And old, 19th Century windmill in contrast to wind turbines today.

Last summer I visited the Netherlands, the original home of the windmill. Surprisingly, I saw hardly any of the quaint structures we associate with Dutch wind power. One hundred years ago Holland had about 10,000 wooden windmills dotting its landscape. Today, barely 10% remain. What I saw instead were high tech wind turbines, white and spare and gracefully generating electricity with wind from the North Sea. Many view these modern day towers as an eyesore, but I see them as a sign of hope. Like giant flowers across a landscape, they symbolize for me a clean energy future. But wind power, and solar, have a handicap that fuels claims that renewables will never be more than a small percentage of U.S. power. These energy sources can't be counted on when night falls or the wind subsides. Their inconsistent and therefore unreliable nature poses a problem for a world with an enormous appetite for electricity. If only excess power could be stored on a grand scale, it might solve many of our energy problems.

It isn't that electrical energy isn't currently storable, but as Andrew Tang, Senior Director of PG&E’s Smart Meter program points out, the current generation of batteries can’t store electricity at a price that's cost effective. But both he and Steve Berberich from California System Operators were optimistic about future storage possibilities. Tang described an experimental project that uses a sodium sulfur battery the size of an 18-wheeler trailer. The battery would be located next to a substation, or somewhere in the network, and its stored power would be used during times of peak demand. He also talked about the future of plug-in electric cars whose batteries could both store energy and in theory put it back onto the grid when the car's not in use. Steve Berberich envisioned several possibilities for storing excess power. He proposed converting it to hydrogen, which could be burned in a gas plant or could be used in a fuel cell. And he suggested using power to compress air, which could be injected into the ground and called upon when the wind's not blowing and the sun’s not shining.

Whatever the final solution to storage, you can guarantee it will be a game changer in the renewable power industry. No longer will wind and solar be looked upon as unreliable. Hopefully this missing puzzle piece will go a long way towards helping us detach from our dependence on fossil fuels. But we’ll still be left with the challenge of getting all that clean, green energy onto the power grid. And you can be sure that environmental concerns, zoning, aesthetics, and cost will undoubtedly be cantankerous issues for years to come.

Watch the Climate Watch: Unlocking The Grid television story online.

More people appear to be saying "yes" these days, even if grudgingly. The question is: Is it too late?

The Public Policy Institute of California has been tracking public support for expanded nuclear power over the past several years. Survey participants are offered a menu of four potential energy options, one at a time.

The question posed is: "Thinking about the country as a whole, to address the country’s energy needs and reduce dependence on foreign oil sources, do you favor or oppose the following proposals?" Then the four options are offered, including: "How about building more nuclear power plants at this time."

As recently as 2002, adults surveyed in California opposed the idea by a margin of 59% to 33%. But that gap has been closing steadily in the years since and by this July, Californians were split just about down the middle on the question, with 46% in favor and 48% opposed. The poll has a margin of error of about 2%, making it a virtual tie.

When you dig into the numbers a little deeper, some demographic preferences emerge: support increases with both age and education. Californians 55 and older support more nuclear by a wide margin (58% to 36%) as do college graduates (50%-43%).

Many people use cost as an argument against nuclear but just as the PPIC was phoning around for opinions on the matter, the Palo Alto-based Electric Power Research Institute was finishing up its own report , concluding that trying to reach greenhouse gas reduction goals without baseload technologies like nuclear power, could end up costing much more. Dan Kammen, who runs an energy lab at U.C. Berkeley, would appear to agree. He said in a recent interview for Climate Watch that "Without knowing exactly where things will come down on nuclear, I think that it absolutely has to be part of the equation in a way that it has not been in the past. Energy costs from fossil fuels are rising at almost 5% a year now, and the damage we are doing and are going to do more of, if we don’t stop our fossil fuel expansion, in terms of greenhouse warming, is so large an issue that these technologies have to be back on the table.

But there's a serious question of whether the nation– let alone the state– is in a position to embrace nuclear as it did in the 1960s. Kammen is also a professor of nuclear engineering, and noted with some alarm the rate at which the industry is "graying." Now in his mid-forties, he told me that when he attends technical meetings for nuclear engineers, he's often "the youngest guy in the room–by 20 years." Since the U.S. more or less abandoned its nuclear hopes following the Three Mile Island debacle, the nation has ceded most of its nuclear industrial capacity to other nations, and few young people have chosen to enter the field.

The effective ban on new nuclear plants that California has had in place since 1976 could be reconsidered. But ultimately electric utilities will have to want it and I sense a certain "nuclear fatigue" in that arena.

