Climate Progress

If you want a good primer on the dos and don’ts of designing good climate legislation, watch the Senate hearing, “Economic and International Issues in Global Warming Policy.” This was a hearing last month in front of the Environment and Public Works Subcommittee on Private Sector and Consumer Solutions to Global Warming and Wildlife Protection, which is chaired by Joseph Lieberman (I/D, CT) and John Warner (R-VA), who have been working together on a climate bill.

All of the witnesses were good, but I thought the presentation by aptly named Blythe Masters, Managing Director, JP Morgan Securities, was especially cogent. She makes a compelling case against the safety valve:

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My post on the NASA data revision and Hansen’s emails resulted in a tremendous amount of new visitors who provided thoughtful comments on both sides.

Many expressed doubts about the threat posed by global warming because: 1) the warming won’t be very severe, and/or 2) the planet is just going through a “natural” warming cycle, and/or 3) humans can’t do much to change things (because either we aren’t the main cause or the kind of emissions reductions needed are beyond the world’s capability). I won’t rebut those views here — that is the goal of this blog and my book.

These doubters don’t like being called names, especialy Denier/Denyer — and who can blame them? I am trying in this post to be clear about my terms. [Note, I use Denyer with a ‘y’ because that’s what my publisher recommended for my book.]

I do not consider the vast majority of those doubters to be Denyers, and I doubt Hansen considers them “court jesters.” The Denyers are people who actively spread misinformation or disinformation, sometimes with funding from fossil fuel companies, but who in any case do so for a living and/or who do know better — or should.

Obviously, that latter point is a judgment call, but as my many posts about, say, the Denyers at Planet Gore demonstrate, these folks just make stuff up or willfully misinterpret the facts or the research. Michael Crichton, as a professional writer of persuasive fiction(s), is perhaps the archetypal Denyer. Indeed, I would say the defining characteristic of Denyers is that they repeat arguments/fictions that have long been debunked. For them, no amount of scientific evidence is persuasive.

For me, you are a definitely a professional Denyer if you work to obfuscate the climate change issue for an organization that has taken money from ExxonMobil. Another clue is if you follow the detailed rhetorical strategy laid out by conservative message guru Frank Luntz in his infamous memo on the environment.

Most people — including most doubters — are not in a position to render scientific judgments on climate change. They must decide whom they trust. In general, Denyers are conservatives or libertarians from places like the Competitive Enterprise Institute. So it is no surprise that doubters, who are also typically conservatives or libertarians, are more willing to put their trust in the Denyers.

Also, a point I make in my book is that because the solution to global warming requires strong government-led efforts — to put in place a carbon dioxide cap-and-trade system and efficiency standards — people who don’t believe in strong government are much less predisposed to believe in a problem that requires such a solution.

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Climate tipping points have been the subject of much debate and confusion. Now Professor Tim Lenton of the University of East Anglia has published a very good piece, “Tipping points in the Earth System,” giving some intellectual substance to the notion.

Not surprisingly, the tipping point Prof. Lenton worries about most is the disintegration of Greenland’s ice sheet. He told The Guardian:

We know that ice sheets in the last ice age collapsed faster than any current models can capture, so our models are known to be too sluggish.

His paper examines where Greenland’s tipping point is:

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A new website has launched today:

Cleantech COLLECTIVE is a moderated online business community for clean tech investors, entrepreneurs, policymakers and concerned citizens. If that’s you, sign up and start building a personal network with your peers and leading environmental experts…create a profile and promote your business…submit your own content, rate posts and leave comments…get advice you can use from the web’s leading experts on clean technology.

And yes, I am a featured blogger — they are basically reprinting all my ClimateProgress posts — but I’d recommended it even if I weren’t. If you look around you’ll see some very good writers and some very good information. It features experts like Joel Makower and both of the authors of my favorite book on green technology, The Clean Tech Revolution, by Pernick and Wilder.

People interested in the CleanTech business will probably find the greatest use for this new website.

The carbon capture and storage (CCS) discussion has focused on pre-combustion capture of CO2, since it has long been assumed that is easier and cheaper than trying to capture the CO2 post-combustion from the flue gas (exhaust stream). The problem is 1) that approach limits CCS to new coal plants and 2) that requires utilities to build integrated gasification combined cycle (IGCC) plants, which are more expensive to build and more expensive to maintain.

Post-combustion capture would allow CCS to be retrofitted on existing coal plants. If it proves practical and affordable, that would be a major breakthrough in efforts to control greenhouse gas emissions. Last week brought us this announcement:

BP Alternative Energy and Powerspan Corp. today announced their collaborative agreement to develop and commercialize … a post-combustion CO2 capture process for conventional power plants.

