Converging Weather Patterns Caused Last Winter’s Huge Snows

A Warming World Can Still See Severe Storms

That’s the headline on the news release from the Earth Institute at Columbia University for a new GRL study, “Northern Hemisphere winter snow anomalies: ENSO, NAO
and the winter of 2009/10″ (PDF here).

The study itself slams the “deniers” for trying to spin the storms as inconsistent with human-caused global warming:

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Wind farm ‘mega-project’ underway in Mojave Desert

The Alta Wind Energy Center “” with plans for thousands of acres of turbines to generate electricity for 600,000 Southern California homes “” officially breaks ground Tuesday. It’s being called the largest wind power project in the country, with plans for thousands of acres of towering turbines in the Mojave Desert foothills generating electricity for 600,000 homes in Southern California.

And now it’s finally kicking into gear.

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In a recently published New York Magazine profile, pollution billionaire David Koch lies about his support for tea-party radicalism, cracks racist jokes, and denies the threat of global warming. One of the wealthiest men in the world, Koch has used his billions for decades to promote the extremist, anti-regulatory, right-wing political groups like Americans for Prosperity that now organize under the Tea Party banner. “I’ve never been to a tea-party event,” Koch told reporter Andrew Goldman, even though he hosted AFP’s “Defending the American Dream” tea-party hoopla in Washington, DC, last year.

Fueled by his fear that the greenhouse gas pollution generated by Koch Industries might be limited by government regulation, Koch promotes a fantasy about benefits of a changing climate:

Koch says he’s not sure if global warming is caused by human activities, and at any rate, he sees the heating up of the planet as good news. Lengthened growing seasons in the northern hemisphere, he says, will make up for any trauma caused by the slow migration of people away from disappearing coastlines. “The Earth will be able to support enormously more people because a far greater land area will be available to produce food,” he says.

Unfortunately, Koch’s pollution really is heating the planet, and the consequences are grave. With less than one degree C of average warming, heat waves, extreme storms, droughts, sea levels, ocean acidity, wildfires, and flooding are already on the rise. In the unregulated world of global warming pollution envisioned by Koch, the planet’s average temperature will increase five to ten times more than existing warming, with a significant chance of a runaway greenhouse effect. As warming passes 7 degrees C, possible within this century, half the world’s inhabited area will become uninhabitable, literally too hot for the human body to survive. The world’s coral reefs will go extinct, as will about fifty percent of the species on the planet.

The IPCC analysis of global warming’s impact on agriculture found that even if destructive changes in extreme events or the spread of pests and diseases are ignored, agricultural yields will decline in the poorer regions of the world under relatively minor warming. Events like the record Russian heat wave that has destroyed 32 percent of its wheat crop and sent global prices skyrocketing will become commonplace. As temperatures increase more than 3 C, global productivity will decline, the American heartland turned to a permanent Dust Bowl, coastal areas consumed by rising seas, the world’s glaciers melting into memory. As the David Koch-funded Smithsonian Human Origins Initiative warns, global warming is an “experiment” that is “likely to create entirely new survival challenges” for the entire human race. Quite simply, Koch’s happy scenario of a greenhouse planet comfortably sustaining human civilization is not based in fact.

Koch’s sense of humor is as regressive as his politics. “I played basketball when you could be white and be good,” Koch joked about his college days, though he made sure to tell the reporter, “I’m not a racist. I’m very broad-minded.”

… in the real world, in the world where people believe the BS analysis in the Washington Post, and in an alternative universe where the GOP isn’t anti-science and pro-pollution

The chances for either an economy-wide shrinking cap on greenhouse gas emissions or a major push on clean energy investment over the next several years are not large — on this Earth.  The chances would be higher on planet Eaarth, where (in descending order of importance):

1. Senate Republicans aren’t in the thrall of the anti-science, pro-pollution ideologues and special interests.
2. The media coverage of climate science, solutions, and economics isn’t so abysmal.
3. The President gives a full-throated push on such legislation.

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Here is another terrific climate cartoon from Tom Toles, “The devil made us do it” “” along with his thoughts on the source of our failure in science education:

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“Big Oil Showdown in California” is a Progressive Media blogging series on the fossil fuel-funded Prop 23 effort to repeal California’s clean energy and climate law. Read previous posts on Prop 23′s economic impact, national repercussions, and funding from Texas oil companies. Today’s post is cross-posted from the Wonk Room.

