IF we don’t get off our current emissions path

Sea levels may rise three times faster than the official predictions of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and the global average sea level may increase by as much as 1.9 metres (6ft 3in) by 2100, scientists said yesterday.

The new assessment comes just one week after another international scientific body concluded that the IPCC had been too conservative in estimating a maximum of 59 centimetres of sea level rise this century as a result of global warming.

That’s the UK’s Independent reporting on a new study in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, “Global sea level linked to global temperature” (open access), by Stefan Rahmstorf of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research and Martin Vermeer of Helsinki University of Technology in Finland.

The figure above is from the study, with the caption, “Projection of sea-level rise from 1990 to 2100, based on IPCC temperature projections for three different emission scenarios (labeled on right…). The sea-level range projected in the IPCC AR4 [Fourth Assessment Report, 2007] for these scenarios is shown for comparison in the bars on the bottom right. Also shown is the observations-based annual global sea-level data (red).”

We are currently on the A1F1 emissions trajectory (see “U.S. media largely ignores latest warning from climate scientists: “Recent observations confirm “¦ the worst-case IPCC scenario trajectories (or even worse) are being realised” “” 1000 ppm“), though I am hopeful that the agreement coming out of Copenhagen coupled with the bipartisan U.S. climate bill will take us off that trajectory.

But the bottom line is that if we listen to the anti-scientific ideologues urging inaction, the midrange sea level rise projection is now about 5 feet by century’s end.  And that is consistent with many other recent studies –see, for instance, Startling new sea level rise research: “Most likely” 0.8 to 2.0 meters by 2100.

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Our guest blogger is Dave McCurdy, President and CEO of the Alliance of Automobile Manufacturers.

Disclosure: The Alliance of Automobile Manufacturers is currently running paid advertisements on ThinkProgress.

As negotiations between world leaders in Copenhagen hit full swing, the auto industry supports efforts to build a comprehensive, global framework for reducing greenhouse gas emissions sustainably. Automakers are already reinventing the automobile, introducing new technologies that dramatically reduce greenhouse gas emissions and increase fuel economy including fuel cell, electric, hydrogen, clean diesel, advanced biofuels and more.

However, in the transportation sector, for these efforts to be successful, the technology winners and losers cannot be pre-ordained. There is no “silver bullet” technology that will by itself alleviate our dependence on fossil fuels and reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Therefore, a diverse, global, and economy-wide set of energy solutions is needed.

Doing so will encourage competition and innovation among automakers, as well as provide consumers the world over with a continued ability to buy the types of vehicles they need for family, business and leisure. A global, economy-wide system of carbon reductions will also avoid generating conflicting standards from different regulatory bodies and provide automakers much needed certainty for long-term product planning.

In their discussions, world leaders should consider that it does not make sense to craft another future just as singularly dependent on one type of transportation technology as the current is on carbon based fuels.

While it is clear that reducing carbon emissions is a necessity, government’s role should not be to dictate which technologies are ultimately available to the consumer. Instead, government should evaluate our starting point and determine a satisfactory end point, but let the global market dictate what path to take between the two.
By developing these sound long-term end points, governments can thereby provide clarity and direction for businesses over the long haul -especially important given how fundamental a shift we are talking about.

The auto industry has already begun taking major steps to achieve significant carbon reductions in a relatively short period of time, but no one can predict the future or know which greenhouse gas- reducing transportation technologies will be successful. If automakers are regulatorily forced into researching and developing a handful of technologies to address climate concerns while ignoring all others, the world will miss a never before seen chance to spur transportation innovation, provide consumers with a multitude of choices, and develop a truly sustainable global carbon reduction framework.

