A federal judge today upheld the George W. Bush administration’s decision to list the polar bear as threatened under the Endangered Species Act.

The ruling is a blow to environmental groups that wanted the bear listed as endangered, thereby giving it more protections, and industry groups and others that don’t want it listed at all.

The original Bush decision meant listing the polar bear as “threatened” because of its melting polar sea ice habitat, but then doing nothing to actually protect that polar habitat from its primary threat, greenhouse gas emissions from fossil fuel combustion.

As I wrote at the time, the Department of Interior suffers from a rare form of bipolar disorder called bye-polar disorder.  On the one hand, then DOI Secretary Kempthorne explicitly wanted “to allow continuation of vital energy production in Alaska,” while on the other hand the DOI noted:

• The polar bears need sea ice for feeding.
• The sea ice is being destroyed by human-caused emissions, faster than the models had predicted.
• Thus, the polar bear is endangered.

Bye-polar disorder is apparently hard to diagnose.  You can read the 116-page ruling of U.S. District Judge Emmet Sullivan of the District of Columbia here, but he is no diagnostician:  Sullivan said the plaintiffs challenging the listing “have failed to demonstrate that the agency’s listing determination rises to the level of irrationality.”  Oh, it wasn’t irrational for the pro-oil Bushies, but for bears, it was just nuts.

Let’s be clear here:  “The survival of polar bears as a species is difficult to envisage under conditions of zero summer sea-ice cover,” concludes the 2004 Arctic Climate Impact Assessment, by leading scientists from the eight Arctic nations, including the United States.

The climate models have left people with the impression that summer Arctic sea ice will survive past 2050, but reality is already worse than the IPCC’s worst-case scenario.  As I discussed in my post last month, “Arctic sea ice volume: The death spiral continues,” it is extremely likely the Arctic will be virtually ice free in the summer within about two decades, and it wouldn’t be surprising if it happened within one.

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Aren’t we too puny to rival the great forces of nature that shape our planet?

Certainly some prominent [skeptics] have said as much.

But the facts show that we are fundamentally impacting planet Earth in unprecedented ways, and we’ve known about it for a century.

“The radiative forcing of the CO2 we have already put in the atmosphere in the last century is … the equivalent in energy terms to almost half a billion Hiroshima bombs each year.”  Radiative forcing is a measure of how out of balance the Earth’s energy budget is.  “When there’s more energy radiating down on the planet than there is radiating back out to space, something’s going to have to heat up.”

Australian scientists have been contributing to a multi-part series, “Clearing Up the Climate Debate” at “The Conversation” website.  I’m reposting some of the best.  Here, Mike Sandiford, Director of the Melbourne Energy Institute and Professor of Geology explores the staggering ways we influence the the globe and the climate.

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Texas is facing the driest eight-month period in its recorded history, a drought so bad that Texans are praying for hurricanes to get rain. But as fields dry up and the state’s reservoirs run dry, “plastic-lined pits holding millions of gallons of blue-green water are tucked away in fields chock-full of withering mesquite trees.”

The much-needed water, it turns out, is being pumped out of underground aquifers by oil companies that are using it for hydraulic fracking.

Not only does fracking come with potentially huge air pollution costs, it consumes billions of gallons of water each year, much of which cannot be recovered and reused for more imminent needs:

It can take millions of gallons of fluid to hydraulically fracture, or “frack,” a single well. Only about 20 percent to 25 percent on average of the water is recovered, while the rest disappears underground, never to be seen again.

The Texas Water Development Board estimates the total amount of water used for fracking statewide in 2010 was 13.5 billion gallons. That’s likely to more than double by 2020, and decline gradually each decade after that until dropping back down to current levels between 2050 and 2060.

“We’re using scarce resources to get scarce resources,” said John Christmann, Permian Region vice president for Apache Corp., a Houston-based oil and gas company that operates in almost every West Texas county.

Since October, parts of Texas have received as little as a tenth-of-an-inch of rain, forcing water restrictions on residents and leaving the ground dry and barren, resulting in massive wildfires that now cover large swaths of the state. The water shortage has gotten so bad that even Gov. Rick Perry (R), a staunch protector of the state’s oil industry, recently signed legislation forcing companies to disclose how much water they use in fracking operations.

Instead of using the plentiful amounts of non-potable water Texas has beneath its surface, these companies have decided to deprive the state of a valuable resource in a time of need. And for Texas, the problem is two-fold: not only is it losing its water, it’s losing it to companies who use a process that may be so destructive and dirty, not even coal mining compares.

A round-up of climate and energy news. Please post other stories below.

