When one of the world’s leading hurricane experts reverses his long-held position based on detailed analysis, it’s worth pointing out. I’m talking about M.I.T.’s Kerry Emanuel, author of perhaps the best book ever written on hurricanes–Divine Wind: The History and Science of Hurricanes. He said in May:

And so the rise of hurricane into the 1950s, its subsequent fall around 1990 or so, and then its more recent rise we now believe is mostly owing to changes in the radiation reaching the earth that have been caused by solar variability, volcanic activity, sulfate aerosol pollution and greenhouse warming….

So I no longer believe that there is any evidence for natural cycles of Atlantic hurricanes, even though a year ago I did.

And since greenhouse warming will just keep rising unless we take action soon, global warming will soon overwhelm completely all the other factors. Emanuel told Plenty magazine in February (subs. req’d), “I don’t see any reason why the power of hurricanes wouldn’t continue to increase over the next 100 to 200 years.” In June, Emanuel published the underlying analysis in Eos (subs. req’d), showing precisely why the dominant force driving ocean sea surface temperatures is human-caused global warming, not “natural cycles.”

The May quote was part of a terrific teleconference put on by Clear the Air, which also included a number of other leading experts. I recommend the transcript and audiotape of the event to anyone wishing to become more knowledgeable on this important subject.

Half a story is not better than the whole story.

On Sunday, the “paper of record” reported on the record-breaking wildfire season, never mentioning how human-caused global warming may be contributing–even though recent research suggests it is. Now they finally run a major story on the devastating drought sweeping the nation, one they compare to “the Dust Bowl of the 1930′s,” but again, no mention of global warming–even though increased risk of drought is a well-known prediction from climate scientists.

Heck, the Times is even running a Reuters story on the new World Bank climate report that points out global warming is forecast to cause “more frequent and severe droughts.” But the Times in its drought story states instead that “scientists deemed the weather conditions and its effects in the areas of the worst drought a once-in-50-years experience.” That might be true absent global warming.

On our current greenhouse gas emissions path, however, the kind of drought we are experiencing now will be, tragically, a far more common occurrence. And just last year, climatologist Jonathan Overpeck warned that humanity is at danger of forcing “abrupt shifts to drier conditions, including possible decadal megadrought.”

The Times simply needs to do a far, far better job of covering this most important of stories.

Hurricane Katrina revealed what is to come for this country from global warming. As super-hurricanes become common and sea levels rise in a warmed world, all our great Gulf and Atlantic Coast cities are at risk for the same fate as New Orleans. On our current greenhouse gas emissions path, we face 100 Katrinas.

That’s one reason Climate Progress is being launched today. On a personal level, Katrina’s ferocious storm surge destroyed the Mississippi home of my brother, his wife, and son as they huddled in a Biloxi shelter. Katrina’s brutal aftermath spurred me to dig more widely and more deeply into the subject.

While I have spent most of the last two decades working on climate solutions, my Ph.D. thesis was on physical oceanography, researched at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography. I talked to the world’s leading climate scientists and reviewed the growing body of scientific evidence, which in turn led to a book, Hell and High Water: Global Warming–The Solution and the Politics (William Morrow, January 2007) and to this blog.

What did I learn?
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The New York Times finally did a major story on the record-breaking wildfire season the country is facing. But while the story explicitly examines the causes of the remarkable wildfires we are experiencing, it never mentions global warming at all–even though the cover story of Science magazine last week was on research establishing the global warming-wildfire link, and even though the Times covered this research when it was first released over a month ago.

The Times story points out that the “devastating” Western wildfire season has seen “at least 7.1 million acres burned by late this week, more than in any comparable period in 10 years, federal figures indicate.” About half the story is devoted to various explanations, including a recent shift in Pacific Ocean water temperatures and an intense heat wave in May and June that eliminated some of the snow pack that normally moistens forests in the summer.

The reporter, however, misses the real story. He mistakenly makes it seem like this wildfire season is somehow a unique event, and the opening sentence talks about large individual fires from 1949, 1988, and 1910. You would never know from this article that the U.S. record for wildfire acreage burned was set in 2005 (8.5 million acres), breaking a record just set in 2000.

