Here’s a  stunner from Climate Wire (subs. req’d) today:

Rural electric cooperatives, which represent many small, coal-dependent utilities in the Midwest and raised a ruckus in the House debate, are eligible for a portion of allowances under the new draft.

But at a conference last week, the head of the National Rural Electric Cooperative Association, Glenn English, said “the basis for a deal” on climate would not revolve so much around allowances, but around whether people in coal-dependent regions would get enough help with efficiency retrofits on homes so they can manage potential electricity spikes.

Wow — somebody who would rather have smart policies than more allowances.

Interestingly, Boxer gave the Co-ops a real piece of the action:

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A terrific story by the AP’s Seth Borenstein, “Statisticians reject global cooling,” not only debunks that myth — it will make your head spin once again on error-riddled Superfreakonomics (coauthored by Levitt).

Have you heard that the world is now cooling instead of warming? You may have seen some news reports on the Internet or heard about it from a provocative new book.

Only one problem: It’s not true, according to an analysis of the numbers done by several independent statisticians for The Associated Press.

The debunking will be no surprise to CP readers [see The BBC asks "What happened to global warming?" during the hottest decade in recorded history! and "NYT's Revkin pushes global cooling myth (again!)], but the AP made three nice contributions.  First, the AP talked to NOAA:

The recent Internet chatter about cooling led NOAA’s climate data center to re-examine its temperature data. It found no cooling trend.

“The last 10 years are the warmest 10-year period of the modern record,” said NOAA climate monitoring chief Deke Arndt. “Even if you analyze the trend during that 10 years, the trend is actually positive, which means warming.”

Second, “In a blind test, the AP gave temperature data to four independent statisticians and asked them to look for trends, without telling them what the numbers represented”:

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This is part three of a three-part series. Read parts one and two here.

Blogging economist J. Bradford DeLong has read the “global cooling” chapter of SuperFreakonomics and has asked six wonkish questions about climate science and policy. DeLong’s final two questions were about the lifecycle costs of deploying solar power. In SuperFreakonomics, Dubner and Levitt cite billionaire mosquito-laser inventor Nathan Myhrvold’s argument that solar power is not actually a “good thing” when it comes to tackling global warming.

Solar panels, Myhrvold argues, create both an “albedo debt” and a “warming debt.” If a “black” solar panel is placed on a light-colored surface, even as it generates electricity it will increase air temperatures. Furthermore, the construction of large-scale solar plants generates global warming pollution, which Myhrvold claims would counteract the benefit of replacing coal-burning plants. He makes the radical claim that the “warming debt” from solar plant construction would make “emissions and global warming worse every year until we’re done building out the solar plants, which could take 30 to 50 years.” DeLong, not surprisingly, finds these claims a bit dubious:

5: “The problem with solar cells is that they are black… designed to absorb light from the sun…. But only about 12 percent gets turned into electricity, and the rest… contributes to global warming.” Surely the heat energy reradiated from a solar panel is a small fraction of the heat trapped by all the carbon dioxide that would be produced by the coal-fired plants that would otherwise generate the electricity, isn’t it?

6: “The energy consumed by building the thousands of new solar plants necessary to replace coal-burning and other power plants would create a huge long-term ‘warming debt’.” I had thought that practically none of the power plants that we will use in 2050 are now in operation, and that building them–whether for open-carbon cycle, closed-carbon cycle, or non-carbon–will cost about the same amount of energy, and thus that there is no significant extra power-plant construction debt from going green in our new power-plant construction over the next forty years as long as it is done gradually. Am I wrong?

Myhrvold has defended his arguments, saying that when he said “black,” he didn’t mean black, just, well, rather dark. Although Dubner and Levitt radically misrepresented Ken Caldeira’s opinions in their chapter, they were spot on with Myhrvold, who blogged:

If we go hell-bent for leather in building solar plants for the next 50 years or so, it is entirely possible that we won’t see much small benefit for 30 to 50 years.

This is nonsense. Take a simplified model of the world that starts with 100 percent high-emission coal plants emitting 10,000 MMT of carbon dioxide a year and no zero-emission solar plants. Let’s assume that the construction of each solar plant has a three-year “warming debt” and that the use of each plant has a two-year “albedo debt,” in line with Myhrvold’s estimates. We’ll also assume slow growth in total energy demand (an assumption which does not affect the results of this thought experiment). If all the coal plants are replaced over a forty-year period (by 2050), the world starts seeing the benefit in only twenty years (by 2030): Read more

The most detailed satellite information available shows that ice sheets in Greenland and western Antarctica are shrinking faster than scientists thought and in some places are already in runaway melt mode, a new study found….

Using 50 million laser readings from a NASA satellite, scientists for the first time calculated changes in the height of the vulnerable but massive ice sheets and found them especially worse at their edges. That’s where warmer water eats away from below. In some parts of Antarctica, ice sheets have been losing 30 feet a year in thickness since 2003, according to the study….

“To some extent it’s a runaway effect. The question is how far will it run?” said lead author Hamish Pritchard of the British Antarctic Survey. “It’s more widespread than we previously thought.”

