“Apple CEO Tim Cook today participated in the Climate Week NYC environment-focused conference to speak on behalf of Apple and the company’s efforts on preserving the planet,” Zac Hall reports for 9to5Mac.
“During his interview,” Hall reports, “Cook stated that Apple’s new headquarters will be what he thinks is the greenest building on the planet: ‘We’re building a new headquarters that will, I think, be the greenest building on the planet. It’ll be a center for innovation, and it’s something clearly our employees want and we want.'”
Hall reports, “Apple’s Campus 2, the subject of his statement on Apple’s environmental effort, is currently under construction as seen by recent aerial shots of the location and expected to be complete around the end of 2016.”
Read more in the full article here.
[Thanks to MacDailyNews Readers “Fred Mertz,” “Dan K.” and “Arline M.” for the heads up.]
Related articles:
Apple pushes environmental efforts ahead of Earth Day – April 21, 2014
Greenpeace: Apple leading the way in creating a greener, more sustainable internet – April 2, 2014
Apple plans Nevada solar farm to generate clean power for data center – July 2, 2013
Apple now gets 75 percent of its total power needs from renewable energy – March 21, 2013
Apple’s NC and Oregon data centers to use 100 percent renewable energy – May 17, 2012
Bloom Energy confirms they will supply fuel cells for Apple’s North Carolina data center – April 30, 2012
New aerial images of Apple’s planned NC fuel cell, solar farms published – April 7, 2012
Apple’s massive fuel cell energy project to be largest in the U.S. – April 4, 2012
Apple plans USA’s largest private fuel cell energy project in North Carolina – April 1, 2012
How Apple took the lead on the environment – February 22, 2012
Apple patent application reveals next-gen fuel cell powered Macs and iOS devices – December 22, 2011
Apple’s Mothership campus solar roof will be among biggest in U.S. – December 7, 2011
Apple working with US company, Leaf Solar Power, on North Carolina solar farm – November 8, 2011
Apple patent app details highly-advanced hydrogen fuel cells to power portable devices – October 20, 2011
Apple building huge solar farm around its billion-dollar North Carolina data center – October 26, 2011
Environmentalist NAZIS!
The damned planet has NOT been warming for the past 18 years and these freaks never want to give it up.
You see that freak show yesterday in NYC and you see what’s really about… Communists On Parade!
The “Global Warming”…. I, mean… “Climate Change” is about CONTROL.
Oh NO!! Clean Air!! Clean Water!! Solar Energy & Wind Power!! It’s EVIL!!!!!
Moron.
YOU and your pathetic fanatic tree-huger buddies are the morons and ignorant. No one is against protecting the planet and have a healthy environment for us and our children. What is so wrong is the way this HOAX based on flawed and manipulated science that has been pushed by socialist politicians and celebrities with an agenda.
If you are smart enough you’ll see what is really behind all this.
What are you doing here? Jump the fence and go tell someone!
I’m communist, not socialist!!!!
There is nothing wrong with what Apple is doing to make its new HQ building (and other facilities) more “green.” Apple is being responsible. And it probably saves Apple money in the long run.
What is wrong with “climate change” is the focus on “global.” The environmental emphasis needs to be regional and local, not global. And it needs to be about pollution in general, not specifically about “climate.”
Global “climate change” happens twice a year; it’s called winter and summer… Focus on reducing pollution in specific parts of the world, and by specific nations. The “world” can take care of itself.
“Global “climate change” happens twice a year; it’s called winter and summer… ”
Lots of shrill and poorly thought out debate by non-experts. I personally defer to the scientific consensus one side, and the official statements of Exxon and other large oil companies on the other.
They are actually pretty close, so I don’t understand where all the fear and conspiracy theory nonsense is required.
The mass extinction rate is now 1000x over the baseline that existed for tens of millions of years before we developed civilization. The oceans biomass is decreasing with large reductions in the larger forms of life we are most dependent on. The small forms are being stressed with pollutants from rivers and micro plastic particles. The glaciers are melting. The sea is rising.
