News Flash (as it were):

Hundreds of people posed naked on Switzerland’s shrinking Aletsch glacier today for US photographer Spencer Tunick as part of a Greenpeace campaign to raise awareness of global warming.

Now that is all the nudes that’s fit to print.

On a more serious note: “Switzerland has about 1800 glaciers and almost all of them are losing ground.” Everyone needs to do their part to raise awareness, even if it is a visibly small part.

Climate Progress is happy to introduce Bill Becker as the first of several new guest bloggers. Bill is Executive Director of the Presidential Climate Action Project, an initiative to help the next President of the United States take decisive action on global warming within his or her first 100 days in office. You can read his full bio here. Bill is not only one of the most knowledgeable people on sustainable development, he helped launch one of the first green communities — Soldiers Grove, WI. And he’s also a former newspaper editor — making him uniquely qualified to blog on energy and climate issues. Welcome, Bill!

My PC has been a blog-free zone. Until now.

Joe Romm asked me to become a contributor to Climate Progress and, after some hesitation, I agreed. I hesitated because my time, energy, and mental capacity are dominated these days by an effort to create a climate action plan for the next President of the United States.

But Joe is one of my former bosses at the U.S. Department of Energy, where he amazed us all by becoming one of the all-time champions of the Washington Post‘s weekly humor contest. He did that in his spare time, when he wasn’t creating one of the U.S.’s first comprehensive plans to combat global warming. I admire Joe a lot — his writing and his intellect and his mix of passion and science — so I agreed.

I expect to take advantage of Climate Progress to obtain your help with the presidential plan, sometimes by inciting a blog-riot, other times by gentler means of soliciting your reactions. I will start by telling you the assumptions upon which we’re basing our approach to climate action.

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Popular Science has published a terrific article, “Konrad Steffen: The Global Warming Prophet,” about one of the world’s leading climatologists. Steffen has spent “18 consecutive springs on the Greenland ice cap, personally building and installing the weather stations that help the world’s scientists understand what’s happening up there.” The article notes:

Water from the melting ice sheet is gushing into the North Atlantic much faster than scientists had previously thought possible. The upshot of the news out of Swiss Camp is that sea levels may rise much higher and much sooner than even the most pessimistic climate forecasts predicted.

What is going on in Greenland? Steffen explains what he and NASA glaciologist Jay Zwally figured out from their study of fissures in the ice sheet (called moulins — see figures above and below):

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I have argued previously that the landmark Stern Report got the big picture right — strong action now to reduce greenhouse gas emissions is economically justified, since the cost of action (i.e. mitigation), perhaps 1% of GDP, is far less than the cost of inaction (i.e. climate change impacts), which Stern estimates as at least 5% of GDP and possibly as high as 20%.

In particular, I (and others) argued Stern’s much-criticized choice of a low discount rate, 1.4%, was in fact justified — see here and here for a good discussion.

Now perhaps the most mainstream economic policy think tank in the country — Resources for the Future (RFF) — has written a major report, “An Even Sterner Review,” with two key conclusions. First, “we find no strong objections to the discounting assumptions adopted in the Stern Review.” Second,

[T]he conclusions reached in the review can be justified on other grounds than by using a low discount rate. We argue that nonmarket damages from climate change are probably underestimated and that future scarcities that will be induced by the changing composition of the economy and climate change should lead to rising relative prices for certain goods and services, raising the estimated damage of climate change and counteracting the effect of discounting.

What does RFF mean by “rising relative prices”?

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