Back in 2009, NASA’s Gavin Schmidt was asked, “what percentage of global warming is due to human causes vs. natural causes?”  His answer:

Over the last 40 or so years, natural drivers would have caused cooling, and so the warming there has been … caused by a combination of human drivers and some degree of internal variability. I would judge the maximum amplitude of the internal variability to be roughly 0.1 deg C over that time period, and so given the warming of ~0.5 deg C, I’d say somewhere between 80% to 120% of the warming. Slightly larger range if you want a large range for the internal stuff.

Turns out he was spot on.

A new study in Nature Geoscience, “Anthropogenic and natural warming inferred from changes in Earth’s energy balance” (subs. req’d) finds:

Our results show that it is extremely likely that at least 74% of the observed warming since 1950 was caused by radiative forcings, and less than 26% by unforced internal variability. Of the forced signal during that particular period, 102% (90–116%) is due to anthropogenic and 1% (−10 to 13%) due to natural forcing….  The combination of those results with attribution studies based on optimal fingerprinting, with independent constraints on the magnitude of climate feedbacks, with process understanding, as well as palaeoclimate evidence leads to an even higher confidence about human influence dominating the observed temperature increase since pre-industrial times.

Here’s a figure from the study comparing the magnitude of different “forcing agents” or contributors to warming since the 1950s:

Contributions of different forcing agents to the total observed temperature change. Error bars denote the 5–95% uncertainty range. The grey shading shows the estimated 5–95% range for internal variability. Observations are shown as dashed lines.

The Nature News and Scientific American stories have had misleading headlines:

Three-Quarters of Climate Change Is Man-Made

That’s not a good headline.

The 74% or “three quarters” probability is where the 95% confidence level is for this one study.  As climatologist Kevin Trenberth put it in an email, it is “highly likely” that all of the warming since 1950 is due to human activity:

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The Washington Post gives former House speaker Newt Gingrich a rare upside down Pinocchio for this whopper on Saturday:

“I’ve said publicly, sitting on the couch with Nancy Pelosi is the dumbest single thing I’ve done in the last few years. But if you notice, I’ve never favored cap and trade, and in fact, I actively testified against it. I was at the U.S. House Energy and Commerce Committee the same day Al Gore was there to testify for it, I testified against it and through American Solutions we fought it in the Senate and played a major role in defeating it.”

In fact, as the WashPost points out, in a February 2007  Interview on PBS’s “Frontline” Gingrich said:

“I think if you have mandatory carbon caps combined with a trading system, much like we did with sulfur, and if you have a tax-incentive program for investing in the solutions, that there’s a package there that’s very, very good. And frankly, it’s something I would strongly support.”

That is a pretty unequivocal endorsement of cap-and-trade.

Gingrich is a major-league flip-flopper, like Mitt Romney, but somehow he gets more of a pass by the GOP base since they know he is very conservative in his core.  The Post summed up Gingrich’s flip-flop this way:

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DURBAN — Christiana Figueres, the top United Nations diplomat tasked with managing the international climate negotiations process, is blasting the U.S. for its inability to act on climate change.

Speaking to Climate Progress at the UN’s COP 17 climate conference in Durban, South Africa, Figueres called American climate policy “hamstrung” and lamented the lack of urgency in the country:

“The U.S. is hamstrung. And I wonder how long it’s going to take the U.S. civil society … to realize that climate change is affecting them directly – it’s not just affecting somebody else. I really think the … U.S. population needs to understand that this is not just their historical responsibility, but this is their future that they’re compromising. And when that awareness is raised, then I think the government will make more ambitious decisions. I think there’s no public pressure in the United States to take any more ambitious decision.”

Figueres is certainly right that inaction on climate will compromise the future health and well-being of Americans (see “An Illustrated Guide to the Science of Global Warming Impacts: How We Know Inaction Is the Gravest Threat Humanity Faces“).

Figueres, who says she’s optimistic about the ability of parties (including the U.S.) to agree on a framework for key initiatives like the $100 billion Green Fund, is decidedly less positive about the American position coming into the talks. U.S. negotiators are being criticized for reacting coolly to the prospects for negotiations over a binding treaty with developing countries. American Environmental groups wrote a letter to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in the lead up to COP, saying the U.S. “threatened to impede … global cooperation.”

