Climate Progress

If you are not reading the web site, Realclimate.org regularly, you should be. As their banner says, they provide “climate science from climate scientists”–some of the top climate scientists in the country

While it helps to have some comfort with technical matters, the vast majority of the content is very accessible. Some good recent posts:

• If you are worried about global warming plunging us into another Ice Age (virtually impossible) or at least making Europe much colder (not that likely this century), then you probably want to be able to wow your friends by explaining why the “Gulf Stream” is not the same thing as the “Thermohaline Circulation,” which is not the same thing as the Meridional Overturning Circulation (which is also often called the North Atlantic Current).
• Perhaps you want to be able to explain why changes in solar activity are NOT the cause of recent global warming. Try here and here.
• But then you’ll want to be able to show why greenhouse gases ARE the cause of recent warming.

Realclimate should be a standard bookmark of yours, but I will periodically highlight their best.

Yes, that bastion of conservatism, the Wall Street Journal, which, like most bastions of conservatism, does not support conservation — is singing a different tune today (”ultraviolet moon”). They have actually published an article calling for the more efficient use of electricity titled, “Less Power to the People” (a subscription is required — but I’m sure you’re go to want to own the collector’s edition).

This article even contains the sentence “Conservation seems a much more feasible solution than quickly building dozens of new power plants to add generating capacity — especially if reducing emissions is a goal.” What a concept — reducing emissions.

A blue moon is a rare event — two full moons in one month. An ultraviolet moon is rarer still — when conservatives contemplate conservation to reduce emissions.

Quick hit: Here is the link for a study that is now getting a lot of media attention: “Climate Change - the Costs of Inaction,” by leading economists at the Global Development and Environment Institute at Tufts University in the U.S. for The Big Ask, Friends of the Earth’s climate campaign.

You can read the press release, “ECONOMISTS WARN CLIMATE CHANGE WILL COST WORLD TRILLIONS IF GOVERNMENTS FAIL TO ACT,” here.

I just wanted to do a quick post because I had trouble finding the actual study, and wanted to save CP readers some time. The study makes clear that the cost of inaction is far, far, far higher than the cost of action, a major point of Climate Progress.

While CP is not a fan of profiling global warming deniers, the Chronicle did debunk all of his misinformation. That said, it is time for newspapers to stop repeating the Bush line that the president believes in taking action to reduce emissions. The article tries to make it appear as if even the President disagrees with Inhofe:

President Bush recently called global warming “a serious problem.” He said there is still uncertainty over how much of the warming is natural and how much man-made, but he added that it was time to “get beyond the debate” and deploy new technologies to curb greenhouse gases.

But in the U.S. Senate, one prominent lawmaker isn’t buying it.

No and No.

First, what Bush said was, “I have said consistently that global warming is a serious problem. There’s debate over whether it’s man-made or naturally caused.” Those who believe it is naturally caused will never take more than minimal effort to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

Second, as CP has noted, Bush does not support deploying new technologies to “curb greenhouse gases”–he only says he does, and he only gets away with those mis-statements if the media reports them unchallenged. Or maybe Bush is from the Bizarro world, where “curb” means “allow to continue rising forever until deserts grow in size by a factor of 10, half the species die, and the great ice sheets melt causing 80-feet of sea level rise.”

Inhofe buys the Bush position completely–he just hasn’t learned the rhetorical art of saying one thing and doing another.

Global warming-driven “changes could make insurance unaffordable for customers in high-risk areas.” So concludes “Climate Change and Insurance: An Agenda for Action in the United States,” a report by the conservation group World Wildlife Fund and the Allianz Group, one of the world’s largest insurance providers.

High-risk areas include

• Florida and other hurricane-prone regions, since the most severe tropical storms are on the rise
• All coastal cities, since sea levels are also on the rise
• Regions susceptible to forest fires, which are also on the rise.

Clem Booth, a board member of Allianz, told Reuters: “That it will cost more, there’s no question; we can put that on the table right at the beginning.”

While the political leadership inside the Beltway refuses to act, the good news is that, “There’s no question that business leaders like Allianz, GE and others are way ahead of the current administration,” in the words of Carter Roberts, president of WWF in the United States.

Action now is the only true insurance against catastrophic climate change.

Here are two small clues that explain the decline of the relevance of Big Media. The New York Times ran a story Monday, “Climate Change May Hurt Asian Economies,” from the Associated Press. The story opens:

Hotter temperatures and higher sea levels could devastate Asian economies, displace millions of people and put millions more at risk from infectious disease, according to a climate change report released Monday.

