University of Alaska, Fairbanks scientists reported the alarming news at the AGU meeting:

A team led by International Arctic Research Center scientist Igor Semiletov has found data to suggest that the carbon pool beneath the Arctic Ocean is leaking.

The results of more than 1,000 measurements of dissolved methane in the surface water from the East Siberian Arctic Shelf this summer as part of the International Siberian Shelf Study show an increased level of methane in the area. Geophysical measurements showed methane bubbles coming out of chimneys on the seafloor.

“The concentrations of the methane were the highest ever measured in the summertime in the Arctic Ocean,” Semiletov said. “We have found methane bubble clouds above the gas-charged sediment and above the chimneys going through the sediment.”

We first heard about this research when Semiletov talked to the UK’s Guardian in September (see “Has runaway climate change begun?“) These observations are extremely worrisome for four reasons. First, many fear that a huge methane release is what happened during the Permian-Triassic extinction event and the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum. Second, releasing even a small fraction of the sub-sea methane would make a stabilizing greenhouse gas emissions at non-catastrophic concentrations all but impossible.

Third, as NOAA reported earlier this year, levels of methane rose sharply last year for the first time since 1998:

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This is a reprint of a post that first appeared at WonkRoom.

President-elect Barack Obama has reportedly completed his Cabinet with the selection of Rep. Hilda Solis (D-CA) as Secretary of Labor. Solis, a five-term representative from East Los Angeles, is a progressive leader in the fight for green jobs, as both a “stalwart friend of the unions” and the author of the first environmental justice law in the nation. At this summer’s National Clean Energy Summit, convened by the Center for American Progress Action Fund, University of Nevada at Las Vegas, and Sen. Harry Reid (D-NV), Solis spoke about her commitment to solving global warming through a clean energy economy for all:

Our nation is at a crossroads right now. We can choose to transition to a clean energy economy that secures our energy supply and combats climate change or we can continue down the same old path of uncertainty and insecurity that we’re currently in. Current economic conditions, particularly for under-served, under-represented minority communities underscore the need to transition to clean energy technology.

Watch it:

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Congress is answering President-elect Barack Obama’s call for an economic recovery package that includes green infrastructure investments. However, as Friends of the Earth warns, “the road-building lobby is attempting to hijack this bill and divert billions of dollars to the construction of new, unnecessary roads, highways and bridges that would deepen our nation’s dependence on oil and increase greenhouse gas emissions.”

As Bob Massie explained earlier in the week, there’s no reason for infrastructure investment and the transformation to a green economy to be mutually exclusive. In fact, these two goals will be “far more powerful” if they are “directly connected.”

There is undeniable need to invest in “truly imperiled bridges, seriously decayed subway lines and roads, leak-plagued water systems, [and] schools crying out for basic repairs,” as The American Society of Civil Engineers gave the United States a “D” grade on its infrastructure in 2005 and reported that traffic congestion led to huge productivity losses. Plus, without adequate roads and bridges, mass transit initiatives become that much more difficult. However, this investment would only be the beginning.

Further investment in “energy stimulus” should go to modernize government buildings, update public schools, and improve the electrical grid. Also critical will be the greening of individual homes, which can create jobs, improve housing values, and “bring new [green] technologies rapidly to scale.”

The Center for American Progress notes that part of this could be accomplished through the greening of HUD-assisted housing, as “it is generally agreed that each $1 million investment in rehabilitation of affordable housing yields between eight on-site jobs to 11 on-site jobs“:

According to Oregon Housing and Community Services’ study of some of its affordable residential development and rehabilitation projects, for each job created on-site another 1.5 jobs on average are created off-site. Using these numbers, a $1 billion investment in the greening of HUD-assisted housing would create an estimated 20,000 green jobs to 27,500 green jobs.

Another option is to fully fund the Weatherization Assistance Program (WAP), “and build toward a goal of weatherizing 1 million homes” in 2009. This improves home energy-efficiency, as “each house that benefits from WAP reduces its carbon dioxide emissions by 1.79 tons per year,” and also acts as stimulus, with each $1 million of program funding creating 52 direct jobs and additional indirect jobs for subcontractors and material suppliers. And Architecture 2030 has proposed an energy-efficiency mortgage refinancing stimulus.

A properly crafted economic recovery package will restore our job market in a green economy that rewards work instead of Wall Street gambling, and builds a sustainable infrastructure instead of paving new roads to nowhere.

President-elect Barack Obama has reportedly completed his Cabinet with the selection of Rep. Hilda Solis (D-CA) as Secretary of Labor. Solis, a five-term representative from East Los Angeles, is a progressive leader in the fight for green jobs, as both a “stalwart friend of the unions” and the author of the first environmental justice law in the nation. At this summer’s National Clean Energy Summit, convened by the Center for American Progress Action Fund, University of Nevada at Las Vegas, and Sen. Harry Reid (D-NV), Solis spoke about her commitment to solving global warming through a clean energy economy for all:

Our nation is at a crossroads right now. We can choose to transition to a clean energy economy that secures our energy supply and combats climate change or we can continue down the same old path of uncertainty and insecurity that we’re currently in. Current economic conditions, particularly for under-served, under-represented minority communities underscore the need to transition to clean energy technology.

