#1. Pilates
#2. More blogging, less TV
#3. Less blogging, more time with daughter
[The more resolutions, the more chances I'll keep a few.]
…

Re #47. In case Climate Progress didn’t have enough to blog on in 2008, now comes this story from Energy Washington (subs. req’d, whole article below):

Coal Liquids Advocates Need Funding, Friends And Facts In 2008
The policy debate on the future of coal use in the United States will begin to heat up almost immediately in 2008, possibly as early as the State of the Union address and in response to an imminent EPA report that will likely find coal-to-liquids (CTL) a cleaner technology than first thought, say CTL industry sources. They will be pushing, alongside industrial energy consumers, for a way to carve out a place for coal at the climate bill table, say sources on the front lines of deliberations between industry, Congress and the administration on coal.

Everybody needs facts but CTL more than most, given its overwhelming negative impact on greenhouse gas emissions, water….

Bring on the facts (or, more likely, “facts”) Bush EPA and other CTL friends. Preemptively, I’m going to start this resolution early with a long list of related posts at the end.

The rest of the article is here:

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A recent Nature Geoscience study, “High rates of sea-level rise during the last interglacial period,” (subs. req’d) finds that sea levels could rise twice what the IPCC had project for 2100,. This confirms what many scientists have recently warned (and here), and it matches the conclusion of a study earlier this year in Science.

[As an aside, in one debate with a Denier -- can't remember who, they all kind of merge together -- I was challenged: "Name one peer-reviewed study projecting sea level rise this century beyond the IPCC." Well, now there are two from this year alone!]

For the record, five feet of sea level rise would submerge some 22,000 square miles of U.S. land just on the Atlantic and Gulf Coasts (farewell, southern Louisiana and Florida) — and displace more than 100 million people worldwide. And, of course, sea levels would just keep rising some 6 inches a decade, or, more likely, even faster next century than this century.

The researchers base their finding on their analysis of the rate of sea level rise during the last warm or interglacial period (the Eemian, about 120,000 years ago), when seas rose 1.6 meters (5 feet) per century. Why look at the rate of Eemian sea level rise? Becaause that’s the last time the planet was as warm as it soon will be again: “such rates of sea-level rise occurred when the global mean temperature was 2 ^°C higher than today, as expected again by AD 2100.”

Indeed, if we don’t reverse emissions’ trends very soon (and stay below 450 ppm of carbon dioxide), the planet might well warm 3^°C or more by 2100. The Eemian warming was driven by “changes in orbital parameters from today (greater obliquity and eccentricity, and perihelion), known as the Milankovitch cycle.” Current warming is driven by human emissions of greenhouse gases.

Here is the entire abstract from the article — note that the Eemian is also called “Marine Isotope Stage 5“:

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