.org

About Dr. David W. Titley:

Dr. David W. Titley is a nationally known expert in the field of climate, the Arctic, and National Security. He served as a naval officer for 32 years and rose to the rank of Rear Admiral. Dr. Titley's career included duties as Oceanographer and Navigator of the Navy and Deputy Assistant Chief of Naval Operations for Information Dominance. While serving in the Pentagon, Dr. Titley initiated and led the US Navy's Task Force on Climate Change. After retiring from the Navy, Dr. Titley served as the Deputy Undersecretary of Commerce for Operations, the Chief Operating Officer position at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Dr. Titley has spoken across the country and throughout the world on the importance of climate change as it relates to National Security. He was invited to present on behalf of the Department of Defense at both Congressional Hearings and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) meetings from 2009 to 2011.

About Captain James C. Goudreau:

Captain James C. Goudreau serves as the Director of the Navy Energy Coordination Office. His sea duty and overseas assignments include: Assistant Supply Officer onboard USS REASONER (FF 1063) and USS NIMITZ (CVN 68), Supply Officer, USS THE SULLIVANS (DDG 68) and Supply Officer, Joint Maritime Facility, St. Mawgan in Cornwall, United Kingdom. His most recent assignment was as the Assistant Chief of Staff for Logistics at Expeditionary Strike Group Seven and Amphibious Force Seventh Fleet Based in Okinawa, Japan. Captain Goudreau's ashore tours include: Naval Air Station Key West, FL; Naval Inventory Control Point, Philadelphia, PA as the P-3 Weapons Team Lead and Director of Aviation Industrial Support; Fleet and Industrial Supply Center San Diego as Site Director, Fleet Readiness Center Southwest; and Commander, Defense Logistics Agency North Island. Captain Goudreau is a member of the Defense Acquisition Corps (formerly the Acquisition Professional Community) and is qualified as a Naval Aviation Supply Officer and as a Surface Warfare Supply Corps Officer. He has been awarded the Meritorious Service Medal (three awards), Navy Commendation Medal (five awards), Navy Achievement Medal (two awards), and various campaign and unit awards.

http://climatedesk.org/2013/02/how-the-us-navys-clean-energy-evolution

Sea Change: The Bay of Bengal's Vanishing Islands

Rapid erosion and rising sea levels are increasingly threatening the existence of islands off the coast of Bangladesh and India.

mrbichel/Flickr

Schoolteacher Nurul Hashem lives in a grass hut set among coconut palms and pine trees, yards from a pristine beach on the sparkling Bay of Bengal. It sounds idyllic, but he longs to return to the island of Kutubdia, 50 miles away, where his family home has been swallowed by ever-rising tides and is now out at sea under several feet of water.

To make matters worse, the local government, which welcomed him when he arrived three years ago, wants him and thousands of other families who have fled to the coast from the island, to make way for an airport and hotel developments.

Kutubdia is one of many islands off Bangladesh and India affected by increasingly rapid erosion and some of the fastest recorded sea-level rises in the world. These "vanishing islands" are shrinking dramatically. Kutubdia has halved in size in 20 years, to about 100 sq km. Since 1991 six villages on the island of fishermen and salt workers have been swamped and about 40,000 people have fled. Like Hashem, most have relocated to the coast near Cox's Bazar.

"The sea water is rising every day," says Hashem, who calls himself a climate refugee.

To keep reading, click here.

http://climatedesk.org/2013/01/sea-change-the-bay-of-bengals-vanishing

Why Greenland's Melting Could Be the Biggest Climate Disaster of All

Glaciologist Jason Box is racing to figure out just how rapidly we're pushing the 7 meters of sea rise level locked up in the Greenland ice sheet onto our shores.

Jason Box

Jason Box speaks the language of Manhattans. Not the drink-the measuring unit.

As an expert on Greenland who has traveled 23 times to the massive, mile thick northern ice sheet, Box has shown an uncanny ability to predict major melts and breakoffs of Manhattan-sized ice chunks. A few years back, he foretold the release of a "4x Manhattans" piece of ice from Greenland's Petermann Glacier, one so big that once afloat it was dubbed an "ice island." In a scientific paper published in February of 2012, Box further predicted "100 % melt area over the ice sheet" within another decade of global warming. As it happened, the ice sheet's surface almost completely melted just a month later in July-an event that, in Box's words, "signals the beginning of the end for the ice sheet."

