The UK’s Independent reports on a study to be presented Tuesday to the annual meeting of the American Geophysical Union in San Francisco by top cryosphere scientists:

Scientists have found the first unequivocal evidence that the Arctic region is warming at a faster rate than the rest of the world at least a decade before it was predicted to happen.

Climate-change researchers have found that air temperatures in the region are higher than would be normally expected during the autumn because the increased melting of the summer Arctic sea ice is accumulating heat in the ocean. The phenomenon, known as Arctic amplification, was not expected to be seen for at least another 10 or 15 years and the findings will further raise concerns that the Arctic has already passed the climatic tipping-point towards ice-free summers, beyond which it may not recover.

The study is from scientists at the National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC), who have been regularly reporting on the unexpectedly rapid loss of Arctic ice over the past several years (see NSIDC stunner: Arctic ice at “Likely Record-Low Volume”). It bears repeating that “The recent [Arctic] sea-ice retreat is larger than in any of the (19) IPCC [climate] models” — and that was a Norwegian expert in 2005. The retreat has accelerated in the past three years.

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At Change.gov here.

The AP reports today from Shanghai:

BYD presented the vehicle, known as the F3DM, in a ceremony in the southern city of Shenzhen…. The vehicle can run up to 100 kilometers (62 miles) on its electric engine, and when it runs low on power shifts to a back up gasoline engine. Its battery can fully charge in nine hours from a regular electrical outlet, or much faster at BYD’s own charging stations, the company said in a statement.

The car will sell for 149,800 yuan ($22,000), about the same as many Chinese-made mid-sized cars, it said.

One can certainly be skeptical about such an announcement from a company that “didn’t even make cars a few years ago,” as Treehugger notes. “Until recently, it was only a battery maker (the biggest in China).” One might also be skeptical about plug-ins from a company whose name stands for Build Your Dreams and which touts its all-electric F3e vehicle as “Inheriting the design concepts of being Faddy, Faithworthy and Futuramic.”

Then again, one should be skeptical about the overdesigned Chevy Volt from a company that has a long history of overpromising and under-delivering innovation, a company that has mismanaged itself to the brink of bankruptcy. And “MidAmerican Energy Holdings Co., a unit of Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway Inc., invested in a 9.9 percent stake” in BYD, something GM can only dream about.

Green Car Congress has more of the specs:

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[Our guest blogger is Bob Massie, a former Democratic nominee for lieutenant governor of Massachusetts, who chaired an Energy Empowerment Rally in Boston last month. First posted in WonkRoom.]

As President-elect Barack Obama prepares to tackle the vast problems ahead for America, he has consistently made two bold proposals.

First, he intends to make an immense investment in infrastructure — roads, bridges, railways — to jump-start jobs. Second, he plans to boost clean green technologies to make up for the squandered opportunities of the Lost Decade.

These are both powerful, worthy ideas. But they would be far more powerful if they were directly connected. The incoming administration has a historic opportunity to accomplish five major goals at once through a massive investment in stopping the waste of energy and dollars pouring out of American homes.

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Local Pittsburgh media is reporting that “Consol Energy Inc. and the Pittsburgh Penguins announced on Monday a 21-year deal for naming rights to the new Pittsburgh multipurpose arena.” Consol, based in Pittsburgh, is the nation’s fifth largest coal producer, and a major practitioner of mountaintop removal mining.

By the time this deal expires, actual penguins may be driven to extinction. The global warming pollution from fossil fuel companies like Consol has wreaked dramatic changes to the penguins’ habitat in the southern hemisphere. Ninety percent of Antarctica’s glaciers are in retreat. The Antarctic ice sheet is losing 36 cubic miles of ice a year. Scientists have found that global warming is threatening the Galapagos, king, emperor, Adelie, and the other thirteen species of penguins on the planet.

But the Pittsburgh Penguins are ebullient. Said Penguins president David Morehouse:

Inside on the ice, on the scoreboard, on the dasher boards, Consol Energy will have a major presence, and they’re going to be a major partner with us going forward.

Unless we halt the unregulated burning of coal immediately, we may doom ourselves to an ice-free planet. And then worrying about the fate of other species will seem like a luxury.

(H/T The Green Agenda)

This Friday I am scheduled to spend two hours with MIT’s Future of Solar Energy Study. As the May announcement of the study said:

Under the direction of Institute Professor John Deutch, the group will spend about a year and a half analyzing the prospects for solar photovoltaics, solar thermal generating systems, solar water heating, and the use of solar energy to produce fuels ["such as hydrogen from water"].