Figueres expressed the same sentiment, but in a much less direct way.  As you can see in the video of the interview, when asked by Climate Progress about her thoughts on the U.S. position coming into this year’s climate talks, she paused, seemingly to make her response as diplomatic as possible:

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On Saturday, Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney said he wanted to strip the EPA of its authority to set standards for cars and trucks that reduce tailpipe carbon emissions. Just a few short years ago, Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney had the exact opposite position when it came to greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions standards for our vehicles, in Romney’s landmark 2004 Massachusetts Climate Protection Plan:

IMPLEMENT STRONGER VEHICLE EMISSIONS STANDARDS

Massachusetts will adopt GHG emissions standards for new light-duty vehicles. Under Section 177 of the Clean Air Act, work will be as soon as California finalizes its standards. Starting immediately, the Commonwealth will undertake the necessary work to facilitate adoption of the new California standards as soon as they are adopted. In addition, the Commonwealth will work cooperatively with New York, Vermont, Maine, New Jersey, Connecticut, and other states to implement these rules and to seek regional approaches to reduce GHGs from the regional vehicle fleet wherever feasible.

The Clean Air Act authority California and Massachusetts were using to establish their own vehicle emissions standards is the very same legal authority EPA is using to move forward with its own carbon dioxide emissions standards for cars, trucks, power plants, and other very large polluters — authority reaffirmed by the Supreme Court in Massachusetts v. EPA. Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney now says he disagrees with that decision.

In a Fox News interview on Sunday, Republican presidential candidate Newt Gingrich claimed that he “never favored cap and trade,” four years after he expressed “strong support” for a cap-and-trade program to reduce carbon pollution. Gingrich told questioner Ken Cuccinelli, the Virginia attorney general, that the climate action ad he did with House Speaker Nancy Pelosi as part of Al Gore’s We Campaign was the “dumbest thing” he’d ever done:

I said publicly sitting on the couch with Pelosi is the dumbest thing I have done. But I never favored cap and trade and actively testified against it. I was in the U.S. House and Energy Committee the same day Al Gore was there to testify for it and I testified against it. Through American Solutions we fought it in the Senate and we played a major role in defeating it.

Watch it:

In 2007, Gingrich told Frontline he would “strongly support” a mandatory cap and trade program:

I think if you have mandatory carbon caps combined with a trading system, much like we did with sulfur, and if you have a tax-incentive program for investing in the solutions, that there’s a package there that’s very, very good. And frankly, it’s something I would strongly support.

Gingrich may never have “favored” cap-and-trade. Instead, he strongly supported it.

Gingrich’s positions on global warming and federal climate policy have twisted in the wind over more than two decades, with his positions mostly coinciding with whether the party holding the presidency is a Republican or a Democrat. Here’s ThinkProgress Green’s exclusive history of the epic series of reversals Gingrich has made since 1989, while carbon pollution and the earth’s temperature have skyrocketed:
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by Brad Johnson, cross-posted from TP Green

In a new interview with Newsbusters’ Noel Sheppard, Sen. James Inhofe (R-OK) reiterated his delusional claim that manmade global warming is “the greatest hoax ever.” Inhofe believes that the last eight years of record warmth and catastrophic weather have vindicated his claim, and that he is “doing the Lord’s work” by demonizing attempts to limit fossil fuel pollution:

You might remember, it was 2003 when I made the statement that the idea that manmade gases, CO2, are causing catastrophic global warming is the greatest hoax ever perpetrated on the American people. I was hated at that time, but now people realize I was right. That, by the way, is the title of my book that’s going to come out in January.

“We’re both doing the Lord’s work, Noel,” he told his interviewer.

Inhofe’s assessment is not shared by many.

Pope Benedict XVI, the leader of the Roman Catholic Church, believes there is a “global responsibility” to find the “moral will” to combat the “threatening catastrophe” of climate change.

American ecumenical organizations including Church World Service and the National Council of Churches of Christ have sent letters to President Obama, urging him to do all he can towards reaching “a fair, ambitious and binding agreement that sets forth a truly moral response to climate change.”

