Co-author: “Unless we curb carbon emissions we risk mass extinctions, degrading coastal waters and encouraging outbreaks of toxic jellyfish and algae.”

A unique ‘natural laboratory’ in the Mediterranean Sea is revealing the effects of rising carbon dioxide levels on life in the oceans. The results show a bleak future for marine life as ocean acidity rises, and suggest that similar lowering of ocean pH levels may have been responsible for massive extinctions in the past.

That’s the opening (and headline) of a news release from the Geological Society of London.  The new study is “Modern seawater acidification: the response of foraminifera to high-CO₂ conditions in the Mediterranean Sea” (subs. reqd.) in the latest Journal of the Geological Society.

For background on ocean acidification, see Nature Geoscience: Oceans are acidifying 10 times faster today than 55 million years ago when a mass extinction of marine species occurred.

The study identified a tipping point at “mean pH 7.8″:

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The one-time “Skeptical Environmentalist” now says, “man-made global warming exists” and “we have long moved on from any mainstream disagreements about the science of climate change.”

Climate ‘sceptic’ Bj¸rn Lomborg now believes global warming is one of world’s greatest threats

One of the world’s most prominent climate change sceptics has called for a $100bn fund to fight the effects of global warning, after rethinking his views on the severity of the threat.

That’s the UK Telegraph’s headline.

Bj¸rn Lomborg: the dissenting climate change voice who changed his tune

With his new book, Danish scientist Bj¸rn Lomborg has become an unlikely advocate for huge investment in fighting global warming….

That’s from the Guardian’s headline.

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Upgrading just 40% of buildings would generate 625,000 jobs and cut U.S. energy bills up to $64 billion a year

Energy efficiency is THE core climate solution: The biggest low-carbon resource by far.  “Efficiency Works,” a major new report by Bracken Hendricks, Bill Campbell, Pen Goodale, finds that a straightforward set of policies aimed at upgrading just 40% of the residential and commercial building stock in the United States would:

• Create 625,000 sustained full-time jobs over a decade
• Spark $500 billion in new investments to upgrade 50 million homes and office buildings
• Generate as much as $64 billion a year in cost savings for U.S. ratepayers, freeing consumers to spend their money in more productive ways

What follows is a cross-post of the report summary.

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Natural gas is beating up on coal

Coal has always been cheap and dirty. And the dirty part was justifiable because it was so cheap. Now, gas prices are dropping, threatening coal’s dominance in the North American energy market. Which means gas could take over before coal gets a chance to clean up its act.

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The new review of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s by the InterAcademy Council offers some useful suggestions for improving the IPCC process and its reports.  Most of these are not new suggestions, see “The IPCC lowballs likely impacts with its instantly out-of-date reports and is clearly clueless on messaging “” should it be booted or just rebooted?”

In any case, as I wrote three years ago, I don’t think that continuing the IPCC process will have any meaningful impact on American climate policy.  The IPCC is simply not set up to provide intelligent messaging in the face of rapid climate change or in the face of the rapid disinformation effort.

I agreed with Dutch assessment of the IPCC: “Overall the summary conclusions are considered well founded and none were found to contain any significant errors.”  They foresee much higher sea-level-rise risk than IPCC — and urge IPCC to “to pay attention to ‘worst-case scenarios’. “  To have any serious value going forward, the IPCC must do a better job of spelling out both what we face if we stay anywhere near our current emissions path and the worst-case scenario.

The IAC Chair, economist Harold Shapiro of Princeton University, made the key point that:

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Our guest blogger is CAP’s Daniel J. Weiss.

Senator Jay Rockefeller (D-WV) wants to prevent the Environmental Protection Agency from undertaking any efforts to reduce global warming pollution from stationary sources or additional reductions from vehicles for two years.   This would actually be a four year delay in pollution reductions because it takes two years for EPA to propose and finalize reduction standards.  This misguided bill puts public health in jeopardy, a risk we simply can’t afford.

