Climate Progress

A major new report from the Center for American Progress (CAP) provides a detailed roadmap for avoiding catastrophic global warming and restoring our energy security, while maintaining economic development.

The report, Capturing the Energy Opportunity: Creating a Low Carbon Economy, is by CAP’s John Podesta, Kitt Batten, and Todd Stern. It is well worth reading, and I say that not because I am a senior fellow at CAP, but because the 88-page report lays out the most comprehensive set of plausible job-creating climate/energy policies I have seen.

The authors understand the scale of the problem:

The challenge we face is nothing short of the conversion of an economy sustained by high-carbon energy–putting both our national security and the health of our planet at serious risk–to one based on low-carbon, sustainable sources of energy. The scale of this undertaking is immense and its potential enormous.

The urgency of this issue demands a president willing to make the low-carbon energy challenge a top priority in the White House–a centerpiece not only of his or her energy policy but also of his or her economic program–to produce broad-based growth and sustain American economic leadership in the 21st century. This task is so encompassing it will demand that the incoming president in 2009 reorganize the mission and responsibility of all relevant government agencies–economic, national security, and environmental.

The report explores the crucial steps needed to meet the challenge:
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We are the nation we are because giants have walked among us.

America was founded by giants. Others have appeared since to guide us through crises or to great things: Teddy Roosevelt, FDR, Abraham Lincoln, Martin Luther King. We have had leaders whose oratory has, sometimes in a single sentence, rallied the American people around their obligations of citizenship, the morality of equal rights, the spirit of exploration, and the compassion our blessed nation should show to those who have never known security or abundance.

Are giants walking among us today? Are any of them in the present field of presidential candidates?

Polls indicate that most Americans agree the current President has demonstrated some qualities we do not want in the White House. I’d like to offer an unabashedly old-fashioned and idealistic answer about the qualities we DO want, drawn from the Presidential Climate Action Plan.

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The Detroit Free Press reports:

Congressional negotiators are close to agreement on an increase in fuel economy standards to 35 miles per gallon by 2020, with some caveats to satisfy U.S. automakers.

What caveats?

The compromise would preserve the distinction between cars and trucks, something Detroit automakers have fought for, while giving federal regulators strict limits on how to put the increases into place. It also would include a provision backed by the UAW aimed at keeping small-car production in the United States.

Still, much better than no deal at all.

Well, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratories has collected many of the most popular carbon calculators — including their own — and compared their features here. Pick one and go for it!

NOAA’s National Climatic Data Center reports that the Northern Hemisphere year to date (January through October) is the hottest since record-keeping began in 1880.

And NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center forecasts (another) warm winter (duh):

NOAA Climate Prediction Center forecasters remain confident in predicting above average temperatures for much of the country — including southern sections of the Northeast — and below normal precipitation for the southern tier of the nation.

Click on the map to see the details of the forecasts.

Do you want the latest data — some not yet published — and the best post-IPCC scientific predictions for the stunning collapse of Arctic ice and unexpected shrinking of the Greenland (and Antarctic) ice sheets? Then you should definitely watch (UPDATE: this C-SPAN video) of yesterday’s American Meteorological Society seminar (see note on link below).

The seminar is by three of the world’s top cryosphere experts: Dr. Mark Serreze (NOAA), Scott Luthcke (NASA), and Dr. Konrad Steffen (CIRES) — full bios and program summary available here. I will post their presentations when AMS puts them online (which will be here).

I have spent a great deal of time studying the ice and sea level rise issue (see links below) and still found the presentations informative and startling. It is very safe to say the Arctic Sea will be essentially ice free by 2030, and I’d personally bet on 2020 — any takers?

The most interesting presentation to me was the last one, by Konrad Steffen, who made a convincing case that the IPCC is “underestimating the rate of sea level rise” this century significantly. He expects one meter or more by 2100. The modelers are busy at work trying to account for ice dynamics in ice sheet collapse — but it may take 4 or 5 years for them to do that. When they are finished, sea level rise estimates for this century are likely to double or triple.

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The World Meteorological Organization (WMO), in its new 2006 Greenhouse Gas Bulletin, reports:

In 2006, globally averaged concentrations of carbon dioxide (CO2) in the atmosphere reached their highest levels ever recorded … 381.2 parts per million (ppm), up 0.53 per cent from 379.2 ppm in 2005.

Note this is a one-year rise of 2.0 ppm, continuing the accelerated trend of the past decade, which is due to increases in global economic activity and carbon intensity, together with decreased efficiency of natural sinks, like the ocean.

Why worry so much about soaring CO2 emissions? The WMO explains:

CO2 is the single most important infrared absorbing, anthropogenic gas in the atmosphere and is responsible for 63% of the total radiative forcing of Earth by long-lived greenhouse gases. Its contribution to the increase in radiative forcing is 87% for the past decade and 91% for the last five years. For about 10,000 years before the industrial revolution, the atmospheric abundance of CO2 was nearly constant at ~ 280 ppm.

We have radically altered the composition of the atmosphere, and the bill is coming due.

In his final testimony submitted to the Iowa Utilities Board on the proposed coal-fired power plant in Iowa, NASA’s James Hansen used a very provocative metaphor about the trains that deliver coal:

If we cannot stop the building of more coal-fired power plants, those coal trains will be death trains — no less gruesome than if they were boxcars headed to crematoria, loaded with uncountable irreplaceable species.

The President and CEO of the National Mining Association wrote Hansen a letter (posted here by Hansen with his response) complaining:

The suggestion that coal utilization for electricity generation can be equated with the systematic extermination of European Jewry is both repellent and preposterous…. I believe you owe the hard-working men and women of the coal mining and railroad industries an apology and respectfully request that you refrain from making such comments in the future.

Hansen’s reply was:

There is nothing scientifically invalid about the above paragraph. If this paragraph makes you uncomfortable, well, perhaps it should.

I have a slightly different view of the metaphor.

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As I mentioned in a previous post, many of my colleagues in climate-action circles are delighted at the detailed commitments the presidential candidates in the Democrat field are making about what they’ll do to fight global warming. It seems ungrateful to ask them for more. But ask we must.

We need to know what they’ll do to act quickly. And we need to hear their unifying vision for the post-carbon world.

On speed: We’ve all read Jim Hansen’s warning that the international community must take significant action within a decade if we wish to avoid the most dangerous consequences of global warming.

Now the head of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has moved up the deadline. In announcing the IPCC’s final report on Nov. 16, Rajendra Pachuari warned, “If there’s no action before 2012, that’s too late. What we do in the next two to three years will determine our future. This is the defining moment.”

So, the question we must ask the candidates is not only what they’ll do, but when they’ll do it. What, for example, is each candidate’s plan for the first 180 days of the presidency — the six-month honeymoon period between inauguration and the middle of August, when Congress traditionally takes its summer recess?

What will the next President do about our constipated Congress?

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A new study, “Climate Alarm: Disasters increase as climate change bites,” by Oxfam International finds:

Climatic disasters are on the increase as the Earth warms up — in line with scientific observations and computer simulations that model future climate. 2007 has been a year of climatic crises, especially floods, often of an unprecedented nature. They included Africa’s worst floods in three decades, unprecedented flooding in Mexico, massive floods in South Asia and heat waves and forest fires in Europe, Australia, and California. By mid November the United Nations had launched 15 ‘flash appeals’, the greatest ever number in one year. All but one were in response to climatic disasters.

This is no shock to Climate Progress readers, but we all need to remember that this is a human tragedy (and it is going to get much, much worse if we don’t reverse emissions trends within the decade), as the Oxfam study reports in its summary:

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