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:

All of New Mexico is in drought conditions, southern New Mexico in exceptional drought. U.S. Drought Monitor.

180-day precipitation in New Mexico is greater than 75 percent below normal. National Weather Service.

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)

The Board of Directors of the American Association for the Advancement of Science has issued a must-read statement on “Personal Attacks on Climate Scientists.”  It begins:

We are deeply concerned by the extent and nature of personal attacks on climate scientists. Reports of harassment, death threats, and legal challenges have created a hostile environment that inhibits the free exchange of scientific findings and ideas and makes it difficult for factual information and scientific analyses to reach policymakers and the public.

Of course, the climate science deniers don’t want factual information and scientific analysis to reach policymakers and the public untainted by their lies.

The AAAS, which publishes the journal Science, is specifically talking about cyberbullying and lawsuits going after two of the nation’s top climatologist, Michael Mann and James Hansen, as their news release makes clear:

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We’ve been reporting on statistics from the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization that illustrate a dire global problem: We squander nearly one third of our food through food waste (on the consumption side) and food losses (on the production side). In developed countries, over 40% of losses come from companies and consumers throwing out perfectly good food. And on the production side, we lose enough food to feed at least 48 million people due to inefficiencies in harvesting, storage and delivery, according to the FAO. The WorldWatch Institute is addressing the problem through its Nourishing the Planet project, a two-year effort to make the food system more equitable and efficient. It couldn’t come soon enough. — Stephen Lacey

From the WorldWatch Institute:

At a time when the land, water, and energy resources necessary to feed a global population of 6.9 billion are increasingly limited  —and when at least 1 billion people remain chronically hungry-food losses mean a waste of those resources and a failure of our food system to meet the needs of the poor. The Worldwatch Institute’s Nourishing the Planet project, a two-year evaluation of environmentally sustainable agricultural innovations to alleviate hunger, is highlighting ways to make the most of the food that is produced and to make more food available to those who need it most.

According to Tristram Stuart, a contributing author of Worldwatch’s State of the World 2011: Innovations that Nourish the Planet report, some 150 million tons of grains are lost annually in low-income countries, six times the amount needed to meet the needs of all the hungry people in the developing world. Meanwhile, industrialized countries waste some 222 million tons of perfectly good food annually, a quantity nearly equivalent to the 230 million tons that sub-Saharan Africa produces in a year. Unlike farmers in many developing countries, however, agribusinesses in industrial countries have numerous tools at their disposal to prevent food from spoiling-including pasteurization and preservation facilities, drying equipment, climate-controlled storage units, transport infrastructure, and chemicals designed to expand shelf-life.

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

Talk of natural gas bubble draws industry ire

Big energy company executives and government researchers are firing back at a recent New York Times story suggesting the recent boom in natural gas production from shale rock is unsustainable and perhaps fraudulent.

“You really have to wonder why the New York Times is campaigning against cleaner-burning, domestically produced natural gas,” ExxonMobil Vice President Ken Cohen wrote in a blogpost Monday. “If the writer had bothered to call us, we would have told him that ExxonMobil’s investment approach is disciplined and based on a long-term view of global market conditions.”

[Joe Romm:  You really have to wonder why Big Oil is still campaigning against clean energy legislation and funding climate science denial, if they actually care about "clean-burning, domestically produced" energy (see below).]

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By Jessica Goad, Manager of Research and Outreach, Public Lands Project, Center for American Progress Action Fund.

America’s national parks are well-loved by Americans of all political leanings due to their immense beauty, function in preserving the past, and their iconic role in our history. But the findings of a new study released yesterday by the National Parks Conservation Association on the State of America’s National Parks show that efforts to protect national parks are more challenging than ever in the face of climate change. Indeed, it is an ironic reality that parks — the natural reserves that we will depend on to help our country and its natural resources adapt to climate change — are themselves threatened by it and other human influences. The addition of climate change to the already-evident stressors of invasive species, industrial development, degraded water, and dirty air will have an unprecedented, compounding effect on national parks, and will severely limit their abilities to bounce back from the impacts that they are already feeling:

Climate change poses a long-term threat to park resources by exacerbating landscape fragmentation and complicating traditional approaches to resource management.

Climate change is a “systemic threat” to the character and appeal of national parks, chipping away at what makes them unique and loved in the first place: glaciers melting in Glacier National Park, Joshua trees disappearing from Joshua Tree National Park, redwoods threatened in Redwood National Park, and the coral reefs surrounding Virgin Islands National Park getting bleached with rising sea temperatures.

A few weeks ago, Think Progress reported on three prominent Republicans speaking out in support of parks, an odd occurrence in an era where public lands are politicized more than ever before. Rep. Cynthia Lummis (R-WY), on the influential House Appropriations Committee, noted that fighting for the park service budget is her “number one priority” in advance of the parks’ 100th anniversary in 2016. But Republicans on committees overseeing the national park service continue to deny the very existence of man-made global warming:

- Rep. Cynthia Lummis (R-WY), the self-crowned hero of the park service budget: “I believe the jury is still out on whether mankind can alter global climate trends.” [Lummis]

- Rep. Rob Bishop (R-UT), Chairman of the House Natural Resources Subcommittee on National Parks, Forests and Public Land: “Despite the fact that scientific data underlying the studies of global warming appear to have been manipulated to produce an intended outcome, EPA officials disregarded the contaminated science, calling it little more than a ‘blip on the history of this process.’”
” [Bishop, 12/08/09]

