Joe « Climate Progress

“The Web's most influential climate-change blogger” — Time Magazine A Project of Center for American Progress Action Fund

Author Archive for Joe

Honey, I shrunk the GOP, Part 4: Moderate GOP candidate yields to angry conservative. Gingrich says if this keeps up, “we’ll make Pelosi speaker for life and guarantee Obama’s re-election.”

Sunday, November 1st, 2009

We’ve seen how GOP conservatives want to cleanse their party of moderates — see “Honey, I shrunk the GOP, Part 1: Conservatives vow to purge all members who support clean energy or science-based policy.” Even Lindsay Graham (R-SC), an American Conservative Union “Senate Standout,” among the 20 most conservative U.S. Senators in 2008, is being attacked for even daring to engage in bipartisan efforts to solve our climate and energy security problem (see Teabaggers try to “flush” Graham out of GOP, calling him “traitor” and “RINO” and “wussypants, girly-man, half-a-sissy”; Graham responds, “We’re not going to be the party of angry white guys”).

Well, Senator, not only does Glenn Beck say “I’m going to stick with the angry people,” Mike Pence, chair of House GOP Conference, sides with Beck (see here).

If you need it further proof that there’s a growing purity test for GOP nominees for national office, that the angry people are taking over the party, consider this bombshell from New York:

A moderate Republican whose candidacy for an upstate New York Congressional seat had set off a storm of national conservative opposition, abruptly withdrew on Saturday, emboldening the right at a time when the Republican Party is enmeshed in a debate over how to rebuild itself.

The candidate, Dede Scozzafava, said she was suspending her campaign in the face of collapsing support and evidence that she was heading for a loss in a three-way race on Tuesday involving Douglas L. Hoffman, running on the Conservative Party line, and Bill Owens, a Democrat.

As TP reports, “big tent” and “establishment” Republicans — such as Gingrich, the RNC, and the NRCC — backed Scozzafava whereas “purists” — such as Sarah Palin, Rick Santorum, and Bill Kristol — backed Hoffman.

What test did Scozzafava fail:

Post by Joe in Advocacy Content, Politics | 8 Responses

Contest: Come up with a title for my book

Saturday, October 31st, 2009

My publisher and I still haven’t come up with a title that works. The problem is that there are a great many books on climate and/or clean energy solutions coming out right now many with similar sounding titles.

I do think this collection of blog posts accomplishes what I try to do on my blog — save readers time, cut through the crap and focus on what’s important in climate science, solution, and politics (with a hefty dose of old-media critiques). The trick is it making that all clear in a few, catchy words.

I prefer figures of speech — The Hype About Hydrogen is my best-selling book. And don’t worry too much about the subtitle — it will explain what the book covers, and I have a pretty good idea for that, but don’t want to thwart any of your creativity by putting out any ideas right now.

If we end up choosing your suggestion (or something very similar), you’ll get free copy of the book (woo-hoo) and you can write a guest blog post! For similar sounding suggestions, the earliest entry wins. You can build on someone else’s idea — in fact, that’s usually how the best title is ultimately found.

Enter as many suggestions as you want. Do use Google to check whether the title is sufficiently original.

Post by Joe in Climate Progress | 198 Responses

Energy Secretary Steven Chu on home weatherization: Saving money by saving energy

Saturday, October 31st, 2009

The guest blogger today is the Nobel prize-winning Secretary of Energy Steven Chu, by way of HuffPost. As you’ll see, he’s the mirror image of Bush’s Energy Secretary (see “Bodman as Orwell: DOE erases ‘most successful’ weatherization program from website“).

I’ve always been a bit of an energy efficiency nut.

I’ve made it my mission to cut the utility bills at every home we’ve owned. Long before I learned about the risks of climate change, I was fanatical about energy efficiency because I’m cheap.

Whenever my wife and I move into a new home, I check the attic for adequate insulation. I look for leaks around doors and windows and install a programmable thermostat if needed. In our latest home, I’ve also insulated our water pipes with inexpensive foam from our local hardware store and painted mastic sealant on the seams of the air ducts. When our hot water heater needed replacement, we installed a tank-less water heater which decreased our summer-time gas use by 50%. In the summer, we found that setting the thermostat at 77 – 78 degrees and a gentle breeze from a fan was all that is required to be comfortable.

So far, we are on track to cut our utility bills by about half compared to the previous owner, but we are doing more. Our home has two large skylights that funnel too much heat out in the winter and let too much heat in the summer. We intend to replace these older windows with modern widows with five times the efficiency.

