Global financial giant Deutsche Bank has crushed the climate skeptics in a new paper released today, finding that “human-made climate change is already happening and is a serious long term threat.” The bank’s DB Climate Change Advisors, working with the Columbia Climate Center at the Earth Institute, Columbia University, reviewed the suite of skeptic claims — that global warming is a hoax, natural, or good for people — and found no evidence to support these contrarian positions. Mark Fulton, Global Head of Climate Change Investment Research for Deutsche Bank’s $7 billion in climate funds, concluded that trusting the skeptics “does not seem a gamble worth taking“:

The paper’s clear conclusion is that the primary claims of the skeptics do not undermine the assertion that human-made climate change is already happening and is a serious long term threat. . . .

Simply put, the science shows us that climate change due to emissions of greenhouse gases is a serious problem. Furthermore, due to the persistence of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and the lag in response of the climate system, there is a very high probability that we are already heading towards a future where warming will persist for thousands of years. Failing to insure against that high probability does not seem a gamble worth taking.

The paper itself, “Climate Change: Addressing the Major Skeptic Arguments,” refutes in short order the top skeptic and conspiracy theorist claims about climate science, including the Climategate smear campaign and purported IPCC errors, much in the style of John Cook’s excellent Skeptical Science website. Of most interest is its treatment of the claim that global warming is good for civilization:

Although adaptation is possible, historical shifts in climate have never occurred under conditions of such high human population numbers. Natural resources and ecosystems are already taxed and further climate perturbation is likely to be disruptive. Climate shifts in the past have frequently been accompanied by collapse of governments or extensive mortality. Increasing population pressure exacerbates the likelihood of pandemics and the destabilization of food-insecure regions can lead to failed states and threats to global security. Humans have survived numerous past changes in climate, but survival of the species is a poor measure of the true consequences and costs associated with adaptation to climate change.

Deutsche Bank is shifting its $700 billion in assets to address the dangers of global warming. “Coal is basically out of the game,” says Mark C. Lewis, Deutsche Bank’s managing director of its Global Carbon Markets desk. Deutsche Bank is financing wind farms in Minnesota, but the United States is largely being left behind. “They’re asleep at the wheel on climate change, asleep at the wheel on job growth, asleep at the wheel on this industrial revolution taking place in the energy industry,” said Kevin Parker, global head the Deutsche Asset Management Division, about the United States government. Deutsche Bank is instead directing investment opportunities in Germany, Italy, Spain and China. Of Deutsche’s $7 billion expressly focused on climate investment, only $45 million is invested in the United States.

Paleoclimate study: “the Arctic temperature change consistently exceeds the Northern Hemisphere average by a factor of 3-4″

A first-of-its-kind analysis, “History of sea ice in the Arctic” (subs. req’d), by an international team of 18 top scientists led by Leonid Polyak concludes:

[E]pisodes of considerably reduced sea ice or even seasonally ice-free conditions occurred during warmer periods linked to orbital variations. The last low-ice event related to orbital forcing (high insolation) was in the early Holocene, after which the northern high latitudes cooled overall, with some superimposed shorter-term (multidecadal to millennial-scale) and lower-magnitude variability. The current reduction in Arctic ice cover started in the late 19th century, consistent with the rapidly warming climate, and became very pronounced over the last three decades. This ice loss appears to be unmatched over at least the last few thousand years and unexplainable by any of the known natural variabilities.

The key point is that the Arctic loses ice when it is forced to lose ice.  In the past that was driven by orbital changes, and now it is being driven by human emissions.

This Quaternary Science Reviews paper is based on a detailed study of “proxy records from the Arctic Ocean floor and from the surrounding coasts.”  You can find a brief discussion of those methods in the Ohio State University news release here, which explains this is “the first comprehensive history of Arctic ice.”  The analysis “re-examined the data from past and ongoing studies — nearly 300 in all — and combined them to form a big-picture view of the pole’s climate history stretching back millions of years.”

I asked the lead author, Leonid Polyak, of Ohio State’s Byrd Polar Research Center, when was the last time the Arctic was ice free.  He replied:

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Last week the Politico reported on the California Senate debate: “Fiorina’s major stumble came on the issue of Proposition 23.” Fiorina had waffled on whether she supported the landmark climate and clean energy legislation that Prop 23 would kill, since, of course, she supported cap-and-trade during the presidential campaign.

Now the GOP Senate candidate she has completed her flip-flop to full support for the dirty energy proposition funded by Big Oil, as the L.A. Times notes in its piece, “Global warming bill a lose-lose issue for GOP candidates.”

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Once-Lowly Charcoal Emerges as ‘Major Tool’ for Curbing Carbon

Charcoal is taking root on the farm.

Simmered out of eucalyptus, charcoal is being hoed into the degraded soils of former forests in western Kenya. Roasted out of chicken manure, it is spurring the growth of malting barley in Australia. And in Iowa, researchers are plowing charcoal into corn rows, hoping to limit the tons of fertilizer that saturate the state’s fields each year.

At these farms and more, scientists are probing the limits of how high-grade charcoal, dubbed biochar, can be formed from plant and animal waste to squirrel away the atmosphere’s carbon for centuries, or even millennia. Inspired by ancient Amazonian soils, researchers have found that buried charcoal resists bacteria’s attempts to break it down. And thanks to its porous geometry, it has a knack for improving land in ways still being revealed.

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A study by a German military think tank has analyzed how “peak oil” might change the global economy. The internal draft document — leaked on the Internet — shows for the first time how carefully the German government has considered a potential energy crisis.

The term “peak oil” is used by energy experts to refer to a point in time when global oil reserves pass their zenith and production gradually begins to decline. This would result in a permanent supply crisis — and fear of it can trigger turbulence in commodity markets and on stock exchanges.

The issue is so politically explosive that it’s remarkable when an institution like the Bundeswehr, the German military, uses the term “peak oil” at all. But a military study currently circulating on the German blogosphere goes even further.

That’s from an article last week in Der Spiegel online.  None of this is a surprise to CP readers (see “Peak oil production coming sooner than expected“) or to those who follow the once staid International Energy Agency (see World’s top energy economist warns: “We have to leave oil before oil leaves us”).

But what is remarkable is the source — and the bluntness of the report’s conclusions about political and economic impacts.

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A group of influential conservative members of the behemoth social media site Digg.com have just been caught red-handed in a widespread campaign of censorship, having multiple accounts, upvote padding, and deliberately trying to ban progressives. An undercover investigation has exposed this effort, which has been in action for more than one year.

That’s from an expos© last month by Alternet, “Massive Censorship Of Digg Uncovered.”  I didn’t blog on it at the time because I was just going on vacation. It apparently did drive Digg to change one of its key features and is worth excerpting to show how far the right wing will goes to distort even the online discussion:

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