Box, who will speak at next week's Climate Desk Live briefing in Washington, D.C., pulls no punches when it comes to attributing all of this to humans and their fossil fuels. "Those who claim it's all cycles just don't understand that humans are driving the cycle right now, and for the foreseeable future," he says. And the coastal consequences of allowing Greenland to continue its melting-and pour 23 feet's worth of sea level into the ocean over the coming centuries-are just staggering. "If you're the mayor of Hamburg, or Shanghai, or Philadelphia, I think it's in your job description that you think forward a century," says Box. "They're completely inundated by the year 2200."

Unless, that is, something big changes-something big enough to start Greenland cooling, shifting its "mass balance" from ice loss to ice gain once again. But that would require us to reverse global climate change, in an ever-dwindling time frame for doing so.

Currently based at the Byrd Polar Research Center at Ohio State-with a joint appointment at the Geological Survey of Denmark and Greenland-Box got his research start while an undergraduate at the University of Colorado-Boulder. As a senior, he traveled north with the Swiss glaciologist Konrad Steffen. In subsequent years, as his scientific career developed, Box increasingly began to think outside of...his last name. Rather than waiting on funding agencies, he teamed up with Greenpeace on a series of expeditions to document, and also dramatize, the ice sheet's melting. He also began to set up time lapse cameras to observe the ice as it declines, something captured in the new documentary Chasing Ice, which features Box's work.

Today, Box is trying to understand the feedback loops that may be driving a melting of Greenland that is much faster and more dramatic than many scientists expected. Take, for instance, melting on the ice's sheet surface: Warmer or melting ice (or just plain meltwater) absorbs more sunlight than does healthy, cold ice. So as warmer temperatures melt the ice, the ice sheet absorbs more solar heat-melting even more. Another example: As Greenland melts, the massive ice sheet, more than two miles above sea level at its highest point, slumps in altitude. When that happens, more of the ice sheet is bathed in the warmer atmospheric temperatures that are found at lower elevations. So-you guessed it-it melts more.

But Box is most intrigued by one of the processes occurring atop the ice sheet, on its surface. Last summer, wildfires torched large parts of the US West, and especially Box's home state of Colorado. The soot from the fires traveled as far north as the Greenland ice sheet and, once deposited on the ice, these dark particles absorbed additional sunlight. Compounding this effect are the Arctic microbes that live off of impurities from soot-living longer as the ice warms, and releasing dark pigments to protect themselves from the sunlight.

"I'm sitting in LaGuardia on my way to Greenland, people riveted to the TV with news about fire across the US," Box remembers. "It was really dramatic, but I'm like, 'Hold on, we need to really measure the soot." Thus was born the Dark Snow project, in which Box and colleagues are trying to crowd-fund an expedition to sample the ice at high elevations and determine just how much soot from global wildfires and pollution are amplifying Greenland's melting.

The upshot of what they know so far is that Greenland is not only melting-it may be melting faster than anyone expected, including most scientists. And what's more, we may be blowing past a point of irreversibility, where the world commits, irrevocably, to a level of sea level rise that, as it unfolds over the coming centuries, would devastate many coastal megacities.

Just consider one striking statistic from Box: The summer melt from Greenland in 2012 alone added a millimeter to the global sea level. And not only is that millimeter felt around the globe, but it is felt in specific places. For instance, it rode atop the wall of water that Superstorm Sandy pushed inland at New York and New Jersey.

And that's just a tiny fraction of what's to come. One recent scientific prediction suggested that 1.6 degrees Celsius (just under 3 degrees Fahrenheit) of temperature rise above pre-industrial levels might be enough to lock in Greenland's complete melting. Greenland temperatures in summer have already risen a full degree Celsius since the year 2000, and if the soot-related and biological feedbacks that are Box's current focus turn out to be big enough, the 1.6 degree threshold might also be too conservative.

In other words, Box's boots-on-the-ground perspective on Greenland suggests that the models might be undershooting things-and all that water may be coming faster still.

In his inaugural address, President Obama put a strong focus on the issue of climate change, citing the "devastating impact of raging fires, and crippling drought, and more powerful storms." But all of this pales in comparison to a global ocean containing what used to be Greenland. And that, Box says, should serve as a major wake-up call, since "there's no doubt that if climate continued like in 2012, Greenland's gone."

http://climatedesk.org/2013/01/why-greenlands-melting-could-be-the-big