To manage their initiative to roll back California’s landmark climate change law, AB 32, big oil is turning to the same deceptive tobacco operatives who engineered Philip Morris’ fight against efforts to tax cigarettes and stop childhood as well as indoor smoking. According to veteran right-wing activist Ted Costa, former Philip Morris outside counsel Tom Hiltachk co-opted his AB 32 repeal initiative, known as Proposition 23 (“Prop 23″³). Hiltachk’s name appears on both versions of Prop 23 filed with the California Attorney General, and his tactics and already ubiquitous in the campaign.

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This post is part of a Progressive Media blogging series on the fossil fuel-funded Prop 23 effort to repeal California’s clean energy climate law. Read Rebecca Lefton’s posts on Prop 23′s economic impact, national repercussions, and funding from Texas oil companies.

To manage their initiative to roll back California’s landmark climate change law, AB 32, big oil is turning to the same deceptive tobacco operatives who engineered Philip Morris’ fight against efforts to tax cigarettes and stop childhood as well as indoor smoking. According to veteran right-wing activist Ted Costa, former Philip Morris outside counsel Tom Hiltachk co-opted his AB 32 repeal initiative, known as Proposition 23 (“Prop 23″). Hiltachk’s name appears on both versions of Prop 23 filed with the California Attorney General, and his tactics and already ubiquitous in the campaign.

Hiltachk, who is also serving as an attorney for Republican gubernatorial candidate Meg Whitman, has made a career writing misleading right-wing initiatives, then pitching the initiatives to corporations that may benefit from their passage. To fund Prop 23, he reached out to a friend from his days working for the tobacco industry, Mike Carpenter. Carpenter, the former top California lobbyist for Philip Morris, now lobbies for Valero, a Texan oil company with operations in California. To date, Valero has been the prime driver of the Prop 23, donating over $1 million so far directly to the effort.

The Prop 23 campaign seems to be laundering money and using front groups to promote their efforts. Indeed, one of the most visible groups supporting Prop 23, the California Manufacturers and Technology Association, which is mobilizing press events and “pro-business” organizing is funded by Valero. Carpenter sits on the board of the conservative think-tank, the Pacific Research Institute, producing bunk studies to bolster pro-Prop 23 claims. Other large donations to the pro-Prop 23 campaign are from front groups like the Missouri-based Adam Smith Foundation and the Howard Jarvis Taxpayers Association, which both carefully conceal their funding.

But these under-the-radar tactics of shifting money around and using phony groups are nothing new to Hiltachk and Carpenter:

– During the eighties and nineties, Hiltachk and his law partners helped the tobacco industry, with funding from Philip Morris and R.J. Reynolds, coordinate a variety of stealth front groups. While his law firm received over a million from tobacco interests, Hiltachk helped organize “Californians for Smokers’ Rights,” a supposedly “grassroots” group that relied on tobacco industry consumer lists to mobilize opposition to anti-smoking initiatives. Working with “academic” fronts like the Claremont Institute (also funded by tobacco), Hiltachk and his law partner Charles Bell mobilized business opposition through a front they helped manage called Californians for Fair Business Policy.

– As the top California lobbyist for Philip Morris, Carpenter helped liaison to nonprofit groups to orchestrate efforts to fight back against anti-smoking laws. Working closely with Hiltachk’s law firm at the time, Nielsen, Merksamer, Parrinello, Mueller & Naylor, Carpenter distributed news clips, recommended tobacco donations to certain outside groups, and mobilized messaging and polling operations against an initiative to tax cigarettes to fund anti-childhood smoking programs, according to files with the Legacy Tobacco Documents Library. One document shows Carpenter receiving a pro-tobacco screed from the Pacific Research Institute, faxed by a communications officer at Philip Morris. The Pacific Research Institute, funded by Valero and tobacco interests, is now helping to provide academic-sounding cachet to the pro-Prop 23 campaign.

After millions of Californians needlessly suffered or died from smoking, the pair ultimately failed in their tobacco lobbying. California voters successfully passed several successive cigarette taxes and smoking bans.

It appears Hiltachk and Carpenter are up to their old tricks. Carpenter is busy recruiting trade association support for the initiative, spending April meeting with groups like the California League of Food Processors. And for his part, Hiltachk has tapped firms he has steered contracts to for over twenty years, like Goddard Claussen West and Woodward & McDowell, to do the legwork of signature gathering and ad making. According to Costa, the Prop 23 proponents boasted to him that they would raise $50 million for their campaign. Aside from the devastating impact Prop 23 will have on California’s economy and the prospects for addressing climate change, at least former tobacco operatives like Hiltachk and Carpenter will be doing quite well.