Global warming pause that began in 1998 could last until 2033 per Science Magazine peer reviewed study-BBC

"Cooling periods associated with the latter deeper heat-sequestration mechanism historically lasted 20 to 35 years." Meaning ongoing pause could continue until 2033 (1998 + 35= 2033).
 
8/21/14, "Global warming slowdown 'could last another decade'," BBC, Matt McGrath

"The hiatus in the rise in global temperatures could last for another 10 years, according to new research.

Scientists have struggled to explain the so-called pause that began in 1999, despite ever increasing levels of CO2 in the atmosphere.
 
The latest theory says that a naturally occurring 30-year cycle in the Atlantic Ocean is behind the slowdown. The researchers says this slow-moving current could continue to divert heat into the deep seas for another decade. 
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However, they caution that global temperatures are likely to increase rapidly when the cycle flips to a warmer phase.

According to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), global average temperatures have increased by around 0.05C per decade in the period between 1998 and 2012. This compares with a decadal average of 0.12 between 1951 and 2012.

More than a dozen theories have been put forward on the cause of this pause in temperature growth that occurred while emissions of carbon dioxide were at record highs.

These ideas include the impact of pollution such as soot particles that have reflected back some of the Sun's heat into space.

Increased volcanic activity since 2000 has also been blamed, as have variations in solar activity. 

The most recent perspectives have looked to the oceans as the locations of the missing heat.

Last year a study suggested that a periodic upwelling of cooler waters in the Pacific was limiting the rise.

However this latest work, published in the journal Science, shifts the focus from the Pacific to the Atlantic and Southern oceans.

The team, lead by Prof Ka-Kit Tung from the University of Washington, US, says there is now evidence that a 30-year current alternately warms and cools the world by sinking large amounts of heat beneath these deep waters.

They've used observations from a network of devices called Argo floats that sample the oceans down to 2,000 metres.

Ice age fears 

The researchers say that there was another hiatus between 1945 and 1975 due to this current taking down the heat, that led to fears of a new ice age. 

From 1976 though, the cycle flipped and contributed to the warming of the world, as more heat stayed on the surface.

But since the year 2000, the heat has been going deeper, and the world's overall temperatures haven't risen beyond the record set in 1998. 

"The floats have been very revealing to us," said Prof Tung.

"I think the consensus at this point is that below 700 metres in the Atlantic and Southern oceans [they are] storing heat and not the Pacific."

A key element in this new understanding is the saltiness of the water. The waters in the Atlantic current coming up from the tropics are saltier because of evaporation. This sinks more quickly and takes the heat down with it.

Eventually though, the salty water melts enough ice in Arctic waters to lower the saline level, slowing down the current and keeping the heat near the surface. "Before 2006 the saltiness was increasing, this indicated that the current was speeding up," said Prof Tung.

"After 2006, this saltiness is diminishing but it's still above the long-term average. Now it is slowly slowing down. "Once it gets below the long-term average, then it is the next period of rapid warming."

As well as the data from the Argo floats, Prof Tung has also examined the Central England Temperature record, that dates back over 350 years. He believes that this confirms the

regular 70-year cycles of warm and cold spells. 

This historic pattern, he says, could extend the current period of pause. 

"We probably may have another 10 years, maybe shorter as global warming itself is melting more ice and ice could flood the North Atlantic, but historically we are in the middle of the cycle."

Several other researchers in this field acknowledge the Tung analysis is part of a growing body of evidence that suggests the Atlantic has a role in the pause. 

Prof Reto Knutti from the ETH Zurich has recently published a review of all the current theories on the hiatus.

"I see the studies as complementary, and they both highlight that natural variability in ocean and atmosphere is important in modifying long term anthropogenic trends," he said.

"A better understanding of those modes of variability is critical to understand past changes (including differences between models and observations during the hiatus period) as well as predicting the future, in particular in the near term and regionally, where variability dominates the forced changes from greenhouses gases."

Other scientists say that the Atlantic hypothesis is interesting but a much longer range of observations is needed.

"We really don't have a lot of data," said Dr Jonathan Robson from the University of Reading, UK.

"So if there is this 60-year oscillation in the ocean, we haven't observed it all, basically we've observed the impact of it. We may have to wait 15-20 years to know what's going on."

