Earth Techling opens a recent article with this statement: "One thing we've come to expect with the rise of electric vehicles is that pollution levels in areas where these are driven will drop, even if just slightly. Given the newness of mass adoption though, there's only so much data out there to collaborate our assumption. [...]
http://insideevs.com/turns-out-electric-vehicles-can-actually-reduce-u
A monsoon triggers flooding in India. (Credit: AFP/Getty Images)
Secretary of State John Kerry's upcoming trip to India next week provides an opportunity to strengthen cooperation between our two countries in response to these dramatic and devastating changes.
The monsoon season is a long-awaited and celebrated time in India, determining the crop output and economic stability of the 70 percent of Indians who either directly or indirectly depend on farming for their livelihoods. Farming makes up nearly 15 percent of the country's $1.83 trillion GDP, making drought a huge threat to the overall economy. The Indian Space Research Organization found that 68 percent of India is prone to droughts, with a third categorized as "chronically drought prone."
Last August, India was in the midst of its second drought in four years, with rainfall 20 percent below average nationwide and 70 percent below average in other states like Punjab. Many experts believe the drought was a factor in the July 2012 blackout that left over 600 million Indians without power. Low rainfall led farmers to irrigate crops with water pumps, drawing more electricity from the grid than usual.
Considering these factors, this year's monsoon coming one month ahead of schedule was welcome news in parched areas across India. But the extreme flooding in the Northern states demonstrated why India is considered one of the most vulnerable countries in the world to climate change. The flooding left over 71,000 pilgrims stranded in the state of Uttarakhand and thousands of others displaced and missing across the region. Dozens of buildings and bridges collapsed under water pressure and landslides stranded hundreds. An Indian Army team of over 5,500 is leading rescue operations and Prime Minister Manmohan Singh announced a $170 million aid package for the state of Uttarakhand on Wednesday.
Droughts, floods, more intense heatwaves, sea-level rise, stronger cyclones and storm surges - this is the new climate reality for India's 1.2 billion people. Climate change will undoubtedly impact the economy with shifting drought and monsoon patterns and create complex environmental, humanitarian, and security challenges in India.
In a recent report, the Center for American Progress examines the nexus of climate change, migration, and security in South Asia. The video below from this report explains how climate change will impact existing tensions with migration in Northeast India.
While India is starting to prepare, the daunting breadth of climate impacts the country faces will require forward-thinking, innovative adaptation and resiliency measures.
Next week, Secretary of State John Kerry heads to India, already promising to put climate change at the top of his agenda. The U.S. should take this opportunity to strengthen our existing bilateral relationship through enhanced cooperation on climate change resilience.
A good model for Kerry would be to take the template of our existing bilateral agreement on clean energy with India, which has proved to be the strongest point of climate related cooperation between our two countries. The U.S.-India Partnership to Advance Clean Energy (PACE) has put $125 million toward a U.S.-India Joint Clean Energy Research and Development Center, $20 million toward collaboration on deployment, and mobilized more than $1.7 billion in public and private resources for clean energy projects in India. Cleaner energy sources will help prevent 100,000 deaths in India from coal-fired power plant pollution each year.
A similarly structured venue for cooperation on climate change resilience, focused on strengthening response and recovery to events such as this week's deadly floods, would be ideal. The U.S. and India are already working together through the Indian Ministry of Earth Sciences and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration to enhance monsoon forecasting. As with the PACE programs, the focus could be on building joint capacity from Indian and U.S. public and private institutions for research that would benefit both countries. While the disruption of the Indian monsoon cycle amply demonstrates the need for better forecasting and response capacity in India, the same need exists in the United States.
There are strong indications that such a move would be welcome In India. A recent Yale-Shakti Foundation poll found that only 7 percent of Indian respondents knew "a lot" about global warming - but when it was explained to them, 72 percent believed global warming was happening and 56 percent believed it was caused by human activity. What the Indian public is apparently responding to is changes in weather events and the new unpredictability of monsoons.
Source: Yale-Shakti Foundation poll
Source: Yale-Shakti Foundation poll
Yesterday, President Obama described our future if the world failed to address climate change:
The grim alternative affects all nations - more severe storms, more famine and floods, new waves of refugees, coastlines that vanish, oceans that rise. This is the future we must avert. This is the global threat of our time.
India and other regions of the world are already acutely experiencing this climate reality. The time to act is now.
http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2013/06/20/2190071/as-secretary-kerry
Credit: David Goldman / AP
The combined average surface temperature over land and the ocean was 59.79 degrees Fahrenheit, which is 1.19 degrees Fahrenheit above the 20th-century average, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA)....
"It... marked the 37th consecutive May and 339th consecutive month [more than 28 years] with a global temperature above the 20th-century average. The last below-average May global temperature was May 1976, and the last below-average global temperature for any month was February 1985," the agency said in its monthly report.
The biggest single donor to the Competitive Enterprise Institute's annual fundraising dinner was Google, with Facebook not far behind. [WaPo]
The L.A. Times editorial board says the rise of extreme weather makes it clear the time to act on climate change is now. [LATimes]
The National Research Council has endorsed a carbon tax as a effective way of combating climate change. [Politico]
Agricultural output is not rising fast enough to meet the food needs of a rapidly growing population, according to a new study. [Guardian]
Poor land management and rising levels of CO2 are causing woody, thorny plants to crowd out African grasslands - spelling trouble for cheetahs. [Guardian]
The EPA is abandoning a draft 2011 study that linked fracking to Wyoming water pollution. [The Hill]
Tens of thousands of people in India are trapped and almost 120 have been killed after heavy flooding and landslides devastated the country this week. [Fox News]
More than half of Americans consider the environment when choosing what to buy, according to a new survey. [L.A. Times]
Heavy flooding in western Calgary, Canada could force 100,000 from their homes, and heavy rain and mudslides have washed out roads and closed highways. [NBC News]
Intense air pollution in Beijing is causing many expatriates to leave the city and country for good. [L.A. Times]
http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2013/06/21/2194261/june-21-news-noaa-
(Credit: AP)
In a letter released Thursday, 145 members of Obama's 2008 and 2012 campaigns called on the president to "make the right decision" on the pipeline:
Mr. President, we are just a few of the millions of young people across the country who are frightened at the prospect of runaway climate change. One of the reasons we came to work for you in the first place is because we trust you understand how big this challenge is.