Watch it:

The Green Jobs Act authored by Solis and passed into law as part of the 2007 energy bill was not funded at all. Green For All and the Center for American Progress are calling for full funding of this important legislation to bring skilled, well-paying jobs to communities that have been left behind in earlier economic good times — and are now hardest hit by the current economic crisis.

Science magazine is reporting today that “Strong indications are that President-elect Barack Obama has picked physicist John Holdren to be the president’s science adviser.”

I have known Holdren for over a decade and have discussed energy/climate issues with him many times. He probably has more combined expertise on both climate science and clean energy technology than any other person who could plausibly have been named science adviser. You can see a video of an excellent talk he gave here (along with talks by Chu and me). For a more recent BBC interview, see “The Climate Quote of the Week“.

I would say that if Holdren is named (on Saturday), it is an even stronger signal than the terrific choice of Steven Chu for Energy Secretary that Obama is dead serious about the strongest possible action on global warming. After all, the science adviser works out of the White House and oversees science and technology funding, analysis, and messaging for all federal agencies.

Holdren ain’t in the “do something but not enough to avoid catastrophe” crowd that the NYT‘s Andy Revkin keeps on touting (see here and here). In fact, Revkin quoted him last year as an anti-moderate:

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At Yale Environment 360, a group of environmental activists, scientists and thinkers — Paul Hawken, Bill McKibben, Rajendra Pachauri, Van Jones, Fred Krupp, and Joseph Romm– were asked to offer President-elect Obama advice on the environmental and energy priorities he should set for the first 100 days of his administration. Here’s what I suggested:

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Jeff Goodell, our roving reporter at the American Geophysical Union’s fall meeting, filed his third dispatch — with the help of his iPhone.

Dark Ages are over; science matters again.

This morning, the fourth day of the fall AGU meeting, I walked into the bright open atrium at Moscone Center expecting the morning buzz to be a little duller than it has been. After all, conference fatigue should be setting in right about now. This is such a huge event, 15,000 scientists attending, with hundreds of talks and poster session each day, that just deciding which events to attend each day is exhausting. This morning, do I want to hear about cloud effects on aerosols, chlorofluorocarbons in the ocean, ice sheet hydrology, or geoengineering to counteract global warming?
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I recently sat on the Defense Science Board Task Force on DoD Energy Strategy, which took testimony and wrote a report, More Fight — Less Fuel, on how energy efficiency and renewables makes sense — and can save lives — for the military. The findings are here.

Efficiency and renewables finally start getting the attention of even the most conservative Pentagon planner

• when one of your most dangerous targets in a war zone is the convoy trucking in fuel at an equivalent cost of tens of dollars a gallon;
• when the single biggest contributor to the weight of the backpack for your special forces is the battery; and
• when your domestic (and international) military bases still rely on an antiquated and highly vulnerable electric grid for primary power.

Climate Wire (subs. req’d) has an excellent story on this issue:

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The AP reports on new data to be presented today at the annual meeting of the American Geophysical Union:

More than 2 trillion tons of land ice in Greenland, Antarctica and Alaska have melted since 2003, according to new NASA satellite data that show the latest signs of what scientists say is global warming.

More than half of the loss of landlocked ice in the past five years has occurred in Greenland, based on measurements of ice weight by NASA’s GRACE satellite, said NASA geophysicist Scott Luthcke. The water melting from Greenland in the past five years would fill up about 11 Chesapeake Bays, he said, and the Greenland melt seems to be accelerating.

This staggering ice loss is all the more worrisome because it was not predicted by the IPCC’s climate models. As Penn State climatologist Richard Alley said in March 2006, the ice sheets appear to be shrinking “100 years ahead of schedule.” In 2001, the IPCC thought that neither Greenland nor Antarctica would lose significant mass by 2100. They both already are.

Even the 2007 IPCC report assumed very little contribution to sea level rise this century from Greenland and Antarctica, since it was based almost exclusively on studies done before 2006. And that’s of course why a US Geological Survey study concluded sea-level rise in 2100 will likely “substantially exceed” IPCC projections. For the most credible post-IPCC study see Startling new sea level rise research: “Most likely” 0.8 to 2.0 meters by 2100.”

One reason landlocked ice is flowing faster: The floating ice shelves that normally block that ice like a cork in a bottle are disappearing at a staggering rate. Ohio State researchers reported at the AGU meeting this week that “the amount of ice lost this summer is nearly three times what was lost one year ago“:

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