A previously unreported study out of the Oklahoma Geological Survey has found that hydraulic fracturing may have triggered a swarm of small earthquakes earlier this year in Oklahoma. The quakes, which struck on Jan. 18 in a rural area near Elmore City, peaked at magnitude 2.8 and caused no deaths or property damage.

The study, currently being prepared for peer review, follows news today that Cuadrilla Resources, a British shale gas developer, has found that it was “highly probable” its fracturing operations caused minor quakes of magnitude 2.3 and 1.5 in Lancashire, England. The Cuadrilla study could complicate the expansion of hydraulic fracturing for shale gas in risk-averse Europe, where France has already banned the practice.

That’s E&E News PM on the twin earth-shaking reports on an emerging concern about fracking, which involves blasting massive amounts of water through rock under high pressure to get the gas out.

If this had been happening to some renewable energy technology it would be all but fatal.  Oh, wait, it was:  “Fears of induced minor earthquakes have already complicated development of geothermal energy in regions like Nevada and Switzerland.”  See also LiveScience, “Earthquake Concerns Shake Geothermal Energy Projects.”

As the Economist notes in its piece:

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Texas State Climatologist:  “This is really the first time when climate change has manifested itself in a tangible way within the state of Texas.”

Koch-funded Richard Muller:  “The existence of global warming is pretty much beyond dispute now.”

NBC’s Anne Thompson:  Koch brothers are “oil billionaires and climate change deniers.”

Wow!  The NBC Evening news ran one of the best segments on global warming and extreme weather ever to appear on a major network.  Here it is:

The  weather is becoming so extreme in a manner that  climate scientist had been predicting for decade that it’s getting harder to ignore.   At the same time, climate scientists are starting to do a good job of documenting the link to global warming and  coming up with good analogies with which to explain it to the public, like Meehl’s steroids analogy.

Indeed, the AP also reported on a leaked version of a new IPCC report on this subject with the headline, “More weather disasters ahead, climate experts report; Some locations will become ‘increasingly marginal as places to live’.”  Here are some key excerpts:

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Climate Progress is poised to achieve another pair of milestones — 5,000 tweets and 20,000 twitter followers:

How tweet it is.  You can help put us over the top by clicking here.

But why should you follow this blog on twitter?  Four reasons:

1. It’s a modern, portable version of a news teletype.
2. Your (online) neighbors are doing it!
3. The UK Guardian listed us as one of the Top 50 Twitter Climate Accounts to Follow.
4. You can help some of our best content go viral.

Let me elaborate:

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The Department of Energy has had a remarkably low rate of fraud in its rapid distribution of billions of dollars in Recovery Act funds, the department’s Inspector General has found. After more than 100 investigations, Gregory H. Friedman has recovered 0.07 percent of the $35.2 billion in stimulus funds deployed by the Department of Energy, the Washington Post’s Ed O’Keefe reports:

Gregory H. Friedman is slated to tell lawmakers that the Energy Department‘s efforts to quickly distribute $35.2 billion in economic stimulus funding “was more challenging than many had originally envisioned.” [...] Friedman’s appearance Wednesday is meant to summarize the more than 100 investigations conducted by his office into the department’s stimulus spending. To date, the office has recovered $2.3 million in stimulus fraud and has sparked five criminal prosecutions.

Friedman identified that a large amount of stimulus spending is still in the pipeline at the local level: “45 percent of stimulus dollars distributed by Energy still hadn’t been spent by state and local government as of Oct. 22.” The nearly $16 billion yet to be spent should provide a significant boost to the local economies as it reaches businesses, manufacturers, and workers.

Bizarrely, the O’Keefe portrayed the 99.93 percent success rate of clean energy spending this way: “Energy Department couldn’t manage stimulus money.”

At the Western Republican Leadership Conference, a GOP summit held after the CNN-Las Vegas presidential debate, ThinkProgress spoke to a set of lawmakers with a history of targeting public lands for privatization. However, Rep. Cynthia Lummis (R-WY) bucked the trend, telling us that she actually has never heard of any “single American” from any party that has called for developing the National Parks.

