James Hansen was arrested on Monday, Aug. 29, on day 10 of the anti-Keystone XL pipeline protests at the White House. In total, 521 participants have been arrested. Credit: Tar Sands Action

The nation’s top climate scientist was arrested today protesting the tar sands pipeline.  Back in June, he famously wrote, “Exploitation of tar sands would make it implausible to stabilize climate and avoid disastrous global climate impacts.”

SolveClimate has more:

The president-to-be’s campaign promises had led him to believe that Obama had the tenacity and knowledge to make climate change a signature issue. Hansen was hopeful Obama would communicate directly with citizens instead of letting politicians hijack that agenda. It’s difficult and rare, he added, to find leaders such as Abraham Lincoln, Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Winston Churchill who are strong enough to tell the truth and courageously commit to a cause.

Now, Hansen fears President Obama will fumble his defining moment on global warming.

“If the tar sands pipeline is approved, we will be back and we will grow,” he said. “For the sake of our children and our grandchildren, we must find somebody who is working for our dream.”

Obama already fumbled his defining moment on global warming (see “The failed presidency of Barack Obama“).  So we better find that new “somebody” PDQ!

In a call to arms this afternoon at the National Clean Energy Summit, Vice President Joe Biden made the case for continued investments in renewable energy, explaining that “we have to unleash” innovation in the sector to stay competitive and rise to the environmental and economic challenges of the day.

“If we don’t develop renewable energy, we will make the biggest mistake in this nation’s history,” he explained a crowd of over 700 policymakers, investors, students and other business professionals in Las Vegas.

He also criticized political opponents of clean energy investments who have fought to de-fund major R&D and deployment programs, explaining “the President and I are not going to listen to those voices.”

Biden did not lay out any new policy priorities in today’s speech. Instead, he used the platform to reiterate the Obama Administration’s support for investing in renewable electricity and fuels. In his January State of the Union Address, Obama called this period of history “our generation’s Sputnik moment,” and outlined a broad plan to get 80% of the nation’s energy from clean resources by 2035.

With the potential for significant reductions in long-term spending on certain energy programs, the Administration may find it difficult to make the investments needed to come close to achieving that goal. While Biden didn’t address those specific challenges, he did make it clear that that the White House was at least standing behind the goal rhetorically.

“I have one specific message. Our country has a choice. Are we going to rise to the challenges like our grandfathers and grandmothers did? Or are we going to be a follower?”

Budget negotiations this fall will be a true test.

To see the rest of today’s speeches and roundtables at NCES, you can watch the live streaming here.

In order to be a viable Republican presidential candidate in 2012, denying the science of climate change is a must. With all the leading candidates attacking basic science in varying degrees, it’s not a surprise that our Nobel-Prize-winning Energy Secretary, Steven Chu, believes science education should be one of the nation’s top priorities.

In a speech this morning at the National Clean Energy Summit, Chu outlined three major policy needs to “move aggressively” to develop clean energy — with science and energy education being on the top of his wish list.

Although climate change did not actually come up in his speech, Chu spoke to Climate Progress afterward and lamented the manufactured political “debate” over climate change, saying that “it saddens me. And I think as a scientist you have to re-double your efforts.”

Steering clear of anything political when asked whether the GOP’s anti-science platform scared him, Chu simply used the opportunity to explain the basic physics of climate change, adding “it’s not rocket science.”

Watch it:

America, Chu says, is the only place in the world where there’s an actual “debate” over climate science. He blamed the confused political situation largely on the fossil fuel industry, which, he says, has been effective in sowing doubt and “who have an interest in seeing that action isn’t taken. This reminds me exactly of what we saw in the tobacco industry.”

His remarks came from separate audio and video interviews at the National Clean Energy Summit.

It doesn’t take an accomplished physicist and Nobel Prize winner to notice that something is wrong. But at a time when uttering the word “climate” in Washington is anathema, it’s a good thing we have someone leading the Energy Department who isn’t afraid to talk about the issue.

Related Post:

• Steven Chu on climate change (2/09): “Wake up,” America, “we’re looking at a scenario where there’s no more agriculture in California.”