The Sacramento Municipal Utility District (SMUD) shut down its only reactor in 1989, after a thumbs-down referendum. When I called to ask for an interview on the prospects for a nuclear revival, they declined. They didn't even want to talk about it. Managers at PG&E, whose twin reactors at Diablo Canyon produce nearly a quarter of the utility's output, still claim an interest in nuclear. But when I asked CEO Peter Darbee about it recently, he said he had the sense that most people in California would prefer to look elsewhere for energy solutions. Of course, that was before the latest PPIC poll.

Listen to the New Nuclear radio report online.

Check out an interactive "atomic timeline," marking some of the milestones in nuclear power history in the U.S. By former Climate Watch intern Amanda Dyer.

Our trip to the Farallon Islands was certainly eventful: seasickness (me), bug bites (me) and immersion in one of the most unique wildlife habitats in the world (which made it all worth it). This chain of windblown rocks, about 27 miles from San Francisco, is teeming with 300,000 seabirds in the spring and summer.

The noise of all these nesting and breeding birds is almost overwhelming (check out the slideshow below for a firsthand look), but these birds speak for a lot more than themselves. Our guides, PRBO Conservation Science, have been studying these birds for 40 years. As Biologist Russell Bradley explained, these seabirds are environmental samplers. In order to raise their chicks, they depend on the food web that blooms in the spring when coastal upwelling brings nutrient-rich water to the surface. If that is disrupted or delayed, the first place scientists will see it is in these bird populations, who will either have poor or non-existent breeding seasons.

Those changes in the upwelling patterns can be due to natural variability in the system. But increasing, scientists are asking whether the changes are due to climate change. That's not an easy question to answer. There are a lot of different factors in the mix.

I spoke with Zack Powell, a professor at UC Berkeley who studies climate and upwelling, and he said it all comes down to the timing of natural cycles. First, there's El Nino – where warm water spreads across the equator and heads up the California coast. That can happen every two to seven years and when it does, it acts a barrier to upwelling, interfering with the marine food web. Scientists recently confirmed that El Nino will return this year.

Looking at changes on a longer time frame, there's the Pacific Decadal Oscillation. It's a pattern of ocean warming and cooling that can last 30 years. Powell says it can also have an effect on marine life and fisheries.

And finally, there's climate change, which comparably may cause changes on the longest time frame. Powell says there's about 100 years of historical data about the ocean conditions off the California coast and it's not much when looking at such long-lived patterns. Powell and others work on climate modeling to help answer these questions. Some of the models show that the seasonal winds may become stronger, meaning upwelling patterns could be altered. And ocean temperatures could rise significantly, changing the way warmer surface water and nutrient-rich deep water mix.

Powell says right now his focus is the granularity of the climate models. They simply can't predict changes on a small geographic scale. "For most models, the smallest footprint is about 100km and all the upwelling takes place closer to shore than that." But he's hoping there will be drastic improvements over the next few years. And if extreme changes do take place, for whatever reason, the birds will certainly tell us.

Listen to the Journey to the Farallones radio report online, and check out our Farallon Islands Interactive Map for the sights and sounds of the island. Or watch the audio slideshow below for a first-hand look.

Cooper and me saving energy on the couchMy cousin Mark is a pretty smart guy who reads widely. (All my cousins are above average.) Here is what Mark sent to me in an e-mail about dogs:

Professor Temple Grandin says that dogs are genetic wolves that have co-evolved with humans for 100,000 years, maybe more. Hence dogs and humans have complementary advantages and deficits. Humans used to have a better sense of hearing and smell, now dogs are better than us at those. Humans walk upright and have better vision and organizational skills, so dogs depend on us to see things and try to find them. Both are social creatures. So the lesson is that Nature has bundled the hardware and software for these skills and abilities between the two species. Unbundling them carries certain risks, so you should try to live with a dog if you can.

I agree that dogs and humans are a pretty good combination. Michele and I have had a dog for about a year now. Cooper is a medium-sized Labradoodle, which is a Lab and Poodle mix. He's a great dog and we love him a lot. He's heartbreakingly cute and cuddly. He has a Lab's great disposition and a Poodle's smarts. We think he's the best dog ever.

But, along with being a good partner, is Cooper an energy efficient addition to our household? Are pets, and dogs in particular, a step in the right direction in the battle against global warming and the fight for energy security? Is Underdog more than a cartoon?

I think "bundling" ourselves with animals is a good idea for lots of reasons, but here is why I think dogs are energy efficient:

1.)   Dogs add warmth in the winter and stay outside most of the time in the summer, so they don't add much to a house's cooling load.

2.)   Dogs add fur in the winter and cool themselves using their tongues. Try that, humans!

3.)  When he has nothing to do, Cooper lays down flat as a pancake and barely moves, thereby conserving energy.

4.)  Dogs are great alarm systems and don't even need batteries.

5.)  Dogs eat stuff that humans throw away. They will clean your plates if you let them, saving water and energy.