Gore rebuts Palin in NBC interview, Palin “publishes her crazy” on Facebook

That’s Cheryl Lockwood of Alaska Youth for Environmental Action testifying at a 2007 hearing, “Youth Leadership on Climate Change” of The Select Committee on Energy Independence and Global Warming.  At the time, Limbaugh mocked her for crying, as Media Matters discussed:

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In mid-November, thousands of emails from the University of East Anglia Climatic Research Unit webmail server — a top climate research center in the United Kingdom — were hacked and dumped on a Russian web server. Polluter-funded climate skeptics, along with their allies in conservative media and the Republican Party, sifted through the e-mails, and quickly cherry picked quotes to falsely accuse climate scientists of concocting climate change science out of whole cloth. The skeptics also propelled the story, dubbed “Climategate,” to the cover of the New York Times and newspapers across the globe. According to a Nexis news search, the Climategate story has been reported at least 325 times in the American press alone.

While the hacked e-mails may reveal that scientists might not have nice things to say about climate change deniers at times, they do nothing to change the scientific consensus that carbon dioxide emissions from fossil fuel use are raising temperatures and making oceans more acidic. As the right attempts to use the Climategate story to derail the Copenhagen Climate Change Conference this week, arctic sea ice is still at historically low levels, Australia is still on fire, the northern United Kingdom is still underwater, the world’s glaciers are still disappearing and today NOAA confirmed that not only is it the hottest decade in history, but 2009 was one of the hottest years in history. But how did the right-wing noise machine hijack the debate?

The methods for the right-wing political hit machine were honed during the Clinton years. Columnist and language-guru William Safire, a former aide to actual Watergate crook President Nixon, attached “-gate” to any minor post-Nixon incident as a “rhetorical legerdemain” intended “to establish moral equivalence.” (See phony manufactured scandals “Travelgate,” “Whitewatergate,” etc.) A right-wing echo chamber — including the Rev. Moon-funded Washington Times, the Wall Street Journal editorial page, talk radio, and the constellation of various conservative front groups and think tanks — would then blare the scandal incessantly, regardless of the truth. But the more troubling aspect of this gimmick is the increasing willingness for traditional media outlets, from the Evening News to the Washington Post, to largely reprint unfounded right-wing smears without context or critical reporting.

One of the most successful coups for right-wing hit men was the “SwiftBoat” campaign, a well financed effort orchestrated by lobbyists and Bush allies to smear Sen. John Kerry’s (D-MA) war record. But “Climategate” is no different, with many of the same conservatives actors playing their respective roles:

(Click MORE to read the Wonk Room’s timeline of Climategate)
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Wonk Room’s Brad Johnson is reporting on the scene from Copenhagen during the United Nations Climate Change Conference.

The Tuvalu Protocol

At this morning’s plenary session of the Copenhagen climate negotiations, the tiny island nation of Tuvalu called for strengthening the Kyoto Protocol to limit warming to 1.5 °C above pre-industrial levels, rather than the current standard of 2 ° C. Their proposal to amend the Kyoto Protocol with a new, legally binding agreement to set a target of 350 ppm of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere fractured the session, as Tuvalu was supported by other small island states and poor nations in Africa, but was opposed by fifteen richer developing nations, including Saudi Arabia, China, and India. Stabilizing carbon dioxide concentrations at 350 ppm would be 25 percent above pre-industrial levels, but is 10 percent below the present concentration of 390 ppm, so the targets would require significant and immediate reductions in emissions from both developed and developing nations. Tuvalu negotiator Ian Fry told the conference that “our future rests on the outcome of this meeting.”

The chair of the session, Danish conference president Connie Hedegaard suspended the negotiations because an agreement on whether to establish a “contact group” “” a new formal negotiating session “” could not be reached. Outside the plenary hall, activists rallied around the Tuvalu plan.

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This guest post is by Julian Wong and Kari Manlove.

Today at the COP15 meetings in Copenhagen, the governments of the UK, Mexico, Norway, and Australia proposed the establishment of a new Green Fund and a set of governance principles. The document is not final or even formal, but it is encouraging progress and entails a clear indication that the US is not expected to fully bear the financial burden.

In fact, the proposal states that, “whilst recognizing the responsibility of developed countries, future climate finance arrangements should be responsive to future changes in the global economy.”

