JR: The Arctic sea ice Hockey Stick is more of a cliff…..

by Rob Painting, in a Skeptical Science cross-post

Many climate change “skeptics” obsess over the ‘hockey stick‘, and their discussion inevitably leads back to 1998, when climate scientist Michael Mann first published his paper indicating that current global warming was anomalous in the last 1000 years or so. In plain language, Mann’s work suggested that current warming was likely due to mankind’s carbon dioxide pollution, not any as-yet-unidentified, or yet-to-be-discovered or observed natural phenomenon.

Despite the “skeptics” cherry-picked focus on a  peer-reviewed paper more than a decade old, the science has moved on considerably since then. Paper after paper has basically affirmed that current warming is outside the bounds of natural variation, and therefore likely due to human activities. For example we have seen a sea level hockey stick, an underwater hockey stick, a South American hockey stick, an Arctic summer temperature hockey stick, a tropical glacier hockey stick, a North American mountain snowpack hockey stick, a glacier length hockey stick, and warming of Atlantic water into the Arctic hockey stick.

Into this league of hockey sticks, we have a just published scientific paper, (Kinnard [2011]), which shows that the Arctic sea ice retreat is also a hockey stick, and that the present rate of melt in the Arctic summer is unprecedented in the last 1,450 years. See figure 1. (Note that the hockey stick blade is facing down in this reconstruction).

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

Today over 100 economists from top universities, economic firms, counties, and other groups sent a letter to President Obama urging him to protect more national parks, national monuments, and wilderness areas. The signatories make the case that because the western United States is shifting from a resource extraction-based economy to one founded in tourism and the migration of Americans wanting to live close to wide open spaces, protected places are valuable economically.

As the letter stated, “protected public lands are significant contributors to economic growth.” Ray Rasker, the executive director of Headwaters Economics, who holds a Ph.D from Oregon State University, further explained that:

In the last 40 years, the fastest growth in the West has been in communities that are adjacent to protected public lands. It’s one of the West’s competitive advantages, it’s one of the strengths of the West, and investing in these sorts of public lands—the wilderness areas, the national monuments, the national parks—is a way to protect the competitive advantage of the west. This is what is creating jobs currently, and at a time when we have high unemployment, we need policies that create jobs.

Watch it:

There is a wide variety of jobs created from protecting public lands, many of which are detailed in the Center for American Progress’ recent report, “The Jobs Case for Conservation.” These include outdoor guides, construction workers restoring trails and forests, manufacturers of outdoor goods like skis and hunting equipment, engineers, and park rangers, to name just a few. The Outdoor Industry Association notes that the outdoor recreation industry supports 6.5 million jobs and $730 billion in economic growth every year.

ThinkProgress recently reported that a handful of House Republicans, such as Rep. Rob Bishop (R-UT), have denied that protecting the West’s special places has positive economic impacts. At a hearing last month, Bishop stated, “Contrary to claims by the administration and others, the designation of national monuments and wilderness are not a boon to local economies, but rather a detriment in most scenarios.”

Additionally, members of the Congressional Western Caucus — a group made up entirely of Republicans — labeled the designation of national monuments and wilderness expansion as “job-killing” policies in a report last year.

Canada has long prided itself on being a progressive leader in North America.

But that image is changing in the eyes of some world leaders who are concerned about Canada’s regression in climate policy. As the country threatens to pull out of the Kyoto Protocol at the Durban climate talks, and pushes aggressively to extract and export carbon-intensive tar sands crude, Canadian officials are facing increasing pressure on the international stage.

This week, a group of African leaders is issuing a plea to Canada to consider the environmental and social consequences of the country’s energy policy. The group includes Archbishop Desmond Tutu, a prominent South African activist who has been a leading voice on climate justice.

The group has issued a new ad in Canada’s Globe and Mail newspaper that slams the Canadian government for moving backward in addressing climate change — explaining the social consequences that stretch far beyond the country’s borders:

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EIA analysis finds that Senator Bingaman’s clean energy standard would reduce carbon emissions by 43% and lower GDP growth by just .02 percent.

by Richard W. Caperton

Imagine if we could create jobs, increase renewable energy generation, improve air quality across the country, and reduce our carbon dioxide pollution — all at effectively zero cost to our economy. Wouldn’t that be great? Well, the Energy Information Administration just informed us that we can do all of these things, by adopting a strong national clean energy standard. (In fact, as the map above shows, 29 states have already done so.)