All of these things (except the plastics) are similar to past sudden changes due to unusual mass events, so hopefully the worst we do is set life back a few million years. But mitigating our damage is sensible if we put value on the condition of the earth while we and our children are alive.
And we should be “mitigating our damage” to the environment, by focusing regionally and locally on the specific sources of pollution, not some global crusade about climate.
> The oceans biomass is decreasing with large reductions in the larger forms of life we are most dependent on. The small forms are being stressed with pollutants from rivers and micro plastic particles.
Exactly. And that has nothing to do with “greenhouse gases.” It’s about POLLUTION. And there are known and specific sources for that pollution. It’s not ambiguous data, often “doctored” to show whatever the “researcher” wants to prove (and ignored when it does not). Pollution is the urgent problem, not climate change. The fixes for pollution are regional and local (and very specific), not global (and ambiguous).
Some paint a picture of climate as a marble balanced on the top of a DOME, with any nudge able to push it off its delicate balance point, into climate oblivion. In the “real” world, turn that dome up-side-down, so it’s a BOWL with the marble at the bottom. Human activity may nudge the marble off its ideal balance point, but the overall system is stable (the world “nudges back”). If this was not true, the world would already be like Venus or Mars, because there have been many natural events (both sudden and longer-term) that make ALL of human activity pale into insignificance. And the world has returned to its “balance point” again and again.
Pollution is the real problem. Focus on reducing pollution, not climate change.
What is the basis for a statement like:
“The mass extinction rate is now 1000x over the baseline that existed for tens of millions of years before we developed civilization.”
How can we possibly have a good handle on anything that happened so far before recorded history? Every such statement is based on theory and conjecture that cannot be proven.
It doesn’t matter how many people believe something. Belief does not make theories true. The theory may, in fact be true (or not) but it cannot be proven.
So what’s the problem? You think making greener and cleaner buildings is a bad thing? Cleaner sources of energy are a bad thing?
I don’t understand the vitriol.
WSJ: Climate Science Is Not Settled
The idea that “Climate science is settled” runs through today’s popular and policy discussions. Unfortunately, that claim is misguided. It has not only distorted our public and policy debates on issues related to energy, greenhouse-gas emissions and the environment. But it also has inhibited the scientific and policy discussions that we need to have about our climate future.
My training as a computational physicist—together with a 40-year career of scientific research, advising and management in academia, government and the private sector—has afforded me an extended, up-close perspective on climate science. Detailed technical discussions during the past year with leading climate scientists have given me an even better sense of what we know, and don’t know, about climate. I have come to appreciate the daunting scientific challenge of answering the questions that policy makers and the public are asking.
The crucial scientific question for policy isn’t whether the climate is changing. That is a settled matter: The climate has always changed and always will. Geological and historical records show the occurrence of major climate shifts, sometimes over only a few decades. We know, for instance, that during the 20th century the Earth’s global average surface temperature rose 1.4 degrees Fahrenheit.
Nor is the crucial question whether humans are influencing the climate. That is no hoax: There is little doubt in the scientific community that continually growing amounts of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, due largely to carbon-dioxide emissions from the conventional use of fossil fuels, are influencing the climate. There is also little doubt that the carbon dioxide will persist in the atmosphere for several centuries. The impact today of human activity appears to be comparable to the intrinsic, natural variability of the climate system itself.
Rather, the crucial, unsettled scientific question for policy is, “How will the climate change over the next century under both natural and human influences?” Answers to that question at the global and regional levels, as well as to equally complex questions of how ecosystems and human activities will be affected, should inform our choices about energy and infrastructure.
But—here’s the catch—those questions are the hardest ones to answer. They challenge, in a fundamental way, what science can tell us about future climates.
Even though human influences could have serious consequences for the climate, they are physically small in relation to the climate system as a whole. For example, human additions to carbon dioxide in the atmosphere by the middle of the 21st century are expected to directly shift the atmosphere’s natural greenhouse effect by only 1% to 2%. Since the climate system is highly variable on its own, that smallness sets a very high bar for confidently projecting the consequences of human influences.
