Vermont Governor:  “We’ve got to get off fossil fuels as quickly as we know how, to make this planet livable for our children and our grandchildren.”

Below the jump is a guest post, “Surviving My Own Predictions: A Vermont Climate Scientist Faces Hurricane Irene.”

A house in Sharon, Vermont, that started out the week on the other side of this underpass, via Masters.

The storm of the century — at least for large parts of New England — is over.  But Irene’s 1-in-100 year deluge leaves devastation in its wake.   Meteorologist and former hurricane Hunter Dr. Jeff Masters summed it up this way yesterday:

Record flooding continues in the Northeast from Irene’s torrential rains. Hardest hit was Vermont, where heavy rains in the weeks prior to Irene’s arrival had left soils in the top 20% for moisture, historically. Irene dumped 5 – 8 inches of rain over large sections of Vermont, with a peak of 11.23″ at Mendo. The reading from Mendo was the greatest single-day rainfall in Vermont’s history…. beating the 9.92″ that fell at Mt. Mansfield on 9/17/1999 during the passage of Tropical Storm Floyd.

Governor Peter Shumlin (D-VT) spoke Tuesday about the danger human-caused climate change poses to his state and others:

I find it extraordinary that so many political leaders won’t actually talk about the relationship between climate change, fossil fuels, our continuing irrational exuberance about burning fossil fuels, in light of these storm patterns that we’ve been experiencing.

We had storms this spring that flooded our downtowns and put us through many of the same exercises that we’re going through right now. We didn’t used to get weather patterns like this in Vermont….

We in the colder states are going to see the results of climate change first…  Myself, Premier [Jean] Charest up in Quebec, Governor [Andrew] Cuomo over in New York, we understand that the flooding and the extraordinary weather patterns that we’re seeing are a result of our burnings of fossil fuel. We’ve got to get off fossil fuels as quickly as we know how, to make this planet livable for our children and our grandchildren.

What follows is a guest post by Dr. Elizabeth R. Sawin of Hartland, Vermont.  Sawin is Co-Director of Climate Interactive, a non-profit organization that creates computer simulations of climate and energy policy in the U.S. and around the world – ClimateInteractive.org.

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GOP presidential front runner Rep. Michele Bachmann’s (MN) new notion to drill for oil in the Florida Everglades is compelling the public, scientists, and even a few in her own party to raise their eyebrows at her “incredible faux pas.”

Ever resilient against the onslaught of facts, Bachmann doubled down on her call to drill the Everglades yesterday, stating “Let’s access this wonderful treasure trove of energy that God has given us in this country.” And for those inconvenient truthers who point out there’s no actual evidence of oil under the Everglades, Bachmann told Tampa Bay’s 10News that they’re nothing more than “radical environmentalists“:

Tuesday, a CBS reporter in Miami confronted Bachmann about her call for drilling, asking, “Why would you invade that natural resource with gas and oil drilling?” Bachmann responded, “Let’s access this wonderful treasure trove of energy that God has given us in this country. Let’s access it responsibly.”

Is there even any oil beneath the Everglades? 10News sat down with USF Geologist Dr. Albert Hine, and he told us, “There is no known evidence that there is a significant hydrocarbon deposit beneath the Everglades.”[...]

Bachmann hasn’t been deterred by any naysayers, telling 10News, “The radical environmentalists put up one road block after another to prevent accessing American energy. We also have oil in the Eastern Gulf region.”

Watch it:

The list of nay-saying “radical environmentalists” include: fellow presidential contender Mitt Romney, President George W. Bush, and his brother former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush (R) — not to mention most Floridians. Indeed, fellow Tea Party leader Rep. Allen West (R-FL) promised yesterday to “straighten her out” against targeting “an incredible ecosystem.” Given Bacmann’s renewed obstinence, it’s a promise he’ll most likely fail to deliver on.

If you wonder why the public is so ill-informed about global warming, the following head-exploding story is illuminating.  The New York Times appears to be downplaying the role of climate change.  You be the judge.

A few weeks ago, some experts on public health and the hydrological cycle came out with a nuanced study in the American Journal of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene examining some recent theories as to why cholera outbreaks occur.

The American Society of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene put out a news release headlined:

Scientists pinpoint river flow associated with cholera outbreaks, not just global warming

Previously, some scientists had seen a correlation between sea surface temperature and cholera outbreaks in certain locations, like the coastal waters of the Bay of Bengal.  That puzzled the authors of this new study, “Warming Oceans, Phytoplankton, and River Discharge: Implications for Cholera Outbreaks” (PDF here) for two reasons:

1. High SSTs are normally associated with a decrease in phytoplankton — the authors cite 8 studies on this.  (See also, Nature Stunner: “Global warming blamed for 40% decline in the ocean’s phytoplankton”).
2. High-levels of phytoplankton are thought to lead to cholera outbreaks.  The causal agent of cholera hangs around with copepods, small crustaceans that feed on phytoplankton.  So it’s been theorized that “high levels of phytoplankton may lead to high numbers of cholera-containing copepods, increasing the likelihood of cholera epidemics in coastal human populations.”

What the new study found was that in the Bay of Bengal and other large river basins -‑ the Orinoco (in South America), the Congo, and the Amazon — “The positive relationship between phytoplankton blooms and ocean temperature is related to large river discharges,” said Shafiqul Islam, PhD, the lead investigator of the study and a professor in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at Tufts.  The rivers discharge “terrestrial nutrients.”

The release notes:

But Islam said that global warming may play a role in other ways in outbreaks of cholera, including contributing to droughts and high salinity intrusion in the dry season and floods in the wet season. Both of those conditions have been found also to contribute to cholera epidemics, as published recently in the journal Water Resources Research. “If river flows are more turbulent, if droughts are more severe, if flood is more severe, cholera is more severe,” he said. “But cholera may not have direct linkage with rising sea surface temperatures.”

Okay, so the main result of the study is that cholera outbreaks may not be causally linked with rising SSTs — though the authors can’t make a definitive statement on that (if you actually talk to them).  But cholera outbreaks have been appear to be linked to extreme flooding as well as extreme drought, both of which, of course, have been projected — and even observed — to increase because of climate change!

So what is the headline of the New York Times story?

Seriously.

The news release doesn’t say this at all — quite the reverse.  The study doesn’t say this — if you read it.  Nor do the authors — quite the reverse.   I had an extended interview with Islam yesterday, and, to be clear, he explains that this study simply can’t say whether or not there is a linkage between warmer SSTs and cholera.  But his work does suggest that the kind of extreme weather linked to climate change is a culprit in outbreaks.  Note — “a culprit,” not the only one.

The New York Times appears to have read the news release, but decided to run with its own perverse narrative.  I say that based on the final paragraph of the Times story, which is lifted from the American Society of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene release:

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