Taking these steps is called “weatherization.” I would rather call it “saving money by saving energy.” Over the next several years, we want to help millions of American families seize the same opportunity to cut their utility bills by making their homes and appliances more energy efficient while increasing comfort.

We are making a major down payment on this effort through the President’s economic recovery plan.

Post by Joe in Solutions | 9 Responses

Republicans for Enviromental Protection push back on Big Oil’s attack on Lindsey Graham

Friday, October 30th, 2009

A major denier group has started running falsehood-filled ads going after Lindsey Graham (R-SC), the conservative gamechanger who just made a climate bill likely. As Media Matters explains in their ad fact check:

Using false oil industry talking points, the Big Oil funded American Energy Alliance produced an ad attacking Sen. Lindsey Graham for his willingness to work with Democrats on clean energy jobs legislation. Contrary to the allegations made in the ad, legislation increasing our investment in clean energy technologies would create jobs in every state and help America become more energy independent, all for less than a quarter a day.

Now Republicans for Environmental Protection (REP) are pushing back with their own ad:

The inside-the-beltway GOP and conservative leadership have strayed far from their original roots with their single-minded determination to stop all efforts to preserve a livable climate. The photo and Goldwater quote above come from the REP website (as does the photo/quote below). Here is REP’s news release that goes along with this ad:

Post by Joe in Politics | 9 Responses

Must-have PPTs: GOP witness details harsh impact Bush-Cheney policies had on U.S. manufacturing jobs

Thursday, October 29th, 2009

The US manufacturing sector has lost over 5.1 million jobs in the last 10 years. Output and investment per GDP has fallen consistently and imports have risen sharply. (See charts below) This is not the time to implement risky unproven climate policy. The US economy cannot afford to lose any more jobs or shutdown facilities. Approximately 40,000 manufacturing plants have closed during the seven years ending in 2008. We have lost eleven industries that we were once dominant since the late 1990s. By late 2008, the US trade deficit with China alone was running at close to $1 billion per day, amounting to more than $90 per month or more than $1100 per year for every American.

That’s from one of the strangest pieces of testimony you’re ever going to see — by Paul Cicio, Executive Director, Industrial Energy Consumers of America.

Cicio was the GOP witness at the landmark hearings for the Senate climate and clean energy jobs bill today. He seemed to think that a strong argument against the clean energy bill was that the U.S. manufacturing sector has been devastated by eight years of conservative rule. I have argued many times that conservative do-nothing energy and economic policies led to sharp increases in energy costs (see “Senate GOP propose 25% ‘Do-Nothing’ energy tax on Americans“) and sharp decreases in US competitiveness (see “Invented here, sold there”).

But Cicio has the most (unintentionally) damning set of slides I’ve ever seen, a few of which I’m going to reproduce here since I’m sure progressives will want to use them in explaining why we must never go back to the Bush-Cheney policies. The figure above shows how conservative policies have killed manufacturing jobs. And lest you think that it is purely a coincidence that the manufacturing sector has been slammed by Bush-Cheney, Cicio provides this jaw-dropping figure which goes back another decade:

Post by Joe in Advocacy Content, Clean energy jobs bill, Must-have PPTs | 17 Responses

Contrarian Chic: Why can’t the media tell the difference between an attack on dubious ‘conventional’ wisdom and an attack on genuine scientific wisdom?

Thursday, October 29th, 2009

The Atlantic Monthly named Freeman Dyson a “Brave Thinker” for the “contrarian view” he’s taken on climate change. They tout his quote, “I like to express heretical opinions. They might even happen to be true.”

Like the authors of the error-riddled Superfreakonomics, Dyson is contrarian for the sake of contrarianism — the truth is secondary. Coincidentally, the same is true of the reporter who profiled him for the NY Times magazine — see Media stunner: When asked “Does it matter, from a journalistic point of view, whether [Freeman Dyson is] right or whether he’s wrong?” his NYT profiler replies “Oh, absolutely not.”

In fact, the media’s adoration of contrarians means it is a lot less brave to be a contrarian these days than it used to be in, say, Galileo’s day. Dave Roberts at Grist makes that point in a terrific piece (reposted below):

Willing to risk a fawning NYT profile … freeeeeedooooom!
Is Freeman Dyson really “brave”?

