Climate Progress

The signs of global warming are everywhere.  Coming back from my Vail conference to Denver, the driver pointed out to me the shocking devastation the state is now experiencing from the pine beetle, devastation anyone who lives in the West can see.

The so-called paper of record ran its second major story in less than a year on the country’s most infamous climate-driven pest, “Beetles Add New Dynamic to Forest Fire Control Efforts” by Kirk Johnson.  And like the early piece, “Bark Beetles Kill Millions of Acres of Trees in West,” by Jim Robbins, it’s a great story, other than neglecting to mention climate change. It’d be like an article on an outbreak of avian flu that left out any discussion of birds.

So we have the national “liberal” media, like the NYT and NBC, blowing this story, while the local, conservative media get it right, see “Conservative San Diego Union knows climate change is killing Western forests” and “Oldest Utah newspaper: Bark-beetle driven wildfires are a vicious climate cycle.”

Of course, the journal Nature understands the science, as an April 2008 article made clear: “Mountain pine beetle and forest carbon feedback to climate change.” So does the Canadian media: “Climate-Driven Pest Devours Canada’s Forests.”

No wonder the public is not terribly concerned about global warming and fails to understand that humans are changing the climate now. The only surprising thing is that the NYT itself is surprised that the public is underinformed (see “NYT’s Revkin seems shocked by media’s own failure to explain climate threat“).

This new piece made the crucial connection between the beetles and the record-breaking forest fires that the West have been experiencing — but missed the equally crucial connection to global warming.  On the one hand, that also isn’t surprising since three years ago, the NY Times blew the Wildfire Story.  On the other hand, had reporter Kirk Johnson bothered to spend even one minute on Google he would have uncovered the tragic feedback that would have made his story complete — global warming leads to more bark beetles, which kills more trees, which leads to more fires, which emit large amounts of carbon dioxide, which leads to more global warming!

The NYT did get the grim, superficial facts of the story right:

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In the first half of his Sunday interview after the passage of the Waxman-Markey bill, Obama said he was confident the Senate will pass the climate and clean energy bill.  He also asserted “My strong belief is that innovation and technology are going to accelerate our process beyond these targets, and that we’re going to look back and say we can do even more.”

Then Obama invited Energy Secretary Steven Chu and climate czar Steven Carol Browner to chime in (transcript here).  Here is the rest of the interview:

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High cost and delays are standard operating procedure for new nukes around the globe (see “Turkey’s only bidder for first nuclear plant offers a price of 21 cents per kilowatt-hour“ and “What do you get when you buy a nuke? You get a lot of delays and rate increases…”).  The same is true in the nuke-friendly land up north:

Ontario Puts Nuclear Upgrade Plans on Ice

Two years into a $20-billion nuclear upgrade project meant to replace aging reactors with next-generation technology, the Ontario government put the entire process on hold Monday, citing excessive cost and uncertainties involving the ownership status of the sole Canadian bidder.

“Emission-free nuclear power remains a crucial aspect of Ontario’s supply mix,” Ontario’s minister of energy and infrastructure, George Smitherman, said in a statement. “Unfortunately, the competitive bidding process has not provided Ontario with a suitable option at this time.”

As he told reporters, “We’ll know the right price when we see it and we ain’t seen it yet.”

… To date, Areva is the only nuclear company to have sold a third-generation reactor, to the Finnish electric utility.

And that hasn’t gone so well (see GOP wants 100 new nukes by 2030 while “Areva has acknowledged that the cost of a new reactor today would be as much as 6 billion euros, or $8 billion, double the price offered to the Finns”).

‘Green jobs’ pitch swayed just enough coal-state lawmakers

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Judging by emails and comments, many progressives and enviros seem to be under the misimpression that a much tougher climate bill was politically possible.  I myself was under that misimpression for a while.

Now, in fairness to myself (and others), one serious scenario does exist for a tougher climate bill being politically possible — but that involves a very hands-on Obama, which so far hasn’t been his style for passing legislation (see “Obama can get a better climate bill in 2010“).  Also, his advisors are almost certainly telling him to soft-pedal climate science — a serious mistake, since it essentially gives the deniers free reign to shape half of the debate.  I will blog on that shortly.

Outside the DC beltway, much of what goes on in this town is seen as some form of crass, enigmatic sausage making.  Well, as someone who has lived here for over 15 years, that’s precisely what it is.  And it always bears repeating that given modern conservative ideology, which is 100% anti-conservation, “the country can only contemplate serious environmental legislation when we have the unique constellation of a Democratic president and [large] Democratic majorities in both houses, an occurrence far rarer than a total eclipse of the sun.”