The COP15 negotiations, as agreed to in the Bali Action Plan two years, are structured around four simultaneous issue tracks or pillars, which include mitigation, adaptation, technology transfer, and finance. Indeed, if any progress is to be made on mitigation, adaptation, or technology transfer, countries must make headway on various financial aspect, including scale, architecture of financial mechanism(s), how to calculate contributions, public versus private funding, and governance.

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The Wonk Room is reporting on the scene from Copenhagen during the United Nations Climate Change Conference.

The Tuvalu Protocol

At this morning’s plenary session of the Copenhagen climate negotiations, the tiny island nation of Tuvalu called for strengthening the Kyoto Protocol to limit warming to 1.5 °C above pre-industrial levels, rather than the current standard of 2 ° C. Their proposal to amend the Kyoto Protocol with a new, legally binding agreement to set a target of 350 ppm of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere fractured the session, as Tuvalu was supported by other small island states and poor nations in Africa, but was opposed by fifteen richer developing nations, including Saudi Arabia, China, and India. Stabilizing carbon dioxide concentrations at 350 ppm would be 25 percent above pre-industrial levels, but is 10 percent below the present concentration of 390 ppm, so the targets would require significant and immediate reductions in emissions from both developed and developing nations. Tuvalu negotiator Ian Fry told the conference that “our future rests on the outcome of this meeting.”

The chair of the session, Danish conference president Connie Hedegaard suspended the negotiations because an agreement on whether to establish a “contact group” — a new formal negotiating session — could not be reached. Outside the plenary hall, activists rallied around the Tuvalu plan.

Developing Development

The negotiators then turned to the challenge of financing and governance of clean-energy investment for developing countries, including the state of the Kyoto Protocol’s Clean Development Mechanism CDM). Much time was spent on whether the oil and coal industry’s development of carbon capture and sequestration (CCS) technologies should be funded through the Clean Development Mechanism. Saudi Arabia, which earlier endorsed Climategate to deny global warming, called CCS a “win-win” technology.

Meanwhile, forward progress came as the United Kingdom, Mexico, Australia, and Norway released a co-written climate financing governance paper, the first step in unlocking the post-Kyoto global investment needed to prepare nations from the damages of global warming while reducing the pollution that causes it.

United States

At a press conference, chief US negotiator Todd Stern said, “I completely reject the notion of a debt or reparations” in terms of moral responsibility on the part of the United States for its historical emissions, though he recognized the “historical role in putting emissions into the atmosphere.” Stern reminded the press that the United States would never join the Kyoto Protocol structure, instead working towards a parallel international structure that requires both developed and developing countries to make commitments to emissions reductions. EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson said that the greenhouse gas endangerment finding made yesterday was intended to “make up for lost time,” and would be complementary to whatever legislation Congress enacts.

The Washington Post further damaged its credibility as a paper of record by publishing a Climategate-vs-Copenhagen screed by Sarah Palin, as a climate-denial caucus of Republican House members announced their intentions to head to Copenhagen to tell the world they will work against their president on the international stage. Rep. Dana Rohrabacher (R-CA) stood on the House floor pledging to “fight the globalist clque.”

Pushing Around Targets

Yesterday, South Africa announced it would commit to significantly slowing the growth of their global warming pollution by 2020.

Canada and Croatia took the top “Fossil of the Day” award today for trying to change the 1990 benchmark baseline in the Kyoto Protocol, and Russia took second place because its negotiators announced that President Medvedev’s recently announced reduction targets were merely “political,” rather than a real commitment.

You can watch President Obama receive the Nobel Peace Prize Thursday, 7:00-8:30 am ET  — click here.

The Nobel Peace Prize Award Ceremony takes place in the Oslo City Hall, Norway, on 10 December every year – the anniversary of Alfred Nobel’s death.

