Climate Progress

Global warming is hot. But who knew it was this hot?

Climate Progress had 50,000 unique visitors in December and 20,000 last May. I don’t expect this kind of growth to continue, but then I never expected the growth of the last year in the first place.

I usually post web stats only on the anniversary of the CP’s launch and at the end of the year, but I wanted to share this milestone with all my readers and thank everyone for helping set this monthly record.

Sir Isaac Newton is one of the towering geniuses in all human history. Washington Post columnist Charles Krauthammer … not so much.

Krauthammer has written a classic anti-science screed, “Carbon Chastity: The First Commandment of the Church of the Environment,” that recasts many favorite anti-scientific denier memes in odd terms. You still hear and see all of these today, so let me touch on a few of them. And as I discuss in Part 2, the article is most useful because it is a very clear statement of the real reason conservatives don’t believe in climate science– they hate the solution.

As a physicist, my favorite denier talking point is his strange version of the old claim that “scientists are flip floppers, constantly changing their theories.” He writes:

If Newton’s laws of motion could, after 200 years of unfailing experimental and experiential confirmation, be overthrown, it requires religious fervor to believe that global warming — infinitely more untested, complex and speculative — is a closed issue.

Now that is a strange claim. Newton’s Laws of Motion are still taught in every high school, in every introductory physics class in college, and even in graduate physics classes. Indeed, they are widely used everywhere to explain and estimate wide varieties of motion. Heck, even NASA still uses them: “The motion of an aircraft through the air can be explained and described by physical principals discovered over 300 years ago by Sir Isaac Newton.”

But Professor Krauthammer says they were overthrown and that 200 years of experiments and observations were wrong. What gives? Why aren’t all our planes falling out of the sky?

Newton’s laws are “excellent approximations at the scales and speeds of everyday life” that, along with his law of gravitation and calculus techniques, “provided for the first time a unified quantitative explanation for a wide range of physical phenomena.”

They fail in very special cases — speeds close to the speed of light (where you need Einstein’s special theory of relativity), near large gravitational fields (where you need to Einstein’s general theory of relativity) or at a very, very small scales (where you need quantum mechanics). Interestingly, many of the laws of those three theories are written in the same form as Newton’s and they revert to Newton’s equations for everyday life (see an example at the end of this post).

So Krauthammer’s statement is absurdly misleading, since he is implying that “200 years of unfailing experimental and experiential confirmation” were “overthrown” — when they weren’t. So his implication that all the unfailing experimental and experiential confirmation of climate science will be overthrown is equally absurd. Indeed, anybody seeking to replace climate science will have to come up with a more comprehensive theory that still explains everything we know from existing climate science and observations.

This may seem like a small point, but in fact it is a large point, one that former president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, John Holdren, has repeatedly made. Let me discuss this in the context of another anti-scientific talking point of Krauthammer’s:

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I have been saying for quite some time that if we don’t act immediately to make deep cuts in CO2 emissions then we are headed towards the unmitigated catastrophe of 1000 ppm (see my August 2007 post, “Are Scientists Overestimating — or Underestimating — Climate Change“). Turns out that’s what Nobel laureate F. Sherwood Rowland believes.

Rowland is one of the world’s foremost authorities on atmospheric chemisty “who shared a Nobel Prize for his work revealing the threat to the ozone layer from CFC’s and similar synthetic chemicals,” as NYT’s Andy Revkin explained (here). Wednesday, Revkin

asked Dr. Rowland two quick questions. The first: Given the nature of the climate and energy challenges, what is his best guess for the peak concentration of carbon dioxide?

His answer? “1,000 parts per million.”

My second question was, what will that look like?

“I have no idea,” Dr. Rowland said. He was not smiling.

