Seth Borenstein of the Associated Press reports — and editorializes — on the grim news:

The global output of heat-trapping carbon dioxide jumped by the biggest amount on record, the U.S. Department of Energy calculated, a sign of how feeble the world’s efforts are at slowing man-made global warming.

Feeble indeed.  You go, Seth.  You’re an honorary blogger now!

The new figures for 2010 mean that levels of greenhouse gases are higher than the worst case scenario outlined by climate experts just four years ago.

That means worse than the A1FI scenario (1000 ppm).  It means 10F warming (this century) give or take — and multiple, simultaneous catastrophes.

Here are more details of the sorry situation we find ourselves in:

CLICK HERE TO READ MORE OR COMMENT

Read more

As ThinkProgress Green first reported, the State Department’s review of TransCanada’s Keystone XL tar sands pipeline has actually been run by Cardno Entrix, a company paid to do the job by TransCanada itself. For years, the State Department’s involvement in this project that would run across the nation’s heartland with millions of gallons of toxic crude was limited to a single junior-level staffer. Under the Bush administration, foreign service officer Betsy Orlando was the Keystone Environmental Impact Statement (EIS) Project Manager. Continuing for years in the Obama administration, she represented the entire involvement of the State Department in investigating the impact of $7 billion project, outsourced to contractors who worked for TransCanada, the Huffington Post reveals:

At a public hearing in Oklahoma during summer 2010, Kimberly Demuth, a vice president at CardnoEntrix, described the State Department’s capacity as “a staff of one person, Betsy Orlando, who’s in charge of this project.”

During the Bush administration, Orlando oversaw the approval process of the earlier Keystone pipeline beginning in 2006. That pipeline, which ships tar sands crude across the US-Canada border, gained a Presidential Permit in March, 2008. After that success, TransCanada filed its application to construct the Keystone XL pipeline at the tail end of the Bush administration.

Orlando, who has no formal background that would help her assess the risks of such a pipeline or judge the work of oil industry contractors, moved to a new tour of service in Nigeria in October 2010.

“The people I worked with at State were good, honest people, and they were very inexperienced and naive about environmental laws,” a federal environmental compliance officer told the Huffington Post. “They did not have a senior expert on their environmental impact study, and I’ve never seen that before.”

As criticism from other agencies and grassroots activists of the corrupt draft impact statement has poured in, Clinton’s State Department has called for more work, but with the same conflicts of interest. An analysis of greenhouse gas impacts in response to EPA concerns was done by ICF International under contract to Cardno Entrix, not the State Department. However, the Department of Energy did directly commission contractor Ensys Energy to assess the “impacts on U.S. and global refining, trade and oil markets of the Keystone XL project.” Both reports include the caveat that the “views and opinions of authors expressed herein do not necessarily state or reflect those of the United States Government or any agency thereof.”

Drying of northern wetlands has led to much more severe peatland wildfires and nine times as much carbon released into the atmosphere, according to new research.

The most dangerous amplifying carbon-cycle feedback we face in the near term is, I believe, the thawing northern tundra.  It is poised to turn the Arctic from a carbon sink to source in the 2020s, releasing 100 billion tons of carbon by 2100, according to a 2011 study.

That study found, conservatively, that carbon emissions from a thawing permafrost are “strong enough to cancel 42-88% of the total global land sink. The thaw and decay of permafrost carbon is irreversible” and accounting for it “will require larger reductions in fossil fuel emissions to reach a [given] target atmospheric CO2 concentration.“

But there are a host of other very serious amplifying feedbacks — or vicious circles — whereby an initial warming leads to changes that cause more emissions, which in turn lead to more warming (see partial list at end).  One of those involves the drying of the peatlands.

Most of the world’s wetlands are peat, which are better known as bogs, moors, mires, and swamp forests. Wikipedia notes, “Under the proper conditions, peat is the earliest stage in the formation of coal.” Here’s why peatlands contain so much carbon:

Peat is the accumulation of partially decayed vegetation in very wet places and it covers about two percent of global land mass. Peatlands store large amounts of carbon owing to the low rates of carbon breakdown in cold, waterlogged soils.

A 2008 Nature Geoscience study — “High sensitivity of peat decomposition to climate change through water-table feedback” — projects that “a warming of 4°C causes a 40% loss of soil organic carbon from the shallow peat and 86% from the deep peat” of Northern peatlands. And that amplifying carbon cycle feedback is dangerous for three reasons:

1. The northern peatlands are believed to store some 320 (+/- 140) billion metric tons of carbon, roughly half of what the atmosphere contains.
2. Peatlands tend to emit much of their carbon in the form of methane, which is more than 20 times as powerful a greenhouse gas as carbon dioxide (and 100 times more powerful over a 20-year period).
3. A warming of 4°C this century is all but inevitable if we don’t sharply reverse emissions trends quickly (see “An Illustrated Guide to the Science of Global Warming Impacts“).

Now, a new study does some experiments and makes some observations to look at the impact of drying on peatlands.  A coauthor sums it up:

“Currently, peatlands are considered important global stores for carbon. But we’ve shown that human disturbance or climate-induced drying can switch peatlands from sinks to potentially huge sources of carbon, with losses associated with severe burning far outweighing long-term rates of sequestration.”

The full study is behind a firewall here.  The University of Guelph news release does a good job of explaining what they did and what they found:

CLICK HERE TO READ MORE OR COMMENT

Read more