… What leads people to think that entire areas of climate science and policy, the subject of close study by thousands of very smart people all over the globe every day, can be overturned with facile points of logic and Silver Bullets Nobody’s Thought Of?

Well, it ain’t bravery….

On the other hand, simply repeat the broad global consensus— climate change is an urgent problem that warrants coordinated action to reduce GHG emissions—and you get nowhere. Boooring.

(I can’t tell you how many back-and-forths I’ve had with media outlets where I try to explain that the thing most people think is right actually is right, and they say, maybe so, but that’s not going to titillate our readers.)

Ditto! Scientific wisdom was, like, so last year.

Krugman had it right in his first take on the Superfreaks: “If you’re going to get into issues that are both important and the subject of serious study, like the fate of the planet, you’d better be very careful not to stray over the line between being counterintuitive and being just plain, unforgivably wrong.” Last week, in “Contrarianism without consequences,” the Nobel laureate added:

Post by Joe in Media | 11 Responses

Limbaugh rejects an apology for Revkin

Thursday, October 29th, 2009

When we last left the most vociferous intellectual leader in the conservative movement, he was being widely condemned for telling NY Times environment reporter Revkin: “Why don’t you just go kill yourself?” Limbaugh’s remarks were far beyond the pale even for his brand of extremism.

Yesterday, Limbaugh closed his show with a mention of this incident (audio here):

(music up)…Another excursion into broadcast excellence gone, in the blink of an eye. The fastest three hours of media. You remember last week I had a little fun with this New York Times guy Revkin who seriously considered the carbon limiting implications of limiting childbirths to one per family and I suggested show us some leadership on this. I mean you’re always telling everybody else to not have any go ahead and show us how it works. Die and save the planet. And he was profoundly offended by this and I’m told wants an apology…. (music up, end)

In the comments section of his blog, Revkin takes an Uber-optimistic spin on what looks to me like another slap in the face:

Post by Joe in Politics | 4 Responses

Breaking: Toshiba tells San Antonio its new twin $13 billion nukes will cost $4 billion more! The city balks. This looks like a job for clean energy.

Wednesday, October 28th, 2009

One of the very first new nuclear power plants proposed to be built in the U.S. in over 30 years just hit a brick wall. It’s the same brick wall — absurdly high cost — being hit around the world (see “Nuclear Bombshell: $26 Billion cost — $10,800 per kilowatt! — killed Ontario nuclear bid” and “Turkey’s only bidder for first nuclear plant offers a price of 21 cents per kilowatt-hour“).

The San Antonio Express News reports today:

The estimated cost of two new nuclear reactors proposed by CPS Energy has gone up as much as $4 billion, prompting the City Council to postpone Thursday’s vote on the project’s financing until January.

CPS officials and Mayor Julián Castro, flanked by every council member except David Medina, held a hastily arranged news conference Tuesday afternoon announcing the delay.

CPS interim General Manager Steve Bartley said the utility’s main contractor on the project, Toshiba Inc., informed officials that the cost of the reactors would be “substantially greater” than CPS’ estimate of $13 billion, which includes financing.

The San Antonio Current notes that “After what can only be considered a sustained Certified Sales Event by CPS Energy matched by Mammoth Media Buildup,” the City Council was set to vote for the $400 Million bond issue this Thursday, which would have put the city “on an irreversible date with” the Toshiba nuke.

Occasional guest CP blogger Craig Severance not only tipped me off to this, but in fact predicted this price rise last month in a post, “San Antonio: New Economy Leader or Nuclear Guinea Pig?” that offers some saner and cheaper clean energy alternatives, which I’ll reprint below.

If you want to see an especially painful press conference from a Mayor who had been putting his foot on the nuclear accelerator, watch this:

Even before the latest jump price jump, the city was planning “a 9.5 percent base rate increase to cover the nuclear expansion and the utility’s other capital projects.” Such preemptive rate increases years before the plant would even deliver a single kilowatt hour are inevitable when you pursue nuclear power these days, as Florida has painfully found out (see “What do you get when you buy a nuke? You get a lot of delays and rate increases….”).

New nuclear plants are so expensive they are likely to provide electricity at some 15 cents per kilowatt hour (see “Nuclear power, Part 2: The price is not right“) — or possibly more than 20 cents/kWh (see “Exclusive analysis, Part 1: The staggering cost of new nuclear power“). The precise answer — 50% higher than average U.S. electricity prices or more than 100% higher — is hard to know since it is all but impossible to find a utility willing to stand behind a firm price in a rate hearing.