The remnants of Hurricane Irene have passed over the East Coast, but rivers swollen by the storm’s extreme rain continue to endanger homes and lives from New Jersey to Vermont with the worst flooding in decades (and after the region had seen the wettest August on record even before Irene). Washed-out bridges and roads from the torrential rains cut off access to 11 towns in Vermont, leading FEMA officials to use helicopters to deliver supplies.

But once the floodwaters recede, the damage will go beyond rebuilding homes, bridges, and roads destroyed by extreme rains. Residents in the flood-soaked areas will have to worry about sewage, pesticides, and other contaminants that were left behind by the flood or that were swept into East Coast waterways. One New York apartment building has already been evacuated because oil carried by the floodwaters contaminated several apartments. The U.S. Geological Survey sent crews to follow the storm and test for bacteria and chemicals in rivers, according to the New York Times:

“What typically happens is that you get a significant amount of rainfall that leads to a significant amount of runoff,” said Charles Crawford, sampling coordinator for the agency.

That runoff, he said, carries pesticides from farmland, gardens and lawns like those used for termites around the foundation of homes. [...] Excessive amounts of nutrients like nitrogen and phosphorus, Mr. Crawford said, could cause algae blooms that can threaten aquatic life and fisheries. And sewage in the high flows from the hurricane can lead to higher concentrations of E. Coli in areas that use surface water for drinking, he said.

Contaminated water is frequently a problem following flooding from heavy rains or storm surge from a massive hurricane. After Hurricane Katrina, tests found extremely high levels of sewage bacteria in water samples. When thunderstorms deluged Nashville in May 2010, health officials warned residents to treat all floodwater as if it had sewage in it because of reports about overflowing sewage systems. Floodwaters from the Mississippi River in May swept pesticides and fertilizer down the river and into the Gulf of Mexico, and this highly polluted water swamped 3 million acres of farmland along the way.

Global warming continues to make hurricanes more intense and dangerous and fuels more “500-year” floods along the Mississippi River. “Once in a lifetime” storms are no longer a rarity, and handling the dangerous chemicals dispursed by these floodwaters and heavy rains will continue to potentially endanger people’s health and harm aquatic life in waterways as weather patterns continue to grow more extreme.

Presidents say the darndest things to kids. Obama opened up on climate change in a recent interview with a child reporter from Scholastic News.

Compared to his recent reticence to talk about global warming and climate change at all, Obama is positively loquacious here.  Here’s the transcript:

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In 2009, the world’s largest geothermal developer, Ormat, moved into the solar market – using its power plant construction expertise to build solar PV and CSP plants in Israel.

And in the last couple of years, a number of CSP developers have partnered with natural gas and coal operators to create hybrid solar/fossil plants in an effort to lower the installed cost of solar and make fossil generation more efficient.

It was only a matter of time before we saw the hybrid geothermal-solar plant.

A group of business and policy leaders were in Las Vegas at the National Clean Energy Summit this morning announcing the groundbreaking of the world’s first solar-geothermal power plant – a 24-MW facility that will combine 80,000 polycrystalline PV modules with traditional hydrothermal technology.

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Guest repost from The Way Things Break.

ConCERN Trolling on Cosmic Rays, Clouds, and Climate Change

Depending on where you get your science news, you might be hearing claims to the effect that CLOUD at CERN has “proven that cosmic rays drive climate change”, or something to that effect. That’s certainly the impression that climate “skeptics” would like you to get. Unfortunately for “skeptics” (and if we don’t rein in greenhouse emissions, everyone else), it’s not true. While cosmic rays may have some influence on cloud formation, they are not responsible for the present, human-driven climatic change or alleged changes in the geologic past.

What’s the deal?

Although seemingly out of fashion for a while until recently, the “cosmic rays are driving climate” myth has long been one of the mainstays of the self-contradictory climate “skeptic” argument stable, and it’s something covered fairly often at this blog (previous posts here, here, here, here, here, and here). And as with any good falsehood, it starts with a kernel of truth.

