NOAA reports that global warming is harming humans right now in a dramatic way:

Wintertime droughts are increasingly common in the Mediterranean region, and human-caused climate change is partly responsible, according to a new analysis by NOAA scientists and colleagues at the Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences (CIRES). In the last 20 years, 10 of the driest 12 winters have taken place in the lands surrounding the Mediterranean Sea.

“The magnitude and frequency of the drying that has occurred is too great to be explained by natural variability alone,” said Martin Hoerling, Ph.D. of NOAA’s Earth System Research Laboratory in Boulder, Colo., lead author of a paper published online in the Journal of Climate this month. “This is not encouraging news for a region that already experiences water stress, because it implies natural variability alone is unlikely to return the region’s climate to normal.”

The Mediterranean region accumulates most of its precipitation during the winter….

Reds and oranges highlight lands around the Mediterranean that experienced significantly drier winters during 1971-2010 than the comparison period of 1902-2010.  [Click to enlarge.]

The above is from a news release from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, “NOAA study: Human-caused climate change a major factor in more frequent Mediterranean droughts.”

It’s a bombshell for three reasons.  First, this NOAA team has not always found a human cause for extreme weather events, as Climate Progress discussed here.  Second, the study found that global warming is already driving drought in a key region of the world:  Climate change is harming a great many people now.  Third, the analysis provides important confirmation of climate predictions that human-caused emissions would lead to drying:  “The team also found agreement between the observed increase in winter droughts and in the projections of climate models that include known increases in greenhouse gases.”

This comes on the heel of the USGS study, that, despite its flaws still found, “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.”

And these studies amplify the piece I had in the journal Nature this week that argued drying and Dust-Bowlification driven by climate change — and the impact on food insecurity — are probably the gravest threats the human race faces in the coming decades.

The fact that the NOAA analysis confirmed the climate models predictions of drying is especially worrisome because the climate models project a very dry future for large parts of the planet’s currently habited and arable land in the coming decades:

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A central component of solving the climate crisis is our built environment — the homes in which we live, the buildings in which we work. Forty percent of energy consumption in the United States is related to buildings, especially heating and cooling. On Thursday and Friday, the T.C. Chan Center is hosting the United Nations Environmental Programme – Sustainable Buildings and Climate Initiative (UNEP-SBCI) Symposia at the University of Pennsylvania.

This conference brings together the different players linked to the built environment from around the world, with the goal of finding solutions that can feed to the international meeting in Rio de Janeiro on climate change and global sustainability next year, twenty years after the seminal conference that set up the international framework for fighting global warming pollution in 1992.

The T.C. Chan Center, founded by Dr. Ali Malkawi, researches and develops technology to “create healthier, productive, energy efficient strategies that will lead to high performance buildings and sustainable environments.” In an interview with ThinkProgress Green, Dr. Malkawi explained why this sustainable building conference is so important, and what are the exciting developments in the world of green architecture.

“The main problem that we have is measuring the performance of buildings,” Malkawi said. “Most of our research is built toward finding solutions that can predict energy consumption of buildings.”

At first glance, the problem of figuring out the energy consumption for buildings doesn’t seem that hard, at least in developed countries like the United States. We have metered electricity and heating use, and clear metrics of energy production. However, when it comes to actually making buildings more sustainable, this aggregate information is insufficent. To design or retrofit an energy-efficient building, Malkawi said, one needs to look at lighting, heating, and cooling systems separately, potentially floor by floor. Most buildings are not submetered. Without sufficiently granular information, it becomes impossible to guarantee clear results:

The rule of thumb is if you cannot measure it, you cannot manage it.

The rewards of data-driving green building design are huge. According to Malkawi, you can save 50 to 60 percent of energy consumption during the design phase. A good example is the Monterrey International Airport, where a new terminal was designed with the idea to lower energy consumption even before systems were put in. Major improvements can also come from ensuring efficient operation of existing systems, the equivalent of making sure that a car’s tires are properly inflated and its sensors calibrated. At the T.C. Chan Center’s home, the University of Pennsylvania, they’ve worked with facilities managers to find problems that exist in systems and optimize systems behavior, using computational models that allowed them to pinpoint individual problem buildings. They’ve achieved 15 to 25 percent reduction in energy use just by getting the best use from existing systems.

