The records broken this winter were supposed to be for cold weather. But fast on the heels of the Arctic seeing the lowest January sea ice extent in the satellite record, the National Snow and Ice Data Center reports:
February 2011 tied February 2005 for the lowest ice extent for the month in the satellite record. Including 2011, the February trend is now at -3.0 percent per decade.
The NSIDC has more details:
By Christy Goldfuss, the Public Lands Project Director at the Center for American Progress Action Fund.
Appearing before the House Committee on Natural Resources Tuesday, Governor Gary Herbert (R-UT) spun a tale of a war on Western jobs. Testifying on the administration’s wild lands policy, he claimed that Secretarial Order 3310 will unleash a wave of lawsuits and destroy existing resource management plans:
We’re being told by oil and gas exploration companies that, due to regulatory uncertainty, they’ll likely be curbing their activities in Utah. They are telling us that they will not invest the time and capital necessary to prepare new bids on new exploration, until the regulatory situation is steadied. The lack of this new investment means not only a loss of jobs for Utah residents but also the loss of natural resources that only increases our nation’s dependence on fuel from foreign, often hostile countries.
The truth is that existing BLM Resource Management Plans are untouched by the administration’s new policy, which only affects future planning endeavors. The oil and gas industry is holding thousands upon thousands of acres of drilling leases without taking action, making the governor’s claims of “loss of natural resources” highly questionable. Furthermore, only 2,530 net new oil, gas, and mining jobs were created in Utah between the years of 1998 and 2008. Even during the Bush administration’s push for greater energy production, the extractive industries did not make up a large portion of the employment in Utah, and were dwarfed by the tourism sector.
As of 2008, less than one percent of the private sector jobs in Utah were from oil, gas, and mining combined. Jobs related to travel and tourism for people coming to enjoy those wild lands make up 13.6 percent of the jobs in Utah.
The wild lands policy in question will not impact current land management, as Bureau of Land Management (BLM) Director Bob Abbey said in the hearing:
I have heard concerns that the new wild lands policy has put a halt to new projects and will prevent important economic activity in local communities. This claim is, simply put, false.
Instead, the wild lands policy issued in December by Interior Secretary Ken Salazar is designed to help the BLM carry out its multiple-use mission, which means managing the millions of acres under BLM’s control, taking into account all uses of the land, including oil, gas, mining, timber, and wilderness. It is the wilderness and the wild lands of Utah that in 2009 brought 19 million people to the state. “Tourism is big business,” Leigh von der Esch, the managing director of the Utah Office of Tourism, testified before the same committee last year. “Parks and federal lands attract visitors that energize local economies, support jobs and economic growth.”
In an interview with the Wonk Room, a small business owner in Utah, Outdoor Utah’s editor Red Oelerich, responded to Gov. Herbert. “I don’t know if all the people making the noise about it understand the economic value of the public lands” and the tourists they attract, Oelerich said. “If there is an overabundance of the extraction industry and if there are coal mines going in, we’re not going to get them, because these are people that want a pretty pristine atmosphere, so it’s going to hurt us economically.”
Approximately 15 percent of the state’s BLM lands may be considered wild lands, which sustain Utah’s thriving tourist industry. By purporting that the wild lands policy could cost Utah billions, Herbert seemed all too willing to ignore the billions of dollars those lands currently generate and the jobs they currently supply in favor of a pollutive industry that just happens to have contributed heavily to his campaign.
Yes, my sources say the White House communications shop muzzled the Office of Science and Technology Policy from offering a robust defense of climate science after Climategate. And yes, Obama has utterly failed to offer a strong, coherent message on climate science and related energy policy (see “Obama calls for massive boost in low-carbon energy, but doesn’t mention carbon, climate or warming“).
I’ve been as critical of Obama about this as anybody, and like you, have come to the conclusion that he doesn’t appear to get the dire nature of the situation we’re in. But, in ‘fairness’ to the President, it must be pointed out that the White House sucks at messaging in general.