See also Obama wins Nobel Peace Prize in part because “the USA is now playing a more constructive role in meeting the great climatic challenges the world is confronting.” Looks like he’ll be going to Copenhagen after all!

Report: U.S. solar market sees 50% annual growth

The hodgepodge of federal and state policies are favoring the growth of large-scale solar farms, which will help propel the U.S. closer to the No. 1 spot, says GTM Research.

Solar energy installations in the United States are poised to grow about 50 percent annually in the next three years as the country closes in on Germany, the largest solar market in the world.

The U.S. is likely to install 400 megawatts of new solar projects in 2009, and see the growth reach 1.5 gigawatts to 2 gigawatts of new installations in 2012, according to GTM Research’s new report released Tuesday.

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This is a Think Progress repost.

During the 2008 presidential campaign, Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) called on the U.S. to urgently address climate change, proposing cap and trade legislation and presenting his policies as a break from the backwards views of the Bush administration, which was reluctant to acknowledge the dangers of manmade greenhouse gas emissions. From remarks he made in May 2008:

We stand warned by serious and credible scientists across the world that time is short and the dangers are great. The most relevant question now is whether our own government is equal to the challenge. “¦ A cap-and-trade policy will send a signal that will be heard and welcomed all across the American economy. And the highest rewards will go to those who make the smartest, safest, most responsible choices.

Now that McCain isn’t fighting in the general election, however, he’s more than happy to tout the conservative line. He has turned on cap and trade legislation, calling it “cap and tax” and dubbing the American Clean Energy and Security part of a “far left” agenda.

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This is reposted from the Union of Concerned Scientists Global Warming Blog. Another good, detailed debunking can be found at the Pew Center for Global Climate Change.

The manufactured controversy over emails stolen from the University of East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit has generated a lot more heat than light over the past two weeks. Experts at the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS) have concluded that while the emails “do raise some valid concerns about scientific integrity, they do not indicate that climate data and research have been compromised.”

UCS’s analysis of the emails and the debate surrounding them aims to correct popular misconceptions about what the emails say, put them in scientific context and explain the importance of scientific integrity.

Media outlets are getting the story wrong. These emails don’t demonstrate anything wrong with global warming data.

Scientists didn’t “trick” anyone or “hide” anything.

Scientists are talking about understanding our climate, not hiding anything.

Some emails raise valid scientific concerns, but don’t undermine the science.

Science must be viewed in context to be properly understood.

Groups misrepresenting these emails are overplaying their hand, demonstrating their desperation.

The timing of releasing the stolen emails is suspicious.

Scientists are as human as anybody else.

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This excerpted guest post, first published on The Green Leap Forward, is by Angel Hsu and Christopher Kieran, both graduate students at Yale University, reporting live from Copenhagen.

The China Information and Communication Center （中国新闻与交流中心） held an unpublicized press briefing featuring Su Wei (pictured center of panel), China’s lead negotiator and Director-General of the NDRC’s Department of Climate Change. While mainly consisting of reporters, the event was open to anyone – well, just about any one of 50 people with their ear to the ground who managed to squeeze in early before crowds more were turned away. We were two of the lucky few who successfully navigated to the quiet back corner of the Bella Center, near the Chinese delegation’s offices, where the briefing took place….

Mr. Su was completely unabashed when it came to his comments regarding developed country commitments. Targeted amongst his criticisms were the European Union, Japan, and the United States.

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Plus musings on progressivism, fascism, and science

I’m combining two related Wonk Room posts here.  The first is a Brad Johnson piece (featured on MSNBC, above) and then commentary by Benjamin Hale, a philosophy and environmental studies professor.  Both are blogging live from Copenhagen.