The challenge of sustainable buildings is greater than just one of designing good structures. “There’s work that’s underway that looks at the behavior of urban environments and the interaction with individual buildings,” Malkawi said. If buildings are placed away from urban infrastructures, that will require more energy consumption by its users, including the costs of increased transportation. A good rating system for green buildings takes into account the “neighboodscape,” as Malkawi described it.

The UN symposium deals with the technology, policy, and financial issues of sustainable building. There needs to be meaningful, performance-based policy to encourage green buildings, as well as a way to finance these measures. “There’s a need for both top-down and bottom-up policy,” Malkawi said. Without mandatory policies that set objective standards and technology to measure results, the financial sector won’t be able to ensure that efforts to decrease energy consumption have guaranteed value. Policies that set clear thresholds, Malkawi believes, “would drive the financial sectors and technologies.”

Unfortunately, the United States is lagging behind, Malkawi said, although our strong university system is keeping us in the game:

At the moment, research and development is in good shape. We’re much further than other countries because we still have the best universities in the world — but not in deployment and practice, which is best in best in northern Europe and Japan. It’s being hindered here by lack of enforced standards that would require developers to erect energy efficient buildings. Pretty soon, if you don’t put these issues up front, even the areas of research are going to be lagging behind.

Rebuilding our living and working spaces to be sustainable is both one of the world’s greatest challenges but also an incredible opportunity. The housing crisis, jobs crisis, and climate crisis are linked by our built environment. Whichever nation leads the way will reap the greatest rewards.

So far this week, four of the world’s top five oil companies have announced more than $24 billion in third quarter profits. And by the logic of Florida Congressman Cliff Stearns, that should mean those oil companies deserve more subsidies, not less.

Speaking at a town hall meeting last weekend in his home state of Florida, Stearns displayed a very sketchy grasp on how subsidies should work, explaining to Climate Progress that incentives should be given to mature companies, not early-stage companies.

“When somebody is successful, then you give them the subsidies and the tax credit,” explained Stearns, talking to Climate Progress.  In short, the rich get richer.  This is how the 1% operate. No wonder income inequality is growing in this country.

Stearns has backed that up with hearty government rewards to the most profitable, successful companies on the planet — voting multiple times to continue billions in tax breaks to oil companies while voting against shifting those incentives to the nascent clean energy industry.

As Chairman of one of the House subcommittees investigating the Solyndra loan, Stearns has railed against government loan guarantees, saying they “pick winners and losers.” But when talking to Climate Progress about the topic of loan guarantees, Stearns completely misunderstood how the policy works, saying it’s “where the government gives you money outright.”

In fact, a loan guarantee is exactly the opposite. It is simply an agreement with private lenders that the government will back a loan in case of default. The government is not actually giving any money outright — it only provides federal funds through a loan guarantee in a worst-case scenario. In order to qualify for the program, recipients must prove that they’ve raised adequate private capital. And in the case of power-plant developments, companies must have a long-term agreement to sell the energy.

To round out his mind-bending logic on subsidies, Stearns calls for more federal support of nuclear, an industry he admits has gotten “a huge amount of subsidies.” However, no nuclear power plants have been built in the U.S. in more than 30 years — and none would likely get built in this country without government-backed insurance and loan guarantees.

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Our guest blogger is Emilie Surrusco, Communications Director, Alaska Wilderness League.

Royal Dutch Shell’s quarterly earnings report includes numbers that are almost too big to comprehend – profits of $7 billion in just the last three months, or $2.3 billion in the last month, or $583 million in the last week, or $83 million on Thursday.

I don’t know about you, but I’ll never see the amount of money Shell makes in one day in my entire lifetime. Granted, they are a huge multinational corporation with a budget that is bigger than many nation states. I’m a mere mortal. But with that much money — just in profits alone — you’d think that a multinational corporation like Shell could move mountains. Or at least step up to the challenge of putting together a viable plan to clean up an oil spill in one of the world’s most extreme, remote places — the Arctic Ocean.