I have kept the NYT’s original web-link, which goes not to the report, but to their extensive reporting on climate change. This is a standard for the Times, but relatively useless for savvy online readers who have no difficulty whatsoever finding extensive background on the subject of climate change but are actually interested in the study.

And this brings me to my second complaint. If you read this story, you will have a great deal of difficulty finding the report online, since they never mention who actually sponsored it. The second paragraph states:

Global temperatures will rise by up to 4 degrees by 2030, particularly in the arid regions of northern Pakistan, India and China, predicted the report, conducted by Australia’s main research agency, the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization.

But if you google that agency and go to their web site, www.csiro.au, you will probably be as surprised as I was that there is no mention of any such report.

(more…)

The Norwegian government believes it can reduce greenhouse gas emissions 50% to 80% by 2050 without having to pay an “exorbitant” cost. And pursuing the key solutions will “strengthen Norway’s technological expertise.”

This is the conclusion of the final report of the Commission on Low Emissions. You can find the details in their press release or the full report (the latter is in Norwegian). This chart shows how they do it:

None of this is rocket science. In fact, it isn’t science at all — it is morality. As the Commission notes,

Fairness dictates that the rich countries reduce their greenhouse gases by about two-thirds from current levels by the middle of this century.

Clearly, this country needs a government Commission on Low Emissions — but, tragically, that will almost certainly have to wait until 2009.

Senators John Kerry (D-MA) and Olympia Snowe (R-ME) introduced climate legislation that would set the nation on a path to avoid a catastrophic warming. Some highlights of the Global Warming Reduction Act:

Requires that the U.S. freeze emissions in 2010 and then calls for a gradual reduction each year to 65% below 2000 emissions levels by 2050. The bill achieves these targets through a flexible, economy-wide cap-and-trade program for greenhouse gas emissions.

Requires that passenger vehicles reduce their global warming pollution.

Includes measures to advance technology and reduce emissions through clean, renewable energy and energy efficiency in the transportation, industrial and residential sectors.

Requires the U.S. to derive 20% of its electricity from renewable sources by 2020.

This is a serious bipartisan climate proposal from the Senate, similar to another one that Jim Jeffords (I-VT) introduce this summer. These will certainly never become law as long as George W. Bush is president, and they may not even get voted on unless congressional leadership changes after the mid-terms, but they do show that some senior lawmakers understand the scale of the problem and solution.

In a truly amazing CNN interview with Miles O’Brien, Senator James Inhofe (R-OK), the chairman of the Environment and Public Works Committee, was asked to respond to the statement by John McCain (R-AZ): “I believe climate change is real. I believe that we need to act as quickly as possible.” He replied:

But as far as John McCain’s concerned, he’s a good friend of mine. I’ve served with him. However, John McCain is running for president and this is a huge, popular issue. Seventy percent of the people have been duped by the media.

If the public has been duped by the media, then apparently Sen. McCain has too — unless we are to read Inhofe’s comments as saying that McCain knows he is wrong and is intentionally misleading the public merely to win votes from duped Americans. It is tough being a good friend of Sen. Inhofe.

[Yes, the headline could have been “Inhofe says Public has been Duped by the Media,” but that didn’t strike me as news.]

The entire interview is worth watching because CNN’s Miles O’Brien really did his homework and pushed back hard on Inhofe’s misrepresentations of the science. Amazingly, Inhofe seems to think he gets the best of this interview, since he has the tape on his web site.

British scientists have issued the harshest warning yet about the devastating impact of unrestrained greenhouse gas emissions: “One third of the planet will be desert by the year 2100.”

This stunning new UK research, from the Met Office’s Hadley Centre for Climate Prediction and Research, shows

[The] figure for moderate drought, currently at 25 per cent of the Earth’s surface, rising to 50 per cent by 2100, the figure for severe drought, currently at about 8 per cent, rising to 40 cent, and the figure for extreme drought, currently 3 per cent, rising to 30 per cent.

Within 100 years, some 30 percent of Earth will be rendered essentially uninhabitable, leading to mass migrations and millions of environmental refugees. And this result is based on a greenhouse gas emissions growth scenario that ignores key carbon cycle vicious cycles (such as the tundra melting). The Independent reports: “In one unpublished Met Office study, when the carbon cycle effects are included, future drought is even worse.”

The UK study shows that we are already seeing the impact of greenhouse gas emissions on drought: “In the last decade of the 20th century droughts were nearly 25% more widespread than in the previous 40 years.” Climate Progress has noted the undercoverage of the drought-climate link in the major US media, but the British media certainly gets it, as evidenced by the cover story in The Independent. That may be because there is less muzzling of scientists. The Met Office is actually within the UK’s Ministry of Defence.

If only our political leadership were as concerned with the security threat from global warming.