Climate scientists have found the Obama administration’s assessment of climate change for a proposed coal strip mine to be severely flawed. In email interviews with ThinkProgress Green organized by the Climate Science Rapid Response Team, two top climate scientists criticized the draft environmental impact statement prepared by the Bureau of Land Management for the proposed expansion of the Alton coal strip mine near Bryce Canyon National Park in Utah.

The BLM did not analyze the effects of mining and burning this coal on global climate change because, it claimed, “existing climate prediction models are not at a scale sufficient to estimate potential impacts of climate change within the analysis area.”

Dr. Werner Aeschbach-Hertig, a paleoclimatologist at the University of Heidelberg’s Institute of Environmental Physics, says the BLM reasoning “makes scientifically no sense.”

Dr. Michael Raupach, a top Australian climate researcher who has done influential research on carbon emissions, agreed that “the problem is irrelevant, because single-source impacts are globally shared.” The BLM’s reasoning “leads directly to a tragedy-of-the-commons,” Raupach explained, “in which nobody takes any action and climate change is locked in.

Research examining the social cost of climate change offers guidance on impacts of incremental greenhouse pollution, the scientists said. In the Stern review, the social cost of carbon (SCC) is estimated to lie between $25 and $30 per ton of CO2. More recent valuations estimate the cost between $28 and $893 per ton, rising each decade.

Even with an extremely conservative SCC of $25 per ton, the impact of mining the project’s 100 million metric tons of recoverable coal would be on the order of $7 billion. A proper analysis would take into account that the cost of carbon rises over time, so coal mined in 2040 has higher damages than coal mined now.

The BLM’s statement also contained a skeptical assessment of the impact of burning fossil fuels on the global climate, using qualifiers like “possible”, “potential”, and “may” to question the strength of the scientific conclusion that greenhouse pollution is causing dangerous changes. Dr. Raupach sharply criticized the BLM assessment, saying the language is “far from an accurate reflection of the state of climate science”:

The qualifiers (“possible”, “potential”, “may”) completely understate the confidence of the scientific community in the broad conclusions of climate science and the consequent imperative for action to reduce emissions. The conclusions of the IPCC (2007) Fourth Assessment were essentially that warming is unequivocal and attribution to human influence can be made with very high confidence. Numerous national scientific academies and peak bodies have released their own assessments over the last few years, reinforcing this position. Hence the qualifiers in the question are far from an accurate reflection of the state of climate science.

Dr. Aeschbach-Hertig specifically showed how the BLM statement systematically lowballed the scientific understanding of climate change, as represented by the IPCC in 2007 : Read more

Ohio’s transparency-allergic treasurer and U.S. senate candidate Josh Mandel (R) is finally stepping out on stage by offering a certain type of policy positions: wildly unpopular. Mandel endorsed Gov. John Kasich’s (R) anti-labor law early this summer, insisting that Senate Bill 5 — a bill that was resoundingly defeated by police and firefighters — “is about respecting police and firefighters.” Now, Mandel is demanding that Ohio officials open up a national forest in Ohio to fracking — a policy 70 percent of Ohioans oppose. And he wants it done immediately.

Ohio’s Wayne National Forest is host to oil and gas wells, but none as deep and dangerous as those created by fracking, a method of deep natural gas drilling. The plan to lease 3,302 acres during a Dec. 7 public auction “inspired new fears” in Athens, OH about the possible pollution of the area water supply. These concerned prompted Wayne National Forest supervisor Anne Carey to withdraw the auction and begin an evaluation process that could take up to six months. Mandel slammed Carey for her concern, insisting that places like Mahoning Valley (which is about 150 miles away from the park) “will greatly benefit from fracking“:

“The Mahoning Valley is one of the areas that will greatly benefit from fracking,” said Mandel, who called The Vindicator on Thursday to discuss the issue as well as criticize a decision by a national forest supervisor in the Athens area for postponing a plan to lease more than 3,000 acres for oil and gas drilling.[...]

Mandel said the gas-and-oil business is booming and “a delay in drilling is a delay in job creation for the state of Ohio.”

The business can “rejuvenate parts of Ohio,” including the Valley, he said.

Once again, Mandel’s idea of “benefit” is questionable. Fracking has a long history of groundwater pollution, leaving entire towns with highly-contaminated water supplies. Indeed, some contaminated wells have been found to contain extremely high levels leukemia-causing benzene while others left people filling dizzy and caused horses and pets to lose their hair.

