Global warming is hot. But who knew it was this hot?

Climate Progress had 50,000 unique visitors in December and 20,000 last May. I don’t expect this kind of growth to continue, but then I never expected the growth of the last year in the first place.

I usually post web stats only on the anniversary of the CP’s launch and at the end of the year, but I wanted to share this milestone with all my readers and thank everyone for helping set this monthly record.

Sir Isaac Newton is one of the towering geniuses in all human history. Washington Post columnist Charles Krauthammer … not so much.

Krauthammer has written a classic anti-science screed, “Carbon Chastity: The First Commandment of the Church of the Environment,” that recasts many favorite anti-scientific denier memes in odd terms. You still hear and see all of these today, so let me touch on a few of them. And as I discuss in Part 2, the article is most useful because it is a very clear statement of the real reason conservatives don’t believe in climate science– they hate the solution.

As a physicist, my favorite denier talking point is his strange version of the old claim that “scientists are flip floppers, constantly changing their theories.” He writes:

If Newton’s laws of motion could, after 200 years of unfailing experimental and experiential confirmation, be overthrown, it requires religious fervor to believe that global warming — infinitely more untested, complex and speculative — is a closed issue.

Now that is a strange claim. Newton’s Laws of Motion are still taught in every high school, in every introductory physics class in college, and even in graduate physics classes. Indeed, they are widely used everywhere to explain and estimate wide varieties of motion. Heck, even NASA still uses them: “The motion of an aircraft through the air can be explained and described by physical principals discovered over 300 years ago by Sir Isaac Newton.”

But Professor Krauthammer says they were overthrown and that 200 years of experiments and observations were wrong. What gives? Why aren’t all our planes falling out of the sky?

Newton’s laws are “excellent approximations at the scales and speeds of everyday life” that, along with his law of gravitation and calculus techniques, “provided for the first time a unified quantitative explanation for a wide range of physical phenomena.”

They fail in very special cases — speeds close to the speed of light (where you need Einstein’s special theory of relativity), near large gravitational fields (where you need to Einstein’s general theory of relativity) or at a very, very small scales (where you need quantum mechanics). Interestingly, many of the laws of those three theories are written in the same form as Newton’s and they revert to Newton’s equations for everyday life (see an example at the end of this post).

So Krauthammer’s statement is absurdly misleading, since he is implying that “200 years of unfailing experimental and experiential confirmation” were “overthrown” — when they weren’t. So his implication that all the unfailing experimental and experiential confirmation of climate science will be overthrown is equally absurd. Indeed, anybody seeking to replace climate science will have to come up with a more comprehensive theory that still explains everything we know from existing climate science and observations.

This may seem like a small point, but in fact it is a large point, one that former president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, John Holdren, has repeatedly made. Let me discuss this in the context of another anti-scientific talking point of Krauthammer’s:

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Yesterday, the Bush administration issued “the strongest endorsement yet of a global scientific consensus on the causes of climate change.” The administration buckled to a court order and released “a fresh summary of federal and independent research” which echoes the findings of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and predicts:

An increased frequency and severity of heat waves is expected, leading to more illness and death, particularly among the young, elderly, frail and poor.” It added that deaths from cold would decline, but said uncertainties on both projections made it impossible to characterize the overall risk.

While President Bush’s chief scientific adviser has previously expressed strong agreement for the IPCC conclusion that there is a 90 percent chance that human activity contributes to “global temperature increase[s],” the administration has been reluctant to officially acknowledge the consequences and causes of climate change.

Significantly, this report contradicts the allegations of climate change deniers and pressures the Bush administration to stop dragging its feet on climate change. Kassie Siegel, climate program director at the Center for Biological Diversity, which sued the Bush administration and forced them to complete the new study, suggests that the administration grudgingly conceded to the overwhelming consensus of the scientific community:

For almost eight years they denied and downplayed the science. It sounds like they’ve been forced to acknowledge the consensus science.

