Climate Progress

I reprint this post from TPM election central (a must read blog for political junkies), having already borrowed its headline:

Priorities, priorities.

Check out this Karl Rove quote buried in a Fox News article about the threat Hurricane Gustav poses to the GOP’s convention plans:

“The Republicans can’t seem to get a break when it comes to August and when it comes to the weather,” said Rove, a FOX News analyst. “I know this is being thought a lot about in Washington and at the White House and discussed and I suspect they will monitor it carefully and figure out what to do.”

Yeah, Katrina (which hit in August 2005) was really rough on those Republicans, no question about it.

You can’t make this stuff up!

For more on the implications of Gustav on the RNC, see the Washington Post’s piece today, “GOP Considers Delaying Convention.” The piece warns that, “Gustav threatens to provide an untimely reminder of Hurricane Katrina. A new major storm along the Gulf Coast would renew memories of one of the low points of the Bush administration.” It also notes that, “A hurricane in the Gulf of Mexico could also cast unwelcome attention on the offshore oil rigs that McCain has championed as a solution to rising gasoline prices.”

But the article has two unintentionally funny parts:

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On August 23, 2005, a tropical depression formed 175 miles southeast of Nassau. By the next day, it had grown into tropical storm Katrina and was intensifying rapidly. Early in the evening on August 25, Hurricane Katrina made landfall near North Miami Beach. Even though it was only a Category 1 storm, with sustained wind speeds of about 80 miles per hour, it caused significant damage and flooding, and took 14 lives.

The hurricane’s quick nighttime trip across Florida barely fazed the storm. Entering the Gulf of Mexico’s warm waters quickly kicked Katrina into overdrive, like a supercharged engine on high-octane fuel. Hurricanes fuel themselves by continually sucking in and spinning up warm, moist air.

On August 28, Katrina reached Category 5 status, with sustained wind speeds of 160 mph and a pressure of 908 millibars. A few hours later, wind speeds hit 175 mph, which they maintained until the afternoon.

At 4:00 pm, the National Hurricane Center warned that local storm surges could hit 28 feet, and “Some levees in the Greater New Orleans Area could be overtopped,” a warning that was tragically ignored by federal, state, and local emergency officials. Over the next 14 hours, Katrina’s strength dropped steadily. When the hurricane’s center made landfall Monday morning, it was a strong Category 3, battering coastal Louisiana with wind speeds of about 127 mph. The central pressure of 920 millibars was the third lowest pressure every recorded for a storm hitting the U.S. mainland.

The devastation to the Gulf region was biblical. The death toll exceeded 1300. The damage exceeded $100 billion. [Combined with the effects of Hurricane Rita] two million people were forced to leave their homes, more than were displaced during the 1930’s Dust Bowl. One of the nation’s great cities was devastated.

About 20 miles to the west of the second Gulf landfall was the small town named Pass Christian, Mississippi, where my brother lived with his wife and son.

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The text of Obama’s convention speech has been released. Here is what he said about energy:

And for the sake of our economy, our security, and the future of our planet, I will set a clear goal as President: in ten years, we will finally end our dependence on oil from the Middle East.

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Okay, no more complaints the Dems aren’t talking climate change (see “Should you freak out at the lack of air time for climate change in Denver — or Minneapolis?“). Al Gore globally warmed the crowd in a terrific speech (be sure to read to the end where he compares Obama’s experience to Lincoln’s).

Gore pointed out that if he had won in 2000:

… we would not be denying the climate crisis; we’d be solving it.

Today, we face essentially the same choice we faced in 2000, though it may be even more obvious now, because John McCain, a man who has earned our respect on many levels, is now openly endorsing the policies of the Bush-Cheney White House and promising to actually continue them, the same policies all over again.

Hey, I believe in recycling, but that’s ridiculous.

And Gore took on McCain’s walking away from mandatory caps (see “McCain opposes ‘mandatory’ carbon limits“) and cozying up to Big Oil (see “You’ve heard of ‘polluters pay’? So has McCain.“:

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“I’m nothing special, in fact I’m a bit of a bore….” Okay, my 18-month-old daughter is an ABBA fan. Go figure.

But if I am preaching to the choir, as Brewster worries, then I must say, thank you for the music, for giving it to me.

I wouldn’t be blogging this much if you all weren’t tuning in and writing all your comments. I wouldn’t be adding new features like “Must have PPTs” if it weren’t for the response. And I’m hoping to add yet another feature, podcasts, in time for my brother to do interviews at the Republican National Convention.

As for preaching to the choir, well, last month alone, the choir was over 115,000 unique visitors (triple last year at this time) reading 3.3 pages each. I do get plenty of deniers and doubters, but I have no illusions that we change their mind and since I won’t put up with their posting long-debunked disinformation, I suspect most don’t stick around long. We also get some undecideds.

But I’ve long thought that giving progressives the best information and best arguments with a vigorous debate is about all you can do in our current political climate.

That said, I lot of the media read this — which is one of the reasons I do so many media critiques.

