The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) has released the 2009 State of the Climate report, which concludes the scientific evidence that our world is warming is unmistakable. The past decade was the warmest on record and that the Earth has been growing warmer over the last 50 years.

Human society has developed for thousands of years under one climatic state, and now a new set of climatic conditions are taking shape. These conditions are consistently warmer, and some areas are likely to see more extreme events like severe drought, torrential rain and violent storms.

Deke Arndt, co-editor of the report and chief of the Climate Monitoring Branch of NOAA’s National Climatic Data Center, is quoted in NOAA’s press release:

The temperature increase of one degree Fahrenheit over the past 50 years may seem small, but it has already altered our planet. “Glaciers and sea ice are melting, heavy rainfall is intensifying and heat waves are more common. And, as the new report tells us, there is now evidence that over 90 percent of warming over the past 50 years has gone into our ocean.

Regarding warming oceans, the report says warming has been observed as far as 6,000 feet below the surface, but most of the heat is accumulating in the oceans’ near-surface layers. The implications of a warming ocean are considerable. First, because water expands as it warms, ocean heating is responsible for much of the observed sea-level rise (melting of land-based ice is responsible for the rest). Further, the oceans will hold the heat they’ve accumulated because they warm and cool much more slowly than air – meaning the impacts of warming will continue to be felt long after greenhouse gas emissions peak and begin to decline, should humans ever manage to muster the wisdom and the will to make that happen.

Seems like I’ve been so busy in the garden and on the farm lately that I’ve found no time to report. Let’s catch up.

We transplanted the starts out of the greenhouse and into the garden in March and April – first lettuces, peas and tomatoes under cold frames; then onion, leek & garlic starts, cauliflower and cabbages. Due to the cold, soggy spring, the winter & summer squash and cucumbers didn’t go out until late May. Bean seeds then went directly into the ground, along with red, white, and yellow potatoes.

We’ve been eating fresh lettuces since May, and are now steadily replanting every couple of weeks, growing them under a shade cloth (which seems to help retard bolting). The asparagus we let go around the first of July, to gain strength for next year. We’ve been digging potatoes and picking raspberries since early July. Mid-July, we harvested the garlic – the braids are now hanging in the wine/root cellar. We also pulled the spring crop of peas in Mid-July, at the same time planting seeds in the greenhouse for a fall crop. Luckily, green beans are now starting to come on, as are summer squash. We should have our first tomatoes by early August. If the jalapeños and cilantro cooperate, we’ll soon be swimming in pico de gallo. And the pansies, violas, and nasturtiums we started in the greenhouse from seed are now blooming like crazy, along with the sunflowers. This year we serendipitously planted the sunflowers in rows along one side of the garden – and they’ve proved to be an effective deer fence!

Last weekend we harvested the “Stonehead” cabbage and started a big batch of Sauerkraut. After watching us struggle last year trying to shred cabbage in a food processor, Cousin Doris sent us a Krauthobel from Germany – kind of a big, wooden mandolin. Here it is in operation.

Add about three tablespoons of sea salt for every five pounds of cabbage, and then from the bus tub into the crock.

40 pounds of cabbage was enough to pretty much fill a #8 crock.

The “Megaton” cabbages should be ready to harvest in a week or so. Since our one and only ceramic crock is full, we’ll have to fall back on a 20-gallon food grade plastic container that we’ve been using to store flour. Hopefully this year we’ll have enough Sauerkraut to last well into the new year, rather than running out before the holiday season.

Turn your back this time of the year, and the grape vines want to take over the universe. I’ve been getting up at six o’clock in the morning now for the last few weeks, spending a couple of hours before heading to the office trying to get things back under control. At least the vines are now growing faster than the deer can eat them. I’m dreaming of mid-August, when I’ll again be able to sleep in a bit.

The big culinary hit this year has been a variation on the Alsatian/German Flammkuchen, a kind of “pizza” traditionally made with crème fraîche, Speck, and onions, seasoned with a little fresh nutmeg. I first tasted Flammkuchen at a little jazz club called the Musikantenbuckel, literally underground in an ancient stone building in the tiny village of Oberotterbach, Germany. We’ve ever since attempted to replicate that, substituting well trimmed, uncured pork belly for the unobtainable Speck – not really the same, but American bacon is way too smoky. We tried first boiling bacon to remove some of the smokiness, but have since settled on using uncured pork belly, well-trimmed to remove most of the fat. When vegetarian friends were visiting we made a version using fresh, locally gathered or grown mushrooms (golden oyster, white elm, and morels) and fresh leeks. It was so fabulous it has now become a permanent part of our repertoire.

