Figure 1.  Nine states saw their heaviest precipitation in the 117-year record this spring, two saw their second wettest. Texas had its driest spring on record.

Meteorologist and Former Hurricane Hunter Jeff Masters has a comprehensive new analysis, “U.S. had most extreme spring on record for precipitation,” which I repost below.

Extreme weather disasters, especially deluges and floods, are on the rise — and the best analysis says human-caused warming is contributing (see Two seminal Nature papers join growing body of evidence that human emissions fuel extreme weather, flooding). Craig Fugate, who heads the U.S. Federal Emergency Management Agency, said in December, “The term ’100-year event’ really lost its meaning this year” (see Munich Re: “The only plausible explanation for the rise in weather-related catastrophes is climate change”).

I asked Dr. Kevin Trenberth, Distinguished Senior Scientist in the Climate Analysis Section at the National Center for Atmospheric Research, for his comment on this spring:

The US has recently experienced (or is experiencing) some of the worst climate extremes in history: from drought and wild fires to floods, powerful storms and deadly tornadoes. When natural variability is compounded by human influences on climate, this is what we get. Records are not just broken, they are smashed! It’s as clear a warning as we are going to get about prospects for the future.

Of course it won’t happen this way every year, the regions most affected shift (last year Russia, this year Arizona; last year the Indus in Pakistan, this year the Mississippi and Missouri…), and some times will be benign, but the kinds of changes being recorded are just what we expect and have been predicted for the human influence on climate.

Here’s is Masters’ analysis:

Read more

Yale and George Mason University have released their latest polling analysis, “Public Support for Climate & Energy Policies in May 2011.”

Their polling “shows that despite political polarization in Washington D.C., public support for a variety of climate change and energy policies remains high, across party lines“:

• 71 percent of Americans say global warming should be a very high (13%), high (27%), or medium (31%) priority for the president and Congress, including 88 percent of Democrats, 66 percent of Independents, and 50 percent of Republicans.
• 91 percent of Americans say developing sources of clean energy should be a very high (32%), high (35%), or medium (24%) priority for the president and Congress, including 97 percent of Democrats, 89 percent of Independents, and 85 percent of Republicans.

This isn’t surprising to anybody who follows the actual polls — rather than the media’s and pundits’ and politicians’ misinterpretation of what they think the polling says.  Also, people still confuse polling on global warming and climate science with polling on whether/how the government should go about addressing global warming.

Americans want action — see links to a dozen polls at the end — no matter what they appear to say about climate science, which critically depends on how the question is phrased (see “Opinion polls underestimate Americans’ concern about the environment and global warming“).

Here are more findings from Yale and GMU:

Read more

Surprise, surprise:  It turns out small farmers aren’t as destructive to the world’s forests as multi-national corporations.

A new report by the Union of Concerned Scientists places most of the blame for deforestation on industry, not local farmers. Smallholder and subsistence farmers have historically been blamed as leading culprits in ripping down tropical forests, but new data shows that commercial agriculture (beef, soy, and palm oil in particular) and timber production are now the leading culprits.

Small-scale farming has become less important to deforestation in recent decades, as rural populations have leveled off or declined and large businesses producing commodities for urban and export markets have expanded into tropical forest regions.

Deforestation has changed from a “state-initiated” process to an “enterprise-driven” one. The major agents of deforestation are corporations that analyze it as an economic alternative, and choose it instead of other options because it is advantageous in terms of dollars and cents.

Deforestation contributes somewhere between 15% – 20% of anthropogenic carbon emissions.

Read more

Today the House debated the FY 2012 Agriculture Appropriations bill, which “cuts aid for low-income pregnant women and their children and slashes a key overseas food aid program by about one-third below this year’s funding.” While these drastic cuts are morally indefensible on their own, the bill also contains massive cuts to the oil speculation watchdog – the Commodities Futures Trading Commission.

While experts agree that excessive speculation in the oil markets lead to higher gas prices, Rep. Jack Kingston of Georgia, the chairman of the House Rules Committee, simply dismissed the influence, and called debate about slashing CTFC funding a “red herring”:

What I suggest to you is that the discussion of the CFTC and oil speculators is a red herring. The real issue the Democrats failed to address is drilling for oil in order to increase supply.

