Global Warming’s Next Victim: Wheat – Time Europe. “… the temperature increase that occurred between 1981 and 2002 reduced major cereal crop yields by an annual average of 40 million metric tons — losses worth $5 billion a year. Those losses are sobering, but nothing compared to what might be in store: A recent study sponsored by the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research forecast a 51% decline in India’s wheat-growing land, potentially leaving hundreds of millions hungry.”

Electric Cars 2.0 – Technology Review. A good article on plug-in hybrids.

Big Oil Firms Talk Up Carbon Capture, But Do Little – Reuters. Res ipsa loquitur.

GAO Chides Government on Warming – Washington Post. “Since 1850, the glaciers in Glacier National Park have declined from 150 to 26; climate-triggered coral bleaching in the Florida Keys National Marine Sanctuary is eroding the area’s tourist appeal.” Yet the people “overseeing these 600 million acres of land and 150,000 square miles of protected waters have little direction on how to respond to these shifts, according to the report.” The report states managers “have limited guidance about whether or how to address climate change and therefore, are uncertain about what action, if any, they should take. . . . Without such guidance, their ability to address climate change and effectively manage resources is constrained.”

Climate Progress is happy to introduce Eric Roston as a guest blogger. Eric is a former Time magazine writer and author of the forthcoming book, THE CARBON AGE: How Life’s Core Element Became Civilization’s Greatest Threat. You can read his full bio here. Eric is one of the people responsible for Time‘s great coverage on climate change over the years, and I first met him five years ago when TimeWarner was looking for help on becoming greener. Welcome, Eric!

Tim Flannery takes apart Danish statistician Bj¸rn Lomborg in yesterday’s Washington Post Book World. Flannery, whose The Weather Makers is one of the great popular works on climate science, rightfully lambastes Lomborg for cherry-picking climate research. He sees only areas of opportunity to help the world’s poor, dismissing the big picture.

Flannery is dead-wrong on two words in the last paragraph, in a sentence that reads, “On the surface, [Lomborg's book is] a cry from a compassionate conservative not to waste money on combating climate change when that money could be better spent helping the poor.” In fact, Lomborg is not a “compassionate conservative,” in the sense that the phrase was coined and would be understood by Washington Post readers.

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Climate change is occurring much faster than the IPCC models project. The Greenland ice sheet is a prime example. Robert Correll, chairman of the Arctic Climate Impact Assessment, said in Ilulissat recently:

“We have seen a massive acceleration of the speed with which these glaciers are moving into the sea. The ice is moving at two metres an hour on a front 5km [3 miles] long and 1,500 metres deep. That means that this one glacier puts enough fresh water into the sea in one year to provide drinking water for a city the size of London for a year.”

The glacier’s movement is accelerated as water flows down “moulins” (see picture) to the ice-bedrock interface at the bottom and acts as a lubricant for the entire glacier to slide and glide on. This “provides a mechanism for rapid, large-scale, dynamic responses of ice sheets to climate warming,” according to research led by led by NASA and MIT scientists. Yet this factor has been given “little or no consideration in estimates of ice-sheet response to climate change.”

The models are missing the moulins — even though you can’t miss them in the real world. Correll said that flying over the glacier in the 1960s, he saw no moulins but now “there are hundreds of them.”

Just how fast can a glacier move? Correll “measured one surge at 5km in 90 minutes – an extraordinary event.”

The whole idea of “glacial change” as a metaphor for change too slow to see will vanish in a world where glaciers are shrinking so fast that you can actually watch them retreat. Greenland’s glaciers are moving faster than America’s climate policy, which, I suppose, isn’t saying that much any more….

Human-caused global warming is poised to wipe out polar bears. The normally staid U.S. Geological Survey — studying whether the bear should be listed as a threatened species under the Endangered Species Act — concluded grimly last Friday:

Projected changes in future sea ice conditions, if realized, will result in loss of approximately 2/3 of the world’s current polar bear population by the mid 21st century. Because the observed trajectory of Arctic sea ice decline appears to be underestimated by currently available models, this assessment of future polar bear status may be conservative.

That’s right — this grim prediction is optimistic, a best-case scenario. In the next post, I’ll examine why polar bears are likely to go extinct by 2030 if not 2020. But first I need to dispense with a myth that polar bears are doing well — a myth propagated by some commenters on this blog and people like Bj¸rn Lomborg in his new book, Cool It: The Skeptical Environmentalist’s Guide to Global Warming.

As an aside, Amazon.com amazingly invited, of all people, Michael Crichton, the seriously confused global warming Denier, to be the book’s guest reviewer – perhaps Amazon.com should change its name to Deforestation.com. In his effusive review, Crichton repeats the myth:

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