Senator Rockefeller’s Stationary Source Regulations Delay Act, S. 3072, or “dirty air bill,” is solidly opposed by the public, according to a brand new poll for the NRDC Action Fund by the Benenson Strategy Group.  It polled 1,401 likely 2010 voters from August 10-15 and found:

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Rapid melting threatens water supplies to millions

Many of Asia’s glaciers are retreating as a result of climate change.

This retreat impacts water supplies to millions of people, increases the likelihood of outburst floods that threaten life and property in nearby areas, and contributes to sea-level rise.

Talk about your well-timed studies — see “One-fifth of Pakistan is under water.”

The U.S. Geological Survey collaborated with 39 international scientists — “the most knowledgeable glaciologists for each geographic region covered” — on “The Glaciers of Asia,” which reports on “the status of glaciers throughout all of Asia, including Russia, China, India, Nepal, Bhutan, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Georgia, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, and Kazakhstan.”

Here’s more of their release:

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As oceanic CO2 rises, pH falls.

The burning of billions of tons of fossil fuels every year is altering our planet “” not only by making our atmosphere trap more heat, but also by changing the chemistry of the ocean.  For background, 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.

Since ocean acidification is one of the most dangerous and best-documented impacts we face on our current path of unrestricted greenhouse gas emissions, the anti-science disinformers naturally have trained their Tobacco-industry tactics on it, as Wonk Room’s Brad Johnson explains in this cross-post.

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An Albemarle  County Circuit Court  judge has ruled that the Virginia attorney general’s office has not demonstrated a “reason to believe” that the University of Virginia has documents and materials that are relevant to its investigation into possible fraud by former U. Va. climate science professor Michael Mann.

In a six-page decision, Judge Paul M. Peatross Jr. also ruled that the attorney general also has not sufficiently “stated the nature of the conduct” believed to constitute possible fraud by Mann alleged to satisfy the requirments of the law under which the office can issue a civil investigative demand for information from the university.

That’s the big breaking story from the Richmond Times Dispatch.   Apparently even in Virginia the AG actually has to have an “objective basis” for legal action, rather than simply being allowed to engage in ideological witchhunts.

UPDATE:  The ruling is here.  The WashPost reports, “The ruling is a major blow for Cuccinelli” and adds more detail:

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Anita Mangels, spokesperson for California’s Yes on 23 campaign, wants to get the message out that greenhouse gases emitted from oil refineries, coal plants, and motor vehicles are not “pollutants,” just “emissions.” Mangels is working to suspend California’s landmark global warming legislation, AB 32, on behalf of the Texas oil company-funded Proposition 23 campaign. In a gracious telephone interview with the Wonk Room, Mangels argued that the “semantics are important,” because Prop 23 supporters don’t want to be seen as promoters of pollution:

There’s a huge misconception about AB 32 and Prop 23 are about when it comes to “pollution.” The court made the attorney general rewrite the ballot, which originally talked about “polluters” and “pollution.” The judge said that’s not right because greenhouse gas reduction is not pollution. It is not in the same league as things that we have been dealing with for years like smog-forming pollutants.

Greenhouse gases — while they may be associated with global warming — have no direct impact on the environment or health in California. The nature of greenhouse gas emissions is not at all compatible with other emissions that have been subject to environmental laws.

I’m not using the word “pollutant.” We’re talking about “emissions. Language means a lot. You don’t see ballot labels being ordered to be changed by a judge very often. The semantics are important.

Although Mangels — a project director for the Woodward & McDowell ballot initiative lobbying firm — accurately described the judge’s decision on the ballot language, her conclusion is false. The U.S. Supreme Court recognized that greenhouse gases are pollutants by any reasonable definition in 2007. Greenhouse pollution not only raises sea levels, intensifies extreme weather, and causes heat waves and droughts, but also increases allergens and worsens the effects of other pollutants — all described in the Environmental Protection Agency’s endangerment finding.

