“Microscopic life crucial to the marine food chain is dying out. The consequences could be catastrophic.”

Scientists may have found the most devastating impact yet of human-caused global warming — a 40% decline in phytoplankton since 1950 linked to the rise in ocean sea surface temperatures.  If confirmed, it may represent the single most important finding of the year in climate science.

The headlines above are from an appropriately blunt article in The Independent about the new study in Nature, “Global phytoplankton decline over the past century” (subs. req’d).  Even the Wall Street Journal warned, “Vital Marine Plants in Steep Decline.”  Seth Borenstein of the AP explains, “plant plankton found in the world’s oceans  are crucial to much of life on Earth. They are the foundation of the bountiful marine food web, produce half the world’s oxygen and suck up harmful carbon dioxide.”

We’ve known for a while that we are poisoning the oceans and that human emissions of carbon dioxide, left unchecked, would likely have devastating consequences — see “2010 Nature Geoscience study: Oceans are acidifying 10 times faster today than 55 million years ago when a mass extinction of marine species occurred.”  And we’ve known those impacts might last a long, long time — see  2009 Nature Geoscience study concludes ocean dead zones “devoid of fish and seafood” are poised to expand and “remain for thousands of years.”

But until now, conventional wisdom has been that big ocean impacts might not be seen until the second half of the century.  This new research in Nature suggests we may have much less time to act than we thought if we want to save marine life — and ourselves.  The study concludes:

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In a contrarian take today, Time Magazine’s Michael Grunwald wrote a preemptive post-mortem impact of BP’s Deepwater Horizon disaster, saying that it “does not seem to be inflicting severe environmental damage. Grunwald believes that Rush Limbaugh “has a point” because the right-wing radio host spent weeks dismissing the disaster. New York Times reporters Justin Gillis and Campbell Robertson wrote that the “oil slick in the Gulf of Mexico appears to be dissolving far more rapidly than anyone expected.” The Associated Press’s John Carey believes “the oil slicks that once spread across thousands of miles of the Gulf of Mexico have largely disappeared.” The narrative of the disappearing disaster has been promoted by Politico’s Mike Allen and the Drudge Report.

Meanwhile, the oil blowout has been contained but not killed, oil continues to wash ashore, and the haphazard scientific effort to understand the 100-day disaster is hobbled by BP’s interference and governmental lassitude. It’s fair to point out, as Grunwald does, that the oil disaster’s impact on Louisiana’s shoreline is likely to be meaningless if the marshlands continue to disappear. Fringe rumors of global eco-collapse — never promoted by major environmental groups — continue to be as baseless as the nonsense spouted by conservative activists, media, and politicians on behalf of the oil industry.

However, the only honest take on the BP disaster right now is that this is a calamity, the true scope of which will take years to discover, with many impacts impossible to ever know. No one knows how badly this disaster will affect the dying marshlands of Louisiana. No one knows how badly the toxic oil plumes will affect the spawning grounds of the bluefin tuna, the feeding grounds of the threatened Gulf sturgeon, or the future of the endangered Kemp’s ridley sea turtles, whose corpses have been found at 15 times the historical rate this summer. No one knows what the long-term physical and mental health impacts will be on the tens of thousands of cleanup workers.

Moreover, it is undoubtedly premature to announce that the vast oil slick has largely disappeared from the ocean’s surface. Thick oil, vast slicks, and tar balls continue to wash ashore along Louisiana’s coastline. Satellite imagery from July 27 and 28 — as the stories of disappearing oil were being filed — show a vast region still discolored by slicks and sheen, little diminished from previous weeks:

Composite of MODIS visible satellite imagery from July 27 and July 28. Analysis of spill extent by Brad Johnson, Center for American Progress Action Fund.

EPA determined in December 2009 that climate change caused by emissions of greenhouse gases threatens the public’s health and the environment. Since then, EPA received ten petitions challenging this determination. On July 29, 2010, EPA denied these petitions.

The petitions to reconsider EPA’s “Endangerment Finding” claimed that climate science can’t be trusted, and asserted a conspiracy that calls into question the findings of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) , the U.S. National Academy of Sciences, and the U.S. Global Change Research Program. After months of serious consideration of the petitions and of the state of climate change science, EPA found no evidence to support these claims.

The scientific evidence supporting EPA’s finding is robust, voluminous, and compelling. Climate change is happening now, and humans are contributing to it. Multiple lines of evidence show a global warming trend over the past 100 years. Beyond this, melting ice in the Arctic, melting glaciers around the world, increasing ocean temperatures, rising sea levels, altered precipitation patterns, and shifting patterns of ecosystems and wildlife habitats all confirm that our climate is changing.

That’s the EPA today in its “Denial of Petitions for Reconsideration of the Endangerment.”  See, there can be science-based denial after all!  Nick Sundt has a good post on this, reprinted below:

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The Washington Post has one of the best, short analyses of the climate bill’s death that I’ve seen in the status quo media.  In the print edition, it’s titled “How Washington failed on climate change.”

