A new U.S. Geological Survey analysis finds that, as climate scientists have been predicting for decades, the Southwestern U.S. is drying in part because of rising levels of carbon dioxide:

The decrease of floods in the southwestern region is consistent with other research findings that this region has been getting drier and experienced less precipitation as a likely result of climate change.

The study, “Has the magnitude of floods across the USA changed with global CO₂ levels?” appearing in Hydrological Sciences Journal, however, relies on dubious and “absurd” assumptions, according to a number of climate scientists I spoke with.  Amazingly, the lead author seems to lack an understanding of core issues germane to his analysis, as we’ll see.

The finding about SW drying that I’ve focused on isn’t the main spin the USGS and media have given the study.  The USGS focused on what they claim is the lack of a “significant relationship between carbon dioxide (CO₂) in the atmosphere and the size of floods over the last 100 years” in the three other regions they rather arbitrarily divide the country into — northeast, southeast, and northwest.

Interestingly the NE “stretches from the middle of the Dakotas and Nebraska all the way east to the New York and New England area,” and it “shows a tendency towards increases in flooding over this period.”  But in the USGS analysis, the tendency isn’t statistically significant.  I’ll address in a later post why that isn’t particularly surprising given how the USGS does its analysis.

But it’s worth noting that Kevin Trenberth, senior scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research, and a leading expert on the impact of global warming on extreme weather and precipitation, thinks it is “absurd” that USGS was looking for a relationship between global CO2 levels and flooding.  Other climate scientists I spoke to expressed similar reservations about this.  One called it, “simply wrong.”  Why?

CO2 levels have been rising pretty steadily for many decades, but flooding is primarily linked to warming (through the greater water vapor in the atmosphere and things like early snowmelt).

Many studies and all global climate models have made clear that global temperatures don’t rise in lockstep with global mean carbon dioxide concentrations (GMCO2)  — thanks to aerosols, volcanoes, and the El Niño Southern Oscillation (ENSO) and so on.  And, of course, the temperatures relevant to U.S. flooding don’t rise in lockstep with global temperatures thanks to ENSO and the like.  So finding  correlations between flooding and GMCO2 is not terribly dispositive.

Yet even with that big flaw and many others, the study still found one trend that is similar to what the IPCC models have predicted:

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Population Action International asks “What’s Your Number?”

Climate Progress hasn’t focused on population, for reasons explained here: “Consumption dwarfs population as main global warming threat.”  But now that it seems that population growth trends are not stabilizing as quickly as had been widely projected just a few years ago, we’ve been covering it a little more.

Population Action International has this clever calculator to draw attention to the issue.  And here’s an excellent video they put together last month, “Weathering Change:  Stories about climate and family from women around the world,” which “takes us to Ethiopia, Nepal and Peru to hear the stories of four women as they struggle to care for their families, while enduring crop failures and water scarcity”:

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Concentrating Solar Power — large power plants that convert thermal energy into electricity — offer firm, centralized power that better match a utility’s needs.  See “Solar Can Be Baseload: Spanish CSP Plant with Storage Produces Electricity for 24 Hours Straight.”

But CSP plants, which require far more material and man-power to develop than equivalent PV plants, are not coming down in cost as quickly. That’s not because the technology is flawed. It’s because CSP requires a unique set of requirements that make them more capital intensive to build.

An investment announced today by the Department of Energy may help accelerate those cost reductions. The DOE is working to facilitate more innovation in the sector by investing $60 million over the next three years toward companies and labs developing new technologies and power plant development techniques. The funds are being deployed through the SunShot Initiative, DOE’s competitive program with the goal of reducing solar costs by 75%.

DOE is looking at deploying funds to 20 teams working on new solar collectors, heat transfer technologies, power plant engineering approaches, and improvements in steam temperature ranges.

It could provide a good R&D boost for the sector, which has been somewhat overshadowed by the frenzy around cost and price reductions in solar PV.

Last year, DOE put released a good film highlighting all the different types of CSP currently being deployed. It’s a bit rudimentary for those who know about the technology, but it illustrates the various ways in which the technologies could be improved.

