Climate Progress: An insider's view of climate science, politics, and solutions

The top climate reporter for the NYT has published what is arguably the worst article of his career, replete with statements that simply are scientifically inaccurate or misleading beyond belief:

The world leaders who met at the United Nations to discuss climate change on Tuesday are faced with an intricate challenge: building momentum for an international climate treaty at a time when global temperatures have been stable for a decade and may even drop in the next few years….

The recent spate of relatively cool years is particularly noticeable because it followed a seesawing from unusually cool temperatures to unusually hot ones in the 1990s, said Vicky Pope of Britain’s climate agency, called the Met Office….

The global average temperature is now only an imperceptible .01 degree Fahrenheit higher than it was in 1999, according to the British meteorology office.

That litany of misinformation and confusion is what you expect from the Swift boat smearer’s website, not the paper of record.  And sure enough, former Inhofe staffer and general disinformation spreader Marc Morano couldn’t be in more agreement Revkin, running the blaring headline at ClimateDepotted:  “NYT’s Moment of Clarity: UN faces challenge achieving climate treaty ‘when global temps have been stable for a decade and may even drop in next few years’.”

As we’ll see, Revkin owes his readers and the whole world multiple corrections and “explanations,” if not a complete retraction.

Let me try to set the scientific record straight, since the NYT has so confused the matter.  First off, the most shocking thing that Revkin does is quote the Met Office in the same exact sentence he makes his most egregious mistatement:   “The recent spate of relatively cool years.”

Relatively cool?  Relative to what, Andy?  Venus?  Here is the Met Office temperature ranking of the past century and a half on planet Earth (see here):

That’s right, according to the Met Office, there has been a recent spate of relatively very, very hot years.  As the Met Office explains, “over the past decade, most years have remained close to the global average temperature reached in 1998. All the years from 2000 to 2008 have been in the top 14 warmest years on record.”

The interesting question is not why the global temperature has — using the Met Office data — been roughly flat for a few years.  The interesting question is what caused the step change in temperature rise, whereby the decade of the 2000s is going to be the hottest decade in the temperature record, much warmer than the decade of the 1990s, which at the time was the hottest decade on record.  Hint:  Scientists call it global warming.  I’ll come back to this step change, this recent jump in temperatures, in a later post.

Andy’s questionable and uber-misleading assertion — “global temperatures have been stable for a decade” — should at the very least be amended “at record high levels.”

But it’s far from clear the original statement is actually true!  Indeed, you’d never know it from Revkin’s post, which relies exclusively on the temperature record of the leading UK climate change office, but the United States actually produces a global temperature record that paints a very different picture than the Met Office.  But then, that temperature record does not fit into the narrative Revkin is pushing, so it’s no big surprise that he omits any mention of it whatsoever:

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NOAA reported the blockbuster news today:

The world’s ocean surface temperature was the warmest for any August on record, and the warmest on record averaged for any June-August (Northern Hemisphere summer/Southern Hemisphere winter) season according to NOAA’s National Climatic Data Center in Asheville, N.C. The preliminary analysis is based on records dating back to 1880.

NCDC scientists also reported that the combined average global land and ocean surface temperature for August was second warmest on record, behind 1998.

This is almost certainly the new El Niño on top of the long-term warming trend (see NOAA says “El Niño arrives; Expected to Persist through Winter 2009-10″ — and that means record temperatures are coming and this will be the hottest decade on record).

Pretty impressive given that we’re at “the deepest solar minimum in nearly a century,” according to NASA.  Go figure (see “Another long-debunked denier talking point is debunked again: Changes in the Sun are not causing global warming“).

As the AP noted about the July, which also had record ocean temps:

Breaking heat records in water is more ominous as a sign of global warming than breaking temperature marks on land, because water takes longer to heat up and does not cool off as easily as land.

“This warm water we’re seeing doesn’t just disappear next year; it’ll be around for a long time,” said climate scientist Andrew Weaver of the University of Victoria in British Columbia. It takes five times more energy to warm water than land.

