Will we see Arctic sea ice records broken this September for both volume and extent?

The National Snow and Ice Data Center just issued their full July report, which suggests that, because of “cool, stormy weather” last month, “It would take a very unusual set of conditions in August to create a new record low.”

The Study of Environmental Change’s September Sea Ice Outlook: July Report, which surveys forecasters, says “The spread of Outlook contributions suggests about a 29% chance of reaching a new September sea ice minimum in 2010.”

You can see what appears to be a change in slope in the last few days, but the Arctic weather is fickle, so the extent of the extent in September remains unclear.

As for volume, the NSIDC report spotlights the demise of some of the oldest and thickest ice left:

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The Atlantic‘s Clive Crook has written the most embarrassing and libelous piece published by the media, “More on Climategate.”

The fact that the Atlantic continues to allow him to make up stuff and print it (without fact-checking) for the sole purpose of smearing Michael Mann — after the editors were informed of the libelous errors in the first piece — calls into question the editorial judgment of the entire magazine.

Both of Crook’s pieces should be taken down from the web, and he should issue a huge, public apology to Mann.  Indeed, I think he owes Mann the courtesy of a phone call apology, too, since he has now written two falsehood-filled smear jobs on Mann without even bothering to try to talk to him.

Two weeks ago I wrote, “The Atlantic’s Clive Crook needs to retract his libelous misinformation and apologize to Michael Mann.” I pointed out a bunch of untrue assertions he made about Mann.   Crook now acknowledges some of them, sort of — but he doesn’t even go back and correct the original post!

At the time I thought he had fabricated a quote when he wrote, falsely:

Three of four allegations are dismissed out of hand at the outset: the inquiry announces that, for “lack of credible evidence“, it will not even investigate them.

Of course, the allegations weren’t “dismissed out of hand.”  Mann had been exonerated of them in the first investigation, as I noted.

I can’t find the phrase “lack of credible evidence” anywhere in the second inquiry (or first, for that matter, the one Crook seems to suggest he was aware of even though his entire first post suggests otherwise).  Crook fails to identify where in the inquiry it came from, so I assume he can’t.  I challenge him to do so, especially since in his new post he makes a major fabrication whose sole purpose is to smear Michael Mann.  Two fabrications would make a pattern.

As we will see, this latest fabrication is so extreme it goes beyond what even extremists like Virginia AG Ken Cuccinelli have done in their effort to defame Mann.  Here is what Crook writes:

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The vast quantities of oil and dispersants that have flooded the Gulf of Mexico are now disappearing into the water column, leading scientists to worry about the long-term toxic effects. One species of particular concern is the Gulf sturgeon, a remarkable “living dinosaur” of a fish that can reach 1000 pounds, and can cause serious injury with its armor-plated skin as it leaps through the air. However, these anadromous fish — which, like salmon, spawn in rivers but live as adults in the ocean — are no match for man’s destructive power. Once living throughout the eastern Gulf, the fish is now a threatened species because of river damming, pollution, and overfishing, with a range limited from the Suwannee River in Florida to the Pearl River in Mississippi and Louisiana. According to Frank Parauka, a fishery biologist with the the U. S. Fish & Wildlife Service, there are about 10,000 Gulf sturgeon left.

When the Bush administration made plans to open up more of the Gulf of Mexico to drilling — including the eventual site of the Deepwater Horizon disaster — the Minerals Management Service predicted that there would be “minimal” impacts on the Gulf sturgeon, even in the case of “accidental spills”:

Impacts on Gulf sturgeon associated with routine operations and accidental spills under the proposed action are expected to be minimal, because there is relatively little overlap between the locations that could be affected by activities and the distribution of Gulf sturgeon. [p. 57]

In fact, nearly all of the estuarine regions that are key to Gulf sturgeon survival have been affected by the BP oil disaster. Ichthyologist Stephen Ross, who has been tracking Gulf sturgeon in the marine environment for years, has found that the adult fish live among the Mississippi barrier islands in the cold months of the year, and that juveniles probably live there all year long. In an email interview with the Wonk Room, Ross explained that the threat to the sturgeon from the subsurface (benthic) oiling of the barrier islands and gulf coast could be “devastating”:

