Climate Progress

If Saturday’s 75 degree heat in Washington, DC caused you to pick up Sunday’s Washington Post, you saw schizophrenic reporting of global warming, just in the pages of that one edition.

Unfortunately, the cover story, run next to a photograph of rooftop sunbathers, unjustifiably disregarded the impact of global warming. They quoted one meteorologist to the effect that “despite views to the contrary, global warming is not responsible for the region’s unusually mild winter.” But that statement is scientifically indefensible.

It would be more accurate to say that record winter temperatures are likely due to the combination of global warming and El Niño – and global warming may be making El Niños more likely. The meteorologist sarcastically added, “The world is not coming to an end.” Everything is fine, no need to take any action….

But then if you flip a few pages further in the paper and you find “March in January! Or is it Mayday?” The story opens with:

Never has good weather felt so bad. Never have flowers inspired so much fear. Never has the warm caress of a sunbeam seemed so ominous. The weather is sublime, it’s glorious, it’s the end of the world.

(more…)

The paleoclimate record shouts out to us that, far from being self-stabilizing, the Earth’s climate system is an ornery beast which overreacts even to small nudges.
–Wallace Broecker, climate scientist, 1995

The ongoing Arctic warming corresponds to the predictions of the more pessimistic climate models. By extension, the pessimistic scenarios of climate change can be expected to unfold in the rest of the Northern Hemisphere.
–Louis Fortier, climate scientist, June 2006

We are on the brink of taking the biggest gamble in human history, one that, if we lose, will transform the lives of the next fifty generations….

My focus in this chapter is the question of the century:

Do we humans have the political will to stop the great ice sheets of Greenland and West Antarctica from melting . . . to stop Hell and High Water?

… On our current emissions path, Earth’s average temperature will probably rise 1.5°C by midcentury. By century’s end we will be more than 3°C warmer than today. The last time Earth was 1°C warmer than today, sea levels were 20 feet higher. That occurred during the Eemian interglacial period about 125,000 years ago, when Greenland appears to have had far less ice.

How fast can the sea level rise? Following the last ice age, the world saw sustained melting that raised sea levels more than a foot a decade. Many scientists believe we could see such a melting rate–a catastrophic melting rate of more than 12 inches every ten years– within this century. Sea levels ultimately could rise much more than 20 feet because Antarctica contains far more landlocked ice than Greenland.

The last time Earth was 2° to 3°C warmer than it is now, some 3 million years ago, sea levels were more than 80 feet higher.

… The answer to the question of the century–Do we humans have the political will to stop the great ice sheets from melting?–is, at best, “Not yet”….

Realclimate has a post critiquing a recent Andy Revkin article in the New York Times that was titled “A New Middle Stance Emerges in Debate over Climate.”

I must side with Realclimate here. The Revkin article begins:

Amid the shouting lately about whether global warming is a human-caused catastrophe or a hoax, some usually staid climate scientists in the usually invisible middle are speaking up.

This is a bizarre statement for three reasons. First, it is the media which insists on quoting the extreme opinions on both sides. So this lede is truly the pot calling itself boiling mad: “I’m shocked, shocked that the media has polarized the issue.”

Second, the “invisible middle” is in fact the highly visible consensus created by the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) assessments–the starting ground for all arguments.

Third, global warming will be “a human-caused catastrophe” if we fail to act within the next decade. What is emerging among the dozens of climate scientists that I talked to for my book Hell and High Water, is the exact opposite of what Revkin wrote. Louis Fortier, Canada Research Chair on the Response of Arctic Marine Ecosystems to Climate Change at Universite Laval, echoed the thinking of many when he said at a June 15, 2006 transatlantic conference I attended:

The ongoing Arctic warming corresponds to the predictions of the more pessimistic climate models. By extension, the pessimistic scenarios of climate change can be expected to unfold in the rest of the Northern Hemisphere.

ClimateProgress has posted on this subject many times, including “Ten Reasons Why Climate Change May Be More Severe than Projected” and “The Permafrost is not so Perma.” It is always a surprise to people when I tell them that no IPCC models include the feedback from a melting permafrost, and thus all the models severely underestimate likely future impacts.

Ironically, then, if we listen to the people telling us we don’t have to act urgently now, we will be guaranteeing the worst-case scenario of global warming impacts and thus proving the “extremists” were right.

