Yes, the news on climate science, solutions, and politics is already coming faster than I can keep up with.

But still, in the coming weeks and months I do want to be as responsive as possible to reader interest. Some readers have already asked me for suggestions on how to reduce their carbon footprint, and I’ve even been asked by a couple folks where I think a good place to live is in a globally warmed world. I hope to get to these topics this month. And yes, I am planning to run a post on biochar … someday.

So give me one or more ideas — and feel free to endorse other people’s ideas.

In an interview with Yale Environment 360, New Yorker reporter Elizabeth Kolbert explains that everyone, from journalists and scientists to politicians and economists, are responsible for the inability of the United States to respond to the threat of climate catastrophe:

This is a total system failure, okay? We’re not talking about an isolated little problem, and that’s the problem. It’s a total system failure that we’re in this situation and it’s a total system failure that we can’t seem to steer away even when the evidence is absolutely overwhelming that we better do something.

Discussing the “terrible heat wave” and “terrible drought” in Australia that has led to hellish wildfires, Kolbert notes:

And it has woken the Australians up pretty quickly, and there’s a lot of coverage on climate change issues if you are reading the Australian media. So unfortunately, I think it does take something that’s very, very palpable, really affecting people’s lives. And as I say, precisely the message that scientists have been trying to give us is, do not wait until that drought hits you, because that’s too late.

California, Nevada, Texas, Oklahoma, Louisiana, Florida, Georgia, South Carolina, North Carolina, Virginia, and Wisconsin are in moderate to severe drought, with large swathes of Texas in an exceptional, multi-year drought.

Kolbert, the award-winning author of Field Notes From a Catastrophe, makes a special call for “scientists to make their voices heard.” Although she is “not at all optimistic” that we’re going to do what actually needs to be done, she admits she “was one of those people who was pessimistic about Obama, the prospect of electing a black president seemed to be not that plausible, and here we are today. So things do happen that surprise you.”

As climate science predicts, the Arctic is warming faster than the rest of the globe (see NSIDC: Arctic melt passes the point of no return, “We hate to say we told you so, but we did”). This is often called polar amplification (PA).

I wanted to do a post on PA for two reasons. First, “there are no permanent weather stations in the Arctic Ocean, the place on Earth that has been warming fastest,” as New Scientist explained (see here and here). “The UK’s Hadley Centre record simply excludes this area, whereas the NASA version assumes its surface temperature is the same as that of the nearest land-based stations.”

Thus contrary to what the global warming deniers say about the recent temperature record, it is almost certainly the case that the planet has warmed up more this decade than NASA says, and especially more than the UK’s Hadley Center says.

So that’s why I see the NASA temperature record as more accurate, which puts 2005 as the warmest year on record, with a rough tie for second between 2007 and 1998. Sorry, deniers, not bloody much evidence for recent “global cooling.”

Second, PA is a tad more complicated — and more interesting — than the popular explanation has it.

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Rep. Donna Edwards (D-MD) believes that the goal of climate legislation should be to put a “real tax” on polluters and invest the revenues in “green infrastructure” policies that benefit entire communities. After participating in a live online chat with the Wonk Room at her Capitol Hill office (with a grand view of the Capitol Power Plant), Edwards described her thoughts on President Barack Obama’s proposed climate plan to direct most of the pollution revenues into payroll tax credits. Edwards, who represents a majority African-American, middle class district in the Maryland suburbs of Washington, D.C., is skeptical that a “check in hand” is better for her constituents than policies that “incentivize and reward communities that would be adversely impacted”:

I think the money actually has to be returned into the policy you want to promote. I’m a skeptic of those kinds of tax cuts anyway, in terms of whether they have real benefit for people. For example, if we’re going to impose taxes, a real tax, a significant tax on polluters, then I think it’s actually important to take that and invest it in the kind of technologies and green buildings and green infrastructure and renewables and conservation and the things you want to promote, because we have to begin to incentivize and to reward communities that would be adversely impacted. That would be better for me and some of my communities than it would be to simply get a tax credit or a tax cut and a check in hand.

Watch it:

Rep. Edwards concluded, “It could mean weatherization, it could mean building green buildings in the community and replacing wetlands, and all of those kind of things that would actually have a broader public benefit and incentive a green infrastructure, rather than incentivizing continued carbon production.”