Officials: W.Va. Mine Operator Kept Two Sets Of Safety Records

Federal mine disaster investigators disclosed a few pieces of new information Tuesday night from their year-long look at the April 2010 deadly Upper Big Branch mine explosion. They said that:

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As record-shattering heat cripples Oklahoma, Sen. Jim “global warming is a hoax” Inhofe (R-OK) failed to show for an fossil-industry-funded climate denial conference. A shrinking band of far-right economists, lawyers, and a few scientists have gathered in Washington, DC, for the Heartland Institute’s sixth International Conference on Climate Change, funded, like Inhofe himself, by Koch Industries and Exxon Mobil. Inhofe was scheduled to be the denier conference’s keynote speaker, but he bailed out, explaining appropriately that he is “under the weather“:

I am sorry that I will not be able to join you today at the Heartland Institute’s sixth International Conference on Climate Change. Unfortunately, I am under the weather, but I did want to send a short note to say thank you for all of your hard work and dedication. Your efforts have gone a long way to stop the global warming alarmist agenda.

Although the Koch denial machine has succeeding in blocking global warming legislation, they have certainly done nothing to stop global warming itself. Billions of tons of fossil fuel pollution are cooking the entire planet, bringing a slew of climate disasters to the United States, including “extraordinary heat and wind” behind “exceptional drought” in Inhofe’s home state. Wildfires have torn through Oklahoma’s bone-dry prairie. The “drought’s impacts have been enormous,” and “very little relief is in sight,” Oklahoma’s state climatologist, Gary McManus writes. The average high temperature in Oklahoma City in June 2011 was 10 degrees above normal, 97 degrees instead of 87 degrees. “Any way you slice it, it has been hot,” Oklahoma City’s Stephen Mullins explains:

Today marks the 29th consecutive day over 90. That is a record.

Today is forecast to be the 10th day above 100 in June. That is a record.

Today marks the 34th consecutive day above normal.

June 2011 set or tied single-day record high temperatures on the 17th, 18th, 19th, and 27th. Those record temperatures were 103, 104, 101, and 103 degrees, respectively.

Earlier in June, Inhofe cosponsored legislation to have the federal government cut $12 billion from the general budget to provide tax breaks for residents of Alabama, Arkansas, Georgia, Kentucky, Mississippi, Missouri, North Carolina, Oklahoma, and Tennessee who were victims of climate disasters this spring. In April, Inhofe championed legislation to reverse the scientific finding that greenhouse pollution threatens the public welfare of American citizens.

You may recall last year that Senator Inhofe’s grandchildren built an igloo to mock a killer snow storm, calling it ‘Al Gore’s New Home’.  Of course, extreme precipitation is precisely what we expect from human-caused global warming, but the story still got a lot of play in the media.

What’s more ironic is that the Senate’s leading climate denier bailed on the annual Heartland climate science denial conference this morning — saying “I am under the weather” (!) — just as his home state is being slammed by a record-smashing heatwave and a drought more severe than the Dust Bowl of the 1930s.

Yes, I know, it’s just coincidence, not a karmic backlash.  But then again climate science projects a permanent dust bowl for the Southwest if we keep listening to Inhofe.  It also projects that by century’s end, the state will be above 90°F for 135 days a year!

What’s also ironic is just yesterday I pointed out that the Texas drought is so bad, “In Austin, They are Praying for a Hurricane.” Incredibly, meteorologist Stephen Mullens, aka Oklahoma City Weather Examiner, in his Wednesday post, “Heat wave records fall: No relief in sight,” writes

It seems the only hope of rain would be for a hurricane to hit the Texas coast and travel northward to Oklahoma. That path is a fairly common one. Fortunately, the scientists at Colorado State University have predicted a 50% probability that the Texas coast will be hit by a hurricane this year.

No, I don’t think one should use the word “fortunately” to describe a hurricane hitting Texas.  But it is a measure of the desperation felt by a state that is three quarters covered by severe drought and that has been above 90 for the entire month.

Here are some of the amazing statistics of this Oklahoma heat wave:

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By Tom Kenworthy, a Senior Fellow at the Center for American Progress Action Fund.

Almost from the moment Rep. Doc Hastings (R-WA) and his Grand Oil Party colleagues took over the leadership of the House Natural Resources Committee they have been trying to spread the lie that Obama administration energy development policies have crippled domestic oil and gas production, raised gasoline prices, and cost jobs.

Not only is the industry sitting on oil and gas leases on public lands totaling more than 30 million acres without developing them, but the evidence is clear that it is market forces that largely determine the pace of drilling.