Instead, Shell has put forward an oil spill response plan that looks like a fancy cut and paste job from the spill plans of yesteryear. (Remember BP’s Gulf of Mexico spill plan? The one that talked about walrus in Louisiana’s warm, tropical waters? Those are the plans I’m talking about.) It looks to me like Shell didn’t even bother spending a day’s profits on their spill plan for the Arctic. Instead, they’ve piled millions into PR about how great the plan is.

Shell’s latest Arctic P.R. scheme barely costs them a minute’s worth of profits. They recently announced that they will donate $5,000 in Inupiat language preservation grants to an Arctic community school that comes up with the best Inupiat name for one of the drill rigs they plan to use to drill 10 wells in the Arctic’s Chukchi and Beaufort Seas.

But back to Shell’s plan to clean up an oil spill in waters completely covered by sea ice nine months of the year (and partially covered the other three months) — in an environment where temperatures plunge well below zero, there is no sunlight and where more often than not, hurricane force winds cause icebergs the size of apartment buildings to move at 40 mph. The Arctic gives foreboding a new zip code.

Here are some of the highlights of Shell’s plan: Read more

by Noreen Nielsen

Today, oil giant ExxonMobil announced their 2011 third-quarter earnings, reporting a whopping $10.3 billion in profits, an increase of 41 percent from the same period last year. Overall, Exxon has earned over $31 billion in profits in the first nine months of the year. Not surprisingly, ExxonMobil is also one of the most politically engaged of the top five oil companies. A few key facts:

• Exxon is the top oil and gas contributor in 2011, giving over $569,714 in campaign contributions already this year, with 91 percent of the contributions going to Republicans.
• Exxon has spent nearly $7 million on lobbying Congress this year
• Exxon pays a lower effective tax rate than the average American. In the years spanning 2008 to 2010, Exxon paid an effective rate of 17.6 percent, nearly 16 percent below the average individual federal tax rate.
• ExxonMobil spent $5.7 billion—more than half of its first-quarter profit—to buy 69 million shares of stock in order to “reduce shares outstanding.”
• In the second-quarter 2011, ExxonMobil spent $5.5 billion repurchasing its stock – more than half of its profits.
• ExxonMobil is sitting on $8 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 ranking in the top of the Fortune 500 list of company profits, ExxonMobil, along with other oil companies, continues to receive billions of dollars in tax breaks paid for by taxpayers.
• ExxonMobil CEO Rex Tillerson ranked in as one of the highest paid CEOs in 2010, earning over $21 million in direct compensation.

by Cole Mellino

As the global community considers the interwoven issues of food access, resource scarcity, increased urbanization and climate change, innovation in the agriculture sector is blossoming. We’re going to continue to highlight important projects and scientific developments in agriculture that help address those problems.

And sometimes, those answers are very simple ones.

Earlier this summer, New York City became home to the nation’s first commercial urban hydroponic greenhouse. Gotham Greens, the company that operates the 15,000 square-foot facility in Brooklyn, has harvested and delivered the first of its 100 annual tons of local and organic vegetables and herbs. The rooftop facility, which runs on 55-kilowatt solar panels, provides year-round produce for nearby New York grocers. This means the company can supply local lettuce, even in the dead of winter, to New Yorkers.

There are myriad benefits to urban hydroponics. Many of the problems with conventional agriculture are solved in this controlled environment. The facility uses 10 times less land and 20 times less water compared to conventional agriculture. Pesticide use and fertilizer runoff are eliminated. The company’s strict food safety program ensures that food will not be contaminated by E. coli or Salmonella. And because the food is grown and distributed in New York City, transportation costs are minimal and far less carbon dioxide is emitted than conventionally-sourced food, which travels, on average, 1,500 miles.

The greenhouse is “on a pretty sophisticated computer control system that has sensors all over the place and will deploy lights and fans and shade curtains and heat blankets and irrigation pumps automatically,” according to the Co-Founder and CEO Viraj Puri.

This type of innovative, tech-smart, urban agriculture is an important model to consider as we try to figure out how to feed a growing global population with limited resources.

