The Massachusetts Institute of Technology Joint Program on the Science and Policy of Climate Change has joined the climate realists. The realists are the growing group of scientists who understand that the business as usual emissions path leads to unmitigated catastrophe (see, for instance, “Hadley Center: “Catastrophic” 5-7°C warming by 2100 on current emissions path” and below).

The Program issued a remarkable, though little-remarked-on, report in January, “Probabilistic Forecast for 21st Century Climate Based on Uncertainties in Emissions (without Policy) and Climate Parameters,” by over a dozen leading experts. They reanalyzed their model’s 2003 projections model using the latest data, and concluded:

The MIT Integrated Global System Model is used to make probabilistic projections of climate change from 1861 to 2100. Since the model’s first projections were published in 2003 substantial improvements have been made to the model and improved estimates of the probability distributions of uncertain input parameters have become available. The new projections are considerably warmer than the 2003 projections, e.g., the median surface warming in 2091 to 2100 is 5.1°C compared to 2.4°C in the earlier study.

[Note:  That rise is compared to 1990 levels.  So you can add at least 0.5 °C and 1.0 °F for comparison with pre-industrial temperatures.]

Their median projection for the atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide in 2095 is a jaw-dropping 866 ppm.

Projected decadal mean concentrations of CO2. Red solid lines are median, 5% and 95% percentiles for present study: dashed blue line the same from their 2003 projection.

Why the change? The Program’s website explains:

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A new report from the Center for American Progress Action Fund challenges the Washington Post to correct George F. Will’s error-filled “Dark Green Doomsayers” column, published February 15th. “Matter of Fact” describes how Will has challenged the scientific basis of man-made global warming for years in his columns for The Washington Post, nationally distributed by the Washington Post Editors Group. These columns have been cited for errors in years past. The most recent is no exception.

The report explains how George Will’s “Dark Green Doomsayers” makes significant errors in depicting sea ice as a measure of global warming, the past decade of global warming, and the history of predictions of “global cooling.”

Download “Matter of Fact: The Washington Post Should Correct George Will’s ‘Dark Green Doomsayers’ Column” from the Wonk Room Resource Library.

George F. Will has been recycling error-filled columns challenging the existence of manmade global warming since 1992, for publication and distribution by the Washington Post. Despite the evident mendacity of these columns, the editors of the Washington Post are standing behind their conservative columnist, who is syndicated in more than 450 newspapers nationwide. The Wonk Room already noted Will’s recycling goes back to 2004 — but we hadn’t looked back far enough.

A comparison between 2009′s “Dark Green Doomsaying” column and 1992′s “Chicken Littles” reveals that Will is repeating content that was first published when Boyz II Men and Sir Mix-a-Lot ruled the charts. Since then, of course, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has published three new assessment reports of the science of manmade climate change based on thousands of new scientific papers. Each IPCC report has been more certain than the last — by 2007 they found a 90 percent chance that the “unequivocal” warming was “due to the observed increase in anthropogenic (human) greenhouse gas concentrations.”

Once the recycled content is removed from his latest column, one is left only with Will’s dismissal of long-term worst-case scenarios for California’s climate, a factoid from a John Tierney blog post, and three stories recently promoted by the Drudge Report (here, here, and here). These few additions introduce new errors.

Will’s self-plagiarism raises many questions. What, exactly, is the Washington Post paying George F. Will to do? Do Fred Hiatt, Autumn Brewington, and Alan Shearer consider zombie talking points from the era of grunge to be respectable work? Is it time for Will to retire, and allow the valuable column inches to be occupied by someone willing to devise original content for the Post? If an error is uncorrected for more nearly seventeen years, do the Post’s editors stop caring?

Below is a comparison of the text of “Dark Green Doomsayers” [2009] and “Chicken Littles” [1992]: Read more

Well, first you should read for background, “An efficiency portfolio standard is as important as a renewable standard — and should come first.”

Then you should tune into to the U.S. House of Representatives Committee on Energy and Commerce Subcommittee on Energy and the Environment hearing Tuesday at 10 am. It is chaired by the uber-green Ed Markey (D-MA) and will focus on an EERS — more than the Senate Energy Committee hearing on Thursday, I’m told.

You should be able to get the webcast here. More details on the hearing and witnesses follow:

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Turns out you can teach an old dog new tricks.

Billionaire oil man T. Boone Pickens, who once pushed natural gas as the only way to get off of oil imports, said at today’s National Clean Energy Project (see live-blogging here):

Diesels should be replaced by natural gas. Light-duty vehicles go to the battery.

