The estimated 30,000 power plants worldwide account for about 40 percent of global carbon emissions. While about 80 percent of these plants can be found on a map, there are still unknowns about what these plants are doing, like what fuel they use and how much electricity they generate. The ASU scientists hope to source this information by turning Ventus into a competition: the player who provides the most useable information within the first year will get a trophy and be included as an author on a research publication, plus (according to the website) gain serious street cred “among our very elite, newly-formed global group of citizen scientist enviro-nerds.”

To contribute to Ventus, users are asked to input the exact location of a power plant, its carbon dioxide emissions, what fuel it uses, and its electricity output. Not all of these pieces of information are needed, and users can also edit existing information for 25,000 power plants that have already been mapped, using data from the Center for Global Development. The researchers are specifically hoping to target people who live near or work at power plants, especially the thousands of new facilities in the developing world about which little data exist.

Using Ventus’ Google Maps interface seems simple enough, but as Nature News points out, a previous crowdsourcing effort to map dams wasn’t all that successful. But if the power plant data does start pouring in, researchers should be able to better track fossil fuel emissions, and apply this knowledge to tackle one of the largest contributors to climate change.

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The moves show how Obama is getting creative at a time when Congress isn’t likely to approve budget increases for clean energy support, or other policies like a cap and trade program or carbon tax. The stimulus package, which injected some $90 billion into clean energy projects and incentives, has largely been spent or the funds expired, so clean energy companies and projects are facing a steep drop in federal support in 2013.

Yet, many will note that the moves are piece meal and not as aggressive as Obama originally proposed when he first ran for office. And some of Obama’s concessions to the natural gas and oil industry will likely anger environmentalists and some clean energy advocates. The Washington Post reports that the Obama administration plans to rewrite its proposal to regulate greenhouse emissions using the Environmental Protection Agency, making the proposal weaker and potentially delaying regulations.

The proposal for using $2 billion in federal leases will emerge over the coming weeks. Obama brought up this plan in the State of the Union speech, calling it an Energy Security Trust that will drive new research and technology to shift our cars and trucks off oil for good. Obama said “If a non-partisan coalition of CEOs and retired generals and admirals can get behind this idea, then so can we.”

The use of the infrastructure law is a new idea, and will no doubt prove controversial. A manufacturing association told Bloomberg that the notion had them “freaked out.” The law originally was used to protect water, air and soil from infrastructure projects that could have negative environmental effects.

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I particularly like this analysis, via a quote by Eric Pooley, senior vice president of the Environmental Defense Fund:

“We can’t say that steroids caused any one home run by Barry Bonds, but steroids sure helped him hit more and hit them farther. Now we have weather on steroids.”

Mother Jones also wrote a strong article on the connection between climate change and extreme weather. You can read it here. The article succinctly says:

This will be perceived as a climate-change-related event by much of the public. Weird, extreme weather makes people worry, makes them think the world is changing. They aren’t wrong about that.

Governor Andrew Cuomo took a stand on the issue as well, saying in a press conference:

There has been a series of extreme weather incidents. That is not a political statement. That is a factual statement. Anyone who says there’s not a dramatic change in weather patterns, I think is denying reality.”

Sadly, if there’s anything that will help deliver more public support for clean technologies, and low carbon energy and transportation infrastructure, it’ll be people experiencing the direct and indirect of extreme weather.

Image courtesy of Brian R. Birke.

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• Google: Google might be the biggest big data company of them all, and it used everything in its toolbox yesterday to create probably the most comprehensive tool available for tracking Sandy’s progress — its Superstorm Sandy Crisis Map. Not only does it collect, display and layer weather data from a number of sources, but it also includes video feeds from various locations, evacuation routes, emergency centers and traffic conditions (note: embedded map is interactive).

• Palantir: Secretive Palo Alto, Calif.-based startup Palantir doesn’t often talk about what it’s up to, but customer Direct Relief issued a press release on Monday explaining how Palantir’s technology helps the agency prepare — and continue to monitor — its efforts to donate medical supplies ahead of storms, including Sandy. Here’s how it explained its efforts heading into yesterday’s landfall:

“Working with analytical and data visualization tools from technology partner, Palantir, Direct Relief is able to to pinpoint clinic partners located in socially vulnerable areas and in flood risk zones near Hurricane Sandy’s path. Palantir’s tools allow Direct Relief to pull together massive amounts of information sources into a common framework to better understand, visualize, plan, and manage for complex emergencies in near real-time.

“… Offers of supplies were sent to more than 300 partners in the path of the storm and along evacuation routes.”

