I couldn’t stomach watching Mayor Giuliani’s convention speech, so I missed this defining moment when it was live.

But should John McCain win (and maybe even if he doesn’t), and assuming the country fails to achieve a bipartisan agreement to take action strong enough and fast enough to avoid the catastrophic impacts of global warming (and of peak oil, too) — then the Future Historians of America (FHA) will be able to trace the precise time and place the great American experiment failed. It was September 3, 2008 at 10:14 pm EST at the Republican National Convention in St. Paul, Minnesota:

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Yes, the delegates to one of the two major political parties were chanting for crack cocaine to feed an addiction that is destroying the economic health of this country, strengthening our enemies, jeopardizing our security, and ultimately posing “an existential threat to civilization” itself. With apoligies to T. S. Eliot:

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You can see it live here. After that, it will be downloadable.

I was a tad milder than in my blog posts.

In an exclusive interview with the Wonk Room, Massachusetts Institute of Technology climatologist Kerry Emanuel says that he would be “surprised” if global warming “were not a big factor” in intensifying Hurricane Katrina’s destructive power. Katrina, the costliest and third deadliest hurricane in United States history, intensified to Category Five strength, with peak sustained winds over 170 mph, over extremely warm waters in the Gulf of Mexico before its record storm surge devastated the Gulf Coast.

Emanuel compared the meteorological conditions in which Hurricane Katrina developed in 2005 to the existing conditions twenty-five years earlier in 1980. Using his model of tropical storm potential intensity, which uses at determining factors such as sea and air temperature and wind shear, he found that Katrina would have been significantly weaker twenty-five years earlier. When asked how to characterize his findings, Emanuel replied:

I think it is correct to say that Katrina would not have been as intense in 1980. What part of that to attribute to global warming is tricky, but I would be surprised if it were not a big factor.

NCEP/NCAR Re-analysis potential intensity for 1980 and 2005 (Emanuel, 2008)

Dr. Emanuel, one of Time Magazine’s 100 Influential People of 2006, is the author of dozens of influential papers on tropical meteorology and climatology, including the 2005 Nature paper, “Increasing destructiveness of tropical cyclones over the past 30 years.” Dr. Emanuel has authored the popular science books Divine Wind: The History and Science of Hurricanes and What We Know About Climate Change, and is profiled in ScienceProgress editor Chris Mooney’s book, Storm World: Hurricanes, Politics, and the Battle Over Global Warming.

Two major new studies, in Nature and Science, sharply increase the projected sea level rise (SLR) by 2100. This post discusses the Science study, “Kinematic Constraints on Glacier Contributions to 21st-Century Sea-Level Rise” (subs req’d), which concludes:

On the basis of calculations presented here, we suggest that an improved estimate of the range of SLR to 2100 including increased ice dynamics lies between 0.8 and 2.0 m.

… these values give a context and starting point for refinements in SLR forecasts on the basis of clearly defined assumptions and offer a more plausible range of estimates than those neglecting the dominant ice dynamics term.

Scientific analysis is finally catching up to scientific observation. In 2001, the IPCC projected that neither Greenland nor Antarctica would lose significant mass by 2100. The IPCC made the same basic projection again in 2007. Yet both ice sheets already are. As Penn State climatologist Richard Alley said in March 2006, the ice sheets appear to be shrinking “100 years ahead of schedule.”

So for over a year now, delayers like Bj¸rn Lomborg have been able to cling to (a misrepresentation of) the IPCC’s lowball SLR estimate (see “Debunking Bj¸rn Lomborg — Part II, Misrepresenting Sea Level Rise.” Science‘s Richard Kerr explained what the IPCC did wrong and what the new study does right:

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As the Wonk Room reported yesterday, Newt Gingrich’s “Drill Here, Drill Now, Pay Less” campaign will soon include the launch of a book, inventively titled Drill Here, Drill Now, Pay Less: A Handbook for Slashing Gas Prices and Solving Our Energy Crisis. Drill Here, Drill Now was ghostwritten by American Solutions for Winning the Future (ASWF) official Vince Haley, formerly Newt’s research director at the American Enterprise Institute, the premier Exxon-Bush think tank. It’s being published by Regnery Publishing, the right-wing organ that distributed Jerome Corsi’s Unfit For Command.

Newt’s book oozes with false sympathy for working Americans:

The suffering of Americans due to high energy prices is bad enough. But there’s more: powerful people believe that Americans — everyday folks just trying to earn a living, feed their families, and help others — are actually the root cause of the energy crisis. These influential people — many of them the very same individuals who helped create the energy crisis in the first place — have little compassion for the suffering of their fellow countrymen.

Who are the “influential people” who “helped create the energy crisis in the first place” Gingrich and Haley blame? Is it Bush, Cheney, Halliburton, Enron, Exxon Mobil, Peabody Coal, Tom DeLay, John McCain, hedge-fund speculators, former House Speaker Newt Gingrich himself, or others in the conservative elite who have profited from skyrocketing energy prices and prevented change while American families suffered?

Nope! The villians in Newtland are “anti-energy, left-leaning politicians.”

Seems like somebody out there is listening (see “Since offshore oil is de minimis, why shouldn’t Obama and the Dems make a deal? Part 1“). The AP reported:

Democratic leaders in the U.S. Senate will push a bipartisan energy proposal that would allow for some expansion of offshore drilling when Congress returns next week from a five-week recess.

A spokesman for Sen. Harry Reid, leader of the Senate’s Democratic majority, said Wednesday the plan would allow Virginia, Georgia, North Carolina and South Carolina to opt into leasing programs starting 50 miles (80 kilometers) off their shores. The spokesman said the idea now has the support of 16 senators, eight Democrats and eight Republicans.

The proposal, which has not yet been introduced as legislation, also would lift a ban on drilling off the Gulf coast of Florida, invest $20 billion on developing petroleum-free motor vehicles and extend expiring tax credits for renewable energy.

Apparently Reid is going to offer the Gang-of-1o proposal (see “The good, the bad and the ugly of the Gang-of-10 drilling deal, Part 2: Something for nothing?“). Success remains an unlikely. Many Dems still don’t want any drillings. Many in the GOP don’t want this to come to a vote, since it takes away their “drill, drill, drill” message:

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