Ohio itself doesn’t have the greatest record with natural gas. One Cleveland home actually blew up after fracking forced gas into its water well. Just this week, a natural gas pipeline just south of the national park in Ohio exploded this week, “causing fires that destroyed three houses and a barn.” It’s the second to occur this year. Perhaps this is why Ohioans are dead set against the idea. Or perhaps this is just Mandel’s idea of rejuvenation.

Bringing the GOP’s Solyndra spin out completely of control, Presidential Candidate Michele Bachmann explained on Fox News today that the Solyndra debacle “makes Watergate look like child’s play.”

Really? Yes, really. Bachmann actually went there.

Perhaps it’s not surprising, coming from a candidate who believes that the Lion King movie is gay propaganda and who says carbon dioxide is harmless. (Time to update the 10 craziest things Michele Bachmann has ever said.)

Bachmann was also on Fox News last night, calling the Solyndra loan guarantee “criminal.” So far, the GOP investigation has found absolutely no criminal activity surrounding the approval of the loan guarantee to the now-bankrupt solar manufacturer. Of course, no one should make any assumptions about what did or didn’t happen before the investigation is through.

But Watergate?  How soon they forget.

I’m not sure how many open letters I’ve read over the years from businesses and state-level political leaders urging Congress to extend short-term tax credits to renewables. It’s a lot. And it’s kind of sad that I’m still reading them.

The latest letter, written by a bi-partisan coalition of governors who support wind energy, lament the negative impact that a looming expiration of the production tax credit is having on businesses throughout the country:

Wind-related manufacturing is beginning to slow in our states because the credit has not yet been extended. If Congress pursues a last minute approach to the extension, the anticipated interruption of the credit’s benefits will result in a significant loss of high-paying jobs in a growing sector of the economy.

The leading wind project developers and manufacturers are slowing their plans for 2013 and beyond due to the current uncertainty. Some developers have no projects scheduled for 2013, and are beginning to lay off employees. The ripple effect of this slow down means reduced orders for turbines and decreased business for the hundreds of manufacturers who have entered the wind industry in our states. If the tax credit is allowed to expire at the end of 2012, there will be negative impacts on the high-tech manufacturing jobs that the industry has brought to or created in our states.

To put it more bluntly: Congress is hurting businesses.

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In another tirade against solar, Bill O’Reilly recently said he couldn’t find anyone in Long Island to install a system on his house.

“There’s no where, no one,” explained O’Reilly. Gee, what a predicament.

Actually, as a quick Google search points out, there are more than a dozen companies installing solar electric and solar hot water systems around Long Island. And that’s not to mention the dozens of other solar companies working throughout New York State.

Unfortunately, if we can’t expect a major media figure like O’Reilly to do an easy Google search to find a solar company, how can we expect him to report fairly on the industry? As a recent compilation of Fox News clean energy coverage makes perfectly clear, the pundits railing against solar simply have no idea how the technology works. It’s time to fight back against this ignorance not by telling these pundits that solar works, but by actually showing them.

If you’re a solar company in New York, consider taking O’Reilly up on his offer and install solar on his house. If he’s serious about creating a “no spin zone,” maybe he’ll actually give the technology a fair shake.

The world’s climate scientists agree that humanity is poisoning the weather with fossil fuel pollution, making extreme weather more dangerous and deadly. The cavalcade of catastrophe of recent years — epic floods, heat waves, droughts, and storms — is only a foretaste of our planet’s future, because of the unceasing buildup of carbon pollution from the burning of oil, coal, and other fossil fuels. A special report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change summarizes some of the latest scientific findings, which paint a dire picture of increasing disaster for a largely unprepared civilization:

“We need to be worried,” said one of the study’s lead authors, Maarten van Aalst, director of the International Red Cross/Red Crescent Climate Centre in the Netherlands.

The report calls for mobilization in climate resilience, in particular approaches that reduce the exposure to climate disasters while also improving economic well-being and lowering pollution. Areas that need focus include systems that warn people of impending disasters; changes in land use planning; sustainable land management; ecosystem management; improvements in health surveillance, water supplies, and drainage systems; development and enforcement of building codes; and better education and awareness.

Climate disasters strike the rich and poor very differently. In short, climate disasters harm the economies of developed countries, but kill the people in developing countries. From 1970 to 2008, over 95 percent of natural-disaster-related deaths occurred in developing countries. For some, the only risk management from disasters like sea level rise and drought will be relocation.

Scientists recently found that day-to-day weather has grown increasingly erratic and extreme, with significant fluctuations in sunshine and rainfall affecting more than a third of the planet.