You already know all the reasons we can't afford this pipeline - that it will lock in gigatons of carbon pollution over the next four decades and that it could spill into our nation's most valuable water sources - we're just asking you to think of us when you make up your mind. Dozens of supporters across the country told us they were casting their ballot for someone they could count on to make the tough calls when it came to our security and our health care and our climate. They voted for you, Mr. President, because we told them you'd be on the right side of history when you had to make these calls. Because we knew you'd do the right thing and stop this pipeline.
Public pushback against Keystone XL - which Obama is expected to decide on by this winter - has picked up over the past few months, following the State Department's release of the project's environmental impact statement. On Thursday, the 145 signatories joined billionaire climate activist Tom Steyer as he unveiled a social media campaign against Keystone XL that aims to garner support from Obama's supporters. (Full disclosure: Steyer is a member of the Board of Directors at the Center for American Progress.) Also on Thursday, a group of nurses and environmental activists marched across the Golden Gate Bridge in hopes of highlighting the health impacts of the pipeline, which run from air pollution, to the risk of contaminated water and illness from spills, to the increased risk of disease spread in a warming world.
The renewed push against Keystone XL comes as recent reports and events shed light on the pipeline's disputed safety and the environmental impacts of tar sands mining. If Keystone XL is built, TransCanada won't be using the latest technology in spill detection for the pipeline; it would have to be spilling oil at a rate of 12,000 barrels a day before its spill detectors would sound an alarm. A report from Alberta's Energy Resources Conservation Board found TransCanada failed to clean up the "vast and expanding" toxic waste ponds leftover from tar sands mining, which kill about 7,000 ducks and geese every year. And a massive toxic waste spill from an oil and gas mining site in Alberta covered more than 1,000 acres in early June, causing "every plant and tree" to die.
http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2013/06/20/2181171/obamas-former-camp
Credit: Citizens Campaign for the Environment
Earlier this week, Bloomberg flagged work by the Stockholm Environment Institute and others to nail down answers to those questions with hard numbers. Their conclusion?
As of now, the United States bears fully one third of the burden to reduce global carbon emissions, with much of Europe shouldering nearly another third. It's a bracing conclusion. The latest analysis suggests the per-unit social and economic damage from carbon emissions due to global warming is as much as twice what we thought. Several countries with much more modest obligations than America's have already moved to price carbon, leaving the U.S. sticking out like a sore thumb. Even China is tip-toeing up to it.
Much of the researchers' work comes from the Greenhouse Development Rights Framework. First, they set a global threshold for living standards, below which people are considered free from the responsibility to sacrifice in the fight against climate change. They came up with $7,500 a year in dollars (adjusted for purchasing power parity) - it's the living standard at which malnutrition, infant mortality, low education, and other problems of poverty begin to fade, plus a bit of breathing room. Even then, about 70 percent of the globe lives at or below this level, and taken all together is responsible for only 15 percent of the cumulative global emissions.
Capacity to invest in climate mitigation and adaptation was then defined as all income per person falling above that threshold. As you can see below, the United States' capacity swamps that of both India and China, despite the much larger populations of the latter two countries:
Source: The Greenhouse Development Rights Framework
The researchers then tried to quantify responsibility for climate change by accounting for cumulative emissions since 1990, and all projected emissions going forward, while excluding all emissions associated with income below the threshold. Putting it all together, they calculated the "responsibility and capacity indicator" (RCI) for each country. In other words: everyone's fair share of the responsibility to reduce carbon emissions enough to keep the planet's climate under two degrees Celsius of warming.
The result? The United States has 33.1 percent of the global RCI in 2010, dropping to 25.5 percent in 2030. The European Union has 25.7 percent in 2010 and 19.6 percent in 2030. Thanks to its economic growth, China does jump from 5.5 percent in 2010 to 15.2 percent in 2030. But no other country even cracks 8 percent, or changes much over that period.
Source: The Greenhouse Development Rights Framework
This shouldn't be surprising. Other data suggests the U.S. can claim a third of the world's carbon dioxide emissions since the mid-1800s, and our per capita emissions top nearly every other nation. We're also the most economically developed nation without a price on carbon, meaning we implicitly subsidize fossil fuel use far more than anyone else.
In fact, the paper notes that even if the advanced countries get their carbon emissions down to practically zero by 2050, the two degree target doesn't give the poor and developing countries much room to work with. That matters, because reducing poverty requires reducing energy poverty, and reducing energy poverty usually means increased carbon emissions. It's possibly the key paradox of human advancement - the world is creeping up on an astonishing reduction in global poverty, even as our greenhouse gas emissions keep driving us towards likely climate and ecological catastrophe. It's what led the International Energy Agency and the World Bank to note that tackling energy poverty and climate change at the same time is going to have a hefty global price tag.
Here in America and the developed west, meanwhile, we've basically got the problem of deep poverty licked. Given the position of extraordinary economic privilege we enjoy in the global order, it's right that the lion's share of the climate change burden falls to us. To that end, the paper suggests establishing an international fund to invest in global climate change mitigation and adaptation, with countries contributing in accordance with their RCI share. Or just use the RCI proportions to calculate direct emission reduction targets for each country.
But it's not grim self-sacrifice. The insurance bill the U.S. is paying for extreme weather disasters - increasing thanks to climate change - far outpaces that of any other country, meaning reducing global warming is in our quantifiable financial self-interest. We also need jobs, and specifically jobs that pay well but are accessible to less educated Americans, in order to avoid falling into an economy with just an upper and lower class, but no middle class. Research suggests renewable energy produces more jobs per unit of energy generated than the fossil fuel industries, green jobs are both more accessible to less educated Americans than all jobs as a whole, and their more likely to involve manufacturing. Finally, if we 're exporting renewable technology to China and the world, rather than importing it when they develop it first, we'll help close our trade deficit and improve the government's finances.