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by Noreen Nielsen

BP announced early this morning that its third-quarter profits more than doubled as a result of high oil prices, earning them $4.9 billion, and bringing their total profits earned in 2011 to nearly $16 billion. A is quick look at some other key facts:

• BP has spent over $3.7 million on lobbying Congress in 2011.
• BP has made over $65,000 in political contributions in just 2011, with 70 percent of contributions going to Republicans.
• BP is sitting on $19 billion in cash on hand. Added together, the Big Five oil companies — BP, Exxon, Chevron, ConocoPhillips and Shell — are sitting on cash resources of $59 billion and made nearly $1 trillion in profits over the past decade.
• Despite this, BP and its other Big Oil allies continue to aggressively lobby Congress to maintain their billions of dollars in oil industry tax breaks.

Moreover, BP — responsible for the worst oil spill in U.S. history — has only paid out about $7 billion of the $20 billion fund set up to pay compensation claims to the economic victims of the Gulf of Mexico oil spill.

Related Post:  “As Gulf Coast suffers, BP Q1 profits soar to $7 billion“

Other big world climate stories: Japan seeks new CO2 cuts; Draft plan for Global Green Climate Fund handed to UN

Report: China to set regional energy caps

China’s efforts to curb its greenhouse gas emissions are poised to take another major step forward, according to reports from the state-backed Xinhua news agency detailing plans to set binding regional caps on energy consumption.

Quoting Jiang Bing, head of the planning department of the National Energy Administration, the news agency reported that the proposals for energy quotas would be released in the near future, although it added that the plans would need approval from China’s State Council.

Jiang also signalled that the quotas would only apply to energy derived from fossil fuels with hydro, wind and solar power exempted from the caps.

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Rep. Ralph Hall (R-TX), the science-denying chairman of the House science committee, says a federal clean energy standard would be an “expensive new electricity tax on the American people,” based on a study he requested. An analysis by the Energy Information Administration (EIA) of a clean energy standard he designed finds that “household electricity bills could jump an average of $115 per year by 2025.” President Obama has called for a clean energy standard of 80 percent clean electricity production by 2035, allowing for production from renewable sources, nuclear, natural gas, and coal with carbon capture and sequestration. This goal would mean that America’s aging, dirty coal plants would be mostly phased out over the next 25 years.

Defending the coal industry that funds him, Hall attacked the president’s plan based on the EIA report:

This report—prepared by independent government experts—makes clear that the CES amounts to an expensive new electricity tax on the American people. With an anemic economy and unemployment stuck above nine percent, it is very troubling that the President continues to pursue an energy policy that would add billions to Americans’ energy bills.

Hall fails to mention that the EIA analysis says the “impacts on electricity prices prior to 2015 are negligible.” In other words, this standard poses no threat to the “anemic economy” of today. In fact, the EIA projects that employment will increase over the reference case by 2030.

Furthermore, the EIA analyzed a clean energy standard proposed by Hall, not by the Obama administration. The EIA makes that clear throughout its report, saying their analysis is of the Hall Clean Energy Standard (HCES). Hall’s CES was purposely designed to compel rapid investment in new electricity production without flexibility, which EIA models as a high cost. The inflexibility Hall required includes these provisos:

There is no option to purchase compliance credits from the government.

HCES credits earned in one year cannot be “banked” for use in a subsequent year.

All electricity retailers are covered by the requirement, regardless of ownership type or size.

There is no provision for excluding any electricity sales from a seller’s baseline based on resources used to produce the electricity or type of customer purchasing the electricity.

This report’s findings are a result of Hall’s deliberate gaming of the economic tools of the EIA. Moreover, they reflect the assumptions that energy economists use to analyze policy instruments, even though those assumptions have been proven false by history. The health costs of coal pollution are not incorporated, even though top economists have found that coal-powered electricity is dragging down the US economy by ruining Americans’ health. The EIA projects that electricity prices would increase by 2.7 cents/kWh by 2035, which is almost exactly what economists found as the annual cost of health damages from coal pollution today (2.8 cents/kWh).

To repeat — the “costs” that the EIA projects in 25 years as a result of Hall’s rigid clean energy standard are already being paid today by Americans through suffering and death, especially our children and elderly. A clean energy standard would replace the economic costs of asthma and heart disease with investment in new jobs and technology.