The July 2010 edition of Oilwatch Monthly reports that both crude oil and liquid fuels production continue their slow decline from peak levels. The charts below taken from the report are posted at The Oil Drum.

Oil consumption in the twenty-seven countries of the European Union peaked in 2006 and has since been declining at a rate of 3% per year. Oil consumption in the transport sector in the EU began to decline in 2008, dropping 1.4% from 2007. Oil consumption in road transport fell, offsetting a continuing but slowing rise in air transport consumption.

Usings less oil than the U.S. does not mean the EU is less prosperous than the U.S. EU nations consume only 60% of the oil as the U.S., but  the gross domestic product of the combined 27 EU nations exceeds that of the U.S. by 15%.

The Federal Highway Administration reports travel on U.S. road and streets is up 0.1% for May 2010 as compared with May 2009. Cumulative travel for 2010 is down 0.1%. The cumulative estimate for the year is 1,206.2 billion vehicle miles of travel.

Calculated Risk has posted this graph showing the rolling 12-month total VMT going mostly sideways, still 2.0% below the peak and only 0.6% above the recent low.

VMT in Oregon was off 2.4% in May compared to May last year.

China has overtaken the United States as the world’s largest consumer of energy, according to data from Paris-based International Energy Agency. The IEA said China consumed the equivalent of 2.25 billion tons of oil last year, slightly above U.S. consumption of 2.17 billion tons. The measure includes all types of energy: oil, nuclear, coal, natural gas and renewable energy sources.

This chart is posted at The Daily Reckoning:

As this chart posted at The Daily Reckoning shows, China has a long way to go to catch up with U.S. per capita energy consumption:

40% of the world’s population – China and India – uses two barrels of oil per person per day. In the US, we use 25.

China dismissed the IEA’s analysis, saying the IEA data on China’s energy use is unreliable. China’s National Bureau of Statistics said in a report in February that China’s energy consumption last year stood at 3.1 billion tons of standard coal equivalent, or 2.132 billion tons of oil equivalent. Even by China’s reckoning, China is fast approaching U.S. energy consumption levels.

In June, China consumed approximately 9.4 million barrels each and every day. Of this total, they imported 5.44 million barrels. Between them, China and India together now consume about 28 million barrels-per-day, nearly 33% of the world total.

But while China’s oil consumption is rising and China is busy locking up future oil supplies around the world, U.S. oil consumption is declining – and improved efficiency has nothing to do with it. Oil consumption has likely peaked in the United States because our economy is trashed and likely to remain so. In 2007, the last year before the crash, American oil consumption often exceeded 21 million barrels per day. Those days are over. U.S. consumption is now bouncing around 19 mbd, a decline of ~10%.

The mobile slaughterhouse could play a critical role in the burgeoning local food movement. This photo of a “slaughtermobile” is from an article in the Washington Post. The article reports the USDA is paying more attention to small and mid-size farms, encouraging organic and sustainable agriculture, and investing in projects to bring locally grown meat and produce to consumers.

A mobile slaughterhouse, with a team composed of a butcher and a federal meat inspector, travels from farm to farm.

USDA’s efforts to help small farmers are focused within its “Know Your Farmer, Know Your Food” program, which seeks to help make the link between local production and local consumption.

USDA has published a Mobile Slaughter Unit Compliance Guide to help those who want to establish a mobile slaughter unit under Federal inspection and operate in accordance with Food Safety and Inspection Service (FSIS) regulations.

Rural life is extremely energy intense, especially in terms of oil. Exurban living – people living “consumer lives with prettier views” – depends on very long supply lines. Alex Stefan at Worldchanging explains why the exurban lifestyle is not only not “green”, it is at risk in an environment where energy prices can go nowhere but up.

[W]e know that big, dense cities are greener; that the energy used in shipping food is a small portion of its overall impact, that transit is more energy efficient than driving (and indeed, that cars are the largest contributor to climate change), and that the benefits of urban living in compact, walkable, wired communities can extend far beyond living in smaller homes, served by more efficient infrastructure and not owning a car, to include a dramatic overall drop in one’s environmental impact. What’s more, we know why these things are so[.]

