Climate Progress

Mass extinction is certainly one of the gravest threats posed by climate change. A new paleoclimate study underscores the danger:

We analysed the fossil record for the last 520 Myr against estimates of low latitude sea surface temperature for the same period. We found that global biodiversity (the richness of families and genera) is related to temperature and has been relatively low during warm ‘greenhouse’ phases, while during the same phases extinction and origination rates of taxonomic lineages have been relatively high. These findings are consistent for terrestrial and marine environments and are robust to a number of alternative assumptions and potential biases. Our results provide the first clear evidence that global climate may explain substantial variation in the fossil record in a simple and consistent manner.

The conclusion of the study, “A long-term association between global temperature and biodiversity, origination and extinction in the fossil record“:

(more…)

Global warming threatens our 4th of July celebrations with droughts that have forced communities to scrap plans for fireworks displays. And it threatens our White Chistmases with winter heatwaves. And our Arbor Days with record wildfires. And now it imperils our Halloweens.

In a story headlined, “Rain, Drought, Wipe Out Pumpkin Crops Across U.S.” Fox News reports the frightening news:

Scorching weather and lack of rain this summer wiped out some pumpkin crops from western New York to Illinois, leaving fields dotted with undersized fruit. Other fields got too much rain and their crops rotted.

Pumpkin production is predicted to be down for the second straight year.

One expert ominously predicts a run on pumpkins: “If you’ve got to have them for your 5-year-olds, I certainly would not wait a long time to get them.”

Even Stephen Colbert has reported on what he calls the War on Halloween (though, characteristic of his out-of-the-mainstream politics, he doesn’t make the obvious link to global warming).

The bottom line, however, is clear: Pumpkins (like most people) hate extreme weather. Sadly, global warming means more droughts and more deluges.

What exactly does extreme weather done to pumpkins?

(more…)

Climate Progress is happy to introduce Auden Schendler as a guest blogger. Auden is Executive Director for Community and Environmental Responsibility at Aspen Skiing Company. Named a “Climate Crusader” in TIME magazine’s 2006 special issue on climate change, Auden once worked for Amory Lovins at Rocky Mountain Institute (as I did). You can read his full bio here. Auden has unique insight into the difficulties of corporate sustainability in the absence of government leadership and a price for carbon. Welcome, Auden!

Recently, Businessweek covered Aspen Skiing Company’s work on emissions reduction as part of an article titled “Little Green Lies.” The article has received considerable coverage in the blogosphere because it addresses the gap between rhetoric and reality when it comes to business claims on the environment.

Joe asked me if I’d like to clarify that story, and I jumped at the opportunity.

My main point, which probably didn’t get across in the article, is that even at a remarkably progressive company like Aspen Skiing Company, which has strong support from ownership, management, and staff, cutting CO2 emissions is very difficult. Imagine how hard it must be in most standard businesses that don’t have this level of buy-in! This statement may seem obvious, but it cuts against conventional wisdom. Most entities involved in emissions reduction have a stake in saying it’s profitable, relatively easy, and sometimes fun. The NGO community makes its living on this perspective. The government needs its own programs to look good. And corporations have a stake in their perceived success as well.

(more…)

Those of us who have never tried to push a bill through Congress can’t appreciate what a difficult and frustrating process it is. It’s time we do — and time we take to the streets.

Some weeks ago, I posted a column about the Lieberman-Warner climate bill, which proposes that by 2020, we reduce greenhouse gas emissions 15% below their level in 2005. That’s less than half the goal set by the European Union - the equivalent of a 32% reduction in emissions by 2020 compared to 2005. The Lieberman-Warner cap is hardly a model policy for the world’s second-largest source of GHG emissions. I was not happy with a group of U.S. environmental leadership who endorsed that goal in a letter to Congress.

I spent time last week with one of those leaders — a man who carries a picture of his grandson in his shirt pocket to remind him of why working on the climate issue is worth the grief he gets from people like me - and I gained a different perspective: Inadequate action on the Hill is the result of inadequate action on the streets. The political calculus for climate caps is the same as it is for virtually every other dicey issue in Congress: Members feel they are more likely to keep their seats supporting a 15% reduction than supporting a 30% reduction.

We need to flip that calculation, making bold climate action the best way for members of Congress and presidential candidates to win the next election, and that puts the burden back on us voters. While our environmental leaders are chasing legislative aides through the halls of the Capitol, the rest of us need to take to the streets in a nonviolent show of solidarity that elected officials cannot ignore.

The movement to the streets may take legs this week.

(more…)

The remarkably low fueling cost of the best current hybrids (like the Toyota Prius) and future plug-in hybrids are a major reason why I don’t worry as much about peak oil as some do.

James Kunstler, for instance, argues in his 2005 book The Long Emergency (see Rolling Stone excerpt here), that, after oil production peaks, suburbia “will become untenable” and “we will have to say farewell to easy motoring.” In Rolling Stone, Kunstler writes “Suburbia will come to be regarded as the greatest misallocation of resources in the history of the world” [No — that distinction probably belongs to China’s torrid love-affair with coal power].

But suppose Kunstler is right about peak oil. Suppose oil hits $160 a barrel and gasoline goes to $5 dollars a gallon in, say, 2015. That price would still be lower than many Europeans pay today. You could just go out and buy the best hybrid and cut your fuel bill in half, back to current levels. Hardly the end of suburbia.