And so do a lot of young people. They get here through Google, unexpectedly enough, mainly researching reports on polar bears. In fact, here are my most widely read posts year to date (with # of views in parens):

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The uber-centrist Brookings Institution joins the climate alarmist realist crowd. President Strobe Talbott and VP for foreign policy studies Carlos Pascual explain in an Op-Ed:

The world may have only seven years to start reducing the annual buildup in greenhouse gas emissions that otherwise threatens global catastrophe within several decades.

The politics is a little bland for my taste, but that’s to be expected from Brookings, which has moved closer and closer to the center in recent years. But the whole piece is worth reading, if only to see just how far the informed center has moved:

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I interviewed the billionaire conservative oilman for Salon. My article and the interview are now online here. My goal was not to trip him up with the flaws in his plan, but just explore some of the key issues, especially the role of government in making it happen.

Talking to him it is clear he is very genuinely concerned about the impoverishment we face on our current laissez-faire energy path — a $10 trillion transfer of weath from Americans to rest of the world over the next decade, ending with $300 a barrel oil.

But I simply couldn’t get him to acknowledge that or all his claims that his proposal is nonpartisan, it is his fellow conservatives who stand in the way of achieving his dream. The subtitle of the piece tells the story: “The oil tycoon’s support of John McCain for president demonstrates that his heavily advertised plan for wind power is only hot air.”

Pickens says “The government’s going to have to provide corridors to transmit the wind energy to the east and west coast… Second you need to put a 10-year production tax credit.”

I couldn’t agree more. But then again, I’m not in Congress. So I asked him the obvious political question: If you looked at the votes in the last year that have held up just a one-year extension of the production tax credit, the vast majority of Republicans have consistently voted against that, while the vast majority of Democrats voted for it. “So let me ask you, how do we, how do we get Republicans to support that kind of investment in renewables.”

Salon sharply edited down Pickens’ rambling answer to my key question, but I think it is worthwhile to see the whole thing:
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I am starting a new feature and a new category here on Climate Progress for Must-have PowerPoint Slides. I’ll begin with my favorite new slide, which shows just how stable the climate has been over the 10,000-year period that allowed modern human civilization to develop and flourish (click figure for larger version):

The slide is a must-have because it captures the risk we are taking while also providing a quick visual rebuttal to a very common denier talking point, one that NASA administrator Michael Griffin of all people repeated last year (see “And the Moon is Made of Green Cheese“):

To assume that [global warming] is a problem is to assume that the state of Earth’s climate today is the optimal climate, the best climate that we could have or ever have had and that we need to take steps to make sure that it doesn’t change…. I guess I would ask which human beings — where and when — are to be accorded the privilege of deciding that this particular climate that we have right here today, right now is the best climate for all other human beings. I think that’s a rather arrogant position for people to take.

Seriously! Needless to say, his employee, James Hansen rightly called those remarks “ignorant and arrogant.” He might have added “suicidal.”

So I had to have this slide after I saw it in a recent presentation from my friend Bob Corell, chair of the Arctic Climate Impact Assessment and now Director of Global Change Programs at the Heinz Center.

And it’s not just Griffin pushing this nonsense. One of the Cato Institute climate experts currently debating the online, Indur Goklany, just advanced the following argument against my call to stabilize at 450 ppm or less:

… there is no guarantee that stabilizing CO₂ at 450 ppm would optimize human or environmental well-being. For all we know, stabilizing at 750 may be more optimal.

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“After all, just 20 years ago scientists were worried about the new Ice Age.” This myth is so potent for deniers from Michael Crichton to George Will to Senator James Inhofe that even word guru and strategist Frank “death tax” Luntz made it a recommended line of attack in his super-slimy 2002 memo to conservatives on how best to cast doubt on climate science.

Why do deniers love it so? It makes present global-warming fears seem faddish, saying current climate science is nothing more than finger-in-the-wind guessing. This attack appeals especially to conservatives who want to link their attack on climate scientists to their favorite attack against progressive presidential candidates — that they are flip-floppers.

The myth has been utterly debunked in the scientific literature (see “Another denier talking point — ‘global cooling’ — bites the dust,” RealClimate here and here, “Was an imminent Ice Age predicted in the ’70’s by scientists, in scientific journals? No.” and Skeptical Science).

In fact, 27 years ago Thursday, James Hansen and six other NASA atmospheric physicists, published a seminal article in Science, “Climate Impact of Increasing Atmospheric Carbon Dioxide.” The paper has a number of caveats, as befits a major projection before modern climate models and modern supercomputers were available, before we had decades of verifying observations, and before we knew just how fast greenhouse gas emissions would rise. But the analysis bears up unbelievably well — any one of us would be delighted if we published something a quarter century ago that was this prescient:

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That headline is lifted from Drudge. Needless to say, he left out “… and on the third anniversary of Hurricane Katrina, where both Bush and McCain were AWOL” (see TP’s “As Katrina hit, McCain celebrated 69th birthday with Bush“).

Track the storm with the National Hurricane Center here. Best hurricane blog here.

Readers of this blog know that my brother lost his home in Katrina three years ago, which is probably the main reason I began this blog in the first place (see “100 Katrinas and the Launch of Climate Progress“).

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