Reading more like a transcript of Glenn Beck episodes than a business broadsheet, Rupert Murdoch’s Wall Street Journal has jumped on the crazed right-wing bandwagon of comparing climate scientists to fascists. In The Totalities of Copenhagen, deputy editorial page editor Bret Stephens claims that the “intellectual methods” of “global warming true believers” and “closet Stalinists” are “instructively similar,” citing “revolutionary fervor,” “a disgust with democratic practices,” “utopianism,” “anti-humanism,” “intolerance,” “grandiosity,” “indifference to evidence,” and “monocausalism”:

Monocausalism: For the anti-Semite, the problems of the world can invariably be ascribed to the Jews; for the Communist, to the capitalists. And as the list above suggests, global warming has become the fill-in-the-blank explanation for whatever happens to be the problem.

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The Wonk Room is blogging and tweeting in Copenhagen on the United Nations Climate Change Conference.

Tuesday, December 8: After breezing through registration — avoiding the epic lines of Day One — I entered the Bella Center housing the convention. The first item of business to attend was the daily Fossil of the Day presentation, put on by Avaaz.org and the International Climate Action Network. After some lovely live bass viol music, the young presenters, garbed in gleefully formal attire, took the stage. They sang the Fossil of the Day anthem to the Jurassic Park theme, then announced the winners to raucous boos. Although the ceremony itself was goofy, the awards were picked in all seriousness by the iCAN members to highlight the worst decisions made or the most indefensible positions taken by national delegations in the last 24 hours.

The Ukraine swept the awards, sharing second place with other nations but winning the first and third place awards outright. Ukraine’s bronze came for refusing to say where the 300 million worth of emissions credits it sold Japan went. It won first place for trumpeting its emissions reduction target of a 20% reduction from 1990 levels, which sounds good, except that it represents a 75% increase from current levels. After the economic collapse of the Soviet Union, pollution from the former union nations and eastern bloc countries declined precipitously, which makes the Kyoto Protocol benchmark of 1990 highly misleading for those states. This allows nations like Russia, the world’s third-largest greenhouse gas emitter, to have a huge bank of emissions credits to sell to other nations under the terms of the Kyoto Protocol. The conundrum of whether to count the emissions drop from 1990 as “real” reductions or not is known in climate negotiator parlance as the “hot air” problem.

The second-place award went to the Umbrella Group of industrialized non-EU nations, namely Canada, Iceland, Japan, Kazakhstan, New Zealand, Norway, Russian Federation, Ukraine, United States and Australia. At today’s Subsidiary Body for Scientific and Technological Advice (SBSTA) plenary, the Umbrella Group proposed that carbon capture and storage (CCS) projects should qualify for Clean Development Mechanism financing — a program designed to help developing nations transition to a sustainable economy through reduced deforestation, energy efficiency, and renewable energy projects. Qualifying CCS for this international financing would subsidize coal and oil industries doing the capture programs in developing countries.

Our guest blogger is Andrew Light, a Senior Fellow at American Progress specializing in climate, energy, and science policy.  He will be leading the CAP delegation in Copenhagen this week.  The photo is of Lumumba Di-Aping, the Sudanese chair of the G77 (by Adam Welz).

The Guardian reported yesterday that the UN climate meeting currently underway in Copenhagen (the 15th meeting of the Conference of the Parties or COP 15) had disintegrated into disarray when secret draft language for an interim climate agreement from the host Danish delegation had been uncovered by the Group of 77 – the coalition of well over a hundred developing countries which negotiate as a group at the UN climate meetings. A secret group of nations had supposedly put the document together without any consultation.

The so-called Danish text, a secret draft agreement worked on by a group of individuals known as “the circle of commitment” – but understood to include the UK, US and Denmark – has only been shown to a handful of countries since it was finalized this week.

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The impact of up to 200 million climate migrants by 2050

Climate migration will be one way in which humans adapt to global warming and it has numerous humanitarian, security, and legal implications that present an opportunity and mandate to handle climate migrants with a sustainable security framework, write Michael Werz and Kari Manlove in this guest post from CAP.

Fast forward to the year 2050. The world’s population will be up to 9 billion people according to the United Nations””an increase of one-third. More than 90 percent of this growth will take place in developing countries. Estimates also predict that 200 million people will be newly mobilized as climate migrants by 2050 due to global warming’s effects. This increased migration will very likely affect global security, which makes it imperative for the United States and other nations to begin formulating responses to climate migration now.