The author, Stephen Stromberg, gets two thirds of the main blame about right.  First, he notes, “With few exceptions, Republicans have behaved shamefully on climate issues in this Congress, opposing policies that their party embraced in the 1990s (think cap-and-trade). Yet none of them will pay a price in November, and many GOP challengers will benefit.”  Second, he makes a good case that “The president had the political capital and the numbers in Congress to pass something big. He chose health care” over climate.

The irony is that Stomborg is “Deputy opinions editor of washingtonpost.com,” and he is strangely silent on the role of the media, which I think deserves much more blame than Obama (but less than the GOP).  The dreadful media coverage simply creates little space for rational public discourse.  The media has for a long time downplayed the importance of the issue, miscovered key aspects of the debate, given equal time to pro-pollution disinformers, and generally failed to inform the public.  And the Washington Post itself is worse than most, which is why it won the 2009 “Citizen Kane” award for non-excellence in climate journalism.

Even Eric Pooley, author of the must-read political history of how we got into this mess, The Climate War: True Believers, Power Brokers, and the Fight to Save the Earth, leaves out the media in his listing of Murderer’s Row for the climate bill’s homicide at Yale e360:

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Yesterday, ThinkProgress reported on coal baron Don Blankenship’s foray into the 2010 congressional elections in West Virginia, where he has contributed thousands of dollars to help elect coal-friendly Republicans. One of the candidates, Spike Maynard, previously served as chief justice of the West Virginia Supreme Court of Appeals and vacationed with Blankenship on the French Riviera while his company, Massey Energy, had millions of dollars in cases pending before Maynard’s court.

But Blankenship isn’t the only one with chips in the game. The Lexington Herald-Leader in Kentucky reports that several coal executives, including Blankenship, are pooling their money to take advantage of the Supreme Court’s Citizen United decision loosening corporate campaign finance laws by forming a 527 group to help elect coal-friendly Republicans. Why a 527? Because according to the IRS, they can hide their activities until “next year, long after the Nov. 2 election.” From the report:

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Academy Award-winning actress and New Orleans resident Sandra Bullock has severed her involvement in a campaign to call attention to the BP spill, after learning from ThinkProgress that it was a greenwashing effort by the oil industry.

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New poll shows steady support for state’s climate-change law, while opposition to drilling shoots up

The state’s climate-change law, AB 32, has been a hot topic on the campaign trail this year “” with the Republican candidates for governor and U.S. Senate branding it as a “job-killer,” as opponents of the law marshal support for a November ballot measure that would suspend implementation until the state’s unemployment rate drops to 5.5% for a year.

But despite the controversy over the 2006 law, which would reduce greenhouse gas emissions to 1990 levels by 2020, a new poll shows that two-thirds (67%) of California residents continue to back it “” about the same level as last year.

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George Schultz, former Ronald Reagan Administration Secretary of State, and Tom Steyer, CAP Board member, have teamed up as the co-chairs of Californians for Clean Energy and Jobs, the effort to fight Big Oil’s Proposition 23 on the California ballot this coming November. Prop 23 is Big Oil’s blatant attempt to destroy California’s landmark climate bill and supporting clean energy legislation.

What makes this unlikely partnership so significant is that in addition to his duties leading Californians for Clean Energy and Jobs, Schultz is also co-chair of the campaign to elect Republican gubernatorial candidate Meg Whitman. Steyer, on the other hand, supports Jerry Brown, and is donating $5 million to fight Prop 23.

To complicate matters even more, the Whitman campaign thus far has chosen to stick with hardline republican talking points denouncing California’s clean energy law as a “job killer.” Whitman makes the following accusation on her campaign website:

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Potential Utility-Scale Generation in the South

The dramatically scaled-back energy and oil-spill bill released by Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid on Tuesday lacks both a carbon pricing mechanism and a renewable electricity standard (RES).  While support for a RES increased as the chances of passing more substantive legislation dwindled, Reid insists that 60 votes for an RES simply do not exist in this Senate.  That is particularly true for an RES that would actually push renewables beyond business as usual projections (see Chu: Proposed renewable standard is too weak).

Misplaced regional concerns routinely prevent Congress from passing a national renewable electricity standard.  Southern lawmakers on both sides of the aisle claim that a RES would pose a disproportionate burden to their states, for example, perpetuating a myth that the South lacks clean energy potential.

A new study from Georgia Tech and Duke University, “Renewable Energy in the South: A Policy Brief,” dispels that myth, finding plenty of clean energy opportunities in the South””especially if Congress enacts a national renewable electricity standard (RES) or puts a price on carbon.  With comprehensive policies to support renewable energy development and address climate change, the study reports, southern states can generate 15 to 30 percent of their electricity from renewable sources by 2030.

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With hopes of squeezing a national clean energy and climate bill out of the 111th Congress rapidly dimming, many are now asking whether the federal government can use its existing authority to reduce global warming pollution. One issue on which the Obama Administration has shown leadership is in using executive authority to reduce the emissions of the federal government itself (see here).  CAPAF’s Sean Pool has the story.

Last week, the President upped his ante by announcing that the federal government would reduce carbon pollution from indirect sources, such as employee travel and commuting, by 13 percent by 2020. This goes above and beyond previous commitments made to reduce emissions from direct sources by 28 percent by 2020, under last year’s Executive Order 13514.

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