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

When we last left the Competitive Enterprise Institute, they were going ape for the Scopes climate trial that the Chamber of Commerce had proposed for the EPA.  The deniers just stick their fingers and their ears and scream whenever they hear any science-based finding that GHGs harm human health.  What else can you expect from a group that which actually runs ad campaigns aimed at destroying the climate for centuries?

Now CEI is trying to go after the UK temperature record because the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) at the University of East Anglia, used by the Hadley/Met Office, has abandoned some bad data.  Climate Science Watch (CSW) has the background, “CEI global warming denialists try another gambit seeking to derail EPA endangerment finding.“  Ironically, as Prof. Phil Jones, CRU’s Director explains below:

Almost all the data we have in the CRU archive is exactly the same as in the Global Historical Climatology Network (GHCN) archive used by the NOAA National Climatic Data Center [see here and here].  The original raw data are not “lost.”

A small amount of data, which could be easily reconstructed if one wanted to waste a lot of time, was abandoned for reasons such as the following:

Station series for sites that in the 1980s we deemed then to be affected by either urban biases or by numerous site moves, that were either not correctable or not worth doing as there were other series in the region.

Yes, for years the deniers have been claiming that the temperature record is corrupted by the urban heat island effect or bad locations.  In fact, we know that it isn’t (see Must-read NOAA paper smacks down the deniers: Q: “Is there any question that surface temperatures in the United States have been rising rapidly during the last 50 years?” A: “None at all.”)  But when CRU actually tries to abandon such data, the deniers cry foul.

CEI:  Can’t live with them, future generations could live with out them.

To compound the irony, the only meaningful hole in the Hadley data is the “hole in the Arctic,” as RealClimate puts it (see here).  The Hadley record simply excludes the part of the world “just where recent warming has been greatest.”  Because of that gap, the Hadley data almost certainly underestimates recent warming.

CSW asked three prominent scientists to comment on CEI’s bogus data-shredding charge and posted them here and here.  I’m reprinting them below, starting with Stanford’s Stephen Schneider, a member of the National Academy of Sciences, and author of Science as a Contact Sport: Inside the Battle to Save Earth’s Climate, coming out next month:

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Existential question of the day:  How can Paul Hudson’s byline be “Climate correspondent, BBC News” when his ‘reporting‘ doesn’t correspond to the climate, which continues to warm?

It is tiresome debunking yet another poor researched article by a media outlet that has historically had a great deal of credibility [see "NYT’s Revkin pushes global cooling myth (again!) and repeats outright misinformation"].  The BBC headline inanely asks “What happened to global warming?”  Answer — it keeps on keepin’ on:

• Very warm 2008 makes this the hottest decade in recorded history by far, according to NASA
• Sorry deniers, Hadley Center and WMO say 2000s are easily the hottest decade in recorded history

And those posts were just projections from December 2008, before factoring in the record warming we’re seeing this year (see “NASA reports hottest June to September on record“).  The figure above is from NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies.  The solid red line is the five-year mean, which is obviously a better view of the climate picture, as opposed to the highly variable annual data.  NASA used the “January-September (9 months) mean” for the 2009 data point.  The hottest year on record is 2005, and 2009 is likely to be close to the second hottest years of 2007 and 1998.

But Hudson is a Brit, so he (sort of) uses the data from the Met Office aka Hadley Center in his lede:

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Fast on the heels of the second warmest August on record and warmest June-July-August for the oceans, NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies reports that this was the second hottest September on record.

Unlike NOAA, which will announce its September global analysis in a few days, NASA just quietly updates its data set (here).  So you have to do a little math to see that for the June through September period, 2009 now tops both 2005 and 1998.  I put the asterisk in the headline since these four months in 2009 are only slightly warmer than those in 1998.

I’m not cherry-picking these last four months, but rather ENSO-picking them.  The reason 1998 was so anomalously warm even beyond the human-caused trend was the uber-El Niño.  Back in January, NASA had predicted:  “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, despite the moderate negative effect of the reduced solar irradiance.”

Then, back in early June NOAA put out “El Niño Watch,” which I noted meant that “record temperatures are coming and this will be the hottest decade on record.”  So here we are.

What makes these record temps especially impressive is that we’re at “the deepest solar minimum in nearly a century,” according to NASA.  It’s just hard to stop the march of anthropogenic global warming, well, other than by reducing GHG emissions, that is.