Watch it:

But speculation’s role in rising gas prices is no secret, and it’s been proven time and time again that more drilling won’t help lower gas prices. In May 2011, the CFTC charged traders for artificially driving up the price of oil in 2008, and in April of this year, Goldman Sachs, the world’s largest commodity trader  admitted that speculation was to blame for high oil prices, telling its clients that speculation had added as much as $27 to the price of a barrel of oil . And during a Senate Financial Services Committee hearing, Rex Tillerson, the CEO of Exxon Mobil, said that if prices were reliant just on supply and demand, the price of a barrel of oil should be about $60 or $70 per barrel.

And while the CFTC has been tasked with cracking down on excessive commodities trading, they’ve got even more ground to cover.  The CFTC released data showing that hedge funds and speculators  “increased their positions in energy markets by 64 percent since June 2008 to the highest level on record.” And just last week, the CFTC reported that almost 90 percent of oil traders betting on rising prices are speculators, while just 12 percent of these bets were “held by producers, merchants, processors and users of the commodity.”

Despite this, the Republican’s House Agriculture spending bill, HR 2112, slashes funding for the CFTC by 44 percent from levels Obama requested.  The $172 million appropriated for the CFTC is also $30 million – 15 percent – less than 2011 levels. But this isn’t the first time the GOP has taken a stance against measures that would end gas price increases.  The House GOP already voted twice to slash funding to the CFTC. And as the Hill reported, these cuts to the CFTC “would significantly curtail the timely and effective implementation of the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act.”

Last night at the GOP debate in New Hampshire, Michele Bachmann (R-MN) said of the Environmental Protection Agency:

What we need to do is pass the mother of all repeal bills, but it’s the repeal bill that will get a job killing regulations. And I would begin with the EPA, because there is no other agency like the EPA. It should really be renamed the job-killing organization of America.

It may not be a big surprise that a tea party extremist like Bachmann wants to undo the Clean Air Act and the Clean Water Act, exposing our children to countless toxic pollutants.

What is a little more surprising is that the video shows the other presidential contenders start nodding in agreement with this radical attack on public health:

Read more

Mike Lukovich isn’t the only cartoonist thinking along those lines.

Tom Toles has his own twist on our dangerous obsession with the unimportant:

Read more

Asked about federal disaster relief for recent tornado and flood victims at last night’s GOP debate, candidate Mitt Romney called the spending “immoral” and said the Federal Emergency Management Agency should be privatized. With greenhouse pollution on the rise, the United States has been struck by a “punishing series of billion-dollar disasters.”

Embracing a radical anti-government ideology from the most extreme elements of the Tea Party, Romney said that the victims in Mississippi, Louisiana, Tennessee, Massachusetts, and other communities hit by tornadoes and flooding should not receive governmental assistance. He argued it is “simply immoral” for there to be deficit spending that could harm future generations:

Every time you have an occasion to take something from the federal government and send it back to the states, that’s the right direction. And if you can go even further and send it back to the private sector, that’s even better. [...] We cannot — we cannot afford to do those things without jeopardizing the future for our kids. It is simply immoral, in my view, for us to continue to rack up larger and larger debts and pass them on to our kids, knowing full well that we’ll all be dead and gone before it’s paid off. It makes no sense at all.

Watch it:

From its founding, the federal government has served the Constitutional goals of domestic tranquility and general welfare of the American people by aiding the victims of climate disasters. Romney’s extremist stance in favor of corporate “disaster vultures” would leave the United States in ruin, with only rich and well-connected people like the Romneys assured of getting food, water, shelter, and protection when disaster strikes.

If Romney actually cared about the welfare of future generations, he would take action to arrest global warming pollution instead of supporting the oil company agenda, and would cut subsidies for billionaires instead of balancing the budget on the backs of the poor and vulnerable.

Transcript: Read more

NOAA’s National Climatic Data Center has just released an overview of its new “1981-2010 Climate Normals” (PDF here).  Meteorologist Paul Douglas, founder and CEO of Broadcast Weather, explains what this means:

NOAA just released the latest climate “normals” for the USA. When you hear the “average high” or “average low”, it’s a running, 30-year average. Data was just updated to show the first decade of the 21st century….  For a look at how the new normals were calculated click here – the full data set is set to be released on July 1. For continuity the same 5,053 weather observation sites were used. Averaged together (all reporting stations) the inclusion of the 2000-2010 data showed a 0.6°F warming trend nationwide for the latest, running, 30-year averages.

Here is the one “showing the difference between the 1981-2010 normals and the older 1971-2000 numbers. The data shows a distinct warming trend, factoring in the last decade’s worth of highs and lows, a 2-4 temperature increase for January low temperatures.”

