An Update on Climate and Energy Basics

Association of Energy Engineers

New York Chapter

March 2009 NewsletterPart 2

An Update on Climate and Energy Basics

By Andrew C. Revkin & Marylynn K. Yee, NYTimes, Mar 13 09

National and global discussions of climate science and related policy choices have intensified markedly in the last several months, which is not surprising given pledges by President Obama and congressional leaders to pursue climate legislation and the December deadline world leaders set for a new climate treaty.

Scientists and campaigners are pressing with ever stronger language to convince the public, fixated on economic troubles, that efforts to curb heat-trapping gases cannot be delayed. Foes of emissions restrictions, from conservative lawmakers to scientists who reject catastrophic climate change, are also in overdrive.

So this might be a good time to step back from the fray and review the points that a wide range of climate and energy experts agree on. Everyone I know who works in conflict resolution — Ted Kheel being a good example — says it’s vital to start with points of possible accord. Here goes:

1. A big buildup of long-lived greenhouse gases will very likely influence the climate in a host of ways that could impede the journey toward a stable, prospering human population later this century.

2. Humanity’s existing energy choices and habits are grossly insufficient for a population heading toward (more or less) 9 billion people seeking a decent life.

3. The planet’s existing energy choices and habits will lead to an enormous buildup of greenhouse gases, particularly as large developing countries industrialize.

4. The world’s industrialized countries, outside of Japan, have for decades invested a tiny proportion of wealth (public and private) in research and development on energy technology compared to nearly all other technological and scientific endeavors (from building better weapons to fighting cancer).

On the climate front, the best starting place remains the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, whose four reports over 20 years show the trajectory of understanding on the interaction of humans and climate, while specifying the level of confidence in particular conclusions. Go to < for a particularly clear and useful explanation of the fourth I.P.C.C. report. ….

Skeptics Dispute Climate Worries and Each Other

By Andrew C. Revkin, NYTimes, Mar 9 09

More than 600 self-professed climate skeptics are meeting in a Times Square hotel this week to challenge what has become a broad scientific and political consensus: that without big changes in energy choices, humans will dangerously heat up the planet.

Chester Higgins Jr./The New York Times

Richard S. Lindzen, a professor at M.I.T. and a longtime skeptic of the mainstream consensus

that global warming poses a danger.

The three-day International Conference on Climate Change — organized by the Heartland Institute, a nonprofit group seeking deregulation and unfettered markets — brings together political figures, conservative campaigners, scientists, an Apollo astronaut and the president of the Czech Republic, Vaclav Klaus.

Organizers say the discussions, which began Sunday, are intended to counter the Obama administration and Democratic lawmakers, who have vowed to tackle global warming with legislation requiring cuts in the greenhouse gases that scientists have linked to rising temperatures.

But two years after the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change concluded with near certainty that most of the recent warming was a result of human influences, global warming’s skeptics are showing signs of internal rifts and weakening support.

The meeting participants hold a wide range of views of climate science. Some concede that humans probably contribute to global warming but they argue that the shift in temperatures poses no urgent risk. Others attribute the warming, along with cooler temperatures in recent years, to solar changes or ocean cycles.

But large corporations like Exxon Mobil, which in the past financed the Heartland Institute and other groups that challenged the climate consensus, have reduced support. Many such companies no longer dispute that the greenhouse gases produced by burning fossil fuels pose risks.

From 1998 to 2006, Exxon Mobil, for example, contributed more than $600,000 to Heartland, according to annual reports of charitable contributions from the company and company foundations.

Alan T. Jeffers, a spokesman for Exxon Mobil, said by e-mail that the company had ended support “to several public policy research groups whose position on climate change could divert attention from the important discussion about how the world will secure the energy required for economic growth in an environmentally responsible manner.”

Joseph L. Bast, the president of the Heartland Institute, said Exxon and other companies were just shifting their stance to improve their image. The Heartland meeting, he said, was the last bastion of intellectual honesty on the climate issue.

“Major corporations are painting themselves green around global warming,” Mr. Bast said, adding that the companies have shifted their lobbying and public relations efforts toward trying to shape climate legislation in their favor. He said that contributions, over all, had continued to rise.

But Kert Davies, a climate campaigner for Greenpeace, who is attending the Heartland event, said that the experts giving talks were “a shrinking collection of extremists” and that they were “left talking to themselves.”

Organizers expected to top the attendance of about 500 at the first Heartland conference, held last year. They also point to the speaker’s roster, which included Mr. Klaus and Harrison Schmitt, a geologist, Apollo astronaut and former senator.