Unfortunately, the administration’s acknowledgment may be too little, too late. As Sen. John Kerry (D-MA) points out, “the three-year delay of this report is sadly fitting for an administration that has wasted seven years denying the real threat of global climate change. In these lost years, we could have slowed global warming and advanced clean energy solutions, but instead America’s climate change strategy has been at best rhetorical, not real.”

I have been saying for quite some time that if we don’t act immediately to make deep cuts in CO2 emissions then we are headed towards the unmitigated catastrophe of 1000 ppm (see my August 2007 post, “Are Scientists Overestimating — or Underestimating — Climate Change“). Turns out that’s what Nobel laureate F. Sherwood Rowland believes.

Rowland is one of the world’s foremost authorities on atmospheric chemisty “who shared a Nobel Prize for his work revealing the threat to the ozone layer from CFC’s and similar synthetic chemicals,” as NYT‘s Andy Revkin explained (here). Wednesday, Revkin

asked Dr. Rowland two quick questions. The first: Given the nature of the climate and energy challenges, what is his best guess for the peak concentration of carbon dioxide?

His answer? “1,000 parts per million.”

My second question was, what will that look like?

“I have no idea,” Dr. Rowland said. He was not smiling.

Readers of Climate Progress have an idea, since I have done my best to describe this grim future that scientists rarely model because they can’t believe humanity would be so self-destructive as to let it happen:

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Science has published a major new study, “The Sensitivity of Polar Ozone Depletion to Proposed Geoengineering Schemes” (subs. req’d). That study finds:

The large burden of sulfate aerosols injected into the stratosphere by the eruption of Mount Pinatubo in 1991 cooled Earth and enhanced the destruction of polar ozone in the subsequent few years. The continuous injection of sulfur into the stratosphere has been suggested as a “geoengineering” scheme to counteract global warming. We use an empirical relationship between ozone depletion and chlorine activation to estimate how this approach might influence polar ozone. An injection of sulfur large enough to compensate for surface warming caused by the doubling of atmospheric CO2 would strongly increase the extent of Arctic ozone depletion during the present century for cold winters and would cause a considerable delay, between 30 and 70 years, in the expected recovery of the Antarctic ozone hole.

Of course, this geo-engineering scheme has lots of other problem. An earlier study noted:

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McCain has put out a climate policy that, like Bush’s, wouldn’t help the climate (see McCain speech, Part 2: Relying on offsets = Rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic). Wednesday he announced he won’t even bother showing up to vote on his friend Joe Lieberman’s climate bill because of insufficient subsides (read “pork”) for nuclear power (see here) three weeks after saying he supported it (see here).

Now will the media finally stop idolizing this Bush clone who has mastered W’s art of saying one thing, to get favorable media coverage, and then doing the exact opposite, either to please his base or because that’s what he really believes?

Indeed, given that Time said earlier this monththat McCain’s “stance on global warming –it’s real, and we need to deal with it –is his campaign’s best evidence that he’s not just like George W. Bush,” it would seem we are left with a McCain who is just like George W. Bush.

Let’s see if the traditional media start to change their coverage from the nonsense peddled in stories like “On Policy, Obama Breaks Little New Ground,” a frothy front-page McCain press release article by the Washington Post. That article claims the Illinois Senator has supposedly “dismissed the importance of policy proposals” — even though he actually has a detailed climate plan that would actually save the climate (see “Obama’s excellent energy and climate plan”). The Post then actually claims

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NASA’s James Hansen has posted a “summary of recent attempts to provide information and interact with governors re actions needed to stem climate change” here. As he explains in the accompanying e-mail:

This Sunday evening (June 1) I will give a talk at Cary Hall in Lexington, Massachusetts a few hundred yards from where the first shots of the American Revolution were fired. Perhaps there is an analogy between the gap that developed between the best interests of the American people and policies of despotic King George and the gap that has developed between the best interests of the public (and nature) and the policies (mainly those related to energy) that we now live under.