Prof Tung believes that whatever the cause and the length of the pause, we are on a "rising staircase" when it comes to global temperatures that will become apparent when the Atlantic current switches again.

"At the end we will be on the rising part of the staircase, and the rate of warming there will be very fast, just as fast as the last three decades of the 20th Century, plus we are starting off at a higher plateau. The temperatures and the effects will be more severe.""

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Science Magazine study on "slowdown" in global warming linked in above BBC article:

8/22/14, "Varying planetary heat sink led to global-warming slowdown and acceleration," sciencemag.org. Xianyao Chen¹,², Ka-Kit Tung²,* Author Affiliations

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¹Key Laboratory of Physical Oceanography, Ocean University of China, Qingdao, China. ²Department of Applied Mathematics, University of Washington, Seattle, WA, USA.

"A vacillating global heat sink at intermediate ocean depths is associated with different climate regimes of surface warming under anthropogenic forcing: The latter part of the 20th century saw rapid global warming as more heat stayed near the surface. In the 21st century, surface warming slowed as more heat moved into deeper oceans. In situ and reanalyzed data are used to trace the pathways of ocean heat uptake. In addition to the shallow La Niña–like patterns in the Pacific that were the previous focus, we found that the slowdown is mainly caused by heat transported to deeper layers in the Atlantic and the Southern oceans, initiated by a recurrent salinity anomaly in the subpolar North Atlantic. Cooling periods associated with the latter deeper heat-sequestration mechanism historically lasted 20 to 35 years."...

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2013 Nature published study on "the hiatus" in global warming:

"Our results show that the current hiatus is part of natural climate variability, tied specifically to a La-Nina-like decadel cooling."...Nature.com

8/28/13, "Recent global-warming hiatus tied to equatorial Pacific surface cooling," Nature.com, Yu Kosaka and Shang-Ping Xie

"Despite the continued increase in atmospheric greenhouse gas concentrations, the annual-mean global temperature has not risen in the twenty-first century^{1, 2}, challenging the prevailing view that anthropogenic forcing causes climate warming. Various mechanisms have been proposed for this hiatus in global warming^{3, 4, 5, 6}, but their relative importance has not been quantified, hampering observational estimates of climate sensitivity. Here we show that accounting for recent cooling in the eastern equatorial Pacific reconciles climate simulations and observations. We present a novel method of uncovering mechanisms for global temperature change by prescribing, in addition to radiative forcing, the observed history of sea surface temperature over the central to eastern tropical Pacific in a climate model. Although the surface temperature prescription is limited to only 8.2% of the global surface, our model reproduces the annual-mean global temperature remarkably well with correlation coefficient r = 0.97 for 1970–2012 (which includes the current hiatus and a period of accelerated global warming). Moreover, our simulation captures major seasonal and regional characteristics of the hiatus, including the intensified Walker circulation, the winter cooling in northwestern North America and the prolonged drought in the southern USA. Our results show that the current hiatus is part of natural climate variability, tied specifically to a La-Niña-like decadal cooling. Although similar decadal hiatus events may occur in the future, the multi-decadal warming trend is very likely to continue with greenhouse gas increase." 

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Climate models didn't forecast pause in global warming:

2009, BBC: "For the last 11 years we have not observed any increase in global temperatures. And our climate models did not forecast it."...

10/9/2009, "What happened to global warming?" Paul Hudson, BBC

"This headline may come as a bit of a surprise, so too might that fact that the warmest year recorded globally was not in 2008 or 2007, but in 1998.

But it is true. "For the last 11 years we have not observed any increase in global temperatures.

And our climate models did not forecast it, even though man-made carbon dioxide, the gas thought to be responsible for warming our planet, has continued to rise."...  

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2011 PNAS study finds "hiatus" in global warming 1998-2008:

7/5/11, "Reconciling anthropogenic climate change with observed temperature 1998–2008," PNAS.org
 "Robert K. Kaufmann^a,¹ ,Heikki Kauppi^b, Michael L. Mann^a, and James H. Stock^c"... 

"Abstract"

"Given the widely noted increase in the warming effects of rising greenhouse gas concentrations, it has been unclear why global surface temperatures did not rise between 1998 and 2008. We find that this hiatus in warming coincides with a period of little increase in the sum of anthropogenic and natural forcings....

