A round-up of the top climate and energy news. Please post other links below.
Progressive lawmakers Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and Rep. Keith Ellison (D-Minn.) teamed up on Thursday to introduce legislation designed to stop subsidies to the oil, coal and natural gas industries, preserving an estimated $110 billion over the next ten years. [Huffington Post]
The Australian National University has released a series of abusive and threatening emails which were sent to its climate change scientists. [ABC News]
Of a possible $1.4 billion dollars in proposed spending cuts in the Departments of Commerce and Justice for 2013, the U.S. House Representatives voted to approve none of them. None of them except a piddly $542,000 for a NOAA climate website. [Washington Post]
According to a peer-reviewed paper James Hansen has submitted to a leading scientific journal and made available to Time.com prior to publication, scientists can now state “with a high degree of confidence” that some extremely high temperatures are in fact caused by global warming, simply because they occur much more frequently than they used to. [Time]
In California, May typically marks the beginning of a warm and dry summer season. This year, however, things are different. Not only has it been warm and dry for the past couple weeks; it’s been warm and dry for months. [Climate Central]
A proposal by California Public Utilities Commission President Michael Peevey to change the way that “net metering” is calculated is the latest skirmish in the war between the state’s largest utilities and the fast-growing rooftop solar industry. [Mercury News]
They seldom meet on the cricket or football fields, but the world’s small island developing states are informally competing with each other to be the first to ditch fossil fuels and embrace clean energy. [Guardian]
Ottawa has waged a concerted lobbying campaign against Brussels’ proposal to rate the carbon content of tar sands. An examination of hundreds of pages of documents obtained under access to information legislation in both Brussels and Ottawa, some dating back to 2009, as well as interviews with leading officials in both Canada and Europe show just how extensive that effort has been. [Reuters]
Previous in TP Climate Progress
Language Intelligence: Lessons on persuasion from Jesus, Shakespeare, Lincoln, and Lady Gaga
“Progressive Lawmakers Unveil Bill To Eliminate Subsidies To Fossil Fuels”
Yes, we Can! And we put this money to use when re-redirecting it to renewable energy resources. It is up to the oil companies to transition and update their portfolio as well.
The announced solar subsidies in the german solar industry (CP reported) have been vetoed today by the Bundesrat. A 2/3 majority voted against the solar subsidy cut.
SPIEGEL:
Die Kürzung bei der Förderung für Solarstrom wurde sogar mit einer Zwei-Drittel-Mehrheit abgeschmettert. Auch hier muss ein Ausschuss ran und das Papier grundlegend überarbeiten. http://www.spiegel.de/politik/deutschland/opposition-im-bundesrat-blockiert-steuerreform-und-solarfoerderung-a-832673.html
Not any job, only Green Jobs can start to move the economies of the world out of the morass. As long as capitalism has the ability to profit, handily I would add, from polluting the commons, every “Black” job just digs the hole deeper. Only green jobs ADD VALUE to the economy and start to rejuvenate Earth’s life support systems.
Corporations are “People” now for better or worse. Speaking as a “RealPeople”, if I throw a paper cup out the car window, bingo, ~$100 fine. Corpro/People can pollute the air, water, dirt, and oceans with Toxins and the “Blackest” Corpro/People have become richest Corpro/People in the world and the foundation of western Capitalism. Even the breast milk my Daughter-in Law feeds the Grand kidder is contaminated with their toxins, as does those of every other mammal in the world! Still Corpro/People get rich and even subsidized with YOURS & MY TAX MONEY. And I cannot stop it. GOP don’t fund abortion, how come I must fund the Ecocide of Earth’s life support systems? Go figure. Please help! Stop profits from the pollution of the commons…. PLEASE…
Corporations are just like ‘people’-Rightwing people. Greedy, brutal, bullying, single and simple minded, violent. The Right’s version of the Left’s commune, collective, community. It’s no wonder they act as they do, and they cannot be reformed or made beneficent, as their basic purpose, profit maximisation, is a process of turning the living fabric of this planet into the dead stuff of commodification. You might as well talk of a healthful cancer.
Potential breakthrough energy storage technology
New nanostructure for batteries keeps going and going
For more than a decade, scientists have tried to improve lithium-based batteries by replacing the graphite in one terminal with silicon, which can store 10 times more charge. But after just a few charge/discharge cycles, the silicon structure would crack and crumble, rendering the battery useless.
http://phys.org/news/2012-05-nanostructure-batteries.html
We don’t need heartland to sow seeds of confusion….
http://dotearth.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/05/11/another-view-on-extreme-weather-in-a-warming-climate/
From sun-drenched New York City
The Bike-Share Map: It’s Real, It’s Bit, and It’s Only Going to Get Bigger
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http://www.streetsblog.org/2012/05/11/the-bike-share-map-its-real-its-big-and-its-only-going-to-get-bigger/
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via @streetsblogNYC
And, remember that this is only early-stage net zero transit.
correct story title should read:
The Bike-Share Map: It’s Real, It’s Big, and It’s Only Going to Get Bigger
So the GOP point people on marriage are: An unwed teen mother (Bristol Palin), A three-time divorced fat radio host (Limbaugh), a dude with five grandmothers (Romney) and a never married spinster (Ann Coulter). OK, got it. http://www.reddit.com/r/politics/comments/ti7ae/so_the_gop_point_people_on_marriage_are_an_unwed/
Please don’t call Limbaugh ‘fat’. Clinically he is plainly morbidly obese, or, if you prefer, he has a ‘Pickwickian body habitus’.