A centerpiece of the 2008 meeting was the release of a report, “Nature, Not Human Activity, Rules the Planet.” The document was expressly designed as a challenge to the reports from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

This year, the meeting will focus on a more nuanced question: “Global warming: Was it ever a crisis?”

Most of the talks at the meeting will challenge climate orthodoxy. But some presenters, including prominent figures who have been vocal in their criticism in the past, say they will also call on their colleagues to synchronize the arguments they are using against plans to curb greenhouse gases.

In a keynote talk Sunday night, Richard S. Lindzen, a professor at M.I.T. and a longtime skeptic of the mainstream consensus that global warming poses a danger, first delivered a biting attack on what he called the “climate alarm movement.”

There is no solid scientific evidence to back up the models used by climate scientists who warn of dire consequences if warming continues, he said. But Dr. Lindzen also criticized widely publicized assertions by other skeptics that variations in the sun were driving temperature changes in recent decades. To attribute short-term variation in temperatures to a single cause, whether human-generated gases or something else, is erroneous, he said.

Speaking of the sun’s slight variability, he said, “Acting as though this is the alternative” to blaming greenhouse gases “is asking for trouble.”

S. Fred Singer, a physicist often referred to by critics and supporters alike as the dean of climate contrarians, said that he would be running public and private sessions on Monday aimed at focusing participants on which skeptical arguments were supported by science and which were not.

“As a physicist, I am concerned that some skeptics (a very few) are ignoring the physical basis,” Dr. Singer said in an e-mail message.

“There is one who denies that CO2 is a greenhouse gas, which goes against actual data,” Dr. Singer said, adding that other skeptics wrongly contend that “humans are not responsible for the measured increase in atmospheric CO2.”

There are notable absences from the conference this year. Russell Seitz, a physicist from Cambridge, Mass., gave a talk at last year’s meeting. But Dr. Seitz, who has lambasted environmental campaigners as distorting climate science, now warns that the skeptics are in danger of doing the same thing.

The most strident advocates on either side of the global warming debate, he said, are “equally oblivious to the data they seek to discount or dramatize.”

John R. Christy, an atmospheric scientist at the University of Alabama who has long publicly questioned projections of dangerous global warming, most recently at a House committee hearing last month, said he had skipped both Heartland conferences to avoid the potential for “guilt by association.”

Many participants said that any division or dissent was minor and that the global recession and a series of years with cooler temperatures would help them in combating changes in energy policy in Washington.

“The only place where this alleged climate catastrophe is happening is in the virtual world of computer models, not in the real world,” said Marc Morano, a speaker at the meeting and a spokesman on environmental issues for Senator James M. Inhofe, Republican of Oklahoma.

But several climate scientists who are seeking to curb greenhouse gases strongly criticized the meeting. Stephen H. Schneider, a climatologist at Stanford University and an author of many reports by the intergovernmental climate panel, said, after reviewing the text of presentations for the Heartland meeting, that they were efforts to “bamboozle the innocent.”

Yvo de Boer, head of the United Nations office managing international treaty talks on climate change, said, “I don’t believe that what the skeptics say should provide any excuse to delay further” action against global warming.

But he added: “Skeptics are good. It’s important to give people the confidence that the issue is being called into question.”

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ASHRAE’s New ‘Must-Have’ Manual for Load Calculations

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Everyone who does load calculations, from the newest engineer to the veteran looking for the latest information on the radiant time series method (RTSM), needs answers to three main HVAC design questions:

What is the required equipment size?
How do the heating / cooling requirements vary spatially within the building?
What are the relative sizes of the various contributors to the heating / cooling load?

The perfect partner to the upcoming 2009 ASHRAE Handbook—Fundamentals, this manual guides the user to those answers efficiently and effectively with:

A strong application orientation
Step-by-step examples of the RTSM
The latest information on load calculations
A CD with Microsoft Excel®spreadsheets for computing cooling loads with the RTSM. Adaptable for a wide range of buildings, these spreadsheets calculate the solar irradiation, conduction time factor series, and radiant time factors used by the method.

The Load Calculation Applications Manual is also an important reference. Proceeding from the general to the specific, the manual’s early chapters give an overview of the heat transfer processes present in buildings and a brief discussion of their analysis to determine the cooling load. Later chapters focus on the theory and application of the RTSM, systems and psychrometrics, heating / cooling load calculations, and the Heat Balance Method (HBM) and its implementation.