The warmer water “affects weather on the land,” Prof. Weaver said. “This is another yet really important indicator of the change that’s occurring.”

As revealed by the NOAA video above (via Andy Revkin),  it is getting hot pretty much everywhere, except of course over the continental United States, a small fraction of the world’s overall landmass inhabited by a large fraction of the world’s deniers, delayers, and disinformers who continue to trumpet the supposedly “cool” weather of the United States as part of their overall planetary cooling nonsense.  And that’s too bad because we need all the unmuffled warnings we can get given that humans are not like slowly boiling frogs, we are like slowly boiling brainless frogs.

Once again, the geographical distribution of the warming continues to be bad news for those worried about the permafrost permamelt, since temps even in the summer ran upwards of 3°C (5.4°F) warmer than the 1961-1990 norm over much of Siberia, as National Climatic Data Center’s figure shows:

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The Energy Information Administration released its monthly Short-Term Energy Outlook (STEO) last week with a bombshell prediction for near-term carbon dioxide emissions:

Projected carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions from fossil fuels fall by 6.0 percent in 2009 because of the weak economic conditions and declines in the consumption of most fossil fuels (U.S. Carbon Dioxide Emissions Growth Chart).  Coal leads the drop in 2009 CO2 emissions, falling by nearly 10 percent because of fuel switching from coal to natural gas in the electric power sector.  The projected recovery in the economy contributes to an expected 0.9-percent increase in CO2 emissions in 2010.

Now that’s the perfect storm:  a weak economy, low natural gas prices, state renewable energy standards, and a clean-energy-friendly stimulus (see “EIA projects wind at 5% of U.S. electricity in 2012, all renewables at 14%, thanks to Obama stimulus!“).

This 6% drop in CO2 emissions from fossil fuels in 2009 is double the drop EIA had projected just 5 months ago in its  Updated Annual Energy Outlook 2009 Reference Case Reflecting Provisions of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act and Recent Changes in the Economic Outlook, which had this chart:

If my calculations are right, this means by year’s end we’ll actually be more than 8.5% below 2005 levels in energy-related CO2 emissions, which make up the overwhelming majority of U.S. greenhouse gases.  And that is halfway to the 2020 Waxman-Markey target!  And EIA doesn’t project a dramatic recovery in emissions in 2010 — just a 0.9% rise.

This has a bunch of big implications for what the Senate should do in writing its climate bill:

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Ocean temperatures are at record levels (see “Breaking heat records in water is more ominous as a sign of global warming than breaking temperature marks on land.”)  The 2000s are on track to be nearly 0.2°C warmer than the 1990s, meaning  “this will be the hottest decade in recorded history by far“ –  and that temperature jump is especially worrisome since the 1990s were only 0.14°C warmer than the 1980s.  The World Meteorological Organization Secretary General explained to the bewildered editors of the Washington Post:

Data collected over the past 150 years by the 188 members of the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) through observing networks of tens of thousands of stations on land, at sea, in the air and from constellations of weather and climate satellites lead to an unequivocal conclusion: The observed increase in global surface temperatures is a manifestation of global warming. Warming has accelerated particularly in the past 20 years.

What follows is Wonk Room repost of yet another addition to the right wing disinformation campaign — Fox News host Bill O’Reilly promoting “the conspiracy theories” of Accuweather meteorologist Joe Bastardi, who “scoffed at the connection between global warming and wildfires in California.”  Indeed “Bastardi — who has an undergraduate degree in meteorology from 1978 and no other academic credentials — went so far as to claim”:

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Just about everywhere you look ice is melting — see USGS report details “recent dramatic shrinkage” in U.S. glaciers, matching global decline.

Here is a very impressive presentation from a 2009 TED (Technology, Entertainment, Design) conference:  “Photographer James Balog shares new image sequences from the Extreme Ice Survey, a network of time-lapse cameras recording glaciers receding at an alarming rate, some of the most vivid evidence yet of climate change.”