Another thing that makes these record temps impressive is that we’re only in a “weak El Niño,” according to the latest monthly “El Niño/Southern oscillation (ENSO) Diagnostic Discussion” of the Climate Prediction Center of NOAA’s National Weather Service:

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Our story so far:

On September 22, I debunked the global cooling myth for the umpteenth time (see “NYT’s Revkin pushes global cooling myth (again!) and repeats outright misinformation“).  To see whether the status quo media and the professional Deniers, Delayers, and Disinformers believe the cooling crap they are pushing, I proposed what should be seen as a generous bet (from their unscientific perspective):

that the 2010s will be the hottest decade in the temperature record, more than 0.15°C hotter than the hottest decade so far using the NASA GISS dataset.

Led by Triple D All Star Chip Knappenberger (”Is Joe Romm a ‘Global Lukewarmer’?”) my attempt to call out suckers deniers who insist we are entering a long-term cooling, was somehow turned into a statement of my belief as to what the science says is going to happen on our current emissions path.  What is especially bizarre about that is I have written about 2 million words on the subject, so my views are no mystery at all (see, for instance, “Intro to global warming impacts“).

What is especially laughable is that the deniers, led by Knappenberger, who should know better (well, I guess that’s a contradiction in terms), then ascribe their ignorance of the science to my statement and with an anti-scientific linear extrapolation for what I am supposedly predicting the warming will be this entire century.  That is to say, because I supposedly believe we will only warm 0.15°C next decade (which I don’t), that means I am also asserting we will only warm only on the low-range this century, perhaps only 1.5°C.

That represents such a staggering lack of understanding of the basic science of climate change that it should immediately disqualify anyone who advances it from the debate — including Thomas Fuller, who took my bet!  In fact, as everyone who understands the science knows, the warming is projected to be quite nonlinear, in part because the climate system has feedbacks, and the major ones all appear to be positive (see here).  Also, aerosols (human and volcanic) have “dimmed” or muted the full impact of the anthropogenic greenhouse gases we would have seen so far (to a remarkable degree, see here).

Anyone who bothered to look at the IPCC report, which you would think is the minimum required of someone claiming to be interested in an “intelligent conversation” about the science, would see that.  As the Figure above shows, in the high-end scenarios, like A2, the warming is much slower in the early decades of this century than in the later ones.

Fuller took my bet (see his comment here), but it wasn’t until I saw this inane headline on the Swift Boat smearer’s website (complete with my photo) that I realized just what Fuller did:

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The empirical data has spoken. Cancel the global cooling party. Global warming is still happening.

The planet is heating up, thanks to human-generated emissions of greenhouse gases.  But as a new NOAA-led study, “An observationally based energy balance for the Earth since 1950” (subs. req’d, release here) concluded:

[S]ince 1950, the planet released about 20 percent of the warming influence of heat-trapping greenhouse gases to outer space as infrared energy. Volcanic emissions lingering in the stratosphere offset about 20 percent of the heating by bouncing solar radiation back to space before it reached the surface. Cooling from the lower-atmosphere aerosols produced by humans balanced 50 percent of the heating. Only the remaining 10 percent of greenhouse-gas warming actually went into heating the Earth, and almost all of it went into the ocean.

Note that this Journal of Geophysical Research-Atmospheres study was done “without using global climate models.”

Figure 1: “Total Earth Heat Content [anomaly] from 1950 (Murphy et al. 2009). Ocean data taken from Domingues et al 2008.”

That figure comes from the first of two posts by the terrific website Skeptical Science, which I repost below.  Skeptical Science is an excellent, well-organized site to send convincible people for a shredding of the standard, long-debunked denier talking points.

Now I’m sure the deniers and delayers out there are shrieking, “There are peer reviewed analyses that document that upper ocean warming has halted since 2003!” — a claim I dealt with in my July post, “Like father, like son: Roger Pielke Sr. also doesn’t understand the science of global warming — or just chooses to willfully misrepresent it.”

Subsequently, however, another JGR article, “Global hydrographic variability patterns during 2003–2008” (subs. req’d, draft here) details an analysis of “monthly gridded global temperature and salinity fields from the near-surface layer down to 2000 m depth based on Argo measurements.”  Background on Argo here.   Their findings are summed up in this figure:

Figure [2]: Time series of global mean heat storage (0–2000 m), measured in 10⁸ Jm^-2.

