“The Web's most influential climate-change blogger” — Time Magazine A Project of Center for American Progress Action Fund
Why should you vote for ClimateProgress in TreeHugger’s Best of Green Awards 2010 Readers Choice in the category of Best Political Website (click here to vote)?
Sure, you like the insider’s view of climate science, solution, and politics delivered every day to you for free. But the other nominees are pretty darn good, too.
Well, set aside all issues of merit, look at the competition, and vote strategically:
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.
A must-see video, but it only works if you have a Facebook account (click here).
Oil prices and profits are on the rise again. The anti-science disinformation campaign funded in large part by Big Oil is having unimaginable success. And the powerful minority of do-nothing ideologues appear to have the upper hand in the Senate.
And that means a modern day Mr. Potter oil company executive can speak his mind and tell us what he really thinks of clean energy, as Greenwire (subs. req’d) reports:
Climate’s a hot issue in Arkansas
Arkansas is rapidly emerging as ground zero for climate politics, as advocates from all sides swarm embattled incumbent Sen. Blanche Lincoln.
Lincoln’s approval rating — at an all-time low of 27 percent — has made her one of the most politically endangered Democrats in the Senate. Last week, Arkansas Lt. Gov. Bill Halter jumped into the race, posing a serious challenge from the left to the conservative Democrat.
As long as we keep taking no serious action on climate and clean energy, there’s nothing to stop the energy bills of Americans from rising. Daniel J. Weiss, CAP’s Director of Climate Strategy, explains what’s in store this summer.
The mounds of snow blackened by auto exhaust have barely melted in Washington, D.C, yet the Energy Information Administration’s Short Term Energy Outlook already predicts that:
Polling data is misunderstood and misread all of the time. The public strongly supports action on climate and clean energy legislation, even if it raises their energy bill by $10 a month, but even (lazy) environmentalists are unaware of that.
Now it turns out that polling on the science may be equally misunderstood, as USA Today reported Tuesday:
The American Farm Bureau is continuing to lie to farmers about the threat of Clean Air Act regulation of greenhouse gases. Brad Johnson has the story in this Wonk Room repost.
The Bureau, the largest lobbying group for American agriculture, denies the threat of global warming of farming, instead fearmongering for years about a mythical “cow tax.” Speaking to members of the Kansas Farm Bureau yesterday, AFB lobbyist Rick Krause claimed the Environmental Protection Agency “will require all farms with more than 25 dairy cows and more than 50 head of beef cattle or 200 head of hogs to get a Clean Air Permit”:
I understand why anti-science disinformers like Marc Morano kick climate science messaging when it’s down. But why Josh Dorfman?
The Host of “The Lazy Environmentalist” writes on Huffpost how he got truck drivers and other car enthusiasts excited by the “fast speeds, raw power, and American self-reliance” of electric cars running on American electricity. Cool. I’m all for it. Been pushing electric drive vehicles myself for quite some time. Heck, been pushing the American self-reliance pitch a long, long time (see my 1996 Atlantic Monthly article, “MidEast Oil Forever”).
But then he feels obliged to join the circular firing squad:
The bipartisan effort of Senators Lindsey Graham (R-SC), John Kerry (D-MA), and Joe Lieberman (I-CT) to craft comprehensive clean energy legislation that caps global warming pollution has brought some positive words from Big Oil and their political allies. Brad Johnson explains why in this Wonk Room repost.
In particular, the senators are considering a proposal by ConocoPhillips, BP America and ExxonMobil to exclude petroleum producers and refiners from a carbon market and instead levy a carbon fee. “Once you have oil people saying, ‘We can live with this, this was our idea,’ then hopefully everybody else begins to look at this thing anew,” Graham told reporters. “That’s the hope.” However, the American Petroleum Institute’s Jack Gerard explained that the “support” from the oil industry for a carbon fee on petroleum will come in the form of “signs at the gas pump letting people know they’re paying more because of U.S. efforts to deal with climate change”:
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:
Governments estimated to spend $500 billion a year to subsidize fossil fuels
The world might be spending as much as $500 billion annually to subsidize fossil fuels, researchers working at the direction of President Obama and other leaders have found.
What I think Obama needs to be doing now is hard lobbying one-on-one with key swing senators. That way he can focus on a targeted pitch for each one and have a frank discussion. He needs to start moving people one-by-one from the “fence sitter” to the “probably yes” category. Instead, he (and Energy Secretary Chu, Interior’s Salazar, and Ag’s Tom Vilsack), is meeting with a whole bunch of them at once, as The Hill Reports:
A few weeks ago, Obama tripled the budget for the nuclear loan guarantee program, though there hasn’t been a single promising application in two years. CAP Policy Analyst Richard W. Caperton explains what that risky move means for American taxpayers in this repost.