Yes, the 80-year-old Pickens has been edging slowly in that direction, since running cars and light trucks on natural gas never made much sense (see “Memo to T. Boone Pickens: Your energy plan is half-brilliant, half-dumb” and “Pickens’ natural gas plan makes no sense and will never happen“). But this was the bluntest I had heard him.

The problem for his messaging, of course, is that even if you replace half of highway diesel use with natural gas over the next decade — a huge accomplishment — that would be under 10% of all U.S. petroleum use and barely make a dent in oil imports and the trade deficit 10 years in 2020.

Pickens also said made his prediction that we will be back at $140 a barrel oil in 2 years, which I tend to agree with unless this global recession turns into a global depression, which remains possible.

He also cannot bring himself to acknowledge that it is his fellow conservatives who are the stumbling block to the high-renewable future he advocates. After all the strong, positive comments from so many speakers about the need and the practicality of a clean energy future, he warned:

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E&E Daily (subs. req’d) reports on two hearings worth tuning into because of the witnesses [links for webcasts below]:

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An all-star cast of the leading voices in the new Obama era is convening at the Newseum in Washington DC to discuss the future of U.S. energy policy. The National Clean Energy Project follows a similar meeting convened by Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) last summer in Nevada. But much has changed in the past few months. The new administration — including Energy Secretary Steven Chu, Interior Secretary Ken Salazar, and White House energy adviser Carol Browner — have committed to a multibillion investment in a new clean energy grid with the economic recovery act signed into law last week by President Obama.

The live webcast of the event can be seen at NationalCleanEnergyProject.org.

Joe Romm is liveblogging the summit at ClimateProgress. The Wonk Room is liveblogging the summit below.

Former senator Tim Wirth of Colorado introduces the meeting.

10:30 PRESIDENT BILL CLINTON

Every time before in the last thirty years when I started this … every time oil dropped people said give my Hummer back. They’re not saying that any more. I want to thank everybody this economic recovery bill has good things in it and I’m grateful as a citizen. We have to maximize the value of this economic recovery. The big short-term gains in jobs and greenhouse gas reductions are in energy efficiency advances.

10:35 VICE PRESIDENT AL GORE

We really do have a planetary emergency. This sounds shrill to many ears. We’re still not used to thinking in those terms. We’ve seen the oil price roller coaster. This roller coaster’s headed for a crash and we’re in the front car.

10:45 HOUSE SPEAKER NANCY PELOSI

We have to hold together or we will all regret the missed opportunity.

10:55 T. BOONE PICKENS

Geothermal does not operate an eighteen-wheeler. Get realistic… I’m running out of time. But we are going to have an energy policy in America.

11:00 JOHN PODESTA, CENTER FOR AMERICAN PROGRESS ACTION FUND

We have to recognize we’re living through a terrible recession, a dependence on fossil fuels, and the almost existential threat of global warming.

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I am here liveblogging the clean energy and green grid summit sponsored by the Center for American Progress Action Fund — see Watch Al Gore, Bill Clinton, Steven Chu, John Podesta on how to build a smart, green grid — 10 am EST Monday.

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Part 1 was an overview of the energy strategies the country needs to stop building new coal plants and start reducing emissions from existing ones, focusing on energy efficiency, wind, and concentrated solar power. Biomass cofiring will be the focus of a couple of posts since, although rarely-discussed, it is probably the cheapest, easiest, and fastest way to provide new renewable baseload power without having to build any new transmission lines.

I first started analyzing the carbon benefits of cofiring biomass with coal in 1997 when I was overseeing a study by five U.S. national laboratories that examined what an aggressive technology-based strategy built around energy efficiency and renewable energy could achieve in terms of emissions reductions. (See full study here and some history on it by California Energy Commissioner Art Rosenfeld here.) With supporting analysis done by the Electric Power Research Institute, the Five Lab Study concluded that biomass cofiring was the single biggest potential contributor to near-term greenhouse gas reductions of any renewable energy strategy.

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In a Saturday article on President Obama’s budget outline, the NYT reported:

Full details of Mr. Obama’s budget for the 2010 fiscal year will be released in April. The outline on Thursday will make clear that he intends to push ahead on promises to contain health care costs and expand insurance coverage, and to move toward an energy cap-and-trade system for controlling emissions of gases blamed for climate change.

“The president believes there are essentially three areas that have to move forward even as we pare back elsewhere — health care, energy and education,” said David Axelrod, his senior adviser. “These are the bulwark of a strong economy moving forward.”

So, yes, we will see a cap-and-trade bill on Obama’s desk in FY2010 — between October 1, 2009 and September 30, 2010. Equally interesting are the details of the bill that leaked into the budget:

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