A new study by Headwaters Economics buttresses this point. The Bozeman, Montana-based independent research group reports that oil and gas drilling levels in the U.S. have now rebounded strongly from the recession, reaching almost a 20-year high. Based on numbers from Baker Hughes, the oil and gas industry standard for counting drill rigs, study author Julia Haggerty said that oil and gas drilling has surged during the Obama administration:

Oil and natural gas drilling activity has made a strong recovery since reaching a recession-induced low in late 2008. Market prices and advancements in drilling technology account for most of the increases in drilling activity. . . . When it comes to land-based oil and gas drilling in the United States, there is little evidence that state and federal regulations are hampering industry’s ability to respond to market signals.

As the charts prepared by Headwaters Economics for ThinkProgress below show, when the price of oil and natural gas rise, do does drilling activity, and it has little to do with policy:

The Republican drumbeat attacking the government for spiking oil prices is a deliberate attempt at misdirection. Despite overwhelming evidence from both federal commodities regulators and the industry itself, the Grand Oil Party won’t admit that speculation is a big factor in the recent runup in gasoline prices. After all, how could “market forces” be to blame for American pain at the pump?

First, the bad news:

Facing continued litigation, California officials will delay enforcement of the state’s complex carbon trading program until 2013, state Air Resources Board Chairwoman Mary Nichols announced Wednesday.

The delay in the cap-and-trade program, which was slated to take effect in January, is proposed, she said, because of the “need for all necessary elements to be in place and fully functional.”

Nichols testified that delay would not affect the state ability to return emissions of “planet-warming gases to 1990 levels by 2020.”  It’s worth noting that the cap-and-trade program accounts for only “a fifth of the planned cuts under the state’s 2006 Global Warming Solutions Act.”

Derek Walker [of EDF] praised the delay as a prudent step that “will give the cap-and-trade program its best chance of success…. Cap-and-trade … cuts climate change pollution at the lowest possible cost. By getting this right, California will once again serve as a model that other states and countries can follow.”

On the other side ever warming planet, the world’s biggest emitter of carbon pollution is accelerating its cap-and-trade efforts:

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“The fundamental problem with America’s farm programs: They mostly reward those who own the land, not those who farm it, or are most in need, or grow the healthiest food, or do the best job of protecting soil, water and wildlife habitat.”

No matter how many movies we see on the problems with our industrial farming system, most of us will always conjure the iconic image of a wholesome family farming the land when we think of agriculture. But your tax dollars may not be going to who you think.

A report by the Environmental Working Group, a non-profit that monitors federal programs, concludes that the U.S. government is sending hundreds of millions of dollars to people in urban areas of the country, some of whom have no direct connection to agriculture. According to EWG’s updated 2011 Farm Subsidy Database, $394 million last year went to residents of almost 350 cities with at least 100,000 people each.

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This is “the worst Texas drought since record-keeping began 116 years ago.”  Drought and wildfires have led the US Department of Agriculture “to declare the entire state of Texas a natural disaster.”  Over 70% of the state was in “exceptional” drought last week, with another 20% in “extreme” drought, and “213 counties in Texas have lost at least 30 percent of their crops or pasture.”

You know a drought is devastating when people are so desperate for relief they start rooting for a catastrophic deluge.  But that’s what NPR reported today:

The word drought doesn’t really capture what’s happening in Texas. The last nine months have been the driest in state history. Instead of rain, spring brought nearly half a million acres of wildfires. And in central Texas, around Austin one of the area’s largest lakes is drying up.

That’s why I prefer Dust-Bowlification. And if drought doesn’t capture what’s happening now, it certainly won’t capture what we face if we don’t reduce greenhouse gas emissions sharply (see U.S. southwest could see a 60-year drought this century).  Back to NPR:

Haskell Simon has been farming rice in Matagorda county near the Gulf of Mexico since the 1940s. He says that over the last 15 years the rice planting season has been getting earlier and earlier, because the South Texas climate is getting hotter and hotter….

In Austin, they’re praying for a hurricane, a nice slow moving category one or two, or a tropical storm, that makes its way up to Austin and then stalls out over the Texas hill country.

And the Southwest isn’t the only part of the country that is facing the alternating twin threats of Dust Bowl and deluge, Hell and High Water. (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“)

NPR quotes farmer Simon about the change, “Typically LCRA [Lower Colorado River Authority] would turn on the irrigation water pumps by April 15th. And now the pumps can be started as early as March the 1st. So something is happening, obviously, there.”