Colorado isn’t waiting for Washington to move aggressively on clean energy, as CAP Senior Fellow Tom Kenworthy explains here.
On March 5, the state Senate approved a measure to increase Colorado’s renewable energy standard (RES) to 30% by 2020, and on March 8th, the House finalized the bill, sending it to Gov. Bill Ritter for his signature.
The serial misinformers and misrepresenters demand equal time for their misinformation and misrepresentations. What should climate science defenders and the media do?
INDIANTOWN, Fla. — In former swamplands teeming with otters and wild hogs, one of the nation’s biggest utilities is running an experiment in the future of renewable power.
Contrary to what one might read in newspapers, the science of climate change is strong. Our own work and the immense body of independent research conducted around the world leaves no doubt regarding the following key points:
* The global climate is changing….
* Human activities produce heat-trapping gases….
* Heat-trapping gases are very likely responsible for most of the warming observed over the past half century….
* The higher the levels of heat-trapping gases in the atmosphere, the higher the risk of potentially dangerous consequences for humans and our environment.
That’s from a Houston Chronicle op-ed by these leading Texas climate scientists:
This post will serve as an introduction to climate solutions as well as a gateway to my ongoing series on the core solutions.
In this post I will lay out “the solution” to global warming.
I have argued that stabilizing atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide at 450 ppm or lower is not politically possible today, but that it is certainly achievable from an economic and technological perspective (see Part 1). I do, however, believe humanity will do it since the alternative is Hell and High Water.
It would require some 12-14 of Princeton’s “stabilization wedges” — strategies and/or technologies that over a period of a few decades each ultimately reduce projected global carbon emissions by one billion metric tons per year (see technical paper here, less technical one here). These 12-14 wedges are my focus here.
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:
I’m very interested in your thoughts on Avatar.
Here are mine on the must-see movie — but flawed eco-pic — and the controversies surrounding it:
[Mild spoiler alert, I suppose, but then if you can't figure out how this movie is going to end, well, you have led a very sheltered life.]
French energy giant Areva has bought U.S.-based Ausra in order “to become a world leader in concentrated solar thermal” power (CSP). And so the race is on for market share in “The Technology that will Save Humanity.”
CSP is the most scalable and affordable baseload (or, even better, load-following) low-carbon supply technology — when used with low-cost, high-efficiency thermal storage. CSP can also share its steam turbine with biomass, a strategy the Chinese are pursuing, or with natural gas (see “Hybrid solar/gas plants provide low-cost, low-carbon power when needed“).
The Oil Drum wonders if Areva is “losing faith in the oft-predicted but unrealised ‘nuclear renaissance’.” Certainly, Areva’s best-known product is pricing itself out of the market (see Areva has acknowledged that the cost of a new reactor today would be as much as 6 billion euros, or $8 billion, double the price offered to the Finns).
CSP, on the other hand, has just started down the experience curve and is poised to be one of the major winners in the low-carbon economy. Indeed, Bloomberg/BusinessWeek [another corporate merger?] reports:
We expect some of the most significant impacts of climate change to occur when natural variability is exacerbated by long-term global warming, so that even small changes in global temperatures can produce damaging local and regional effects. Year on year the evidence is growing that damaging climate and weather events — potentially intensified by global warming — are already happening and beginning to affect society and ecosystems. This includes:
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.
This repost comes from economists at E3 Network: Eban Goodstein, Kristen Sheeran, Director, Peter Dorman, Jonathan Isham, and John Laitner.
I. Addressing Climate Change Can Lead to Net Job Growth in the United States
Many economists believe that due to the global downturn, the US will experience high rates of unemployment (>6%) for a number of years to come. However, a steady shift toward climate protection will likely boost net job growth in the US:
In honor of the Vancouver Olympics, I am reposting this humorous video from 2008:
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.”
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”:
First, the main findings of IPCC over the years, have they been seriously cast in doubt? No….
On balance if you look at all the things the IPCC [Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the body of experts convened by the United Nations to advise governments in responding to global warming] has been doing over the last number of years, they were trying very hard to put in all the peer-reviewed serious stuff. I’ve actually always felt that they were taking a somewhat conservative stand on many issues and for justifiable reasons….
They should be able to say that this is serious science and take a somewhat conservative view. If you look at the climate sceptics, I would have to say honestly, what standard are they being held to? It’s very asymmetric. They get to say anything they want. In the end, the core of science is deeply self checking.