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A Hockey Stick in Melting Ice

Arctic temperatures in the 1990s reached their warmest level of any decade in at least 2,000 years, new research indicates. The study, which incorporates geologic records and computer simulations, provides new evidence that the Arctic would be cooling if not for greenhouse gas emissions that are overpowering natural climate patterns.

So reports the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR), which coauthored the study to be published in Science Friday.  [I'll put the link up when it's posted.]  The Washington Post story notes:

The analysis, based on more than a dozen lake sediment cores as well as glacier ice and tree ring records from the Arctic, provides one of the broadest pictures to date of how industrial emissions have shifted the Arctic’s long-standing natural climate patterns. Coupled with a separate report on the region issued Wednesday by the World Wildlife Fund, the studies suggest human-induced changes could transform not only the Arctic but climate conditions across the globe.

“It’s basically saying the greenhouse gas emissions are overwhelming the system,” said David Schneider, a visiting scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research and one of the Science article’s co-authors.

The same could be said about the entire planetary ecosystem — on our current path, we’re going to overwhelm the whole system (see “Intro to global warming impacts: Hell and High Water “).  Indeed, in some sense we already have, as a number of climate scientists have pointed out.  The NYT’s Andy Revkin interviewed Thomas Crowley, a climate specialist at the University of Edinburgh:

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Global warming is “capable of wrecking the marine ecosystem and depriving future generations of the harvest of the seas” (see Ocean dead zones to expand, “remain for thousands of years”).

A post on ocean acidification from the new Conservation Law Foundation blog has brought to my attention that the first documentary on the subject, A Sea Change: Imagine a World without Fish, is coming out.

Ocean acidification must be a core climate message, since it is hard to deny and impervious to the delusion that geoengineering is the silver bullet.  Indeed, a major 2009 study GRL study, “Sensitivity of ocean acidification to geoengineered climate stabilization” (subs. req’d), concluded:

The results of this paper support the view that climate engineering will not resolve the problem of ocean acidification, and that therefore deep and rapid cuts in CO₂ emissions are likely to be the most effective strategy to avoid environmental damage from future ocean acidification.

If you want to understand ocean acidification better, see this BBC story, which explains:

Man-made pollution is raising ocean acidity at least 10 times faster than previously thought, a study says.

Or see this Science magazine study, “Evidence for Upwelling of Corrosive “Acidified” Water onto the Continental Shelf” (subs. req’), which found

Our results show for the first time that a large section of the North American continental shelf is impacted by ocean acidification. Other continental shelf regions may also be impacted where anthropogenic CO2-enriched water is being upwelled onto the shelf.

Or listen to the Australia’s ARC Centre of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies, which warns:

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The BBC reports:

Polar bears have shrunk over the last century, according to research.

Scientists compared bear skulls from the early 20th Century with those from the latter half of the century.

Their study, in the Journal of Zoology, describes changes in size and shape that could be linked an increase in pollution and the reduction in sea ice.

Physical “stress” caused by pollutants in the bears’ bodies, and the increased effort needed to find food, could limit the animals’ growth, the team said.

Okay, it’s not most important climate story in the world, but it does let me use the above photo again.  I should note that the NYT’s Revkin blogged last month, “More Polar Bear Populations in Decline“:

There is rising concern among  polar bear biologists that the big recent summertime retreats of sea ice in the Arctic are already harming some populations of these seal-hunting predators. That was one conclusion of the  Polar Bear Specialist Group, a network of bear experts who  met last week in Copenhagen to review the latest data (and data gaps) on the 19 discrete populations of polar bears around the Arctic. The group, part of the  International Union for Conservation of Nature, includes biologists in academia and government and at nonprofit conservation organizations. Only one bear population is increasing (in the Canadian high Arctic), while eight are declining in numbers, the scientists said. At its last meeting, in 2005, the group concluded that five populations were in decline. Three populations appear to be stable and seven are too poorly monitored to gauge a trend.

