Seven years later, we’re still doing it (see “Into The Valley Of 400 PPM Rode The 7 Billion“). Kolbert has a great New Yorker piece this week, “Lines in The Sand,” on crossing the 400 parts per million threshold of CO2, as measured at Hawaii’s Mauna Loa observatory.

She quotes one marine geologist who said that hitting 400 ppm, “feels like the inevitable march toward disaster.” Of course, it isn’t inevitable, which was the point of Kolbert’s quote above — it is a choice.

That said, most people do feel powerless to change direction, since the choice to avert disaster isn’t directly in our hands. It is in the hands of the most powerful opinion makers and political leaders, like President Obama.

Kolbert concludes her piece:

Were we to burn through all known fossil-fuel reserves, the results would be unimaginably bleak: major cities would be flooded out, a large portion of the world’s arable land would be transformed into deserts, and the oceans would be turned into liquid dead zones. If we take the future at all seriously, which is to say as a time period that someone is going to have to live in, then we need to leave a big percentage of the planet’s coal and oil and natural gas in the ground. These basic facts have been established for decades, and every President since George Bush senior has vowed to do something to avert catastrophe. The numbers from Mauna Loa show that they have failed.

In rejecting Keystone, President Obama would not solve the underlying problem, which, as pipeline proponents correctly point out, is consumption. Nor would he halt exploitation of the tar sands. But he would put a brake on the process. After all, if getting tar-sands oil to China were easy, the Canadians wouldn’t be applying so much pressure on the White House. Once Keystone is built, there will be no putting the tar back in the sands. The pipeline isn’t inevitable, and it shouldn’t be treated as such. It’s just another step on the march to disaster.

Hear! Hear!

The CBO is the group of analysts tasked with modeling and projecting the consequences of Congress’ proposed laws, so that lawmakers can have some idea of what the likely consequences of their actions will be. You may recall the CBO from the big role its scores played in the debate over health care reform a few years ago. They’re a highly respected, methodologically cautious, and strictly nonpartisan outfit that’s widely viewed as the go-to authority for refereeing policy disputes in Washington.

With China on the verge of unilaterally putting a cap on its own carbon emissions, and with wide support for a carbon tax amongst voters, politicians, industry, economists and think tanks, the fact that CBO is using its position to highlight the risks of not addressing climate change is worth paying attention to.

Now, much of their report’s content wasn’t new. It projected that a price of $20 per metric ton on carbon dioxide emissions would bring in $1.2 trillion in revenues between 2012 and 2021, and cut emissions by roughly 8 percent over the same period, which came from work CBO did in 2011 (page 205). And the debate over what to do with the revenues from a carbon tax, which much of the report is dedicated to, is also familiar.

But one thing that is noteworthy is CBO’s blunt assessment that allowing climate change to continue unchecked could be very costly to both the United States and global society:

Climate change resulting from an increase in average temperatures is a long-term problem with global causes and consequences, including effects on humans and ecosystems. Significantly limiting the extent of future warming would require a concerted effort by countries that are major emitters of greenhouse gases. Nonetheless, U.S. efforts to decrease emissions would produce incremental benefits, in the form of incremental reductions in the expected damage from climate change.

Researchers have attempted to estimate the monetary value of the future damage from climate change associated with an increase in CO2 emissions in a given year — and thus the value of the benefits from a commensurate reduction in emissions — a measure referred to as the social cost of carbon (SCC)… Those values are highest when researchers attach significant weight to long-term outcomes and when they incorporate a small probability that damage from climate change could increase sharply in the future — causing very large, or even catastrophic, losses. Delaying efforts to reduce emissions increases the risk of such losses. Given the inherent uncertainty of predicting the effects of climate change, and the possibility that it could trigger catastrophic effects, lawmakers might view a carbon tax as a reflection of society’s willingness to pay to reduce the risk of potentially very expensive damage in the future.

Even CBO’s 2009 round-up of climate change science, which focused heavily on the uncertainty built into such projections, pointed out that the worst case scenarios for climate change “even if unlikely, would justify more stringent policies than would result from simply balancing the costs of reducing emissions against the benefits of averting damages from the expected or most likely degree of warming.”

As for the question of how to structure a carbon tax, the Center for American Progress’ Richard Caperton put forward a proposal last December for a tax of $25 per ton on carbon dioxide emissions from power plants. That ought to put us on a course to reduce those emissions by 17 percent from 2005 levels by 2020, and 80 percent by 2050, though the tax would ultimately need to be expanded to the entire economy. Caperton estimated the revenue from this tax — more limited than the one envisioned by CBO — would be in the vicinity of $55 billion annually. That could be split between the roughly $20 billion annually needed to fund research and development of clean energy, deficit reduction, and support for low-income Americans.

That last aspect is especially important, because on its own a price on carbon has a regressive effect, imposing more costs on the poor and the working class than the well-off. Reductions in the payroll tax, or refundable income tax rebates, would do the most good, mainly because they target support to the very people who would most need help shouldering higher energy costs. But CBO’s new report also found that a price on carbon would reduce overall growth slightly by reducing incomes throughout the economy, and by working through income taxes those two options would counteract that drag.

However meritorious, those policies are something of a step into the economic unknown, and thus understandably worrying to the average voter. So if the economy is affecting the national mood, that’s a problem for policy efforts to fight climate change. And earlier this week, the Washington Post’s Brad Plumer dug up a new study that put some hard data to that phenomenon at the political level.

What Grant Jacobsen of the University of Oregon did was take a look at how unemployment in various states changed the votes of senators from those states. He used the League of Conservation Voters’ (LCV) scorecard as a measure of 296 senators’ friendliness to pro-environment votes. Then Jacobsen determined how their score changed as unemployment in their state went up and down between 1976 and 2008.

The result? For every one percent point unemployment went up, the average senator’s LCV score dropped 0.48 percentage points. Jacobsen statistical analysis also suggested this result was like due to a meaningful correlation between unemployment and the vote score, rather than random chance or noise.

To make sure he wasn’t just reading swings in the political leanings of the legislative body, Jacobsen also compared the American Democratic Association’s (ADA) scores — a widely accepted measure of liberalism — to his findings. With that control, the relationship between voting and unemployment actually strengthened, to 0.64 percentage point drop in the LCV score for every one percentage point increase in unemployment. Jacobsen also found the LCV decline was 0.83 percentage points when just looking at Republicans, and 0.29 when just looking Democrats, though the latter result wasn’t as statistically robust.

Now, changes of 0.64 and 0.48 may not sound like big swings on a score that goes from 0 to 100, but lawmaking is a game of inches.

Just to bring the point home, Jacobsen also looked at how votes from 1981 to 2008 would’ve changed if a given state had always experienced its minimum unemployment rate. (See table at right.) Accounting for whether a particular Senate vote was straight majority or involved a filibuster, he determined that environmentally favorable votes would’ve increased from 36 percent to 41 percent under improved economic conditions. That’s almost a 14 percent increase in the rate of favorable votes. Not exactly peanuts.

This fits in with other studies on the relationship between support for environmental policies and the economy. As Plumer noted, Matthew Kahn and Matthew Kotchen used Google searches and surveys in a 2010 finding that higher unemployment lowers voters’ concern with global warming. Jacobsen’s paper mentions two other studies showing that per capita income increases correlate with higher support for environmental legislation, and more upcoming work from Kahn and Kotchen.

Furthermore, the Center for American Progress’ Dan Weiss previously went through the history of environmental legislation, and found that most of the bills passed when unemployment was low. “The first Clean Air Act, Clean Water Act, Endangered Species Act, and Resource Conservation and Recovery Act (hazardous waste disposal) were all enacted when unemployment was 6 percent or lower,” Weiss determined. “Only six major environmental laws were enacted with annual unemployment over 7 percent, and none with unemployment greater than 7.7 percent.”

Unemployment is currently 7.5 percent, which is the lowest it’s been since it peaked at 10 percent after the 2008 crash. So if you’re wondering why the cap-and-trade bill died in 2010, and why climate policy has been stuck in neutral ever since, the drag unemployment puts on voters’ and politicians’ willingness to take a leap on climate policy is a big piece of the puzzle.

That said, Dave Roberts over at Grist has been beating the drum on other pieces for a while now. There’s the staggering rise in the use of the filibuster, which can delay Congressional action and constrict the realm of the possible for legislative strategy even when one party has enough Senators to regularly overcome the 60-vote threshold. Second, partisanship in Congress and lockstep voting by political party has been steadily rising since at least 1990, which was likely exacerbated by the recession itself. Gerrymandering and the way the 2-votes-per-state structure of the Senate over-represents the interests of low population states certainly didn’t help either. Third, there’s the unusual geography of climate politics. The economies of several blue states rely heavily on fossil fuels, meaning support and opposition to climate bills don’t fall neatly along partisan lines like, say, the politics of health care reform — even as our political system’s ability to pass anything relies ever more heavily on total control of Congress by one party.

So there are several moving parts in the sociopolitical mechanism that determines what legislation passes and what doesn’t. But one thing should be clear: if you want to be an effective champion of the fight against global warming, you can’t escaper the necessity of being an effective champion for the unemployed.

Gasoline prices averaged $3.66 per gallon nationwide on May 21, 2013, which is 2 cents per gallon lower than they were a year ago when the price per gallon was $3.69. But experts predict that prices will plateau or increase throughout the summer, providing little relief at the pump for American families during this vacation season. These high prices enable the five biggest oil companies—BP, Chevron, ConocoPhillips, ExxonMobil, and Shell — to reap huge profits even though they are producing less oil worldwide than this time last year.

Beginning with the Memorial Day weekend and throughout the summer, Americans will spend their hard-earned dollars traveling to visit family, friends, and the great outdoors. Meanwhile, Big Oil will be making huge profits off of these travel expenditures on fuel, while at the same time fighting for decreased public health and climate-change protections.

Here is a by-the-numbers look at what Big Oil will cost us this holiday weekend:

An expensive holiday weekend ahead for travelers

• 690 miles: Average distance Americans will travel this Memorial Day; 7 percent higher than the 2012 average.
• $105: Gasoline cost for an average trip this Memorial Day weekend.

Big Oil profits increase as Americans face high prices at the pump

• $30.2 billion: Earnings for the first three months of 2013—about $336 million per day—for the five biggest publicly traded oil companies: BP, Chevron, ConocoPhillips, ExxonMobil, and Shell.
• $1 trillion: Combined profits from 2001–2011 for the five biggest oil companies.
• $2.4 billion: Special federal tax breaks received by the big five oil companies in 2011.
• One minute: Big Oil makes more in one minute than what 95 percent of American households earn in an entire year.
• One-third: Proportion of the Big Oil profits used to repurchase their stock, which only serves to pad the pockets of senior executives and the largest shareholders.
• -2 percent: Reduction in worldwide oil production by the big five oil companies compared to one year ago.

Big Oil’s influence machine

• $71 million: Total direct federal campaign contributions from the oil and gas industry in the 2012 election cycle.
• 90 percent: Proportion of direct federal campaign contributions from the oil and gas industry that went to Republican candidates.
• $140 million: Total lobbying expenditures by the oil and gas industry in 2012.
• $50 billion: Total lobbying expenditures by the big five oil companies in 2012.

New Jersey’s tourism sector is essential for state’s economic growth

• $34.7 billion: New Jersey’s annual tourism revenue.
• 62 percent: Estimated percentage of tourism dollars that were spent at the Jersey Shore in 2008.
• 500,000: Number of Americans employed by New Jersey’s tourism industry.
• $1,420: Estimated additional annual tax that each New Jersey household would have to pay in the absence of state tourism dollars, in order to maintain current government revenues.

Climate-change fueled extreme weather impacts tourism

• 94 percent: Proportion of New Jersey beaches and dunes that were damaged by Superstorm Sandy.
• 27 million: Number of cubic yards of sand that the Army Corps of Engineers will replace along the New Jersey and New York coastlines to restore storm-damaged beaches. Thomas Herrington, professor of ocean engineering at Stevens Institute of Technology, said the amount of sand lost to Superstorm Sandy is “unprecedented” and equal to what is typically lost over the course of a decade.
• 4: Number of states with significant wildfires in their national and state forests as of May 20, 2013. (The states: California, Florida, Minnesota, and Montana.)
• 3,800: Number of acres currently burning through the Los Padres National Forest in California. As of May 20, 2013, the fire was only 25 percent contained.
• 1 million: Estimated annual visitors to the Los Padres National Forest between 2005 and 2009.

Big Oil behaving badly, again

• 210,000: Total number of gallons of tar-sands oil spilled by a pipeline leak in Mayflower, Arkansas, in March 2013. The failure of the nearly 70-year-old pipeline owned by ExxonMobil forced 83 people to evacuate their homes.
• 126,000: Number of gallons ExxonMobil had yet to recover as of early May. The same pipeline ruptured a second time on May 1, 2013 in Ripley County, Missouri, spilling 42 gallons of oil.
• $14 billion: Estimated minimum cleanup costs for BP’s Deepwater Horizon oil spill in 2010 that killed 11 oil-rig workers and gushed 210 million gallons of crude oil into the Gulf of Mexico.
• $75 million: Limit on liability that oil companies currently face for future offshore-oil blowouts regardless of actual damage.

Keystone XL pipeline won’t lower gasoline prices

• 0 (zero, nada, none): Guaranteed percentage of oil transported by Keystone XL to Gulf Coast refineries that will remain in the United States after refining into gasoline or diesel fuel.
• 0 (zero, nada, none): Impact of Keystone XL pipeline on U.S. gasoline prices. Christopher Knittel, professor of energy economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, testified on May 16, 2013, in the House that, “There will be no appreciable changes in the world oil price, certainly not enough to base policy decisions on it.”

Read the full analysis: Memorial Day Driving by the Numbers by Jackie Weidman and Daniel J. Weiss.

Reprinted with permission from the Center for American Progress website.

At the Sandy town hall organized by public television stations NJTV and WNET, John Boulé, the former commander of the New York District, Army Corps of Engineers, warned New Yorkers to stop ignoring climate change and start preparing for higher sea level rise and more frequent and more powerful storms:

First of all, we’ve got to realize it’s the new reality. Climate change is real. It’s more than sea level rise that’s going to happen over the course of the next 100 years. It’s greater storm intensities, it’s greater storm frequencies. We’ve got to stop ignoring it and start planning and building to reduce the risk to the public. That’s where we are.

Watch it:

Like Boulé, other panelists, including PSE&G president Ralph LaRossa, recognized the “new reality” of rising seas and extreme weather. Although these words are welcome, the most important element of facing the reality of climate change is understanding that it’s caused by human activities — something no-one at the forum did. In fact, Richard Ravitch, the real-estate scion and former Democratic lieutenant governor of New York, blamed “forces of nature” on sea level rise.

At no point during the two-hour forum did any panelist or reporter discuss the manmade causes of climate change or recommend opposing the threat to civilization posed by the fossil-fuel industry. The words “fossil fuels,” “carbon”, “greenhouse,” “pollution,” and “oil” were never mentioned. Also not mentioned was David Koch, the carbon pollution billionaire and richest man in New York, who was on the board of WNET from 2006 until the day of the forum. At the WNET board meeting on the morning of May 16, Koch’s resignation was accepted.

Members of the “Stop the Frack Attack” coalition held a forum yesterday because, as their website states:

Impacted communities [are] “experts” schooled in the curriculum of hard knocks doled out by the oil and gas industry.

In total, 16 people spoke at the forum representing eight different states. They included ranchers, mothers, librarians, nurses, and former industry employees. They came from various political backgrounds — in fact, one speaker held up the Constitution, the Bible, and his badge from the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) this year to relate how he has pled with Republicans to help communities pushed to the wayside by oil and gas companies.

All of the speakers described the impacts of oil and natural gas drilling on their health and property. For example, Kristi Mogen, whose community in Wyoming was evacuated after a well blowout in April 2012, spoke of her two daughters and husband who suffered nosebleeds and other health effects afterwards. And Rod Brueske of Longmont, Colorado explained how his “American dream was shattered by multinational companies” after a natural gas well across the street from his farm released chemicals into the air.

This is an important moment for oil and natural gas policy in Washington, D.C.  The Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee this week is holding the final two of its three recent forums on natural gas policy issues. Of the 36 witnesses invited to share their opinions about natural gas in the U.S., none are citizens from affected communities.

And, last week, the Department of Energy announced the approval of a second facility to export natural gas to other counties, while the Department of the Interior released rules governing hydraulic fracturing on public lands that lack basic public right-to-know measures.

A new report released from the Center for American Progress shows that the five largest oil companies earned more than $30 billion in profits in just the first quarter of 2013. Put a different way, in only one minute these companies make more than “what 95 percent of American households earn in an entire year.”

And yet, citizens living near drilling rigs have to deal directly with the costs of drilling. As Jon Fenton, a rancher in Wyoming who admitted he hadn’t been on an airplane until six years ago when he began working on behalf of his community stated at the forum yesterday, “It’s us who have to bear that burden…but now I know that there are things worth fighting for.”

The biggest piece of President Obama’s second-term agenda is his widely expected plan for the Environmental Protection Agency to issue new carbon regulations for power plants, a move that could bring the United States in line with the greenhouse-gas-reduction goals it agreed to in Copenhagen and open the way for an international treaty to control climate change. If the administration unveils such a plan, conservatives will undoubtedly challenge its legality. The legal challenge won’t take place for two years, but the two sides are preparing for war already. The field of battle will be the Federal Appeals Court in Washington, D.C.

The D.C. Circuit, as the appeals court covering legal issues arising within the nation’s capital, has assumed a large and growing influence in the ideological wars over the scope of government, and over the last decade its appointments have provoked bitter conflict. … Since President Obama took office, four vacancies have opened on the D.C. Circuit Court, and Obama has not managed to seat a single justice to fill any of the slots. Republicans have displayed a willingness to filibuster even mainstream nominees, like Caitlin Halligan, who recently withdrew, while Obama expended little effort to resist.

Harry Reid is warning that, unless Republicans stop routinely filibustering Obama’s nominees for cabinet and judicial positions — that is, unless they adopt the high threshold that Senate Democrats accepted for blocking Bush’s nominees — he will change the Senate rules to ban such filibusters, just as Republicans had threatened under Bush. … The Republican response is more audacious. They propose not merely to continue blocking Obama’s nominees but to simply eliminate all three vacancies on the D.C. Circuit, which will hear the inevitable legal challenge to power plant regulations.

More on the divestment campaign: students are pressuring their schools to stop investing in fossil fuel companies. [AP]

The Solar Impulse completed the second leg of its cross-country journey, setting a distance record for a solar powered airplane. [AP]

Vice President Biden told graduating Coast Guard officers that they faced the “opportunity” and “challenges” of an ice-free Arctic. [The Hill]

The Congressional Budget Office released a report on the effects of a carbon tax, noting it could raise “significant” revenue while heading off “catastrophic” climate change. [The Hill]

In a new survey, 70 percent of Americans say global warming should be a priority for lawmakers, and 87 percent say we should be developing clean energy. [TreeHugger]

Toyota is increasing its production of lithium-ion batteries sixfold in an effort to upgrade its line of Prius hybrid cars. [TreeHugger]

A new organic solar cell printer can produce a binder-sized sheet of solar panel every two seconds. [Gizmodo]

An entrepreneur is crowd funding a new solar-powered water pump for crop irrigation in developing countries. [Ecopreneurist]

Electric utilities are trying to get the tariff system for rooftop solar altered, in an effort to protect their dwindling revenues. [Renew Economy]

Total greenhouse gas emissions from global agriculture his 4.69 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide in 2010, a 13 percent increase over 1990, according to a new study. [Farmers Guardian]

These legislators support the oil industry’s push for the pipeline, even though it would create far fewer jobs than its supporters claim, would do nothing to make the country more energy independent, and would facilitate a dramatic increase in the production of high carbon polluting tar sands oil.

The 241 members who voted for the bill have taken a collective $39,150,812 in career contributions from the oil and gas industry, compared to $5,094,217 for those who voted no. Even more starkly, in the last election cycle, that split widens to $11,529,335 versus $742,125.

Only 19 Democrats voted for the bill, less than a third of the number (69) who supported a similar bill in April 2012. Even some supporters of the pipeline couldn’t vote for tonight’s bill, such as Rep. Nick Rahall (D-WV):

“Last Congress, I voted for every piece of pro-Keystone pipeline legislation that was brought before this body…. Something’s happened along the way between then and now. And that something is called a hijacking of this bill by the right wing.”

This is the eighth time Republicans pushed a bill promoting Keystone, and the fifth time it voted to speed up the approval process. A White House statement made clear that President Obama would veto the bill because it “conflicts with long-standing Executive branch procedures.”

While some conservatives may claim the pipeline would create tens of thousands of jobs, the most recent State Department draft environmental impact statement found that the pipeline would directly create only “3,900″ temporary construction jobs. After construction is complete, the operation of the pipeline would only support 35 permanent and 15 temporary jobs, with “negligible socioeconomic impacts.” Moreover, only 10 percent of the total workforce would be hired locally. For perspective, the U.S. had 3.4 million green energy jobs in 2011 and it was the fastest-growing industry in the country.

The State Department’s report also made clear that at least some of the Keystone oil will be refined and exported in response to “lower domestic gasoline demand and continued higher demand and prices in overseas markets.” This means the pipeline will add nothing to U.S. energy security, a key talking point used by proponents. An amendment offered by Rep. Rush Holt (D-NJ) would have required oil transported by the pipeline to be kept in the U.S. unless it is in the national interest to export it — however the amendment failed 162-255. The pipeline is simply a way for the oil industry to sell refined fuel at higher prices available in other countries, including China and Venezuela.

Proponents have made the case that Keystone will have no impact on carbon pollution and climate change due to the fact that Canada’s tar sands will be developed regardless of the pipeline and transported by rail. However, Canadian government’s top Keystone cheerleader admitted that rail would not be an effective alternative to the pipeline.

In fact, the addition of the pipeline would more than double the production of tar sands by 2025, leading to an increase in greenhouse gases by an equivalent of adding nearly 8 million cars on the road every year. The EPA submitted a public comment on the State Department’s Draft Environmental Impact Statement, finding that, among other things, State needs to make revisions on the true impact of the project’s carbon emissions and about how dirty tar sands oil truly is. Without the pipeline, tar sands production is expected to fall flat by 2020.

Congress has wasted taxpayers’ time and money, holding almost a dozen hearings on Keystone since 2011. The bottom line is that the decision belongs to the State Department and it is not Congress’ right to take that power.

Now I have a name for this growing scandal — No-Water-Gate. It is increasingly clear that the gravest climate threat to the most people in the coming decades will be Dust-Bowlification and the impact that has on food security (see Oxfam: Extreme Weather Has Helped Push Tens of Millions into “Hunger and Poverty” in “Grim Foretaste” of Warmed World).

As I wrote in my 2011 Nature article, “The next dust bowl,” which reviewed some of the vast literature on the growing threat of prolonged warming-driven drought, “Feeding some 9 billion people by mid-century in the face of a rapidly worsening climate may well be the greatest challenge the human race has ever faced.”

You’d think that a New York Times front page story on our current return to Dust Bowl conditions — and how farmers need to adapt — would discuss some of this vast literature. Or at least mention climate change. Once.

You’d be wrong. And so this NY Times story is one of the inspirations for naming the greatest scandal of our time No-Water-Gate:

The failure to discuss climate change renders the piece less than useless — it is scandalously misleading. The article focuses on how the drought has accelerated the depletion of the High Plains Aquifer by Kansas and Texas farmers:

Kansas agriculture will survive the slow draining of the aquifer — even now, less than a fifth of the state’s farmland is irrigated in any given year — but the economic impact nevertheless will be outsized. In the last federal agriculture census of Kansas, in 2007, an average acre of irrigated land produced nearly twice as many bushels of corn, two-thirds more soybeans and three-fifths more wheat than did dry land.

Farmers will take a hit as well. Raising crops without irrigation is far cheaper, but yields are far lower. Drought is a constant threat: the last two dry-land harvests were all but wiped out by poor rains.

In the end, most farmers will adapt to farming without water, said Bill Golden, an agriculture economist at Kansas State University.

No, no, a thousand times no: Farmers aren’t going to “adapt to farming without water”!

Farmers might adapt to farming without water from the aquifer for irrigation — but only if the climate is not changing for the worse!

An important, if under-reported, 2012 study from the The National Center for Atmospheric Research “strengthened the case” that, unless we reverse emissions trends soon, we risk having a situation by the end of the century where ”most of southern Europe and about half of the United States is gripped by extreme drought” a great deal of the time:

[Author Aiguo] Dai’s new work stresses that the drying effect of human-produced greenhouse gases should overwhelm natural variability by later this century.

“The U.S. may never again return to the relatively wet conditions experienced from 1977 to 1999,” he says.

How will farmers adapt to no aquifer water and dwindling precipitation and rising temperatures (see We’re Already Topping Dust Bowl Temperatures — Imagine What’ll Happen If We Fail To Stop 10°F Warming).

Worse, how will they adapt to no aquifer water and dwindling precipitation and rising temperatures – and the media and other opinion-makers ignoring the latter two irreversible (but not unstoppable) trends?

The No-Water-Gate scandal is that the nation and the world has chosen not to heed decades of warning by climate scientists that unrestricted emissions of greenhouse gases would cause ever-worsening droughts.

A 1990 Journal of Geophysical Research study, “Potential evapotranspiration and the likelihood of future drought” projected that severe to extreme drought in the United States, then occurring every 20 years or so, could become an every-other-year phenomenon by mid-century.

Aiguo Dai of the National Center for Atmospheric Research, in his 2010 study, “Drought under global warming: a review,” had a similar conclusion. Here is a rough representation of where his analysis projects the PDSI [Palmer Drought Severity Index] will be soon after mid-century, again, if we don’t dramatically reverse greenhouse gas emissions trends:

The PDSI in a moderate emissions scenario soon after mid-century. In the Great Plains during the Dust Bowl, the PDSI apparently spiked very briefly to -6, but otherwise rarely exceeded -3 for the decade (see here).

Dai found that:

By the end of the century, many populated areas, including parts of the United States and much of the Mediterranean and Africa, could face readings in the range of -4 to -10. Such decadal averages would be almost unprecedented.

In the 1930s, you could certainly make a case that people didn’t know just how destructive their land management practices were. But we have been warned again and again that we face ever-worsening warming and drought conditions. Here are a few more studies:

• In 2007, Science (subs. req’d) published research that “predicted a permanent drought by 2050 throughout the Southwest” — levels of aridity comparable to the 1930s Dust Bowl would stretch from Kansas to California. And they were also only looking at a 720 ppm case.
• In December 2008, the Bush Administration quietly released a US Geological Survey stunner: SW faces “permanent drying” by 2050, which found:

The serious hydrological changes and impacts known to have occurred in both historic and prehistoric times over North America reflect large-scale changes in the climate system that can develop in a matter of years and, in the case of the more severe past megadroughts, persist for decades. Such hydrological changes fit the definition of abrupt change because they occur faster than the time scales needed for human and natural systems to adapt, leading to substantial disruptions in those systems. In the Southwest, for example, the models project a permanent drying by the mid-21st century that reaches the level of aridity seen in historical droughts, and a quarter of the projections may reach this level of aridity much earlier.

• NOAA: Climate change “largely irreversible for 1000 years,” with permanent Dust Bowls in Southwest and around the globe.  This January 2009 PNAS paper finds

… the climate change that is taking place because of increases in carbon dioxide concentration is largely irreversible for 1,000 years after emissions stop….   Among illustrative irreversible impacts that should be expected if atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations increase from current levels near 385 parts per million by volume (ppmv) to a peak of 450-600 ppmv over the coming century are irreversible dry-season rainfall reductions in several regions comparable to those of the “dust bowl” era.

• Michael Wehner et al., “Projections of Future Drought in the Continental United States and Mexico” (2011). A good PDF of a  PowerPoint presentation ia here.

And these studies don’t generally even consider the impact of the increasingly early loss of the winter snowpack (see “U.S. Geological Survey: Warmer Springs Causing Loss Of Snow Cover Throughout The Rocky Mountains.”

What greater scandal could there be than ruining the breadbasket of the world — and large tracts of arable land around the planet — just as we are adding another 2 billion people to the planet? Other than not reporting on it, that is….

Related Post:

• Oxfam Warns Climate Change And Extreme Weather Will Cause Food Prices To Soar

The loan was offered in 2009 through the Department of Energy’s Advanced Technology Vehicle Manufacturing Loan Program, which began during the Bush Administration in 2007 and was funded in 2008. The program has resulted in $34.4 billion in loans and the creation of roughly 60,000 jobs.

This announcement, hinted by Tesla CEO Elon Musk on Monday via Twitter, follows the company’s first profitable quarter and Consumer Reports rating the Model S a 99 out of a possible 100. Tesla also outsold similarly-priced gas-powered cars created by Mercedes-Benz, BMW, and Audi.

Tesla’s history has not always been as bright as its future looks now. In 2010, Musk said his investments in Tesla had essentially dried out his personal fortune, stating in a court filing that he “ran out of cash.”

Musk also said that “Tesla will do well as long as we make good products…. To say a car company is the best way to get a return on your investment is absurd, though Tesla will do well for its shareholders.”

Apart from achieving profitability, the full repayment of Tesla’s loan was made possible by “a portion of the approximately $1 billion in funds raised in last week’s concurrent offerings of common stock and convertible senior notes.”

Musk, Tesla’s initial primary investor and CEO, thanked the Energy Department, Congress, and the American taxpayer, saying “I hope we did you proud.”

Credit: Associated Press

China is taking steps to tackle its huge carbon output. Today, the country announced the details of its first carbon trading program, which will begin in the city of Shenzhen next month. The southern city is one of seven cities and provinces, including Beijing, which will take part in the pilot program, set to be completely implemented by 2014.

And according to one local news source, China could implement an absolute, nation-wide cap on its carbon emissions by 2016. China’s 21st Century Business Herald reported this week that the country’s State Council still needs to approve the carbon cap proposal submitted by the National Development and Reform Commission, a government entity that controls much of the Chinese economy. The proposal, which the State Council is reportedly likely to support, would ensure China’s emissions would not increase past the country’s target cap, regardless of economic growth — though it’s still unclear what that cap would be. The paper reported that the NDRC also predicts China’s greenhouse gas emissions will peak in 2025, rather than 2030, as earlier predictions stated.

If the cap is adopted, it would be a major step for the world’s top CO2 emitter, which desperately needs to slow its carbon production. China is experiencing the world’s fastest growth in energy production and CO2 emissions, while production and emissions in the U.S. and Europe are flat-lining or decreasing. China uses 47 percent of the world’s coal, a number that’s only going up: in 2011, China’s coal consumption grew by 9 percent, accounting for 87 percent of the world’s 374 million ton increase in coal consumption that year.

The country’s emissions aren’t just a major contributor to climate change worldwide — they’re causing serious local problems as well. In Beijing, pollution has reached record levels, topping 775 in January — a number that breaks the Environmental Protection Agency’s air quality scale of 0 to 500. The air pollution levels are so high that Beijing schools are building air-purified domes over playgrounds so that children can play outside, and many expatriates are withdrawing their applications from Beijing jobs or choosing to leave the country altogether.

The possibility of a carbon cap in China has been hailed as “potentially transformative” in the fight against climate change, as other major emitters such as the U.S. have historically cited China’s inaction on climate change as reason to avoid implementing meaningful greenhouse gas regulations. Previously, China has shied away from cuts in emissions, saying its main priority was the growth of its economy. In November 2012, the state-owned Xinhua quoted Xie Zhenhua, China’s chief negotiator to the UN climate change talks, as saying it was “unfair and unreasonable to hold China to absolute cuts in emissions at the present stage, when its per capita GDP stands at just 5,000 U.S. dollars.”

But now, China’s advancements in carbon regulation mean the U.S.’s strategy of waiting for China to act on climate change before it does is becoming less and less credible. China has already pledged to cut its carbon intensity, or emissions per unit of GDP, by 17 percent between 2011 and 2015 and 40 to 45 percent by 2020, compared to 2005 levels. In February, the country announced it would be implementing a carbon tax, but it later clarified that it would wait until 2013 is over to introduce the program. And the country has invested substantially in renewable energy, spending $65 billion on clean energy projects in 2012, nearly twice as much as the U.S.’s $35.6 billion.

Dr. Ernest Moniz was sworn in as the new Energy Secretary this week. Last week, the previous Secretary, Dr. Steven Chu, gave an interview to Stanford where he is returning as a physics professor.

The Nobel laureate was asked “What’s the No. 1 problem on your list?” His answer:

Climate change. We’re heading into an era where if we don’t change what we’re doing, we’re going to be fundamentally in really deep trouble. We’re already in trouble. So we have to transition to better solutions.

We’re not too far away from producing a lot of renewable energy, and doing it cheaply. Solar power is going to become cheaper and cheaper – costs have plummeted three-fold in six years, partly because of the dropping price of modules and electronics. Wind energy is within 15 percent of the cost of new natural gas energy, and the DOE predicts that that cost will cross over within one or two decades, so we need to start to plan the transition system that can conduct more wind energy.

But right now, we’re not prepared. As technology continues to race forward – battery technology has advanced faster in the past five years than what I’ve seen in the [previous] 15 years – we need policy to guide and anticipate development. It takes decades to change things like infrastructure, and so people have to think about that today. Otherwise, progress slows down, and we emit more carbon and get into more trouble environmentally.

Back in 2009, Chu said “Wake up,” America, “we’re looking at a scenario where there’s no more agriculture in California.”

Chu did keep talking about climate change in the past 4 years, but neither the media nor the White House were paying much attention. And so we are “already in trouble” with much, much worse to come if we don’t act now.

Related Post:

• Chu Resigns, Writes Of Our ‘Moral Responsibility’ For Action Amid Growing Evidence We’re Making Weather More Extreme

As Chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee, I see a lot of fanfare applauding increased oil production in the U.S. and the increase is truly remarkable. We are producing nearly 2 million more barrels of oil a day than government (EIA) experts had predicted ten years ago. But here’s what is truly astounding: We are consuming over 5 million barrels less in oil a day than had been predicted in 2003. So, there is no question we are making dramatic strides in the oil sector, but we are doing twice as well on the conservation side of the ledger than we are in production.

Oil conservation lacks the sizzle that energy production enjoys. After all, you don’t see people striking it rich by taking a train to work, by driving an electric car, or converting their business’ fleet to run on natural gas. What’s worse, not only does it lack sizzle, some public figures say oil conservation isn’t even a serious approach to energy policy. Vice President Cheney famously said conservation is a “sign of personal virtue, but … not a sufficient basis for a sound, comprehensive energy policy.”

But as a nation, in order to continue to improve our energy security, insulate our economy from high oil prices, and address climate change, we will continue to accomplish a lot more by using less oil than by producing more oil. It’s less exciting than an oil geyser, but the opportunity is simply much bigger. Increasing oil production in the U.S. helps our energy security and our economy, but increasing domestic production is often described as the healer of all wounds. Unfortunately it is not.

If it were, oil prices would not be so stubbornly high. Oil is traded in a worldwide market, so our increased production has been drowned out by increased demand elsewhere. But thanks to increased fuel economy standards, investment in public transportation, and a burgeoning market in alternative fuel vehicles, Americans do not need nearly as much oil to achieve mobility as once predicted. And we have a lot more improvement to do. After all, we use twice as much oil per capita as the United Kingdom and Germany and a third more than Australia.

Despite our exceptional prowess in drilling for oil, we simply cannot drill our way out of our problems. To address climate change, drive down prices, and truly end the world’s dependence on energy from unstable parts of the world, we need to use a lot less oil. The good news is that we have gotten off to a great start.

When 97 percent of Greenland’s ice experienced at least some melting in July 2012, scientists wondered if it was a one-time phenomenon. Now a new study in Geophysical Research Letters indicates it is a sign of things to come and by 2025, there is a 50-50 chance of it happening annually.

Extent of surface melt over Greenland’s ice sheet on July 8, 2012 (left) and July 12, 2012. In just a few days, the melting had dramatically accelerated and an estimated 97 percent of the ice sheet surface had thawed. Credit: NASA.

It’s not clear what the effects of such melting will be: the majority of Greenland’s ice loss, which has accelerated significantly over the past decade, comes from glaciers shedding more ice into the sea, and moving faster toward the sea, not from melting snow and ice at higher elevations of the ice sheet.

Nevertheless, such widespread melting indicates an overall warming in the region that could threaten the ice more generally, adding significantly to the threat of sea level rise.

The 2025 projection is based on two factors, according to lead author Dan McGrath, a glaciologist at the University of Colorado, Boulder. The first is a series of temperature measurements going back to 1950 at the Summit research station, at the highest — and on average, the coldest — point on the Greenland ice sheet. The mercury has been rising more or less steadily there for that entire time, with the fastest increase, of about .22° F per year, coming since 1992. “That’s six times faster than the global average,” McGrath said in an interview.

The highest parts of the ice sheet still remain below the freezing mark virtually all the time, but when unusual weather conditions set in — an especially warm air mass, or as in the case of the 2012 melting, an influx of clouds just thin enough to let sunlight through but thick enough to block heat from escaping — the thermometer can sneak above 32°F. “Only an hour above freezing is enough to start the surface melting,” McGrath said.

Another factor that went into the analysis involved what’s known as the equilibrium line — the altitude where the snow is neither piling up year to year nor shrinking. Over the past 20 years or so, that transition zone has been gradually moving up the ice sheet by about 115 feet every year, on average— another indication that temperatures on the frozen island are warming.

It was this second effect that led McGrath and his colleagues to launch their study. “When our research camp was established, it was put as close as possible to the equilibrium line,” McGrath said.  “If they put it any lower, it would melt out every year, and if it was higher, it could get buried in snow.”

But when the team returned for the summer season in 2009, he said the surface had melted so much that “it was falling apart. It looked like someone had dropped a bomb on it.”

They relocated the camp, and things were fine in 2010, but the following summer it had melted out again. “That led us to look at things in more depth,” he said.

The findings broadly agree with earlier research by other groups. “This is clearly an interesting paper, although I think it’s dangerous to pinpoint such a specific date as 2025,” said Marco Tedesco, a glaciologist at City University of New York, who produced some of that research.

To Tedesco, there’s too little emphasis on how Greenland’s ice would respond to a variety of scenarios for emissions of greenhouse gases, the primary reason for the planet’s overall warming over the past half-century.

Tedesco also felt that the new paper didn’t look hard enough at some of the feedback mechanisms between the ice sheet and the atmosphere that could arise as melting ice gives rise to more clouds, for example.

Nevertheless, he agreed, the overall message is entirely consistent with what others have found: Greenland’s ice is under assault by rising temperatures, and whether or not 2025 will represent a milestone, the consequences over coming decades could be catastrophic.

– Michael D. Lemonick, reposted with permission from Climate Central

Related Posts

• Science Stunner: Greenland Ice Melt Up Nearly Five-Fold Since Mid-1990s
• JPL bombshell: Polar ice sheet mass loss is speeding up, on pace for 1 foot sea level rise by 2050
• Greenland Ice Sheet Melt Nearing Critical ‘Tipping Point’
• Greenland Ice Sheet “Could Undergo a Self-Amplifying Cycle of Melting and Warming … Difficult to Halt,” Scientists Find

An infographic from the International Displacement Monitoring Centre and Norwegian Refugee Council of populations displaced by climate change and extreme weather disasters. [The Guardian]

More than 32 million people fled their homes last year because of disasters such as floods, storms and earthquakes – 98% of displacement related to climate change. Asia and west and central Africa bore the brunt. Some 1.3 million people were displaced in rich countries, with the US particularly affected. Floods in India and Nigeria accounted for 41% of displacement, according to the International Displacement Monitoring Centre and Norwegian Refugee Council.

The House plans to vote today on a bill forcing the approval of the Keystone XL pipeline, while the Obama Administration issued a firm statement “strongly opposing” the bill. [Washington Post]

Senator Tom Coburn (R-OK) is refusing to approve new disaster aid for the tornadoes that just hit his state without offsetting cuts elsewhere. [HuffPo]

China has reportedly committed to a hard cap on its carbon emissions by 2016, which could spur the U.S. and other nations to a serious accord in 2015. [Independent, Renew Economy]

New Energy Secretary Ernest Moniz committed to energy efficiency legislation and improved standards, saying, “I have never seen a credible solution to the climate risk mitigation challenge, to reach the kinds of goals we need to reach, without the demand side playing a very, very important part in that.” [The Hill]

Moniz will also delay approval of 20 liquefied natural gas export facilities while he studies the effect exports will have on the domestic market. [Washington Post]

The Energy Information Agency expects an extension of renewable energy production tax credits to significantly expand clean energy capacity and generation. [Today in Energy]

Most Americans think the U.S. should do something about climate change and develop clean energy, according to a new Yale/GMU poll. [LA Times]

The Great Barrier Reef has already lost half its coral, and Australia’s contributions to coal consumption — along with other forms of pollution — are threatening to destroy what’s left. [Spiegel]

Tesla Motors CEO Elon Musk says he will likely pay back the loan it received from the Department of Energy not in 2022, but… today. [Bloomberg]

The Energy Department’s Better Buildings Challenge has voluntarily encouraged more than a billion dollars in efficiency investments to cut waste and save millions per year for dozens of companies and more than a hundred partners. [USA Today]

The airplane Solar Impulse is in the air again, looking to break another distance record from Arizona to Texas. [CleanTechnica]

One last blast of Alaska winter today, hopefully? This is what “Grad Blast” means in Alaska! We’ll move our graduation b-b-q indoors and watch the mini-blizzard from ’round the fireplace. (Global warming my gluteus maximus.)

When Palin was running for national office, she advocated capping carbon emissions and said man’s activities contribute to global warming. Over the last half decade, she has swung back to rejecting climate science and embracing carbon emissions:

Aug. 2008: Asked about global warming, said “I’m not one though who would attribute it to being man-made.”

Sep. 2008: Told Charlie Gibson: “I believe that man’s activities can certainly be contributing to the issue of global warming, climate change.”

Oct. 2008: Said during the vice presidential debate that she supported capping carbon emissions.

May 2009: Forced to cancel an appearance at White House Correspondents’ dinner because of a flooding disaster caused by an “unusually warm spring thaw in Alaska.”

Nov. 2009: Asked Rush Limbaugh, “Are we warming or are we cooling?”

Dec. 2009: Attacked climate scientists in a Washington Post op-ed, then said she would not debate Al Gore on climate change because “they don’t want to listen to the facts. They don’t want to listen to some reasonable voices in this.”

Feb. 2010: Asserted that climate science is “snake oil” and said “man-made global warming hysteria isn’t based on sound science.”

Apr. 2010: Dismissed “this snake oil science stuff that is based on this global warming, Gore-gate stuff

Jun. 2010: In the wake of the Deepwater Horizon spill, said “I chant, ‘drill, baby, drill,’ because it will help make the country energy independent.”

May 2011: At a motorcycle rally, exclaimed: “I love that smell of the emissions!”

Jan. 2012: In the middle of last winter, took to Facebook to ask, “What global warming?”.

Apr. 2012: Celebrated Earth Day by calling, yet again, to “drill, baby, drill.”

Palin is an entertainer now rather than a public servant and so her opinions alone do not merit much consideration. Yet her joking asides that cold weather means that climate change is not happening are representative of a larger skepticism and confusion about the link between climate and weather.

Essentially: climate is a trend, while weather is a data point. Lots of data points make up a trend. The trend thus far has been that of frankly shocking warming. In December, we saw the 333rd month in a row global temperatures exceeded the long-term average. Both the science and the evidence tell us that humans have a lot to do with this. Carbon emissions are rising — and recently hit the highest levels humans have ever seen.

But what about the fact that some parts of the U.S. have recently seen cold temperatures? In fact, it is entirely possible that the cold weather is partially driven by climate change.

The Arctic has recently been warming twice as fast as the rest of the Northern Hemisphere. Paired with melting sea ice, this can cause extreme weather “such as drought, flooding, cold spells, and heat waves.” Some studies suggest this causes a “blocking” weather pattern arises over somewhere like Greenland, which slows down the jet stream and alters weather patterns. This is what appears to be happening this spring.

The blocking pattern slowed down weather patterns and allowed them to tap into more cold air. This brings cold into the continental U.S., allowing the Arctic to warm dramatically.

Though some parts of the U.S. have been colder than, for instance, last year’s extremely warm spring, climate change makes itself apparent in unusual ways. In March, the bulk freighter “Federal Hunter” docked in Duluth, Minnesota. It was the earliest such arrival in the port’s history, as the St. Lawrence Seaway’s is usually frozen over that early in the season. This year, Duluth residents saw their first “saltie” before April 1.

At a ceremonial event to mark the rebuilding of the Jersey Shore boardwalk post-Hurricane Sandy, Christie responded to a question from WNYC/New Jersey Public Radio about how the state could have better prepared for the consequences of climate change:

Well, first of all, I don’t agree with the premise of your question because I don’t think there’s been any proof thus far that Sandy was caused by climate change. But I would absolutely expect that that’s exactly what WNYC would say, because you know liberal public radio always has an agenda. And so since I disagree with the premise of your question I don’t feel like I have to answer the rest of it.

Of course, this isn’t about whether Sandy was “caused” by climate change. It’s about whether climate change and sea level rise are making such storms more frequent and much more destructive (see links below) — and that is something we can plan for.

Christie is already one of the few Republican leaders that acknowledge human activity causes climate change. Even so, he still casts it as a second-tier issue. “Maybe in the subsequent months and years, after I get done with rebuilding the state and getting people back in their homes,” he told reporters in February, “I’ll have the opportunity to ponder the esoteric question of the causes of the storm.” He even acknowledged climate change is real in the same speech where he announced that he was pulling New Jersey out of a regional compact aimed at reducing greenhouse gas emissions.

Contrast Chrstie’s words with New York Governor Andrew Cuomo (D), who said, “We have a one-hundred year flood every two years now.” Still, both governors make the case for greater greater resiliency, even though Christie does not directly reference climate change. The different responses also characterize the gulf in NY and NJ preparations for climate change. According to a report from WNYC, New Jersey overlooked climate change warnings before Sandy, which resulted in it losing over one-quarter of its public transit fleet. Meanwhile, New York had consulted scientists on climate change-related incidents, and lost 19 of its 8,000 rail cars.

What Christie fails to grasp is the impact climate change is having on his constituents today, including coastal flooding, powerful storms, sea level rise, and drought. Extreme weather has also cost taxpayers $136 billion in the last three years, with Sandy’s toll alone at $60 billion.

Related Posts:

• How Arctic Ice Loss Amplified Superstorm Sandy — Oceanography Journal
• How Does Climate Change Make Superstorms Like Sandy More Destructive?
• Yes, Climate Change Contributed To Superstorm Sandy

“The news helicopter from kfor.com caught this image of the shocking near-total destruction of a huge area of Moore, Oklahoma, on May 20, 2013.” Via Masters.

Tom Karl, the director of the National Climatic Data Center, explained in a 2011 email:

What we can say with confidence is that heavy and extreme precipitation events often associated with thunderstorms and convection are increasing and have been linked to human-induced changes in atmospheric composition.

Insured losses due to thunderstorms and tornadoes in the U.S. in 2012 dollars. Data and image from Property Claims Service, Munich Re.

Tornadoes “come from certain thunderstorms, usually super-cell thunderstorms,” explained climatologist Dr. Kevin Trenberth in an email today, but you need “a wind shear environment that promotes rotation.” Global warming may decrease the wind shear and that may counterbalance the impact on tornado generation from the increase in thunderstorm intensity.

Trenberth, the former head of the Climate Analysis Section of the National Center for Atmospheric Research, notes:

The main climate change connection is via the basic instability of the low level air that creates the convection and thunderstorms in the first place. Warmer and moister conditions are the key for unstable air.

The climate change effect is probably only a 5 to 10% effect in terms of the instability and subsequent rainfall, but it translates into up to a 32% effect in terms of damage. (It is highly nonlinear). So there is a chain of events and climate change mainly affects the first link: the basic buoyancy of the air is increased.  Whether that translates into a super-cell storm and one with a tornado is largely chance weather.

After April 2011 saw records set for most tornadoes in a month and in 24 hours — “The Katrina of tornado outbreaks“ — I examined the climate/tornado link in great detail here, looking at the data, the literature, and expert analysis. That piece concluded:

1. When discussing extreme weather and climate, tornadoes should not be conflated with the other extreme weather events for which the connection is considerably more straightforward and better documented, including deluges, droughts, and heat waves.
2. Just because the tornado-warming link is more tenuous doesn’t mean that the subject of global warming should be avoided entirely when talking about tornadoes.

Early March 2012 saw what was likely “the most prolific five-day period of tornado activity on record for so early in the year,” as meteorologist Dr. Jeff Masters put it.

Then we had an unusually long “tornado drought” from May 2012 to April 2013, which has now come to a stunning end, punctuated by the devastating Moore, Oklahoma tornado yesterday:

A massive, mile-wide supercell tornado ripped through the suburbs of Oklahoma City, destroying homes, schools and other buildings. The tornado was on the ground for some 40 minutes, according to the National Weather Service (NWS), and police reported that an occupied elementary school was in the path of the cyclone. Early estimates had winds on the ground near 200 mph, which would have made the cyclone an F4 or higher. Witnesses said the damage was like something out of an atomic bomb strike, and there are at least 24 people dead, including many young children, with a toll that could eventually be far higher.

Masters says “the Moore tornado likely to be one of the five most damaging tornadoes in history,” which is particularly tragic because Moore had “previously experienced the 4th costliest tornado in world history, the notorious May 3, 1999 Bridgecreek-Moore EF-5 tornado.”

You can donate to the American Red Cross disaster relief here.

Below is an extended review of the scientific literature along with some analyses from this year and last year by leading experts.

BACKGROUND ON THE SCIENCE

For decades, scientists have predicted that if we kept pouring increasing amounts of heat-trapping greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, we would change the climate. They specifically predicted that that many key aspects of the weather would become more extreme — more extreme heat waves, more intense droughts, and stronger deluges.

As far back as 1995, analysis by NOAA’s National Climatic Data Center (led by Tom Karl) showed that over the course of the 20th century, the United States had suffered a statistically significant increase in a variety of extreme weather events, the very ones you would expect from global warming, such as more — and more intense –precipitation. That analysis concluded the chances were only “5 to 10 percent” this increase was due to factors other than global warming, such as “natural climate variability.” And since 1995, the climate has gotten measurably more extreme.

Multiple scientific studies find that indeed the weather has become more extreme, as expected, and that it is extremely likely that humans are a contributing cause (see “Two seminal Nature papers join growing body of evidence that human emissions fuel extreme weather, flooding that harm humans and the environment” and links therein).

Beyond that, as Dr. Kevin Trenberth, former head of the Climate Analysis Section of the National Center for Atmospheric Research, explained here in 2010: “There is a systematic influence on all of these weather events now-a-days because of the fact that there is this extra water vapor lurking around in the atmosphere than there used to be say 30 years ago. It’s about a 4% extra amount, it invigorates the storms, it provides plenty of moisture for these storms.” He told the NY Times, “It’s not the right question to ask if this storm or that storm is due to global warming, or is it natural variability. Nowadays, there’s always an element of both.”

Trenberth elaborated on this in a must-read 2012 article, “How To Relate Climate Extremes to Climate Change.”

And the latest science says that shockingly rapid loss of Arctic ice is also likely driving an increase in extreme weather.

Munich Re, one of the world’s leading reinsurers, issued a news release in 2010, “large number of weather extremes as strong indication of climate change,” which noted:

Munich Re’s natural catastrophe database, the most comprehensive of its kind in the world, shows a marked increase in the number of weather-related events. For instance, globally there has been a more than threefold increase in loss-related floods since 1980 and more than double the number of windstorm natural catastrophes, with particularly heavy losses as a result of Atlantic hurricanes.

The rise in natural catastrophe losses is primarily due to socio-economic factors. In many countries, populations are rising, and more and more people moving into exposed areas. At the same time, greater prosperity is leading to higher property values. Nevertheless, it would seem that the only plausible explanation for the rise in weather-related catastrophes is climate change. The view that weather extremes are more frequent and intense due to global warming coincides with the current state of scientific knowledge as set out in the Fourth IPCC Assessment Report.

Here is their data:

I have tended to focus on the extreme weather events for which the causal chain is clearest and which will do the most damage to the most people in the foreseeable future. Dust-Bowlification is probably at the top of that list (see “We’re Already Topping Dust Bowl Temperatures — Imagine What’ll Happen If We Fail To Stop 10°F Warming“).

But tornadoes are among the most visibly and viscerally destructive events — though I do find it interesting how much media coverage these tornadoes have gotten compared to, say, Tennessee’s 1000-year deluge aka Nashville’s ‘Katrina’. So it was inevitable that scientists would be asked the obvious question of whether recent remarkable outbreaks are connected to human-caused climate change — and they were indeed remarkable.

Many scientists have weighed in on the climate-tornado link. Two of the people who have done more research and publication on extreme weather and climate change than most are Trenberth and Karl, now director of NCDC. I emailed Karl for his thoughts and here is what he wrote me in 2011:

Best info we have on the relationship between a warmer world and severe convective storms that can produce tornadoes is in the 2008 Synthesis and Assessment Report of the US Global Change Research Program. Chapter three of that Weather and Climate Extremes Assessment indicates that several studies do show that environmental conditions favorable for convection are more likely with more greenhouse gases, but results are not conclusive.

We now have improved resolution models running at our Oak Ridge Supercomputer thanks to the Stimulus funding. We may be able to make more definitive statements (one way or the other) after these get analyzed over the next few years. Meanwhile, we know that La Nina years tend to have a greater chance of severe outbreaks. So as usual, there are natural factors that have to be considered, and any human made factors would be confounded within these naturally occurring events making our attribution much more difficult.

Joe, what we can say with confidence is that heavy and extreme precipitation events often associated with thunderstorms and convection are increasing and have been linked to human induced changes in atmospheric composition.

You can find that 2008 Report here. I wrote about it here (see Sorry, deniers & delayers, Even Bush Administration says human emissions are changing the climate).

Trenberth made clear to me in an extended 2010 interview that he was dismayed by the media coverage of extreme weather, especially extreme deluges, that made no mention whatsoever of global warming:

I find it systematically tends to get underplayed and it often gets underplayed by my fellow scientists. Because one of the opening statements, which I’m sure you’ve probably heard is “Well you can’t attribute a single event to climate change.” But there is a systematic influence on all of these weather events now-a-days because of the fact that there is this extra water vapor lurking around in the atmosphere than there used to be say 30 years ago. It’s about a 4% extra amount, it invigorates the storms, it provides plenty of moisture for these storms and it’s unfortunate that the public is not associating these with the fact that this is one manifestation of climate change. And the prospects are that these kinds of things will only get bigger and worse in the future.

I emailed Trenberth in 2011 to check his quote in ThinkProgress. And I again checked with him in 2012. He stands by the quote with the clarification he had added of the context:

It is irresponsible not to mention climate change in stories that presume to say something about why all these storms and tornadoes are happening.

The environment in which all of these storms and the tornadoes are occurring has changed from human influences (global warming). Tornadoes come from thunderstorms in a wind shear environment. This occurs east of the Rockies more than anywhere else in the world. The wind shear is from southerly (SE, S or SW) flow from the Gulf overlaid by westerlies aloft that have come over the Rockies. That wind shear can be converted to rotation. The basic driver of thunderstorms is the instability in the atmosphere: warm moist air at low levels with drier air aloft. With global warming the low level air is warm and moister and there is more energy available to fuel all of these storms and increase the buoyancy of the air so that thunderstorms are strong. There is no clear research on changes in shear related to global warming. On average the low level air is 1 deg F and 4 percent moister than in the 1970s.

Just because attribution is difficult doesn’t mean that the subject of global warming should be avoided entirely when talking about tornadoes. Equally important, when discussing extreme weather and climate, tornadoes should not be conflated with the other extreme weather events for which the connection is considerably more straightforward and better documented:

There are lots of posts from 2011 on this. Stu Ostro, Weather Channel Senior Meteorologist, wrote in his May 2011 post, “The Katrina of tornado outbreaks“:

The atmosphere was explosively unstable with summerlike heat and humidity, interacting with a classic wind shear setup as a strong jet stream and upper-level trough crashed overhead”….

The atmosphere is extraordinarily complex, and ultimately what’s happened the past month is probably a combination of influences, including La Nina, other natural variability, and anthropogenic global warming.

Here is how meteorologist and former hurricane hunter Dr. Jeff Masters put it May 31, 2011:

In summary, this year’s incredibly violent tornado season is not part of a trend. It is either a fluke, the start of a new trend, or an early warning symptom that the climate is growing unstable and is transitioning to a new, higher energy state with the potential to create unprecedented weather and climate events. All are reasonable explanations, but we don’t have a long enough history of good tornado data to judge which is most likely to be correct.

Here is how Masters put it in 2012:

Last year’s tornado season was incredibly severe, and we are off to one of the worst early-season starts to tornado season on record now in 2012. However, it is too soon to ring the alarm bells on climate change being responsible for this. The tornado data base going back to 1950 doesn’t show an increasing trend in strong tornadoes in recent decades. While climate change could potentially lead to an increase in tornadoes, by increasing instability, it could also decrease them, by decreasing wind shear. I’d need to see a lot more bad tornado years before blaming climate change for the severe tornado seasons of the past two years. One thing that climate change may be doing, though, is shifting the season earlier in the year. The 5-day total of tornadoes from February 28 – March 3 will probably break the record of 131 set in 1999 for the largest tornado outbreak so early in the year. Warmer winters, and an earlier arrival of spring due to a warming climate, will allow tornado season to start earlier–and end earlier. This year’s early start to tornado season is consistent with what we would expect from a warming climate. I have a more extensive article on this subject that has just been published by Weatherwise magazine….

Then we have the study The Effect of Climate Change on Tornado Frequency and Magnitude:

There is an obvious increase in tornado frequency between 1950-1999. This could be due to increased detection. Also this could be due to changing climatic conditions. Looking at the raw data we have seen that there are generally less tornadoes in El Nino years compared to La Nina Years. But, since we were unable to get climate data, we were unable to see if the change in the frequency was due to climate factors.

Our data has failed to show a strong correlation in increase in tornado frequency and magnitude during El Nino and La Nina events.

The jury is out.

A NYT blogger directed us to this chart:

There is no apparent trend in the strongest tornadoes (F5 is the most destructive). The NYT blogger quotes Harold Brooks of the National Severe Storms Laboratory:

The primary changes appear to occur ~1975, most likely as a result of the retrospective rating process that assigned ratings to tornadoes prior to the near-real-time ratings that began when the [National Weather Service] adopted the F-scale operationally in the mid-1970s, and ~2000, for reasons that aren’t completely clear, but are likely due to an increased emphasis on examining construction details and policies that changed the nature in how the ratings are created for the strongest tornadoes. Both have lead to a decrease in probability of a tornado being very strong, given that it’s strong. It’s possible that there’s a meteorological component, but the reporting practice changes are large enough that I don’t think we can pull a physical signal out, even if it’s fairly large.

So it may simply be that the data is simply is too confused by the reporting practices for analysis to draw any strong conclusions. That doesn’t mean the question shouldn’t be asked or that scientists shouldn’t give their best answer.

In general I do think it’s best to avoid statements like “global warming is to blame for” or “global warming caused” or “this is evidence of global warming,” especially in regards tornadoes.

Finally, while tornadoes will continue to grab the headlines wherever they flatten cities and take lives, it is virtually certain that other extreme events — and ultimately the permanently changed climate — will cause the greatest harm attributable to human emissions of greeenhouse gases.

The population hasn’t even acclimatized to the climate change we’ve had already — in part because the GOP and the fossil-fuel-funded disinformation campaign have obfuscated efforts to inform the public.

We’ve only warmed about a degree Fahrenheit in the past half-century. If we keep listening to the disinformers, we are on track to warm nearly 10 times that this century (see literature review here). In short, we ain’t seen nothing yet. Or, as one commenter put it:

“Mother nature is only warming up.”

And yes we need to improve housing for those in tornado alley. That’s a great thing for blogs that don’t focus on climate to write about. Just as obviously we need an aggressive strategy for reducing carbon pollution. that also supports real adaptation.

DeSmogBlog notes that the Bureau of Land Management’s recently-released rules governing fracking on federal lands ”will adopt the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) model bill written by ExxonMobil for fracking chemical fluid disclosure on U.S. public.” It uses a voluntary online chemical disclosure database that has “truck-sized” loopholes, most notably that it’s voluntary — editors.

By Frances Beinecke via NRDC

When I talk to people who live near fracking operations, they often ask me the same question: “What is this doing to my drinking water?” Homeowners have shown me jugs of water from their kitchen sinks that look like rusty mud. One man said he could light his tap water on fire after energy companies put a drill pad in his neighborhood. Others tell me they worry their water is causing health problems for their families.

People across the country share these concerns. From Pennsylvania to Texas to Colorado, residents see wastewater pits leak, smell chemicals in the air, or read the scientific research showing that fracking can contaminate water supplies and pose a host of other threats. No one should have to live with these dangers: we all want to keep our drinking water safe from dangerous chemicals and reckless industrial activity.

And yet the federal government just released draft rules for fracking that fail to protect people from harm. Instead the rules protect the oil and gas industry from having to follow strong public health and environmental standards.

There is a lot at stake here. The Bureau of Land Management’s draft rules would cover fracking on public lands, including millions of acres of wild landscapes and private property where the federal government owns mineral rights. An enormous amount of land is involved, but also water.  The weak rules in the draft need to do more to protect the water supplies for millions of Americans. Residents of Denver, Washington, DC, and Santa Barbara, for instance, live downstream of public lands where fracking could or already does occur.

Would you want your tap to run brown? Would you want to serve toxic water to your family?

Ordinary citizens have a hard time forcing energy companies to keep our water and air clean. We count on the government to do that job. Yet when it comes to fracking, states have proven ill equipped for the job. Only about half of the 30 states with fracking, for instance, require companies to report which chemicals they use in fracking fluids. And in most of the states with disclosure rules, companies can withhold information they deem confidential without any justification or oversight.

The federal government hasn’t been much better. The oil and gas industry has won exemptions from critical sections of our nation’s most basic environmental laws – the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act, the Safe Drinking Water Act.

Now the Bureau of Land Management has issued woefully inadequate rules for fracking on public lands. The current draft rules are even weaker than a previous draft leaked several months ago, and they read like an industry wish list.

They could exempt huge tracts of state and tribal lands from the safeguards. They offer only weak chemical disclosure requirements that would make it hard for homeowners or medical professionals to find out all the chemicals being used in fracking operations. And they ignore key areas of health and environmental concern like the huge wastewater pits have been known to leak toxic and radioactive materials.

Surely America can do a better job of holding industry accountable for its actions. Fracking is already moving full steam ahead on our public lands. Now is the time to enact strong standards, not issue giveaways to oil and gas companies.

The Obama Administration should be a leader in establishing safeguards that protect public health and the environment. And the industry—which is drilling in our backyards, near our schools, and in our natural treasures—should accept these stronger safeguards. Americans deserve to know their water is safe from fracking chemicals.

– Frances Beinecke, President of NRDC, reposted from NRDC Switchboard with permission

Yet, some people still think the PTC should be eliminated. Most interestingly, Exelon — the large Midwestern utility and power plant operator — has made ending the PTC its number one lobbying priority, claiming that the credit distorts markets. This would be scary. Fortunately, it’s not true.

The truth is that Exelon hopes to slow or halt expansion of wind power projects that can affect the bottom line of their nuclear power plants in the Midwest, and to achieve that objective they’re blaming wind and the PTC for market phenomena like negative pricing that are almost always caused by inflexible generation technology and transmission constraints.

This post will summarize Exelon’s position on the PTC, show where it falls short, and then point out that Exelon is more concerned about competition from wind power, in general, than the Production Tax Credit.

Why does Exelon say the PTC is distortionary?

Exelon’s argument hinges on two fundamental ideas. First, that the PTC causes negative prices; and second, that negative prices are bad for wholesale electricity markets.

Digging into this argument requires a little knowledge of how power markets work. In much of the country — including where Exelon’s nuclear plants are located — power is sold in competitive markets, at a “clearing price” set by an auction process. In general, the clearing price is set by the most expensive marginal resource needed to meet demand at a given time. This price is then given to all the generators providing electricity at that time. (For more on this, see Wind Power Helps to Lower Electricity Prices.)

Importantly, all power plants bid prices that reflect not just their fuel expenses and other operating costs, but also forgone revenues. For example, coal plant owners can sell the coal ash for industrial uses, and they take these lost sales into account when deciding how much they should charge for power from the plant. Wind power is exactly the same, only one of its lost benefits is a tax credit.

The Production Tax Credit offers eligible wind generators a tax credit worth $23 per megawatt hour for the electricity they produce. Since the fuel costs for wind power are zero and operational costs are low, wind turbines can theoretically offer to sell their power at a negative price (that is, they can make money even though they’re paying someone to take their power).

Where Exelon goes wrong is when they draw policy conclusions from these facts. Exelon believes that these negative prices are bad for wholesale electricity markets because they discourage investment in new generation. And, because all power plants operating get the same price, a negative price can force nuclear power plant owners to pay someone to take their power.

Where Exelon loses the plot

Exelon’s explanation of negative prices is generally correct, but it’s also incomplete. First, we need to look at how often wind is setting the power price.

Exelon’s nuclear power plants are located in the PJM Interconnection, which covers parts of 13 states and the District of Columbia. In the PJM territory, there are actually two electricity markets resources compete in, the “day-ahead” market and the “real-time” market. The vast majority of transactions occur in the day-ahead market, since forecasts for the following day’s electricity are generally accurate enough that grid operators can gauge what they need and when. Real-time markets are where transactions occur to account for the differentials that may arise in the course of the day, and they account for a much smaller percentage of total transactions.

Day-ahead markets are where the vast majority of baseload power — like coal and nuclear — compete. And rightly so; because they cannot ramp up and down as easily, they need a predictable schedule instead of relying on real-time market signals. Revenue from the day-ahead market is the bread-and-butter of these power plants.

So how often did wind set the clearing price in the day-ahead market, thereby usurping potential revenue from these baseload providers? Not once (see page 62). Wind never set the clearing price in the day-ahead market in 2012. So, even if wind power was bidding a negative price, and if negative prices were bad, it still wouldn’t matter to Exelon’s nuclear plants. The real-time market is a slightly different story, but still nothing to raise alarms. In this market, wind that could bid below $0 only accounted for 0.5 percent of all dispatchable offers in 2012 (see page 55). Coal and gas, on the other hand, accounted for 89.2 percent of all clearing prices. The idea that the PTC has contributed more to changing market dynamics than, say, cheap natural gas is unsupported by any of the available data.

And yet, negative prices do show up in the day-ahead market. So if not from wind, where do they come from?

One possible answer is that when you have generation that cannot ramp down located far away from users, negative prices occur.

This is particularly true in the region that Exelon points to most frequently, the Northern Illinois Hub. What you see there is lots of generation (Exelon’s nuclear plants and then a few wind farms) that are isolated from demand by limited transmission. Since nuclear plants cannot just “shut off” they have to run with or without demand. This is called being “non-dispatchable.” Making matters worse for Exelon, now those nuclear plants are joined on the “island” by wind plants that further cut into their profit margins. The problem isn’t that wind is setting negative prices; it is that cheap wind power is taking revenue from more expensive nuclear power plants.

The second part of Exelon’s argument is that negative prices are inherently bad. Is this right? No. Negative prices are actually sending the right economic signal about market conditions at that time. When there are excess, non-dispatchable resources in one place and high demand in another — it is time to build transmission to relieve that condition. Alternatively, you could have less generation on the island, which is essentially the tact that Exelon is taking.

The real story is that Exelon doesn’t like competition from wind

Exelon is obviously a sophisticated company, so they likely understand all of this. And, they’re likely not arguing against the PTC for the fun of it. In fact Exelon owns some wind plants themselves, and it is very probable that what they are really opposed to is cheap wind power owned by other companies located in regions where it hurts the bottom line of their power plants. Our conclusion is that Exelon is much more concerned with competitive wind power than the alleged market distortion from the PTC.

First of all, Exelon is not opposed to all Production Tax Credits — just those for wind. The Production Tax Credit for nuclear, for example, is totally fine by them (see if you can spot their opposition to the $18 per megawatt hour production tax credit for nuclear here, but don’t look for too long). They also aren’t opposed to the other kinds of credits that power plants cash in, such as coal plants selling ash. The only difference between these power plants and wind power is that wind has zero fuel costs, while these others do not.

Second, the arguments above clearly show that the clearing prices in day-ahead markets where nuclear power is making their money are not influenced by wind, and that in fact the combination of cheap natural gas and transmission constraints are probably to blame. And yet, Exelon is focused on the PTC instead of focusing on transmission or natural gas. The massive stake Exelon now holds in cheap natural gas generation through its acquisition of Constellation; combined with the money they make off transmission constraints driving prices up elsewhere, probably explain part of their choice. It is an easier target to take wind out of the competition than it is to help pay for the transmission to accommodate it.

To understand how misguided these attacks on the PTC are, it helps to go through a little thought experiment. Given the arguments above, imagine the PTC expires tomorrow. What would happen? Day-ahead prices would still occasionally be negative, since power plants would still be islanded away from users who need energy. Prices in the real-time market would still occasionally be zero, since wind can set the clearing price when demand is very low. Cancelling the PTC wouldn’t address any of the concerns Exelon put on the table — the only difference is that less wind would get built next year, and the year after that. Less wind being built means that the Exelon generators already in existence have less competition from cheap alternatives.

When you look at it this way, Exelon’s argument actually supports what CAP has long argued: The PTC is effective in getting more wind power built. The difference is that we think this is a good thing, while Exelon disagrees. Given the economic and environmental benefits of wind power, we’re confident that we’re on the right side of that argument.

Tomorrow, the House of Representatives should pass a bill aiming to force approval of the Keystone XL pipeline, but some House Democrats are trying to offer amendments to clarify the true nature of the project. [The Hill]

The House is expected to easily pass a Keystone XL pipeline approval bill this week with bipartisan support, but liberal Democrats that oppose the project will try to land some punches too.

Rep. Rush Holt (D-N.J.) wants a floor vote on an amendment requiring that oil transported through the Canada-to-Texas oil sands pipeline — and any refined products made from it — remain in the U.S. …

Holt’s export ban amendment is one of several submitted thus far to the House Rules Committee, which will meet late Tuesday afternoon to decide which amendments will receive votes on the floor the next day. …

And a separate amendment from Rep. Carol Shea-Porter (D-N.H.) requires that prior to the pipeline approval taking effect, TransCanada must “disclose its campaign contributions and other electioneering expenditures over the previous five years to the public,” a summary states.

A good brief summary of what can be said about tornadoes and climate change (hint: it’s complicated). [Grist]

Chris Christie says there is no “proof” that climate change helped cause Superstorm Sandy. [WNYC]

Pakistan, facing extreme heat and electric blackouts, is turning off air conditioning in public building and directing civil servants to not wear socks. [Guardian]

Governor Sean Parnell of Alaska told the Chamber of Commerce that Alaska would contribute $50 million to model how much oil is in the Alaska National Wildlife Refuge to better lobby the federal government to permit oil companies to “recover” oil from the refuge. [LA Times]

Ernest Moniz gets sworn in as Energy Secretary today. [The Hill]

The United States and European Union have decided to negotiate a settlement among a set of antidumping cases with China involving solar panel exports. [Bloomberg, New York Times]

Organizing for Action, the successor to the Obama campaign, has listed dozens of climate deniers in Congress and is asking supporters to “call them out.” [Organizing for Action]

The Post reports on the “impatient” Obama supporters who want action on climate change, do not see enough executive action, and are planning protests of OFA meetings. [Washington Post]

Yes, we’re definitely over 400 parts of carbon dioxide per million parts of air in the atmosphere now. [LA Times]

The U.S. Chamber of Commerce is criticizing green groups for suing the EPA for failing to meet a regulatory deadline or requirement. [The Hill]

The largest wind farm on tribal land will proceed in Oklahoma, with Cherokee Nation, Kaw Nation, Otoe-Missouria Tribe, Pawnee Nation and Ponca Nation expecting $16 million in revenue over 20 years. [Sustainable Business]

Electric plug-in car sales have passed 100,000, according to EV America, with the market approaching 48 percent growth. [EarthTechling]

Two years ago, the Washington Post’s Editorial Page Editor wrote that “The GOPs climate-change denial may be its most harmful delusion.” Apparently it is a delusion the Post is happy to spread. Below is a fact check of the seven worst parts of Smith’s piece:

Integrity of Climate Science

Smith opened with a general appeal for a clear discussion of the facts: “Climate change is an issue that needs to be discussed thoughtfully and objectively. Unfortunately, claims that distort the facts hinder the legitimate evaluation of policy options.”

However, with a look at his record, Rep. Smith did not have such a clear discussion in mind. After he became chair of the science committee, his first move was to schedule a hearing that aimed to take issue with the science of climate change. He has criticized “the idea of human-made global warming.” More dangerously, he has made headlines for authoring legislation that would politicize research conducted by the National Science Foundation. Of course, there is strong, 97%-grade consensus on human-caused climate change in the scientific literature, as a recent study confirmed.

Keystone Claims

With the House set to vote on Wednesday to force the approval of the Keystone tar sands pipeline, Rep. Smith argued that opposition to the Keystone tar sands pipeline hurts the economy and would not decrease carbon emissions. He said the “State Department has found that the pipeline will have minimal impact on the surrounding environment and no significant effect on the climate,” and would create “more than 40,000 U.S. jobs.”

This just isn’t true. The Environmental Protection Agency submitted a public comment on the State Department’s Draft Environmental Impact Statement, finding that, among other things, State needs to make revisions on the true impact of the project’s carbon emissions and about how dirty tar sands oil truly is. Additionally, tar sands oil extraction is not inevitable because transporting it by rail is not feasible — the pipeline is really their only option. Smith’s claims about 40,000 jobs are also quite inflated. The project would create just 35 permanent jobs, along with 51 coal plants’ worth of carbon dioxide each year.

U.S. Emissions

Smith went on to argue “that U.S. emissions contribute very little to global concentrations of greenhouse gas.”

In fact, annual U.S. carbon emissions rank just behind China’s, despite having only a quarter of China’s population. The U.S. is by far the world’s biggest contributor to global concentrations of CO2, the main greenhouse gas, since that depends on cumulative emissions.

Despite advances in energy efficiency and renewable energy, the United States remains a significant part of overall global carbon emissions. Domestic coal use is on the rise again in the U.S., and coal exports reached a record high last year, beating the record set in 1981. America is also the world’s number one fossil fuel subsidizer.

Recent Warming

Rep. Smith made the case that “global temperatures have held steady over the past 15 years, despite rising greenhouse gas emissions.”

This is simply not the case. The overall trend line shows continued warming. 2010 was the hottest year on record. Every year of the decades of the 2000′s was warmer than the average temperature in the ’90s.

Superstorm Sandy

The Chair of the House Science Committee called out “unscientific and often hyperbolic claims” about the impacts of a warming climate. He cited experts that ostensibly claimed that Superstorm Sandy had nothing to do with climate change.

However, experts in the field explain that climate change makes hurricanes and Nor’Easters like Superstorm Sandy more powerful and more destructive. The experts that Rep. Smith tried to cite mainly focused on research saying that climate change has not increased the frequency of hurricanes. Climate scientists pointed to the link between climate change and the increased strength and intensity of storms.

It is not just the increased ocean and atmospheric temperatures that can make storms more intense, however. A recent article in Oceanography Journal found that the melting and receding Arctic ice also amplifies storms like Sandy.

Fixing the Problem

Smith said that the EPA “proposed emissions standards that virtually prohibit new coal-fired power plants.” He goes on to say that regulating carbon emissions from power plants will “raise both electricity rates and gas prices — costing jobs and hurting the economy.”

The Environmental Protection Agency is required to regulate carbon because the Supreme Court ruled that carbon dioxide is a pollutant. EPA regulations actually help the economy and create jobs. Every $1 invested in the economy yields $10 in benefits.

The U.S. can do much more than it currently is to reduce carbon emissions, and doing so will actually be a boon to the economy. The EPA could help cut carbon emissions 17 percent by the end of the decade by regulating carbon dioxide under the Clean Air Act.

Slowing Down Progress

Smith concludes that we are “pursuing heavy-handed regulations” on climate change and urges everyone to “take a step back from the unfounded claims of impending catastrophe and think critically about the challenge before us.”

There have been thousands of experts thinking critically about the reality of climate change, and their overwhelming conclusion is that emissions need to be reined in. Not eventually, but right now.

A 2012 World Bank climate report concluded: “A 4°C [7°F] world can, and must, be avoided” to avert “devastating” impacts. The IMF chief warned in February: “Unless We Take Action On Climate Change, Future Generations Will Be Roasted, Toasted, Fried And Grilled”

Continuing to kick the can down the road could be dangerous in the extreme. Millions displaced. Drastically warmer weather. Tropical diseases. Extreme drought that leads to wildfire conditions.

Smith may benefit from protecting the biggest carbon emitters — he has accepted more than half a million dollars from the oil and gas industry — but the rest of the country, and the world, cannot afford to wait.

In the wake of Superstorm Sandy, New York City’s flagship public television station, WNET, has dropped the richest man in New York, carbon pollution billionaire David Koch, from its board of trustees. Days before the monthly board meeting on May 16, Koch’s name was removed from the WNET website. Koch had been a board member since 2006. Koch has been funding WNET since 1986.

The severance of Koch’s longstanding relationship with WNET — which not only serves the New York City area but also produces national programs such as Charlie Rose, Nature, and Great Performances — comes at a time of increasing tension between Koch’s anti-regulatory, climate-polluting industrial empire and the educational mission of public television.

The inherent conflict between Koch’s conspiratorial, anti-science ideology and the public interest with has come under attention in recent months. After Superstorm Sandy struck, WNET’s Charlie Rose and Bill Moyers ran shows on the tragic consequences and threat of greenhouse pollution for the New York region. More recently, reports of Koch Industries’ interest in the newspaper holdings of the Tribune Company have spurred nationwide protests.

Koch also was featured in the November 2012 PBS documentary Park Avenue, which contrasted the extreme wealth of Koch’s residence at 740 Park Avenue with the stark poverty less than a mile north in East Harlem. In the documentary, a former doorman noted that Koch, with a net worth of about $45 billion, gives only $50 holiday tips.

On May 16, the evening after Koch left the WNET board, the station ran a major live town hall on Superstorm Sandy. Broadcasting from New Jersey and New York City, the NY/NJ/Long Island affiliates under WNET management broadcast a two-hour show that talked repeatedly about the major threat posed by climate change in rising sea levels and more frequent storms of increased intensity — threats which Koch’s Cato Institute denies.

In anticipation of today’s piece on the Kochs in The New Yorker by Jane Mayer, Koch Industries issued a conspiratorial rant accusing her of running a “left-leaning” “smear” campaign, in coordination with “MSNBC, ThinkProgress, The New York Times, NPR, The Nation, Mother Jones, Huffington Post and more”:

Jane Mayer’s Agenda

As campaigns and attacks against Koch Industries and its shareholders go, the one led by Jane Mayer of The New Yorker has been consistent, if nothing else – consistent in its left-leaning bias, baseless accusations, and numerous inaccuracies.
Since lobbing her opening salvo against us in an August 2010 article that was riddled with biases and inaccuracies and based on research by a ThinkProgress blogger, Mayer has authored nearly a dozen screeds attacking Koch Industries, Charles Koch and David Koch. Her latest submission, soon to be published, will be another attempt to smear us while advancing her partisan agenda. We don’t precisely know the content of her story. However, based on her questions to us, we believe it will be an attempt to promote a fleeting PBS show that aired six months ago – one on which she collaborated and in which she appeared. The show attacked David Koch and Charles Koch, with Mayer making an appearance as an interviewee.
We also believe Mayer will work hard to make the case that should Koch purchase the Tribune newspapers, as is rumored, we would use those papers to advance a particular agenda. This assertion, of course, is made with no basis in fact or history to support such a claim.
Mayer’s tale about us will likely be promoted in all the usual places – MSNBC, ThinkProgress, The New York Times, NPR, The Nation, Mother Jones, Huffington Post and more.
Once we see it, we will fact check it and set the record straight here on KochFacts.

Koch is still on the board of trustees of WGBH, the prominent Boston-based PBS affiliate which produces major series such as Masterpiece, Antiques Roadshow, and the science show NOVA.

Note: Forecast the Facts members are participating in the campaign to discourage the Tribune Company from selling its papers to the Koch brothers.

Update: “Mr. Koch resigned from our Board of Trustees as of Thursday, May 16th to concentrate on his other obligations,” WNET communications director Kellie Castruita Specter informed Forecast the Facts in an email response.

(Credit: Robert F. Bukaty, AP)

Fishing is a profession often passed down from one generation to the next. Many lobstermen in Maine fish the same bottom their fathers and grandfathers fished, and the same holds true of fishermen father offshore as well. Yet increasingly, anecdotal evidence has suggested that the old faithful fishing spots are no longer quite so reliable.

In northern regions these shifts could lead to conflicts over fishing rights and access to traditional fishing grounds. In the tropics, the problem could be more dire. As our oceans warm, species may not be able to adapt at all, leaving tropical oceans with severely depleted fish stocks and some of the most vulnerable human populations with a distinct shortage of a vital protein source.

Much of this scarcity of native species can be attributed to overfishing, a practice now largely halted in U.S. waters thanks to strict new science-based management tactics implemented as a result of a 2006 reauthorization of the law that governs our fisheries. But increasingly, both scientists and fishermen have been eying climate change as a reason some fish are showing up in new places and the catch fishermen are accustomed to finding have been surprisingly slow to rebuild.

A new study published this week in the journal Nature puts some peer-reviewed punch behind what up until now was a common-sense theory. Most fish have a preference for a certain water temperature range, and because they are mobile creatures, as water warms due to climate change, fish populations are on the move toward the poles. The study found:

Except in the tropics, catch composition in most ecosystems 
slowly changed to include more warm-water species and fewer cool-water species. In the tropics, the catch followed a similar pattern from 1970 to 1980 and then stabilized, likely because there are no species with high enough temperature preferences to replace those that declined. Statistical models showed that the increase in warm-water species was significantly related to increasing ocean temperatures.

This latest research builds on the authors’ 2009 study that stated:

…climate change may lead to large-scale redistribution of global catch potential, with an average of 30–70% increase in high-latitude regions and a drop of up to 40% in the tropics.

This trend could have dire implications for both fishermen and fish.

As U.S. fishermen are increasingly operating under management systems that set the total amount of fish they can catch based on their historic landings, this kind of habitat shift can lead to complex management conundrums. If a fisherman from Massachusetts is suddenly catching more summer flounder (which prefer warmer water) and less winter flounder (which prefer colder water) but his catch allocation was set based on his history of catching winter flounder, his business will not last.

Meanwhile the New Jersey fisherman’s boat may not be equipped to catch the species that will replace summer flounder in his waters so he will either have to move with the fish into an area where he may not be permitted to fish, or invest in new gear and face the possibility of learning a new fishing method entirely. Neither is an attractive option.

In tropical regions, particularly in less-developed countries, the results could be much worse. Fish is the primary source of protein for more than three billion people on the planet, many of them in less-developed tropical countries. But in their case, the fish that migrate out of their waters won’t be replaced by anything. This is not a question of parsing out a different mix of fish. It will result in a complete loss of a major food source.

And if it’s bad for the people who depend on the fish for protein, it’s worse for the fish themselves. As Daniel Pauly, one of the new study’s authors put it in an interview with NPR on Wednesday, “imagine a reef fish that is driven by temperature into North Carolina or the Delaware coast. That reef fish will not find reefs. It’s like you having to move, but you cannot take your furniture with you, or your house.”

The challenge of rebuilding today’s depleted fish populations is already a herculean one for fishery managers to address. Unfortunately, it now appears they’re going to have add the complexity of tomorrow’s warming and acidifying oceans to the equation.

But a low sensitivity would mean that aggressive action to reduce CO2 emissions starting now would have a modestly higher chance of keeping total warming below 4°F and averting the worst impacts. That’s the point of New Scientist‘s article, “A second chance to save the climate” on a new sensitivity study in Nature Geoscience:

“If we are lucky and the climate sensitivity is at the low end, and we have a strong agreement in 2015, then I think we stand a chance to limit climate change to 2 °C,” says Corinne Le Quéré of the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research in Norwich, UK. “But there’s a lot of ifs.”

If this new study is accurate, then near-term surface warming might be less than expected. But as the lead author Oxford’s Dr. Alexander Otto told the BBC, “We would all like climate sensitivity to be lower but it isn’t.”

The researchers say the difference between the lower short-term estimate and the more consistent long-term picture can be explained by the fact that the heat from the last decade has been absorbed into and is being stored by the world’s oceans.

Recent studies make clear the ocean is warming quite fast, as (see “Global Warming Has Accelerated In Past 15 Years, New Study Of Oceans Confirms” and here). If, as many climatologists believe, some of that ocean heat is released to the surface in the next decade or two, that would reverse the recent slowdown in the rate of surface warming.

Also, many other recent studies find that the climate is more sensitive than we expected:

• Last Time CO2 Levels Hit 400 Parts Per Million The Arctic Was 14°F Warmer!
• Observations Support Predictions Of Extreme Warming And Worse Droughts This Century

Indeed, the new study does little to eliminate the confusion about sensitivity. The media continue to conflate and confuse climate sensitivity with how much warming will we subject our children and countless future generations to (see here and below).

Another related source of confusion is conflating “climate sensitivity” — which generally refers to the change in the global surface temperatures (absent major feedbacks) — with how sensitive the climate itself is to changes in temperature.

For instance, our climate models wildly underestimate what’s happening in the Arctic right now:

Arctic sea ice is melting much, much faster than even the best climate models had projected (actual observations in red). The reason is most likely unmodeled amplifying feedbacks. The image (from Climate Crocks via Arctic Sea Ice Blog) comes from a 2007 GRL research paper by Stroeve et al.

And considerable recent research suggests that our climate in turn is much more sensitive to Arctic ice loss than we ever thought:

• Arctic Warming Favors Extreme, Prolonged Weather Events ‘Such As Drought, Flooding, Cold Spells And Heat Waves’
• NOAA Bombshell: Warming-Driven Arctic Ice Loss Is Boosting Chance of Extreme U.S. Weather
• How Arctic Ice Loss Amplified Superstorm Sandy — Oceanography Journal

Finally, since the media keep misreporting the issue, here once again are the four factors that determine how much warming we are going to inflict on future generations:

1. The so-called “equilibrium climate sensitivity” – the sensitivity of the climate to fast feedbacks like sea ice and water vapor. The ECS, which is typically the focus of modeling studies like the new one discussed above, is how much warming you get if we suddenly adopt a super-aggressive effort to cut carbon pollution and only double CO2 emissions to 560 ppm — and there are no major “slow” feedbacks.  We know the fast feedbacks, like water vapor, are strong by themselves (see Study: Water-vapor feedback is “strong and positive,” so we face “warming of several degrees Celsius” and Skeptical Science piece here).
2. The actual CO2 concentration level we hit, which on our current emissions path is far, far beyond 550 ppm (see U.S. media largely ignores latest warning from climate scientists: “Recent observations confirm … the worst-case IPCC scenario trajectories are being realised” — 1000 ppm).
3. The real-world slower (decade-scale) feedbacks, such as tundra melt (see “Carbon Feedback From Thawing Permafrost Will Likely Add 0.4°F – 1.5°F To Total Global Warming By 2100“).
4. Where they live — since people who live in the mid-latitudes (like most Americans) are projected to warm considerably more than the global average.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change concluded in 2007 that equilibrium climate sensitivity was in the range of 2.0-4.5C. The new study has a similar range, 0.9-5.0C.

Actual warming this century on our current emissions path is all but certain to be catastrophic, even if ECS is closer to 2°C than 3°C or more.

Related Posts:

• “Memo To Media: ‘Climate Sensitivity’ Is NOT The Same As Projected Future Warming, World Faces 10°F Rise