Some city Council members are now rethinking their commitment to the nuke:

Post by Joe in Solutions | 21 Responses

Arctic sea ice is refreezing quite slowly. Go figure!

Wednesday, October 28th, 2009

When records were being set for loss of summer Arctic sea ice area (2007) and sea ice volume (2008), the deniers spent all their time talking about how quickly the ice refroze in the ensuing months. Now, they are strangely quiet on the remarkably slow refreezing we’re seeing.

Why the slow refreezing this year? I’ll post the answer from the National Snow and Ice Data Center at the end. First, some background.

“The recent sea-ice retreat is larger than in any of the (19) IPCC [climate] models,” as Tore Furevik, Vice director at Bjerknes Centre for Climate Research, pointed out in a May 2006 talk (big PPT here) on climate system feedbacks.

And that was before another staggering drop in Arctic sea-ice area in 2007 (see “Arctic Ice shrinks by an Alaska plus a Texas“).

And then we hit a record low volume in 2008 (see here), as this remarkable figure shows:

Post by Joe in Science | 17 Responses

University Of Kentucky approves new $7 million industry-funded dorm named after “Coal”

Wednesday, October 28th, 2009

You can’t make this stuff up, as this Think Progress repost makes clear.

A group led by Alliance Coal CEO Joseph Craft recently proposed donating $7 million to the University of Kentucky for a new dorm for the men’s basketball team. The catch, however, is that the dorm would have to be named after Craft’s true love: coal. The proposed change sparked intense protests from local environmentalists and students. One professor said that as universities become “models for new energy sources,” putting “coal” on a prominent building could “make it difficult to attract top students and faculty members to the university.”

[JR: Yes, coal industry will spend millions for a new dorm -- and yet Massey Energy refused to fund a new school so students can move away from coal processing plant!]

Yesterday afternoon, the University of Kentucky Board of Trustees voted 16-3 to approve the proposal for the new dorm, which will be named the “Wildcat Coal Lodge.” Significantly, two of the “no” votes were from faculty representative Ernie Yanarella and Student Government President Ryan Smith, who said he opposed the motion “as a voice for the student body.”

Students in the audience were reportedly not allowed to speak at the meeting. After the vote, people began chanting, “Move forward, not backward,” forcing the trustees to temporarily recess. More on the events at the meeting:

Post by Joe in Greenwashing | 6 Responses

Memo to Baucus: Your state’s trees are being ravaged by warming-driven pests now and Montana faces 175% to 400% increase in wildfire burn area

Wednesday, October 28th, 2009

Sen. Max Baucus said Tuesday he has “serious reservations” about climate legislation unveiled by his Democratic colleagues, signaling trouble for a proposal that is stronger in certain respects than a bill passed by the House.

In an effort to inject drama and conflict into a hearing that lack both, the WSJ and other media outlets trumpeted the fact that Baucus said he thought Boxer’s proposed bill was too strong.

In fact, it’s obvious to everyone else that one couldn’t get 60 votes for Boxer’s bill and the final bill is going to be different (see Breakthrough Senate climate partnership: Graham (R-SC) and Kerry (D-MA) join forces and assert they are “convinced that we have found both a framework for climate legislation to pass Congress“). The WSJ story never mentioned this fact, but ominously writes, “Supporters of the climate proposal can ill afford to lose any Democratic votes in the Senate, given stiff Republican opposition.” Baucus himself said (full remarks at the end):

I support passing common-sense climate legislation that reduces greenhouse gas emissions while protecting our economy. And the key word in that sentence is “passing.”

So Baucus will be voting for the final bill.

One part of the media focused on the real story that Montanans are increasingly concerned about: Climate change is already hitting their state hard now and is poised to devastate it utterly. American Public Media’s Marketplace has be done a terrific multipart series on climate change, which can be accessed here, along with a map of how different regions of the country are being affected now and how they are likely to be hit in the future.

The first piece “Climate change in our own backyards,” tells the amazing story of the warming-driven bark beetle infestation around Helena. And yes, this is the same exact story that the NYT screwed up in July (see “Signs of global warming are everywhere, but if the New York Times can’t tell the story (twice!), how will the public hear it?“).

