Project BudBurst

Posted on | April 21, 2010 | No Comments

“Project Budburst citizen scientists find that plants are blooming unusually early.”

Students, gardeners, retirees and other volunteers across the nation who are taking part in a nationwide initiative–Project BudBurst–are finding hints that certain plants are blooming unusually early, perhaps as a result of climate change.

The citizen scientists are recording the timing of flowers and foliage, amassing thousands of observations from across the nation to give researchers a detailed picture of our changing climate.

The project, which started as a pilot program in 2007, now focuses on a list of the “10 most wanted species”–flowers and trees such as the common lilac, red maple and Virginia bluebell.

Such widely distributed plants can provide important early signs of the impact of warming temperatures on the environment, according to the scientists who designed the project.

“Project BudBurst empowers people living anywhere in the country to make a contribution that will lead to better understanding of our environment,” said Project BudBurst director Sandra Henderson of the University Corporation for Atmospheric Research (UCAR) Office of Education and Outreach. “This is needed data to help scientists who are studying the impacts of climate change.”

Project BudBurst is operated by UCAR and the Chicago Botanic Garden, and is a partner in the USA National Phenology Network.

Funding comes from the National Science Foundation (NSF), along with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, U.S. Geological Survey, U.S. Forest Service, National Ecological Observatory Network, NASA and the National Geographic Education Foundation.

“While these observations may reveal impacts of climate change in local areas, scientists need data from many more locations,” said Elizabeth Blood, program director in NSF’s Directorate for Biological Sciences, which funds Project BudBurst. “Scientists also need more years of data to understand changes over larger regional scales, as well as distinguish the effects of long-term trends in climate from natural year-to-year variations.”

In Chicago, volunteers who have observed 15 kinds of plants since 2007 have found that seven of them are flowering earlier now than at any time in more than 50 years of observations by botanists.

“We will need volunteers to make observations for a number of years before we can fill in an accurate picture about the impact of climate change on our landscape,” Henderson says.

Volunteers say they enjoy making the observations.

“Where there are curious people, it doesn’t take long to bring together a group to go scrutinizing particular plants and trees, discovering the earliest stages of cones or bud formation, for instance, then following the later development,” said Sue Prindle, who lives in a retirement community in Silver Spring, Md. “It has been rewarding and fun.”

Overall, participants across the country have made more than 10,000 observations since 2007, establishing a baseline for the timing of key plant events.

“These findings are important as scientists analyze the impacts of global warming on our natural world,” says Kayri Havens, a senior scientist with the Chicago Botanic Garden and co-manager of Project BudBurst.

Each participant in Project BudBurst selects one or more plants to observe.

The Project BudBurst Web site encourages volunteers to focus on the 10 most wanted species, but it also welcomes observations of other plants.

Volunteers begin checking their plants at least a week prior to the average date of budburst–the point when the buds have opened and leaves are visible.

After budburst, participants continue to observe the tree or flower for later events, such as seed dispersal and autumn leaf dropoff. Participants submit their records of these phenophases online.

Anyone can view the results as maps of the phenophases across the United States.

The science of phenology, or tracking cyclic behavior among plants and animals, has a distinguished history.

For centuries farmers, naturalists, geographers and others have kept careful records of the phenology patterns of plants and animals.

Farmers have long used their phenology knowledge to predict the best time for planting and harvesting crops, when to start expecting problems with insect pests, and other seasonal events.

The effects of climate change on numerous plant and animal species throughout the world have been observed and reported in the scientific literature.

Some plants respond to warmer temperatures by extending their growing seasons. Others shift their ranges toward the poles or to higher elevations.

At the same time, many insects breed and disperse based on regular cycles of sunlight rather than temperature.

This can cause a mismatch between the behavior of pollinating insects, such as bees, and flowers that bloom earlier than the insects expect. Such asynchronous behavior has already been noted across many parts of the world.

-NSF-

Green Computing And Data Centers

Posted on | April 20, 2010 | No Comments

It’s a daunting challenge erecting the largest net-zero-energy office building in the world.

It’s especially daunting when that building will be full of people computing, teleconferencing, and generating teraflops of information about renewable energy.

The National Renewable Energy Laboratory aims to generate as much energy as it uses in the new 222,000-square-foot U.S. Department of Energy Research Support Facility (RSF) on the NREL campus. When completed this summer, it will house more than 800 people and a data center that stores and manages mountains of information on computer servers.

A net zero-energy building produces as much energy as it consumes.

To get there, “every watt has to count,” Craig Robben, Information Technology project manager for the RSF says.

The RSF can’t get to net-zero without getting credit from some of the energy produced via the sun and wind at its Golden, Colo., campus.

But neither can it get there if the actual energy use in the new building gets above about 250 watts per person. “That’s four or five light bulbs per person – for everything – computers, servers, building systems, the exercise room, everything,” Robben told a roomful of employees at a recent informational gathering.

The engineers and scientists from NREL’s Building Technology Program set the energy criteria and the energy design strategies that are making it possible for the RSF to use no more carbon-based energy than is produced by renewables.