Moreover, new scientific research by Mark Z. Jacobson, finds that carbon dioxide pollution is a two-fold killer — causing not just global warming but also forming “domes” that trap other pollutants in urban areas. Even if “CO2 in adjacent regions is not controlled,” Jacobson estimates, “reducing local CO2 may reduce 300-1000 premature air pollution mortalities per year in the U.S. and 50-100 per year in California.” Mangels claimed that greenhouse pollutants are “unlike localized emissions that have a tangible impact on the health and the environment — if you spend money on that, you can see a tangible result in that.” In fact, greenhouse pollutants are just like other pollutants — they make people sick, they kill ecosystems, and the less that’s emitted, the better.

In another demonstration of “semantics,” Mangels claimed that “our coalition members do not oppose AB 32.” The Yes on 23 campaign, bankrolled by Texas oil companies Valero and Tesoro, just wants to indefinitely postpone the legislation because “it would increase costs by billions of dollars for energy and would probably destroy a million or so jobs” — which would be bad when California has an “economic crisis.” Mangels did concede that some economic studies of AB 32 find that California’s net jobs would increase, but “there will be a handful of winners and everyone else will be their customers.”

When you cut through the greenwashed rhetoric of the “California Jobs Initiative” — the Yes on 23′s other name — all that’s left is yet another attempt by fossil fuel companies and their ideological allies to prevent the growth of a green economy.

Study: Drinking water polluted by coal-ash dump sites

A new study identifies 39 additional coal-ash dump sites in 21 states that pollute drinking water with arsenic, lead and other heavy metals.

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Anita Mangels, spokesperson for California’s Yes on 23 campaign, wants to get the message out that greenhouse gases emitted from oil refineries, coal plants, and motor vehicles are not “pollutants,” just “emissions.” Mangels is working to suspend California’s landmark global warming legislation, AB 32, on behalf of the Texas oil company-funded Proposition 23 campaign.

Brad Johnson interview Mangels in this WR cross-post.

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The former is self-correcting, the latter has become self-destructive

UPDATE:  Revkin replies below with a tweet that pretty much makes my case.

UPDATE 2:  Dr. Robert J. Brulle of Drexel University, whom the NYT itself quoted last year as “an expert on environmental communications,” writes me that Revkin “fundamentally misrepresents the actual history of climate science.” His full comments are below.

So New York Times blogger Andy Revkin has written perhaps his worst post yet. The blogosphere and my inbox are filled with the most amazing rebukes I’ve seen from scientists and others, which I’m reposting here, including Steve Easterbrook’s, “When did ignorance become a badge of honour for journalists?”

Revkin’s guilt-by-(distant)-association piece, “On Harvard Misconduct, Climate Research and Trust,” betrays a remarkable lack of understanding of the scientific process. And what is most ironic is that if you replace the word “research” with “reporting” — and “science” with “journalism” — throughout his piece, you get a much more plausible indictment of modern climate journalism.

As one of the country’s leading climatologists emails me (paraphrasing Revkin’s final graf):

Can we trust Andy Revkin to cover the science of climate change in an honest way without misquoting scientists, drawing false equivalencies, and interpreting all new findings through the myopic lens of a contrarian narrative? I wouldn’t be a scientist if I answered “yes”.

Science blogger Eli Rabett of Rabett Run fame writes (here):

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Our guest bloggers are Center for American Progress CEO John Podesta and Agriculture Policy Director Jake Caldwell. The original, full version of this post appears at ForeignPolicy.com.

There was already little margin for error in a world where, for the first time in history, 1 billion people are suffering from chronic hunger. But the fragility of world food markets has been underscored by the tragic events of this summer. The brutal wildfires and crippling drought in Russia are decimating wheat crops and prompting shortsighted export bans. The ongoing floods and widespread crop destruction in Pakistan are creating a massive humanitarian crisis that has left more than 1,600 dead and some 16 million homeless and hungry in a region vital to U.S. national security. These and other climate crises trigger widespread food-price volatility, disproportionately and relentlessly devastating the world’s poor. The spiking price of wheat is up 50 percent since early June.