A different sort of revolution, within the democratic framework, is needed, but it won’t be easy. What makes it a hair-raising drama, with an outcome far from assured, is the combination of climate system inertia and resulting planetary energy imbalance, energy system inertia, and climate system tipping points.

The event referred to above (7:30 PM, June 1) is hosted by the Lexington Global Warming Action Coalition (info at www.lexgwac.org). It starts with a short talk by Mark Bowen, author of Censoring Science, followed by my talk on the science, and then open discussion. There is a $5 admission. I have no financial interest in the book or event (but I probably get in free).

Needless to say, if you live in the Boston area, this is a must see.

There is one policy area where I pretty strongly disagree with Hansen. He calls for:

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Part 1 looked at why “The permafrost won’t be perma for long.” Part 2 looked at whether the potential destruction of the tundra represents “The point of no return” for the climate, necessitating that we keep atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide below 450 ppm or else risk going to 800 ppm to 1000 ppm. Here I examine two local amplifying feedbacks that further threaten the permafrost — forests and fires.

Reduced snow cover and albedo (reflectivity) in the summertime Arctic landscape, caused by global warming, has added local atmospheric heating “similar in magnitude to the regional heating expected over multiple decades from a doubling of atmospheric CO₂” (Science, subs. req’d). That same Science study warns “Continuation of current trends in shrub and tree expansion could further amplify this atmospheric heating 2-7 times.”

The point is that if you convert a white landscape to a boreal forest, the surface suddenly starts collecting a lot more solar energy. That trend is occurring now, as seen in these two photos from a recent ScienceNews article, “Boreal forests shift north.”

“Upper photo taken in 1962 shows tundra-dominated mountain slope in Siberian Urals. A 2004 photo of the same site, below, shows conifers were setting up dense stand of forest.”

Now, another major study warns that the warming-driven northward march of vegetation poses yet another threat to the tundra.

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In March, British prime minister Tony Blair launched the Breaking the Climate Deadlock initiative to promote a new global agreement on climate change.

Today he has an Op-Ed the in the Washington Post, “Leading On Climate Change: How Action in Congress Can Move the World,” in which he argues

The climate change bill that senators are to begin debating next week is a hugely important signal of intent on behalf of U.S. legislators. Yes, negotiations could still alter the legislation. But the bill’s core proposition is correct: Unless the United States radically reduces its greenhouse gas emissions, along with other major emitters, the damage to the climate will be irreversible.

Well, the bill certainly does not put this country on a path to “radically” reduce GHGs (see “Boxer bill update: Probably no U.S. CO2 emissions cut until after 2025“), but I agree with Blair the vote will be cast in mostly symbolic terms. I hope Boxer can at least get a majority vote in the Senate, but not if she has the water down the bill even more. Enough is enough.

It must be said that Blair is years too late in his strong public pleas for U.S. action. Almost exactly a year ago The Guardian had reported: “Tony Blair believes he is close to persuading George Bush to accept an ambitious plan to bring the world’s greatest polluters into international partnership to fight climate change for the first time.” As I wrote at the time, “Yes, and monkees will fly out of my — but let it go” (see “Bush 100, Blair 0. Game over“).

Blair blew it big time as PM on the climate issue. Still, it’s good to see him using his high profile now to press for climate action. Here is the rest of Blair’s argument:

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This is eco-Gingrich’s new energy strategy for America. Seriously. So much for Andy Revkin’s claim that Gingrich is part of a “move to the pragmatic center on climate and energy.”

Okay, the slogan is slightly different (see here). But I changed it so it would be factually accurate. After all, the Administration’s own Energy Information Administration explained in 2004 how ineffectual this strategy is. In a 2004 Congressional-requested “Analysis of Oil and Gas Production in ANWR“:

It is expected that the price impact of ANWR coastal plain production might reduce world oilprices by as much as 30 to 50 cents per barrel [in 2025].