The nine faculty members on the team [named here] include specialties in chemistry, mechanical engineering, electrical engineering and computer science, materials science and engineering, physics, economics, and management.

Yes, I’ll be suggesting that splitting water is not the most productive use of solar, and, of course, I will be talking up solar thermal baseload.

But since this is close to the beginning of their study, I think the more interesting issue to raise is — what are the key questions the study should answer?

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Obama will formally name Steven Chu his nominee for energy secretary at a press conference this afternoon. Here’s the top 5 reasons he is one of the best cabinet picks in recent memory:

5. His “views on climate change would be among the most forceful ever held by a cabinet member.” He said last year, scientists had come to “realize that the climate is much more sensitive than we thought” [see Scientists are Underestimating Climate Change, Part I]. He said people who said they were uncertain whether climate change is being caused by humans were “reminiscent of the dialogue in the 1950s and ’60s on tobacco.” In a speech earlier this year, he said that climate change of the scale we face “will cause enormous resource wars, over water, arable land, and massive population displacements…. We’re talking about hundreds of millions to billions of people being flooded out, permanently.

4. As a Chinese American and Nobel Prize winner, he will be uniquely poised to help enable the crucial energy and climate negotiations the Obama team must undertake immediately with the world’s other big emitter (see What will make Obama a great president, Part 2: A climate deal with China). The AP reports from China:

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Our guest blogger is Bob Massie, a former Democratic nominee for lieutenant governor of Massachusetts, who chaired an Energy Empowerment Rally at Faneuil Hall, Boston, in November. An alternate version of this piece appeared in the Boston Globe on Sunday.

As President-elect Barack Obama prepares to tackle the vast problems ahead for America, he has consistently made two bold proposals.

First, he intends to make an immense investment in infrastructure — roads, bridges, railways — to jump-start jobs. Second, he plans to boost clean green technologies to make up for the squandered opportunities of the Lost Decade.

These are both powerful, worthy ideas. But they would be far more powerful if they were directly connected. The incoming administration has a historic opportunity to accomplish five major goals at once through a massive investment in stopping the waste of energy and dollars pouring out of American homes.

Think of this as “infrastructure spending for American families.” To date, our efforts to promote energy efficiency have been locked in a paralyzing cycle. When oil prices are high, we can’t afford efficiency improvements because our wallets are empty. When oil prices are low, we won’t pay for improvements because the payback seems too long.

So how do we fix our roofs –- and windows, and heating systems –- no matter what is happening to the weather or the price of oil? The solution is both simple and powerful: the government should set up a large bond fund into which institutional, pension, and other private dollars could be invested for a guaranteed rate of return. Read more

Fatih Birol, chief economist to the International Energy Agency, told the UK’s Guardian today:

In terms of non-Opec [countries outside the big oil producers' cartel],” he replied, “we are expecting that in three, four years’ time the production of conventional oil will come to a plateau, and start to decline. In terms of the global picture, assuming that Opec will invest in a timely manner, global conventional oil can still continue, but we still expect that it will come around 2020 to a plateau as well, which is, of course, not good news from a global-oil-supply point of view.”

That is a triple shocker. First, as a famous 2005 study funded by the Bush DOE “Peaking of World Oil Production,” concluded:

The world has never faced a problem like this. Without massive mitigation more than a decade before the fact, the problem will be pervasive and will not be temporary. Previous energy transitions (wood to coal and coal to oil) were gradual and evolutionary; oil peaking will be abrupt and revolutionary.

The IEA says conventional supply will not be able to meet rising global demand in about a decade, while the DOE makes clear that you need much more than a decade of sustained, “massive” effort to transition away from oil to avoid catastrophic impacts. This looks like a job for a President who plans an activist clean energy agenda (see “A real energy plan for America: Efficiency now, 10% renewables by 2012, and one million plug-in hybrids by 2015“) and who has assembled a really smart energy team (see “A Nobelist for Energy Secretary who gets both climate and energy efficiency?“).

The second shocker is that this warning comes from the IEA, which has, for most of its existence, been a bland and staid reporter of conventional wisdom. When I was at the DOE in the 1990s, no one paid much attention to the latest IEA report that explained how the future would be just like the recent past. So if the IEA is telling the world oil might peak in a decade, the world better listen up.

Third, this is an apparent reversal from their most recent report, which had this figure (see “IEA: Oil price to rebound to $100 when economy recovers, then soar to $200 by 2030“):

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