That’s Energy Secretary Steven Chu in his new interview with the Financial Times (regis. req’d).
While the media has gone back to giving equal time to even the most discredited “skeptics,” the Nobel Prize winner in physics understands the difference between real scientists, who sometimes make small, unintentional mistakes but are self checking and self-correcting, and the anti-science disinformers (and their allies in the right-wing media) who just “get to say anything they want,” who intentionally mislead, but keep getting quoted over and over again by the media (see “N.Y. Times and Elisabeth Rosenthal Face Credibility Siege over Unbalanced Climate Coverage“).
Chu pushed back against FT’s repeated efforts to get him to say the IPCC crossed some imaginary line and it’s effort to label cap and trade now “dead”:
If you’re looking for summaries of “the best scientific papers on every aspect of climate change” that Tom Friedman’s promised in his column yesterday, you’ve come to right place. If you want a review of the best papers in the past year (with links), click here. 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 nation and the world, try “Intro to global warming impacts.”
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:
Today’s guest blogger is Tom Kenworthy, Senior Fellow at American Progress.
Last month, an NREL study showed that America could generate 20% percent of its power just with wind by 2024. That would require about 300,000 MW or 300 GW. The ultimate potential is much, much higher — 30 times higher (!) — as Tom Kenworthy, CAP’s Senior Fellow based in Colorado, explains.
Thanks to improvements in wind turbines over the last decade and a half, the United States has the potential to generate more than three times as much electricity from wind as previously thought, according to a new analysis from the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL).
The assessment of onshore wind energy potential found that the U.S. could produce almost 37 million gigawatt-hours yearly. According to the American Wind Energy Association, that’s nine times our current annual electricity consumption.
Tom Tomorrow poses the question in this hilarious cartoon for Salon:
THE EARTH is warming. A chief cause is the increase in greenhouse gases accumulating in the atmosphere. Humans are at least in part responsible, because the oil, gas and coal that we burn releases these gases. If current trends persist, it’s likely that in coming decades the globe’s climate will change with potentially devastating effects for billions of people.
Contrary to what you may have read lately, there are few reputable scientists who would disagree with anything in that first paragraph.
That’s the opening of a pretty good editorial on climate from the paper that has all but destroyed the credibility of its opinion pages (see and the 2009 “Citizen Kane” award for non-excellence in climate journalism goes to …).
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.
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“).
Within a year, even a major report signed off on by the Bush administration itself was forced to concede that the IPCC numbers were simply too out of date to be quoted anymore (see US Geological Survey stunner: Sea-level rise in 2100 will likely “substantially exceed” IPCC projections). About half a dozen major studies since the IPCC report concluded that we face much higher sea level rise this century (see “PNAS Study: Sea levels may rise 3 times faster than IPCC estimated, could hit 6 feet by 2100” and links therein).
The figure above from the PNAS study is especially alarming since we are currently on the A1F1 emissions trajectory (see “U.S. media largely ignores latest warning from climate scientists: “Recent observations confirm … the worst-case IPCC scenario trajectories (or even worse) are being realised” — 1000 ppm“). In short, we appear to be on track for 1.4 meters (56 inches) of sea level rise.
So the anti-science crowd was delighted when a Nature Geoscience study suggested that the IPCC estimates might not be so far off. The top anti-science website, WattsUpWithThat, cheered, “Sea level rise by 2100, “nailed”! Between 7 and 82 centimeters” (3 to 32 inches). At the time RealClimate scientists explained why the study was flawed.
Well, it turns out that the RC scientists were right — but the anti-science crowd is now cheering the withdrawal of the paper! Brad Johnson explains how that could be:
The need is urgent for climate scientists to communicate more effectively to policymakers and the public. This article details some of the problems with how climate scientists communicate and offers practical suggestions for improvement. For example, scientists can improve their effectiveness by avoiding jargon as well as words that mean different things to scientists than to non-scientists. They can use appropriate metaphors and re-frame poorly framed questions. As policymakers grapple with the climate challenge, scientists should take the opportunity and responsibility of clearly communicating what the wider world needs to know about this issue.
Saying scientists are not doing a terribly good job communicating climate science is like saying the status quo media are not doing a terribly good job communicating climate science. But then the media doesn’t suffer the consequences of that failure. At least not more than, say, the American pika….
Our guest blogger is Susan Joy Hassol, an expert in climate communication. She was lead author of “Impacts of A Warming Arctic,” the synthesis report of the Arctic Climate Impact Assessment, and helped author or edit many major climate reports in the past decade. In 2008, she wrote “Improving How Scientists Communicate About Climate Change,” which is reprinted below with her permission:
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.