Don’t spend it all in one place, American public! [Note to Gingrich: There are 42 gallons in a barrel.] EIA continues:

Assuming that world oil markets continue to work as they do today, the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries could countermand any potential price impact of ANWR coastal plain production by reducing its exports by an equal amount.

Curses, foiled again!

But how is drilling for more oil — and exploiting shale oil and opposing the Warner-Lieberman climate Bil, both of which are part of Gingrich’s video message — and releasing more greenhouse gases part of “”entrepreneurial environmentalism,” or a call to conservatives to “embrace their inner Teddy Roosevelt”? You’ll have to ask Andy Revkin, E. O. Wilson, and the rest of the people suckered by Newt’s spin (see below). Read more

Price does matter. So does public perception of likely future prices. As it becomes increasingly clear that high gasoline prices are not a fluke, Americans are adjusting their driving habits.

March 2008 saw “the sharpest yearly drop for any month in FHWA history” of total vehicle miles traveled (aka VMT) according to the Federal Highway Administration’s monthly report on “Traffic Volume Trends.” [Note to FHWA -- you have mis-labeled the report here as a second February 2008 report.]

In March 2008, Americans drove 246 billion milles, compared to 257 billion in March 2007. Indeed, the March 2008 figure is lower than the March 2004 figure. To see just how remarkable that is, look at the annual vehicle-distance traveled data (in billions of miles) since 1983 (this is a moving 12-month total):

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The White House put Stephen Johnson in charge of the EPA in 2005, and he has given the U.S. an anti-regulation, anti-science, anti-law approach to the health of our nation and planet. The White House and its fixer at the EPA are increasingly being sued by the states and challenged by Congress for failure to follow the law.

Last week saw Johnson called before Representative Henry Waxman’s committee and grilled on his refusal to follow the Clean Air Act and probed the White House’s role in the decision. CSPAN coverage of an entertaining snippet of the hearing is available at youtube, where Johnson refuses to answer, Waxman pushes back, Representative Darrell Issa objects to Waxman’s question, and Waxman threatens to have Issa physically removed if he does not cease. Waxman’s commitee has amassed extensive documentation of the White House’s involvement in the EPA’s denial of California’s waiver request that would have allowed it to regulation greenhouse gas emissions from cars.

Two days after Waxman’s hearing, Senator Barbara Boxer’s Committee on Environment and Public Works approved S. 2555, “The Reducing Global Warming Pollution from Vehicles Act of 2008,” which would override the EPA’s rejection of California’s waiver request: Read more

Rep. Ed Markey (D-MA) will talk about the climate legislation he will be introducing to the House of Representatives today. Markey is Chair of the House Select Committee on Energy Independence and will be speaking at the Center for American Progress Action Fund, introduced by CAPAF CEO John Podesta.

I received a pre-brief on the legislation last night, and while it is not perfect, it is a much better bill than Boxer-Lieberman-Warner.

In particular, it has the single most important item new climate legislation should have — an emissions standard that stops traditional coal plants from being built [see "Is 450 ppm politically possible? Part 4: The most urgent climate policy (and it isn't a CO2 price)"].

Starting in 2009, I believe, no coal plant can be built that cannot capture and sequester 85% of its carbon dioxide emissions (a grace period of a few years is allowed for plants built after that time to actually find a place to sequestered the carbon). I will post more on this bill as it is put on line.

More details on the briefing below:

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I made a mistake about the Boxer substitute for the Lieberman-Warner bill. Every year, it allows into the market enough offsets to cover 30% of the total quantity of emissions allowances. I had said it was 15% (here), which was a loophole the size of the Gateway Arch. How big a loophole is 30% offsets? Wait and see.

I had said the three offsets — domestic, international, and international forestry — could make up 15% of allowances because the WRI summary (here) says that “The combination of all three of these mechanisms is limited to 15 percent of total emissions allowances” and because when I read the actual bill (here, page 23), that’s what it seemed to say. But in fact we read it wrong. My apologies! What does this all mean?