But self-interest aside, at the end of the day there's no escaping the simple morality of the matter. As President Obama pointed out at a prayer breakfast in 2012, quoting Luke 12:48, "for unto whom much is given, much shall be required." He was talking about justly distributing the burden of deficit reduction, but the point applies to carbon reduction just as much.
http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2013/06/06/2110951/us-obligated-clima
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:
http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2013/05/21/2039811/christie-climate-c
When future generations look back on the scandals of our age, it'll be the unchecked rise in global temperatures, not the Benghazi talking points, that infuriate them.
Yes, unchecked warming is likely to prove the greatest scandal in U.S. history.
Certainly it's the one that will ruin the lives of the most people, far more than Watergate did if our government doesn't act to expose what's going on and work to put an end to it - before it puts an end to our stable climate:
Scandalous: Projected warming this century (in red, via recent literature) if humanity allows current carbon pollution trends to continue compared to the temperature change over past 11,300 years (in blue, via Science, 2013).
I know it's not one of the scandals the major media are now obsessed with 24/7, but that is business as usual for the MSM, as Klein notes:
Things go wrong in government. Sometimes it's just bad luck. Sometimes it's rank incompetence. Sometimes it's criminal wrongdoing. Most of the time you never hear about it. Or, if you do hear about it, the media eventually gets bored talking about it (see warming, global).
It was Watergate and the fame it brought Woodward and Bernstein that inspired so many journalists to enter the field. But now that post-modern cynicism reigns supreme -which is to say, much of the media acts as if their really is no objective truth or over-arching public interest - fame alone seems to drives the media.
And so this scandal goes largely unreported (see "Silence Of The Lambs 3: Media Coverage Of Climate Mixed In 2012, But Still Down Sharply From 2009") or misreported (see "False Balance Lives").
Fortunately for the media, having largely missed the chance to report the scandal when it might have had some positive impact on the outcome, they'll have plenty of time to become famous reporting on its consequences (see Climate change "largely irreversible for 1000 years," with permanent Dust Bowls in Southwest and around the globe).
http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2013/05/19/2028241/worse-than-waterga
False balance is alive and well at even the best media outlets (see links below). Bloomberg news, famous for the post-Sandy cover story,"It's Global Warming, Stupid," now proves they can be the stupid ones, in a Monday piece on "Greenhouse Gases Hit Threshold Unseen in 3 Million Years":
Happy Plants
"The Earth has had many-times-higher levels of CO2 in the past," said Marc Morano, former spokesman for Republican Senator James Inhofe and executive editor of Climate Depot, a blog that posts articles skeptical of climate change. "Americans should welcome the 400 parts-per-million threshold. This means that plants are going to be happy, and this means that global-warming fearmongers are going to be proven wrong."
Yes, "Happy Plants" is Bloomberg's header. Plants will be so damn happy when it is 10° F warmer and a third of the arable land has been turned to dust bowl!
And yes, Bloomberg actually quoted Marc Morano, the Charlie Sheen of global warming, former denier-in-chief for Sen. James Inhofe (R-OIL) - "among the first reporters to write about the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth campaign."
As Media Matters notes, you should know your news article is pushing false balance when you are quoting someone making the exact same argument as a "rock bottom" Wall Street Journal op-ed:
Marc Morano is not a scientist and has no scientific education. He is paid by an oil-industry funded organization to confuse the public about climate change, and has compared climate science to the Mayan calendar, Nostradamus, and medieval witchcraft. Moreover, his argument is laughable: by focusing on how carbon dioxide stimulates plant growth in a controlled environment, he ignores that our huge emissions of it and other greenhouse gases are warming up the planet, thereby increasing the risk of extreme rainfall and drought to the detriment of agriculture. A Wall Street Journal op-ed made the same argument on Thursday, leading to a deluge of condemnation.
So why is Bloomberg News not only featuring Morano, but giving his discredited argument equal weight to the extensive evidence presented by scientists?
Equally lame, Bloomberg trots out a long-debunked denier talking point:
Skeptics of man's influence on warming temperatures note that while CO2 levels in the atmosphere have continued to rise since the 1990s, no year has been statistically warmer on average than 1998, with higher levels for 2005 and 2010 falling within the margin of error for that year, according to data compiled by the U.K. Met Office.
Is Bloomberg really suggesting that those who are skeptical of man's influence on warming temperatures have any credibility?
Somehow the 2000s were still the hottest decade on record - and somehow 90% of manmade global warming ended up precisely where scientists said it would (see "Global Warming Has Accelerated In Past 15 Years, New Study Of Oceans Confirms").
Even as written, this torturous myth is beneath Bloomberg:
Even if the UK Met Office's ranking of 2010 and 2005 as the warmest years on record globally is within the margin of error for 1998 (U.S.'s NASA and NOAA both rank 2010 and 2005 as statistically warmer than 1998), the fact that the difference between these individual years is small illustrates again that we should pay more attention to the long-term trend. As NASA explained, "all three [surface temperature datasets] show the last decade is the warmest in the instrumental record."
Bloomberg can - and must - do better.
Related Posts:
http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2013/05/14/2008601/false-balance-live
The idea behind the report was simple. Tally up all the world's natural capital - land, water, atmosphere, etc. - that doesn't currently have a dollar value attached to it, and figure out the price. But the next step was where it got interesting. Figure how much of that natural capital is being consumed, depleted or degraded without the responsible party paying the cost for that use. The number the study hit on was a staggering $7.3 trillion in 2009 - about 13 percent of global economic output for that year.
This brings up what economists call "negative externalities." That's a technical term for what happens when one actor in the economy has to pay for another actor's mess. In a theoretically perfect market, the price of consuming, degrading or depleting a resource would be paid by the party responsible.
But getting the theory of markets to map onto the real world is difficult. Dumping trash on a neighbor's lawn is technically free, so a lot of us should be doing it more. But because we've built societies in which our neighbor can sue us, or the cops can fine us, we're forced to internalize that cost. Lots of costs can only be internalized through smart institutional design and government policy, rather than by leaving the markets free to do their market thing.