In a new, bi-weekly video report, BBC reporter Martine Croxall reviews the most recent extreme weather from around the globe. In the first episode of this Vestas-sponsored venture, she discusses the freak polar hurricane, flash floods in Italy, Snowtober, and the Thailand floods:

Losses from climate disasters are already high, running at as much as $200 billion a year, said Michael Oppenheimer of Princeton University, a study author. “Global warming is increasing the risk of disaster and already makes dealing with several types of disaster, like heat waves, more difficult. The risk will become greater as the future gets hotter,” he said. “Governments are not doing a good job now protecting us from disaster in the current climate.”

A USA Today (not IPCC) chart emphasizes the risk of drought in heavily populated areas.

The IPCC Special Report “Managing the Risks of Extreme Events and Disasters to Advance Climate Change Adaptation (SREX)” is now online.  I had seen the previous draft and the changes to it, so I knew that it was a big missed opportunity, as I explained here.

UPDATE:  Dr. Richard Klein offers a defense of the IPCC process in the comments of my previous post (here).

Even so, since the media hasn’t been spending much time connecting the dots between extreme weather and climate change, the report has garnered some headlines:

• Report: Climate change worsens extreme weather events (USA Today)
• Extreme weather to worsen with climate change: IPCC (Reuters)
• Extreme weather will strike as climate change takes hold, IPCC warns; Heavier rainfall, storms and droughts could wipe billions off economies and destroy lives, says report by 220 scientists (UK Guardian).

There is definitely some good material in the report (I’ll do a separate post on that).  We should all appreciate the hard work that a great many scientists put into this report.  I’ve been highly supportive of IPCC scientists over the years, pushing back against the attacks by the deniers and confusionists — even as I have been critical of the IPCC process that tends to water down even the most obvious conclusions.

For instance, the report states:

It is virtually certain that increases in the frequency and magnitude of warm daily temperature extremes and decreases in cold extremes will occur in the 21st century on the global scale. It is very likely that the length, frequency and/or intensity of warm spells, or heat waves, will increase over most land areas.

Virtually certain means “99-100% probability” while very likely means “90-100% probability.”  Is there really as much as a 10% chance that the length, frequency and/or intensity of warm spells, or heat waves, will NOT increase over most land areas over the next 90 years?

Then we have this line:

It is very likely that mean sea level rise will contribute to upward trends in extreme coastal high water levels in the future.

C’mon guys and gals.  You couldn’t put a “virtually certain” on that?  Note that the sentence is already hedged with “will contribute” and “upward trends” and even the vague “in the future.”  Precisely how could mean sea level rise — even sticking with the lowball estimate from the 2007 report — have as much as a 10% chance of NOT contributing toward an upwards trend in extreme coastal high level waters sometime in the future.

So you can see the effect of the IPCC process that waters down even the most innocuous conclusions.  And by the way, since this is a 2011 report, it ought to base such statements on the recent literature of sea level rise, which is considerably higher than the 2007 estimate (see the discussion in “Scientists withdraw low-ball estimate of sea level rise“).

My biggest problem with the report remains the short shrift it gives to the vast literature on drought that I reviewed in my recent Nature article.  As I wrote, “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.”

You can see from the chart above that USA Today (and Jeff Masters, who helped put it together) figured out that drought may be the biggest extreme weather danger in that it affects 5 heavily populated areas.

Reuters, in its story, states what should be obvious:

Droughts, perhaps the biggest worry for a world with a surging population to feed, were also expected to worsen.

The 29-page report itself has quite little on droughts, and the word “agriculture” appears only once in the main text, but it does have this blockbuster chart:

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The all-day grilling of Secretary of Energy Steven Chu over the Solyndra bankruptcy by the House energy oversight subcommittee was an eye-glazing embarrassment, reporters agreed. Rep. Cliff Stearns (R-FL) tried to defend his belief that the United States can’t compete with China on clean technology by attacking Chu, even calling for his firing. “America faces a simple choice: compete or accept defeat,” Chu shot back at Stearns in the hearing. “I believe we can and must compete.”

Without any evidence of wrongdoing, the Republican-led hearing drove outside observers to tears. “Stop it with the Solyndra nonsense,” Scientific American energy editor David Biello pleaded on Twitter. “Just stop it.”

Fortune editor Dan Primack scathed the hearing as a colossal waste of time:

My eyes have glazed over. I’m hungry, dumber than I was this morning and very angry with myself.

Don’t be coy, you know what I’m copping to having done: I spent almost the entire workday watching yet another Congressional hearing on the Solyndra “scandal.”

This is at least the third such hearing, all in a flailing effort by GOP reps to prove that Solyndra wasn’t simply an honest loan gone bad, but rather an example of corruption and self-dealing in the Obama White House. For all the talk about this deal, there still has not yet been any actual evidence — including cherry-picked emails released by the Republican-led committee — that Solyndra received its $535 million government loan because of crony capitalism. And that remains the case, after five hours of testimony from U.S. Energy Secretary Stephen Chu.