As for the new study, here’s the abstract for “Craniometric characteristics of polar bear skulls from two periods with contrasting levels of industrial pollution and sea ice extent” (subs. req’d):

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I’m delighted to have the great environmental writer and founder of 350.org, Bill McKibben, as the guest blogger for this big story. Note that Pachauri was the guy handpicked by Bush to replace the “alarmist” Bob Watson. But it’s the facts that make people alarmists, not their politics or professional background (see “Desperate times, desperate scientists“).

This blog was the very first place to take note of an oped I wrote for the Washington Post in late December of 2007, which in turn was the first public notice of a talk Jim Hansen had given a few days earlier at the AGU conference in San Francisco. That was where Hansen announced his finding:  350 ppm CO2 represented the bottom line for the planet.

In the 18 months since, as we’ve built 350.org, we’ve found lots of support–from Al Gore, from 94 of the world’s smallest and poorest nations, and so on. But today may have been the biggest breakthrough of all: Rajendra Pachauri, head of the IPCC, said clearly and unequivocally that 350 is the number. Here’s a few lines from his interview with Agence France Presse:

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The National Snow and Ice Data Center reports:

During the first half of August, Arctic ice extent declined more slowly than during the same period in 2007 and 2008. The slower decline is primarily due to a recent atmospheric circulation pattern, which transported ice toward the Siberian coast and discouraged export of ice out of the Arctic Ocean. It is now unlikely that 2009 will see a record low extent, but the minimum summer ice extent will still be much lower than the 1979 to 2000 average.

“The graph [click to enlarge] shows daily sea ice extent as of August 17, 2009. The solid light blue line indicates 2009; the solid dark blue line shows 2008; the dashed green line shows 2007; and the solid gray line indicates average extent from 1979 to 2000. The gray area around the average line shows the two standard deviation range of the data.”

Since the 2009 arctic extent AREA seem to be close to 2008 levels, which set the record for minimum ice VOLUME, it is too soon to say whether 2009 will set a volume record (see “Will we see record low Arctic ice VOLUME this year?“).

It remains as clear as ever that the Arctic ice isn’t going to recover, and we are headed for ice free summers in the foreseeable future:

• North Pole poised to be largely ice-free by 2020: “It’s like the Arctic is covered with an egg shell and the egg shell is now just cracking completely”
• New NSIDC director Serreze explains the “death spiral” of Arctic ice
• NSIDC: Arctic melt passes the point of no return, “We hate to say we told you so, but we did”
• The International Polar Year: “Arctic sea ice will probably not recover
• Permafrost loss linked to Arctic sea ice loss

The UK’s National Oceanography Centre in Southampton reports:

The warming of an Arctic current over the last 30 years has triggered the release of methane, a potent greenhouse gas, from methane hydrate stored in the sediment beneath the seabed.

German and British scientists “have found that more than 250 plumes of bubbles of methane gas are rising from the seabed of the West Spitsbergen continental margin in the Arctic, in a depth range of 150 to 400 metres” [See figure on right].

Methane released from gas hydrate in submarine sediments has been identified in the past as an agent of climate change. The likelihood of methane being released in this way has been widely predicted.

A lead researcher said, “Our survey was designed to work out how much methane might be released by future ocean warming; we did not expect to discover such strong evidence that this process has already started.”

This is the first time that such behaviour in response to climate change has been observed in the modern period.

While most of the methane currently released from the seabed is dissolved in the seawater before it reaches the atmosphere, methane seeps are episodic and unpredictable and periods of more vigorous outflow of methane into the atmosphere are possible. Furthermore, methane dissolved in the seawater contributes to ocean acididfication.

Geophysics Professor Graham Westbrook warns: “If this process becomes widespread along Arctic continental margins, tens of megatonnes of methane per year – equivalent to 5-10% of the total amount released globally by natural sources, could be released into the ocean.”