What Trucost found is that when you scale this problem up globally - all the river, air, and land and air pollution that isn't paid for, all the water and land use that isn't paid for, and especially all the carbon emissions dumped into the atmosphere that aren't paid for - the numbers get very big:
Global Greenhouse Gas Emissions: $2.7 trillion. This was by far the biggest single problem, and East Asia and North America were the two biggest culprits. That lines up with an International Monetary Fund study that determined the United States is the world's biggest subsidizer of fossil fuels - with Asia the runner-up - because it's failed to put a price on carbon emissions through a carbon tax or a cap-and-trade system. Trucost assumed a social cost to carbon emissions of $106 per metric ton. That's higher than the IMF's assumption of $25 per ton, but well within the overall range of costs studies have found.
Global Water Consumption: $1.9 trillion. Wheat farming was the biggest problem here, followed by rice farming and general water supply, mainly in Asia and North Africa. That's probably largely because developing and poorer countries have fewer institutions or infrastructure for managing water use.
Global Land Use: $1.8 trillion. Cattle ranching in South America came in first here, followed by cattle ranching in South Asia. Besides the usual uses, the effects of logging and fishing were also included. Trucost estimated the value of unused land using metrics laid out in the United Nations' Millennium Ecosystem Assessment.
Global Waste And Land, Air, And Water Pollution: $850 billion. Sulfur dioxides, nitrogen oxides, and particulate emissions were the big culprits for air pollution ($500 billion total) mainly in North America, East Asia, and Western Europe. Land and water pollution ($300 billion total) was actually mostly fertilizers, from North America, Asia, and Europe again. Global waste was the remainder, mostly hazardous materials. Trucost figured out these prices mainly through the costs of clean-up and health effects.
On top of that, the study's next conclusion was equally dramatic: whole sectors of power generation, materials production, farming and ranching across the globe would become entirely unprofitable if they had to pay the true cost of their natural capital use. The top five biggest regional industries the study looked at are in the chart below, and even in the best case their natural capital costs effectively wipe out their revenues:
But that bill will ultimately be paid in full are - by our children and countless future generations.
The Consequences For The Economy
The purpose of the study was actually quite hard-nosed - to give investors some idea of the risks their investments may face. It's great for a business if someone else pays for their use of natural capital. Until that natural capital suddenly goes away, or the related ecological system collapses. Then the costs are "re-internalized" though droughts, extreme weather, rising seas, and all the attendant damage to infrastructure, to food prices, to cities, to human health and to human lives. One of the benefits of price signals - which is lost when these capital costs aren't accounted for - is that they prevent investors and industrial sectors from getting in over their heads in unsustainable practices.
According to a recent report from the Carbon Tracker Initiative and the London School of Economists, if the world successfully enacts policies to hold global warming under two degrees Celsius, then 60 to 80 percent of coal, oil and gas reserves could be rendered unusable. That would mean a loss of about $6 trillion in investments, which suggests how poorly the global economy is currently accounting for its use of the Earth's natural resources.
The Consequences For The Planet (And For Us)
The other benefit price signals ostensibly provide is that they prevent overconsumption of resources by keeping demand tethered to supply. By not pricing natural capital, we're losing out on that, too.
For a while now, the Global Footprint Network has been working on tallying up the planet's biocapacity, which is the ability of any unit of land - usually measured in global hectares - to produce useful biological materials like crops or drinking water, and to absorb wastes. What they've determined is that global biocapacity per capita is going down, since there's only a limited amount of Earth and the human population is rising. But also, humanity's ecological footprint per capita is going up, due to the all the ways we over-consume or poorly consume our natural capital. And ever since the early 1970s, we've been overshooting:
This isn't just a question of biocapacity's ability to supply human civilization with the resources it needs to function - it's a question of biocapacity's ability to regenerate that capital after it's consumed. The overshoot means that, at this point, it takes 1.5 years for the planet to regenerate the resources we consume in one year. In effect, we're taking money out of the bank faster than the interest payments can restore it. Eventually, we're going to spend biocapacity down past the point of sustainability. Eventually, something's going to give.
What We Can Do About It
In 2011, the public policy shop Demos put out a report exploring how gross domestic product has become a sort of catch-all measure of human welfare, and how inadequate it currently is to that conceptual task. One of the main reasons for that inadequacy was, not surprisingly, the fact that we don't price so many of the benefits human beings derive from natural ecosystems.
Demos suggested several ongoing projects as models for correcting that failure: There's the aforementioned Millennium Ecosystem Assessment, which attempts to put a quantifiable economic value on the ability of ecosystems to provide food, crops, fresh water, raw materials, air quality, protection against erosion, protection against storms, climate maintenance, and cultural benefits. Based off the Assessment's work, China instituted a system of ecosystem payments to make sure incentives to conserve natural resources compete equally with incentives to consume them. The World Bank has also set up a project of six to ten countries that's building ecosystem benefits into national accounting practices.
The United States has actually been working on Integrated Environmental and Economic Accounting (IEEA), which was proposed by the United Nations in 1999. It constructs assessments of ecosystem values that's directly compatible with methods already in place for national accounting. The hope is the IEEA will result in environmental policies that better weigh the value of ecosystems versus the traditional economy, and will help federal agencies better manage resources. Several governments - including Switzerland, Wales, and the United Arab Emirates - are also using the ecological footprint measure as a guide in their own management practices.
Finally, the report from the Carbon Tracker Initiative and the London School of Economists suggests that capital markets start accounting for climate change, and that regulators require companies to report the carbon emissions built into their current fossil fuel reserves - precisely the sort of price signaling that isn't currently being done.
In short, the problem is real, and enormous. America is deeply implicated, but there are already concrete models out there to start accounting for our use of the natural world on the level of both policy and economics. Can we get to work already?