Data for global surface temperature indicate little warming between 1998 and 2008 (1). Furthermore, global surface temperature declines 0.2 °C between 2005 and 2008. Although temperature increases in 2009 and 2010, the lack of a clear increase in global surface temperature between 1998 and 2008 (1), combined with rising concentrations of atmospheric CO₂ and other greenhouse gases, prompts some popular commentators (2, 3) to doubt the existing understanding of the relationship among radiative forcing, internal variability, and global surface temperature."...


 

California and Hawaii have over-supply of solar panels. Hawaii is refusing to hook up new panels to the grid in some areas-BBC

"Rooftop solar panels don't just produce electricity at the "wrong" time of day, they also produce it at a low voltage, which, according to the German renewable energy entrepreneur Alexander Voigt, means it is effectively trapped at the level of the local community."...

6/13/14, "Vanadium: The metal that may soon be powering your neighbourhood," BBC World Service, by Laurence Knight

"Hawaii has a problem, one that the whole world is likely to face in the next 10 years. And the solution could be a metal that you've probably never heard of - vanadium.

Hawaii's problem is too much sunshine - or rather too much solar power feeding into its electricity grid.

Generating electricity in the remote US state has always been painful. With no fossil fuel deposits of its own, it has to get oil and coal shipped half-way across the Pacific.

That makes electricity in Hawaii very, very expensive - more than three times the US average - and it is the reason why 10% and counting of the islands' residents have decided to stick solar panels on their roof.

The problem is that all this new sun-powered electricity is coming at the wrong place and at the wrong time of day.

Hawaii's electricity monopoly, Heco, fears parts of the grid could become dangerously swamped by a glut of mid-day power, and so last year 

it began refusing to hook up the newly-purchased panels of residents in some areas.

And it isn't just Hawaii.

"California's got a major problem," says Bill Radvak, the Canadian head of American Vanadium, America's only vanadium mining company.

"The amount of solar that's coming on-stream is just truly remarkable, but it all hits the system between noon and 4pm."

That does not marry well with peak demand for electricity, which generally comes in the late afternoon and evening, when everyone travels home, turns on the lights, heating or air conditioning, boils the kettle, bungs dinner in the microwave, and so on.

What the Golden State needs is some way of storing the energy for a few hours every afternoon until it is needed.

And Radvak thinks he holds the solution - an electrochemical solution that exploits the special properties of vanadium.

Back in 2006, when Radvak's company decided to reopen an old vanadium mine in Nevada, electricity grids were the last thing on their minds.

Back then, vanadium was all about steel. That's because adding in as little as 0.15% vanadium creates an exceptionally strong steel alloy.

"Steel mills love it," says Radvak. "They take a bar of vanadium, throw it in the mix. At the end of the day they can keep the same strength of the metal, but use 30% less."...

And because vanadium steel retains its hardness at high temperatures, it is used in drill bits, circular saws, engine turbines and other moving parts that generate a lot of heat.

So steel accounts for perhaps 90% of demand for the metal.

Vanadium's alloying properties have been known about for well over a century. Henry Ford used it in 1908 to make the body of his Model T stronger and lighter....

Today, vanadium mainly goes into structural steel, such as in bridges and the "rebar" used to reinforce concrete.

It is a small and sometimes volatile market. Supply is dominated by China, Russia and South Africa where the metal is extracted mostly as a useful by-product from iron ore slag and other mining processes.

China - which is midway through the longest and biggest construction boom in history - also dominates demand.

A recent decision by Beijing to stop using low-quality steel rebar has bumped up forecast demand for vanadium by 40%.

Yet the biggest source of future demand may have nothing to do with steel at all, and may instead exploit vanadium's unusual electro-chemical nature....

Vanadium "redox flow" batteries are indeed stable. They can be discharged and recharged 20,000 times without much loss of performance, and are thought to last decades (they have not been around long enough for this to have been demonstrated in practice).

They can also be enormous, and - in large part thanks to their vanadium content - expensive. The smallest of the "Cellcube" batteries that American Vanadium is producing in partnership with German engineering firm Gildemeister has a footprint the size of a parking bay and costs $100,000....

The BBC's headquarters in London - home to 7,000 employees - would need one the size of two 12-metre trailers, Radvak says, perched up on the roof or perhaps buried underground. 