Even just a couple years ago, there would have been no hope for per-capita energy use being that low in a modern office building. The electrical needs of desktop computers, servers, scanners, printers, and more would have mushroomed above those numbers.

Still, Robben is confident the RSF will meet those goals, with a big boost from smarter use of information technology.

Smart Cooling, Virtualized Servers Key to Energy Savings
Plans to get RSF there employ an intelligent cooling system, natural lighting, virtualized servers and common-sense measures to conserve, switch off and think twice.

“We’re wasting a lot of energy going out the back of the desktops as heat,” he said. “Desktop computers are not supposed to be space heaters.”

So, employees will be encouraged to continue the switch to laptops, which only average about 35 watts – about a third the average wattage of desktops. And laptops are getting so powerful that they exceed the needs of most users. Newer mobile processors now include the ability to ‘ramp-up’ their processing speeds as more number crunching is required.

Only LCD monitors will be going into the RSF, and a good portion of those will use the more energy-efficient LED-backlight. LCD’s have always been more energy efficient than the cathode ray tube monitors, but manufacturers are stepping up with new technologies to be even more efficient. As time goes on, Robben expects other new display technologies, such as Organic LED (OLED) displays, to replace LCD’s.

All-in-One Printer/Copier/Scanner to be the Norm
There will be very few, if any, local or group printers in the RSF. Scanners, copiers and fax machines will grow all but extinct. New all-in-one devices that can fax, scan, print, e-mail and copy in one unit will save huge amounts of energy, Robben said. The new protocol will be just one or two of those units per wing, compared to the current situation, in which there are some 600 printers for 1,800 employees, plus hundreds of other devices to scan, fax and copy.

The new units can print up to 50 pages per minute, print in high-resolution color on both sides of up to tabloid-sized paper, and perform high-resolution color scans that can be e-mailed.

Phone calls will be made via the Voice Over Internet Protocol system, which uses less energy, even while affording more functionality. The phone system gives users the option of turning the computer into a virtual handset. “Your computer becomes your phone,” Robben said.

RSF employees will be encouraged to switch to motion-detector or similar “smart” power strips that will sense when someone isn’t in the office, and then switch off the devices that aren’t needed – say, the label printer or task lights.

“It’s scary how much power is wasted there,” he said.

Cooling Down the Teraflops
The greatest challenge is achieving net-zero energy in a building that has a large data center.

Typically, servers rest in racks, chomping up and spitting out information. Cool air blows through, trying to keep the processors from frying.

To create all that cool air, data centers typically employ chillers, basically big air conditioning units that sit outside on pads. The chillers are running all of the hours of the day, pumping chilled water into the building. The cool liquid passes over a big radiator and fan unit cooling the air that passes through the data center and to the servers.

The RSF will employ several strategies to dampen the energy needs of the data center including taking advantage of Colorado’s climate and some ingenious engineering to minimize the hours the chillers must run.

“The building has been designed from the beginning to take advantage of our environment,” Robben said.

Underneath the RSF is a labyrinth of concrete looking like a Rube Goldberg mousetrap, storing thermal energy. That labyrinth becomes a giant “battery,” storing cool air during the summer nights and warm air during the winter days.

Air will circulate through that concrete maze constantly. The cold high-altitude air captured at night will remain in the labyrinth during the warm hours of the following day. During the winter, the hot air from the data center will be dumped into the labyrinth to aid in heating the building.

Meanwhile, efficient evaporative chillers, running cold water over pads, will cool the servers when needed. And for the rare occasion when outside air is too hot and humid for evaporative chillers to work effectively – estimated to be fewer than 10 hours per year – a more traditional central chilled water plant will cool the data center. Right now the data center chillers operate 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

The Key: Running Many Virtual Servers on One Physical Server
In the RSF’s data center, the individual rack-mount server will go the way of dinosaurs.

Each of the rack-stacked servers plugs into its own power supply, and must be switched on even if during most hours it is just handling, say, 5 percent of its processing capacity. A humming, albeit underused, server still piles up the wattage.

Blade servers are game-changers, though. They’re smaller, more streamlined and still packed with great capacity. And they’ll be the work horses of the RSF.

Sixteen blade servers can fit in the space taken up by a few older servers. More important, all 16 are in a single blade chassis, sharing power supplies, cooling fans and circuit boards.

Along with blades, virtualization is the biggest energy saver at the server level. “Virtualization is taking multiple logical servers and running them on a single physical server,” Robben said. “We’re averaging 20 virtual servers per blade. We can run so many virtualized systems on one blade because most systems are only running at about 5 percent of their potential. With that kind of load we could potentially run 320 servers” off a single chassis fully loaded with blades.

Any virtualized server can be moved from one physical system to another without impacting services. That means that underutilized servers can be moved and their physical server can be put to sleep until it is needed again.

“Technology continues to provide us with the tools we need to make IT energy efficient,” Robben said. “The RSF will demonstrate how using these methods, standards and tools in an office environment can help a building reach net-zero.”

