New energy agency chief sees household energy use rising in industrial countries – International Herald Tribune. “Despite the growing political commitment to tackling global warming, individual energy use and carbon emissions in the leading industrial countries have actually increased in recent years,” according to Nobuo Tanaka, the first non-European chosen to lead the International Energy Agency. He added that “Europe, Canada, Australia and particularly the United States had to do much more to increase energy efficiency if they wanted to have any credibility when calling on India and China to act.”

Move to identify climate change security hotspots – The Guardian. “The MoD [Ministry of Defence] has identified climate change as a key strategic factor affecting societal stresses and the responses of communities and nations to those stresses. We have a pressing need for the best available advice on future climate change and, based on these predictions, assessments of the impacts of those changes on human societies at the regional and local scale,” said Roy Anderson, the MoD’s chief scientific adviser.

New report: Global warming impact like “nuclear war” – report – Reuters. “The International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS) security think-tank said global warming would hit crop yields and water availability everywhere, causing great human suffering and leading to regional strife.”

Here is yet another carbon-cycle amplifying feedback not in most climate models.

On the one hand, the United Nations’ top climate official, Yvo de Boer, announced that

Climate change has become the prime cause of an accelerating spread of deserts which threatens the world’s drylands.

On the other hand, he pointed out that desertification would, in turn, accelerate climate change:

“You’ll see a sort of feedback mechanism … quite a lot of carbon is captured in soil, so with more desertification (exposing the soil), you also get more CO2 emissions. They are two halves of the same coin.”

Well, two sides of the same coin, anyway. But we get his point. He was interviewed at a U.N. desertification conference in Madrid. What’s coming?

Read more

So we finally learn that the great tragedy the 4400 were sent forward and then backward in time to prevent with their newly-acquired special abilities has to do with the squandering of our natural resources, like fresh water. That’s gotta be global warming and the century of drought, yes?

Of course, we must take this with a grain of salt since we learn this from two of the marked–the evil elite from the future who don’t want the resource-destroying tragedy prevented and whose personality-containing nanites have been injected into (and taken control of) the bodies of present day folks like our hero Tom Baldwin.

Hey — you were warned!

[And tell me you don't watch NBC's Heroes, which is a The 4400 rip-off -- OK, so The 4400 is kind of an X-men ripoff....]

I taped a debate with Lomborg today on a Denver radio station. I’ll post a link when it will be broadcast on the Internet. I’ll be interested to hear your reactions.

I have long thought it is pretty much impossible to win a 1-on-1 debate on climate change with anybody who knows what they’re doing, who knows the literature and is willing to make statements that are not really true but can’t be quickly disproved. After all, the audience is not in a position to adjudicate scientific and technological issues, so it just comes down to who sounds more persuasive. And Lomborg is quite good at sounding reasonable — he doesn’t deny the reality of climate change only its seriousness.

Lomborg is more of what I term a delayer — the clever person’s denier. Lomborg is especially persuasive because he is so clearly concerned about reducing suffering and death in the Third World.

Yes, dammit, we should do more to provide developing countries with clean water and protection from mosquitoes — but Lomborg thinks global warming is at the bottom of the list of things we should be spending money on right now. Such delay is the road to ruin. As Tim Flannery put it:

By empathizing with those who are concerned about climate change and poverty, and trying to persuade them to divert their energies, Cool It is a stealth attack on humanity’s future.

Lomborg’s book is already #53 on Amazon, and #1 in the categories of climate changes, public policy, and conservation. Contrarian books do well these days. The #2 climate change book is a hardcore denier treatise, Unstoppable Global Warming: Every 1,500 Years ! [Yes, the title makes no sense -- if global warming is unstoppable, then why did it stop 1500 years ago?]

Lomborg’s book, Cool It: The Skeptical Environmentalist’s Guide to Global Warming, is painful to read, but quite short. I read it quickly for the debate, and will read it more closely tomorrow while I await selection for jury duty. I will do a thorough debunking in the coming days, since I do think progressives will need to know how to respond to Lomborg’s clever arguments — and I will need some way to restore my blood pressure to normal after reading it twice.

“Who am I? Why am I here?” Admiral James Stockdale uttered those words on national television, to laughter and applause among audience members, at the 1992 vice-presidential debate. They are questions worth asking ourselves every once in a while.

I’m a journalist who has spent the better part of the last three years reading thousands of scientific articles, interviewing hundreds of scientists, and pouring over many books by science-writers and writer-scientists, seeking a way to draw out the connective tissue, the dynamic, intriguing science that unifies what we think of as disparate things, but once you scratch the surface, really aren’t. As it turns out, the fastest way to learn the most about the world–climate, energy, health and industry–is through the carbon atom.

That doesn’t explain why I’m here. I’m here because I’m a fan of Joe’s good work and hope to chat with Climate Progress readers about new ideas for thinking about climate and the context in which we discuss it. Here’s one idea.

My house is filled with books and paper and notebooks in quantities that are difficult to order. That doesn’t include the number of peer-reviewed journal articles and electronic books you can fit on a 1 gigabyte flash memory stick. Every good nonfiction writer knows his or her job is to simplify things. We live by Occam’s Razor and by Einstein’s related dictum that everything should be made as simple as possible, but no simpler.

GLOBAL WARMING’S EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

In that spirit, I was turning over my basement recently, looking for some interview notes (The basement is not as simple as possible). I wondered what all this research would look like condensed to two sentences. Every day reports come out–economic, scientific, predictive, retrospective, lifeless, hysterical. What would the executive summary of all executive summaries look like? With some cautious feedback from senior scientists, I think an irreducible two-sentence description of global warming comes down to this:

1. Temperature and atmospheric carbon rise and fall together on every geological time scale.
2. Humans are adding carbon to the atmosphere more than 100 times faster than any known precedent, heating and transforming the Earth.

– Eric R.