One-year-old ice in Beaufort Sea now a foot thinner than in 2009

In November, Rear Admiral David Titley, the Oceanographer of the Navy, testified that  “the volume of ice as of last September has never been lower”¦in the last several thousand years.” Titley, who is also the Director of Navy’s Task Force Climate Change, said he has told the Chief of Naval Operations that “we expect to see four weeks of basically ice free conditions in the mid to late 2030s.”

Wieslaw Maslowski of the Naval Postgraduate School has “projected a (virtually) ice-free fall by 2016 (+/- 3 yrs).” Contrary to some reporting, that projection has been unchanged for years, though Maslowski is in the process of creating a more sophisticated model that he expects “will improve prediction of sea ice melt,” as he explained to me recently.

Until then, we have some new observational data of Canadian sea ice thickness and this remarkable figure of sea ice volume since 1979 from Neven’s Arctic Sea Ice Blog, based on data from the University of Washington’s Polar Science Center [click to enlarge]:

Arctic sea ice volume by month in cubic kilometers (with simple quadratic trend lines projecting to zero volume, details here).  The bottom (red) line is September volume.

Compare this to Maslowski’s March 2010 PowerPoint:

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As ThinkProgress has been documenting, conservative lawmakers have been facing the ire of Main Street America at town halls all over the country. These Americans are demanding fair sacrifice rather than budget cuts that unfairly saddle the poor and middle class with the burden of deficit reduction.

Rep. Jaime Herrera Beutler (R-WA) came face to face with this growing movement at a town hall in Vancouver, Washington this week.  TP explains what happened next.

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Kim Knowlton, in an NRDC Action Fund repost

Recently, Senator Scott Brown denied that carbon emissions and climate change are connected to asthma and sick children, saying “Nothing could be further from the truth.”

In fact, the Senator couldn’t be further off-base.
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Sen. Claire McCaskill (D-MO), after a recent vote to protect coal polluters at the expense of children’s health, is now attacking the League of Women Voters. Brad Johnson has the story.

The 91-year-old good-government organization is running television spots that hold McCaskill and Sen. Scott Brown (R-MA) accountable for voting to block enforcement of Clean Air Act rules that limit greenhouse pollution, threatening the hundreds of thousands of children with asthma in their states. Watch the McCaskill ad:

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Huntsman:  This is an issue that ought to be answered by the scientific community; I’m not a meteorologist. All I know is 90 percent of the scientists say climate change is occurring. If 90 percent of the oncological community said something was causing cancer we’d listen to them. I respect science and the professionals behind the science so I tend to think it’s better left to the science community - though we can debate what that means for the energy and transportation sectors.

Jon Huntsman, Jr., Obama’s former ambassador to China and a potential contender for the Republican presidential nomination in 2012, told Time he believes in the diagnosis climate scientists have made about global warming — he just refuses to embrace any treatment now.

His flip-flip to now oppose cap-and-trade — or any type of action now — however, isn’t enough to satisfy the right wing, with its anti-science litmus test.  As The Politico reported:

American Spectator’s Chris Horner, RedState’s Daniel Horowitz and Commentary’s Jonathan Tobin all hit their blogs to attack Huntsman yesterday and questioned whether it makes him a loser in a GOP primary.

Horowitz wrote that Huntsman’s remarks to Time magazine, “can only mean that he is seeking the VP nomination for a Mike Bloomberg ticket.”

As Tim Pawlenty proudly observed in March, “Every one of us” running for president has flip-flopped on climate change.  Huntsman is no different, as ThinkProgress points out in its post, “Jon Huntsman’s Secret Life As A Progressive“:

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NOAA chief warns of rapid onset of ‘unprecedented’ changes in oceans

A combination of climate change, overfishing, pollution and other threats is changing the world’s oceans at an “unprecedented” rate, the head of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration said yesterday.

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Our guest blogger is Bill McKibben, founder of 350.org.

We’ve managed to disrupt the planet in so many ways that some new disaster breaks out almost daily. One spot on earth that seems really snakebit this month is the Canadian province of Alberta. In the past week, a drought and strong winds have combined to produce huge wildfires that gutted much of the town of Slave Lake—all 7,000 residents had to evacuate, and the city hall and many other buildings were burned to the ground. Right now there are over a hundred wildfires raging in Alberta, with 36 of them still “out of control.”

Just two weeks before the fires, a massive spill from an oil pipeline sickened residents of the community of Little Buffalo, the traditional lands of the Lubicon Cree. It took the government six days to show up and begin monitoring the air, despite the fact that local residents were suffering headaches, burning and nausea from the stench. Melina Laboucan-Massimo, a local Cree organizer, wrote 350.org board member Naomi Klein:

My heart hurts, not a day has gone by that I have not broken down crying but I hope that I can expose this cover up for what it is. And hope that my community will not continue to be silenced like they have for decades. It is a sad time as you can imagine.

The reason the government doesn’t want to acknowledge the problem, of course, is that this region of Alberta is home to the giant tar sands project. Over the objections of many indigenous residents residents, they’ve made a moonscape of large swaths of the region, as they ramp up massive oil production. When that oil leaks, it’s bad—and it’s bad when it’s burnt too, because it pours carbon into the atmosphere. The carbon that raises the temperature, making wildfire and drought more likely and more devastating.

The Lubicon Cree have shown great courage in fighting to protect their home. The rest of us need to show not only our respect for their fight, but similar courage in fighting to protect our joint home, this rapidly warming planet. The only answer is to keep that carbon in the ground and end the tar sands project before it causes any more trouble.

In the meantime, emergency assistance for Alberta families can be sent via the Canadian Red Cross and you can read more from Melina.

Solar photovoltaics (PV) is one of the hottest high-tech areas around.

For instance, 3-D technology is all the rage these days.  Now, one company thinks it can bring the concept to solar too.

Santa Barbara-based Solar3D is working on a silicon “microcell” at the nano scale that uses an optical element to direct sunlight into a walled-in structure, thus capturing more photons and increasing the amount of electrons that are discharged. If a traditional solar cell is the ceiling of a room, the 3-D solar cell would be the room itself with the optical element acting as a skylight.

Jim Nelson, the CEO of Solar3D, says the cell could theoretically be 25% efficient. (A traditional silicon-based cell is usually in the 12-15% efficiency range, meaning that 12-15% of the sunlight hitting the cell will be turned into electricity. High efficiency cells are now reaching above 19%, with record cells hitting over 24% in the lab.)

But let’s acknowledge the key word here for the 3-D solar technology: “theoretically.”

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Conservative lawmakers, right-wing interests, and top executives from the nation’s most lucrative oil companies proved their words fairly interchangeable last week after the Senate Finance Committee’s May 12 hearing on oil-and-gas tax incentives and rising energy prices. The following week, lawmakers chose to keep billions in taxpayer subsidies flowing to these highly profitable businesses.  CAP’s Valeri Vasquez has the story.

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