Murdoch’s Shakespearean Tragedy
Elveden’s investigators are looking into allegations that News Corp. reporters bribed police, Army, and defense ministry officials — and possibly other British officeholders — to win scoops and perhaps other business favors. That means the evidence Elveden turns up could form the basis of charges in the United States against News Corp. and its employees or executives under the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, which bars American-based companies from paying off “foreign officials” in order to obtain or retain business.
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http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/comment/2012/05/murdochs-shakespearean-tragedy.html
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@NewYorker
What? Murdoch was supposed to obey US law? Pah! Real men know that one’s simply gotta do what one’s gotta do, the law be damned. Plus, holding Murdoch accountable to the law won’t help Obama get re-elected, eh will it?
– frank
“According to a peer-reviewed paper James Hansen has submitted to a leading scientific journal and made available to Time.com prior to publication, scientists can now state “with a high degree of confidence” that some extremely high temperatures are in fact caused by global warming, simply because they occur much more frequently than they used to.”
This is an important paper by Dr Hansen and the Times post is worth the read. So far it only seems to be reported on the Times eco blog.
Just a few of the important points from the Times blog:
“scientists can now state “with a high degree of confidence” that some extremely high temperatures are in fact caused by global warming, simply because they occur much more frequently than they used to.
the authors show that extreme outliers of more than three standard deviations above the mean temperature covered between six and thirteen percent of the globe during the years 2003 to 2008.
“The climate dice are loaded now, just as we said back in the 1980s that they would be,” Hansen wrote to Time.com. “People should be able to recognize the change, especially the increasingly extreme events. Don’t be surprised if there are more examples this summer.”
Well we knew that about the loaded climate dice but it is important to keep saying it.
This is the link
Global Warming: An Exclusive Look at James Hansen’s Scary New Math
A new analysis by the NASA climatologist for the first time ties specific weather events to human-induced climate change
http://ecocentric.blogs.time.com/2012/05/10/global-warming-an-exclusive-look-at-james-hansens-scary-new-math/
I have always felt that extreme events not noted before in the record, along with the knowledge of the context, meant that the probability of the event being caused by GW was high… more than likely caused by GW.
In these cases they should therefore be assumed to be caused by GW unless proven otherwise….rather than not or not sure if.
It is surprising how reticent scientist can be even when the probabilities are staring them in the face!
6-13% is a huge and should be easily notice difference to 0.2%.
“In the paper, which Time.com confirmed has been peer-reviewed, the authors show that extreme outliers of more than three standard deviations above the mean temperature covered between six and thirteen percent of the globe during the years 2003 to 2008. If they were normally distributed and similar to the climactic record, that should have been just a 0.1-to-0.2 percent frequency of an extreme heat event. (That’s about exactly as often as a perfect bell curve predicts they would occur.) Hansen dubs this difference a “three-sigma anomaly,” for the Greek-letter symbol for standard deviation. And in the world of statistics, these anomalies represent a stunning 10-fold increase in extreme weather events.
GW caused more chaotic weather patterns and you would expect wide swings on a regional basis as thing spiral hotter and hotter.
“These three-sigma anomalies,” Hansen says, “we can now say are due to global warming.” But what about the extreme cold snaps climate-change deniers keep pointing to? Even with global warming, Hansen told Time.com in an email, there “is still a broad bell curve. In fact, it has become broader, which means there will still be times when a season is colder than average. When that happens [people] should not say, ‘What happened to global warming?’ It will still be there — they are just looking at natural variability.”
2nd billion-dollar weather disaster of 2012: April 3 severe weather in Texas
http://www.wunderground.com/blog/JeffMasters/comment.html?entrynum=2090
The story on death-threats to climate scientists is interesting, seeing as just this week the Murdoch sewer headlined a story claiming that these reports of death-threats had been proved false. The denialist gibberers immediately started prattling about ‘lying climate scientists’. It is all in accord with a sudden, and quite marked, uptick in the sheer hysteria and viciousness of the Right here, in the Murdoch cess-pool in particular. Some very mild redistributive measures in the Federal Budget this week, giving money to the poorest and middle income earners, and winding back a few of the rorts granted the rich under John Howard, were greeted by the Murdoch mire with hysterical diatribes about ‘class war’ and sordid ‘cartoons’ with Red Flags and Hammers and Sickles rampant. Ah, the good old days. Perhaps the terminal decline towards collapse into a bonfire of corruption of the Murdoch pathocracy has driven the minions mad, or perhaps the crumbling of Murdochism so plainly mirrors the collapse of the market capitalist system, that the propaganda apparatchiki are attempting to reverse history and invert reality to save their natural dystopian habitat by sheer weight of abuse, invective and intimidation. It never failed them before.