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:
Mass media have been a key vehicle by which climate change contrarianism has traveled, according to Maxwell Boykoff, a University of Colorado at Boulder professor and fellow of the Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences, or CIRES.
Last week, the South Dakota House of Representatives passed a resolution to “urge” public schools to teach astrology. Brad Johnson has the amazing story in this Think Progress repost.
I’d like your help debunking this atrocious piece of media misreporting, “Push to Oversimplify at Climate Panel.”
Yes, the WSJ piece wins the prize for the most unintentionally ironic headline since it is the media’s self-destructive push to oversimplify that has led to repeated libeling of Michael Mann and other climate scientists (see “Newsweek staff who play fast and loose with the facts are imperiling not just their profession but the planet” and “Abandoning all journalistic standards, CBS libels Michael Mann based on a YouTube video — while reporting his exoneration!”
I am running a full response by Dr. Mann below. It seems the least I can do in response to the umpteenth false attack on his reputation. It simply boggles the mind — and raises serious questions of journalistic bias for the paper — that the WSJ can run this error-riddled attack on Mann and the Hockey Stick without even mentioning any of these three central facts:
Read the rest of this post »
UPDATE: Joe Bastardi replies to this post in the comments here.
Ah, the anti-science crowd. Their much-vaunted satellite data shows record smashing temperatures (make your own chart here). So what’s a disinformer to do? You either have to tie yourself in knots to explain how a rather moderate El Niño could be to blame — or go after the satellite data. And the latter is coming, I’m sure.
But Accuweather’s meteorologist Joe Bastardi is a satellite-data-ophile, so he chooses the knot-twisting approach in his must-read stream of consciousness “European Blog,” which certainly wins the gold medal for self-contradiction. What is so incredible about this blog is that it resides on one long page, so you’d think Bastardi might occasionally go back and look and see if what he just wrote doesn’t contradict something he wrote a little earlier.
Look at Saturday’s post:
It would be an enormous relief if the recent attacks on the science of global warming actually indicated that we do not face an unimaginable calamity requiring large-scale, preventive measures to protect human civilization as we know it.
That how Al Gore’s op-ed big Sunday NY Times op-ed begins.
Since the anti-science disinformers get such absurdly unjustified amount of ink these days — even in the paper of record (see “NYT Faces Credibility Siege over Unbalanced Climate Coverage” — the least I can do is excerpt an actual science-based analysis at length. I’ve added links to the relevant scientific literature:
The Australian author and ethicist Clive Hamilton has been running an amazing series of articles on the attack on climate science (click here). He has given me permission to repost them. I’ll start with #4.
Hamilton was appointed Professor of Public Ethics at the Centre for Applied Philosophy and Public Ethic in June 2008. He is the author of the forthcoming book “Requiem for a Species,” which has a blunt video:
Our favorite climate de-crocker, Peter Sinclair has a terrific new video on the basic facts of climate science (with links to the literature):
Researchers must purge e-mail in-boxes daily of threatening correspondence, simply part of the job of being a climate scientist
That’s the subhed for a new Scientific American piece on cyber bullying. It comes fast on the heels of “Bullying, lies and the rise of right-wing climate denial,” the first part of the terrific series by Clive Hamilton, reprinted below (followed by an excerpt of the SciAm piece):
This is a Wonkroom repost.
According to the mainstream media, there is a controversy over the validity of climate science, in particular the conclusion that the warming of the planet by greenhouse gas emissions poses a risk to the public:
You can get daily email updates on climate science, solutions, and politics by clicking here. If you want to know more about this website, start with “An Introduction to Climate Progress.” This is a Think Progress repost.
Last week, Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) spoke with New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman to discuss clean energy legislation. During the interview, Graham warned his party that it will fall into irrelevancy if it continues to embrace climate change disinformers:
There appears to be a lot more natural gas than previously thought. And that could have huge implications for low-cost CO2 emissions reductions in the near term, if we pass a climate and clean energy bill with a shrinking emissions cap and rising price, as I discuss here.
But can the gas be developed in an environmentally responsible fashion? That question is explored by Sarah Collins, an intern with the Energy Opportunity team, and Tom Kenworthy, a Senior Fellow at CAP, in this repost. In the 2008 AP photo above, a natural gas well pad sits in front of the Roan Plateau near Rifle, Colorado.
Hydraulic fracturing, also called “fracking” or “fracing,” is a widely used but somewhat controversial oil and gas drilling technique that is opening up new energy possibilities in the United States. It’s also starting to draw a lot of high-level attention in Washington, and this scrutiny is appropriate and overdue.