Readers of Climate Progress have an idea, since I have done my best to describe this grim future that scientists rarely model because they can’t believe humanity would be so self-destructive as to let it happen:

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Science has published a major new study, “The Sensitivity of Polar Ozone Depletion to Proposed Geoengineering Schemes” (subs. req’d). That study finds:

The large burden of sulfate aerosols injected into the stratosphere by the eruption of Mount Pinatubo in 1991 cooled Earth and enhanced the destruction of polar ozone in the subsequent few years. The continuous injection of sulfur into the stratosphere has been suggested as a “geoengineering” scheme to counteract global warming. We use an empirical relationship between ozone depletion and chlorine activation to estimate how this approach might influence polar ozone. An injection of sulfur large enough to compensate for surface warming caused by the doubling of atmospheric CO2 would strongly increase the extent of Arctic ozone depletion during the present century for cold winters and would cause a considerable delay, between 30 and 70 years, in the expected recovery of the Antarctic ozone hole.

Of course, this geo-engineering scheme has lots of other problem. An earlier study noted:

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McCain has put out a climate policy that, like Bush’s, wouldn’t help the climate (see McCain speech, Part 2: Relying on offsets = Rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic). Wednesday he announced he won’t even bother showing up to vote on his friend Joe Lieberman’s climate bill because of insufficient subsides (read “pork”) for nuclear power (see here) three weeks after saying he supported it (see here).

Now will the media finally stop idolizing this Bush clone who has mastered W’s art of saying one thing, to get favorable media coverage, and then doing the exact opposite, either to please his base or because that’s what he really believes?

Indeed, given that Time said earlier this monththat McCain’s “stance on global warming –it’s real, and we need to deal with it –is his campaign’s best evidence that he’s not just like George W. Bush,” it would seem we are left with a McCain who is just like George W. Bush.

Let’s see if the traditional media start to change their coverage from the nonsense peddled in stories like “On Policy, Obama Breaks Little New Ground,” a frothy front-page McCain press release article by the Washington Post. That article claims the Illinois Senator has supposedly “dismissed the importance of policy proposals” — even though he actually has a detailed climate plan that would actually save the climate (see “Obama’s excellent energy and climate plan”). The Post then actually claims

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NASA’s James Hansen has posted a “summary of recent attempts to provide information and interact with governors re actions needed to stem climate change” here. As he explains in the accompanying e-mail:

This Sunday evening (June 1) I will give a talk at Cary Hall in Lexington, Massachusetts a few hundred yards from where the first shots of the American Revolution were fired. Perhaps there is an analogy between the gap that developed between the best interests of the American people and policies of despotic King George and the gap that has developed between the best interests of the public (and nature) and the policies (mainly those related to energy) that we now live under.

A different sort of revolution, within the democratic framework, is needed, but it won’t be easy. What makes it a hair-raising drama, with an outcome far from assured, is the combination of climate system inertia and resulting planetary energy imbalance, energy system inertia, and climate system tipping points.

The event referred to above (7:30 PM, June 1) is hosted by the Lexington Global Warming Action Coalition (info at www.lexgwac.org). It starts with a short talk by Mark Bowen, author of Censoring Science, followed by my talk on the science, and then open discussion. There is a $5 admission. I have no financial interest in the book or event (but I probably get in free).

Needless to say, if you live in the Boston area, this is a must see.

There is one policy area where I pretty strongly disagree with Hansen. He calls for:

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Part 1 looked at why “The permafrost won’t be perma for long.” Part 2 looked at whether the potential destruction of the tundra represents “The point of no return” for the climate, necessitating that we keep atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide below 450 ppm or else risk going to 800 ppm to 1000 ppm. Here I examine two local amplifying feedbacks that further threaten the permafrost — forests and fires.

Reduced snow cover and albedo (reflectivity) in the summertime Arctic landscape, caused by global warming, has added local atmospheric heating “similar in magnitude to the regional heating expected over multiple decades from a doubling of atmospheric CO₂” (Science, subs. req’d). That same Science study warns “Continuation of current trends in shrub and tree expansion could further amplify this atmospheric heating 2-7 times.”