For more on this, see the original GRL study here (subs. req’d).

The rest of this post, which reviews some recent findings on the not-so-perma-frost, is a guest blog by Ken Levenson, who blogs at checklisttowardzerocarbon.

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The guest blogger is Tom Kenworthy, Senior Fellow at the Center for American Progress. The U.S. Geological Survey images below show the retreat of South Cascade Glacier, Wash.

For a half century the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) has been closely studying changes in glaciers in three different climatic regions in Alaska and Washington state. In a new report, the Interior Department agency details “recent dramatic shrinkage” in the Wolverine and Gulkana glaciers in Alaska and the South Cascade glacier in Washington state’s Cascade Mountains.

“Since 1989,” USGS reports, “the cumulative net balances of all three glaciers show trends of rapid and sustained mass loss.”

USGS scientist Edward Josberger said the changes observed in the three U.S. glaciers are consistent with other shrinking glacers around the world as they respond to climate change. “There is no doubt that most mountain glaciers are shrinking worldwide in response to a warming climate,” Josberger said.

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The fate of the next 50 generations may well be determined in the next several months and the next several years.  Will Congress agree to a shrinking GHG cap and the clean energy transformation?  If not, you can scratch a global climate deal.  But even if the bill passes and a global deal is achieved — both will need to be continuously strengthened in coming years, as the increasingly worrisome science continues to inform the policy, just as in the case of the Montréal Protocol on the ozone-depleting substances.

In short, the fate of perhaps the next 100 billion people to walk the Earth rests in the hands of scientists (and those who understand the science) trying to communicate the dire nature of the climate problem (and the myriad solutions available now) as well as the ability of the media, the public, opinion makers, and political leaders to understand and deal with that science.

And so what could be more timely — and disquieting — than a book titled Unscientific America: How Scientific Illiteracy Threatens our Future?  The book is by Chris Mooney, whose science blog was a major inspiration for me to pursue blogging, and scientist Sheril Kirshenbaum.

While it notably and presciently disses former TV meteorologist Watts for his unscientific obsession with pushing weather data in the climate debate (see “Unscientific America, Part 1: From the moon-landing deniers to WattsUpWithThat“), climate-saturated CP readers will be happy to know that very little of the book actually focuses on global warming.

Rather, this short, highly readable book is a survey of the sorry state of scientific understanding and communication in this country, ending with some proposals for improving the situation.  Here are some of the interesting/depressing factoids from the book:

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Among the phrases you really, really do not want to hear from climate scientists are: “that really shocked us,” “we had no idea how bad it was,” and “reality is well ahead of the climate models.” Yet in speaking to researchers who focus on the Arctic, you hear comments like these so regularly they begin to sound like the thumping refrain from Jaws: annoying harbingers of something that you really, really wish would go away.

So writes Newsweek’s Sharon Begley in one of the most thoughtful climate pieces ever to appear in a major national publication.  She makes the very case I did in my recent post (except without the hyperlinks — the Achilles Heel of MSM science writing).  For more on the International Polar Year, see The IPY: “Arctic sea ice will probably not recover” and their website.

The Begley piece is so outstanding — and so rare — I’m going to reprint it below:

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“If the slimehead were still a slimehead, it wouldn’t be in this kind of trouble,” begins a good WashPost story today on overfishing of the Orange roughy and other fish with popular nom de plumes. 

As lakes and oceans have been depleted by heavy fishing, the seafood industry tried to dress up what was left — former ‘trash’ species, and unfamiliar fish from the deep ocean — with new names to improve their popularity.

The Post story is based on a major report on the world’s seafood stocks published in Science, “Rebuilding Global Fisheries” (subs. req’d), which found that 63 percent of assessed fish stocks, species are below healthy levels.  I feel compelled to note that the lead author of this major report on overfishing is Boris Worm.  I can only imagine what he went through as a child….

