Four new papers confirm that “the world is warming fast,” as the Economist summed it up.  One paper finds that “the effect of urban heating on the global trends is nearly negligible.”  Another finds that the work of the scientist-smearing denier Anthony Watts is pure BS.

Okay, that’s all “dog bites man” stuff, which is to say, not news in the least.  The news is that this work was funded in part by Charles Koch, a leading funder of deniers, and two of the key authors are well-known smearers of climate scientists, Judith Curry and Richard Muller.  Hot dog!

Climate Progress actually broke this story back in March — see Exclusive: Berkeley temperature study results “confirm the reality of global warming and support in all essential respects the historical temperature analyses of the NOAA, NASA, and HadCRU.”  That was based on an email Climatologist Ken Caldeira sent me after seeing their preliminary results and a public talk by Muller confirming:

• “We are seeing substantial global warming”
• “None of the effects raised by the [skeptics] is going to have anything more than a marginal effect on the amount of global warming.”

But now the Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature Study have completed their “independent” analysis of all of the temperature stations and found a rate of warming since the 1950s as high NOAA and NASA and faster than the (much maligned) UK Hadley/CRU data:

The decadal land-surface average temperature using a 10-year moving average of surface temperatures over land. Anomalies are relative to the Jan 1950 – December 1979 mean. The grey band indicates 95% statistical and spatial uncertainty interval.

If there is any news here it is that Watts has been demonstrated once and for all to be an “anti-scientist” — not just someone who routinely smears scientists,  but someone who represents the negation of the scientific method.  No facts can change his conclusions.  He is a science rejectionist — and an uber-hypocritical one, as we’ll see.

Watts had famously promised “I’m prepared to accept whatever result they produce, even if it proves my premise wrong.“  He and other deniers even started working with BEST to influence the outcome, as I first reported here:  “Bombshell: Climate Science deniers claim to have full access to Berkeley temperature study work-product — and are now working with the Berkeley team!”

But BEST just released a whole paper devoted to debunking Watts’ life work –  his effort to smear climate scientists by accusing them of knowingly using bad temperature stations to rig their results.  NOAA had debunked Watts 2 years ago (see here), of course.  But now it’s friendly fire trained on Watts.

Here’s what the BEST paper found:

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When mortgage lenders consider whether or not to give a homeowner a loan, they look at a variety of factors like income, value of personal assets, taxes and property value. (At least, they do now after poor lending standards helped create the financial crisis.)

But underwriters are still completely ignoring another very important factor in valuing a mortgage: energy costs.

With the average homeowner spending around $2,000 on energy costs — more than on real estate taxes or home insurance, according to the Institute for Market Transformation — properly accounting for energy use can give American consumers a better picture of how much they’re using. That, in turn, can help homeowners make better choices about what kind of home to buy, and help them determine if they need an efficiency upgrade.

A new bill introduced in the Senate yesterday by a bi-partisan pair of Senators — Georgia Republican Johnny Isakson and Colorado Democrat Michael Bennet — will require mortgage providers to factor energy costs into mortgages. Called the SAVE Act (Sensible Accounting to Value Energy), the law would instruct the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) to develop new guidelines for appraisal that include energy.

In addition to receiving accurate information that will help them with a purchasing decision, the SAVE Act would allow homeowners to finance energy efficiency retrofits through their mortgages.

The economic impact of the SAVE program could be huge. According to an analysis put together by the American Council for an Energy Efficient Economy and the Institute for Market Transformation, these simple guideline changes could help create around 83,000 net jobs and over $1 billion in energy savings over the next decade. All with no cost to the taxpayer.

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by Ben Dimiero, in a Media Matters cross-post

Last month, Daily Caller reporter Matthew Boyle published a story that was basically catnip for the anti-regulation crowd. Citing a court brief from the Environmental Protection Agency, Boyle wrote that the EPA was “asking for taxpayers to shoulder the burden of up to 230,000 new bureaucrats — at a cost of $21 billion — to attempt to implement” new climate change regulations. Boyle also took to Twitter to broadcast how EPA administrator “LISA JACKSON wants an ARMY OF 230k BUREAUCRATS.”

Predictably, the story got picked up by Fox News, the office of Sen. James Inhofe, and the usual climate-change-denial suspects. Unfortunately for them, Boyle’s story was 100% false. Boyle completely misread the court brief, which detailed how the EPA had avoided the scenario he described.

Boyle’s misfire was widely ridiculed, but rather than admit fault and correct the error, the Daily Caller stuck to their guns. Executive editor David Martosko compounded the damage to the publication’s credibility by issuing a snide comment to Politico and following that with a misleading editor’s note on the Caller website.