More details on this potentially important technology below:

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The nation’s top climate scientist is so frustrated over the nonsense racing about the blogsophere and mainstream media about the tiny flaw in NASA’s U.S. temperature database that he has already sent out two e-mails on the subject. In the first, James Hansen wrote:

The flaw did have a noticeable effect on mean U.S. temperature anomalies, as much as 0.15°C, as shown in Figure 1 below (for years 2001 and later, and 5 year mean for 1999 and later).

Not bloody much of an effect. He goes onto say

The effect on global temperature (Figure 2) was of order one-thousandth of a degree, so the corrected and uncorrected curves are indistinguishable.

Yes, the globe is still warming at an alarming rate — and we still aren’t doing anything about it — which is why in his second, more impassioned email, he writes:

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… you’ll see this picture (Bush ex-speechwriter, Michael Gerson) and a copy of this unbelievable Post column: “Hope on climate change? Here’s why.” Without a trace of irony, Gerson writes that we should be hopeful on climate change because a simple policy, a “cap-and-trade system,” could solve the problem.

I’d normally say, “Duh!” but Gerson seems blissfully unaware that his old boss actually campaigned in 2000 on a carbon cap-and-trade for utilities, and then not only reneged on that promise shortly after taking office, but then repeatedly opposed such a system in this country — and worked tirelessly behind-the-scenes to block other countries from developing a new post-Kyoto cap-and-trade system.

The blogosphere is already rife with take-downs of this laughable piece (see here and here). But if you really want to see Gerson taken down, get this month’s Atlantic Monthly (subs. req’d so try this), where Gerson is trashed by a fellow Bush speechwriter as a petty, self-aggrandizing credit-stealer.

Jeers to the Washington Post for giving Gerson that rarest of platforms — a regular column on the Op-Ed page.

While the blogosphere has been up in arms over a trivial revision to a few years of U.S. temperature data, the country and the planet keep smashing records for extreme weather. The National Climatic Data Center reports:

• “Record warmth in Western US in July”
• Nearly half the country in some stage of drought
• More than 5 million U.S. acres burned by wildfires
• The second warmest January-July globally on record
• The warmest Jan-July over land on record
• “The least [Arctic] sea ice extent in July since records began in 1979″ as the figure shows:

The recent rate of ice loss is stunning. If, as new research suggests, the planet is really going to heat up after 2009, then this rate might continue and the Arctic might soon become ice free during the summer –a condition not experienced for more than a million years.

Why should Americans care about Artic sea ice? Well a 2004 study in Geophysical Research Letters (subs. req’d) found that “future reductions in Arctic sea ice cover could significantly reduce available water in the American west.”

The global climate system is interconnected — and we change it at our peril.

The Washington Post has a terrific front-page story on offsets. I’ve been meaning to post on renewable energy certificates (RECs) as offsets, but this article beat me to it:

Even more head-spinning [than trees as offsets] are the questions about “renewable energy certificates” from wind farms and solar plants, certifying that they made a certain amount of clean energy.

Offset companies buy these pieces of paper. Then, they use them to claim credit for pollution “avoided” — reasoning that they helped produce energy that would otherwise have come from a polluting coal or natural-gas plant.

Some of the money paid for these certificates stays with the offset vendor or with a middleman. The rest usually winds up with the energy project’s builder or the utility that buys its electricity. In some cases, this can amount to something like a donation to a for-profit company: American Electric Power, which sold an undisclosed amount of certificates from wind farms last year, earned more than $1 billion in profit.

Some environmentalists balk at this. If the certificate is bought only after the energy is produced, they wonder, how can an offset vendor know the energy wouldn’t have been produced anyway?

Consider how this plays out for one offset company, Carbonfund.org, whose Executive Director, Eric Carlson, I actually debated earlier this month:

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For those wondering why the planet hasn’t yet exceeded the 1998 El Niño-fueled temperature record, a new Science magazine article (subs. req’d) explains why. Basically, in addition to the steady increase in anthropogenic warming from greenhouse gases you have to add a smaller variation from climate oscillations linked to the oceans. Those oscillations have been tamping down temperatures a tad, and will keep doing so for the next couple of years, but the decade of the 2010s is going to bring a return to record-smashing temperatures:

Our system predicts that internal variability will partially offset the anthropogenic global warming signal for the next few years. However, climate will continue to warm, with at least half of the years after 2009 predicted to exceed the warmest year currently on record.

They further predict the year 2014 will “be 0.30° ± 0.2°C warmer than the observed value for 2004,” which means there is a 50% chance that the warming from 2004 to 2014 will be 3/8 that of the warming of the previous century!

In short, if these projections are right (and if there are no major volcanoes to dampen temperatures), then the Denyers have a couple more years to spin their misinformation, but, after that, the accelerating nature of climate change should become painfully clear to all. And I would not be surprised if this epic multi-year heatwave drives the Arctic over the edge, leading to a drastic — if not total — reduction in summer ice by 2020.