Lummis seems to be ignoring her own colleague, Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-MN), who called for drilling for oil in the Everglades. But Lummis, for whatever reason, claimed that such ideas were completely foreign and unheard of to her:

LUMMIS: I don’t know a single American — Republican, Democrat, Independent, or other — who wants to develop our National Parks. They’re set aside for the enjoyment of the people of this country. And everybody wants to see that unique resource protected.

KEYES: Including the Everglades, for instance?

LUMMIS: The parts that are National Parks in the Everglades, absolutely.

Watch it:

Its not only Bachmann. Rep. Rick Berg (R-ND), while campaigning for Congress last year, called for drilling for oil underneath North Dakota’s Theodore Roosevelt National Park and other federal lands as a scheme to pay for Social Security. Additionally, dozens of Republicans in Congress, including Lummis herself, have cosponsored bills that would severely limit the president’s authority to designate new national monuments. Many of the national parks that Lummis defends so easily started out as national monuments, including Grand Canyon National Park, Joshua Tree National Park, and Zion National Park. Just yesterday President Obama designated his first national monument at Fort Monroe, a historic Civil War site in Virginia.

Reconstruction of Northern Hemisphere temperatures, Mann et al, 2008.  Multiple, independent analyses confirm recent warming is unprecedented in magnitude and speed and cause (so the temperature history looks like a Hockey Stick).

by Chris Mooney, in a DeSmogBlog cross-post

Yesterday in a Virginia courtroom, Michael Mann—who is quickly becoming the Galileo of climate science—triumphed over the conservative American Tradition Institute, and ongoing attempts at scientist-harassment.

More specifically, Prince William County Circuit Court Judge Gaylord Finch both allowed Mann to join the case that ATI is pursuing against the University of Virginia to get Mann’s emails, and allowed UVA to back out of an agreement with ATI to let it review some of Mann’s emails that the university is nevertheless claiming are exempt from disclosure.

This is a bit technical, as is often the case in ongoing court proceedings, but let’s remember why it matters.

The ATI lawsuit is a follow-on to Virginia attorney general Ken Cuccinelli’s outrageous harassment of Mann. And protecting Mann’s emails from disclosure is critical for ensuring that ideological fishing expeditions that attack and harass scientists aren’t permitted. The contrary result, as many scientific groups have asserted, could have a chilling effect on academic research and freedom of inquiry in controversial areas.

Mann has been greatly supported by the Union of Concerned Scientists, the American Geophysical Union, and other organizations, and by grassroots fundraising efforts to support his legal expenses. To contribute see here.

 

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Media Matters reports that “On Fox News, Karl Rove criticized President Obama for elevating climate change as a national security concern.”  I’ll repost their debunking below, but first here is an extended excerpt from a September 2008, Washington Post article that makes abundantly clear that the intelligence community figured out in the Bush administration that global warming was “a serious security threat for the coming decades“:

An intelligence forecast being prepared for the next president on future global risks envisions a steady decline in U.S. dominance in the coming decades, as the world is reshaped by globalization, battered by climate change, and destabilized by regional upheavals over shortages of food, water and energy.

The report, previewed in a speech by Thomas Fingar, the U.S. intelligence community’s top analyst, also concludes that the one key area of continued U.S. superiority — military power — will “be the least significant” asset in the increasingly competitive world of the future, because “nobody is going to attack us with massive conventional force.”

… The 2025 report will lay out what Fingar called the “dynamics, the dimensions, the drivers” that will shape the world for the next administration and beyond. In advance of its completion, intelligence officials have begun briefing the major presidential candidates on the security threats that they would be likely to face in office. Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.) received an initial briefing Sept. 2….

The predicted shift toward a less U.S.-centric world will come at a time when the planet is facing a growing environmental crisis, caused largely by climate change, Fingar said. By 2025, droughts, food shortages and scarcity of fresh water will plague large swaths of the globe, from northern China to the Horn of Africa.