• SiSense: SiSense is a business intelligence startup headquartered in Tel Aviv, Israel, that boasts one of the fastest in-memory data analysis platforms around. On Monday, the company showed off what its product, called Prism, can do with a little weather data. The resulting interactive dashboard — which the company claims took less than an hour to build and uses open data from Data.gov — won’t help anybody track Sandy’s progress, but could help companies looking to avoid natural disasters find the safest places to locate their companies or critical data center assets.

• Datum Companies: A Greenwich, Conn., company called Datum Companies on Friday (we’ll assume the timing isn’t entirely coincidental) launched its flagship catastrophe-prediction platform called Eurus. Designed for customers in the insurance industries, the cloud service uses a variety of advanced statistical methods, as well as machine learning algorithms, to predict the likelihood of and monetary losses associated with natural disasters. Built on the Cassandra NoSQL database, the platform stores and collects billions of data points that it uses to train its predictive models.

Of course, parties interested in turning a profit aren’t the only ones whose data expertise proves effective in the case of natural disasters. We might also start paying more attention to the computer models from meteorology researchers, which proved remarkably accurate in predicting Sandy’s evolution from a coastal hurricane into an inland post-tropical storm. Assuming new, better satellites do actually launch later this decade to power future models, they might combine with next-generation commercial big data products and open data sets to provide some very useful data about how and when disasters will hit, how bad the effects might be, and how best to prepare.

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The Climate Corporation (nee WeatherBill) has been a darling of the venture capital world — and the farming community — thanks to its deceptively simple model for protecting farmers against the weather. Farmers give Climate Corp. their growing plans and locations for the year, and Climate Corp. gives them customized policies based on the specific details of their situations. If a covered weather event happens — an occurrence that presumably results in some degree of crop loss — the farmer gets paid immediately. The company provides a fuller (and better illustrated) explanation here.

Under the covers, however, the company’s business is a tad more complex. Like, the kind of complexity that comes with being accurate to a geographic area as narrow as a farmer’s specific field, and granular down to the level of average soil moisture. According to Climate Corp. Founder and CEO David Friedberg, his company knows the shape of each of the 20 million fields in the United States, as well what was grown each year, the outcome in terms of crop yield, the water-holding capacity of the soil, and other critical metrics. To bastardize a classic idiom: You can’t make a weather omelet without cracking 30 years worth of data-rich eggs.

How much data are we talking about?

Here’s how much data Friedberg and his team of 21 Ph.Ds. have and how they analyze it:

• About 200TB of historical data stored in Amazon S3.
• Monthly predictive simulations and daily forecasts for each location it insures.
• Each simulation:
  • Uses between 4,000 and 5,000 computing cores on Amazon Elastic MapReduce.
  • Considers 10,000 scenarios for each of the next 730 days.
  • Analyzes 5 trillion data points.
  • Consumes 20TB of uncompressed data.
• Data volumes have grown about 15x since last year.

It’s worth noting, though, that even with all its data and simulations, Climate Corp. isn’t in the business of predicting the weather, just giving probabilities. “‘Predict’ is a strong word in weather,” Friedberg explained, denoting an ability to say with some certainty what will happen and when. Friedberg cares about statistics — determining the probability that something will happen over a particular timeframe, then analyzing the accuracy of those probabilities to further improve the models.

Farmers know their tech

But looking beyond the sheer computing power and data science that Climate Corp. puts behind its insurance policies, the most impressive part of the company’s business model might be that it actually gets farmers to use the web-based service to improve their output. Friedberg isn’t too surprised, though.

“Farmers are not just fly-by-night small business owners who decide overnight they’re going to start selling soda and candy,” he said. Rather, they’re often the products of generations of inherited knowledge and experience on how to grow the best crops possible, and the most of them. They know what it costs them to plant an acre and what they need to grow to make a profit. But “the one thing they can’t control is the weather,” he added.

If a tool can help them accurately account for the possibility of bad weather and thus maximize the volume of crops they produce, they’ll learn to use it. As the climate that farmers depend on continues to evolve, that might be more true than ever. A statistical mind through and through, Friedberg wouldn’t call it “climate change,” but did note a trend toward warmer temperatures and volatility of extreme weather events that makes it more difficult to get a sense of what might be coming.

And it’s not like farmers are the luddites that popular culture might make them out to be. “Now, they’re using GPS equipment in their self-drviing tractors and combines,” Friedberg said. “They’ll sit back and watch Hulu on their iPad while the tractor drives itself.” Apparently, they’ll delve into some big data, too.