A second challenge to “knowing” future climate is today’s poor understanding of the oceans. The oceans, which change over decades and centuries, hold most of the climate’s heat and strongly influence the atmosphere. Unfortunately, precise, comprehensive observations of the oceans are available only for the past few decades; the reliable record is still far too short to adequately understand how the oceans will change and how that will affect climate.
A third fundamental challenge arises from feedbacks that can dramatically amplify or mute the climate’s response to human and natural influences. One important feedback, which is thought to approximately double the direct heating effect of carbon dioxide, involves water vapor, clouds and temperature.
But feedbacks are uncertain. They depend on the details of processes such as evaporation and the flow of radiation through clouds. They cannot be determined confidently from the basic laws of physics and chemistry, so they must be verified by precise, detailed observations that are, in many cases, not yet available.
Beyond these observational challenges are those posed by the complex computer models used to project future climate. These massive programs attempt to describe the dynamics and interactions of the various components of the Earth system—the atmosphere, the oceans, the land, the ice and the biosphere of living things. While some parts of the models rely on well-tested physical laws, other parts involve technically informed estimation. Computer modeling of complex systems is as much an art as a science.
For instance, global climate models describe the Earth on a grid that is currently limited by computer capabilities to a resolution of no finer than 60 miles. (The distance from New York City to Washington, D.C., is thus covered by only four grid cells.) But processes such as cloud formation, turbulence and rain all happen on much smaller scales. These critical processes then appear in the model only through adjustable assumptions that specify, for example, how the average cloud cover depends on a grid box’s average temperature and humidity. In a given model, dozens of such assumptions must be adjusted (“tuned,” in the jargon of modelers) to reproduce both current observations and imperfectly known historical records.
We often hear that there is a “scientific consensus” about climate change. But as far as the computer models go, there isn’t a useful consensus at the level of detail relevant to assessing human influences. Since 1990, the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, or IPCC, has periodically surveyed the state of climate science. Each successive report from that endeavor, with contributions from thousands of scientists around the world, has come to be seen as the definitive assessment of climate science at the time of its issue.
For the latest IPCC report (September 2013), its Working Group I, which focuses on physical science, uses an ensemble of some 55 different models. Although most of these models are tuned to reproduce the gross features of the Earth’s climate, the marked differences in their details and projections reflect all of the limitations that I have described. For example:
• The models differ in their descriptions of the past century’s global average surface temperature by more than three times the entire warming recorded during that time. Such mismatches are also present in many other basic climate factors, including rainfall, which is fundamental to the atmosphere’s energy balance. As a result, the models give widely varying descriptions of the climate’s inner workings. Since they disagree so markedly, no more than one of them can be right.
• Although the Earth’s average surface temperature rose sharply by 0.9 degree Fahrenheit during the last quarter of the 20th century, it has increased much more slowly for the past 16 years, even as the human contribution to atmospheric carbon dioxide has risen by some 25%. This surprising fact demonstrates directly that natural influences and variability are powerful enough to counteract the present warming influence exerted by human activity.
Yet the models famously fail to capture this slowing in the temperature rise. Several dozen different explanations for this failure have been offered, with ocean variability most likely playing a major role. But the whole episode continues to highlight the limits of our modeling.
• The models roughly describe the shrinking extent of Arctic sea ice observed over the past two decades, but they fail to describe the comparable growth of Antarctic sea ice, which is now at a record high.
• The models predict that the lower atmosphere in the tropics will absorb much of the heat of the warming atmosphere. But that “hot spot” has not been confidently observed, casting doubt on our understanding of the crucial feedback of water vapor on temperature.
• Even though the human influence on climate was much smaller in the past, the models do not account for the fact that the rate of global sea-level rise 70 years ago was as large as what we observe today—about one foot per century.