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In the aftermath of the Fukushima nuclear plant disaster, U.S. regulators have sought tougher standards on nuclear safety at home. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission has given the green light on most of the safety upgrades recommended by a task force in July, which indicated the “existing patchwork of regulatory requirements and other safety initiatives” is not enough. It will take up to five years to implement the new requirements, including better preparedness for power loss, floods and earthquakes.

Disaster preparedness is not a hypothetical discussion. In September, at least 27 nuclear reactors showed risk in the 5.8 earthquake on the East Coast. Yet before Fukushima, lawmakers belittled the issue of nuclear safety, including a number of Republican senators. Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) recognized the need for “straight talk” only after Japan’s crisis:

McCain: I think what happens now to this power plant as to whether the damage is contained or not will have a direct effect on the future of nuclear power in the United States. Let’s have a little straight talk.

Before the disaster in Japan, McCain dismissed nuclear safety. His views on the issue in his 2008 presidential campaign amounted to “blah, blah, blah.”

The British government has just released the findings of an independent report it commissioned last year. The report, conducted by Professor John Hills, director of the Centre for Analysis of Social Exclusion at the London School of Economics, examines the problem of fuel poverty, which involves people being unable to afford the fuel to heat their homes.

Hills’s research has found that 2,700 United Kingdom residents die every year due to causes related to fuel poverty — more than the country loses to road accidents:

This problem is significantly greater for those living in the coldest quarter of homes than those in the warmest quarter of homes. Using this difference, recent analysis attributes about a fifth of excess winter deaths to living in cold homes. Even if only half of this is due to fuel poverty, that would still mean 2,700 deaths – more than the number who die on the roads – every year.

As the U.K.’s Green Party notes in a press release, the “Big Six energy companies earned over £30billion in profits over the last five years.” The Greens are calling on the government to enact policies that would require these companies to use their profits to help people afford fuel.

The global challenge of climate change poses a perfect moral storm — by failing to take action to rein in carbon emissions, the current generation is spreading the costs of its behavior far into the future. Why should people in the future pay to clean up our mess?

Here are some excerpts of a piece Stephen Gardiner published in Yale Environment 360, “The Ethical Dimension of Tackling Climate Change”:

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With some labor unions on one side and environmentalists lobbying on the other, Democrats are still split over the massive Keystone XL pipeline TransCanada has proposed and are pressuring the White House on both sides. The State Department has overseen TransCanada’s permit application to build the pipeline and supports the project, but final approval rests with President Obama.

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) weighed in for the first time on Oct. 5 in a letter to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton questioning the 1,700-mile project that would stretch from Canada to the Gulf Coast:

“The proponents of this pipeline would be wiser to invest instead in job-creating clean energy projects, like renewable power, energy efficiency or advanced vehicles and fuels that would employ thousands of people in the United States rather than increasing our dependency on unsustainable supplies of dirty and polluting oil that could easily be exported,” Reid wrote.

But after the bankruptcy of Solyndra — a solar energy company — Stephen Brown, vice president of federal government affairs for oil refiner Tesoro, asked why Reid would even focus on renewable energy instead of oil. “It will come as a shock to the tens of thousands of professional skilled American refinery workers, many of whom are union members, that their jobs do not have the same cachet as politically correct ‘green jobs’ in Solyndra-like endeavors,” Brown said.

In contrast to Reid’s letter, 22 House Democrats sent a letter to Obama asking him to support the Keystone XL project because of the jobs it could create:

[T]he Keystone XL Pipeline will inject $20 billion of private sector investment into the American economy, create 20,000 direct jobs, spur the creation of 118,000 spin-off jobs, payout $5 billion in taxes to local counties over the project’s lifetime, bolster America’s energy security and strengthen our national security. [...] We are confident that the Department of State’s review process and the project operator’s commitment to employing well-trained union workers will yield the most appropriately routed, safest and environmentally sound pipeline in our nation.

Out of the entire House Democratic Caucus, 22 members is hardly a majority, and most who signed onto the letter are moderate Blue Dog Democrats. And the State Department estimates that the pipeline will create fewer jobs than TransCanada has estimated, with many being temporary positions. The environmental risks for a pipeline crossing the United States and Canada also could be much higher than previous assumed, according to the Environmental Protection Agency.

Previously, former Vice President Al Gore has pushed for Obama to block the pipeline, and Gov. Dave Heineman (R-NE) has said he opposes the pipeline because of the risk it would pose to one of his state’s major water supplies.

One of the biggest source of confusion and errors in climate discussions concerns “carbon” versus “carbon dioxide.”