His firm is providing the batteries' key ingredient, the electrolyte (the fluid in the battery)....

Radvak says that among his target customers are large corporate electricity consumers such as the Metropolitan Transport Authority, which runs New York's subway, and with whom his firm has just signed a pilot deal to supply Cellcube batteries.

Such companies are facing ever higher charges for the electricity they use during the peak hours of the day, and the Canadian claims they can cut their bills by a quarter if they use a battery to draw down the daytime electricity they need during the night, when it is cheapest.

By flattening out demand between the daily peaks and troughs, the batteries also help out the electricity companies.

One of their biggest expenses is investing in the extra power station capacity that is only ever called upon for a few hours each year when the weather, holidays and the time of day all conspire to produce the biggest peak in electricity demand.

That challenge of balancing electricity supply and demand is set to get a whole lot more difficult as ever more solar and wind energy is added to the grid.

Which brings us back to Hawaii.

Rooftop solar panels don't just produce electricity at the "wrong" time of day, they also produce it at a low voltage, which, according to the German renewable energy entrepreneur Alexander Voigt, means it is effectively trapped at the level of the local community.

"Our traditional electricity grid is built in a way that the energy flows from the high voltage to the low voltage, and not the other way round," he says.

That means the solar energy can only be shared among the few households - typically just a village or a town neighbourhood - that happen to share the same transformer station that plugs them into the high-voltage national grid.

Voigt helped set up the vanadium battery company that was later bought up by Gildemeister. He foresees the batteries being built next to transformers, where they can store up each community's daily solar surplus, before releasing it back again in the evening.

It is a rosy image, but it does prompt two obvious questions.

First, why should vanadium batteries be the technology of choice? 

For example, there is a glut of cheap lithium batteries these days, after manufacturers built out their capacity heavily in anticipation of a hybrid and electric cars boom that has yet to arrive.

Lithium batteries can deliver a lot of power very quickly, which is great if you need to balance sudden unexpected fluctuations - as may be caused by passing clouds for solar, or a passing gale for wind.

But a lithium battery cannot be recharged even a tenth as many times as a vanadium battery - it's likely to die after 1,000 or 2,000 recharges.

Nor can lithium batteries scale up to the size needed to store an entire community's energy for several hours. By contrast, vanadium batteries can be made to store more energy simply by adding bigger tanks of electrolyte. They can then release it at a sedate pace, unlike conventional batteries, where greater storage generally means greater power.

At the other end of the scale, there are also plenty of large-scale energy storage systems under development, such as those exploiting liquefied air, and the 1,000-fold shrinkage in the volume of the air when it is cooled to -200C.

But these systems take up a lot of space, Mr Voigt says, and are better suited to the very largest-scale facilities that will be needed to serve for instance a large offshore wind farm plugging into the high-voltage national grid.

The second really big question for vanadium is whether the world contains enough of the stuff. The immediate challenge is that the birth of the vanadium battery business is coming just as China is ramping up its demand for vanadium steel.

But there is also a longer-term problem - the quantities of vanadium added to steel alloys are so tiny that it is not economic to recover it from the steel at the end of its life. So for the battery market, that vanadium is effectively lost forever.

But Mr Voigt remains optimistic. 

"Like with all raw materials, it's always a question of how stable is the need of the market, and how big are the incentives for the industry to set up new mines."

With demand on an upward trend, American Vanadium is not the only one trying to fill the gap. 

For example, rival battery-maker Imergy has developed a cheap ways of producing vanadium electrolyte from iron ore slag and the fine ash produced by coal-burning.

Over the longer term, demand for vanadium steel could be met by melting down and recasting old vanadium steel rather than making it afresh, so that freshly mined vanadium could be channelled into the energy market instead.

And in the very long run, perhaps we will harvest vanadium from sea squirts - there are plenty of them in the Pacific."





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Scientists reverse consensus view, now find solar wind triggers lightning on earth, wind whipped particles penetrate clouds making electrical discharges easier, extreme weather can last more than a month after solar wind blasts-BBC

5/14/14, "Solar wind 'triggers lightning on Earth'," BBC, R. Morelle

"Activity on the sun is sparking lightning strikes here on Earth, a study suggests. 

Scientists have found that when gusts of high-speed solar particles enter our atmosphere, the number of lightning bolts increases.

The research is published in the journal Environmental Research Letters. 