The Solyndra witch hunt has been fueled especially by Politico, whose large team of energy reporters have fixated on the story. Two-thirds of Politico energy stories since Sept. 12 have been on Solyndra. Senior energy and environment reporter Darren Samuelsohn has dominated the coverage, with 90 percent of his prolific output dedicated to fluffing up the Solyndra “scandal.”

Concerned Congregations Gather to Decry Oil Pipeline

by Catherine Woodiwiss

A small tinfoil dove on a wooden pole waved above the orange safety jackets, snappy signs, and a mock pipeline carried by thousands of demonstrators encircling the White House on November 6. Meanwhile, a group of protesters in yellow shirts emblazoned with ‘”Standing on the Side of Love” gathered around as clusters of youth chanted, “Hey Obama, listen to the Dalai Lama” and “No XL pipeline, I’m gonna let it shine.”

As promised in the weeks leading up to the Keystone XL protest at the White House, faith voices had joined the cries against the construction of a controversial oil pipeline from Canada to the Gulf Coast.

And after nearly 12,000 protesters encircled the White House, President Barack Obama’s decision on Thursday to support the State Department’s request for further review on the pipeline’s impact indicates that citizens’ environmental concerns are resonating.

Concerns over the pipeline became a line in the sand for climate activists nationwide. After the announcement to delay movement on its construction, many within the environmental community—particularly younger people who brought President Obama into office—are redoubling their efforts to make Keystone XL, a Canadian pipeline intended to carry tar sands-extracted oil through six states and the Ogalalla Aquifer, a primary drinking source for millions of Americans, the platform from which to weigh the president’s efforts to move away from the “tyranny of oil,” as he once suggested.

People of faith leant their voices to protesting the pipeline since it was first proposed in 2007, starting with Bill McKibben, the face of the Tar Sands Action group and a Methodist Sunday school teacher.

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

Today, the House Subcommittee on Energy and Minerals will debate a proposal to jump start oil shale production, which could be one of the dirtiest forms of energy in existence if it were to become viable. Subcommittee Chairman Doug Lamborn’s (R-CO) bill would codify midnight regulations on oil shale that the Bush administration passed just as it was leaving office in early 2009.

You’re not alone if you haven’t heard of oil shale, which should not be confused with the viable energy producer “shale oil.” In order to develop the oil shale, a type of rock, power plants must be built to heat the rock up to nearly 1,000 degrees Fahrenheit and produce crude oil that still needs to be refined. This takes a large amount of energy and money, as well as 3-5 barrels of water per barrel of oil produced, a dangerous issue in the parched West.

Politicians and oil companies have extolled the virtue of this “new” form of energy since the early 1900s, yet not a single barrel of oil from oil shale has been commercially sold. That does not stop today’s politicians and oil CEOs from using the same language as their decades old predecessors. In a field hearing this summer, the Checks and Balances Project developed a bingo card with old-timey oil shale phrases — all of which but one were used. You can follow along today to see if the same arguments are used yet again (click on the card for a larger version).

Oil companies and proponents of oil shale claim it can “solve our energy crisis,” and Lamborn recently claimed that it is “one of America’s greatest natural resources.” Yet, despite decades of experimentation and hundreds of millions of dollars in investment, oil shale has never been produced commercially in the United States. Even the director of the Center for Oil Shale Technology and Research admitted that:

All of the major companies are doing oil shale because they think it’s an interesting and high-potential area, but they’re not in a hurry to make it productive…

Oil companies already have research and development leases on public lands, but they now seeking even more public lands on which to experiment. Lamborn’s bill continues to reward dirty fossil fuel companies for chasing what some have called “the petroleum equivalent of fool’s gold.” Throughout his career, Lamborn has received $126,962 from the oil and gas industry.

On Wednesday, House Natural Resource Committee Republicans held their 20th oversight hearing on how to drill more. In addition to oil shale, todays legislative hearing will feature bills to drill in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge and to mandate offshore oil and gas lease sales.

Other stories below: CSP Market to See Ups and Downs; Fisherman Sue ConocoPhillips Over China Oil Spill

Gingrich’s Shifting Statements on Climate Change

Mitt Romney may be the GOP presidential candidate that is most often criticized for flip-flopping, but as Newt Gingrich rises to challenge him at the top of the polls, the former House speaker may also be giving him a run for his money on that label of inconsistency.

When it comes to global warming, Gingrich’s position seems to have changed faster than the climate.

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