Even then, you must contend with the fact that a key part of this new Democratic majority is built upon votes from districts that are relatively moderate if not conservative, people who voted Democratic not so much because they endorse the progressive platform, but because they finally saw the ever-shrinking Republican Party for what it is — a rigidly-ideological movement hat has no solutions to offer for the many problems facing the country, problems that in fact stem from the few times the public mistakenly handed them the keys to the Hummer.

I would also add that in my one year as an American Physical Society Congressional science fellow advising a conservative Democrat from Florida in 1987-1988 — a pre-Gingrich time that was in theory much more conducive to bipartisanship — I never once saw a single member cast a vote purely for the national interest, except when that vote had no bearing whatsoever on their district.  And even then, every vote was still primarily a political calculation, and if their support wasn’t needed for passage, members almost automatically asked for a pass on any vote that could conceivably get them in any trouble in their district.

So how did we actually get a majority to vote for the first major environmental bill in two decades, a bill that is easily demagogued against politically — see this misleading but brutal GOP ad already whipped up against one Dem –  but whose major environmental benefit is decades in the future?

The Politico explains in “Chaos, arm-twisting gave Pelosi win,” excerpted below:

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Enhancing cooperation on climate change and energy efficiency should be a major plank of U.S. Russia policy and should be discussed at the highest levels when President Obama meets with President Medvedev next week.This Center for American Progress post, by Senior Fellow Andrew Light, Senior Policy Analyst Julian L. Wong, and Fellow Samuel Charap, was first published here.

The summit between President Barack Obama and Russian President Dmitri Medvedev in Moscow on July 6-8 comes in the middle of a packed international schedule of bilateral and multilateral meetings for the United States. on climate change. In the run up to the critical U.N. climate talks in Copenhagen at the end of this year, when the extension or successor to the existing Kyoto Protocol must be agreed upon, it is crucial that the United States and Russia—both major emitters of greenhouse gases and potentially leaders on this crucial issue—explore ways of working together to ensure a positive outcome at these talks. Enhancing cooperation on climate change and energy efficiency should be a major plank of U.S. Russia policy and should be discussed at the highest levels when President Obama meets with President Medvedev next week.

Russia, like the United States, is a significant contributor to global warming. If the European Union is disaggregated Russia is the third-largest emitter of carbon dioxide behind the United States and China and still currently ahead of India. More importantly Russian per capita emissions are on the rise, and are projected at this point to approach America’s top rank as per capita emitter by 2030. Russia is also the third-largest consumer of energy and one of the world’s most energy-intensive economies. Making Russia a partner on these issues could be critical in order to advance a sound global climate change agenda.

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Many of the top climate scientists in the world issued a major synthesis report reviewing the scientific literature since the 2007 IPCC Fourth Assessment Report (AR4).  They found “greenhouse gas emissions and many aspects of the climate are changing near the upper boundary of the IPCC range of projections.”  In short, actual observations show things are much worse than the IPPC found.  Duh! and Duh! and Duh! Media coverage level — bupkis!  Technorati links to report released June 18 — 6.

One EPA economist,  Alan Carlin, cuts and pastes some disinformation from a denier blog post in order to (falsely) assert that the EPA’s endangerment finding is flawed because

• “In the rapidly evolving field of climate change, by grounding its TSD Technical Support Documents in the IPCC AR4 the EPA is largely relying on scientific findings that are, by early 2009, largely 3 years or more out of date.”
• “Important developments” since the IPCC cast doubt on its conclusions.

Media coverage level of this crap, whose entire conclusion was vitiated by the earlier synthesis by real scientists — Michael Jackson [adjusted for subject area]!  Technorati links to “report” posted by deniers on June 25 — 61.

THE MEDIA PREFERS FABRICATED DRAMA TO GENUINE FACTS

When a government agency doesn’t incorporate plagiarized disinformation into their work product, is that suppression — or your tax dollars working the way they’re supposed to, with decisions based on sound science?   Deniers like the Competitive Enterprise Institute and Roger Pielke, Jr. say it’s the former, and they have spun some of the more gullible members of the status quo media, like CBS, who reported Friday:

Less than two weeks before the agency formally submitted its pro-regulation recommendation to the White House, an EPA center director quashed a 98-page report that warned against making hasty “decisions based on a scientific hypothesis that does not appear to explain most of the available data.”

Well, this “report” was actually first just “proposed comments” and then actual “Comments on the Draft Technical Support Documents for Endangerment Analysis for Greenhouse Gas Emissions under the Clean Air.”