Related Post:
http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2013/04/23/1905421/global-ponzi-schem
In giving the bills a hearing, members of the committee have offered a solution in search of a problem. Community members representing the national monuments that President Obama has designated thus far were at the hearing to show support for the process and the monuments created. As Molly Ward, Mayor of Hampton, Virginia (the location of Fort Monroe National Monument) said on the subject:
The bills up for discussion this morning will have but one result: to prevent other communities from enjoying the same kind of success that our nine communities recently enjoyed.... The Antiquities Act should remain unchanged and ready for the current and future presidents to respond quickly when Congress is unable to proceed quickly.
Nearly one month ago, President Obama used his executive authority to create five new national monuments, a move that was widely supported. But rather than celebrating these successes, certain House members are instead attempting to reprise their role in making the last Congress the most "anti-environmental House of Representatives in the history of Congress." These bills fan the anti-government flames that have recently swept western state legislatures, which are attempting to turn over public lands to the states for private profits.
At issue is the 1906 Antiquities Act, which has been used by 16 out of the last 19 presidents to protect objects and places of "historic or scientific interest" on federal lands and waters. Even President George W. Bush used the act to protect millions of acres of marine areas.
Contrary to claims that monuments are a detriment to local communities, the facts show that they actually provide economic benefits. For example, a study of large monuments in the West by economic research firm Headwaters Economics determined that "the local economies surrounding all 17 of the national monuments grew following the creation of new national monuments."
National monuments and other protected areas like national parks and wilderness also create jobs, as noted by economists. In 2011, over 100 economists asked the president to "create jobs and support businesses by investing in our public lands infrastructure and establishing new protected areas such as parks, wilderness, and monuments."
Last Congress, and this Congress thus far, have been paralyzed when it comes to preserving America's special places. As the Washington Post wrote in an editorial yesterday:
...one can hardly blame the president [for designating new monuments]. Despite bipartisan support for various land conservation proposals, the last Congress was the first since 1966 that failed to set aside any land - any at all.
If members of Congress object to the use of the Antiquities Act to protect special places, they should use their legislative authority to introduce and work to pass bills that do so. Otherwise, as the president told Congress in his State of the Union address: "... if Congress won't act soon to protect future generations, I will."
http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2013/04/16/1874431/as-communities-che
Limbaugh was so impressed - and genuinely shocked - that climate denier books exist at the library, he offered the kid an iPad. Here is an excerpt of the exchange:
RUSH: You mean...? Hold it just second. Alex, you're at the health food store, and it's cold out there. It's March. You're there in March, it's cold, and two people in there are surprised that it's cold because it's global warming outside?
CALLER: Exactly.
RUSH: And they still concluded, "Well, we're still in global warming"?
CALLER: Yes.
RUSH: But they were shocked. This is hilarious. You know, Alex, there are none so blind as those who will not see, and that's what you're running up against. Where did you find this evidence? How hard was it for you to research?
CALLER: It wasn't that hard to learn it. There is pretty much a lot of evidence that you can find. I personally just went to the local library and looked up books. That's what I did.
RUSH: You went to the library?
CALLER: Yeah.
RUSH: You didn't use a computer?
CALLER: No, I didn't. Well, yeah, my mom got me one article from the computer. Yeah.
RUSH: Wow. I'm surprised you find evidence of this at the library. That's heartening. Why did you want to do this? What made you doubt the people who believe that there's global warming?
CALLER: Well, over the radio we listen to different things. I've heard lots of evidence that man-made global warming is a hoax. And since I'm doing speeches, I thought it was a very interesting topic. I want to learn more about this. I guess I just always doubted that. There's so much evidence that global warming is not man-made.
It is little surprise that Alex stumbled onto climate denier talking points, since nearly all climate denier books have ties to conservative think tanks. Internal documents obtained by ThinkProgress last year revealed that the right-wing, Koch-funded think tank Heartland Institute developed a curriculum teaching children that climate science is a controversial matter. On the other hand, a mere 24 peer-reviewed articles reject global warming, compared to a staggering 13,926 scientific articles that substantiate it.
If Limbaugh thinks a 13-year-old is where to find the truth about climate science, perhaps he can next invite a 12-year-old to discuss evolution.
Yet many top Republicans in the Senate and House subscribe to the same view. The climate zombie caucus has a wide net of Republicans, including Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL), former ranking member of the Senate Environment Committee James Inhofe (R-OK), House Science Chair Lamar Smith (R-TX), and House Science subcommittee chair Chris Stewart (R-UT), and many others.
http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2013/04/05/1826671/limbaugh-climate-s
The report's findings are in line with previous studies on climate change's relation to fire risk: a 2012 study found that wildfire burn season is two and a half months longer than it was 40 years ago, and that for every one degree Celsius temperature increase the earth experiences, the area burned in the western U.S. could quadruple. The findings are also in line with the observed impacts climate change is having on wildfires. Wildfires in 2012 burned a record 9.2 million acres in the U.S., and record-breaking heat and dry weather in Australia provided ideal conditions for at least 90 fires that raged through the country this January.
The report also outlines the other effects climate change will have on the forests of the U.S. The Rocky Mountain forests are expected to become hotter and drier as the planet warms, conditions that in addition to wildfires will lead to an increase in infestations of insects such as the bark beetle, which has already destroyed tens of millions of acres of U.S. forests. One species, the mountain pine beetle, has already killed 70,000 square miles of trees - area the size of Washington state. As winters become milder, weather becomes drier and higher elevations become warmer, bark beetles are able to thrive and extend their ranges northward. An increase in some species of bark beetle can actually increase the risk of forest fires in areas affected by the beetle - the study notes an outbreak of the mountain pine bark beetle, which attacks and kills live trees, created a "perfect storm" in 2006 in Washington, where affected lodgepole pines burned "with exceptionally high intensity."
David Peterson, a U.S. Forest Service biologist who co-authored the report, told the Denver Post that the destruction the bark beetles have inflicted upon western forests in recent years has been unprecedented:
"We're getting into extreme events that seem to be having more and more effects across broader landscapes."