I was reminded of this last week because of my post Economics Stunner: “Oil and Coal-Fired Power Plants Have Air Pollution Damages Larger Than Their Value Added.” I noticed that Skeptical Science innocently confused C and CO2.

The economists had written, “We assume that the central estimate of the social cost of carbon is $27 per ton of carbon” (which is to say a measly $7.36 per ton of CO2).  SkS assumed the authors meant CO2 couldn’t believe that leading economists could possibly have lowballed climate impacts so much.  As SkS writes in their correction, this puts their social cost of carbon “near the lower limit we have seen in recent economic studies!”

SkS needn’t feel bad.  I’ve seen this mistake made a dozen times — in fact, I got an email from the Director for Modeling and Analysis at one of the largest  fossil fuel companies in the world about my post, and he got it backwards!

The paragraph I usually include in my writing:

Some people use carbon rather than carbon dioxide as a metric. The fraction of carbon in carbon dioxide is the ratio of their weights. The atomic weight of carbon is 12 atomic mass units, while the weight of carbon dioxide is 44, because it includes two oxygen atoms that each weigh 16. So, to switch from one to the other, use the formula: One ton of carbon equals 44/12 = 11/3 = 3.67 tons of carbon dioxide. Thus 11 tons of carbon dioxide equals 3 tons of carbon, and a price of $30 per ton of carbon dioxide equals a price of $110 per ton of carbon.

The reason this confusion arises so much is that scientists usually use carbon, because they are studying the carbon cycle, and governments also usually use carbon, because the scientists do.  But “carbon” is not intuitive, whereas carbon dioxide is what we all emit — that is why businesses and the public typically report numbers in terms of carbon dioxide.

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In last night’s interview with former EPA Administrator Carol Browner, Stephen Colbert came out swinging with a line straight out of the Republican playbook:

“The EPA is useless. That is an indisputable fact…We protected the air and the water. We cleaned it up. Now you’re just rubbing it in our faces by continuing to keep it clean.”

Colbert gave Browner, a Center for American Progress Senior Fellow, the chance to defend the EPA, who explained why regulations create more economic opportunity. Ultimately, Colbert came up with his own solution — describing why pollution is a better job creator than cleaning up the environment:

“If there’s more pollution then there’s more work for the doctors who have to cure us of the diseases we get from the things we eat and drink. I can use your logic against you.”

Rick Perry and Michele Bachmann were furiously taking notes and have already added the talking point to their energy plans.

Watch it:

Colbert also has a very funny intro to the interview, in which he mocks the Republican claims that the EPA is a “job killer.”

“Yes. This job-killing cemetery is murdering jobs and then burying them in itself. Jobs. Everyone knows pollution is a job creator.”

Watch it:

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by Tom Kenworthy

Rick Perry recently made the ludicrous statement that there is not “a single incident of unsafe hydraulic fracturing for natural gas.” Tell that to the residents of Dimock, Pennsylvania who are finally settling a case around methane leaks in local water supplies.

After finding Cabot Oil & Gas Company responsible for the methane contamination of 18 domestic water wells in northeast Pennsylvania, state regulators now say the company can discontinue providing water to affected residents because it has met the terms of a legal settlement with the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection.

Next up is a decision by regulators on Cabot’s request to resume drilling for natural gas in Dimock, PA, where the methane contamination incidents – featured in the movie “Gasland” – have given the town a central role in the ongoing controversy over drilling for shale gas using hydraulic fracturing. Dimock is in the heart of the Marcellus Shale formation that stretches from southwestern New York State to western Virginia.

Residents of Dimock began complaining of exploding water wells and discolored, foul-smelling water shortly after Cabot began drilling in August, 2008.

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Other key stories below: Rising Sea Levels Will Hit South Florida Hard; 64,000 People in Massachussets Have Clean Energy Jobs.

“Climate change could cause extreme weather leaving millions of people trapped, a new report claims.” Photo: AFP

Climate Change Could Trap Hundreds of Millions in Disaster Areas

Hundreds of millions of people may be trapped in inhospitable environments as they attempt to flee from the effects of global warming, worsening the likely death toll from severe changes to the climate, a UK government committee has found.

Refugees forced to leave their homes because of floods, droughts, storms, heatwaves and other effects of climate change are likely to be one of the biggest visible effects of the warming that scientists warn will result from the untrammelled use of fossil fuels, according to the UK government’s Foresight group, part of the Office for Science.

But many of those people are likely to move from areas affected by global warming into areas even worse afflicted – for instance, by moving into coastal cities in the developing world that are at risk of flood from storms and rising sea levels.

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