I worked in a federal agency for five years.  Lots of internal people provide comments on draft documents.  Some of it’s good, some of it’s irrelevant, and some is outright disinformation — typically the latter is from holdovers from a previous administration.  In this case, it actually looks like the comments were

1. Unadulterated and long-debunked disinformation
2. From someone unqualified on the subject they are writing
3. Cut and paste from a blog without attribution
4. Delivered too late and not actually germane

Such comments should not be incorporated into an official government document — certainly not without a serious inquiry first.  They might, however, be the basis of an advserse employment action, as the euphemism goes.

You can read a thorough debunking of these “comments” at the RealClimate Post, “Bubkes.”  A brilliant piece by Deep Climate showed that this so-called “suppressed report” is

largely lifted from an attack on the EPA published last November in climate science disinformation specialist Pat Michaels’ World Climate Report [WCR]. And all this came without any attribution of the large swathes of copied material to WCR or the original author (presumably either Michaels or sidekick Chip Knappenberger).

I won’t repeat the entire Deep Climate analysis, but let me quote from the central thesis of the WCR November 19, 2008 post:  Why the EPA should find against “Endangerment”:

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Turns out justice delayed is not always justice denied

The uphill battle to beat the inevitable conservative filibuster attempt against climate action just got one vote easier.  Think Progress reports:

Eight months after the 2008 election, the Minnesota Supreme Court has declared Democrat Al Franken the winner of the state’s U.S. Senate election. The unanimous decision clears the way for Franken to be seated:

“For all of the foregoing reasons, we affirm the decision of the trial court that Al Franken received the highest number of votes legally cast and is entitled under Minn. 32 Stat. § 204C.40 (2008) to receive the certificate of election as United States Senator from the State of Minnesota.”

This weekend on CNN, Gov. Tim Pawlenty (R) said that he would be ready to “sign” the certificate officially declaring Franken the winner as soon as the supreme court gave the “green light“:

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In 2007, the IPCC warned that “as global average temperature increase exceeds about 3.5°C [relative to 1980 to 1999], model projections suggest significant extinctions (40-70% of species assessed) around the globe.”  On our current emissions path, we will warm far more than that this century, which suggests we risk the high end of species loss.

A new study in Science study (subs. req’d) confirms this risk.  It examines “the pace of diversity loss leading to the Triassic-Jurassic boundary (TJB).”  It finds “the sudden diversity drop ^… coincided with a mere ~100 to ~350 ppmv rise in CO₂ concentration,” and “CO₂-induced global warming was likely an important contributory factor to plant species turnover at the TJB.”

The study notes “The abrupt plant diversity loss … is consistent with expected plant responses to a catastrophically rapid rather than gradual environmental change,” such as might be caused from a massive release of methane  Good thing homo “sapiens” sapiens isn’t doing anything that might bring about catastrophically rapid climate change, like say 5°C warming in one century or a massive release of methane (see NOAA stunner: “Methane levels rose in 2008 for the second consecutive year after a 10-year lull”).

Worse, the study concludes:

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Amazon Conservation Policy Working In Brazil, Study Finds

Contrary to common belief, Brazil’s policy of protecting portions of the Amazonian forest from development is capable of buffering the Amazon from climate change, according to a new study led by Michigan State University researchers.

The study, to be published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, contends state and federal governments in Brazil have created a sustainable core of protected areas within the Amazon. And even if the remaining Brazilian Amazon is deforested, the climate will not significantly change – thereby protecting the Amazon’s ecosystems.

New Measures to Aid Solar on Public Lands

Interior Secretary Ken Salazar announced measures on Monday to hasten the development of solar energy on Western public lands.

Mr. Salazar, appearing in Las Vegas with Harry Reid, the Senate Majority Leader, said that 670,000 acres of lands managed by the Bureau of Land Management (an agency within the Department of the Interior) would be studied to determine whether they could support large solar power arrays.

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You just can’t teach an old petro-dog re-new-able tricks.

The UK’s Guardian reports:

BP has shut down its alternative energy headquarters in London, accepted the resignation of its clean energy boss and imposed budget cuts in moves likely to be seen by environmental critics as further signs of the oil group moving “back to petroleum”.

Sad, but not terribly original or surprising (see “Shell shocker: Once ‘green’ oil company guts renewables effort“).

But Tony Hayward, the group’s chief executive, said BP remained as committed as ever to exploring new energy sources and the non-oil division would benefit from the extra focus of being brought back in house….

“It saves money and brings it closer to home … you could almost see it as a reinforcement [of our commitment to the business],” he said.

Paging Dr. Cal Lightman!

Seriously, they gut the program and claim it is “reinforcement” of their commitment.  Perhaps BP stands for “Beyond Prevarication” or “Beyond Pinocchio.”

In the business world, “money talks, bullsh!t walks” — so let’s follow the money (as it departs the BP clean energy biz):

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