Nor would you have any idea of the recent research linking this trend toward more intense wildfire seasons to global warming.

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No, Tiger hasn’t suddenly become Leonardo DiCaprio or Orlando Bloom or Olympic gold medalist Picabo Street, for that matter. He hasn’t taken up the global warming cause, at least not yet. But there are lessons to be learned from his two consecutive major wins.

As the photo from the British Open shows, the greens at Royal Liverpool were off color. “This is the brown British Open,” as the Associated Press put it:

A heat wave in Britain – the temperature reached 91 degrees Wednesday – has caused the rough to die, leaving wispy strands of native grasses and fairways that are a mixture of yellow and brown. Yellow is the color of the grass, brown is where the grass has died.

Heat waves and droughts are becoming longer and stronger thanks to human-caused climate change. Tiger, however, is the greatest golfer of his generation–probably of any generation–and a briliant all-weather strategist. Washington Post sports writer Michael Wilbon explains:

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In January 2005, the International Climate Change Taskforce, which was established by three leading think tanks including the Center for American Progress, released its report” Meeting the Climate Challenge.” The Taskforce was co-chaired by Senator Olympia Snowe (R-ME) and Stephen Byers, a member of the British Parliament. Its members included scientists and politicians from Australia, China, Malaysia, France, and Germany. The report represents an important starting point for progressives on climate, and Climate Progress will try to build on its work.

The report begins by noting:

The international consensus of scientific opinion, led by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, is agreed that global temperature is increasing and that the main cause is the accumulation of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases in the atmosphere as a result of human activities. Scientific opinion is also agreed that the threat posed will become more severe over coming decades.

The cost of failing to act will be high:

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should not throw stones at those trying to avert catastrophe.

USA Today helped the global warming Deniers and Delayers throw sand in the eyes of the American public last week by publishing a misleading, erroneous, and irrelevant ad hominem attack on former Vice President Al Gore. The article, “Gore isn’t quite as green as he’s led the world to believe,” by author and Hoover Institution fellow Peter Schweizer, accuses Gore of not practicing what he preaches.

That USA Today would publish an obviously un-fact-checked article from someone who works at an institution that has recevied nearly $300,000 from ExxonMobil to spread disinformation on global warming is more evidence of how big media helps confuse the public on global warming.

The article is so flawed, USA Today was itself forced to run a correction.  DeSmog Blog offers a good debunking–“Hoover Institute and the Art of Slander,”–and I will run the reply by Gore’s communications director at the end of this post. I want to focus here on the cleverly misleading irrelevancy of the core argument, which Schweizer summarizes in his final paragraph:
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Many of the articles that discuss the projected temperature change from global warming do not explain crucial points in a clear fashion. Since Climate Progress will be discussing temperature a great deal–why the planet must avoid 3°C (5.4°F) warming and how we can do so–a clarifying note is in order.

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While the recent extreme heat wave generated intense coverage for a while, the media has largely missed the big climate story of the summer–the nationwide drought. The U.S. Drought Monitor paints a sobering picture, with the browns and reds showing the severest areas of drought:

Here is how Rich Tinker of NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center describes the alarming situation:

Overview: Abnormal dryness and all drought intensities remained unusually expansive for the nation as a whole, leading to a variety of impacts. More than 5.9 million acres have been scorched by wildfires so far this year, which is 70 percent more than the average for the same period during the previous 10 years, according to the National Interagency Coordination Center…. Fully half of the nation’s pastures and rangelands were in poor or very poor condition, a proportion exceeded only once since weekly growing season records were first gathered in May 1995.

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In an otherwise informative and well-written article on local climate action, “Cities, States Aren’t Waiting For U.S. Action on Climate,” Post reporter Juliet Eilperin gets the lead paragraph wrong:

With Washington lawmakers deadlocked on how best to curb global warming, state and local officials across the country are adopting ambitious policies and forming international alliances aimed at reducing greenhouse gases.