It means we have now doubled the number of offsets, which would “involve substantial issuance of credits that do not represent real emissions reductions,” according to a recent analysis by Stanford.

Now when I redo the math, it seems the most likely outcome of this bill is that U.S. energy-related CO2 emissions in 2025 would we about the same as they are now, and possibly higher. If that’s the best we can do for a piece of legislation that’s deader than a dead parrot — it is a dead parrot whose body has been given to a veterinary anatomy class for dissection and had its heart removed — why bother?

REDOING THE MATH

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[JR: Here is Bill Becker on a favorite CP topic, see "The tar sands -- Canada's version of liquid coal" and "BP greenwashing."]

I consider Time to be one of the more forward-looking periodicals when it comes to the environment. But the editors messed up in this week’s edition. The June 2 TIME carries a breathless feature about the potential petroleum bonanza in Canada’s tar sands.

The article’s authors are so giddy with the testosterone-rush of big-ass earth-moving machines that they forgot what a multifaceted disaster this “bonanza” would be. The magazine quotes tar-men in Alberta as they marvel at their own ability to move mountains, literally.

At one open-pit mine, a manager brags that his operation moves enough dirt every 48 hours to fill Toronto’s 60,000-seat SkyDome. “A year from now, that mountain won’t be there,” he says, referring to a wall of black soil. Some of the biggest trucks on earth, 20-feet tall, carrying 320 tons of dirt in each load, crawl through the “stark landscape of jack pine, spruce and poplar forests” like Tonka toys built for Paul Bunyan.

How intense is the mining?

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The short, snarky answer is “no — Boxer-Lieberman-Warner is never going to become law.” The longer, analytical answer, which is the primary subject of this post, is “probably not, thanks to the bill’s many cost containment measures, but it would take us off the business-as-usual emissions path.”

Before explaining why, let me make clear that the vote on B-L-W is a purely symbolic one since it as DOA as a bill can be (see here). Most of the media, most of the public, and most of the world are unlikely to get much detail on bill. They will just see whether a greenhouse gas cap & trade bill can get a majority, if not 60 votes, in the U.S. Senate. So, I would recommend any Senator vote for it — after giving a floor statement explaining that it was in fact too weak. I can’t see casting a protest vote against a symbolic bill while asserting it is too weak. The protest would get lost in the noise. Finally, it would be the height of hypocrisy for a conservative senator to cite progressive critiques of the bill, including mine, as a reasons to vote against it. Anyone who votes against this bill should at least have the guts to say whether they themselves think the bill is too weak or too strong.

WHY THE BOXER BILL WOULDN’T CUT U.S. CO2 EMISSIONS BY 2020
This story begins late Friday night, when Deep ‘emissions cut’ Throat sends me the World Resources Institute’s 14-page summary of the Boxer substitute to the Lieberman-Warner bill (here), with a note, “Does this mean no emission reductions until 2028? See bottom of page 6.” Intrigued, I turned to the bottom of page 6 and read this bullet:

• If all cost containment mechanisms in the substitute are applied, the result could be almost no change in U.S. as compared to business as usual.
  

Uh-oh. When the solid analysts at WRI issue a warning, you can take it to the permit bank. I remember Deep ec Throat’s advice to me many years ago, “Follow the cost-containment money.” That’s what led to my post on McCain’s climate plan, “McCain speech, Part 2: Relying on offsets = Rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic.”

Now WRI cryptically says, “WRI intends to explore these issues further in forthcoming analyses.” But why wait for WRI’s solid detailed analysis, when I have Boxer’s full text here and my own dependable abacus? I’ll post this as a draft analysis and if any of you out there can find holes in it, let me know.

My rough calculations say that if every cost containment measure were fully used, then U.S. energy-related CO2 emissions in 2020 could be about the same as if there were no bill. Needless to say, that’s not a good thing.