The figure above is from a major recent study, which projects a staggering increase in “wildfire activity and carbonaceous aerosol concentrations in the western United States” — “with the forests of the Pacific Northwest and Rocky Mountains experiencing the greatest increases of 78% and 175% respectively” by 2050. The graph “shows the percentage increase in area burned by wildfires, from the present-day to the 2050s,” if we only see an “average global warming of 1.6 degrees Celsius (3 degrees Fahrenheit) by 2050.” If we don’t start reducing emissions sharply — sharper than Baucus wants — the UK Met Office says the plausible worst-case is 13-18°F warming over most of U.S. by 2060. Montana would be an inferno.

You can see how serious Marketplace is about getting the climate story right from the very first words of Kai Ryssdal (audio and transcript here):

Post by Joe in Media, Science | 14 Responses

Washington Post mocks Inhofe as “the last flat-earther”

Wednesday, October 28th, 2009

It must be very lonely being the last flat-earther.

Sen. Jim Inhofe of Oklahoma, committed climate-change denier, found himself in just such a position Tuesday morning as the Senate environment committee, on which he is the ranking Republican, took up legislation on global warming. Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) was in talks with Democrats over a compromise bill — the traitor! And as Inhofe listened, fellow Republicans on the committee — turncoats! — made it clear that they no longer share, if they ever did, Inhofe’s view that man-made global warming is the “greatest hoax ever perpetrated on the American people.”

… Agitated, his utterances disjointed, Inhofe went on: “Now, I also was — was kind of — I don’t want any of the media to think just because I had to sit here and listen to our good friend Senator Kerry for 28 minutes, that I don’t have responses to everything he said.”Nobody doubted that Inhofe had a response. The doubt was whether the response would make any sense.

That’s Dana Milbank in his regular “Washington sketch” column writing about yesterday’s Senate climate hearing. Milbank is being kind not to count his fellow WashPost colleagues George Will and Fred Hiatt in calling Inhofe (R-OIL) the last flat-earther (see “WashPost recycles another denier WSJ op-ed, this time from coal apologist Bjorn Lomborg. Funny how two new senior Post editors came from the WSJ” and “Memo to Post: If George Will quotes a lie, it’s still a lie“).

If you’ve been dissed by the WashPost as being too head-in-the-sand on global warming, you must be buried up to your toes. Milbank shows just how out of the mainstream, how devoid of sense Inhofe has become by quoting from his fellow Republicans on the science:

Post by Joe in Clean energy jobs bill | 17 Responses

The weak El Niño appears to be strengthening, as expected, so record temperatures will continue.

Tuesday, October 27th, 2009

Two weeks ago I blogged that NASA reports hottest June to September on record; NOAA says “weak” El Niño “expected to strengthen and last through” winter.

NOAA’s National Weather Service Climate Prediction Center (and most other models) have been predicting for a couple of months that the weak El Niño would strengthen, but it hasn’t. Until now, that is.

This sea surface temperature (SST) data is from the NOAA’s October 26 weekly update on the El Niño/Southern oscillation, “ENSO Cycle: Recent Evolution, Current Status and Predictions“:

It is the warming in the Nino 3.4 region of the Pacific that is typically used to define an El Niño. The region can be seen in this figure:

Post by Joe in Science | 14 Responses

Obama announces $3.4 billion in smart grid investments “to build a clean energy superhighway.” Creating a clean energy economy will require an “all-hands-on-deck approach similar to the mobilization that preceded World War II…. I also believe that such a comprehensive piece of legislation that is taking place right now in Congress is going to be critical.”

Tuesday, October 27th, 2009

The President said today that we’re having a debate “between those who are ready to seize the future and those who are afraid of the future.”

ARCADIA, FLORIDA – Speaking at Florida Power and Light’s (FPL) DeSoto Next Generation Solar Energy Center, President Barack Obama today announced the largest single energy grid modernization investment in U.S. history, funding a broad range of technologies that will spur the nation’s transition to a smarter, stronger, more efficient and reliable electric system. The end result will promote energy-saving choices for consumers, increase efficiency, and foster the growth of renewable energy sources like wind and solar.

The $3.4 billion in Smart Grid Investment Grant awards are part of the American Reinvestment and Recovery Act, and will be matched by industry funding for a total public-private investment worth over $8 billion. Applicants state that the projects will create tens of thousands of jobs, and consumers in 49 states will benefit from these investments in a stronger, more reliable grid. Full listings of the grant awards by category and state are available HERE and HERE. A map of the awards is available HERE.