For poorer countries, climate change “could be the straw that breaks the camel’s back,” Fingar said, while the United States will face “Dust Bowl” conditions in the parched Southwest. He said U.S. intelligence agencies accepted the consensual scientific view of global warming, including the conclusion that it is too late to avert significant disruption over the next two decades. The conclusions are in line with an intelligence assessment produced this summer that characterized global warming as a serious security threat for the coming decades.

Floods and droughts will trigger mass migrations and political upheaval in many parts of the developing world.

So it is absurd for Rove to attack Obama for accepting the intelligence community’s science-based assessment.  The fact is the Bush administration was too blinded by ideology to accept the science and  understand the grave risks of inaction.

Here’s some excerpts from a Media Matters post:

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Our guest blogger is Chris Mooney, who blogs at for Science Progress. This piece is crossposted from DeSmogBlog.

Yesterday in a Virginia courtroom, Michael Mann — who is quickly becoming the Galileo of climate science — triumphed over the conservative American Tradition Institute, and ongoing attempts at scientist-harassment.

More specifically, Prince William County Circuit Court Judge Gaylord Finch both allowed Mann to join the case that ATI is pursuing against the University of Virginia to get Mann’s emails, and allowed UVA to back out of an agreement with ATI to let it review some of Mann’s emails that the university is nevertheless claiming are exempt from disclosure.

This is a bit technical, as is often the case in ongoing court proceedings, but let’s remember why it matters.

The ATI lawsuit is a follow-on to Virginia attorney general Ken Cuccinelli’s outrageous harassment of Mann. And protecting Mann’s emails from disclosure is critical for ensuring that ideological fishing expeditions that attack and harass scientists aren’t permitted. The contrary result, as many scientific groups have asserted, could have a chilling effect on academic research and freedom of inquiry in controversial areas.

Mann has been greatly supported by the Union of Concerned Scientists, the American Geophysical Union, other organizations, and by grassroots fundraising efforts to support his legal expenses. To contribute see here.

Let us also add that there is no reason to think Mann has done anything wrong, scientifically or otherwise, or that his emails will reveal some malfeasance. To the contrary, Mann and other scientists involved in the pseudo-scandal of “ClimateGate” have been repeatedly vindicated by independent investigations.

Meanwhile, the connections between ATI and various other conservative and industry groups and funders have now been extensively documented.

I called Mann the “Galileo of climate science,” and increasingly, I think this is not mere hyperbole.

I’ve been following climate science, and political attacks on it, for nearly a decade. Throughout that period, conservatives have been relentlessly attacking Mann because of the hockey stick graph. And starting in 2005, there have been attempts — first in Congress, then using the legal process — to wrest information from Mann, information whose disclosure would simply allow conservative motivated reasoners to come up with new reasons to criticize and attack him.

This is a beast that, at all costs, must not be fed.

At the same time, all of this has surely exacted a serious toll on Mann himself in the form of personal stresses and, perhaps, legal expenses.

Mann has risen to the occasion, however, and fought back admirably and courageously.

In the process, he has become a hero and a role model for standing up against the forces of ideology and unreason.

And in turn, as this long and completely unnecessary legal process continues, we must continue to give him our full and absolutely unwavering support.

by Daniel J. Weiss

Presidential candidate, former Ambassador to China, and former Utah Governor Jon Huntsman received attention for his willingness to accept scientists’ verdict that carbon dioxide and other pollutants generated by humans is responsible for climate change.

While 98 of 100 climate scientists agree that global warming is real, he is the only one out of nine Republican presidential candidates to say so. Nonetheless, his energy plan presented at a speech delivered on Tuesday in New Hampshire would increase global warming pollution.  The other elements of the plan increase fossil fuel production and consumption, and are based on lack of understanding about energy use and policies.

Let’s take a closer look.