Fortunately, there are signs we will likely avoid a repeat of the 2007-2008 food crisis, when prices jumped as much as 100 percent and led to deadly riots in Port-au-Prince and Mogadishu. This year, bumper crops in the United States, alongside replenished wheat stocks globally, may be adequate to offset shortages due to the fires in Russia. But these short-term measures should not lull us into complacency or a false sense of confidence. We still have neither a strategy nor a solution to ending global hunger.

In the short term, the United States must implement U.S. President Barack Obama’s promise to commit $3.5 billion to food security assistance. Since he made the pledge in 2009, only $812 million has been allocated. Surely the United States can do better, and at a faster pace. Emergency food aid is needed now to prevent famine and needless deaths in Niger, Mali, Chad, Burkina Faso, Mauritania, and northern Nigeria. Congress should increase U.S. contributions to the World Food Program and insist on accountability and reform in the distribution of more than $2 billion in annual U.S. food aid.

Looking beyond the immediate crisis, the United States and other developed countries must renew long-neglected investments in agriculture assistance across the developing world, targeting small farmers as the fundamental drivers of economic growth. While the United States provides more than half of the world’s food aid, agriculture assistance today stands at only 3.5 percent of overall U.S. development aid, down from 18 percent in 1979. We must also improve how this assistance is targeted. We can reap lasting results by focusing on soil and water conservation and improved crop varieties rather than carbon-intensive fertilizers. Scientific research and appropriate biotechnology can deliver significant crop yield gains and water savings if conducted in a safe and transparent manner. We also must invest in women, who represent up to 80 percent of the food producers in many developing countries, but frequently lack the support and services that will allow them to reinvest hard-earned agricultural gains into health and education for their families.

But lasting gains in agricultural productivity will require something more — action to confront climate change. Food shortages resulting from severe crop losses will occur more frequently and take longer to recover from as more people become vulnerable to extreme weather events like the droughts and flooding we see today in Russia and Pakistan. The World Bank predicts that developing countries will require $75 billion to $100 billion a year for the next 40 years to adapt to the effects of climate change on agricultural productivity, infrastructure, and disease.

This year, we may be able to limit the damage to a single supply shock in Russia and Eastern Europe. But even in the best of times, our global food system is stretched to the breaking point by the ever-present challenges of population growth, increased demand from changing diets, higher energy costs, and more extreme weather. Experts at the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization estimate global agricultural productivity must double by 2050 to keep pace with increased demand. Unless we take immediate action, we are destined to race from food crisis to food crisis for generations to come, with grim consequences for the world’s poor and our own national security.

From a very early age, perhaps the age of five or six, I knew that when I grew up I should be a writer. Between the ages of about seventeen and twenty-four I tried to abandon this idea, but I did so with the consciousness that I was outraging my true nature and that sooner or later I should have to settle down and write books”¦.

I knew that I had a facility with words and a power of facing unpleasant facts”¦.

– George Orwell, “Why I write”

I joined the new media because the old media have failed us. They have utterly failed to force us to face unpleasant facts (see here).

What I have learned most from the success of my blog, from the rapid growth in subscribers and visitors and comments, along with the increasing number of websites that link to or reprint my posts, is that there is in fact a great hunger out there for the bluntest possible talk. It is a hunger to learn the truth about the dire nature of our energy and climate situation, about the grave threat to our children and future generations, about the vast but still achievable scale of the solutions, about the forces in politics and media that impede action””a hunger to face unpleasant facts head on.

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A single major error can damage a news organization. But incessant lesser ones can be more harmful. Like a cancer, they gradually destroy credibility and eventually sever the organization’s bond of trust with its audience.

Many readers say that’s happening with The Post….

It’s an industrywide problem. Teresa Schmedding, president of the American Copy Editors Society, predicts more burnout. “There’s only so long you can work in complete and utter chaos and keep your energy level up,” said Schmedding, who is with the Daily Herald in suburban Chicago.

Post ombudsman Andrew Alexander has written a devastating piece on the state of the modern media, “As errors grow, so does a credibility gap.”