Feature image courtesy of Roger Kidd.

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But before I address “the Gleick issue,” it’s worth noting that the scientific evidence in support of global warming is unequivocal. The New York Times, among others, reported that there is scientific consensus since 2007 that global warming is “‘unequivocal’ and that human activity is the main driver.”

And based on that proof, in my work at the Carbon War Room, we’ve found at least $5 trillion in cost effective climate change solutions that could be deployed without further government incentives. So, while we are working on solving a science-based issue, we are solving it with market driven solutions, demonstrating that believing in climate change and the free market are not mutually exclusive.

Now back to Gleick. Gleick has admitted to forwarding documents to prominent journalists covering climate change that describe details of the Heartland’s climate program strategy. While Gleick received these documents anonymously in the mail, he subsequently made two major mistakes.

First, he lied about his identity. In an attempt to confirm the accuracy of the anonymous documents, Gleick solicited and received additional materials directly from Heartland using someone else’s name.

Second, he deceived the very journalists who have supported his work on climate change. Gleick forwarded the documents he had received to them and experts on climate issues, but he did not reveal himself as the source.

At issue is whether this one act of deception undermines all of Gleick’s credibility. Further, it raises the question of whether it actually undercuts rather than supports the science behind climate change.

A Milken moment

Now, I am going to go out on a limb and reference Michael Milken, the former financier and now philanthropist (Update: he’s been a philanthropist since the 1970′s) noted for his role in the development of the market for junk bonds during the 1970s and 1980s. Milken’s position gave him access to insider information that he traded on. He was caught and indicted on 98 counts of racketeering and securities fraud in 1989.

While the severity of Gleick’s lapse of judgment, certainly does not eclipse that of Milken, each were sitting with information at their fingertips, which they misused — and misused badly.

The SEC permanently barred Milken from the securities industry, yet his sentence was reduced to two years for testifying against former colleagues and good behavior.

Despite Milken’s significant character flaws, he has been cited by noted people like author, George Gilder who wrote in his book, Telecosm, “Milken was a key source of the organizational changes that have impelled economic growth over the last twenty years.”

In other words, Milken opened up markets, exposed issues, loopholes and discrepancies in the capital markets through his own indictment.

Milken has since gone on to co-founded the Milken Family Foundation Milken Institute, which has been instrumental in driving significant advances in medical research. So added to his checkered life, he has changed medicine for the better.

How does Milken connect to Gleick?

Gleick has sought a “rational public debate” regarding climate change. While his deception was a discredit to himself and possibly to all climate researchers, it has also put in the open questions about Heartland and its tactics. While Gleick has been less than honest, has Heartland also been less than honest?

My answer is really – who cares? What we do care about is an honest rational debate. Gleick said, “scientific understanding of the reality and risks of climate change is strong, compelling, and increasingly disturbing.” Perhaps Heartland and others have fact-based evidence that conclusively shows otherwise.

Now that dishonesty is out in the open, could this be the beginning of an honest rational discussion about climate change?  I hope so.

So what about that $5 trillion that we discovered could be invested in climate change solutions?  In the last 10 years, we have invested over $1 trillion into climate change solutions – $243 billion of that in 2010 alone. To accelerate that deployment to the scale required we have to make business decisions for our future based on facts – honest facts for an honest debate.

So, while naysayers try to “muddy the waters” on scientific evidence, trillions of investment dollars are forging ahead to solve our climate issue with market driven solutions. It seems that the onus for proof is on those trying to debunk climate change.

Meanwhile, climate change is driving economic growth and creating jobs. And who wants to stop economic growth that?

Jigar Shah is the CEO of the Carbon War Room, a nonprofit that harnesses the power of entrepreneurs to implement market-driven solutions to climate change and create a post-carbon economy. By bringing project finance and growth capital together with infrastructure entrepreneurs, corporations, governments and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), he identifies and eliminates market barriers, driving environmental improvements alongside economic growth.

Shah founded SunEdison in 2003 with a new business model, the solar power services agreement business (SPSA). The SPSA uses mature technologies and required no new legislative action. The SPSA model launched solar services into a multibillion dollar industry. SunEdison now has more solar energy systems and megawatts under management than any other company.

Image courtesy of Tim’s photostream Flickr Creative Commons

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Dr. Jonathan Koomey, Stanford University

This essay is the first of a series of four appearing this week on GigaOm. It draws from material in Jonathan Koomey’s latest book, Cold Cash, Cool Climate:  Science-based Advice for Ecological Entrepreneurs, which is being released by Analytics Press on February 15, 2012.  