Just a few short years ago, then Gov. Huntsman supported a cap and trade system to reduce the carbon dioxide pollution responsible for climate change. He even joined two other governors in ads for the Environmental Defense Fund that urge government action to reduce pollution. He noted that a program to reduce global warming would “bring new jobs and exports.” He concluded that “now it’s time for Congress to act by capping greenhouse gas pollution.”

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“The Kochs are on a whole different level. There’s no one else who has spent this much money. The sheer dimension of it is what sets them apart. They have a pattern of lawbreaking, political manipulation, and obfuscation. I’ve been in Washington since Watergate, and I’ve never seen anything like it. They are the Standard Oil of our times.”

– Charles Lewis, founder of the non-partisan Center for Public Integrity, quoted in a New Yorker expose of the Koch Brothers

President Obama is going to personally make the decision whether to approve the Keystone XL tar sands pipeline, and is concerned about the health and environmental risks of the project, he told a Nebraska reporter yesterday. In his interview with KETV’s Rob McCartney, Obama said he would weigh the short-term economic benefit of construction employment against the health and environmental risks associated with the tar sands pipeline that would stretch across the heartland from Canada to Texas:

The State Department’s in charge of analyzing this, because there’s a pipeline coming in from Canada. They’ll be giving me a report over the next several months, and, you know, my general attitude is, what is best for the American people? What’s best for our economy both short term and long term? But also, what’s best for the health of the American people? Because we don’t want, for example, aquifers that are adversely affected, folks in Nebraska obviously would be directly impacted, and so we want to make sure that we’re taking the long view on these issues.

We need to encourage domestic natural gas and oil production. We need to make sure that we have energy security and aren’t just relying on Middle East sources. But there’s a way of doing that and still making sure that the health and safety of the American people and folks in Nebraska are protected, and that’s how I’ll be measuring these recommendations when they come to me.

Watch it:

Asked about jobs, Obama noted that the health and environmental risks carry economic impacts themselves:

I think folks in Nebraska like all across the country aren’t going to say to themselves, “We’ll take a few thousand jobs if it means that our kids are potentially drinking water that would damage their health or if rich land that’s so important to agriculture in Nebraska ends up being adversely affected.” Because those create jobs, and you know, when somebody gets sick that’s a cost that the society has to bear as well. So these are all things that you have to take a look at when you make these decisions.

The U.S. State Department’s jobs analysis estimates that the Keystone XL pipeline would temporarily employ about 5,000 people, most of whom are likely to already be Canadian company TransCanada’s employees.

“This certainly sounds like the president is giving himself rhetorical room to delay the decision (to do a better environmental impact statement or examine alternative routes) or kill the pipeline outright,” Joe Romm responded at Climate Progress.

“This appears to be major and welcome news,” Friends of the Earth president Erich Pica responded. “People from all 50 states were arrested in Washington this August protesting the pipeline and they will be coming back to the White House this Sunday because this pipeline is also a conduit for climate change,” 350.org founder Bill McKibben said in a statement.

Other stories below: India Solar Power Costs Could Fall 40% by 2015; BP Takes Center Stage on Capitol Hill

Stone Washed Blue Jeans (Minus the Washed)

From the cotton field in rural India to the local rag bin, a typical pair of blue jeans consumes 919 gallons of water during its life cycle, Levi Strauss & Company says, or enough to fill about 15 spa-size bathtubs. That includes the water that goes into irrigating the cotton crop, stitching the jeans together and washing them scores of times at home.

The company wants to reduce that number any way it can, and not just to project environmental responsibility. It fears that water shortages caused by climate change may jeopardize the company’s very existence in the coming decades by making cotton too expensive or scarce.

So to protect its bottom line, Levi Strauss has helped underwrite and champion a nonprofit program that teaches farmers in India, Pakistan, Brazil and West and Central Africa the latest irrigation and rainwater-capture techniques.  It has introduced a brand featuring stone-washed denim smoothed with rocks but no water. It is sewing tags into all of its jeans urging customers to wash less and use only cold water.

JR:  Ironically, the place where cotton is most at risk today from a changing climate is Texas.

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