Something is happening.  Obviously.  Too bad NPR — the supposedly liberal (aka science-based) media — can’t be bothered to stick in even one sentence explaining exactly why the South Texas climate is getting hotter and hotter.  Or how we can be quite certain it’s going to get much, much worse.

What’s surprising about that crucial omission is NOAA’s National Climatic Data Center just released its final State of the Climate in 2010 report, and their climate experts were pretty blunt.  As AFP in its piece, “Experts warn epic weather ravaging US could worsen“:

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Firefighters continue to battle a wildfire that threatens the nuclear-weapons facilities at Los Alamos National Laboratory in north-central New Mexico. “Both the town of Los Alamos, home to about 12,000 residents, and the laboratory, with a work force of about 12,000, were evacuated on Monday,” MSNBC reports. The uncontrolled Las Conchas Fire, now burning 70,000 acres, is part of a global-warming-fueled series of conflagrations throughout the Southwest. The record wildfire season is a product of the region’s record drought, in which precipitation is more than 75 percent below normal:

Arizona, New Mexico, and Texas are aflame:

– The 538,000-acre Wallow Fire in eastern Arizona and western New Mexico, started May 29, now 70 percent contained.

– The 223,000-acre Horseshoe Two Fire in the Chiricahua mountains in southeastern Arizona, started May 8, now 100 percent contained.

– The 30,000-acre Monument Fire near Sierra Vista in southeastern Arizona, started June 12, now 64 percent contained.

– The 15,000-acre Donaldson Fire (named after Sam Donaldson’s ranch), in Alamo Canyon in New Mexico, started June 28.

– Texas firefighters are tackling five fires that have burned 32,981 acres. Since fire season started on Nov. 15, 2010, Texas Forest Service and area fire departments have responded to 12,985 fires that have burned 3,268,011 acres, a greater area than the state of Connecticut.

In Senate testimony, U.S. Forest Service chief Tom Tidwell explained that scientists have found that climate change is making the region hotter and drier, leading to larger and more intense fires. This season of fire in the Southwest is one of the many terrible consequences of the billions of tons of greenhouse pollution industrial activity has added to the atmosphere. Only a full mobilization of our nation’s resources will give ourselves a chance to preserve the American dream in the coming years.

In an exclusive interview with Science Progress, Yale polling expert Dr. Tony Leiserowitz attributes part of the drop in public understanding of climate science since its fall 2008 peak to the collapse in media coverage:

I think underappreciated, is the role of media coverage. We have colleagues who study newspaper coverage as well as television coverage, and they have found that, since 2007, newspaper coverage of this issue has dropped to less than one-third of what it was in 2007 and television coverage, things like the “CBS Evening News,” has dropped to less than one-fifth of what it was back then.

Most Americans know about this issue through what they encounter in the media. They don’t know climate scientists. They don’t read the peer-reviewed literature. They learn about this issue, which is invisible to most of us, through the media. So when the media doesn’t report the issue, it is literally out of sight. So that’s what we think has played an important role.

For more on this see, Silence of the Lambs: Media herd’s coverage of climate change “fell off the map” in 2010.  The drop in media coverage is doubly important because the anti-science disinformation campaign actually ramped up in the last three years.

Interestingly, Leiserowitz, director of the Yale Project on Climate Change Communication, reports a partial rebound in the public’s understanding of climate change this year:

The number has climbed back up, though not to the fall 2008 levels. About half of the distance, about seven points until May of this year, we found that 64 percent of Americans said that climate change is happening.

The full interview is below:

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The Onion has put out another piece of comedic gold.

In this “In the Know” segment, pundits debate a new coal industry ad that claims wind turbines will blow the earth off orbit and solar energy will exhaust the sun’s resources. Unfortunately, with all the misinformation being spread about climate science and renewable energy, this conversation doesn’t seem like much of a stretch:

In The Know: Coal Lobby Warns Wind Farms May Blow Earth Off Orbit

Related Post:

• The Onion: Planet Earth Doesn’t Know How To Make It Any Clearer It Wants Everyone To Leave

The extreme flooding of the Missouri River became inevitable with freak, record rainfall in Montana at the end of May. An onslaught of water struck Montana, which has since turned the heartland from the Dakotas to Missouri into a disaster zone. Large portions of southeastern Montana had rainfall as much as 600 percent of normal for the 14 days ending May 31. From May 10 through the 25, all-time May daily rainfall records were set at 10 locations in Montana:

The flooding that ensued in the first weeks of June overwhelmed Montana towns and caused about $10 million in damages to the state. FEMA officials are now touring the state to survey damages. (HT: Capital Climate)