Still warming, after all these years!  And just where you’d expect it.  The study makes clear that upper ocean heat content, perhaps not surprisingly, is simply far more variable than deeper ocean heat content, and thus an imperfect indicator of the long-term warming trend.

UPDATE:  Yes, I am aware of the recent upper-ocean heat content data on the web.  Please note that plots of very recent, highly variable upper-ocean content heat data down to 700 meters from unpeer-reviewed sources do not trump peer-reviewed analysis of much longer-term data down to 2000 m.  Is it too much to ask people to actually read this entire post before posting comments?

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Memo to media and deniers: If your “global cooling” piece revolves around Dr. Latif, you probably have the entire story backwards. But, at least for deniers, that is the goal.

In an interview today, Dr. Latif told me “we don’t trust our forecast beyond 2015″ and “it is just as likely you’ll see accelerated warming” after then. Indeed, in his published research, rapid warming is all-but-inevitable over the next two decades. He told me, “you can’t miss the long-term warming trend” in the temperature record, which is “driven by the evolution of greenhouse gases.”  Finally, he pointed out “Our work does not allow one to make any inferences about global warming.”

Latif’s work can be baffling, but I mostly deciphered it on this blog in 2008 (see “Nature article on ‘cooling’ confuses media, deniers: Next decade may see rapid warming“).   Latif’s Nature study is consistent with the following statements:

• The “coming decade” (2010 to 2020) is poised to be the warmest on record, globally.
• The coming decade is poised to see faster temperature rise than any decade since the authors’ calculations began in 1960.

Here is his Nature “forecast” in green (”Each point represents a ten-year centred mean” — more discussion at the end):

Now, with the caveat that Latif claims no “skill” in any forecast after 2015 — a caveat the media and deniers never print — as you can see, their model suggests we’ll see pretty damn rapid warming in the coming decade, just as the Hadley Center did in a 2007 Science piece and just as the US Naval Research Lab and NASA recently predicted (see “Another major study predicts rapid warming over next few years — nearly 0.3°F by 2014“).

How badly have the media [and deniers] botched this reporting unintentionally [and intentionally]?  Let’s see:

World will ‘cool for the next decade’

Three mistakes in one New Scientist headline from last month — a record, I suspect.  The headline would have been more accurate if it said, “World poised to see accelerated warming in the coming decade.”

Then we have these multiply-misleading statements:

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Google is using its Google Earth mapping tool to simulate on a 3D map of the world the predicted effects of climate change until the year 2100.

Using data provided by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the search giant created new layers for Google Earth showing the range of expected temperature and precipitation changes under different global emissions scenarios that could occur throughout the century.

The Sydney Morning Herald further reports these “new tools were introduced in partnership with the Danish Government ahead of the United Nations Climate Change Convention in December.”  And as as HuffingtonPost reports, “Al Gore stars” in the Google Earth climate simulator video:

Finally, some of the top climate modelers in the world have done a “plausible worst case scenario,” as Dr Richard Betts, Head of Climate Impacts at the Met Office Hadley Centre, put it today in a terrific and terrifying talk (audio here, PPT here).

No, I’m not taking about a simple analysis of what happens if the nation and the world just keep on our current emissions path.  We’ve known that end-of-century catastrophe for a while (see “M.I.T. doubles its 2095 warming projection to 10°F — with 866 ppm and Arctic warming of 20°F“).  I’m talking about running a high emissions scenario (i.e. business as usual) in one of the few global climate models capable of analyzing strong carbon cycle feedbacks.  This is what you get [temperature in degrees Celsius, multiple by 1.8 for Fahrenheit]:

The key point is that while this warming occurs between 1961-1990 and 2090-2099 for the high-end scenarios without carbon cycle feedbacks, in about 10% of Hadley’s model runs with the feedbacks, it occurs around 2060.  Betts calls that the “plausible worst case scenario.”  It is something the IPCC and the rest of the scientific community should have laid out a long time ago.

As the Met Office notes here, “In some areas warming could be significantly higher (10 degrees [C = 15F] or more)”:

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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 new documentary on ocean acidification is airing tonight (Saturday) on Planet Green at 8 pm.  (You can find your Planet Green channel on their website.)  Here’s the trailer:

For more on the subject with links to primary sources and recent studies, see “Imagine a World without Fish: Deadly ocean acidification — hard to deny, harder to geo-engineer, but not hard to stop — is subject of documentary.”

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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