That’s from “Study: ‘Runaway’ melt on Antarctica, Greenland,” the pull-no-punches MSNBC story last month.  The full study, “Extensive dynamic thinning on the margins of the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets,” was published in Nature (subs. req’d, excerpted below).

The British Antarctic Survey put out a news release with graphics.  Here are some satellite tracks, from NASA’s ICESat (Ice, Cloud, and land Elevation Satellite), revealing areas of dynamic thinning (red) in Antarctica and Greenland [click to enlarge].

The release notes that this “dynamic thinning”:

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Markey expands “clean coal” forged letter investigation

A House committee is investigating whether the coal industry’s largest influence group failed to accurately report its lobbying spending to Congress.

The Select Committee on Energy Independence and Global Warming has expanded its investigation into forged letters sent to lawmakers and their ties to the American Coalition for Clean Coal Electricity, according to documents viewed by E&E.

In an Oct. 21 letter, Chairman Ed Markey (D-Mass.) asked ACCCE whether its lobbying disclosure for 2008 and the first half of 2009 should have included work conducted by the Hawthorn Group, a public relations firm hired in part to coordinate efforts to fight the House climate bill.

Markey directed ACCCE to detail how much of the $10 million it paid Hawthorn Group during that 18-month period went toward work aimed at influencing U.S. climate legislation. ACCCE paid Hawthorn Group more than $7 million in 2008 and nearly $3 million in the first half of 2009, according to documents it gave the committee.

“It does raise some questions,” said Markey spokesman Eben Burnham-Snyder. “What are these activities? They’re to influence a member of Congress to vote a certain way.”

The committee will hold a hearing Thursday on forged letters that came from ACCCE subcontractor Bonner & Associates. The hearing also could delve into the issue of ACCCE’s lobbying spending. ACCCE was told to answer Markey’s questions by Thursday.

Lawmakers received at least 199 letters and more than 4,000 phone calls on the House climate bill because of work by Bonner & Associates and fellow Hawthorn Group subcontractor Lincoln Strategies LLC, according to documents ACCCE gave the committee. Some of those letters urged House members to vote against the bill crafted by Energy and Commerce Chairman Henry Waxman (D-Calif.) and Markey.

At least 12 of those letters were fraudulent, purporting to be from groups opposed to the bill. ACCCE has blamed that on one Bonner & Associates employee. The committee’s letter also seeks more information surrounding the fraudulent letters.

An alliance of coal companies, utilities and railroads that ship coal, ACCCE is one of the best-funded trade groups in the energy sector.

For more background, see “Dirty coal group’s 14th forgery impersonated American veterans” and “ACCCE takes on water: Alstom quits scandal-ridden coal industry front group, joining Duke and Alcoa “” time for GE and Caterpillar to jump ship, too.”  The story continues:

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The Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works launches a full week of hearings this week on the climate and clean energy bill.  You’ll certainly want to tune in (at the EPW website) for first hearing Tuesday, 9:30 ET to hear:

• Energy Secretary Steven Chu;
• Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood;
• Interior Secretary Ken Salazar;
• U.S. EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson; and
• Federal Energy Regulatory Commission Chairman Jon Wellinghoff.

Wellinghoff in particular may be the best Obama appointment you never heard of, who said in April of new nuclear and coal plants:  “We may not need any, ever.” I’ll repost the full witness list for Wednesday and Thursday at the end.

First, however, Senator Barbara Boxer (D-CA), EPW chair, has a great piece on HuffPost on “Telling the Whole Story on Global Warming” — on making sure that we don’t just talk about the cost of action but also talk about the cost of inaction:

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Yale Environment 360: I want to start with this little dust-up over SuperFreakonomics. In the book, you are quoted as saying, when it comes to global warming, “Carbon dioxide is not the right villain.” Is that accurate?

Ken Caldeira: That is not accurate. I don’t believe I said anything remotely like that because I believe that we should be outlawing the production of devices that emit carbon dioxide, and I don’t think we can solve this carbon climate problem unless we drastically reduce our carbon dioxide emissions very soon.

e360: They also write that you are convinced that human activity is responsible for “some” global warming. What does that mean?

Caldeira: I don’t think we can say with certainty whether we’re responsible for 90 percent of it or we might be responsible for 110 percent of it. But the vast majority of global warming, I believe, is due to human release of greenhouse gases to the atmosphere.

e360: Another thing that plays in to the same kind of sensibility is the idea [which the book quotes Caldeira saying] that the “doubling of CO2 traps less than 2 percent of the outgoing radiation emitted by the Earth.” When that’s phrased like that, it makes it sound like it’s not really much of a problem.

Caldeira: You should think of the whole global warming problem as a 1 percent problem, at least for doubling of CO2. In absolute temperature Kelvin “” scientists like to use the Kelvin scale “” the current Earth temperature is around 288 degrees Kelvin, and a 3-degree warming on top of that is basically a one-percent additional warming. And so this whole issue of climate change, when viewed from an Earth-system perspective, is a story about 1 percents and 2 percents. Two percent might sound like a small number, but that’s the difference between a much hotter world, and the kind of world we’re accustomed to….

e360: Overall, do you feel like your work has been accurately and fairly represented in this book?

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