Climate Progress

The Anchorage Daily News reports the amazing comments by Don Young, Alaska’s only Representative:

Before he left the hearing, Young, noting the presence of network TV crews, took a moment to reflect on his thoughts regarding climate change, citing the benefit of global warming — not caused by man — in another eon to an area that today is frozen much of the year. “We’re dealing with the most northern part of the United States of America, and a most hostile climate, and we’re pumping oil, and I’d just like to remind them if they’re asked where did the oil come from, and I would say this to Al Gore specifically: This was a jungle at one time, this was a forest at one time, this was a fern-laden area with mammoths at one time, and that’s really why we’re pumping oil,” he said.

This was sent to Climate Progress by Randy P in Anchorage who notes, “In other words, we should look forward to global warming here in Alaska because in 200 million years or so the increased vegetation will produce oil for Alaska’s residents of the future.”

What Young doesn’t seem to get is that humans are driving today’s climate change with greenhouse gas emissions rising 200 times faster than we have ever seen from natural causes.

Long before Alaska is tropical and regrowing oil-producing vegetation, the rest of the planet will obviously be ice free, yielding sea level rise of 80 meters (260 feet). Take that, Al Gore!

Of course, for Young, chair of the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee, that kind of Biblical flooding probably just means more infrastructure projects to fund. It would certainly give new meaning to the phrase, “Bridge to Nowhere.“

The total acreage burned by wildfires so far this year now exceeds the total acreage burned in any year since records started being kept in 1960. As of September 13, some 8.7 million acres have burned –an area nearly twice the size of New Jersey. This exceeds the record set just last year of 8.5 million acres.

But much of the media seems unwilling to even mention the possibility that this record has anything whatsoever to do with global warming. As Climate Progress noted in August, the New York Times neglected to mention this possibility in its major wildfire story, even though the cover story of Science magazine the previous week was on research establishing the global warming-wildfire link.

The current story by the Associated Press, reprinted in the Times and the Washington Post today, offers this as the entire explanation:

Federal officials attributed the increase to two consecutive seasons of hot and dry weather that left forest and ranges parched and easily ignited by lightning.

It has been “hot and dry.” Thanks for clearing that up major media.

The future of the earth’s climate becomes more certain every day for two reasons. First, absent the leadership of the richest and most-polluting country, global levels of greenhouse gas emissions continue to rise at an alarming pace. This makes it more likely we will see the high end of current projections for both future greenhouse gas concentrations and climate impacts.

Second, almost every week we learn more about the dangerous positive feedbacks or vicious cycle in the climate system, whereby an initial warming causes changes that release more greenhouse gas emissions, which in turn causes more warming, and more emissions, and so on and on.

Perhaps the most dangerous vicious cycle is the melting of the Arctic permafrost, which contains more carbon locked away in frozen soil than the entire atmosphere holds today. Worse, thawed permafrost can release its carbon as methane, which is more than 20 times as potent a greenhouse gas as carbon dioxide.

New research finds that the Arctic contains far more carbon than previously thought (Science, subs. req’d) and that methane is bubbling up out of the tundra far faster than previously thought (Nature, subs. req’d). As the Associated Press put it, humans “may be triggering a self-perpetuating climate time bomb.”

We must all act to ensure that the President elected in 2008 has far more interest in stopping this time bomb than the current president who has none.

Be sure to buy (online or in print) the September issue of Scientific American. The entire issue is devoted to climate solutions by leading energy experts. And unlike the recent article in Science, we get a major discussion of efficiency here, both for electricity and vehicles.

The article by U.C. Berkeley professor Dan Kammen on renewable energy is a must read. And everyone interested in climate should be familiar with the “stabilization wedges” by Princeton professors Socolow and Pacala. I will post more on both of these articles later.

There are also good articles about the future of coal (and carbon sequestration) and nuclear power. I don’t think that hydrogen is a climate solution, (see The Hype About Hydrogen), but if you want to know the other side, start with the article by U.C. Davis’s Joan Ogden.

Scientific American is to be commended for putting together such a first-rate issue.

and the Washington Post gets the story (almost) right.

The Post’s front-page article opens with the aggressive program of the Sacramento Municipal Utility District to plant millions of trees, noting:

Perhaps the most arresting feature of Sacramento’s shade crusade is its rarity, despite federal research showing that carefully planted trees can lower summertime temperatures in cities, significantly reduce air-conditioning bills and trap greenhouse gases responsible for global warming.

You might think that an article by the politically-minded Post would then note that we had a federal program to work with communities to cool them down, called “Cool Communities.” It was gutted by the Gingrich Congress because it was part of the Clinton administration’s plan to reduce global warming emissions. The Post instead wanders off into interviewing a social scientist to explain the “cultural reasons” there has not been a “rush to exploit shade.”

Significantly, a program to cool cities with shade trees (and light-colored roofs) is not only a low-cost way to mitigate global warming, it is a very cost-effective way to adapt to global warming, since it lowers urban temperatures. But the conservatives who support adaptation as a strategy for dealing with global warming only do so rhetorically, in order to fight off efforts to change our energy policy to reduce emissions. If they really believed in adaptation, we would have a major federal “Cool Communities” effort.

Until sanity returns to our politcal culture, you can learn everything you need to know about cooling cities at the terrific web site of the Heat Island Group at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, which includes a number of useful publications, including an article from Technology Review, “Painting the Town White — and Green.“

Energy efficiency, energy efficiency, energy efficiency — is it really so hard to remember that solving global warming will require dealing with energy supply AND demand?