Written for entrepreneurs and investors, this book describes how to profit from tackling climate change, one of this century’s greatest challenges. The author acts as your company’s scientific advisor, summarizing the business implications of the climate problem for both new and existing ventures. Koomey helps you effectively allocate scarce time and resources to the most promising opportunities, drawing upon his more than 25 years of experience in analyzing and implementing climate solutions.

A big lesson from climate science for entrepreneurs

One of the reasons I wrote the book Cold Cash, Cool Climate was because the climate and energy sciences have some important lessons to teach entrepreneurs seeking to reduce emissions and make a profit at the same time. Unfortunately, these lessons have not until now been summarized for that audience. My new book aims to change that.

The most sophisticated analysts of the climate problem think in terms of emissions budgets, defined by questions like “How many greenhouse gases (GHGs) can we emit in the next century and stay under some specified warming limit (like the widely accepted temperature goal of 2 Celsius degrees above preindustrial levels?” Because some important GHGs (like carbon dioxide and nitrous oxide) stay in the atmosphere for centuries once emitted, it’s the cumulative emissions that matter. That’s why people use emissions budgets over many decades to think about the problem.

In the book I lay out a carbon budget and an associated emissions pathway that I call the “Safer Climate case”, which has about a 2/3 chance (based on the latest climate simulations) of keeping global average temperatures from rising more than 2 Celsius degrees from preindustrial levels. This case implies that we’ll keep most fossil fuel reserves in the ground, or find a way to safely sequester that carbon if we choose to burn these reserves. It also implies very rapid emissions reductions: For about three decades, starting in 2012, we’ll need to reduce global carbon emissions by on average almost 7 percent per year (compounded) to meet the constraints of the Safer Climate case, even as population and economic activity grow substantially, and poorer countries continue striving towards modernity.

We’ll also need comparable reductions in other greenhouse gases. This rate of emissions reductions is historically unprecedented, at least over decade long time-scales, but that doesn’t mean it is impossible.

Feasibility depends on context, and on what we are willing to pay to minimize risks. What if there’s a big climate-related disaster and we finally decide that it’s a real emergency (like World War II)? In that case we’d make every effort to fix the problem, and what would be possible then is far beyond what we could imagine today.

At the start of World War II, the US auto industry took six months to transition from building a few million autos a year to building planes and tanks for the war effort. This shift wasn’t easy, but it happened, and it offers a lesson in what is possible when we really put our minds to attacking a problem.

This example illustrates another important point about rapid emissions reductions: they will likely result in some capital being scrapped before the end of its useful life. This is a problem from a political perspective, of course, but many analysts dismiss scenarios with premature capital retirements as infeasible. Based on the analysis in Chapter 5 of the book, I suspect strongly that we won’t have that luxury, given the rapid reductions we’ll need to achieve (and the problem will grow in size if we continue to build high carbon infrastructure after 2012).

Since the constraints of the Safer Climate case will probably force us to scrap some capital stocks before the end of their useful lives, it’s the entrepreneur’s job to make existing capital stocks obsolete more quickly. That means developing replacement products (and ways to retrofit existing buildings and equipment) that are so much better than current ways of delivering energy services that people are willing to scrap or repurpose that equipment to gain the advantages your product provides. That approach will allow us to minimize and sometimes sidestep the difficult political choices caused by premature retirements of existing capital.

As one example of such a product, consider light-emitting diode (LED) down lights that fit in those recessed ceiling cans that are so common in U.S. homes. We installed almost 50 of these in our new house last year to replace our aging fixtures. We would have had to spend $20 to replace each fixture anyway, according to the contractor, and the LED fixtures we bought instead cost $50 each and fit right into the existing cans.  Not only do they look better than what they replaced, they deliver bright and directional light, they come on instantly and dim just fine, their color rendition is so good that even my wife (who is a stickler in such matters) thinks they are great, and they will last 35,000 hours, which is probably 20 years at the rates that we use most of these fixtures.

The long lifetime (compared to at most a few thousand hours for incandescent bulbs and about ten thousand hours for compact fluorescents) was what put them over the top for us. We have relatively high ceilings throughout the house so the prospect of climbing a tall ladder more than a dozen times a year was not an enticing one. The LEDs eliminate that hassle, and in fact are so good that they will surely encourage others to replace their fixtures before the end of their useful lives, because they are so better than what they replace.  And did I mention that they cut lighting electricity use by more than 80 percent?