It is completely accepted in mainstream science that galactic cosmic rays (GCRs) might be able to influence the nucleation process of potential cloud condensation nuclei (CCN), and that it’s conceivable that this could influence cloud behavior at some level. As the IPCC AR4 noted (I’ll include the full text at the end, after the jump):

By altering the population of CCN and hence microphysical cloud properties (droplet number and concentration), cosmic rays may also induce processes analogous to the indirect effect of tropospheric aerosols. The presence of ions, such as produced by cosmic rays, is recognised as influencing several microphysical mechanisms (Harrison and Carslaw, 2003). Aerosols may nucleate preferentially on atmospheric cluster ions. In the case of low gas-phase sulphuric acid concentrations, ion-induced nucleation may dominate over binary sulphuric acid-water nucleation.

While a plausible mechanism exists, real world verifications are necessarily difficult to undertake. The CLOUD project at CERN is seeking to do exactly that. The “skeptic” and right wing blogospheres are abuzz because Jasper Kirkby, et al. have just published the first results in Nature (Kirkby 2011).

RealClimate has a good rundown of what Kirkby et al.’s results do and do not mean. The short version is that Kirkby et al. do find increased aerosol nucleation under increased ionization (i.e. “more cosmic rays”), particularly in the mid-troposphere, but the effect is smaller at warmer, lower levels where the cosmic ray-climate myth proponents claim it has its greatest climatic effect. Lead author Jasper Kirkby has tried to set the record straight, stating (all following emphases mine):

[The paper] actually says nothing about a possible cosmic-ray effect on clouds and climate, but it’s a very important first step.

While their results provide some confirmation of the potential mechanism by which GCRs might induce cloud nucleation, they in no way demonstrate that GCRs do significantly promote cloud formation in the real world, let alone support the myth that GCRs drive significant climatic change.

“But wait!” I’m sure some of you may be thinking, “the Kirkby et al. results certainly don’t disprove GCRs drive significant climatic changes.” And that’s true enough.

How Do We Know That Cosmic Rays Aren’t Driving Significant Climatic Change?

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Click Here to Watch Clean Energy Summit Webcast Starting 9 am PST

Reid, Chu and Biden Kick Off the Day, Climate Progress Will Have Exclusive Interterviews

Politico opens its Morning Energy briefing:

TODAY’S MAIN EVENT: The big happening in energy this week is the fourth annual Clean Energy Summit today in Las Vegas, where Vice President Joe Biden, Energy Secretary Steven Chu, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, Nevada Gov. Brian Sandoval, California Gov. Jerry Brown and Washington Gov. Chris Gregoire are headlining.

Senate majority leader Harry Reid released highlights from his opening remarks:

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Andy Burt being arrested at Keystone XL tar sands pipeline protest in DC August 21.

By Aylie Baker, Andy Burt, and Fran Ludwig

The ride to Anacostia Precinct is a short one, not more than ten minutes.

Thirteen women rode in the police wagon. No one had been arrested before — and yet — with our hands cuffed behind our backs and our bodies slick with sweat in the 90-degree heat, we were not afraid. There were only smiles on our faces.

Sirens blared as we left the White House gates and drove southeast over the Anacostia River. To get to Anacostia precinct  — it turns out — you have to follow signs toward Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard.

Though he died before the first Earth Day, King would have been proud to see the scores of protestors lining up in front of the White House last week. He would have recognized something in the faces of the clergy, doctors, seniors and college students. Their call for equality and justice echoed that of the people who joined him on the streets of Montgomery.

Sunday we gathered for the Tar Sands Action — a 2-week protest that may be the largest act of civil disobedience in the history of the climate movement. We were protesting the construction of a massive oil pipeline from the tar sands of Alberta, Canada to the Gulf of Mexico.

In simple terms, the Keystone XL Pipeline is a 1,700 mile fuse to the largest carbon bomb on the planet. NASA climatologist James Hansen has stated that if we fully exploit the tar sands, it’s “essentially game over” for the climate. The amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere could rise far beyond 550 parts per million (ppm). Currently we’re near 395 ppm. Modern human civilization developed during a narrow range around 280 ppm.

The proposed pipeline runs through tribal lands, national water sources, and fertile farmland. Getting at the tar sands means cutting down a tract of Boreal forest the size the United Kingdom, which, like Brazil’s rainforest, helps to cancel out CO2 emissions that cause global warming.

And it’s marginalized people that King fought for who are most affected by climate change.

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