— Cole Mellino is an intern on the energy team with the Center for American Progress

A Massey Energy security official has been convicted by a jury for his role in covering up the coal company’s culpability for the Upper Big Branch Mine explosion that killed 29 miners in April 2010. Former mine security director Hughie Elbert Stover was found guilty on Wednesday for lying to investigators and “seeking to destroy thousands of security-related documents,” and faces up to 25 years in prison. Stover called his attempt to destroy the documents the “stupidest, worst mistake” in his life. Stover is the second person who has been charged in the investigation so far.

On Tuesday, the United Mine Workers union charged that Massey Energy and its CEO Don Blankenship have committed “industrial homicide.” In a 154-page report, UMW President Cecil Roberts asks, “Why didn’t Don Blankenship shut this mine down?” The report details how a “rogue corporation, acting without real regard for mine safety and health law and regulations” “established a physical working environment that can only be described as a bomb waiting to go off”:

Massey Energy must be held accountable for the death of each of the 29 miners. Theirs is not a guilt of omission but rather, based on the facts publicly available, the Union believes that Massey Energy and its management were on notice of and recklessly tolerated mining conditions that were so egregious that the resulting disaster constituted a massive slaughter in the nature of an industrial homicide.

“We’ve got a security guard who has been indicted, but Don Blankenship can’t figure out how to spend all of his money,” UMW President Cecil Roberts said.

“The investigation continues, so it’s premature to say we haven’t brought justice or we haven’t gone after the real villains,” U.S. Attorney Booth Goodwin told reporters after Stover’s conviction.

by Jocelyn Fong, in a Media Matters cross-post

Looking for “another Solyndra,” ABC News has run several reports about $1 billion in federal loans to advanced car companies Fisker Automotive and Tesla Motors. ABC’s big scoop last week — that Fisker hired a company in Finland to assemble some if its cars — was actually a recycled story pushed by Fox News more than two years ago.

ABC delivered another round of reports last night and got some of its facts wrong. Nightline host Terry Moran introduced the segment as a story about Obama’s 2009 stimulus bill:

MORAN: Two and a half years ago President Obama pushed a $787 billion stimulus bill through Congress that he said would create millions of jobs, but now the president’s under attack by critics who say that stimulus hasn’t created a significant number of jobs and costs too much. Tonight ABC’s Brian Ross looks at two companies that received a billion in government loans and asks, what did they do with it?

Actually, these loans don’t have anything to do with the stimulus package (which, by the way, increased employment by 1 to 2.9 million as of August, according to the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office. If ABC thinks that isn’t a “significant number,” it should say so.)

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Our guest blogger is Frank Ackerman, director of the Climate Economics Group at the Stockholm Environment Institute-US and senior research fellow at the Global Development and Environment Institute of Tufts University.

Rep. Ralph Hall (R-TX) has asked the Energy Information Administration to evaluate an unrealistically harsh and unsophisticated clean energy standard, designed to represent the Republicans’ worst nightmare: every electricity retailer in the country (some of them quite small) must meet a relatively high and rising standard for low-carbon energy, starting very soon, with no trading between companies, banking of excess credits, or other flexibility mechanisms that would soften the blow.

Even the Republican nightmare doesn’t look as bad as one might have suspected: according to the EIA analysis, it achieves a rapid reduction in carbon dioxide emissions, while causing electricity prices to rise by less than one percent per year, and lowering GDP per capita in 2035, the end of the study period, all the way from (watch closely or you’ll miss this) $65,848 to $65,658 – a reduction of less than 0.3 percent, in a national income nearly twice as high as today’s. Employment is slightly higher, as a result of this standard, from the mid-2020’s onward.

In the light of day, no one would allow this nightmare version of a clean energy standard to be adopted. Trading of clean energy credits between companies would almost certainly be included in any real standard. The goal, after all, is to reduce nationwide emissions as cheaply as possible, not to impose burdens on each and every company regardless of size or situation. The large reduction in costs that can result from trading is well established in economic theory, and confirmed by the experience of sulfur emissions trading under the Clean Air Act, among other cases. If some companies can reduce emissions more inexpensively than others, it makes perfect sense to let them sell credits to others; the same amount of emission reduction occurs, but at much lower cost than under the rigid plan that troubles Ralph Hall. This, by the way, is perfectly orthodox free market economics, of a sort that Republicans, once upon a time, used to swear by.