First, subadult and adult Gulf Sturgeon accomplish their entire annual food intake during the time they are in coastal waters (October-March), so any impact that altered the benthic food base would be devastating to Gulf Sturgeon. Second, we are pretty sure that juvenile Gulf Sturgeon inhabit the coastal estuaries throughout the year. Consequently, penetration of oil into the inshore areas would also be a major problem– of course, not just for Gulf Sturgeon but for all aquatic and marsh organisms.

Gulf sturgeon do not forage when they are in the rivers. They enter the estuarine habitat after fasting for months and completely depend on resources obtained when they are in saline waters. Comparing the maps for the Gulf sturgeon critical habitat and the oil’s impact, only the far eastern reaches of the sturgeon’s feeding range appears to be untouched by BP’s toxic slick. Read more

Meet a community that gets oil spilled in their front AND backyard – and find out how we can stop the damage.

Guest bloggers Van Jones and Jorge Madrid reveal some dirty secrets BP doesn’t want us to know about where the oil goes once it is “cleaned up.” Jones is a senior fellow and former adviser to President Obama on Green Jobs, and Madrid is a research assistant at the Center for American Progress.

While the oil-spewing hole in the middle of the gulf has yet to be fully ‘plugged,’ it appears that a spill of a different kind is underway.

The worst environmental disaster in U.S. history has already generated 1,300 tons of solid waste and 39,448 tons of oil waste – that’s the size of an entire Battleship Bismarck!

Where is all of this waste going?

Surprise! It is being dumped right back into the communities that are already suffering in the gulf – overwhelmingly communities of color.   Perhaps this is who BP chairman Carl-Henric Svanberg meant when he was talking about ‘small people‘?

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GOP puts political points above all else

Republicans are opposing bills that would hold BP and other oil companies accountable for disasters, and help 9/11 first responders, writes Daniel J. Weiss in this CAPAf cross-post.

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The original, full version of this post appears at ForeignPolicy.com.

Thirty-five years ago, on August 8, 1975, geoscientist Wallace Smith Broecker published “Are we on the brink of a pronounced global warming?” in the journal Science, the first time the iconic phrase “global warming” was used in a scientific paper. Synthesizing decades of earlier work, Dr. Broecker — known by all as Wally — accurately predicted “that the present cooling trend will, within a decade or so, give way to a pronounced warming induced by carbon dioxide.”

Wally Broecker’s 1975 projection of global warming (dashed line) with actual measurements (red) superimposed.

The past 35 years have seen humanity answer Wally’s question in the affirmative, running a radical experiment on the only planet we inhabit. Carbon dioxide levels have risen 40 percent to 392 parts per million from pre-industrial levels of 280 ppm, and the global mean temperature has risen 0.8 C, on 1.3 trillion tons of carbon dioxide. Humanity has produced 60 percent of that global warming pollution since Broecker’s paper was published. As a result, the planetary ecosystem has fundamentally changed — weather has become more extreme, seasons have shifted, and global ice and snow is in decline — with more rapid and radical change on its way.

“To those who even today claim that global warming is not predictable,” climatologist Stefan Rahmstorf writes at the peerless Real Climate blog, “the anniversary of Broecker’s paper is a reminder that global warming was actually predicted before it became evident in the global temperature records over a decade later.”

In fact, one can even go back to 1896, when Swedish scientist Svante Arrhenius predicted that the burning of coal could eventually double atmospheric CO2, leading to a temperature increase of several degrees Celsius, although he believed such a day was far into the future. For the next fifty years, most scientists considered manmade climate change an unlikely speculation.