Worm predicted that “if fishing continued at the same rate, all the world’s seafood stocks would collapse by 2048.”  The world’s fish catch “has grown more than fivefold since 1950.”  The result:

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A major new study, “Impacts of climate change from 2000 to 2050 on wildfire activity and carbonaceous aerosol concentrations in the western United States” finds a staggering increase in “wildfire activity and carbonaceous aerosol concentrations in the western United States” by mid-century under a moderate warming scenario:

We show that increases in temperature cause annual mean area burned in the western United States to increase by 54% by the 2050s relative to the present-day … with the forests of the Pacific Northwest and Rocky Mountains experiencing the greatest increases of 78% and 175% respectively. Increased area burned results in near doubling of wildfire carbonaceous aerosol emissions by mid-century.

“This graph shows the percentage increase in area burned by wildfires, from the present-day to the 2050s, as calculated by the model of Spracklen et al. [2009] for the May-October fire season. The model follows a scenario of moderately increasing emissions of greenhouse gas emissions and leads to average global warming of 1.6 degrees Celsius (3 degrees Fahrenheit) by 2050. Warmer temperatures can dry out underbrush, leading to more serious conflagrations in the future climate.”

And this is just the mid-century prediction for the IPCC’s “moderate” A1B scenario (CO2 at 522 ppm in 2050), which predicts “mean July temperatures to increase by 1.8°C from 2000 to 2050.”  This is not the worst-case emissions path, which we are currently on (see U.S. media largely ignores latest warning from climate scientists: “Recent observations confirm … the worst-case IPCC scenario trajectories (or even worse) are being realised” — 1000 ppm).  What would happen by 2100 on our current emissions path, when the mean July temperature increase from 2000 is triple (or more) the 1.8°C that the researchers modeled?  Turns out someone did model that a few years ago.

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This is the video that Anthony Watts demanded YouTube take down.  This is what the former TV weatherman who runs a leading anti-scientific website, WattsUpWithThat, is afraid to let the public see:

Fortunately, Anthony Watts knows even less about copyright laws than he does about climate science, if that’s possible [see "Diagnosing a victim of anti-science syndrome (ASS)"].  So YouTube has put it back up after temporarily removing it, which is standard practice for them.

Here’s some background on the terrific video from DeSmogBlog:

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From 2009 to 2014, projected rises in anthropogenic influences and solar irradiance will increase global surface temperature 0.15 ±0.03 °C, at a rate 50% greater than predicted by IPCC.

So conclude Judith Lean, of the US Naval Research Laboratory, and David Rind, of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies in a new Geophysical Research Letters study, “How Will Earth’s Surface Temperature Change in Future Decades?” (subs. req’d).  The UK Guardian explains:

The work is the first to assess the combined impact on global temperature of four factors: human influences such as CO₂ and aerosol emissions; heating from the sun; volcanic activity and the El Niño southern oscillation, the phenomenon by which the Pacific Ocean flips between warmer and cooler states every few years.

This study does not assume we will have a major El Niño, but notes that if we did have a really big one, it could add as much as 0.2°C [0.36°F] to the temperature in an individual year.  In the July 27 weekly update by NOAA’s National Centers for Environmental Prediction, “ENSO Cycle: Recent Evolution, Current Status and Predictions,“ NCEP notes “Current observations and dynamical model forecasts indicate El Niño conditions will continue to intensify and are expected to last through” the winter, and “nearly all of the dynamical models predict a moderate-to-strong episode.”  So again, it looks NASA’s January prediction is accurate,

Given our expectation of the next El Niño beginning in 2009 or 2010, it still seems likely that a new global temperature record will be set within the next 1-2 years.

Significantly, a 2007 Hadley Center paper in Science: “Improved Surface Temperature Prediction for the Coming Decade from a Global Climate Model” (see “Climate Forecast: Hot — and then Very Hot“) also concluded:

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