Climate Progress

The all-day conference is being webcast here now. The subject:

Refineries in the Great Lakes Basin are rapidly expanding to accommodate crude oil from the Alberta oil sands. This conference, How the Oil Sands Got to the Great Lakes Basin: Pipelines, Refineries and Emissions to Air And Water, is intended to provide an opportunity … to inform public opinion about the impacts of refinery expansion in the Basin…. Emphasis will be placed on the cumulative effect of refinery expansions on water quality, air quality and human and non-human downwind communities in the Basin.

The agenda is here. The panel discussion going on now and the next one on “Accelerated energy development in the Great Lakes basin and cleaner air and water: can we have both?” are the ones to catch.

The conference paper is here. It is a very interesting discussion of issues like:

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Just as McCain has tried to muzzle his Vice-Presidential denier, so too has GM tried to muzzle its Vice Chair denier.

McCain didn’t succeed (see Palin on CBS: “I’m not going to solely blame all of man’s activities on changes in climate” and Palin in debate STILL gets global warming backwards). And GM hasn’t done much better, at least on The Colbert Report (see GM’s Lutz is nuts).

Lutz has now adopted one Palin strategy. If you don’t want to or simply can’t answer a question, then don’t. Here is GM’s Vice Chair of Global Product Development on 60 Minutes yesterday:

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Earth to deniers — global warming is caused by human emissions, not solar activity.

The Naval Research Laboratory and NASA report that, “if anything,” the sun contributed “a very slight overall cooling in the past 25 years.” D’oh! The study, “How natural and anthropogenic influences alter global and regional surface temperatures: 1889 to 2006,” finds:

Empirical models that combine natural and anthropogenic influences (at appropriate lags) capture 76% of the variance in the monthly global surface temperature record, suggesting that much of the variability arises from processes that can be identified and their impact on the global surface temperature quantified by direct linear association with the observations.

Natural influences produce as much as 0.2 K warming during major ENSO events, near 0.3 K cooling following large volcanic eruptions and 0.1 K warming near maxima of recent solar cycles. To properly quantify their amplitudes, the natural and anthropogenic changes must be accounted for simultaneously when analyzing the surface temperature anomalies, since neglecting the influence of one can overestimate the influence of another. For this reason, we suggest that estimated solar cycle changes of 0.2 K and Pinatubo cooling of 0.4 K are too large.

None of the natural processes can account for the overall warming trend in global surface temperatures. In the 100 years from 1905 to 2005, the temperature trends produce by all three natural influences are at least an order of magnitude smaller than the observed surface temperature trend reported by IPCC [2007]. According to this analysis, solar forcing contributed negligible long-term warming in the past 25 years and 10% of the warming in the past 100 years…

Here are some excellent visual “reconstructions of the contributions to monthly mean global surface temperatures by individual natural and anthropogenic influences (at appropriate lags) are shown”:

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The Global Carbon Project released its “Carbon Budget 2007” [big PDF] today. The report shows a continuation of the grossly unsustainable growth rate in CO2 emissions since 2000, which is nearly four times the growth rate of the 1990s:

As reported by AP:

… it was large increases in China, India and other developing countries that spurred the growth of carbon dioxide pollution [3%] to a record high of 9.34 billion tons of carbon (8.47 billion metric tons)….

Scientists were surprised and dismayed because the increase “exceeds the most dire outlook for emissions from burning coal and oil and related activities” projected by the IPCC and because the increase occurred despite rising fossil fuel prices:

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If you are in DC, don’t miss Friday’s American Meteorological Society seminar. For those who can’t attend, a video is usually put online days later (I’ll post it should that happen). Here is a program summary and the bios of the very impressive speaker list:

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The UK’s Met Office issued a blunt statement yesterday, “Global warming goes on,” that begins:

Anyone who thinks global warming has stopped has their head in the sand. The evidence is clear — the long-term trend in global temperatures is rising, and humans are largely responsible for this rise. Global warming does not mean that each year will be warmer than the last, natural phenomena will mean that some years will be much warmer and others cooler. You only need to look at 1998 to see a record-breaking warm year caused by a very strong El Niño. In the last couple of years, the underlying warming is partially masked caused by a strong La Niña. Despite this, 11 of the last 13 years are the warmest ever recorded.