“Global climate change is predominantly caused by our burning of fossil fuels,” Inhofe’s own church, the Presbyterian Church of the USA, has recognized. The church issued a resolution in 2008 that “calls upon all Presbyterians to take this seriously, to pray asking for God’s forgiveness and guidance, to study this issue, to calculate your carbon emissions, to educate others, and to use less energy, striving to make your life carbon neutral.”

Brad Johnson is editor of Think Progress Green.

Related CP Post:

• After Getting Sick From Algae Bloom Exacerbated by Heat Wave and Drought, Inhofe Jokes the “Environment Strikes Back”

DURBAN — There’s much speculation at this week’s international climate talks in Durban, South Africa about China’s apparent willingness to consider a binding carbon reduction agreement after 2020.

When China’s chief climate negotiator, Su Wei, said on Saturday that his country would “not rule out the possibility of [a] legally binding agreement,” and explained that “it depends upon the negotiations,” the frameworks being debated in Durban took on a new light.

However, the chief U.S. negotiator, Todd Stern, is expressing caution over the statements from Chinese officials. In an interview with Climate Progress, Stern said he needed to hear more from Wei before he took the comments seriously.

“I don’t think it’s anything different when you deconstruct it than we’ve seen before. But I have to meet with my counterpart, Mr. Xie [Zhenhua, vice chairman of China's National Development and Reform Commission], to see if there’s anything new.”

American officials have demanded that large developing emitters like China and India be a part of any binding agreement in order to consider participating in new negotiations.

Speaking to Climate Progress, Christine Figueres, executive secretary the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, called the hard line U.S. negotiating position “hamstrung.” But she also agreed with Stern that the statements from Chinese officials don’t yet mean much:

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In a Fox News interview hosted by Mike Huckabee, Republican presidential candidate and former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney pledged to overturn existing fuel economy standards that reduce global warming pollution. Responding to a question about the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) from Oklahoma Attorney General Scott Pruitt, Romney said he disagreed with the U.S. Supreme Court decision that carbon dioxide is a pollutant under the Clean Air Act. Romney also said he wants to kill EPA greenhouse standards for cars and trucks, saying the EPA is used by President Obama to “hold down and crush” private enterprise:

The EPA wants to be able to get in and grab more power and basically try and move the whole economy away from oil, gas, coal, nuclear and push it into the renewables. Look, we all like the renewables. But renewables alone are not going to power this economy. And yeah, I would, among other things, I would get the EPA out of its effort to manage carbon dioxide emissions from automobiles and trucks. Look, that was not a pollutant within the meaning of the legislation that authorized the EPA. It is of all the agencies in Washington, it is the one most being used by this President to try and hold down, crush and insert the federal government into the life of the private sector.

Watch it:

The Massachusetts v. EPA decision, made in 2007, compelled the EPA to set tailpipe emissions standards for motor vehicles. The fuel economy standards were issued in 2010, and are in force for cars being sold now. Prodded by higher standards to make more competitive cars, America’s automobile industry is on the road to recovery after years of deregulatory decline.

(HT: Crooks and Liars)

by Dr. Elizabeth Sawin and Dr. Lori Siegel, in a Climate Interactive repost

Postponing commitment to ambitious targets until after 2020 would commit countries to rates of CO2 emissions reductions in decades beyond 2020 that exceed those typically seen in the current generation of energy system models, making future efforts to limit temperature increase to 2°C more expensive and disruptive than needed. Without deeper reductions than are currently pledged by 2020, future generations will have sustain very rapid rates of reduction in emissions.

In the press and in the halls of the climate negotiations some parties, including the US, have been saying that 2020 pledges are essentially fixed in the form of the voluntary commitments made under the Cancun Agreement, and that current political and economic pressures mean that the time for more ambitious commitments to emissions reductions can come only after 2020.