The report also predicts an increase of invasive plants and animals, as well as flooding and erosion due to increased rainfall, higher rain to snow ratios and more burned areas. It notes that U.S. forests offset 13 percent of the country's carbon emissions, and as trees killed by insects and fire decompose, they'll emit carbon themselves. Because of the sweeping impacts, the report, which is being finalized for the White House and Congress, calls on forest managers to make "climate-smart" practices, such as thinning fire-vulnerable forests, a priority.
http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2013/04/04/1821921/climate-change-wil
Late Wednesday, President Obama gave a speech to a Democratic fundraiser for the House that tried to rewrite history and shift any blame for climate inaction away from his failed leadership and failed messaging.
Obama actually ended his remarks on what is needed to achieve climate action by saying:
But the most important thing that it's going to take is people in Washington who are willing to speak truth to power, are willing to take some risks politically, are willing to get a little bit out ahead of the curve - not two miles ahead of the curve, but just a little bit ahead of it. And that's why your presence here is so important.
The donor's presence is important to "support the prospect of Nancy Pelosi being Speaker once again." At a second event, Obama even went so far as to say, "If we're going to deal with climate change in a serious way, then we've got to have folks in Congress - even when it's not politically convenient - to talk about it and advocate for it."
Apparently the President is unaware that it was his own White House that shut down any serious talk of climate change by his Administration, by environmental groups, and even by Congress - see "Team Obama Launched The Inane Strategy Of Downplaying Climate Change Back In March 2009."
And, of course, the Congress did pursue serious climate action when it wasn't "politically convenient" - during the nadir of our recent economic collapse - when the House, under the leadership of then-Speaker Pelosi, passed the Waxman-Markey bill. Then leading Senators spent months trying to put together a deal.
But the President never gave one single speech on the subject, he didn't lead, and he wouldn't twist arms in the Senate on climate the way he did on health care (see "The failed presidency of Barack Obama, Part 2").
To repeat, it is just bizarre that the president would say the key thing is to elect a Democratic House who can speak truth to power and take risks politically, given that when he had a Democratic House (and as Democratic a Senate as he is ever going to see), he didn't speak truth to power and he wouldn't take risks politically.
And his other remarks on climate in the home of Tom and Kat Steyer in San Francisco are even more head-exploding when examined closely:
And something that I know is near and dear to Tom and Kat's hearts, and to Nancy's - we've got more work to do in terms of dealing with climate change and making sure that we've got an economy that is energy-efficient, that is productive, that is cutting-edge, and thinks about not just the energy sources of the past, but also the energy promise of the future.
And the thing that I'm going to have to try to work to persuade the American people a little more convincingly on is this notion that there's a contradiction between our economy and our environment is just a false choice - that if we invest now, we will create jobs, we will create entire new industries; other countries will be looking to catch up, they will be looking to import what we do. We will set the standard, and everybody else will have to adapt.
But - and I mentioned this to Tom and Kat and a few folks right before I came out here - the politics of this are tough. Because if you haven't seen a raise in a decade; if your house is still $25,000, $30,000 underwater; if you're just happy that you've still got that factor job that is powered by cheap energy; if every time you go to fill up your old car because you can't afford to buy a new one, and you certainly can't afford to buy a Prius, you're spending 40 bucks that you don't have, which means that you may not be able to save for retirement - you may be concerned about the temperature of the planet, but it's probably not rising to your number-one concern. And if people think, well, that's shortsighted, that's what happens when you're struggling to get by. You're thinking about what's right in front of you, which is how do I fill up my gas tank and how do I feed my family.
And so part of what we're going to have to do is to marry a genuine, passionate concern about middle-class families and everybody who is trying to get into the middle class to show them that we're working just as hard for them as we are for our environmental agenda, and that we can bridge these things in a way that advances the causes of both. And that's going to take some work.
"The politics of this are tough," Mr. President? That's the big insight you shared with the mega-donors.
First off, the politics of everything are tough! The politics of the stimulus bill, the politics of the financial oversight bill, and the politics of health care reform. And yet, those three all happened.
Second, and more important, the President is apparently completely unaware that his White House organized the entire climate messaging in his first term around the economic issue, around debunking the false choice - and that public opinion polls make clear that piece of messaging worked.
In "Revealed: the day Obama chose a strategy of silence on climate change," the UK Guardian quoted Betsy Taylor (and others) about the big March 2009 messaging meeting convened by the White House:
"What was communicated in the presentation was: 'This is what you talk about, and don't talk about climate change'." Taylor said. "I took away an absolutely clear understanding that we should focus on clean energy jobs and the potential of a clean energy economy rather than the threat of climate change."
The message stuck. Subsequent campaigns from the Obama administration and some environmental groups relegated climate change to a second-tier concern.
The Guardian story explains, "The White House, after studying polling and focus groups, concluded it was best to frame climate change as an economic opportunity, a chance for job creation and economic growth, rather than an urgent environmental problem."
I and others, such as the WashPost's Ezra Klein, explained at length why this was only half a message (see "Can you solve global warming without talking about global warming?").
But the President seems to have no idea that his team got everyone pushing a climate bill to focus on the economic message, on the economic benefits to the middle class of climate action - and that polling makes clear it worked at the time:
As you can see if you click on those links, most of those explicitly polled on the question of whether the public thinks the climate bill would create jobs, foster new industries, and be good for the economy - and key middle class groups - including independents and key swing voters - overwhelmingly said yes.
Obama's remarks last night would seem to confirm that it was David Axelrod who mismanaged the messaging decisions without discussing the matter at length with the President. Even so, the president cannot be unaware of his general silence on the issue and his leadership failure at the key moment. The speech is a disappointment for anyone expecting serious leadership on this issue from Obama in his second term.
http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2013/04/04/1820951/obama-climate-hypo
The results of {the study "NASA faked the moon landing - Therefore (Climate) Science is a Hoax"} implied that conspiratorial thinking is linked to climate denial, and hence might emerge in turn to defend climate denial against cognitive analysis - and that's what happened, as we document in "Recursive Fury."
Our paper Recursive fury: conspiracist ideation in the blogosphere in response to research on conspiracist ideation has been published. The paper analyzed the public discourse in response to an earlier article by Lewandowsky, Oberauer, and Gignac (LOG12 for short from here on), which has led to some discussion on this blog earlier.