Because solar activity is closely monitored by satellites, it may now be possible to forecast when these hazardous storms will hit. 

Lead researcher Dr Chris Scott, from the University of Reading, said: "Lightning represents a significant hazard.

"There's something like 24,000 people struck by lightning each year, so having any understanding or advanced warning of the severity of lightning storms has to be useful."

As the Sun rotates, the fiery ball of plasma hurls out charged particles that travel at between 400-800km a second (900,000 to 1.8 million miles per hour).

The arrival of these solar winds in the atmosphere can trigger displays of the Northern Lights, but this research shows how they could influence our weather too.

"The solar wind is not continuous, it has slow and fast streams. Because the Sun rotates, these streams can be sent out behind each other - so if you have a fast solar wind catching up with a slow solar wind, it causes a concentration to occur," said Dr Scott.

The scientists found that when the speed and intensity of the solar winds increased, so too did the rate of lightning strikes.

The team said the turbulent weather lasted for more than a month after the particles hit the Earth.

Using data from northern Europe, the researchers found there was an average of 422 lightning strikes in the 40 days after the high-speed solar wind arrived, compared with 321 strikes in the 40 days prior.

The finding was surprising, said Dr Scott, because it had been thought that an increase in the solar wind would have the opposite effect.

He explained: "It's unexpected, because these streams of particles bring with them an enhanced magnetic field - and this shields Earth from the very high-energy cosmic rays from outside of the Solar System - these are generated when supernovae explode, and they accelerate particles up to the speed of light."

Previous research has shown that cosmic rays from space can boost the rate of lightning, and it had been thought that an increased shielding effect from the solar particles would cause a decrease in the number of strikes. "Instead what we actually saw was a marked increase in lightning. It turns out these solar winds bring with them a slightly lower energy population of particle - and these are enhancing the lighting rate," Dr Scott said.

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The team is not exactly sure of the mechanism, but said that the particles may be penetrating storm clouds, making it easier for them to discharge electrical energy as a bolts of lightning.
 
"What we need to do now is to track these energetic particles down through the atmosphere, to see if we can see where they end up," said Dr Scott. 

"We know these particles aren't energetic enough to reach the ground, so they must be stopped somewhere in the lower atmosphere, and we need to know where this is."

However, while the questions of how still need to be answered, there is plenty of information about when the particles arrive, which could help with storm forecasting.

"These solar wind streams are very predictable. We know the Sun rotates every 27 days, so there is a very strong recurrence rate. If we see them at one time, we know 27 days later it will be back again," said Dr Scott. 

While the data was collected in Europe, the researchers believe the effect is global."

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This is the ERL study linked in the BBC article but it appears to be about Alaskan glaciers:

May 8, 2014, "Seasonal variability of organic matter composition in an Alaskan glacier outflow: insights into glacier carbon sources," iop science, Spencer et al.






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UK immigration system 'out of control,' minister says-BBC

• 9/5, "Student immigration level unsustainable, says minister" BBC

"The number of foreign students let into the UK is "unsustainable", Immigration Minister Damian Green is to say.

• In a speech later, he will question whether Britain is attracting the brightest and best students - with only half the visas for university courses.

Mr Green's comments come as Home Office research suggests one-fifth of students were still in the UK five years after being granted visas.

• The Home Office study tracked non-EU migrants who came to the UK in 2004.

The largest group - some 185,000 people - were students, and 21% per cent were still in the country five years later.

• BBC home affairs correspondent Danny Shaw says this, together with an increasing number of new overseas students, has led Mr Green to make reform of the student immigration route a priority.

Ministers also intend to examine work visas as two-fifths of people in this group remained in the UK after five years.

• Mr Green said: "We can't assume that everyone coming here has skills the UK workforce cannot offer."

It will be the minister's first major speech on immigration since the formation of the coalition government.

• Office for National Statistics figures released last month showed net migration to the UK increased by 33,000 to 196,000 in 2009.

The number of visas issued to students went up by 35% to 362,015.

• Mr Green said the figures were proof the coalition government had inherited
  

• an immigration system "largely out of control".

"What these figures tell me is that we also need to look at all the other routes [aside from employment] by which people come into this country, maybe for education, for family reunion reasons and also,

• in particular, routes that lead to permanent settlement," he said."

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