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At Home With the Energy Detective

By Joe Hutsko, NYTimes, Mar 10 09

I used the Energy Detective, left, to monitor the energy-consumption profile

of my various appliances.

ALTHIUGH HOME ENERGY TRACKING DEVICES like the single-outlet Kill A Watt or the whole-house Power2Save unit are gaining popularity in this energy-conscious age, I hadn’t tried one out until my electric bill topped out at $150 in January. That prompted me to invest in an Energy Detective, a device that retails for $145 and promises to give homeowners a telling glimpse into their personal energy consumption habits — and the appliances that consume the most juice.

The manufacturer, Energy Inc., recommends you have an electrician handle the setup, which involves tapping into your circuit breaker. Still, I managed to do it on my own with minimal fuss (after cutting the main power, of course).

The device consists of three parts: a Measuring Transmitting Unit, which taps directly into your home’s circuit breaker wiring; a pair of Current Transformers, which are clamped around the thick power cables coming into your home; and a Receiving Unit Display, which plugs into a wall outlet and displays real-time power usage in kilowatts — as well as dollars and cents.

The results were eye-opening. The following table provides a breakdown of how the Energy Detective responded when I turned on various appliances in my house. The top three consumers are highlighted in green.

(A baseline for comparison: 0.1 kilowatts = the power used by a 100 watt bulb.)

Action Energy Cost Waking printer from standby mode to print a note for the FedEx delivery guy. 1.110 kilowatts (15 cents per hour) Turning on stand-up oil-filed radiator set to ‘Max Heat’ mode1.500 to 2.500 kilowatts (20 cents per hour)Opening hot water faucet, which activates tank-less instant hot water heater10.000 to 18.000 kilowatts (about $2.00 per hour)Baking cookies in electric oven3.750 kilowatts (about 49 cents per hour) Playing video game on Xbox 360 and 32-inch HDTV 1.890 kilowatts (3 cents per hour) Making toast in toaster oven 1.350 kilowatts (17 cents per hour) Reheating a cup of tea in microwave oven1.770 kilowatts (22 cents per hour)Running laundry through eco-friendly washer/dryer combo machine18.550 kilowatts to wash; 1.450 kilowatts to dry ($2.37 and 18 cents per hour, respectively) The refrigerator compressor kicking in 260 kilowatts (around 2 cents per hour) Turning on writing desk lamp + sofa reading lamp + third room lamp .120 kilowatts; .140 kilowatts; .160 kilowatts (about 2 cents per hour with all three on) Turning on front porch light + side house light 140 kilowatts; .160 kilowatts (about 2 cents per hour) Watching downloaded movie on Vudu player and 32-inch HDTV .270 kilowatts (2 cents per hour) Hard drive waking from standby to run hourly Time Machine backup on MacBook .110 to 120 (no noticeable change) Operating The Energy Detective with all other appliances, lights, and energy vampires turned off .20 kilowatts (1 cent an hour)

Behavior changing realization? Setting the heater to the lowest level — enough to take the edge off — and then bundling up with an extra pair of socks, long johns, thermal over shirt, and wool gloves with the fingertips snipped off, can cut my winter bill by a quarter to a third.

Europe’s Way of Encouraging Solar Power Arrives in the U.S.

By Kate Galbraith, NYTimes, Mar 13 09

<Kelly LaDuke for The New York Times

John and Susan Stanton, with grandson Zachary Nadeau, at home in Florida.

Solar cells adorn the roofs of many homes and warehouses across Germany, while the bright white blades of wind turbines are a frequent sight against the sky in Spain.

If one day these machines become as common on the plains and rooftops of the United States as they are abroad, it may be because the financing technique that gave Europe an early lead in renewable energy is starting to cross the Atlantic.

Put simply, the idea is to pay homeowners and businesses top dollar for producing green energy. In Germany, for example, a homeowner with a rooftop solar system may be paid four times more to produce electricity than the rate paid to a coal-fired power plant.

This month Gainesville, Fla., became the first city in the United States to introduce higher payments for solar power, which is otherwise too expensive for many families or businesses to install. City leaders, who control their electric utility, unanimously approved the policy after studying Germany’s solar-power expansion.

Hawaii, where sky-high prices for electricity have stirred interest in alternative forms of power like solar, hopes to have a similar policy in place before the end of the year. The mayor of Los Angeles wants to introduce higher payouts for solar power. California is considering a stronger policy as well, and bills have also been introduced in other states, including Washington and Oregon.