The point is that if you convert a white landscape to a boreal forest, the surface suddenly starts collecting a lot more solar energy. That trend is occurring now, as seen in these two photos from a recent ScienceNews article, “Boreal forests shift north.”

“Upper photo taken in 1962 shows tundra-dominated mountain slope in Siberian Urals. A 2004 photo of the same site, below, shows conifers were setting up dense stand of forest.”

Now, another major study warns that the warming-driven northward march of vegetation poses yet another threat to the tundra.

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In March, British prime minister Tony Blair launched the Breaking the Climate Deadlock initiative to promote a new global agreement on climate change.

Today he has an Op-Ed the in the Washington Post, “Leading On Climate Change: How Action in Congress Can Move the World,” in which he argues

The climate change bill that senators are to begin debating next week is a hugely important signal of intent on behalf of U.S. legislators. Yes, negotiations could still alter the legislation. But the bill’s core proposition is correct: Unless the United States radically reduces its greenhouse gas emissions, along with other major emitters, the damage to the climate will be irreversible.

Well, the bill certainly does not put this country on a path to “radically” reduce GHGs (see “Boxer bill update: Probably no U.S. CO2 emissions cut until after 2025“), but I agree with Blair the vote will be cast in mostly symbolic terms. I hope Boxer can at least get a majority vote in the Senate, but not if she has the water down the bill even more. Enough is enough.

It must be said that Blair is years too late in his strong public pleas for U.S. action. Almost exactly a year ago The Guardian had reported: “Tony Blair believes he is close to persuading George Bush to accept an ambitious plan to bring the world’s greatest polluters into international partnership to fight climate change for the first time.” As I wrote at the time, “Yes, and monkees will fly out of my — but let it go” (see “Bush 100, Blair 0. Game over“).

Blair blew it big time as PM on the climate issue. Still, it’s good to see him using his high profile now to press for climate action. Here is the rest of Blair’s argument:

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This is eco-Gingrich’s new energy strategy for America. Seriously. So much for Andy Revkin’s claim that Gingrich is part of a “move to the pragmatic center on climate and energy.”

Okay, the slogan is slightly different (see here). But I changed it so it would be factually accurate. After all, the Administration’s own Energy Information Administration explained in 2004 how ineffectual this strategy is. In a 2004 Congressional-requested “Analysis of Oil and Gas Production in ANWR“:

It is expected that the price impact of ANWR coastal plain production might reduce world oilprices by as much as 30 to 50 cents per barrel [in 2025].

Don’t spend it all in one place, American public! [Note to Gingrich: There are 42 gallons in a barrel.] EIA continues:

Assuming that world oil markets continue to work as they do today, the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries could countermand any potential price impact of ANWR coastal plain production by reducing its exports by an equal amount.

Curses, foiled again!

But how is drilling for more oil — and exploiting shale oil and opposing the Warner-Lieberman climate Bil, both of which are part of Gingrich’s video message — and releasing more greenhouse gases part of “”entrepreneurial environmentalism,” or a call to conservatives to “embrace their inner Teddy Roosevelt”? You’ll have to ask Andy Revkin, E. O. Wilson, and the rest of the people suckered by Newt’s spin (see below). (more…)

Price does matter. So does public perception of likely future prices. As it becomes increasingly clear that high gasoline prices are not a fluke, Americans are adjusting their driving habits.

March 2008 saw “the sharpest yearly drop for any month in FHWA history” of total vehicle miles traveled (aka VMT) according to the Federal Highway Administration’s monthly report on “Traffic Volume Trends.” [Note to FHWA -- you have mis-labeled the report here as a second February 2008 report.]

In March 2008, Americans drove 246 billion milles, compared to 257 billion in March 2007. Indeed, the March 2008 figure is lower than the March 2004 figure. To see just how remarkable that is, look at the annual vehicle-distance traveled data (in billions of miles) since 1983 (this is a moving 12-month total):

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