Needful to say, however, some of the cost containment measures are not super-cheap (although they are probably all much cheaper than the current cost of European Union’s emissions allowances) — and a lot of auction money is used to promote energy efficiency and low carbon technologies. So if this bill were to become law — which, of course, it won’t because last week it was moved from the “morgue to anatomy class” — then I very much doubt emissions would actually follow business as usual (BAU) trends.

I do believe, though, that emissions in 2020 would probably not be much different than they are today, which is still not a good thing.

So what could happen and what would happen? And should a Senator who is concerned about human-caused global warming vote for or against the bill on this basis?

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I don’t think we do a good job of remembering those who have fallen in service to this country or taking actions now that will reduce the need for such sacrifice in the future.

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I cannot imagine what possessed the New York Review of Books to have theoretical physicist Freeman Dyson review two books on human-caused global warming (see here). It is a subject completely outside of his expertise and one that he has repeatedly said is bunk.

Dyson has previously said stuff directly at odds with the actual scientific evidence, like “There is no doubt that parts of the world are getting warmer, but the warming is not global” (see “Freeman Dyson, Climate Crackpot“).

Then again, while he was once a brilliant theoretical physicist, he’s never been strong on the applied side of science. He was, after all, one of the “geniuses” pushing Project Orion — the absurdly impractical idea of creating a rocket ship powered by detonating nuclear bombs.

The new article is critiqued by RealClimate (here). But I did want to highlight one amazing assertion by Dyson on how he believes the issue of carbon emissions will be solved soon, which makes all too clear why he should stick with theoretical physics:

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Yes, I recently had a (lame) letter in Nature. Yes, I haven’t blogged on it because of its lameness. But since nothing escapes the blogosphere, I will explain this sorry episode.

I think it safe to say that with this post I won’t be appearing in Nature again. No great loss, actually, as will become clear.

Once upon a time I received an e-mail out of the blue:

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Suntech Profit Doubles–Sales Up 76% – Investor’s Business Daily. “China-based Suntech — one of the world’s 10 largest solar companies — reported first-quarter earnings per share of 33 cents, more than double year-ago earnings of 16 cents. The company pointed to broad global strength and rising prices for its solar products, as governments dole out more incentives to fuel clean energy.” As of 2008, Chinese probably the top manufacturer of PV, a technology that Americans invented.

Governor: Alaska to challenge polar bear listing – AP News. Alaska Governor Sue Palin announced that the state will sue to challenge the listing of polar bears as threatened species. She argued that there is not sufficient evidence to support the listing, claiming that polar bear numbers have increased over the last 30 years. “Climate models that predict continued loss of sea ice, the main habitat of polar bears, during summers are unreliable, said Palin, a Republican.” Alaska is the state most painfully being transformed by climate change today — how sad that the governor is in such a state of denial.

G8 Greenhouse Gases Down in 2006, Only Russia Up – Reuters. “Greenhouse gas emissions by all the Group of Eight industrial nations except Russia fell in 2006 in the broadest dip since the world started trying to slow climate change in 1990, a Reuters survey showed”…but the ‘dip’ was only 0.6%. Experts are skeptical of any real policy changes, but rather attribute the dip to higher oil prices and a mild winter.

Toyota building $192M green-car battery plant – AP News. The plant will produce nickel-metal hydride batteries for gas-electric hybrid vehicles, including Toyota’s best-selling Prius. Toyota is currently Japan’s top automaker and the industry leader in hybrids.

Italy Embraces Nuclear Power – NY Times. Within five years, Italy plans to “resume building nuclear energy plants, two decades after a public referendum resoundingly banned nuclear power and deactivated all its reactors.” The change reflects a “growing concern in many European countries over the skyrocketing price of oil and energy security, as well as the warming effects of carbon emissions from fossil fuels.” This is certainly a better idea than building new coal plants!

Carbon Market Could be Worth 2 Trillion Euros in 2020 – Physorg.com. “The global market in CO2 emission rights could be worth two trillion euros (3.14 trillion dollars) by 2020 if the United States joins the scheme, analysis group Point Carbon said.” Carbon reductions are the place to make money this century.