An analysis by the Electric Power Research Institute estimates that the implementation of smart grid technologies could reduce electricity use by more than 4 percent by 2030. That would mean a savings of $20.4 billion for businesses and consumers around the country, and $1.6 billion for Florida alone — or $56 in utility savings for every man, woman and child in Florida.

One-hundred private companies, utilities, manufacturers, cities and other partners received awards today, including FPL which will use its $200 million in funding to install 2.6 million smart meters and other technology that will cut energy costs for its customers…. The awards announced today represent the largest group of Recovery Act awards ever made in a single day and the largest batch of Recovery Act clean energy grant awards to-date.

The White House announced this major down payment on the effort to jumpstart the transition to a clean energy economy. Obama himself said:

So at this moment, there is something big happening in America when it comes to creating a clean energy economy…. And I have often said that the creation of such an economy is going to require nothing less than the sustained effort of an entire nation — an all-hands-on-deck approach similar to the mobilization that preceded World War II or the Apollo Project. And I also believe that such a comprehensive piece of legislation that is taking place right now in Congress is going to be critical. That’s going to finally make clean energy the profitable kind of energy in America — legislation that will make the best use of resources we have in abundance, through clean coal technology, safe nuclear power, sustainably grown biofuels, and energy we harness from the wind, waves, and sun.

I’ll repost Obama’s entire speech at the end. It is a good follow on to his M.I.T. speech.

Here’s more on where the $3.4 billion went and its projected impact:

Post by Joe in Clean energy jobs bill | 2 Responses

Green Halloween tips you may not have thought of PLUS when you see kids out trick-or-treating tonight …

Tuesday, October 27th, 2009

There’s a whole website GreenHalloween.org. And everybody’s favorite green website, Treehugger, has a bunch of ideas (reprinted below).

But first, when you see kids out trick-or-treating tonight … please consider these lines from the nation’s top climate scientist:

… the most serious effects will be visited upon the young and the unborn, the generations that bear no responsibility for the problem. The most important effects, I believe, will be those that are irreversible for all practical purposes, specifically (1) extermination of species, and (2) ice sheet disintegration and sea level rise. If we continue business-as-usual energy policy, using more and more fossil fuels, it is likely that we will have: (1) rapid climate change that will combine with other pressures on species to cause the rate of extinction of plants and animals to increase markedly, leading in some cases to ecosystem collapse, snowballing extinctions, and a more desolate planet for future generations. (2) meter-scale sea level rise this century, and ice sheets in a state of disintegration that guarantees future sea level rise in the 10-meter-scale, with a continual reworking of future global coastlines out of humanity’s control.

I would add that the planetary desolation our continued inaction would leave our children includes the loss of the inland glaciers that provide fresh water for a billion people, irreversible ocean acidification and Dust-Bowlification across one third of the habited land mass (see “Hell and High Water “).

That should give a double incentive for a greener Halloween … “in ways you may not have thought of“:

Post by Joe in Solutions | 4 Responses

Sen. Kerry downplays prospect of floor debate on the climate bill this year; Sen. Alexander is still unaware of staggering cost of nuclear power

Tuesday, October 27th, 2009

E&E News (subs. req’d) reports this morning:

International attention on the Senate’s progress on the issue is heightened given the major U.N. climate summit to be held this December in Copenhagen, Denmark. Underscoring that point, Reid yesterday took a call from U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon.

“The secretary general emphasized the urgency of trying to have some movement in the Senate” before the Copenhagen meeting, Kerry said. “I think we’re going to deliver some movement because we’re working in the EPW Committee to try to get the Kerry-Boxer bill and the chairman’s mark out.”

Meanwhile, Kerry also downplayed the prospect of floor debate on the climate bill this year, signaling instead that committee action is about as far as he expects the Senate can go before the two-week Copenhagen negotiations begin on Dec. 7.

“Bottom line, we’re going to keep working this as hard as we can,” Kerry said. “We’re going to keep moving forward. I’m confident we’ll have some kind of effort, whether it’s out of committee, or out of all the committees, or the working group or whatever, before we go to Copenhagen. We’re going to try to do as much as we can.”

