Incident Has Happened Twice Before, in 2007 and 2009, Because Sea Ice They Normally Rest on Has Melted

Tens of thousands of walruses have come ashore in northwest Alaska because the sea ice they normally rest on has melted.

U.S. government scientists say this massive move to shore by walruses is unusual in the United States. But it has happened at least twice before, in 2007 and 2009. In those years Arctic sea ice also was at or near record low levels.

Polar bears are the Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie of climate-change-endangered Arctic species. They get all the press (see Will polar bears go extinct by 2030?)  Heck, they even get their own TV ad!

But not-so-photogenic animals will suffer at the hands of human-caused global warming, too.  Seth Borenstein has a good AP story today on the plight of the walruses (photo above from USGS via WWF).  It concludes:

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Analysis: “Avoiding key impacts of climate change depends on the success of efforts to overcome infrastructural inertia and commission a new generation of devices that can provide energy and transport services without releasing CO2 to the atmosphere.”

A major new study in Science magazine, “Future CO₂ Emissions and Climate Change from Existing Energy Infrastructure” (subs. req’d), makes a powerful case for rapid deployment of low-carbon technology.

The study, one of whose authors is climatologist Ken Caldeira, looks at current and future emissions from existing energy infrastructure.  It concludes that if the world built no new polluting infrastructure, we would end up with “mean warming of 1.3°C (1.1° to 1.4°C) above the pre-industrial era and atmospheric concentrations of CO₂ less than 430 parts per million.”

So while we are inevitably going to build some new CO2-emitting infrastructure, the study makes clear that aggressive deployment of low-carbon infrastructure starting as soon as possible is a crucial strategy for avoiding carbon lock-in and the relatively higher cost of shuttering existing infrastructure before the end of its life, which in turn is critical for minimizing the cost of stabilizing atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide at 450 ppm or lower.

This conclusion isn’t terribly surprising for those who follow energy and climate policy.  Last year, in releasing its World Energy Outlook, International Energy Agency Executive Director Nobuo Tanaka explained:

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Click here for “The Test Tube” with David Suzuki.

I met Suzuki in 1999 when his foundation gave away almost 900 copies of my book Cool Companies to leading Canadians.  Here’s the story from their newsletter, “Finding Solutions“:

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Our favorite climate de-crocker, Peter Sinclair has a new video on the Arctic:
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A comprehensive Wonk Room survey of the Republican candidates for the U.S. Senate finds that nearly all dispute the scientific consensus that the United States must act to fight global warming pollution. In May, 2010, the National Academies of Science reported to Congress that “the U.S. should act now to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and develop a national strategy to adapt to the inevitable impacts of climate change” because global warming is “caused largely by human activities, and poses significant risks for — and in many cases is already affecting — a broad range of human and natural systems.”

This finding is shared by scientific bodies around the world. However, in the alternate reality of the fossil-fueled right wing, climate science is confused or a conspiracy, and policies to limit pollution would destroy the economy.

Remarkably, of the dozens of Republicans vying for the 37 Senate seats in the 2010 election, only one — Rep. Mike Castle of Delaware — supports climate action. Even former climate advocates Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) and Rep. Mark Kirk (R-IL) now toe the science-doubting party line. If Castle loses his primary on Tuesday to Tea Party candidate Christine O’Donnell, the GOP slate will be unanimous in opposition to a green economy.

Many of the Senate candidates are signatories of the Koch Industries’ Americans For Prosperity No Climate Tax pledge and the FreedomWorks Contract From America. The second plank of the Contract From America is to “Reject Cap & Trade: Stop costly new regulations that would increase unemployment, raise consumer prices, and weaken the nation’s global competitiveness with virtually no impact on global temperatures.”

In reality, a carbon cap-and-trade market — by rewarding work instead of pollution — would increase jobs, lower electricity bills, restore American competitiveness, and forestall a climate catastrophe.

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Shining some light on bad analysis in The Economist

Today’s guest debunker is Evan Mills, a leading scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.  He is a widely-published expert on energy efficiency, which remains THE core climate solution and the biggest low-carbon resource by far.

Misreading of a new Sandia National Laboratories study on efficient lighting has led The Economist into the dark.  In the process, they inverted the researchers’ findings, perpetuating the myth of the “energy rebound effect,” which has been postulated in theory but never shown empirically to be significant. The assertion is that the too-cheap-to-meter energy savings from energy-efficient lighting will induce people to become ravenous light hogs, increasing their demand for lumens to such an extent that lighting energy use will grow despite factor-ten improvements in efficiency compared to today’s incandescent lighting.

Perhaps a new species of “Efficiency Deniers” will be born of all this”¦.  I can hear it now:  Energy-efficient technologies will fuel global warming and other scourges of the earth.

The authors of the underlying Sandia study have already pointed out one of many egregious flaws in the article:  Comparing today’s mixed-source lighting energy use with that projected for three and a half decades downstream (larger population, GDP, etc.) and attributing the predicted increase to LEDs (solid-state lighting):

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Study Predicts 13,200 Deaths From Coal Pollutants This Year

A new report by the Clean Air Task Force, a nonprofit environmental group, finds that pollution from coal-fired power plants will result in the premature death of more than 13,000 people this year. The report, which is an update from similar studies conducted in 2000 and 2004, says that emissions from coal plants, like sulfur dioxide (SO2) and nitrogen oxides (NOx), “continue to take a significant toll on the health and longevity of millions of Americans,” even though many of the emissions have decreased in recent years….

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Quotes McCain: “We stand warned by serious and credible scientists across the world that time is short and the dangers are great.”

California’s vision of a cleaner environment and reduced dependence on foreign oil and dirty fuels is now under attack. Make no mistake: Proposition 23 seeks to derail our future through a process of indefinite postponement of our state’s clean energy and clean air standards. A future for California based on clean-power technologies is both an economic and environmental necessity.

It’s about preserving clean air for our kids and fostering good jobs for our workers. It’s about a California that leads the world in the next great global industry and in facing the next great global challenge. The effort to derail it would be a tragic mistake.

Don’t let it happen.

It is pretty hard to find a conservative Republican willing to speak out bluntly on the urgent need for action on climate change and clean energy.  It is doubly hard to find one with the credentials of George P. Shultz who was President Reagan’s secretary of state from 1982 to 1989 — and President Nixon’s first budget director.

Shultz deserves a great deal of credit for signing on as cochair of the effort to kill Prop 23 and making clear that failing to do so “would be a catastrophe.” Now he has an op-ed, “Clean air law is key to our future,” which deserves to be widely read.  It continues:

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