Key aspects of the climate are changing faster than expected and if we stay on our current emissions path, we face catastrophe

In 2009, the scientific literature caught up with what top climate scientists have been saying privately for a few years now:

• Many of the predicted impacts of human-caused climate change are occurring much faster than anybody expected — particularly ice melt, everywhere you look on the planet.
• If we stay anywhere near our current emissions path, we are facing incalculable catastrophes by century’s end, including rapid sea level rise, massive wildfires, widespread Dust-Bowlification, large oceanic dead zones, and 9°F warming — much of which could be all but irreversible for centuries.  And that’s not the worst-case scenario!
• The consequences for human health and well being would be extreme.

That’s no surprise to anybody who has talked to leading climate scientists in recent years, read my book Hell and High Water (or a number of other books), or followed this blog.  Still, it is a scientific reality that I don’t think more than 2 people in 100 fully grasp, so I’m going to review here the past year in climate science.  I’ll focus primarily on the peer-reviewed literature, but also look at some major summary reports.

Let’s start with the basics.  Heat-trapping greenhouse gases are at unprecedented levels, and the paleoclimate record suggests that even slightly higher levels are untenable:

• World carbon dioxide levels jump 2.3 ppm in 2008 — highest in probably 20 million years
• Science: CO2 levels haven’t been this high for 15 million years, when it was 5° to 10°F warmer and seas were 75 to 120 feet higher “” “We have shown that this dramatic rise in sea level is associated with an increase in CO2 levels of about 100 ppm.”

In two key papers, we learned that the planet is warming from those GHGs just where climate science said it would “” the oceans, which is where more than 90% of the warming was projected to end up (see “Skeptical Science explains how we know global warming is happening: It’s the oceans, stupid!“).  The key findings in the second study are summed up in this figure:

Figure [2]: Time series of global mean heat storage (0-2000 m), measured in 10⁸ Jm^-2.

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Cheaper, Stronger Lithium-Ion Batteries for Plug-in Hybrid Electric Vehicles

A British defense technology company, Qinetiq, is testing a new type of lithium-ion battery for hybrids and electric vehicles that could be substantially cheaper and more powerful than existing batteries.

The battery is based on lithium-ion iron-sulfide chemistry, which has a number of advantages over the chemistry of existing batteries, says Gary Mepsted, technical manager for Qinetiq’s power sources group. The new battery would cost half as much as existing vehicle batteries and could last longer and recharge more quickly that other lithium batteries. Mepsted says that compared to standard lithium-ion batteries, the new battery has demonstrated about 1.6 times the energy density (which would extend a plug-in electric’s range) and a 50 percent higher power density (which would let hybrids charge and discharge more rapidly).

Researchers have long viewed lithium-ion batteries as an attractive alternative to the expensive metal-based batteries now used in hybrids. But although standard lithium-ion batteries are relatively cheap and can store about twice as much energy as standard nickel metal hydride cells, developers have had to overcome a number of technological challenges to make them practical for vehicles.

Plug-in electric vehicles need batteries with higher energy densities to extend their range between charges, says Mepsted. And for hybrids, the power density of standard lithium-ion batteries is less than ideal for coping with the rapid charging and discharging that comes with the regenerative braking systems used in hybrids.

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You can’t deny it’s cold outside in Washington, DC today — any more than you can deny the planet is unequivocally warming and humans are probably the cause of most of that warming, can you?  I mean, the fact that it’s cold in early January isn’t news.  It’s the friggin’ winter!

Oh wait, you say we’re setting records for cold over parts of the country.  But if you accept the temperature station data going back over a century that says we’re setting records for cold over a small part of the globe over a short period of time, then you have to accept this very same data over the entire globe over a long period of time, no?

Yes, the 2000s were  the hottest decade in the temperature record by far, though this decade is all but certain to surpass it easily (see here).

Barring a last-minute cancellation, I’ll be on FoxNews with Neil Cavuto at around 4:20 pm ET to talk about the weather and the climate.  There’s never a bad time to talk about climate science and human-caused global warming, is there?

Anyway, here’s what most of the globe is doing right now, temperature-wise, according to NOAA:

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This month, there is a high-stakes battle playing out on the Texas State Board of Education, where a powerful ultraconservative faction is struggling to rewrite the standards for the state’s textbooks and infuse them with right-wing views. Among other things, the group aims to rehabilitate Joseph McCarthy, downplay the contributions of the civil rights movement, bring global-warming denial into science class, and give history a pro-Republican slant. The implications reach far beyond the Lone Star State. In fact, thanks to the peculiar economics of textbook publishing, Texas has the power to shape the materials children read in classrooms nationwide.

That’s the teaser for an important Washington Monthly piece, The Revisionaries, on “the rabble rousers who are rewriting your kids’ textbooks.”  Ironically, Texas leads the country in wind power with nearly 9000 MW (see “U.S. wind energy industry installed 1,649 MW in third quarter, more than Q2 and Q308“).

Here’s the key paragraphs from the WM piece on how our folks like creationist Don McLeroy — who “is one of the leaders of an activist bloc [on the Board] that holds enormous sway over the body’s decisions” — are dumbing down our kids’ textbooks and hence our kids:

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Graham, Kerry, Lieberman: “Every day, we spend nearly $1 billion to sustain our addiction to foreign energy sources and we ship Americans’ hard earned dollars overseas, some of which finds its way to extremist or terrorist organizations.”

Recent events underscore the need for the bipartisan climate and clean energy jobs bill, which is key to maintaining and improving U.S. energy and national security (see “EIA: Clean air, clean water, clean energy jobs bill would make America more energy independent, cutting U.S. foreign oil bill $650 billion through 2030, saving $5,600 per household“).

Yesterday, Meet the Press focused on the failed effort to blow up an airline on Christmas Day.  One exchange was especially illuminating (transcript here)

MR. GREGORY:  Doris, you’re familiar with writing long and wonderful volumes of history.  And if the war on terror, if chapter one was written by President Bush, now it’s chapter two and beyond; and it’s still very, very complicated, an entire decade really defined by, by terrorist acts at the front end and at the back end, an attempted act at the back end.  So much different than the wars we have fought in our past.

Historian Doris Kearns Goodwin, as always, provided a crucial historical perspective:

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