In the scientific explosion following World War II, however, scientists began using new measurements and the new digital computers to revisit the effect of man’s carbon dioxide pollution on the climate, and our modern understanding of the greenhouse effect developed through the work of pioneering scientists. By the end of the 1950s, Frank Capra had made an instructional film on manmade global warming and Robert Revelle had testified before Congress about the “large scale geophysical experiment” mankind was conducting with industrial greenhouse pollution.

The year 1965 marked the first time the threat of manmade global warming was brought to the President’s desk, in an extended report for Lyndon B. Johnson by top climate scientists, including Revelle, Charles Keeling (whose measurements of atmospheric carbon dioxide from Mauna Loa have become the most remarkable graph in climate science), and the young Wally Broecker. “By the year 2000,” they wrote, carbon dioxide pollution might “produce measurable and perhaps marked changes in climate, and will almost certainly cause significant changes in the temperature and other properties of the atmosphere.”

In the years leading up to Broecker’s global warming paper, the field rapidly advanced with the launch of the first weather satellites, the mathematical understanding of chaos theory — by MIT’s Ed Lorenz, and the rise of physical oceanography. Several groups of scientists competed to test the limits of supercomputers with general circulation models that simulated the planetary ocean-atmosphere interactions that generate the global climate, a practice that continues to this day.

By the end of the 1970s, climate scientists around the world were coming to the consensus that Broecker’s analysis was right — the exponential rise in carbon dioxide emissions would overcome natural cooling cycles and the effects of aerosol pollution to dangerously warm the planet within decades. “Man is setting in motion a series of events that seem certain to cause a significant warming of world climates over the next decades unless mitigating steps are taken immediately,” warned a 1979 report by top climatologists for the Carter White House, recommending “[e]nlightened policies in the management of fossil fuels and forests” to “delay or avoid these changes.”

Increasingly, the scientific enterprise has shifted toward the measurement of the changes wrought by global warming in every corner of the world, and toward a new emphasis on civilizational risk management and public engagement. However, the interface between research and policymaking has been poisoned by the influence of corporations and individuals opposed to any restrictions on carbon pollution (even ones based on free market principles). Using lessons learned from the tobacco industry’s efforts to deny the dangers of its product, global-warming polluters have poured their vast resources into a long-running campaign of deceit to corrupt efforts to make policy at local, national, and international levels. Today’s climate scientists face intimidation, slander, and even threats of criminal prosecution for their work to illuminate a way to preserve the human experiment on our burning planet.

After Wally Broecker coined “global warming,” the 1980s followed as the hottest decade on record. The 1990s were even hotter, and the 2000s hotter still – at an increasing rate despite a natural cooling cycle, just as Broecker predicted. The past twelve months have been the hottest in history, bringing continent-wide heat waves, freak storms, and unprecedented rains that have devastated millions from Nashville to Moscow, from Oklahoma City to the French Riviera. Having predicted this future, Broecker now investigates potential triggers for abrupt climate change and researches methods to capture carbon dioxide pollution, because, he says, “We are going to need some way to bail ourselves out.”

Read the full version of this post at ForeignPolicy.com.

Three months ago, Denver Mayor and Colorado gubernatorial candidate John Hickenlooper (D) helped start an ambitious bike share program that has already attracted 14,000 memberships and been a big success.  As TP reports, one of Hickenlooper’s opponents in the Governor’s race sees something sinister lurking behind the mayor’s policies:

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GM Boosts Output of the Chevrolet Volt Electric Vehicle

The buzz about electric vehicles (EVs) recently grew louder, as General Motors Corporation (GM) announced on July 30 that it will increase U.S. production capacity of its new Chevrolet Volt by 50% next year. Citing strong interest, GM said it will boost the number of units from 30,000 to 45,000 in 2012.

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Holman, Despair of the Defenders of Jerusalem, Wikimedia

Now that the prospects for comprehensive climate legislation with a carbon price and/or serious clean energy funding are off the table for the foreseeable future, that really leaves only one strategy for substantial emissions reductions — the direct method.

Energy economics expert and long-time guest blogger Craig Severance, has a review of what might be possible, which I excerpt below.  The full piece can be found on his blog.

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