If you were to believe the hyperbole from the fossil fuel advocates, you would think that a clean energy standard would ruin the United States.  For example, the Heritage Foundation recently declared that a similar policy “would be bad for families, bad for business, and bad for the economy.” As I said at the time, Heritage was simply building a straw-man that isn’t even a serious clean energy proposal, and they weren’t actually modeling our electricity system.

Fortunately, we now have an accurate study of a real clean energy standard proposal, and the EIA has given us some insight into how this policy could benefit our country. In response to a request from Senator Jeff Bingaman (D-NM), EIA modeled a proposal to get 80% of our country’s power from low-carbon and zero-carbon sources. They allow all generation resources to qualify, and weight them based on actual carbon emissions (roughly, that means that natural gas only gets half of the clean energy credits of wind or solar power, for instance). EIA also models several different cases to identify the effects of specific policy choices, like including a cap on program costs or exempting some utilities from compliance.

Here are the top line findings:

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by Dan Krotz, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory

What will a day in the life of a Californian be like in 40 years? If the state cuts its greenhouse gas emissions 80 percent below 1990 levels by 2050 — a target mandated by a state executive order — a person could wake up in a net-zero energy home, commute to work in a battery-powered car, work in an office with smart windows and solar panels, then return home and plug in her car to a carbon-free grid.

Such is a future envisaged in a study published Nov. 24 by the journal Science that analyzes the infrastructure and technology changes needed to reach California’s aggressive emissions reduction goal. The study was conducted by scientists from the U.S. Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) and the San Francisco-based energy consulting firm Energy and Environmental Economics (E3).

How to get from here to there: Seven measures reduce California’s emissions from 875 million metric tons of CO2 in the 2050 baseline case to 85 million metric tons of CO2 emissions in the mitigation case.

The researchers describe a not-so distant time in which lights, appliances, and other devices are pushed to unprecedented levels of energy efficiency. Electricity is generated without emitting carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. And most importantly — even after these measures are implemented — cars, heating systems, and most other equipment that now run on oil and natural gas will instead be powered by electricity.

The scientists say that all of this will be technologically feasible by 2050 if today’s pace of innovation continues.

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Leading experts explain how human-caused warming exacerbates the drought

“With no previous points so dry it’s hard to say exactly what history would say about a summer such as this one.  Except that this summer is way beyond the previous envelope of summer temperature and precipitation.” — Texas State Climatologist John Nielsen-Gammon

From October of 2010 through this September 2011, Texas saw its driest year on record, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

But these historic dry conditions stretch back even further than that.

After examining tree-ring data going back to 1550, researchers at Columbia University found that this year’s drought was only rivaled once in the last 461 years. According to the Palmer Drought Severity Index, a system for measuring wet and dry conditions, the last time Texas experienced a drought this bad was in 1789.

The state’s climatologist, John Nielsen-Gammon, explained the historical significance of the ongoing drought in an interview with CBS:

“This is basically off the charts. Based on past history, you wouldn’t expect to see this happening in maybe 500 or 1,000 years.  One more year and we’re already talking about a drought more severe than anything we’ve ever had. And this will become for them, the drought of record.”

The drought, which Nielsen-Gammon says could stretch over a number of years, has devastated cotton crops, livestock, pumpkin crops, and, as the below CBS story points out, Christmas trees. The dry conditions have been exacerbated by a combination of human-caused global warming and La Niña, which pushes unusually cold air from the Pacific Ocean and causes drier-than-average conditions in the Southern U.S.

A number of leading climate experts recently explained the role that they believe human-caused global warming is playing in this epic drought.

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Toles also penned an “outtake” on the Wall Street’s robber barons:

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Conservatives would have you believe that President Obama has led “nothing short of a war on American energy,” as Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) said in May, repeating a common refrain. “Obama is waging war on American energy,” GOP presidential front runner Newt Gingrich agreed. Fellow candidate Rick Perry said Obama’s “draconian” energy policies don’t let Americans create energy “and sell it to the world.” “All of this killing of our energy supply,” said Sen. James Inhofe (R-OK), perhaps the industry’s biggest apologist in Congress. Of course, when conservatives say “energy,” they mean oil and fossil fuels, as they themselves have led a real war against American clean energy.