6.)  Because dogs need to be walked, they cause their owners to exercise, reducing their owners' appetite and therefore their food intake (that's how it's supposed to work).

7.)  Dogs give you unconditional love and so you don't have to drive your car to visit family and friends.

Anybody want to weigh in on cats?

"2008 was one of the hottest years on record."The conventional wisdom is that a warming planet means more wildfires–and in many cases the conventional wisdom is right. But globally it's a more complex question.

Just last week, Max Moritz and his team at UC Berkeley's Center for Fire Research & Outreach published a study that shows widely varied fire response to climate changes around the world. Post-doctoral fellow Meg Krawchuk was the lead data cruncher in the effort, with contributions from researchers at Texas Tech University.

What they found were suggestions of rapid changes in fire regimes, and not all in the same direction. Some places (like most of California) will likely see a spike in the fire hazard, while other regions (like the Pacific Northwest) could see a retreat of wildfire frequency and intensity:

"In contrast to any expectation that global warming should necessarily result in more fire, we find that regional increases in fire probabilities may be counter-balanced by decreases at other locations, due to the interplay of temperature and precipitation variables. Despite this net balance, our models predict substantial invasion and retreat of fire across large portions of the globe."

Moritz has been stumping for new approaches to fire-climate analysis. He says rather than treat fire strictly as the product of other climate change variables, we should think of it also as a climate driver.

Map shows areas of potential fire advance (orange) and retreat (blue) by 2010-2039 (medium-high emissions scenario)

You can use the player below to hear an excerpt from my interview with Moritz, in which he explains the new perspective that he thinks his team's study brings to the fire-climate connection.

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Cool the Earth is an organization that reaches into elementary school classrooms and Girl Scout troops all over the country, and they're working to make saving energy and being good stewards of our natural resources fun. Participating schools are given a packet of materials to kick off the program with an all school assembly, where characters like Koda the polar bear, Earth, Mother Nature, and Mr. Carbon (boo! hiss!) introduce the topic of global warming and how human actions contribute to the problem. The kids are inspired to save Koda's icy homeland by getting rid of the villain Mr. Carbon.

The students are given a small book of action coupons to take home that recommend tips such as powering down home electronics that use energy when officially "off" but are still in standby mode by unplugging the device or turning off the power at a power strip. Students can earn rewards in the form of prize cards featuring Wasteful Wendy, Rennie Reusable and other characters, for actions such as getting their families to eat one pound less of beef in a week, thereby saving 130,000 gallons of water (the water to grow the crops to feed the cattle, and so on.)

Monthly highlights focus on a particular action, and an Action Banner tracks the progress of the whole school, charting the amount of energy saved and the amount of greenhouse gases avoided. School teachers can go online to access materials, get advice from the staff of Cool the Earth, or just brag about how their school is doing.

The program is working because it employs an age-old motivational strategy– get to the parents through their kids. And the results are tangible. The program so far can account for more than 25 million pounds of carbon emissions avoided. There are 149 schools involved in the program so far, and there is a waiting list for participation. Almost 23,000 students are involved– translating into many more thousands of parents, brothers, and sisters.

A carbon-tracking cell phone. Credit: Nokia
"Do I get to keep the phone?"

Not exactly the environmentally-conscious line of thinking that organizers were hoping for, but understandable for those high-schoolers holding a brand new, latest version of the Nokia in their hands.

The way the San Francisco pilot program works is like this: students get a mobile phone equipped with a GPS maps application. They fill out a profile with the make and model of the cars they use. The cell phone monitors movement, so it picks up when that student is making a car trip. The server factors in the time of day, the weather and humidity, and the type of car the student is riding in – and then calculates the amount of carbon output that trip represents.

The program currently doesn't differentiate between cars and other forms of transportation – bikes, ferries, trains, carpools, buses – so students may need to note when those trips were not regular car trips. The final number is their carbon rating.

When the program expands to three other San Francisco schools at the end of March 2009, a competition will be formed between the high schools to see which group of 25 students can cut back the most on their car trips and carbon output.

That will help answer the question of how much pollution people can save just by altering transportation behavior. And hopefully, the participants here are young enough that those transportation choices might continue after the program has ended. Once they get used to walking or biking, for instance, maybe they'll make that a regular form of transportation.

That, of course, doesn't ameliorate the answer to the other burning question – that, yes, the cool phone goes away when the pilot program ends.

Listen to the Tracking Carbon through Your Cell Phone radio report online.

Sea level rise scenarios for San Francisco International Airport.
Click the map to see a larger image.

The most recent estimate looks pretty dire. The Bay Conservation and Development Commission (BCDC), a state planning agency, says it expects San Francisco Bay to rise about 16 inches by 2050, and 55 inches by the end of the century.