Look at their signature health care initiative. Please tell me what their message is? (see “Can Obama deliver health and energy security with a half (assed) message?“) Yet, health care is an issue that everybody in the White House cares about, unlike, say, climate, which beyond Obama and Holdren and, formerly, Browner, is of little political interest to almost all other senior WH staff.
Based on my discussions with leading journalists, as well as current and former Administration staff, this White House is the worst at communications in the past 3 decades. Indeed, the Obama WH is the worst of both possible worlds. They are dreadful at messaging BUT they think they are terrific at messaging, so much so that they shut down anybody else in the administration that might actually be good at messaging.
And that brings me to Washington Post columnist Ruth Marcus and her op-ed today, “President Waldo: Barack Obama is often strangely absent from the most important debates.” Here are some highlights (lowlights?):
Back in 2007, I wrote that “the immorality of China’s coal policy is breathtaking (literally).” Sadly, even as it has become the world leader in clean energy, China’s self-destructive coal policy continues unabated. China’s CO2 emissions now surpass ours by some 40%!
Our cumulative emissions greatly exceed theirs, of course, so I’m not diminishing America’s culpability in the coming climate catastrophe at all. But their CO2 growth rate is staggering whereas ours is mostly stagnating.
Moreover, the impacts of unrestricted CO2 emissions will surely be much harder on their country than ours, and not just because they are poorer with vastly more people. They are very reliant on inland glaciers that will likely all but vanish this century.
They are vastly more vulnerable to food insecurity. We’re the breadbasket for the world, with vast surplus agricultural production, whereas they might have to import wheat this year if their current extreme drought continues. They already import staggering amounts of soybeans.
Why have China’s emissions risen so rapidly? That question is examined in a fascinating analysis from CO2ScoreCard, that I excerpt at length, below.
This darkly humorous Exxon sign is making the email rounds:
[Fired Issa press aide Kurt] Bardella also disclosed contempt for reporters he described as “lazy as hell. There are times when I pitch a story and they do it word for word. That’s just embarrassing. They’re adjusting to a time that demands less quality and more quantity.”
Readers outside of the Washington DC fishbowl probably have no idea who Kurt Bardella is. Lucky you!
It starts with Rep. Darrell Issa (R-CA), chair of the House Oversight Committee, named by Rolling Stone as one of the 12 politicians and executives blocking progress on global warming. His (former) spokesman, Kurt Bardella, wanted to raise Issa’s profile, and in so doing exposed the seamy underbelly of the political-star-making machinery.
Dana Milbank tells the story well in an op-ed headlined, “Rotten to the press corps.” I was actually surprised that the Washington Post editors would run such a story and its brutal headline (glass houses aside) — though as it turns out they changed the online headline to “Issa press aide scandal is like bad reality TV” and in the link to the story give the headline a question mark: “Rotten to the press corps?”
When you read it, I think you’ll agree that no question mark is needed:
A new scientific study finds that the climate affects every sector of the U.S. economy. In “U.S. Economic Sensitivity to Weather Variability,” Jeffrey Lazo of the National Center for Atmospheric Research, economists Megan Lawson and Donald Waldman of the University of Colorado, and Peter Larsen of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory find that “U.S. economic output varies by up to $485 billion a year of 2008 gross domestic product — about 3.4 percent — owing to weather variability.” They explain:
Weather directly and indirectly affects production and consumption decision making in every economic sector of the United States at all temporal and spatial scales. From very local short-term decisions about whether or not to pour concrete on a construction project to broader decisions of when to plant or harvest a field, to the costs of rerouting an airplane around severe weather, to peak demand electricity generation in response to extreme heat, to early season snow for a bumper ski season in Colorado, drought in the Midwest, or wind-fueled wildfires in California, weather can have positive or negative effects on economic activity.