Washington lawmakers are NOT deadlocked on how best to curb global warming. Most Democrats and a few Republicans want to take action to curb global warming. President George W. Bush and the congressional leadership want to take no action.

For instance, as Think Progress posted last week, House Majority Whip Roy Blunt (R-MO) said that if Republicans remain in power after the November elections, Congress won’t “do anything meaningful” on climate.

Or consider the Senate. The bill from John McCain (R-AZ) and Joe Lieberman (D-CT) that would put an absolute cap on U.S. greenhouse gas emissions received just 38 votes in the summer of 2005. John Shanahan, senior Counsel to Senate Environment Committee chair James Inhofe (R-OK), said in February 2006:

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Okay, so it isn’t breaking news, or at least it shouldn’t be. A 2004 study in Nature examined the role of greenhouse gas emissions in the deadly 2003 heat wave that killed 35,000 Europeans. It concluded that human influence more than doubled the risk of such a heat wave. On our current emissions path, more than half of European summers will be hotter than 2003 within the next four decades. By the end of the century, “2003 would be classed as an anomalously cold summer relative to the new climate.”

But most U.S. coverage of our recent heat wave ignores the subject. I was interviewed by ABC Evening News last week because of my work on urban heat islands, whereby dark roofs and asphalt pavement and the loss of shade trees have made cities much hotter than they would otherwise be. Although I discussed how global warming is making this kind of deadly heat wave more likely and more intense””and combining with the heat island effect to make cities increasingly inhospitable in the summer””they omitted all of these comments. They wanted only a story on heat islands.

Fortunately, a few articles have begun to appear on the subject, even if they don’t make the front page like the scenes of people sweltering. The Washington Post‘s Juliet Eilperin wrote one of the best articles on the subject, “More Frequent Heat Waves Linked to Global Warming,” for a page 3 story last week.

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What to call those who deny that global warming is an urgent problem or who seek to delay strong action to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, people like Sen. Jim Inhofe (R-OK) or President George W. Bush or Michael Crichton, author of State of Fear, a deeply flawed novel that attacks climate science and climate scientists? This is a question that everyone who writes on climate change must grapple with.

The most commonly used term is “skeptic.” But that term is misplaced. All scientists are skeptics. Hence the motto of the Royal Society of London, one of the world’s oldest scientific academies (founded in 1660), Nullius in verba: “Take nobody’s word.”

Skeptics can be convinced by the facts, but not the Deniers. Skeptics do not continue repeating arguments that have been discredited. Deniers do.

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One of the main themes of Climate Progress is that we have the technologyies available to avoid the worst of global warming–but only if we start using them now. So it was heartening to see the recent cover story, “It’s Not Too Late,” in one of the country’s leading technology magazines, MIT’s Technology Review, drive this theme home from its very first line: “The energy technologies that might forestall global warming already exist.”

Conservatives, led by the Bush administration, try to convince the public we can’t act now by arguing that we must wait for new technologies, as in this recent quote from John H. Marburger III, the president’s science adviser: “It’s important not to get distracted by chasing short-term reductions in greenhouse emissions. The real payoff is in long-term technological breakthroughs.” No, let’s not get distracted by the actual solution to the problem.
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UPDATE (10/09):  For an overview of the blog today, new readers should check out An Introduction to Climate Progress and Time magazine names me one of the “Heroes of the Environment 2009″ and “The Web’s most influential climate-change blogger.”

Climate Progress is a web site dedicated to providing the progressive perspective on climate science, climate solutions, and climate politics. Like Think Progress, Progress is a project of the American Progress Action Fund. The American Progress Action Fund is a nonpartisan organization.

Joseph Romm is the editor of Climate Progress. I am a Senior Fellow at the Center for American Progress and a former acting assistant secretary of energy for energy efficiency and renewable energy during the Clinton Administration. You can learn entirely too much about me at my Wikipedia entry. You can expect to see posts mostly from me at the beginning, but also from other Center staff and guest posters.