Refreshingly, the journal Frontiers makes all papers available for free with no paywall. Another unique feature of this journal is that readers can post comments directly beneath the abstract. Unfortunately this has led to the posting of a number of misrepresentations of the paper.
In this post, I'll be addressing some of these misconceptions (but being careful to practise what I preach, will adopt the principles of the Debunking Handbook when I debunk the misconceptions). So here are some key facts about the Recursive Fury paper:
Yep, just stating the obvious, right? Recursive Fury establishes, from the peer-reviewed literature, the traits of conspiracist ideation, which is the technical term for a cognitive style commonly known as "conspiratorial thinking". Our paper featured 6 criteria for conspiratorial thinking:
We then went on to identify responses to LOG12 that exhibited these criteria. Our analysis was entirely based on whether or not public statements conformed to the criteria just listed-we made no comment on the merit of any criticism (except in cases where speculations were plain wrong).
A common misrepresentation of Recursive Fury is articulated by one commenter who says "conspiratorial ideation is defined in such a way that any criticism of LOG12, whether true or false, comes under that heading." Actually, our criteria for conspiracist ideation come from a number of peer-reviewed examinations of conspiratorial thinking and have nothing to do with the substance of any criticism of LOG12. Our objective in Recursive Fury was to demonstrate that some of those criteria arguably applied to the public discourse surrounding LOG12. It does not follow that any criticism of LOG12 involves conspiratorial thinking. Of course not. But if some (not all) critics of a paper on the role of conspiratorial thinking in science denial engage in, well, conspiratorial thinking in response, that's of scholarly interest.
The criteria for conspiracist ideation are applicable without regard to a statement's truth or falsity. Recursive Fury is not about defending LOG12. On the contrary, this latest paper puts on the scholarly record many criticisms of LOG12 that had previously been limited to blogs, and it did so without evaluating or rebutting the substance of those criticisms. Some defence!
A few critics have complained that we didn't include their methodological critiques of LOG12. Such critiques do not fit the conspiracist criteria, which is why they weren't included. Those critics are welcome to submit rejoinders or comments on LOG12 to the journal in question.
Recursive Fury reports and analyzes a number of conspiracy theories regarding LOG12. These range from "global climate activist operation" to "ringleader for conspiratorial activities by the green climate bloggers," to Stephan Lewandowsky receiving millions of dollars to run The Conversation.
Some folk are able to overlook these many documented instances and insist that "There is no 'conspiracy' Mr. Lewandowsky - no matter how many times you try to manufacture one." Recursive Fury documents a whole spectrum of conspiracy theories. As you get further into the paper, the conspiracy theories become broader and more extreme until you get to my personal favourite - maths professor Kevin Judd being the grand poobah of the "global climate activist operation" at the University of Western Australia. Somehow, those who insist "there are no conspiracies" manage to skip over entire sections of the paper.
It appears that "conspiracy denial" may be another phenomenon associated with climatedenial. One blogger cannot see that his claim that climate scientists "colluded with government officials to avoid the law" is conspiratorial. Similarly, another blogger thinks accusing the University of Western Australia of being "a base for this global climateactivism operation" is not a conspiratorial hypothesis because he didn't use the word "conspiracy".
As well as the Recursive Fury paper, we also published Supplementary Material containing excerpts from blog posts and some comments relevant to the various observed recursive theories. In the paper, we characterise this as "raw data" - all the comments that we encountered that are relevant to the different theories. In contrast, the "processed data" are the excerpted quotes featured in the final paper, where we match the various recursive theories to the conspiracist criteria outlined above.
One misrepresentation of Recursive Fury is that we accuse Professor Richard Betts of the Met Office of being a conspiracy theorist because one of his quotes appears in our raw data. This inclusion of a relevant comment in the raw data of a Supplementary Material document was reported in hyperventilating fashion by one blogger as aspectacular carcrash. However, there is no mention of Professor Betts in our final paper and we are certainly not claiming that he is a conspiracy theorist. To claim otherwise is to ignore what we say about the online supplement in the paper itself. The presence of the comment in the supplementary material just attests to the thoroughness of our daily Google search.
Nevertheless, I can see how this misunderstanding arose. The Supplementary Material features the heading "Excerpt Espousing Conspiracy Theory" referring to the excerpted quotes that we pasted into the spreadsheet. In hindsight, the heading should have been "Excerpt relevant to a recursive theory", because the criterion for inclusion was simply whether or not they referred to one of the hypotheses. The analysis of conspiracist ideation occurred after that, and involved the criteria mentioned at the outset.
In this context, it is important to point out that one reason we made the raw data available is for other scholars to be able to cast an alternative interpretative light on the public discourse relating to LOG12. As we note explicitly in the abstract, it is possible that alternative scholarly interpretations can be put forward, and the peer-reviewed literature is the appropriate forum for such analysis.
The original "Moon Landing" paper (referred to as LOG12) is still in press and due to be published soon. The fact that there was a long delay between acceptance and publication is one of the quirks of the peer-review publication process. Sometimes a paper can move from acceptance to publication with surprising speed (as was the case with Recursive Fury). Sometimes it can take months.
However, this random timing has been over-interpreted by many parties, consistent with the "Nothing occurs by Accident" criteria. For example, one commenter argues that"LOG12 was fundemenatlly [sic] flawed from the start, and throughout. It offered no valuable insight or understanding as a result. It is clear to any rational outside observer it had one purpose - to be used to promote the authors advocacy of catastrophicanthropogenic global warming - and to demean and denigrate those who do not believe as he does. The fact this paper has never been published, as Lewandowsky's repeatedly claims, confirms this finding." It will be interesting to see whether this commenter resists the "Something Must Be Wrong" urge when LOG12 is published or continue to assert that the research is "a fraud".
Hindsight is always 20:20 but perhaps we should have anticipated the response to LOG12. The results of LOG12 implied that conspiratorial thinking is linked to climatedenial, and hence might emerge in turn to defend climate denial against cognitive analysis - and that's what happened, as we document in Recursive Fury.