Below is testimony submitted yesterday by Michael Conathan, director of oceans policy at the Center for American Progress, to the House Committee on Natural Resources, on why it makes economic and environmental sense to create a national oceans policy.

In 2004 the bipartisan U.S. Commission on Ocean Policy released its final report, “An Ocean Blueprint.” This report, commissioned by a Republican-led Congress and written by a panel of experts appointed by President George W. Bush, included a lynchpin recommendation that the president “begin immediately to implement a national ocean policy by establishing the [National Ocean Council] … through an executive order.”

The report went on to suggest that the NOC work with all tiers of government, the private sector, nongovernmental organizations, and academia to create regional ocean councils to implement the National Ocean Policy at a regional scale.

The previous year, an independent report issued by the Pew Ocean Commission chaired by current Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta also called out the need to better integrate federal agency oversight of ocean space via implementation of a National Ocean Policy establishing a framework to “reflect an understanding of the land-sea connection and organize institutions and forums… [which] must be accessible, inclusive, and accountable. Decisions should be founded upon the best available science and flow from processes that are equitable, transparent, and collaborative.”

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by Noreen Nielsen

Royal Dutch Shell announced their 2011 third-quarter earnings, reporting profits of $6.98 billion, more than double their profits posted a year ago, bringing their total profits for 2011 to over $21 billion. Below is a quick look at Shell by the numbers:

• Shell has spent nearly $8 million on lobbying in 2011, making it one of the Top 20 Spenders of 2011, and the second biggest spender of the oil and gas industry.
• The oil and gas industry ranks as the third largest spender on lobbying in 2011, spending a combined total of over $75 million.
• Shell is sitting on $13 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
• Big oil tax loopholes, including oil industry specific tax breaks and unnecessary general provisions, will cost the federal treasury $40 billion over the next decade.

The House Resources Subcommittee on National Parks Chairman Rob Bishop (R-UT) made a startling claim at a Republican conference late last week: current federal control of public lands is unconstitutional.

Bishop was on a panel during the Western Republican Leadership Conference to discuss federal control of public lands in the West. After comparing the large tracts of public land that exist out West to the Soviet Union, Bishop told the conservative crowd, “I defy you to find anywhere in the Constitution where this is allowable.”

BISHOP: Federal government owns one out of every three acres in this country. If it’s west of Denver, it’s one out of every two acres. If this kind of federal control is good, then the Soviet Union should have been the Garden of Eden. But what this presents to us – and I defy you to find anywhere in the Constitution where this is allowable - but what it defines to us is – the second slide if you would – everything in red are the states that had the hardest time funding their educations system.

Listen to it:

ThinkProgress caught up with Bishop after the event to find out more about public lands’ supposed unconstitutionality. The Utah Republican told us that federal control of lands out was “never intended” to be permanent. He conceded that national parks were acceptable – “because they’re not moneymakers anyway” – but said that other public lands “could easily be developed and should be developed and there’s no reason for the federal government to keep them.” Read more

Other big global stories: Climate Change May be Spiking Mercury in Yukon’s Rivers; Delhi Faces High Risk from Global Warming; Small Island States Desperately Call for Climate Action

China CO2 emission in millions of metric tons from 1980 to 2009

China ‘won’t follow US’ on carbon emissions

China will not allow its carbon dioxide emissions per person to reach levels seen in the US, according to the minister in charge of climate policy.

Xie Zhenhua, vice chair of the National Development and Reform Commission, said that to let emissions rise that high would be a “disaster for the world”.

Chinese per-capita emissions may reach US levels by 2017, a recent study said.

JR:  I don’t see how China’s per-capita emissions hit ours in 6 years.  Maybe in the 2020s if they don’t reverse trends this decades.  But that misses the point: China’s  total emissions are 40% higher than ours and  will probably be double ours by 2020 — and that by itself would be a disaster for the world.

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