Their study examined the statistical connection between economic activity at the state level and changes between unusually warm and cold weather (measured by heating degree days and cooling degree days), total precipitation, and extreme precipitation and drought (measured by standard deviation of precipitation) over the seventy-year period of 1931-2000. Unsurprisingly, U.S. agriculture is strongly affected by weather variability, but every sector, including the massive finance, insurance and real estate (FIRE) sector are affected by changes in the climate:
A primary finding of this study is that every sector is statistically significantly sensitive to at least one measure of weather variability, and two sectors — FIRE and wholesale trade — show sensitivity to all four measures of weather variability.
Interestingly, mining appears to be the most sensitive to weather variability at 14.4 percent, which could be a product of the high dependence of demand on factors like heat and cold, though the authors caution the “result should be further investigated to determine whether it is an artifact of the data or statistical estimation.”
The economic correlation with more heating degree days “is consistently positive, suggesting though that across the seven sectors for which the estimate is significant, cooler weather is associated with larger GSP.”
This observed sensitivity of the U.S. economy to past weather variability should raise alarms for policy makers as we enter an era not just of changeable weather, but a changing climate that will worsen the weather itself. The Congressional Budget Office has taken the absurd position that the largest potential impact of extreme climate change on the U.S. economy could not be more than three percent. One hopes they will recognize that the science does not agree.
Australia, the fourth-largest wheat exporter, risked more climate-change damage than other developed countries partly because of the threat to its agriculture, said Ross Garnaut, the federal government’s adviser on the topic.
“Our agriculture is particularly vulnerable,” Garnaut told reporters in Canberra. “Australia is already a country of climate extremes where in many places in some parts of the year, temperatures are already near the upper limits of agriculture.”
Australia, also the fourth-largest cotton shipper and biggest coal exporter, will impose a price on carbon in July next year before the start of a trading system as early as 2015, according to plans set out by the ruling Labor Party. Record rain, flooding and a cyclone in the nation’s east damaged crops this season, while drought cut output in the west, increasing concerns that climate volatility and warming will curb output.
Australia is the canary in the coal mine for climate-change impacts (see “Australia faces collapse as climate change kicks in” and Northern Territory Chief Minister on Carlos’s deluge: “So a really one in 500 year event; nobody’s experienced anything like this before”).
It is the most arid habited continent in the world. As Garnaut notes, some regions are already at times near the upper limits for farming. The tropical north is vulnerable to staggering floods. The country is increasingly being whipsawed by human-caused global warming — just as the U.S. SouthEast is (see “Study: Global warming is driving increased frequency of extreme wet or dry summer weather in southeast, so droughts and deluges are likely to get worse“).
The U.S. Energy Information Administration, or EIA, officially reported on March 1st that domestic gasoline prices have reached the second largest one week increase since 1990. CAP’s Valeri Vasquez has the story.
Benefits of Clean Air Act Rules to Reach $2 trillion, EPA Says
A two-decade-old crackdown on smog and soot under the Clean Air Act will yield about $2 trillion in annual benefits by 2020, according to a study (pdf) that was released by U.S. EPA this morning and was touted as proof that the embattled agency’s rules are an economic boon for the American people.
Those rules prevented an estimated 160,000 deaths last year, according to the analysis, and within a decade, that number is projected to rise to about 230,000. That year, the new pollution controls will prevent an estimated 200,000 cases of heart disease, 2.4 million asthma flare-ups and 22.4 million missed school and work days.
Edited by Joe Romm, we cover climate science, solutions and politics. Columnist Tom Friedman calls us "the indispensable blog" and Time magazine named us one of the 25 "Best Blogs of 2010." Newcomers, start here.
Language Intelligence: Lessons on persuasion from Jesus, Shakespeare, Lincoln, and Lady Gaga.
Joe Romm has pulled together the secrets of the greatest communicators in history to show how you can apply these tools to your writing, speaking, blogging — even your Tweeting.
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