The EIA also ignores the existence of global warming, with a reference case that has the United States continuing to increase its greenhouse pollution for decades, even though that would mean planetwide catastrophe. As the International Energy Agency’s World Energy Outlook describes, in a “climate friendly” scenario “the power sector is largely decarbonized by 2035.”

Under Ralph Hall’s inflexible clean energy standard, the EIA finds that annual electricity sector carbon dioxide emissions would decrease by more than 60 percent from the reference case by 2035. Using an estimate of the social cost of carbon of $100 per ton of carbon dioxide, then the benefits of that decline would reach $100 billion a year in 2035, far outweighing the supposed “costs” of shutting down “cheap” electricity from high-polluting coal plants.

Former Massachusetts Governor and presidential front-runner Mitt Romney — once a candidate who stood up to coal and supported clean energy — is now calling green jobs fake.

In an op-ed in the Orange County Register published yesterday, Romney regurgitates GOP talking points on loan guarantees to Solyndra and Fisker Automotive, two stories that have turned leading conservative politicians and media pundits into a pack of scandalmongers — even while many of those politicians supported the same government investments for companies in their own districts.

Romney has officially joined the herd, calling green jobs “illusory.”

First, the good news: President Barack Obama has finally created some “green jobs.” Now for the bad news: They are not in the United States, but in Finland.

The creation of environmentally friendly jobs has been at the top of Barack Obama’s policy agenda since coming into office. With the first of his now many jobs plans, the President set out to fulfill his campaign promise of spending $150 billion to create ten million green jobs. Alas, things didn’t quite work out as planned.

…So far, approximately 100 workers are employed by Fisker in Wilmington, Del., while an additional 500 are actually assembling the cars in Finland.

…Even these few jobs may be illusory: studies of Europe’s green job experiments have found that each new green job destroys several other jobs elsewhere in the economy.

There are numerous gaping holes in Romney’s piece. But here’s the biggest one: There are now 64,000 green jobs in his home state of Massachusetts alone, according to a report released earlier this month by the Massachusetts Clean Energy Center. Hard to call that “illusory.”

Due to making green jobs a “clear economic development priority, supported by the passage of various legislative and policy initiatives,” on the state and federal level, MassCEC reports that the state’s green jobs workforce grew by 6.7% from July of 2010 to July of 2011 — smashing the average 1% growth of other industries in Massachusetts. Employers surveyed expect to see upwards of 15% growth in the next year alone. From the report:

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

Congressional Republicans and presidential candidates have suggested a variety of options for dealing with our country’s budget woes, such as slashing Medicare, reducing federal spending to 1966 levels, and drilling everywhere. Today, the House Natural Resources Committee used much of a hearing on designating wilderness areas to discuss another radical proposal: selling off 3.3 million acres of lands that belong to all Americans without clarifying how taxpayers would receive a fair return for them.

Rep. Jason Chaffetz (R-UT), is a Tea Party favorite who voted against the debt ceiling compromise bill because it “cuts too little in FY 2012.” His “Disposal of Excess Federal Lands Act of 2011” would force the Interior Department to sell 3.3 million acres of lands in Arizona, Colorado, Idaho, Montana, Nebraska, Nevada, New Mexico, Oregon, Utah, and Wyoming to the highest bidder. Chaffetz justified his bill at the hearing today saying:

It is neither logical nor responsible for the federal government to own or manage surplus lands.

Chaffetz has led the charge against America’s public estate, including a cosponsorship of a bill to remove protections from 60 million acres of wilderness-quality lands to give access to corporate interests.

He made the determination of which acres to include in his land sale bill based on a government report from 1997, even though there are updated estimates available in various “resource management plans” issued by the government. As Mike Pool, the witness from the Interior Department stated today, the bill “would be unlikely to generate revenue.”

Selling off federal lands is an antiquated and radical policy option that has been debated since President Teddy Roosevelt first started setting aside lands for future generations to enjoy. More recently, the 1970s and 1980s gave life to the Sagebrush Rebellion in which a handful of westerners sought to sell and transfer the public’s land to state and private interests. As independent California television station KCET put it:

Every 10 to 15 years or so, western politicians have used the national forests and parks as anvils on which to hammer out their anti-Washington anxieties.