Yet again, the media has blown a chance to provide thorough reporting on climate change’s link to the unusually extreme weather that marked 2006.

A USA Today article opens:

This year of weather extremes, from incessant rain in the Northwest to chronic drought in the heartland and wildfires in the West, could go down as the second-warmest on record when it ends this weekend.

The article closes with a quote from Richard Heim of the National Climatic Data Center:

This El Niño we’ve got going right now is one of the weirdest ones that I’ve seen. We should not be having the weather we’re having.

Reading this after a recap of the nation’s record-breaking weather, you may expect to hit a “Continue” or “Page 2″ button, but that’s it. The article ends and is stripped of any larger explanation of why the weather is so radically different.

The article is another missed opportunity. The remarkable instances of extreme weather are an open invitation to explain how climate change creates the conditions for such patterns.

As we enter 2007, the media should stop neglecting the signs of climate change and start informing the public more completely and consistently.

ClimateProgress will feature excerpts from Hell and High Water over the next few weeks. The following is from the Introduction:

We are on the precipice of climate system tipping points beyond which there is no redemption.
– James Hansen, director, NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies, December 2005

The ice sheets seem to be shrinking 100 years ahead of schedule.
– Richard Alley, Penn State climate scientist, 2006

Imagine if inland United States were 10°F hotter, with many states ravaged by mega-droughts and the widespread wildfires that result. At the same time, our coasts were drowning from a 5- to 10-foot increase in sea levels, which were relentlessly climbing 5 to 10 inches a decade or more toward an ultimate sea- level rise of 80 feet.

This “Hell and High Water” scenario is not our certain future, but it is as likely as the bird flu pandemic we are feverishly fighting to fend off. And it could come as soon as the second half of this century, given the many early warning signs of accelerated climate change that scientists have spotted.

Long before then, the temperature of the inland United States will be rising nearly 1°F per decade, enough to cause continual heat waves and searing droughts. At the same time, sea levels will be rising a few inches every decade, with much of our Atlantic and Gulf coasts battered year after year after year by super-hurricanes with savage storm surges.

Let’s call this phase Planetary Purgatory, when the world comes to know that 20-foot sea- level rise is all but inevitable, and we must endure a desperate multi-decade ordeal to correct the mistakes of the past, to keep sea- level rise as low and slow as possible–to avoid the full fury of Hell and High Water. If the politics of inaction and delay that have triumphed in this country continues for another decade, then Planetary Purgatory is the likely future facing our country before midcentury–probably in your own lifetime.

According to a March 2006 Gallup Poll, only about a third of Americans understand that global warming will “pose a serious threat to you or your way of life in your lifetime.” And if you think that global warming will mainly affect other, poorer countries, or that we can delay acting until we have new technologies, you come by your opinions honestly. Many of the most sophisticated policy makers and journalists also just don’t get it–they don’t understand how global warming will ruin America for the next fifty generations if we don’t act quickly.

The widespread confusion about our climate crisis is no accident. For more than a decade, those who deny that climate change is an urgent problem have sought to delay action on global warming by running a brilliant rhetorical campaign and spreading multiple myths that misinform debate. As a result, many people still believe global warming is nothing more than a natural climate cycle that humans cannot influence, or that it might even have positive benefits for this nation. Neither is true. The science is crystal clear: We humans are the primary cause of global warming, and we face a bleak future if we fail to act quickly….

The book that gave birth to ClimateProgress, Hell and High Water: Global Warming — The Solution and the Politics, is out and getting media coverage.

It has already been featured in a New York Times article: “Travel Habits Must Change to Make a Big Difference in Energy Consumption.” The article, one of the better recent pieces quantifying what people need to do to reduce emissions, ends:

Mr. Romm, the author of a new book about energy and climate change, Hell and High Water, said that eventually the world’s industries would have to switch to lower-carbon fuels, but before that time individuals and industries could take plenty of action. “You use efficiency to stop demand growth,” he said.

Giving energy efficiency its due as a climate solution is one of the main goals of both the book and ClimateProgress.

The book is also the subject of a long review in the Toronto Star, as well as an extended podcast interview and blog post, which says the book “offers one of the best looks at why and how the Bush administration (and conservative forces in general) is avoiding action on global warming” and concludes:

The book itself is a short and easy read, not as intimidating as some other works, and it hits all the main points on the science and politics behind global warming, and the policy and technological solutions to minimize damage to the planet, economy and humanity.