In his long-term budget plan, President Obama has proposed to return the bulk of an estimated $80 billion a year in revenues generated from auctioning greenhouse pollution permits in a Making Work Pay tax credit, with $15 billion a year dedicated to clean energy investments like those described by Rep. Edwards. Obama’s budget calls for the initiation of the cap and trade system in 2012.

Part 1 on my Salon article examined the key flaw in the strategy of the world’s biggest grantmaking foundation and asked “Can the problems of the developing world be solved by ignoring global warming?”

Here I’d like to explore what the Foundation might do while remaining true to its mission of helping billions of people, those who “never even have the chance to live a healthy, productive life,” reach that opportunity themselves.

First, however, the key point bears repeating: On our current emissions path, those billions of people (and their descendents) have little hope no matter how many diseases the Foundation cures. As one 2008 paper, “Global Warming and Salt Water Intrusion: Bangladesh Perspective,” concludes (see “Rising sea salinates India’s Ganges“):

Global Warming has already started to hit the Bangladesh coastal areas. The salty sea water intrusion and its disastrous effects in landscape, ecology and human health already created widescale agony amongst the inhabitants of Bangladesh coastal belts….

A 3-foot rise by century’s end … would wreak havoc in Bangladesh on an apocalyptic, Atlantis-like scale, according to scientific projections and models.

A quarter of the country would be submerged…. As many as 30 million people would become refugees in their own land, many of them subsistence farmers with nothing to subsist on any longer.

And we are facing 5 feet of sea level rise by 2100.

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So the NYT‘s Andy Revkin blogs on the new Gallup survey, “Gallup: Rising View That Climate Risk Exaggerated?” and asks “What’s your take on what’s going on?” What’s your take on why Gallup finds “a record-high 41%” of Americans now say the “seriousness of global warming” is exaggerated.

[Yes, let's put aside the irony of that question coming from the reporter who famously wrote an article, "In Debate on Climate Change, Exaggeration Is a Common Pitfall" that charged Nobelist Al Gore -- the man most associated in the public mind with the climate warning -- with exaggeration (a false charge, as I proved here).]

Here’s my take. Objectively, in the last two years, the science makes painfully clear that climate risk has grown sharply, far beyond what 99% of people I talk to realize, even highly informed people:

• Hadley Center: Catastrophic 5-7°C warming by 2100 on current emissions path
• M.I.T. joins climate realists, doubles its projection of global warming by 2100 to 5.1°C
• AAAS: Climate change is coming much harder, much faster than predicted
• Nobel laureate Rowland agrees we are headed to 1000 ppm
• NOAA stunner: Climate change “largely irreversible for 1000 years,” with permanent Dust Bowls in Southwest and around the globe
• Startling new sea level rise research: “Most likely” 0.8 to 2.0 meters by 2100
• US Geological Survey stunner: Sea-level rise in 2100 will likely “substantially exceed” IPCC projections

That means if the public has come to the reverse view, it must be due to the messaging and the media and the misinformers. Let’s look at all three — and why this poll vindicates my analysis that Obama can get a better climate bill in 2010.

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Children play near a meter used to measure the solar power being produced by the panels on a roof in a Colorado co-housing development. The state was the first to require by popular vote that utilities generate a percentage of their power from renewables. This article is reprinted from the Center for American Progress’s “It’s Easy Being Green” series.

The check that landed in my family’s mailbox recently wasn’t much in monetary terms–just $9.73–but to us it was huge in other ways.

The payment from Xcel Energy, Colorado’s largest utility, meant that the grid-tied solar photovoltaic system we installed a year and a half ago on our home in the foothills west of Denver had produced about 200 kilowatt hours more power than we consumed in 2008. At least as far as home electricity is concerned we are slightly better than net zero, both in carbon emissions and costs.

In a broader and more important sense, our modest refund reflects the success of progressive policy choices Colorado voters and officeholders made in recent years that have made it far easier for homeowners like us to follow a greener path. Those policies have put Colorado in the vanguard of what Democratic Governor Bill Ritter likes to call the “new energy economy.” The state now ranks fourth in the nation in solar production, with three-quarters of the 32 megawatts of output coming from rooftop installations like ours.

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