Strong stuff from the UK’s official provider of climate and weather-related analysis, which is actually within the UK’s Ministry of Defence. The UK’s Guardian reported the story as “Met Office says climate change deniers deluded.”

The Met Office has put together an interesting figure to show that global warming has continued at a pace of 0.17°C per decade since 1975 (red line), although the decadal trends (blue lines) have fluctuated wildly.

As the Met Office explains:

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The UK’s Independent reported today some pretty shocking news in “Exclusive: The methane time bomb“:

The first evidence that millions of tons of a greenhouse gas 20 times more potent than carbon dioxide is being released into the atmosphere from beneath the Arctic seabed has been discovered by scientists.

The Independent has been passed details of preliminary findings suggesting that massive deposits of sub-sea methane are bubbling to the surface as the Arctic region becomes warmer and its ice retreats.

Assuming these findings are published in a peer-reviewed publication, as is planned, they should be taken quite seriously for four reasons. First, many fear that a huge methane release is what happened during the Permian-Triassic extinction event and the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum. Second, releasing even a small fraction of the sub-sea methane would make a stabilizing greenhouse gas emissions at non-catastrophic concentrations all but impossible.

Third, as NOAA reported earlier this year, levels of methane rose sharply last year for the first time since 1998:

Fourth, the findings are apparently based on very new and credible in situ measurements:

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Although “This year was cooler and other weather conditions weren’t as bad” as last year, the Arctic sea ice minimum came within 150,000 square miles of last year’s record decline.

This is clear evidence that last year was no fluke and that human-caused global warming has become a major — if not the dominant — driver of long-term Arctic sea ice decline, which in turn could rapidly accelerate the destruction of a livable climate.

The National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC) reported yesterday that the 2007 minimum was probably reached Friday, when “sea ice extent dropped to 4.52 million square kilometers (1.74 million square miles),” which is “the second-lowest recorded since 1979, and is 2.24 million square kilometers (0.86 million square miles) below the 1979 to 2000 average minimum.”

The NYT’s Andy Revkin has a nice figure from the University of Illinois (above) and notes on his blog:

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Last month, NOAA’s National Climatic Data Center reported “the globally-averaged combined land and sea surface temperature was … the ninth warmest for the January-July year-to-date period” (out of 129 years), as I reported here. The first seven months of the year were +0.45°C (+0.81°F) warmer than the 1961-1990 average.

Now here’s the shocking news. The NCDC just reported that “the globally-averaged combined land and sea surface temperature … ranked as the ninth warmest … January-August year-to-date period.” The first eight months of the year were … wait for it … +0.45°C (+0.81°F) warmer than the 1961-1990 average.

So you see, there has been essentially no warming whatsoever from July to August, which is probably because August tied with 1995 as the tenth warmest on record.

Bottom line: Other than a record decline in Arctic sea ice (see “Arctic shrinks by an Alaska and 3 Arizonas in August“), August was a pretty dull month climate-wise — heck, “El Niño/Southern Oscillation (ENSO) conditions were in a neutral phase during August” — and I was desperately trying to spice it up with a sexy headline that might at least temporarily excite my few remaining denier readers.

Since interest in the campaign seems to have brought in a bunch of new readers in the last few weeks, let me repeat the key points from my last post on the monthly data.

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Part 1 of this book review looked at the (mis)handling of climate science in two books by Professor Richard A. Muller — his textbook and general public book, which, confusingly, are both named Physics for Future Presidents. Here I turn to portions of the general public book, such as the chapters on climate solutions, his treatment of terrorist nukes, and even his unsubstantiated dissing of the Toyota Prius.

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