The map on this page shows what San Francisco International Airport and the surrounding area would look like, if the bay rose a meter (roughly 36 inches). You can check other maps around the bay as well.

And the real danger of that big rise in bay waters happens during storm season. High tides and storm surges could send that higher water inland, flooding Highway 101 and neighborhoods along the bay. If the bay runs right up to the edge of development and we build sea walls to protect property, then that deep pool of water will have much higher waves, stronger currents and will pound the shoreline much harder than where there is now graduated wetlands. The effect, experts say, would be similar to what happens when you churn up water in a bathtub, and the wave energy quickly builds up and spills over the sides.

Part of the challenge in BCDC’s design competition is to come up with barriers that might absorb some of the power of those waves, instead of simply deflecting those waves with straight walls.

Listen to the Redesigning the Bay radio report online.

By reporter Marjorie Sun.

I got interested in this story after hearing Silicon Valley venture capitalist Vinod Khosla speak at a conference this fall in Sausalito. He explained how he decides where to invest in green tech and it was fascinating. He and other top venture capitalists think they can help stop global warming and make a ton of money at the same time. You can listen to Khosla's talk on a webcast and listen to all sorts of entrepreneurs and v.c.'s talk about the latest renewable energy projects.

Khosla says to achieve a huge reduction in greenhouse gas emissions fast, we have to think about solutions that make big cuts in emissions and will be widely adopted. Buying a Prius is fine, he says, but it's really just "fashion." We need solutions that people in India and China will buy, Khosla says. To him, the key issues that guide his investments are cost, scale, and adoption. If a renewable solution isn't cheaper than coal, forget it, he says. Geothermal "is nice, but it doesn't scale."

Same with wind. It's "a great technology, but it's a toy." As for hydrogen fuel, the adoption risk is too high. Again, forget it, he says. The focus should be a war on coal, oil, and the manufacturing of cement and steel, which are huge emitters of carbon dioxide. (He's a major investor in Calera, an alternative cement maker in Silicon Valley.)

One more area for potentially huge gains is to improve energy efficiency, such as lighting. Another legendary venture capital company, Kleiner Perkins, is also racing to develop renewable energy solutions and make a fortune. (Khosla is a former partner there.) Kleiner's efforts were profiled in a cover story in The New York Times Sunday Magazine recently

With the Obama administration, it will be interesting to see what new federal policies– tax, economic and regulatory– will be adopted to accelerate solutions and spur more investment during a double whammy of crises: the economic meltdown and climate change.

Listen to the Building Blocks Go Green radio report online.

On the surface, geoengineering almost seems like science fiction. Could humans engineer a way to compensate for global warming by changing dynamics in the Earth's atmosphere? But it's one of the ideas being discussing at the American Geophysical Union conference in San Francisco. Each year, thousands of scientists descend on downtown San Francisco to hold a week of meetings and discussions.

Here's how the idea would work: Using planes or other high-altitude transport, we'd disburse millions of tons of sulfur dioxide (or hydrogen sulfide) into the stratosphere, 13 miles above the Earth. Those gases would create tiny particles, which would reflect sunlight. This process already goes on in the stratosphere – about a third of the energy from the sun is reflected back into space thanks to this dynamic. But by adding more reflecting particles, scientists think it might be possible to cool the planet – and compensate for human-induced warming.

No one has tried this idea yet – but it's something scientists have already observed — through volcanoes. In 1991, Mount Pinatubo erupted in the Philippines, spewing 20 million tons of sulfur dioxide into the atmosphere. As a result, global temperatures temporarily dropped about one degree Fahrenheit.

That doesn't necessarily mean a scheme like this would work. As UCLA Scientist Richard Turco said, it's not easy to predict how the particles would react and disburse. "If the particles are too large, that would actually create a warming effect, a greenhouse warming. Small particles are not useful because they don't reflect much radiation."

This plan isn't just a one time deal. As Turco continued, "we would need a huge monitoring system and can't afford to make any mistakes. Once you start this process, you have to maintain it for two to three centuries."

And then there's the "get out of jail free" aspect. If the focus of climate change policy becomes geoengineering, what happens to simply cutting emissions? As Professor Alan Robock of Rutgers University acknowledged, the costs and technology of geoengineering are uncertain — and it wouldn't curb other climate change impacts, like ocean acidification. "We have to focus on mitigation and keep this in our back pocket for emergencies."

According to Professor David Keith of the University of Calagry, it's worth studying geoengineering — just in case. Our greenhouse gas emissions will continue to grow. "We're not going to stop today, and even if we stopped today, there's enormous inertia," Keith said. In the event that climate change becomes catastrophic, Keith says we may need a last resort. "Whether you like or don't like this, it can be done quickly."

For more on what's new at the AGU, check out KQED's Climate Watch blog.