But like many conservative attacks on the president, the war on American energy is a fiction. In fact, as the Wall Street Journal reports today, U.S. exports of fossil fuels “are soaring” and the U.S. is on pace to be “a net exporter of petroleum products in 2011 for the first time in 62 years”:

According to data released by the U.S. Energy Information Administration on Tuesday, the U.S. sent abroad 753.4 million barrels of everything from gasoline to jet fuel in the first nine months of this year, while it imported 689.4 million barrels.

That the U.S. is shipping out more fuel than it brings in is significant because the nation has for decades been a voracious energy consumer. It took in huge quantities of not only crude oil from the Middle East but also refined fuels from Europe, Latin America and elsewhere to help run its factories and cars. [...]

The reversal raises the prospect of the U.S. becoming a major provider of various types of energy to the rest of the world, a status that was once virtually unthinkable. The U.S. already exports vast amounts of coal, and companies such as Exxon Mobil Corp. are pursuing or exploring plans to liquefy newly abundant natural gas and send it overseas.

This is, of course, good news, even though much of it has to do with the faltering U.S. economy, which has driven down demand for fuel. But the new data also demonstrates the absurdity of conservative energy policy, which starts with the (baseless) assumption that domestic fossil fuel production is too low and follows that it must be incentivized with taxpayer dollars and licenses to pollute and bend labor safety rules in order to increase output.

Meanwhile, U.S. oil production is up, despite Obama’s mythical war against the industry. American drivers have seen little benefit from this, however, because prices are set in a global market, where quickly developing countries are driving up demand and thus prices. So increasing production here would have negligible impact on prices as American refineries would just ship their product abroad where it could fetch higher prices.

Throughout the Solyndra proceedings, one of the biggest perpetrators of the “failing” solar myth has been Fox News. Fox has made wild claims in its coverage of Solyndra, including calling clean energy a “fantasy,” “pointless,” a “hoax,” and that “green energy is failing.”

Trying to dredge up another solar scandal, Fox recently pointed to another company, SunPower, as proof of solar’s failure. Here’s Megyn Kelly calling SunPower a “failing company“:

Well, if you thought the Solyndra loan scandal was bad, listen to this one. New questions being raised today as we learn that another failing company, SunPower, was given a government loan guarantee for $1.2 billion, which is of course more than twice the amount given to Solyndra, which is now bankrupt. And right now that company too, not looking good.

Watch the Fox News attacks on SunPower:

Not only is SunPower regarded as an industry success (one solar market expert called it “a pretty big success story”), but Fox’s sister company — also owned by News Corporation — is confident enough to hire SunPower. Last year, Dow Jones Company, a subsidiary of News Corp, enlisted SunPower to build a giant solar power system in New Jersey. Dow Jones claimed that at peak conditions, the installation would generate 50 percent of the energy needs for its corporate campus. On the News Corp Global Energy Initiative page, Dow Jones CEO Les Hinton is quoted saying the solar installation stands for the future:

“If this solar installation stands for anything at Dow Jones, it should stand as a testament to a company with vision. Dow Jones isn’t waiting for the future. We are making it. We are pioneering profitable digital business models, and we are developing innovative technology to make information more accessible and more useful and ultimately more interesting.

Clearly, companies like News Corp trust solar enough to invest in it. Experts call SunPower a “safe bet” and “strongly placed,” but News Corp’s attack on itself exemplifies how anti-innovation the conservative ideology has become. Energy Secretary Steven Chu has insisted, “We have to press forward … Not by clutching to the past but by seizing the future.” However, conservatives — like those on Fox — cling to conspiracy theories and special interests at the expense of clean energy innovation.

There is an alternative to the choice between ecological disaster and economic destruction. But we need efforts that go beyond Corporate social responsibility, an unprecedented commitment and shared sacrifice

by John Fullerton

A $20 trillion “externality” presents civilization with a big choice: economic destruction or ecological destruction, both with chilling global security implications. It’s a big challenge, but one we can solve.

The Carbon Tracker Initiative recently released an illuminating report, Un-burnable carbon – are the world’s financial markets carrying a carbon bubble? It addresses the role that the value of corporate managed oil, gas, and coal reserves will play on the climate crisis and visa versa.

What the report does not make explicit is the apparent big choice: either we must absorb a $20tn write-off into our already stressed global economy over the next decade, or we will implicitly accept civilization-transforming climate change.