Not a big surprise, given how slow the overall legislative process has been moving in EPW and the molasses pace of health care reform. Indeed, it bears repeating that back in early February, Greenwire reported (see “Breaking: Sen. Boxer makes clear U.S. won’t pass a climate bill this year“):

Post by Joe in Climate Progress | 8 Responses

New CNN poll finds “nearly six in 10 independents” support cap-and-trade

Tuesday, October 27th, 2009

“Six in 10 Americans support a cap and trade” proposal to cut pollution, according to a new national poll,” CNN reports (details at the end). The recent Pew Research poll also found strong support for climate action:

graph of public supporting setting emissions limits

Of course, the Pew poll got a lot of attention for what it said about media miscoverage of the global cooling myth and the effectiveness of the disinformation campaign on climate science (see here). But the more important news is that like a half-dozen recent polls, it made clear the public supports action on climate and clean energy:

And that’s pretty impressive given that the fossil-fuel-funded opponents of action have in aggressively ramping up spending on their anti-action campaign to mislead the public about the low cost of action and the high cost of inaction.

A leading expert on public opinion analysis, Ruy Teixeira, Senior Fellow at the Center for American Progress, writes of the Pew poll:

Post by Joe in Clean energy jobs bill | 4 Responses

Rural Electric Cooperatives: Efficiency measures more important than allowance allocations

Monday, October 26th, 2009

Here’s a stunner from Climate Wire (subs. req’d) today:

Rural electric cooperatives, which represent many small, coal-dependent utilities in the Midwest and raised a ruckus in the House debate, are eligible for a portion of allowances under the new draft.

But at a conference last week, the head of the National Rural Electric Cooperative Association, Glenn English, said “the basis for a deal” on climate would not revolve so much around allowances, but around whether people in coal-dependent regions would get enough help with efficiency retrofits on homes so they can manage potential electricity spikes.

Wow — somebody who would rather have smart policies than more allowances.

Interestingly, Boxer gave the Co-ops a real piece of the action:

Post by Joe in Clean energy jobs bill | 4 Responses

Must-read AP story: Statisticians reject global cooling; Caldeira — “To talk about global cooling at the end of the hottest decade the planet has experienced in many thousands of years is ridiculous.” Levitt “said he does not believe there is a cooling trend”!!

Monday, October 26th, 2009

A terrific story by the AP’s Seth Borenstein, “Statisticians reject global cooling,” not only debunks that myth — it will make your head spin once again on error-riddled Superfreakonomics (coauthored by Levitt).

Have you heard that the world is now cooling instead of warming? You may have seen some news reports on the Internet or heard about it from a provocative new book.

Only one problem: It’s not true, according to an analysis of the numbers done by several independent statisticians for The Associated Press.

The debunking will be no surprise to CP readers [see The BBC asks “What happened to global warming?” during the hottest decade in recorded history! and "NYT’s Revkin pushes global cooling myth (again!)], but the AP made three nice contributions. First, the AP talked to NOAA:

The recent Internet chatter about cooling led NOAA’s climate data center to re-examine its temperature data. It found no cooling trend.

“The last 10 years are the warmest 10-year period of the modern record,” said NOAA climate monitoring chief Deke Arndt. “Even if you analyze the trend during that 10 years, the trend is actually positive, which means warming.”

Second, “In a blind test, the AP gave temperature data to four independent statisticians and asked them to look for trends, without telling them what the numbers represented”:

Post by Joe in Science | 32 Responses

Nature: “Dynamic thinning of Greenland and Antarctic ice-sheet ocean margins is more sensitive, pervasive, enduring and important than previously realized”

Monday, October 26th, 2009

The most detailed satellite information available shows that ice sheets in Greenland and western Antarctica are shrinking faster than scientists thought and in some places are already in runaway melt mode, a new study found….

Using 50 million laser readings from a NASA satellite, scientists for the first time calculated changes in the height of the vulnerable but massive ice sheets and found them especially worse at their edges. That’s where warmer water eats away from below. In some parts of Antarctica, ice sheets have been losing 30 feet a year in thickness since 2003, according to the study….

“To some extent it’s a runaway effect. The question is how far will it run?” said lead author Hamish Pritchard of the British Antarctic Survey. “It’s more widespread than we previously thought.”

That’s from “Study: ‘Runaway’ melt on Antarctica, Greenland,” the pull-no-punches MSNBC story last month. The full study, “Extensive dynamic thinning on the margins of the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets,” was published in Nature (subs. req’d, excerpted below).

The British Antarctic Survey put out a news release with graphics. Here are some satellite tracks, from NASA’s ICESat (Ice, Cloud, and land Elevation Satellite), revealing areas of dynamic thinning (red) in Antarctica and Greenland [click to enlarge].

The release notes that this “dynamic thinning”:

Post by Joe in Science | 21 Responses