Learn more about green IT, Sustainable NREL and the Research Support Facility.

Haselden Construction and RNL are building the 222,000 square-foot Research Support Facility building, which is designed to be a model for sustainable, high-performance building design, and will provide DOE-owned work space for administrative staff who currently occupy leased space in the nearby Denver West Office Park. The RSF was designed by RNL. Stantec Consulting served as the project’s engineering consultant.

NREL is the U.S. Department of Energy’s primary national laboratory for renewable energy and energy efficiency research and development. NREL is operated for DOE by The Alliance for Sustainable Energy, LLC.

— Bill Scanlon

Boost Fuel Economy Standards

Posted on | April 7, 2010 | Comments Off

The U.S. Department of Transportation (DOT) and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) jointly established new federal rules on April 1 that set the first-ever national greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions standards for all new passenger cars and light trucks sold in the United States. The rules, which will significantly increase the fuel economy of the vehicles starting with the 2012 model year, could save the average buyer $3,000 over the life of a 2016 model year car. Overall, the measures will conserve about 1.8 billion barrels of oil, and reduce nearly a billion tons of GHG emissions over the lives of the vehicles covered.

The final rules, issued by DOT’s National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) and EPA, establish increasingly stringent fuel economy standards under NHTSA’s Corporate Average Fuel Economy program and GHG emission standards under the Clean Air Act for vehicles produced in model years 2012 through 2016. The collaboration of federal agencies also allows for clearer rules for all automakers, instead of three standards (DOT, EPA, and a state standard). Starting with 2012 model year vehicles, the rules require automakers to improve fleet-wide fuel economy and reduce fleet-wide GHG emissions by approximately 5% every year. NHTSA has established fuel economy standards that strengthen each year, reaching an estimated 34.1 miles per gallon (mpg) for the combined industry-wide fleet for model year 2016. However, because credits for air-conditioning improvements can be used to meet the EPA standards, the rules require manufacturers to achieve a combined average vehicle emission level of 250 grams of carbon dioxide per mile by the 2016 model year. If all the GHG reductions came from fuel economy improvements, this would be equivalent to 35.5 mpg.

The joint final regulation achieves the goal set by President Obama to develop a national program to establish federal standards that meet the needs of the states and the nation as a whole to conserve fuel and reduce GHG emissions. NHTSA and EPA expect automobile manufacturers to meet these standards by more widespread adoption of conventional efficiency technologies that are already in commercial use, such as improved aerodynamics, lighter materials, and more efficient engines, transmissions, and tires, as well as improvements in air conditioning systems. The agencies also expect some manufacturers to pursue more advanced fuel-saving technologies such as clean diesel engines, hybrid vehicles, plug-in hybrid electric vehicles, and electric vehicles.

Bluefin Tuna Ban Fails

Posted on | March 30, 2010 | Comments Off

The United Nations has failed to agree on listing bluefin tuna at the recent meeting of the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Flora and Fauna [CITES].

The decision occurred after Japan, Canada and many poor nations opposed the measure. Stocks of bluefin tuna have fallen by at least 85% since the industrial fishing era began. Bluefin quotas are set at a ludicrously high 13,500 tonnes by The International Commission for the Conservation of Atlantic Tunas (ICCAT), but realistically over 60,000 tonnes are killed every year. The scientific community believe bluefin tuna may be extinct in the Mediterranean Sea in less than 5 years. The quota is too high, it is not enforced, there is insufficient political willpower to act, the same old story.

Monaco [who tabled the CITES ban motion] argued that the organization responsible for managing the bluefin fishery – ICCAT – had not implemented measures strict enough to ensure the species’ survival.

Bluefin tuna had been put forward for proposed listing as an Endangered Species on CITES Appendix I – which would result in a complete ban on trade in the species among CITES parties. An expert panel of the UN Food and Agriculture Organization had examined the issue and felt an Appendix I categorization was necessary. In fact even ICCAT’s scientific advisors had recommended a trade ban as being justified.

Japan is once again leading the charge into the termination of the species. Japan worked with her allies and stopped the ban being invoked. Over 80% of bluefin tuna is sold in Japan, and companies holding large stockpiles of the valuable fish are keen to see the species become extinct – they will reap enormous profits and be able to control the market. There is simply too much money involved with greedy self interest groups, illegal fish traders, and self-interested political forces having once again won the day. The bluefin tuna have no chance.

Sea Shepherd Conservation Society (Sea Shepherd) will be arriving in the Mediterranean this summer and will stand against the illegal overfishing of bluefin tuna. Sea Shepherd will do everything possible within the boundaries of international law to protect the magnificent bluefin. By sea, air, and land, preparations are well underway for the Mediterranean bluefin tuna defense campaign, and Sea Shepherd’s flagship vessel Steve Irwin, having just returned from intervening against illegal whaling off the coast of Antarctica, is now on its way to enforce international conservation law in European waters.

Steve Roest
Chief Executive Officer
Sea Shepherd Conservation Society