Climate Scientists continue to see persuasive evidence of global warming and climate change when they speak at academic conferences, even though, as Andrew Sullivan rightly put it, the science is being ’swift-boated before our eyes.’ (See also Bill McKibben at Tomdispatch.com on Climate Change’s OJ Simpson moment).
This article at mongabay.com includes some hand-wringing from scientists who say that they should have responded to the attacks earlier and more forcefully in public last fall, or who worry that scientists are not charismatic t.v. personalities who can be persuasive on that medium.
Let me just give my scientific colleagues some advice, since as a Middle East expert I’ve seen all sorts of falsehoods about the region successfully purveyed by the US mass media and print press, in such a way as to shape public opinion and to affect policy-making in Washington:
That is U. Michigan history professor Juan Cole writing on his blog, Informed Comment, Sunday. Cole is “an American scholar, public intellectual, and historian of the modern Middle East and South Asia,” as Wikipedia puts it.
The full title of Cole’s piece is “Advice to Climate Scientists on how to Avoid being Swift-boated and how to become Public Intellectuals.” I’ll excerpt it below with my comments. The main issue I take with his piece is that the overwhelming majority of climate scientists don’t want to become public intellectuals, in part because that is perceived as the kiss of death for their scientific careers.
The Chicago Tribune Online has a helpful Q&A that summarizes where climate science stands today. It also addresses the IPCC, emails, and temperature stations issues.
Its “just the facts” approach is superior to more than 90% of what has been written by the media these days (see Boykoff on “Exaggerating Denialism: Media Representations of Outlier Views on Climate Change” and here):
Vote Vets launches its toughest ad to date on behalf of bipartisan action on climate and clean energy:
All major emitters of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases need to rapidly and cost-effectively transition to a low-carbon economy, in both the production and use of energy and the management of forests and agricultural lands. In order to ensure food, water, and human security, and to protect the world’s biodiversity, the goal should be to limit the global average temperature rise to 2 degrees C (3.6 degrees F) above pre-industrial levels…. Without concerted action now, the world will be faced with temperature increases far in excess of 2 degrees C, with unthinkable impacts.
Dr. Robert Watson was chair of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change from 1997 to 2002. He was opposed by fossil fuel companies like ExxonMobil and the Bush administration waged a successful campaign to have him replaced with Rajendra Pachauri. Now Watson is Strategic Director for the Tyndall Center at the University of East Anglia and Chief Scientific Advisor for the UK Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs. Yale’s Environment 360 online magazine has a piece by him they have given me permission to repost.
In a new report, “Out of the Running?” America Progress’s Kate Gordon , Julian L. Wong, and JT McLain explain how Germany, Spain, and China are seizing the clean energy opportunity and why the United States risks getting left behind. The below video and memo summarize their findings, but you can download the full report here (pdf).
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:
The Heritage Foundation, a once-influential conservative think tank, has long had extreme views (see “Heritage even opposes energy efficiency“). Now it has completely lost its grip on reality, comparing the IPCC’s scientific work to what a magician at a children’s party does (!), as explained in this Wonk Room repost.
The United States created the solar cell industry and literally launched it into space 50 years ago. Solar PV is going to be one of the largest job-creating industries of the century, projected to grow “from a $20 billion industry in 2007 to $74 billion by 2017” (see “Invented here, sold there”).
But thanks to conservative opposition to clean energy from Reagan to the Gingrich Congress to Cheney/Bush, the U.S. share of the PV market has plummeted. By 2008, America had under 6% (!) of the world market (see AllBusiness’s “United States is a bit player in global solar industry“).
Now the Department of Energy is taking steps to improve the domestic manufacturing base, as guest blogger Jacob Abraham, an intern with CAP’s Energy Opportunity team, reports.
Researchers hope to harness energy from office windows
A project from the Center for Architecture Science and Ecology would use office windows as solar power generators by focusing the sun’s rays.
The “integrated concentrating dynamic solar facade” from CASE would capture light on building exteriors with grids of clear pyramids on windows.
Naomi Oreskes’ upcoming book, Merchants of Doubt, explains “the troubling story of how a cadre of influential scientists have clouded public understanding of scientific facts to advance a political and economic agenda.”
The prolific UC San Diego professor discusses the history of both our understanding of human-caused global warming and the anti-science disinformation campaign in this terrific talk from last week:
Starts at 1:45 ET (click here). Here’s some background “about the Sisters“:
Speaking at a conference on the future of America’s economic competitiveness, green jobs leader Van Jones called for a “robust policy discussion” on equity, inclusion, and fairness in the emerging green economy. Brad Johnson of Wonk Room has the story — and the must-see video — in this repost.
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