Conclusions

Because the required emissions in the Safer Climate case are so rapid, some existing energy sector capital will need to be retired in coming decades (and the more high-carbon infrastructure we build in the next few years the more that will have to be scrapped later).  An entrepreneur can assist that process by building low emission products that are so good that people are eager to buy them and happy to scrap existing capital to put them to work. That won’t make all the difficult political problems of the climate issue go away, but it will help.

Image courtesy of Julipan.

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The main Conference of the parties, which includes all the parties that have signed on to the Kyoto protocol, is scheduled to last from Nov. 28 to Dec. 9. It will be live streamed with two feeds, with one picking up the floor audio, and another one providing English simulcast translations. There are also live streams from press conferences and other proceedings like the first meeting of the Subsidiary Body for Scientific and Technological Advice, and all the daily live streams will be listed on this page. A detailed schedule for all meetings can be found here.

Two more things are worth noting: Durban is in the GMT +2 time zone, which means meetings that start at 10 a.m. local time can be watched at midnight PST and 3 a.m. EST. Also, the U.N. is using Microsoft’s Silverlight for live streaming, so you might want to update / download Silverlight before tuning in.

Image courtesy of Flickr user UNclimatechange.

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According to a Nielsen poll  of 25,000 online consumers from 51 countries, 69 percent of respondents say they are concerned about climate change, up slightly from 66 percent in 2009, but down from 72 percent in 2007. Respondents in the U.S. and China were less concerned about climate change in 2011 than in the past, while respondents in Latin America, the Middle East and Africa were more worried about climate change in 2011.

Other issues to worry about

In particular, only 48 percent of Americans in the recent poll say they are concerned about climate change, which represented one of the sharpest declines (at 14 percentage points) in concern about climate change between 2007 and 2011 compared to respondents in other countries. Americans are far more concerned about debt, rising gas prices, and the economy, said Nielsen U.S. SVP Consumer & Shopper Insights Todd Hale.

Chinese consumers also were less concerned about climate change in the latest poll, and 64 percent said they were concerned in 2011, compared to 77 percent in 2009 (a drop of 17 percent).

For regions with respondents that were less concerned about climate change, other environmental issues also grew in prominence over climate change. For example, environmental concerns like air pollution, use of pesticides, water pollution, packaging waste and water shortages.

Where & why people are worried

In contrast to the declines in concern in the U.S. and China, the study found that concern over climate change increased in Latin America to 90 percent in 2011, up from 85 percent in 2009. In the Middle East and Africa concern over climate jumped to 80 percent in 2011, from 69 percent in 2009 — the highest increase regionally.

Not surprisingly, consumers in Latin America are making the connection between the extreme weather events there and climate change. Says Nielsen Latin America President Arturo García:

Latin America has experienced a number of distressing and impactful environmental events over the last several years, and the region’s consumers are increasingly attributing these events to broad climate change. People are expressing clear concern about unusual weather patterns including increased rainfall, hurricanes, and floods in some parts of Latin America, and severe droughts in others.

Likewise in Africa and the Middle East, people are making the link. Nielsen Egypt Managing Director Ram Mohan Rao says:

The hot and dry climates in many Middle Eastern and African countries and the widely held perception that temperatures are rising every summer has likely led to an increased concern about climate change and weather variation.

Closer to home

If there’s a continued increase in extreme weather events in the U.S., I think concern over climate change will also increase here the U.S., too. Even when rhetoric in political circles has seemed to move away from a discussion around climate change, if the weather gets extreme enough locally, it will be hard not to make the connection. 2010 is looking to be the most extreme weather year on record.

Even if Americans don’t end up having all that much first-hand experience with an increase in these major disasters over the next few years, the influx of photos, videos and news stories (available 24/7 on the web) of people increasingly dying or losing their property in extreme weather events is, could be a persuasive factor. Al Gore thinks so; he’s turning to the intersection of digital media and extreme weather to launch a new social movement called the Climate Reality Project, which will live stream content that shows how extreme weather has affected people’s lives and will take place Sept. 14 and 15.

Of course, weather events like hurricane Irene can’t solely be attributed to climate change, but scientists generally are willing to say they think hurricanes will get more extreme thanks to climate change. But we’ll have to see how extreme and prevalent these storms need to be to convince more Americans to become worried about climate change.

Image courtesy of NASA Goddard, Photo and Video, Undertow 851, brownpau, and Matt and Kim Rudge.

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Last week I wrote about how the 24-7 Internet and news cycle of extreme weather events, combined with social media, could potentially finally offer the spark needed for a green web movement around fighting climate change. What do you think? Will you watch this event?

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