Unfortunately for people living in rural areas, we know a lot more about how to live a prosperous-yet-low-impact urban life than we do about how to live a rural life of equal prosperity with a small ecological footprint. Rural areas are poorer than urban areas, and offer fewer opportunities. Envisioning how people in rural areas  will be able to prosper and live decent lives  in an environment bereft of cheap and abundant energy is a challenge that has yet to be faced.

Luis de Souza at The Oil Drum: Europe writes that, rather than thinking of electricity generation load regimes as “base load” and “peak load”, it’s more accurate and useful to think in three categories: base load, intermediate load, and peak load. Electricity demand is not constant, but varies over the course of the day and over weeks and months. Variability of demand over time can be foreseen rather well: the daily, weekly, and seasonal fluctuations are very pronounced and predictable. Thus, the bulk of load-following can be planned long ahead, making it a scheduled form of operation. For the power plant operator, scheduled operation also means that the plant’s average load factor, even if well short of 100%, is rather stable and predictable.

The three-part scheme can be laid out as follows:

1. Base load: plants operated at constant power output, at maximum whenever possible
2. Intermediate load: plants operated with slow variation in power output on regular schedule to follow expected variation in demand, to cover the gap between expected demand and expected base load
3. Peak load: plants operated with fast variation, responding to minute peaks in demand above or below the pre-planned part of supply

. . . and is illustrated in this graph:

If the majority of the lifetime costs of a power plant are upfront investment costs, then the unit costs of electricity produced will be the lower the more the plant is operated and the operator will want to operate it at maximum whenever possible (the very definition of base load).

In the lifetime costs of both wind power and photovoltaics, fixed, up-front investment costs dominate, so these renewable sources operate as part of base load. But unlike conventional base load, wind and solar are intermittent sources: power output depends on weather, time of day, and season. Distributing these sources over a grid spread out over a larger geographical area can reduce weather-related intermittency, but can’t make it go away.

De Souza’s piece examines ways of de-carbonizing base load and intermediate load, including hydro and pumped hydro, biomass, demand management, natural balancing, solar thermal with storage, nuclear, stimulated geothermal, and distributed storage (including flywheels, batteries, capacitors, fuel cells, etc). His conclusion? None are completely satisfactory -and probably most will be needed.

June 2010 was the hottest June since widespread weather recording began, according to the National Climatic Data Center.

June 2010 was the fourth consecutive month with reported warmest averaged global land and ocean temperature on record (March, April, and May 2010 were also the warmest on record). June 2010 was the 304^th consecutive month with a global temperature above the 20^th century average.

The combined global average land and ocean surface temperature for the January–June period was the warmest such period on record, 0.68°C (1.22°F) above the 20^th century average.

Jeff Masters at Wonder Blog reports nine countries have smashed all-time temperature records so far in 2010:

]S]ix nations in Asia and Africa set new all-time hottest temperature marks in June. Two nations, Myanmar and Pakistan, set all-time hottest temperature marks in May, including Asia’s hottest temperature ever, the astonishing 53.5°C (128.3°F) mark set on May 26 in Pakistan. Last week’s record in Russia makes nine countries this year that have recorded their hottest temperature in history, making 2010 the year with the most national extreme heat records.

This graph shows how global temperatures have been rising over the past 100 years:

The National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC) reports the rate of ice loss in the Arctic slowed in the first half of July, primarily because of a change in atmospheric circulation as the dipole anomaly, an atmospheric pattern that dominated the Arctic in June, broke down.

The report explains:

Through much of May and June, high pressure dominated the Beaufort Sea with low pressure over Siberia. Winds associated with this pattern, known as the dipole anomaly, helped speed up ice loss by pushing ice away from the coast and promoting melt.

However, the dipole anomaly pattern broke down in early July. In the first half of July, cyclones (low pressure systems) generated over northern Eurasia tracked eastward along the Siberian coast and then into the central Arctic Ocean, where they tend to stall. This cyclone pattern is quite common in summer. The low-pressure cells have brought cooler and cloudier conditions over the Arctic Ocean. They have also promoted a cyclonic (anticlockwise) sea ice motion, which acts to spread the existing ice over a larger area. All of these factors likely contributed to the slower rate of ice loss over the past few weeks.

In the last few days, high pressure has started to build again in the Beaufort Sea, but whether this will continue remains to be seen.

Still, Arctic sea ice extent at this time is the second lowest ever recorded, as seen in this chart from the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency website, IJIS.