The report details three salient facts: in order to reduce the risk of exceeding two degrees Celsius warming to a 20% chance, our carbon-burning budget for the next 40 years is 565 GtC02. Total proved fossil fuel reserves are estimated at 2795 GtC02, nearly five times the remaining budget, implying 80% of these reserves should be left in the ground. Seventy-four percent of these reserves are state owned, while 26% is owned by the 100 largest listed coal companies and 100 largest listed oil and gas companies.

From the market value of the public companies, we can extrapolate the total estimated market value of these reserves to be $27tn.

A cap on carbon emissions designed to limit warming to two degrees will mean sovereign states and public corporations must strand 80% of their $27tn of proved reserves and related assets, a loss exceeding $20tn.

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Other stories below: Andy Revkin explains the “Revkin” collection of climategate emails

David Longstreath/AP

China critical of Kyoto withdrawal plan

The plan to withdraw from Kyoto Protocol will severely mar the talking process at the UN climate conference in Durban, South Africa, the Chinese delegation told Xinhua on Tuesday.

It will further hurt the international community’s endeavor to cope with climate change, said Su Wei, deputy head of the Chinese delegation to the Durban conference and chief negotiator on climate change.

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by Robert Stavins, cross-posted from the Harvard economic and environmental blog.  Stephanie McMillan cartoon via Julie Johnston at Compassionate Climate Action.

Two weeks of international climate negotiations begin [this week] in Durban, South Africa.  These are the Seventeenth Conference of the Parties (COP-17) of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC).  The key challenge at this point is to maintain the process of building a sound foundation for meaningful, long-term global action, not necessarily some notion of immediate, highly-visible triumph. In other words, the answer to the question of whether the Durban climate negotiations can succeed depends — not surprisingly — on how one defines “success.”

Let’s Place the Climate Negotiations in Perspective

Why do I say (repeatedly, year after year) that the best goal for the climate talks is to make progress on a sound foundation for meaningful, long-term global action, not some notion of immediate triumph?  The reason is that the often-stated cliche about the American baseball season — that it’s a marathon, not a sprint — applies even more so to international climate change policy.  Why?

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Climate Change Endangers Food Security Worldwide

“Extreme weather like the droughts in Russia, China and Brazil and the flooding in Pakistan and Australia [in 2010] have contributed to a level of food price volatility we haven’t seen since the oil crisisof 40 years ago. Unfortunately, this could be just a taste of things to come because in the next few  decades the build-up of greenhouse gases already in the atmosphere could greatly increase the risk of  droughts, flooding, pest infestation and water scarcity for agriculture systems already under  tremendous stress.”   — John Beddington, UK Government Chief Scientific Adviser (March, 2011)

Already, the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization estimates 1 billion people are starving and another 2.5 billion are malnourished.

“Feeding some 9 billion people by mid-century in the face of a rapidly worsening climate may well be the greatest challenge the human race has ever faced,” as I argued in the journal Nature.  Oxfam has been one of the leaders in making this case (see Oxfam Predicts Climate Change will Help Double Food Prices by 2030: “We Are Turning Abundance into Scarcity”).

On the eve of the international climate talks in Durban, Oxfam has released a new report that opens with Beddington’s quote and warns:

Climate change is likely to have a pernicious effect on food production in two main ways.  Firstly, slow onset changes in mean temperatures and precipitation patterns are expected to put downward pressure on average yields.  Added to this will be crop losses resulting from more frequent and intense extreme weather events.

Research to date has focused almost exclusively on the first impact, modeling the extent of long-run average price rises in the absence of volatility….

But this paints only a partial picture.  More frequent and extreme weather events will compound things further, creating shortages, destabilizing markets and precipitating price spikes, which will be felt on top of the structural price rises predicted by the models.  One need not rely on imagination to understand how this could play out for the world’s poorest people.  Looking at the toll extreme weather events are taking on global food security since 2010 alone paints an alarming picture.

The whole report is worth reading, but here is their summary along with recommendations for Durban:

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A deal to sell tar sands oil in Europe would outweigh any good the UK might do with all its other climate change measures

– by Bill McKibben, first published in the UK Guardian

The EU has provisionally imposed penalties severe enough to make it difficult for Canada to sell tar sands oil in Europe, but Britain is working to undermine that stance. Photograph: Jeff Mcintosh/AP