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This is a repost from from today’s Think Progress, by Alex Seitz-Wald.

Appearing on CNN’s American Morning today to discuss the Copenhagen climate change conference, Sen. James Inhofe (R-OK) attempted to defend his theory that the illegally-hacked emails of climate researchers prove that global warming is a “hoax.” Inhofe, who will lead a “truth squad” of global warming deniers to the conference, told host Kiran Chetry that people “all over the world” agree with him about the “climategate” emails.

Inhofe cited two newspapers and a group of meteorologists who are “changing their position” on the science of global warming:

INHOFE: Hey, Kiran, if it was just me saying it’d be one thing, but all over the world they’re talking about this. And just this morning the meteorologists “” one of the groups “” has said that they’re changing their position. Listen, the UK Telegraph “” this is worst scientific scandal of our generation. The Guardian, this is an activist paper, saying pretending this isn’t a real scandal isn’t going to make it go away.

Watch it:

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This is our first guest post by Tom Hilde, who teaches at the University of Maryland School of Public Policy, specializing in ethics and political philosophy, international environmental policy and institutions, and sustainable development. Hilde co-edited “The Agrarian Roots of Pragmatism” (with Paul B. Thompson) and recently edited “On Torture.” His volume on philosophical pragmatism and globalism will appear in 2010, followed by a book on complexity, adaptation, and sustainability.  He dismantles yet another anti-scientific piece by George Will.  For a related CP piece, see “Krauthammer, Part 2: The real reason conservatives don’t believe in climate science.”

Opinion columnist George Will starts off his latest rant against climate change mitigation with this lede:

With 20,000 delegates, advocates and journalists jetting to Copenhagen for planet Earth’s last chance, the carbon footprint of the global warming summit will be the only impressive consequence of the climate-change meeting. Its organizers had hoped that it would produce binding caps on emissions, global taxation to redistribute trillions of dollars, and micromanagement of everyone’s choices.

Impressive. One tries one’s damnedest to orchestrate as many ideological Pavlovian bells as possible into a Washington Post op-ed lede, but this one may be studied by climate disinformers for years to come.

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Our guest blogger is Andrew Light, a Senior Fellow at American Progress specializing in international climate policy. He will be leading the CAP delegation in Copenhagen next week.

Lumumba Di-Aping (photo: Adam Welz)

The Guardian reported yesterday that the UN climate meeting currently underway in Copenhagen (the 15th meeting of the Conference of the Parties or COP 15) had disintegrated into disarray when secret draft language for an interim climate agreement from the host Danish delegation had been uncovered by the Group of 77 – the coalition of well over a hundred developing countries which negotiate as a group at the UN climate meetings. A secret group of nations had supposedly put the document together without any consultation.

The so-called Danish text, a secret draft agreement worked on by a group of individuals known as “the circle of commitment” – but understood to include the UK, US and Denmark – has only been shown to a handful of countries since it was finalized this week.

The British daily goes on to breathlessly claim that it had not only received the document but had been privy to a “confidential analysis” of it by developing countries and that it turned the Kyoto Protocol on its head. They go on to list a dizzying array of dramatic and unjust reductions in emissions required by the Danish text without any actual support from the document itself. They were joined in their condemnation by an array of people like Friends of the Earth U.S. President Erich Pica who condemned the U.S. in similar terms: “The Obama administration’s role in what appears to be a secret plot to strong-arm through an agreement forcing poor countries to bear much of the cost of reducing emissions is despicable.”

In response the G77, plus representatives from China, walked out of a press conference led by the Sudanese chair of the G77, Lumumba Stanislaus Di-Aping, claiming that the Danish text had come from nowhere and reiterating their claim that they would not accept any binding commitments to reductions in carbon pollution.

What do we make of this implosion in the meeting so quickly? Read more