Science magazine just published an article titled “A Roadmap to US decarbonization” with the summary: “Alternative energy sources could replace 70% of fossil fuels in America within 30 years at a cost of $200 billion per year” (Subs. Req’d for full article).

But the analysis looks only at clean energy supply options (such as solar and nuclear), which are inevitably more expensive than fossil fuels like coal. It ignores entirely energy-efficient technologies that can pay for their extra cost–in part or in whole–through reduced energy bills.

Yet just eight years ago, Science published a similarly-titled article (that I co-authored), “A Road Map for U.S. Carbon Reductions,” that looked at both supply and demand solutions. We found very significant energy-efficiency opportunities that kept total cost far lower than simply pursuing supply-side options. Our analysis was based on a major study by five national laboratories, which concluded that an aggressive set of policies could achieve significant carbon reductions without raising the nation’s total energy bill.

Science is a terrific publication, especially on global warming, with news coverage that wastes far less valuable ink presenting the long-discredited views of the global warming Deniers and Delayers than the popular press. But articles like this generate headlines in newspapers like, “Plan to Escape Warming Comes With a Hefty Tab,” which serve only to confuse the real debate we need to have.

Two of American’s leading climate scientists believe the answer could be as much as 11 to 13 feet — if we don’t quickly change our energy and climate policies.

John Holdren, president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, told the BBC, that “We are experiencing dangerous human disruption of the global climate and we’re going to experience more.” The news account of the interview goes on to say, “He added that if the current pace of change continued, a catastrophic sea level rise of 4m (13ft) this century was within the realm of possibility; much higher than previous forecasts.” Holdren actually said, “two, three, even four meters [6.6 to 13 feet] per century” is “well within the realm of possibility,” but even the low-range would be a catastrophe.

Dan Schrag, director of the Harvard University Center for the Environment, says of 3.5 meters [11.5 feet] sea level rise: “100 years is possible.” He commissioned a picture of what the Gulf Coast would look like with such sea level rise: South Florida and New Orleans are gone. It must never come to this.

Realclimate.org has an important post correcting a flawed news article making the rounds on the blogosphere.

An Australian article claims, “The world’s top climate scientists have cut their worst-case forecast for global warming over the next 100 years.” This is based on a misreading of the draft Fourth Assessment Report of the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

The article has confused the projected temperature rise from a doubling of preindustrial levels of carbon dioxide concentrations (the so-called “climate sensitivity”), which the draft report says is 2°-4.5°C, with the projected temperature rise from whatever level of carbon dioxide the world actually ends up with in 2100, which could be considerably above a doubling (or below–if we act soon).

As I have noted previously, confusion about future temperature rise is common. The issue is even more confused here because, as realclimate.org explained previously, the climate sensitivity doesn’t even include crucial feedbacks and vicious cycles in the carbon cycle that could further boost warming. And, of course, the report is only at a draft stage, so perhaps the media should wait until the report is filed early next year before reporting, or misreporting, its conclusions.

The numbers are, in any case, nothing to be sanguine about, since any sane society would want to do everything possible to avoid warming beyond 2°C.

“Britain should write annual targets into law to commit to cutting greenhouse gas emissions 60 percent by 2050, Conservative Party leader David Cameron said Friday.” So begins a must-read article on British climate politics.

British conservatives are prepared to go even further than Prime Minister Tony Blair, who also has called for a 60% reduction, “But his plans do not include legally enforceable annual steps.”

What does the conservative leader in this country think? “I have said consistently that global warming is a serious problem. There’s debate over whether it’s man-made or naturally caused.” Yes, that is President Bush espousing a view that undercuts any rationale for the kind of action that British Conservatives understand the world must take to avoid catastrophic consequences, including as much as 6.5 to 13 feet of sea level rise by century’s end.

Returning greenhouse gas emissions to 1990 levels by 2020 is the essential first step to avoiding catastrophic warming. California has agreed to do just that in “a compromise between Republican Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger and Democratic legislators.”

This bipartisan effort is likely to be a model for other states. Of course, it should also be a model for the entire country, but, sadly, as ABC News explained, we have “a president who doesn’t acknowledge the virtually universal consensus among scientists that mankind is dangerously overheating its home planet.”

The big question is–How much is this going to cost Californians? An L. A. Times piece oversold the costs of action, I thought, but unlike most media coverage of the story, at least took the time to explain the enormous costs of inaction:

[T]emperatures in California would increase by 7 to 10 degrees by 2070, and heat waves in Los Angeles would become six to eight times more frequent…. Sierra Nevada snowpack, important to supplying water to Southern California, would decline by 73% to 90%.

PBS’s Newshour ran a more balanced story, though I was disappointed they gave so much time to David Montgomery of CRA, who rehashed the standard lines by Global Warming Deniers and Delayers that we must wait for “breakthrough” technologies or else the costs will be severe. Still, its worth listening to hear the compelling arguments of NRDC’s Dan Lashof.

Interestingly, I did not see a single story explaining that Californians already use far less electricity–and far less polluting electricity–than other Americans without paying higher electricity bills. How California achieved that and why it means greenhouse gas emissions are likely to be far less costly than most people believe is a subject Climate Progress will focus on in later posts.