Ever-shrinking newsrooms and increased pressure on surviving journalists are destroying two thirds of Joseph Pulitzer’s “standing order to his staff” of reporters:  “ACCURACY. TERSENESS. ACCURACY.”

I’m going to excerpt this must read-piece at length because it contains an unintended irony that connects the growing number of small mistakes to the far larger and more dangerous mistakes the Post and the rest of the status quo media are now making on human-caused climate change:

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Masters rebukes disinformers: “Diminishing the importance of Arctic sea ice loss by calling attention to Antarctic sea ice gain is like telling someone to ignore the fire smoldering in their attic, and instead go appreciate the coolness of the basement, because there is no fire there. Planet Earth’s attic is on fire.”

Chris Mooney has a good piece in New Scientist, “Arctic ice: Less than meets the eye,” the source of the above figures.  Mooney focuses on the work of Canada’s David Barber — you can find his peer-reviewed work here:  “Where on Earth is it unusually warm? Greenland and the Arctic Ocean, which is full of rotten ice” — New study supports finding that “the amount of [multi-year] sea ice in the northern hemisphere was the lowest on record in 2009.”

Mooney also discusses the PIOMAS ice volume model developed by the University of Washington’s Polar Science Center in Seattle, which I have been featuring on CP this year.  Their analysis finds “not only has the total volume of Arctic ice continued to decline since 2007, but that the rate of loss is accelerating” [see also Arctic death spiral: Naval Postgrad School's Maslowski "projects ice-free* fall by 2016 (+/- 3 yrs)"].

Mooney talks to Michael MacCracken of the Climate Institute who explains how an increasingly ice free Arctic will lead to “more extreme storms and heavy precipitation events in regions not used to them” like the U.S. Great Plains.

Uber-meteorologist Jeff Masters also has a great piece, “Northwest Passage opens for 4th year in a row,” which I excerpt below:

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Rhetorical adaptation, however, is a political winner. Too bad it means preventable suffering for billions.

We basically have three choices: mitigation, adaptation and suffering. We’re going to do some of each. The question is what the mix is going to be. The more mitigation we do, the less adaptation will be required and the less suffering there will be.

That’s the pithiest expression I’ve seen on the subject of adaptation, via John Holdren, now science advisor.  Sometimes he uses “misery,” rather than “suffering.”

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The Koch Industries scions, the billionaire brothers Charles and David Koch, have not only polluted American politics with global warming denial, but also barraged their employees with right-wing, anti-science propaganda for years. Koch Industries is one of the largest private companies in the world, with about $100 billion in annual revenues and 80,000 employees. The Koch brothers are virulently right-wing ideologues who have spent decades attempting to prevent regulation of their toxic pollution — including oil refining, formaldehyde, and industrial agriculture — through a network of hard-right think tanks and astroturf groups.

Exploring the Wichita-based Koch Industries in-house newsletter, “Discovery,” the Wonk Room has found that Koch Industries propagandizes its own employees — from the Flint Hills Resources refining group to the Georgia Pacific paper consumer products giant — with global warming denialism. Koch’s corporate climate denial cites the very front groups that it funds, such as the American Council on Capital Formation, Heritage Foundation, the Heartland Institute, and the Institute for Energy Research.

In addition to climate denial, the Koch Industries newsletter — managed by Koch’s top propagandist Rich Fink — repeatedly asserts that any rule or regulation to limit pollution will destroy the economy and American freedom. Employees concerned about this assault on prosperity are encouraged to turn to Americans for Prosperity, Koch’s Astroturf organization that works to elect hard-right Republicans and dismantle progressive policies.

Ironically, the quarterly Koch newsletter also reports on the terrible damage caused by climate disasters to the Koch community from Kansas to Texas. In 2007, tornadoes flattened Greensburg, KS. In 2008, Hurricane Ike washed away the homes of 80 Koch employees and affected 1400 others.

Below is a review of the last few years of Koch Industries “Discovery” newsletters and their dark world of climate denial: Read more

Our favorite climate de-crocker, Peter Sinclair has a new video that is particularly terrifying:
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