- John Cook and Stephan Lewandowsky, reprinted with permission from Skeptical Science
http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2013/03/26/1778421/denier-deja-vu-con
NOAA issued the three-month U.S. Spring Outlook today, stating that odds favor above-average temperatures across much of the continental United States, including drought-stricken areas of Texas, the Southwest and the Great Plains. Spring promises little drought relief for most of these areas, as well as Florida, with below-average spring precipitation favored there. Meanwhile, river flooding is likely to be worse than last year across the country, with the most significant flood potential in North Dakota.
Organizing for America, formed from Obama for America, has asked supporters to to sign a petition for a "clean budget" in the Senate, warning of Republican amendments "designed to destroy environmental protections and set back decades of progress." [The Hill]
Sally Jewell's nomination to become Secretary of the Interior was approved overwhelmingly by the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee yesterday. [Washington Post]
Senator Roy Blunt filed a budget amendment requiring a 60-vote threshold for any carbon price legislation. [The Hill]
Another amendment filed by Senator Barasso would stop federal agencies from including greenhouse gas emissions from exporting fossil fuels in carbon rules. [The Hill]
The 2010 Icelandic volcanic eruption seeded the ocean with clouds of iron particles, which some geoengineering supporters say would reduce carbon dioxide levels, but a new study says it did no such thing. [Daily Climate]
Traffic increases carbon dioxide levels, and a new study finds it also increases chronic asthma cases in children. [LA Times]
Apple's largest data center is now running on 100 percent renewable energy, increasing the proportion of renewable energy used by the entire company to 75 percent. [Reuters]
The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development is urging China - along with other countries with high emissions - to price carbon and stop subsidizing fossil fuels. [Wall Street Journal]
http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2013/03/22/1759381/march-22-news-noaa
Pakistani flood victims move to higher grounds in 2011. (Photo credit: AAP)
By Vladimir Petoukhov and Stefan Rahmstorf, via The Conversation
The northern hemisphere has experienced a spate of extreme weather in recent times. In 2012 there were destructive heat waves in the U.S. and southern Europe, accompanied by floods in China. This followed a heat wave in the U.S. in 2011 and one in Russia in 2010, coinciding with the unprecedented Pakistan flood - and the list doesn't stop there.
Now we believe we have detected a common physical cause hidden behind all these individual events: Each time one of these extremes struck, a strong wave train had developed in the atmosphere, circling the globe in mid-latitudes. These so-called planetary waves are well-known and a normal part of atmospheric flow. What is not normal is that the usually moving waves ground to a halt and were greatly amplified during the extreme events.
Looking into the physics behind this, we found it is due to a resonance phenomenon. Under special conditions, the atmosphere can start to resonate like a bell. The wind patterns form a regular wave train, with six, seven or eight peaks and troughs going once around the globe (see graph). This is what we propose in a study published this week together with our colleagues of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK).
Planetary waves
Normally, an important part of the global air motion in the mid-latitudes of the Earth takes the form of waves wandering around the planet, oscillating irregularly between the tropical and polar regions. So when they swing northward, these waves suck warm air from the tropics to Europe, Russia, or the US; and when they swing southward, they do the same thing with cold air from the Arctic. This is a well-known feature of our planet's atmospheric circulation system.
However, during several recent extreme weather events these planetary waves almost froze in their tracks for weeks. So instead of bringing cool air after having brought warm air before, the heat just stays. And stays. And stays. In fact, we detected a strong amplification of the usually weak, slowly moving component of these waves.
Time is critical here: two or three days of 30°C are no problem, but 20 or more days lead to extreme heat stress. Since many ecosystems and cities are not adapted to this, prolonged hot periods can result in a high death toll, forest fires, and devastating harvest losses.
The northward wind speed (negative values, blue on the map, indicate southward flow) in the mid-latitudes of the northern hemisphere. During the extreme event (a record-breaking heat wave in the US), the normally weak and irregular waves were replaced by a strong and regular wave pattern. (Credit: Vladimir Petoukhov)
What does climate change have to to with it?
Climate change caused by greenhouse-gas emissions from fossil-fuel burning does not bring a uniform global warming. In the Arctic, the warming is amplified by the loss of snow and ice. This in turn reduces the temperature difference between the Arctic and, for example, Europe. Yet temperature differences are a main driver of air flow, thereby influencing the planetary waves. Additionally, continents generally warm and cool more readily than the oceans.
These two factors are crucial for the mechanism now detected. They result in a changing pattern of the mid-latitude air flow, so that for extended periods the slow waves get trapped. The irregular surface temperature patterns disturb the global air flow. This analysis is based on equations that our team of scientists developed, mathematically describing the wave motions in the extra-tropical atmosphere. The conclusions drawn from the equations were tested using standard daily weather data from the US National Centers for Environmental Prediction (NCEP).
During recent periods in which several major weather extremes occurred, the trapping and strong amplification of particular waves - like "wave seven" (which has seven troughs and crests spanning the globe) - was observed. The data show an increase in the occurrence of these specific atmospheric patterns.
This analysis helps to explain the increasing number of unprecedented weather extremes. It complements previous research that already showed that climate change strongly increases the number of heat records around the world, but which could not explain why previous records were broken by such stunning margins. The findings should significantly advance the understanding of weather extremes and their relation to man-made climate change.
The new data show that the emergence of extraordinary weather is not just a linear response to the mean warming trend, and the proposed mechanism could explain that.
Still, things are not at all simple. The suggested physical process increases the probability of weather extremes, but additional factors certainly play a role as well, including natural variability. Also, the 32-year period studied in the project provides a good indication of the mechanism involved, yet is too short for definitive conclusions.
So there's no smoking gun on the table yet - but quite telling fingerprints all over the place.
Vladimir Petoukhov is a Professor of Earth System Analysis at Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research. Stefan Rahmstorf is a Professor of Physics of the Oceans at Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research. This piece is reprinted with permission.
http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2013/03/21/1747451/weather-extremes-a