Politicians who choose to focus on only the face value of public lands are ignoring an incredibly important economic engine in the West — the conservation economy made up of the men and women who work in recreation, restoration, and renewable energy development. Additionally, public lands, such as national parks, national forests, wilderness areas, and national historic sites, have far more value than just what the acreage is worth. Protected areas provide clean air and clean water at no cost at all to the American taxpayer — as just one example, the clean water flowing from national forests has been valued at $7.2 billion every year.

Earlier this year, Gov. Gary Herbert (R-UT) said it’s “worth exploring” selling off much of his own state to help pay down the national debt, agreeing with an earlier call from Rep. Dennis Ross (R-FL).

Now, another Utah politician is introducing legislation to do just that. Rep. Jason Chaffetz (R-UT) has introduced legislation that would sell off nearly 1 percent of the Bureau of Land Management area in 10 states:

While other members of Congress will be pressing Tuesday to set aside some federal lands as wilderness, Rep. Jason Chaffetz will push legislation to dispose of “excess” swaths of the West to help pay down the federal debt. [...] “While there are national treasures worthy of federal protection, there are lands that should be returned to private ownership,” Chaffetz said in introducing his legislation earlier this year. “If the land serves no public purpose and is ‘identified for disposal,’ let’s return it to private ownership.” Chaffetz said the sale would equate to barely 1 percent of Bureau of Land Management area and less then a half a percent of all federal lands. In addition to Utah, the bill would affect public lands in Arizona, Colorado, Idaho, Montana, Nebraska, Nevada, New Mexico, Oregon and Washington.

There will be a hearing on Chaffetz’s bill today at the Subcommittee on National Parks, Forests, and Public Lands.

For the clueless or cynical diehards who deny global warming, it’s getting awfully cold out there.

The latest icy blast of reality comes from an eminent scientist whom the climate-change skeptics once lauded as one of their own. Richard Muller, a respected physicist at the University of California, Berkeley, used to dismiss alarmist climate research as being “polluted by political and activist frenzy.” Frustrated at what he considered shoddy science, Muller launched his own comprehensive study to set the record straight. Instead, the record set him straight.

“Global warming is real,” Muller wrote last week in The Wall Street Journal.

Rick Perry, Herman Cain, Michele Bachmann and the rest of the neo-Luddites who are turning the GOP into the anti-science party should pay attention.

That’s Eugene Robinson in a terrific Washington Post op-ed, “The Scientific Finding That Settles the Climate-Change Debate.”  WARNING:  Read the more than 1000 comments on that piece with a head vise on.

That headline is actually my second favorite one on the Berkeley study.  The BEST, as it were, was from the L. A. Times, “Climate skeptic admits he was wrong to doubt global-warming data,” which opens:

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by Richard Caperton

This year, hundreds of small businesses will expand operations with money borrowed from the government. Thousands of 18-year-olds will pay their freshman-year tuition with money borrowed from the government. Farmers will plant crops, using money borrowed from the government.  And, countless communities in developing countries will clean their water with American-made products, or distribute life-saving American-made medications, which they will buy with money borrowed from the government.

But, according to the Heritage Foundation, the bankruptcy of one company renders all of this irrelevant.  In an interview that aired today on E&E TV’s OnPoint program, Heritage senior policy analyst David Kreutzer offers this outlandish answer:

Monica Trauzzi: Under what circumstances then should the government be giving loans?

David Kreutzer: I don’t think the government should be giving loans. That should not be a business…. They’ve proven over and over that they’re not good at this….

In fact, the government has a strong track record of running loan and loan guarantee programs. The Export-Import Bank, for instance, issues loans and guarantees to borrowers in foreign countries, so that they can buy American-made goods. Not only does Ex-Im support job creation across the U.S., but it actually makes money for American taxpayers. Each year, Ex-Im returns money to the Treasury because it brings in more than it spends.

Or, take the Small Business Administration, which provides low-cost loans to growing American companies. SBA’s support has helped Nike, Apple, and FedEx grow into global powerhouses.

Or, consider Chrysler and General Motors. Both companies borrowed money from the government to avoid catastrophic bankruptcies that would have reverberated throughout the economy, and both companies have paid back their loans in full.