• A crucial measure of our knowledge of feedbacks is climate sensitivity—that is, the warming induced by a hypothetical doubling of carbon-dioxide concentration. Today’s best estimate of the sensitivity (between 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit and 8.1 degrees Fahrenheit) is no different, and no more certain, than it was 30 years ago. And this is despite an heroic research effort costing billions of dollars.
These and many other open questions are in fact described in the IPCC research reports, although a detailed and knowledgeable reading is sometimes required to discern them. They are not “minor” issues to be “cleaned up” by further research. Rather, they are deficiencies that erode confidence in the computer projections. Work to resolve these shortcomings in climate models should be among the top priorities for climate research.
Yet a public official reading only the IPCC’s “Summary for Policy Makers” would gain little sense of the extent or implications of these deficiencies. These are fundamental challenges to our understanding of human impacts on the climate, and they should not be dismissed with the mantra that “climate science is settled.”
While the past two decades have seen progress in climate science, the field is not yet mature enough to usefully answer the difficult and important questions being asked of it. This decidedly unsettled state highlights what should be obvious: Understanding climate, at the level of detail relevant to human influences, is a very, very difficult problem.
We can and should take steps to make climate projections more useful over time. An international commitment to a sustained global climate observation system would generate an ever-lengthening record of more precise observations. And increasingly powerful computers can allow a better understanding of the uncertainties in our models, finer model grids and more sophisticated descriptions of the processes that occur within them. The science is urgent, since we could be caught flat-footed if our understanding does not improve more rapidly than the climate itself changes.
A transparent rigor would also be a welcome development, especially given the momentous political and policy decisions at stake. That could be supported by regular, independent, “red team” reviews to stress-test and challenge the projections by focusing on their deficiencies and uncertainties; that would certainly be the best practice of the scientific method. But because the natural climate changes over decades, it will take many years to get the data needed to confidently isolate and quantify the effects of human influences.
Policy makers and the public may wish for the comfort of certainty in their climate science. But I fear that rigidly promulgating the idea that climate science is “settled” (or is a “hoax”) demeans and chills the scientific enterprise, retarding its progress in these important matters. Uncertainty is a prime mover and motivator of science and must be faced head-on. It should not be confined to hushed sidebar conversations at academic conferences.
Society’s choices in the years ahead will necessarily be based on uncertain knowledge of future climates. That uncertainty need not be an excuse for inaction. There is well-justified prudence in accelerating the development of low-emissions technologies and in cost-effective energy-efficiency measures.
But climate strategies beyond such “no regrets” efforts carry costs, risks and questions of effectiveness, so nonscientific factors inevitably enter the decision. These include our tolerance for risk and the priorities that we assign to economic development, poverty reduction, environmental quality, and intergenerational and geographical equity.
Individuals and countries can legitimately disagree about these matters, so the discussion should not be about “believing” or “denying” the science. Despite the statements of numerous scientific societies, the scientific community cannot claim any special expertise in addressing issues related to humanity’s deepest goals and values. The political and diplomatic spheres are best suited to debating and resolving such questions, and misrepresenting the current state of climate science does nothing to advance that effort.
Any serious discussion of the changing climate must begin by acknowledging not only the scientific certainties but also the uncertainties, especially in projecting the future. Recognizing those limits, rather than ignoring them, will lead to a more sober and ultimately more productive discussion of climate change and climate policies. To do otherwise is a great disservice to climate science itself.
— Dr. Steve E. Koonin
Dr. Koonin was undersecretary for science in the Energy Department during President Barack Obama’s first term and is currently director of the Center for Urban Science and Progress at New York University. His previous positions include professor of theoretical physics and provost at Caltech, as well as chief scientist of BP, where his work focused on renewable and low-carbon energy technologies.
WSJ: Climate Science Is Not Settled
Excerpts from Dr. Koonin’s viewpoint, which I think is pretty balanced:
Quote: “Nor is the crucial question whether humans are influencing the climate. That is no hoax: There is little doubt in the scientific community that continually growing amounts of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, due largely to carbon-dioxide emissions from the conventional use of fossil fuels, are influencing the climate. There is also little doubt that the carbon dioxide will persist in the atmosphere for several centuries. The impact today of human activity appears to be comparable to the intrinsic, natural variability of the climate system itself.”
