The rest of the media is finally catching up to my post from last month (see “Another AGU stunner: Evidence that Antarctica has warmed significantly over past 50 years“).

That’s because Nature published the peer-reviewed paper that was first reported at the American Geophysical Union meeting and Nature‘s own blog (!), “Warming of the Antarctic ice-sheet surface since the 1957 International Geophysical Year” (subs req’d, abstract below).

Scientists know the Antarctic ice sheet is losing mass “100 years ahead of schedule” (see “AGU 2008: Two trillion tons of land ice lost since 2003” and “Antarctic ice sheet hits the fan“).

It is really only the warming of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet (WAIS) that you should worry about (at least for this century) because it’s going to disintegrate long before the East Antarctic Ice Sheet does — since WAIS appears to be melting from underneath (i.e. the water is warming, too), and since, as I wrote in the “high water” part of my book, the WAIS is inherently less stable:

Perhaps the most important, and worrisome, fact about the WAIS is that it is fundamentally far less stable than the Greenland ice sheet because most of it is grounded far below sea level. The WAIS rests on bedrock as deep as two kilometers underwater. One 2004 NASA-led study found that most of the glaciers they were studying “flow into floating ice shelves over bedrock up to hundreds of meters deeper than previous estimates, providing exit routes for ice from further inland if ice-sheet collapse is under way.” A 2002 study in Science examined the underwater grounding lines–the points where the ice starts floating. Using satellites, the researchers determined that “bottom melt rates experienced by large outlet glaciers near their grounding lines are far higher than generally assumed.” And that melt rate is positively correlated with ocean temperature.

The warmer it gets, the more unstable WAIS outlet glaciers will become. Since so much of the ice sheet is grounded underwater, rising sea levels may have the effect of lifting the sheets, allowing more-and increasingly warmer-water underneath it, leading to further bottom melting, more ice shelf disintegration, accelerated glacial flow, and further sea level rise, and so on and on, another vicious cycle. The combination of global warming and accelerating sea level rise from Greenland could be the trigger for catastrophic collapse in the WAIS (see, for instance, here).

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The January 8 twitter cut to the chase, as tweets do:

Plenty magazine folded, leaving the US without a true environmental magazine. thought bad economy was gonna spur gree n jobs not kill them.

The web is not friendly to newspapers and magazines, even a good one like Plenty in an area of growing interest. Folio mag reported on the 12th:

Despite a last-ditch effort to save its Web site, both the print and online editions of the magazine are being discontinued, the magazine’s publisher, Mark Spellun, said Monday.

This is not a good media trend:

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[This post has been written by Dana, winner of the Climate Progress political pundit award.]

To begin with, I’d like to attribute my success in the 2008 election predictions to FiveThirtyEight, a terrific political analysis website to which I was addicted throughout the campaign. The website’s excellent poll analysis was the basis of my own projections. And of course the overall intelligence of the American people to finally elect an intelligent leader with an understanding of the importance of environmental issues ultimately allowed my realistic/optimistic predictions to come to fruition. Like most Climate Progress readers, I’m very excited about the prospects of the Obama presidency, and in fact I’m writing this post on the eve of his inauguration.

Shifting subjects a bit, another of my favorite websites (along with Climate Progress, of course) is the Green Home Huddle.

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The Environmental and Clean Energy Ball may be a party, a once-in-four-years chance to wear my tux, but it is also a source of news about names. Everybody is buzzing over who is going to fill out the organization chart at the Energy Department under Secretary Chu.

Sue Tierney is widely expected to be nominated for Deputy (as WashPost first reported here). Dr. Tierney would be a first rate Deputy — and I can say that with some confidence since not only is Sue a colleague and friend, but my first job at the department in 1993 was special assistant for policy and planning to then Deputy Secretary Bill White (now mayor of Houston).

Deputy is a very demanding job. You are the DOE’s Chief Operating Officer. You have to make the trains run on time, and these are big, messy trains — the nuclear weapons laboratories, the energy labs, the physics labs, and the “cleanup sites” like Hanford, which are the toxic legacy of the U.S. nuclear weapons program. If the Secretary doesn’t have prior experience as part of a senior leadership team managing a federal agency, the COO should. Dr. Tierney was assistant secretary of policy at DOE when I worked there.

Tierney has a unique set of qualifications at a time when we must redesign our entire energy system, change utility regulations to foster energy efficiency, and quickly site tens (and then hundreds) of gigawatts of renewable energy, along with a new, smart power grid to enable both the efficiency and the renewables (and plug-in hybrids):

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In one of his first acts, Obama, through his chief of staff Rahm Emanuel, “ordered a halt to all pending federal regulations until the new White House team conducts a legal and policy review of the last-minute Bush administration rules,” E&E Daily (subs. reqd) reports.

It also turns out that Congress, with simply majorities, can toss any rule within 60 legislative days — and that goes as far back as “May or June 2008.”

Regulation junkies — you know who you are — can read Emanuel’s memo here.

Rahm Emanuel’s memo could lead to the reversal of dozens of energy and environmental measures advanced in Bush’s waning days, including standards addressing mountaintop mining, air pollution permits, logging in the West, an exemption for factory farms from Superfund reporting requirements and endangered species.

The story concludes with background and more details:

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Some commenters suggested my earlier post, “Chrysler to electrify entire product line!” should have been filed under “humor.” How was the company going to survive the current collapse of the auto industry, let alone find the money to invest in green cars?

But now the NYT reports:

The Italian automaker Fiat agreed on Tuesday to take a 35 percent stake in the struggling American auto company Chrysler, which was forced last month to seek a federal bailout amid fears it might not survive.

And, as the article notes, this creates a real eco-opportunity for Chrysler:

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