Why does winter warming in the North Central and North West matter?  We’ve already seen the new USGS study that found global warming is driving Rockies snowpack loss unrivaled in 800 years, which threatens western water supplies.

Then we have the voracious bark beetle, which just loves warmer winters.

Climate change inherently favors invasive pests.  Milder winters since 1994 have reduced the winter death rate of beetle larvae in places like Wyoming from 80% per year to under 10%.

Read more

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

Saudi oil capacity depleted: Goldman

Saudi Arabia’s cushion of spare oil capacity would shrink to almost nothing if the kingdom quickly ramps up to 10 million barrels per day (bpd), Goldman Sachs’ global head of commodities research said on Monday.

Last week the kingdom said it would unilaterally produce as much oil as the market needed after the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries failed to reach agreement as a whole on output policy.

Saudi newspaper al-Hayat reported Saudi Arabia would boost output to 10 million bpd in July, which Jeff Currie of Goldman Sachs said would leave only 500,000 bpd spare.

“If you get up to (10 mln bpd) you start to really create a very tight market relative to spare capacity,” he told the Reuters Global Energy and Climate Summit.

Joe Romm:  Many experts question whether the Saudis in fact can boost output that high, as I discuss here.  And even if the Saudis have enough remaining capacity to significantly reduce the price of oil now, that won’t last long — see “WikiLeaks peak oil bombshell: Saudi Arabian reserves overstated by 40%, global production plateau immiment.”  And one thing is for sure, the Saudis  aren’t doing this to help American consumers — see Saudi Prince: “We Don’t Want The West To Go Find Alternatives” To Oil.

Read more

Read more

As gas prices have started to escalate with the coming of summer, a number of House Republicans have showed up at local gas stations in their districts to pump gas for constituents, as a part of a stunt to advocate for more oil drilling (which would do little to nothing to lower prices overall).

Now, Chattanooga, Tennesse’s WRCB TV reports that one of these stunts cost a hard-working gas station employee a day’s pay. Last week, Rep. Chuck Fleischmann (R-TN) showed up at a Raceway gas station to pump gas for a day. Because the congressman was there working that day, there was only room for one additional employee. Raceway employee Justin Lewis, who works 60 hours a week at two Raceways, was forced to stay home and miss a day’s pay. Lewis told WRCB that he doesn’t make a congressman’s hefty $160,000 salary and that he can’t afford to miss a day’s work:

Justin Lewis normally spends Friday mornings behind the counter at the Raceway on Signal Mountain Road. Last week his schedule changed with a call from his employer. “I was told not to come in because Chuck Fleischmann was going to be working my shift,” said Lewis. [...]

“I needed that shift, I don’t make $160,000 a year,” said Lewis, “so missing a shift means a lot to me.” [...] “It’s not a Republican issue, it’s not a Democrat issue,” said Lewis, “our economy is suffering, everybody is suffering, work is hard to find, money doesn’t go as far as it used to.”

Watch an interview with Lewis in WCRB’s report:

“He pulls down a lot of money for his position, and in the state that our country is in right now, I don’t think it’s the time for grandstanding,” Lewis told a local paper. “I’d rather him do his job than mine.”

Compared to Fleischmann’s six-figure salary, the Chattanooga Times reports that the average gas station employee in Tennessee’s 3rd District earns about $17,500 a year.

People want to know: Are green jobs real? The answer is resoundingly “yes.”

With roughly 93,500 direct and indirect jobs, the American solar industry now employs about 9,200 more workers than the U.S. steel production sector, according to 2010 Bureau of Labor Statistics. The American steel industry has historically been a symbol of the country’s industrial might and economic prosperity. But today, the solar industry has the potential to overtake that image as we build a new, clean-energy economy.

Last week, Germany’s economic development agency announced similarly big news: There are now more than 100,000 workers employed in the German solar PV industry alone. Why is that so significant? The U.S. figures take into account solar jobs in PV, solar hot water and concentrating solar power; Germany is only factoring in solar PV.

And as a reader over at Clean Technica observed: “The US has about 312 million people while Germany has 82 million, about 25% as many people…. That makes the German solar industry more than four times as large an employer than US steel based on country size.”

Read more

Here is the must-read “Open Letter” from leading Australian scientists (list below):

The overwhelming scientific evidence tells us that human greenhouse gas emissions are resulting in climate changes that cannot be explained by natural causes.