Quote: “Society’s choices in the years ahead will necessarily be based on uncertain knowledge of future climates. That uncertainty need not be an excuse for inaction. There is well-justified prudence in accelerating the development of low-emissions technologies and in cost-effective energy-efficiency measures.”
This seems like a very balanced view to me. Climate change is real. Understanding its specific impacts is still a work in progress.
Any actions that take both those points into account will be more likely to do real good as apposed to waste resources.
“The models roughly describe the shrinking extent of Arctic sea ice observed over the past two decades, but they fail to describe the comparable growth of Antarctic sea ice, which is now at a record high.”
That’s correct, but it misses the main issue here. Antarctic sea ice is indeed increasing, and has been doing so for years, due to a complex series of local processes that the models Koonin refers to are not designed to describe. But sea ice forms from the sea, and when it melts, it makes no overall contribution to sea levels.
The important issue here is that the massive Antarctic land ice cap is losing mass, and at an increasing rate. Exactly what the effects of these losses will be on global seawater levels are not easy to predict, partly because they need to be added to Arctic ice sheet losses, and losses from the large Greenland ice cap. But overall, it appears that the planet’s low-lying coastal areas are in for a damp future.
Only is the fact challenged world of the opinion pages of the WSJ, CNBC, Faux Newz, Faux Bidness Newz, WorldNUT Daily, Rush Limbaugh, etc is it not settled.
The consensus over climate change is higher than just about any scientific discovery in modern times and it should be noted that most opposed are in the paid service of those who have a vested interest in the status quo. The Biostitutes of Tobacco Trial days have morphed into climate science Luddites.
There are legitimate discussions regarding the amount of human caused versus natural climate change ongoing. There are also divergent views regarding the rate at which things are changing and the scope of ultimate change. There is no serious debate concerning the fact that the world’s climate is changing and has been changing throughout the fossil fuel era.
“It isn’t easy being green.” – Kermit (the) Frog
The vast majority of studies show that investments made today to improve our water and air quality pay tremendous long-term dividends. It’s not about “control”, it’s about balancing the NEEDS of people alive today with the needs of future generations.
Look at it another way: if you demand from your kids not to leave a pile of dirty dishes in the sink, then you are an environmentalist. Presumably you choose to eat off a clean plate. So you DO care about your environment. Why would you not also demand that international corporations exercise the same basic respect and keep their operations as clean as we reasonably can be? It really is that simple, and it doesn’t pose any threat whatsoever to their profitability.
It is a simple 2X2 matrix of actions and consequences. Climate change affected by human action and we take action = Hit, planet saved, jobs saved, food, costs some upfront cash. We don’t take action = Miss, planet devastated, massive job loss, economic disaster, famine. Climate change not affected by human action and we do nothing, status quo, increasing pollution and toxicants, personal rather than global health affected. We take action = False Alarm, no affect on global climate change, vastly improved personal health, less dependent on carbon fuels, costs some up front cash.
Seems like the cost of a miss is far greater than the cost of a FA. The rational approach is to take immediate action.
No it isn’t. That is a huge oversimplification of a massively complex system.
We humans have a tendancy to greatly over estimate our influence. It must be our pride. Fly over any area or spend some time with Google earth and you will see that we leave a very small footprint on the face of the earth.
Funny thing: the earth is not in danger, we humans are.
A big problem in the “Climate Change Debate” appears to be that many if not most, on both sides, don’t know the difference between weather and climate.
Mark Twain said it best: “Climate is what we expect, weather is what we get.”
Here in the US, it was once almost covered with ice. Somehow the global warming kicked in and melted it. hmm
The carbon tax the cavemen paid was awful.
Debate this – brief explanation of the science and the urgency to change what is happening to our planet: