Climate Progress: An insider's view of climate science, politics, and solutions

Climate change inherently favors invasive pests.  On the one hand, milder winters since 1994 have reduced the winter death rate of beetle larvae in places like Wyoming from 80% per year to under 10%.  On the other hand, hot-weather uber-droughts — aka  “global-change-type droughts” — have made trees weaker, less able to fight off beetles.

Forest Ecology and Management just published a major new study by 19 researchers around the word, “A global overview of drought and heat-induced tree mortality reveals emerging climate change risks for forests.”  Its key conclusion — that human-caused climate change is already killing forests, releasing carbon, and amplifying warming — will be a shock only to the anti-science crowd:

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The anti-science crowd isn’t satisfied with merely spreading disinformation about climate scientists (see “Error-riddled articles and false statements destroy Daily Mail’s credibilty“).  Now many, like Marc Morano, are unrepentantly calling for violence against them (see The rise of anti-science cyber bullying:  Morano says climate scientists “deserve to be publicly flogged“).

Peter Sinclair, our favorite climate de-crocker, has a new video on the subject:

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I came across these answers to frequently asked questions from the U.S. Energy Information Administration.  There’s some good information on emissions and conversion factors:

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Another vote, another win for the conservative majority on Texas’ State Board of Education.

Science is in a street fight with anti-science, as Nature has argued.  Now the forces of the dark ages are taking on the Enlightenment itself.

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Dr. Peter Gleick is co-founder and president of the Pacific Institute for Studies in Development, Environment, and Security in Oakland, California.  He wrote a great op-ed for the San Francisco Chronicle, with that terrific Matt Groening cartoon:

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In this post, I will summarize what the recent scientific literature says are the key impacts we face in the second half of the century if we stay anywhere near our current emissions path. I will focus primarily on:

• Staggeringly high temperature rise, especially over land — some 10°F over much of the United States
• Sea level rise of 5 feet, rising some 6 to 12 inches (or more) each decade thereafter
• Dust Bowls over the U.S. SW and many other heavily populated regions around the globe
• Massive species loss on land and sea — 50% or more of all life
• Unexpected impacts — the fearsome “unknown unknowns”
• More severe hurricanes — especially in the Gulf

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Memo to climate scientists, environmentalists, and others:  If you’re going to give an interview or speak in public, you need to know the FULL scientific literature.  If you just stick to reading up on your area of expertise, you won’t have the sharpest answers for reporters or for a tough questioner in the audience.

Reading the BBC’s interview of Dr. Phil Jones, the climate scientist at the center of the hacked e-mail scandal, makes clear that even an experienced and widely published researcher like Jones doesn’t appear to know the full climate literature or the clearest answers to basic questions.  The interviewer, the BBC’s environment analyst Roger Harrabin, also doesn’t, or he probably wouldn’t have asked “Do you agree that from January 2002 to the present there has been statistically significant global cooling?”

Now the snappiest answer to such a question comes from Ken Caldeira to the AP in October:  “To talk about global cooling at the end of the hottest decade the planet has experienced in many thousands of years is ridiculous.” You could also quote NOAA climate monitoring chief Deke Arndt from that same story, “The last 10 years are the warmest 10-year period of the modern record.  Even if you analyze the trend during that 10 years, the trend is actually positive, which means warming.”

I’d also recommend mentioning two major scientific studies from last year, which demonstrate that when you look at where 90% of the human-caused warming was expected to go — the oceans — you find steady warming in recent years.  I’d keep this figure handy [I use it in my talks]:

Time series of global mean heat storage (from 0 to 1.24 miles).

One reason I am launching the Climate Science Project is to connect people to the best scientific explanations and the best answers to commonly asked questions.  Obviously, one of the first places you should start is SkepticalScience.com.  That’s where I saw this figure — and an excellent explanation of what it means.

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I’m featured in Tom Friedman’s column today, “Global Weirding is Here.”  I’ll blog on that term and that column shortly.

Right now, though, I need to get up a quick post for those who’ve come here looking for that “listing of the best scientific papers on every aspect of climate change for anyone who wants a quick summary now” that Friedman wrote about   Regular readers know I’ve just started that process, but for now let me update my review of the best papers in the past year.  If you want a broader overview of the literature in the past few years, focusing specifically on how unrestricted emissions of greenhouse gas emissions are projected to impact the United States, try “An introduction to global warming impacts: Hell and High Water.”

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Tom Friedman has a new column, “Global Weirding is Here.”  He mentions my new effort to post summaries of “the best scientific papers on every aspect of climate change.”  Readers interested in that project should click here.

If you want to know more about me or this website, start with “An Introduction to Climate Progress.”  You can get daily email updates on climate science, solutions, and politics by clicking here.

Friedman spells out why he suspects “China is quietly laughing at us right now” and why “Iran, Russia, Venezuela and the whole OPEC gang are high-fiving each other”:

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Marine life face some of the worst impacts.  We now know that global warming is “capable of wrecking the marine ecosystem and depriving future generations of the harvest of the seas” (see 2009 Nature Geoscience study concludes ocean dead zones “devoid of fish and seafood” are poised to expand and “remain for thousands of years”).

The acidification of the ocean in particular is a grave threat  — for links to primary sources and recent studies, see “Imagine a World without Fish: Deadly ocean acidification — hard to deny, harder to geo-engineer, but not hard to stop” (and below).

A new Nature Geoscience study, “Past constraints on the vulnerability of marine calcifiers to massive carbon dioxide release” (subs. req’d) provides a truly ominous warning.  The release from the researchers at the University of Bristol is “Rate of ocean acidification the fastest in 65 million years.”

I am reprinting below a piece by award-winning science journalist Carl Zimmer published this week by Yale environment360, which explains ocean acidification and what this important study says:

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Every month brings more evidence the world’s greatest ice sheet is disintegrating much faster than the “consensus” forecast (see Satellite data stunner: “Our data suggest that EAST Antarctica is losing mass…. Antarctica may soon be contributing significantly more to global sea-level rise”). Guest blogger Nick Sundt has the latest news in a piece first published here.

The U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) reported Monday that “every ice front in the southern part of the Antarctic Peninsula has been retreating overall from 1947 to 2009, with the most dramatic changes occurring since 1990. “  The finding comes on the heels of the warmest January on record for the Southern Hemisphere.

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The 2007 IPCC Fourth Assessment Report (AR4) report ignored dynamic ice-sheet disintegration, which was already happening (see Nature: “Dynamic thinning of Greenland and Antarctic ice-sheet ocean margins is more sensitive, pervasive, enduring and important than previously realized”).  The IPCC therefore low-balled sea level rise estimates, suggesting seas might rise “only” a foot or two this century, greatly delighting the anti-science crowd (see “Debunking Bjørn Lomborg:  Misrepresenting Sea Level Rise“).

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Warning:  Please put your head in a vise before reading further.

Andy Revkin has just written the most illogical climate post on Earth.  Or maybe he’s written the most logical climate post on the Bizarro World Htrae.

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Senator James Inhofe, ranking Republican on the Environment and Public Works Committee, has gone a step beyond promoting his long-notorious global warming denialist propaganda. He is now using the resources of the Senate committee to seek opportunities to criminalize the actions of 17 leading scientists who have been associated with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change assessment reports. A report released by Inhofe’s staff on February 23 outlines this classic Joe McCarthyite witch-hunt: page after page of incorrect and misleading statements, a list of federal laws that allegedly may make scientists subject to prosecution by the U.S. Justice Department, and a list of names and affiliations of 17 “key players” in the “CRU Controversy” over stolen e-mails and their connections with IPCC reports.

That’s from Rick Piltz, the guy who blew the whistle on the Bush Administration’s censorship of federal climate science. This is a repost from his website, Climatesciencewatch.org:

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Our favorite climate de-crocker, Peter Sinclair has a terrific new video on the basic facts of climate science (with links to the literature):

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Methane release from the not-so-perma-frost is the most dangerous amplifying feedback in the entire carbon cycle.  Research published in Friday’s journal Science finds a key “lid” on “the large sub-sea permafrost carbon reservoir” near Eastern Siberia “is clearly perforated, and sedimentary CH₄ [methane] is escaping to the atmosphere.”

Scientists learned last year that the permafrost permamelt contains a staggering “1.5 trillion tons of frozen carbon, about twice as much carbon as contained in the atmosphere,” much of which would be released as methane.  Methane is  is 25 times as potent a heat-trapping gas as CO2 over a 100 year time horizon, but 72 times as potent over 20 years!

The carbon is locked in a freezer in the part of the planet warming up the fastest (see “Tundra 4: Permafrost loss linked to Arctic sea ice loss“).  Half the land-based permafrost would vanish by mid-century on our current emissions path (see “Tundra, Part 2: The point of no return” and below).  No climate model currently incorporates the amplifying feedback from methane released by a defrosting tundra.

The new Science study, led by University of Alaska’s International Arctic Research Centre and the Russian Academy of Sciences, is “Extensive Methane Venting to the Atmosphere from Sediments of the East Siberian Arctic Shelf” (subs. req’d).  The must-read National Science Foundation press release (click here), warns “Release of even a fraction of the methane stored in the shelf could trigger abrupt climate warming.”  The NSF is normally a very staid organization.  If they are worried, everybody should be.

It is increasingly clear that if the world strays significantly above 450 ppm atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide for any length of time, we will find it unimaginably difficult to stop short of 800 to 1000 ppm.

Note:  As part of the Climate Science Project, I’m making this post as definitive as I can by including other recent scientific findings on the tundra.  Please add other relevant links in the comments.

The lead author, Natalia Shakhova, explains the new findings in this video:

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The response to the [email] vandals is to bury them with the data and experience of a century of scholarly research and analysis. The information that is important in making the decisions as to how to manage our world is unequivocal and must be advanced, not as questions at the edge of scientific knowledge where scientist like to dwell, but as the facts that they are, facts as immutable as the law of gravity. The climatic disruption is not a theory open to a belief system any more than the solar system is a theory, or gravity, or the oceanic tides, or evolution.  This approach is uncompromising, partisan in the sense of selected for the purpose. It is not a lecture to undergraduates; nor is it ecology 101. It is a clear statement of what is required for government to do its job in protecting the public welfare. The scientific community has a firm responsibility in this realm now. This is not the time to wring our hands over the challenges to hyper-scientific objectivity, the purity of scholars, and to tie ourselves in knots with apologies for alleged errors of trifling import.

That’s the opening paragraph of a statement Dr. George M. Woodwell emailed me yesterday.  Woodwell, founder, Director Emeritus and Senior Scientist at the The Woods Hole Research Center, was responding to some “private e-mails obtained by [the uber conservative newspaper] The Washington Times,” including one of his that has been misrepresented.

Since Woodwell has blogged here before, I asked him to clarify his original use of the word “partisan,” since I was pretty sure he was not using it in its Washingon, DC political sense, as some have implied.  He wasn’t.  In addition to his statement, he sent me a remarkable piece of 1988 Senate testimony he gave (reprinted below), which makes clear he has been at the forefront of warning the public about the dangers of human caused global warming.

His statement continues:

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Nature, the highly respected British scientific journal, has an excellent editorial and news story tomorrow on the recent assault on climate science (excerpted below).

Taking Nature’s advice, I urge the administration to send science advisor Holdren and NOAA Administrator Lubchenco and Energy Secretary Chu on a media blitz and national tour to explain and emphasize the science.

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