And suppose oil hit $280 a barrel and gasoline rose to $8 dollars a gallon in 2025. You would replace your hybrid with a plug-in hybrid, and those trips less than 30 miles that have made suburbia what it is today would actually cut your fuel bill by a factor of more than 10–even if all the electricity were from zero-carbon sources like wind power–to far below what you are paying today. The extra cost of the vehicle would be paid for in fuel savings in well under five years.

(more…)

The legendary Internet technologist Bill Joy has found a better place than the Internet to put his venture capital dollars: green technology.

Joy, co-founder of Sun Microsystems, joined the famed venture capital firm Kleiner, Perkins, Caufield & Byers in 2005 (more proof, if needed, that the rich get richer). In a recent talk, Joy said:

“Eugene Kleiner, the co-founder of Kleiner Perkins, said there is a time when panic is the appropriate response. And I think we should go into a panic–not only (because) the scale of the problem but also the economic opportunity that becoming more efficient in our use of energy gives to us.”

What does this technology guru — and sometimes techno-dystopian — think is hot in clean tech?

(more…)

I recently “won” a Thinking Blogger award — not exactly the Nobel Prize but you take what you can get in the blogosphere.

Even my modest amount of modesty forbids me from repeating what Michael Connelly at Corrections Sentencing blog had to say about ClimateProgress. All I’ll say about Michael Connelly is that I don’t even know him, and this was the first I even heard of his blog, a “place for corrections/sentencing policy readers seeking latest information and research” — not really my forte.

But someone gave him a Thinking Blogger award and this award is sort of a virtual chain letter. So here are the five blogs I would give the thinking blogger award to:

(more…)

Slate has published my reply to economist’s Steven Landsburg’s ill-informed hit-piece, “Save the Earth in Six Hard Questions: What Al Gore doesn’t understand about climate change.”

The editor wisely cut out some of my snarkier comments (Note to self: Slate is not Climate Progress!) but kept the title: “Save the Earth in Two Not-So-Hard Questions: What Steven Landsburg doesn’t understand about climate change” and the last paragraph:

Landsburg seems to believe that only economists can discuss climate change seriously, while the rest of us are wasting everyone’s time: “If you’re not talking about discount rates and levels of risk aversion, you’re blathering.” Landsburg’s piece proves that you can talk about those things and still be blathering.

I do have a serious point to make in the piece. There are two key questions that everyone in the climate change debate needs to answer:

1. How great a threat does inaction on climate change pose for future generations’ quality of life–and for life itself?
2. Will significant action on climate change require sacrificing our quality of life in any meaningful sense?

To see that the answer to the second question is a definite “no,” you need to define the threat in question 1, which I do at length in my book (and on Climate Progress) and briefly in the piece. My bottom line:

(more…)

The important new study, “Contributions to accelerating atmospheric CO2 growth from economic activity, carbon intensity, and efficiency of natural sinks,” that we blogged on earlier is now available online (tip o’ the hat to John M). You can get the abstract here and download the full study here.

What carbon sinks are saturating? A recent and persistent increase in winds (photo, British Antarctic Survey) “over the Southern Ocean, caused by greenhouse gases and ozone depletion, has led to a release of stored CO2 into the atmosphere and is preventing further absorption of the greenhouse gas”(original Science article here).

Let me quote one key, sobering paragraph from the new study:

Growth in Atmospheric CO2. Global average atmospheric CO2 rose from 280 ppm at the start of the industrial revolution (circa 1750) to 381 ppm in 2006. The present concentration is the highest during the last 650,000 years and probably during the last 20 million years. The growth rate of global average atmospheric CO2 for 2000–2006 was 1.93 ppm. This rate is the highest since the beginning of continuous monitoring in 1959 and is a significant increase over growth rates in earlier decades: the average growth rates for the 1980s and the 1990s were 1.58 and 1.49 ppm respectively.

What is particularly novel about this Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences paper is that the authors provide the first quantitative explanation I have seen for this accelerated growth rate:

(more…)

No, the profile of famed scientist James Lovelock in Rolling Stone will not give you renewed hope about humanity’s fate in the face of global warming. It will make you — or Al Gore or James Hansen or even me — look optimistic by comparison:

Lovelock has come to an unsettling conclusion: The human race is doomed. “I wish I could be more hopeful”….

In Lovelock’s view, the scale of the catastrophe that awaits us will soon become obvious. By 2020, droughts and other extreme weather will be commonplace. By 2040, the Sahara will be moving into Europe, and Berlin will be as hot as Baghdad. Atlanta will end up a kudzu jungle. Phoenix will become uninhabitable, as will parts of Beijing (desert), Miami (rising seas) and London (floods). Food shortages will drive millions of people north, raising political tensions. “The Chinese have nowhere to go but up into Siberia,” Lovelock says. “How will the Russians feel about that? I fear that war between Russia and China is probably inevitable.” With hardship and mass migrations will come epidemics, which are likely to kill millions. By 2100, Lovelock believes, the Earth’s population will be culled from today’s 6.6 billion to as few as 500 million, with most of the survivors living in the far latitudes — Canada, Iceland, Scandinavia, the Arctic Basin.

By the end of the century, according to Lovelock, global warming will cause temperate zones like North America and Europe to heat up by fourteen degrees Fahrenheit, nearly double the likeliest predictions of the latest report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the United Nations-sanctioned body that includes the world’s top scientists. “Our future,” Lovelock writes, “is like that of the passengers on a small pleasure boat sailing quietly above the Niagara Falls, not knowing that the engines are about to fail.”

Doh!

But surely we can reduce greenhouse gas emissions and avoid this terrible, terrible fate. Lovelock says, no, it’s too late:

(more…)