Most relevant to Kreutzer’s argument, though, is the Department of Energy’s Loan Guarantee Program. Although Kreutzer derides it as a “bad way to allocate capital,” there’s no evidence backing up his claim that, “We’re going to get bad projects … at the expense of taxpayers.” In fact, the Loan Guarantee Program has backed dozens of innovative projects that will ultimately be strong investments for taxpayers.

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Dr. Jane Lubchenco, a top marine ecologist and senior Obama administration official, is concerned that opening the Arctic to oil and gas development brings unknown risks to human civilization.

In an exclusive interview with ThinkProgress Green, Lubchenco, the administrator of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), discussed the vicious circle of oil and gas greenhouse pollution melting the Arctic sea ice, making it possible for new oil and gas drilling in the region that will melt the ice even faster. Lubchenco had just appeared in a panel on threats to oceans at the Society of Environmental Journalists annual conference on Friday morning, discussing ocean acidification and the unexpectedly rapid decline of Arctic sea ice, both results of greenhouse pollution from burning fossil fuels.

“Less sea ice means greater access to reserves for gas and oil that are there,” Lubchenco said in the TP Green interview, agreeing that “increased production of oil and gas means less sea ice.” When asked whether there are civilizational risks to a world without permanent Arctic sea ice, Lubchenco explained that “what happens in the Arctic doesn’t stay in the Arctic”:

Well, what happens in the Arctic doesn’t stay in the Arctic. It has huge implications for the global system. And one of the reasons people are legitimately concerned about melting of sea ice are the uncertainties associated with the consequences of that for the rest of the planet. We’re entering a no-analogue world here. We’ve never experienced the kinds of changes that we’re seeing now in the Arctic and elsewhere. And we don’t fully understand what the consequences of that are going to be.

Watch the interview:

The United States and other nations with access to the Arctic are taking steps to support the expansion of drilling in regions made accessible by global warming pollution. Although Norway is concerned about the costs of a Deepwater Horizon-like disaster, the government is still encouraging Arctic drilling. In August, Exxon Mobil signed a blockbuster deal with Russia’s Rosneft to explore the Russian reaches of the Arctic ocean for oil. This month, the Department of Interior announced it is moving forward with 500 oil drilling leases sold during the Bush administration for the Chukchi Sea. Last week, the Environmental Protection Agency granted Shell an air permit for exploratory drilling in the Beaufort Sea.

The Arctic Ocean is estimated by the U.S. Geological Survey to have vast reserves of oil and gas. Burning of those fossil fuels would add tens of billions of tons of carbon dioxide to our already overheated atmosphere.

Although NOAA is the nation’s top oceanographic agency, its scientists play only a minor, advisory role in the government’s approval of offshore drilling, which is run by the Interior Department. NOAA plays a larger role in cleaning up after oil spills. Read more

Other key stories below: Solar Has Highest Return on Investment Among Renewables; House Votes to Ban Airline Compliance With EU Climate Law

A September protest of the Keystone XL Pipeline project. Credit: AP

Former Keystone Pipeline Lobbyist Hired by Obama Campaign

President Obama’s reelection campaign has hired a former lobbyist for the controversial Keystone XL oil pipeline as a top adviser.

The campaign said that Broderick Johnson, founder and former principal of the communications firm the Collins Johnson Group, would serve as a senior adviser for the campaign. Before founding the firm this spring, he worked for the powerhouse lobbying firm, Bryan Cave LLP, where his clients included Microsoft, Comcast and TransCanada, the company planning to build the $7-billion pipeline to carry crude from Alberta’s oil sands to the Texas Gulf Coast.

Johnson’s federal lobbyist filings indicate that TransCanada paid Bryan Cave at least $240,000 late last year and early this year for Johnson to work on supporting the “submission for a presidential permit for Keystone XL Pipeline.” He lobbied members of Congress, the filings show, as well as the administration and the State Department.

TransCanada spokesman Terry Cunha denied that Johnson lobbied on behalf of the Keystone project.

An Obama campaign official said that in his new role Johnson would “serve as a national surrogate for the campaign and our representative in meetings with key leaders, communities and organizations.  Broderick will be an ear to the ground for the campaign’s political and constituency operations, helping to ensure that there is constant, open communication between the campaign and our supporters around the country.”

JR:  This is a tone-deaf, bone-headed move that Bill McKibben slammed on behalf of the increasingly disenfranchised 99%:

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