- Rep. Mike Simpson (R-ID), Chairman of the House Appropriations Subcommittee on Interior and Environment: “While scientists cannot explain the climate changes of the past few decades without including the effects of elevated greenhouse gas (GHG) concentrations resulting from the use of fossil fuels, there is widespread disagreement as to the magnitude of human influence on the climate and the degree to which any effort by humanity to reduce carbon output would slow or reverse the effects of climate change.” [Simpson]

- Every GOP member of those subcommittees: The seven GOP members of the Interior and Environment Appropriations subcommittee and the 13 members of the House Natural Resources Subcommittee on National Parks, Forests and Public Lands all supported H.R. 910 to reverse the scientific endangerment finding that greenhouse pollution threatens the public welfare [Dirty Secrets]

Major cuts have already been made on the National Park Service budget this year, which will keep the agency from being able to address man-made crises that national parks are facing. The Continuing Resolution passed by Republicans to fund the government through September made $11.5 million in cuts to the national park system when compared to FY 2010 levels. The FY 2012 is still in the midst of being worked out in Appropriations Committee, but House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan’s “roadmap,” passed by the House in April, cut funding to Interior and environment agencies by $2.1 billion. The park system will be underfunded, at a time when they are the most vulnerable to climate change.

Despite the pressure from deniers, the National Park Service is already undertaking efforts to anticipate and adapt to a changing world, such as the Climate Change Response Council, the creation of which Republicans bashed. As National Park Service Director Jon Jarvis said in 2010, “I believe climate change is fundamentally the greatest threat to the integrity of our national parks that we have ever experienced.” And the park service has an important role in the face of climate change, the NPCA report explains:

The National Park Service is in a unique position among federal agencies to communicate to the public both the consequences of climate change and the opportunities to avert some of those consequences by reducing greenhouse gas emissions.

As the National Parks Conservation Association noted in its report, “the threats facing America’s national parks are serious and sobering. Our parks are becoming biological lifeboats in a changing and challenging landscape.” We should take this call to action seriously — it’s the only way that our parks will survive.

Dominion, one of the largest utilities in the U.S., says it wants to convert three of its Virginia coal plants to run on waste biomass from timber operations. If approved by the state’s regulatory commission, it could bring about 150 MW of renewable capacity to the state and turn two “peaking” coal plants that operate only 25% of the time into round-the-clock generators that operate 90% of the time.

Like other coal-to-biomass projects we’ve reported on in the past, this one will create about 250 direct and indirect local jobs and only cost the typical ratepayer about 14 cents per month. So it will be good for the local economy and will increase renewable generation – but is it a core climate solution?

If biomass can help power plant owners ease away from coal faster, that is certainly a good thing. The Dominion announcement is particularly relevant given the number of planned plant retirements in the coal industry – there are currently 190 generators around the U.S. set to be shut down, and there’s a dwindling appetite to replace them with more coal.

While some independent power providers suggest that natural gas could fill the gap, it will be important for baseload renewables like biomass to be used in existing coal plants that don’t require much new build-out of infrastructure. And considering that new EPA mercury and air toxics regulations exclude biomass for now, the resource may look more attractive to plant owners like Dominion.

Joe Romm wrote about the benefits of using biomass in coal facilities a couple years ago:

Cofiring is a well-demonstrated strategy with multiple benefits. From a practical perspective, most of the existing coal plants are mostly paid off. Plus they are fully permitted and have all the necessary transmission plus they are connected to freight train lines and water supply. Plus this is baseload power. So you avoid all of the problems associated with citing new renewables in the Midwest or Southwest. Cofiring is thus a key near-term strategy for meeting climate goals — and renewable standards — in the midwest and southeast.

And, again, this is baseload power, and your typical coal plant has a capacity factor that is some 2 to 3 times larger than that of wind. So 20 GW of biomass coal firing will generate as much power as 50 GW of wind.

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—Bill McKibben, in a HuffPost repost

It was big news in Canada when, in 2008, the country slipped from the top-ten list of the world’s most peaceful countries (all the way to eleventh). By this year, it was back in eighth, 74 places above the U.S. and, when liberals in the U.S. feel despairing, what dominates their fantasy life but “moving to Canada?”

And yet, today, you could make an argument that Canada has actually become one of the earth’s more irresponsible nations — namely, when it comes to the environment. Indeed, you could argue that the world would be better off if the government in Ottawa was replaced by, say, the one in Brasilia, which has made a far better show of attending to the planet’s welfare. It’s a tale of physics, chemistry, and most of all economics, and it all starts in the western province of Alberta.

The Province’s Tar Sands cover an area larger than the United Kingdom and contain most of the world’s supply of bitumen, a particularly sticky form of petroleum that must be heated or diluted before it can be pumped. Because it’s so unwieldy, it’s only been in recent years that large-scale development of the tar sands have taken place. The steep rise in global oil prices has set off a boom in the region, with all that naturally follows (prostitutes have reported incomes as high as $15,000 a week).

But this is a boom unlike others. It’s the first huge oil play of the global-warming era, the first time we’ve dangerously stepped onto new turf, even though we understand the stakes.

NASA’s James Hansen, the earth’s premier climatologist, has laid out these stakes with some precision.

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