Using the C-ROADS simulation, we examined two scenarios for future emissions reductions, both of which would limit temperature change to 2°C. The first scenario considers if the world were already on a ‘2-degree path’ in 2020 (the “Ambition now” scenario in the graph to the left). The second scenario sets 2020 emissions to the amount indicated by the current level of ambition of the Cancun Agreement (as calculated by our Climate Scoreboard), and includes a corrective action in 2050 to keep the 2°C goal in reach (the “Wait for 2020” scenario). For the “Wait for 2020” scenario we had emissions fall steeply enough after 2020 that by 2100 the increase in temperature approximated the temperature increase in the “Ambition Now” pathway.

We compared rates of reduction in CO2 emissions from fossil fuel use between the two scenarios for the period 2020 to 2050 (as a percentage of year 2000 emissions), and found that in the “Ambition now” scenario emissions fell at 2.1% per year. In contrast, the “Wait for 2020″ showed an average rate of reduction of 4.0%.

What would such a rate of decline mean for the world?

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Others stories below: For Solar Power, Some Breaks in the Clouds (Wall Street Journal!); Scientists confirm Himalayan glacial melting

Source: Global Carbon Project

Carbon Emissions Show Biggest Jump Ever Recorded

Global emissions of carbon dioxide from fossil-fuel burning jumped by the largest amount on record last year, upending the notion that the brief decline during the recession might persist through the recovery.

Emissions rose 5.9 percent in 2010, according to an analysis released Sunday by the Global Carbon Project, an international collaboration of scientists tracking the numbers. Scientists with the group said the increase, a half-billion extra tons of carbon pumped into the air, was almost certainly the largest absolute jump in any year since the Industrial Revolution, and the largest percentage increase since 2003.

The increase solidified a trend of ever-rising emissions that scientists fear will make it difficult, if not impossible, to forestall severe climate change in coming decades.

Climate Progress reported on a similar analysis last month (see “Biggest Jump Ever in Global Warming Pollution in 2010, Chinese CO2 Emissions Now Exceed U.S.’s By 50%“).  Here’s more on the new study:

CLICK HERE TO READ MORE OR COMMENT

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by Rebecca Lefton

DURBAN — Most people do not think of climate change as a gender issue. But experts at the COP 17 climate conference in Durban, South Africa are trying to raise awareness of the disproportionate impact that a changing climate has on women.

Women are responsible for collecting water that is becoming increasingly scarce, and they are needing to travel farther distances to reach clean water supplies. Women are primarily responsible for putting food on the table, but food prices are rising and as climate change worsens agricultural productivity. And women are often the most vulnerable in war and regional conflicts, which will be exacerbated by resource scarcity.

A discussion held yesterday in Durban focused on these impacts. The panel featured the Honorable Mary Robinson, the former president of Ireland and UN High Commissioner for Human Rights. In addressing climate resilience, Robinson stressed the importance of focusing on health and burden impacts of climate change. One of the keys is access to reproductive health for women.

However, access to reproductive health is not on the agenda during COP 17 in Durban. This absence is in part a product of the United Nations system, which segments women’s rights, reproductive health and climate change initiatives under different bodies—encompassed by UN Women, UN Population Fund and the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change respectively.

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ThinkProgress reporter Stephen Lacey is on the ground at the COP17 climate talks in Durban, South Africa. Read all ThinkProgress Durban coverage here.

Cardinal Oscar Rodriguez Maradiaga says failure at U.N. climate talks in Durban is a “moral apartheid” that cannot be allowed to happen. Cardinal Rodriguez Maradiaga is the president of Caritas Internationalis, the Catholic global humanitarian organization. The cardinal mentioned the deadly Durban floods as a sign for action:

Barely a week ago, torrential downpours caused a great deal of suffering and death in Durban. Don’t we realize that the climate is out of control? How long will countless people have to go on dying before adequate decisions are taken?

During the special Mass at Emmanuel Cathedral in Durban, Cardinal Rodriguez also noted, “Just as South Africa’s Apartheid era policies sought divisions along race lines, today the world’s environment and energy policies divide man from nature.”

Rodriguez has said that “the first-hand experience of Caritas staff in emergencies shows the poor will suffer the greatest.” Below is the full text of Cardinal Rodriguez Maradiaga’s homily: Read more

by Jessica Goad, cross-posted from TP Green

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:

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