After a year of climate devastation in 2010, this year has begun with more extreme weather across the globe. In the southern hemisphere and along the equator, it is a summer of floods and storms — in Australia, Sri Lanka, the Philippines, Malaysia, Indonesia, Tonga, Brazil, Colombia, South Africa, as well as Botswana, Lesotho, Mozambique, Namibia, Zambia, Zimbabwe, and Madagascar.

The northern hemisphere’s winter is similarly extreme, with normal patterns of air flow destabilized by a warmed Arctic Ocean. Extreme heat shattered records in California and Canada, while Arctic air and warm oceans combined to produce storm after storm of intense snow throughout Europe and the United States. The Arctic air flooding south brought chaos to the Southwest, leaving Arizonans without gas or electricity and causing rolling blackouts in Texas. Other areas of the world, including Argentina, Chile, and China, are suffering from crippling droughts.

The world has suffered billions of dollars of damage to infrastructure, homes, and crops, with transportation networks and national economies depressed by the extreme weather. Thousands of people have died, and millions more cast into suffering, little more than a month into the year. Global commodity prices have skyrocketed as production of wheat, sugar, rice, corn, and coal have been struck by climate disasters, feeding unrest across the Middle East and elsewhere.

The monster Groundhog’s Day blizzard “stretching from New Mexico to Maine” “paralyzed the nation’s heartland with ice and snow, shuttering airports and schools and leaving normally bustling downtowns deserted.” Satellite imagery shows the continent-wide storm’s massive extent:

Meanwhile, on the other side of the globe, the giant Cyclone Yasi, another continent-scale storm, slammed into Australia, the nation’s second-most damaging stom on record:

In response, conservative pundits have little to offer but puerile attacks on Al Gore, with jokes about eating Twinkies, snipes about bank accounts, and flat-out denial of global warming. It’s a “snow-job,” carped conservative meteorologist Dr. Ryan Maue, without challenging the fact that global warming pollution is influencing the climate and encouraging extreme weather. Dr. Roy Spencer strangely made the baseless claim that “the annual amount of precipitation that falls on the Earth stays remarkably constant from year to year,” despite significant annual anomalies. Sen. Mark Kirk (R-IL) went so far to attack Gore’s “personal life.”

I am interested in your comments on these ads.

I thought the Tibet Super Bowl ad with Timothy Hutton was just dreadful.  I didn’t see the Hurley-deforestation ad until today.  File this under “What the heck were they thinking?”

Seriously, Groupon?  You really think that comparing deforestation to a Brazilian wax is good marketing?

One good thing did come from the ads — This AdRants headline:  “Groupon Trivializes Deforestation With Female Deforestation.”

For those who missed it, here’s the Tibet ad, which actually involves making light of people whose lives and human rights are at risk:

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Nobelist Krugman: “It sure looks like climate change is a major culprit” in the extreme weather that has run up food prices

The expert consensus on the key role that high food prices have played in MidEast protests continues to grow (see my multi-part series on food insecurity).  Indeed, governments in the region themselves are so concerned about the threat of food insecurity to their stability, they are starting to stockpile grain, which, ironically, will further drive up prices, as The Economist explains in their February 3rd edition.

Nobel Prize economist Paul Krugman also weighs in with a major NYT column, “Droughts, Floods and Food” (excerpted below), which also makes the connection I have been focusing on between extreme weather (driven in part by climate change) and food prices.

UPDATE:  And don’t miss the UK Guardian‘s new piece today, “Failure to act on crop shortages fuelling political instability, experts warn.”

First though, the Wall Street Journal provided us some more insight into the role extreme weather is playing in the food-price run-up in their article last week, “When Will Russia Resume Grain Exports Again?”

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JR:  Many experts I know think that a 40% to 50% cut by about 2016 is quite doable — based as much on advances in deployment as in technology gains.  The tough part, of course, will be competing with Chinese who have a much more aggressive R&D and deployment program — and a long-term commitment that conservatives in this country reject.

Of course, even six cents a kilowatt hour will not mean PV competes with existing coal.   As always, if you want to reduce greenhouse gas emissions sharply enough to avert multiple catastrophes, you need a high and rising price on CO2.

Department of Energy seeks to cut solar costs by 75 percent

The U.S. Department of Energy said on Friday it will spend $27 million on a new effort to reduce the costs of solar power by 75 percent by the end of the decade in a bid to make the renewable power source as cheap as fossil fuels.

Energy Secretary Steven Chu dubbed the program a “sun shot” that was patterned on President John F. Kennedy’s “moon shot” goal in the 1960s that called for the United States to land a man on the moon.

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I have previously discussed how climate science denier Harrison Schmitt, appointed to head the new Mexico environment agency, believes enviros and scientists like Holdren are communists.  As the above clip show, Schmitt is actually proud to assert that he is a denier of well-established science.

Now it turns out he denies not only the basic reality that the planet is warming and humans are a major cause — but he denies even more basic scientific observations in this collection of long-debunked denier talking points sent to NASA:

How long this cooling trend will persist remains to be seen; however, Greenland glaciers have been advancing since 2006, Artic [sic] sea ice has returned to 1989 levels of coverage….

Schmitt here channels Groucho Marx:  Who are you going to believe, me or your lying eyes?

First, it’s hard to be in a cooling trend when you’ve just had the hottest decade on record, the hottest 12-month period on record, and a calendar year that was tied with 2005 for the hottest on record in both the NOAA and NASA dataset.  It’s pretty incredible, when you think about it, that a man that NASA put on the moon and brought home safely now denies basic NASA data!

Second, in his debunking post, physicist John Cook notes, “Greenland has been losing over 200 billion tonnes of ice per year.”  Schmitt’s denier talking point is years old.  In fact, a major new study in Environmental Research Letters reported in Science Daily reports, “2010 set new records for the melting of the Greenland Ice Sheet” — beating out the old record of … wait for it … 2007!  The “exceptional” melt season stretched up to 50 days longer than average in some areas.

Third, and most absurd, is Schmitt’s claim that Arctic sea ice has recovered to 1989 levels!  Readers know that is outrageous falsehood (see Arctic Death Spiral 2010: Navy’s oceanographer tells Congress, “the volume of ice as of last September has never been lower”¦in the last several thousand years”).

What follows is an extended excerpt (with charts) from Prof. Scott Mandia’s blog asking how Schmitt can head New Mexico’s Energy, Minerals and Natural Resources Department “IF HE CANNOT READ A GRAPH and HE DENIES WELL-SUPPORTED CLIMATE SCIENCE?”

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Protesters outside Koch meeting

After the Koch brothers organized top Republican billionaires in Palm Springs to plan their 2012 agenda, the district’s representative, Rep. Mary Bono Mack (R-CA), embraced their denial of the threat of greenhouse pollution. In 2009, Mack was one of eight Republicans who voted for sweeping climate legislation.

Brad Johnson has the sad story of her flip-flop.

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Erich Pica, President of Friends of the Earth, in a Huffpost repost.

We all know a Fred Upton.

He’s the coworker who was your friend until he got promoted and “went corporate.” He’s the athlete who played to bring a championship to his home town before following a larger contract to a bigger city. He’s the buddy who was always around until he got into a relationship and didn’t have time for you any more.

Fred Upton is the Republican congressman who used to have interesting ideas about reducing emissions and fighting climate change. But then he ran for chair of the House Energy and Commerce Committee. Now, he has staffed his committee with lobbyists and today he is introducing a bill that seeks to roll back Clean Air Act protections against pollution from factories and power plants.

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