Amounts of warming previously thought to be safe may instead trigger widespread melting of the world’s ice sheets and other catastrophic impacts, scientists said….

“There’s evidence that climate sensitivity may be quite a bit higher than what the models are suggesting,” said Ken Caldeira, a senior scientist at Stanford University’s Carnegie Institution for Science.

That’s from a Daily Climate piece on this panel discussion at last weeks AGU meeting:

The sensitivity issue is a complicated one, as I’ve discussed.  The AGU discussion certainly helps clarify key issues and suggests that some effort is being put into a reconciliation of the different ways of  calculating.

Don’t miss the back and forth on whether we are headed toward 25 meters of sea level rise or 70 meters at the end.  For some of the science, see Science: CO2 levels haven’t been this high for 15 million years, when it was 5° to 10°F warmer and seas were 75 to 120 feet higher — “We have shown that this dramatic rise in sea level is associated with an increase in CO2 levels of about 100 ppm”.

If you’re interested on Caldeira’s work on a very high sensitivity –  5.5°C to 8°C (10 to 14 F) — click here.  It is based on the PETM 55 million years ago and “having strong functioning methane feedbacks.” Thankfully we’ve got nothing to worry about in the Anthropocene (see”NSIDC : Thawing permafrost feedback will turn Arctic from carbon sink to source in the 2020s, releasing 100 billion tons of carbon by 2100).

Here’s more of the Daily Climate piece:

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A new report from iWatch News by Corbin Hiar explores how low-income, minority neighborhoods still bear the brunt of toxic pollution, despite assurances by U. S. Environmental Protection Agency Aministration Lisa Jackson that environmental justice would be a top priority:

Three years into Lisa Jackson’s tenure as head of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, more than a dozen formal complaints alleging air pollution is disproportionately harming low-income, minority communities remain unresolved. Each of these complaints has languished — in some instances, for more than a decade — in the EPA’s Office of Civil Rights despite Jackson’s stated commitment to environmental justice.

“We must include environmental justice principles in all of our decisions … especially with regard to children,” Jackson wrote in a January 2010 memo outlining the agency’s top priorities.

But EPA documents obtained by the Center for Public Integrity’s iWatch News and interviews with activists and residents reveal that the administrator’s words have brought little relief to underprivileged communities overburdened with pollution.

The Office of Civil Rights — whose leader reports directly to Jackson — has in its files a total of 38 unresolved complaints dating to July 1994, according to a list published on the office’s website following a Freedom of Information Act request from iWatch News. Fifteen of these OCR complaints involve air pollution.

The EPA did not explain why so many cases remain unresolved. However, a spokeswoman said in an email that “the Agency has made meaningful progress on many of the complaints that remain on its docket.”

Environmental justice advocates are dubious. “The backlog doesn’t seem greatly improved, and it’s not clear what processes they use to evaluate the complaints” said Marianne Engelman Lado, a lawyer at Earthjustice, a nonprofit environmental law firm. “Why is that progress?”

Rafael DeLeon, the head of the Office of Civil Rights, did not respond to reqests for an interview. Jackson has also not responded to multiple interview requests for iWatch News’ and NPR’s Poisoned Places series.

In 2003, Pixar presented the American imagination with a tour of the world’s sealife led by America’s favorite fish, Nemo. But according to a new study, many of the species who swam on screen are close to no longer existing in real life. The International Union for Conservation of Nature found that 16 percent of the species found in “Finding Nemo” actually “face the threat of extinction“:

Sixteen percent of the species associated with characters in “Finding Nemo” that have been evaluated face the threat of extinction, according to the study, which was conducted by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) and Canada’s Simon Fraser University. The analysis of 1,568 species is not just a whimsical look at American popular culture and its cartoon characters. It reveals how humans treat some of the ocean’s most charismatic inhabitants.[...]

The Oscar-winning 2003 Disney/Pixar movie, which details how the clownfish Marlin defies all odds to save his son from the aquarium trade, has a conservation message. But the film actually inspired a booming aquarium trade in the bright orange fish with white stripes, significantly reducing native clownfish populations on coral reefs in Australia and elsewhere.

While the IUCN classifies clownfish as a “species of least concern,” meaning it does not face an imminent extinction risk, 18 percent of the evaluated species that are related to Nemo — those of the scientific family Pomacentridae — are at risk of extinction. There have been few formal scientific assessments of coral reef fish populations that are sought by the aquarium trade, McClenachan said, so “it’s very hard to know the true extent of the aquarium, live reef and curio trade.”

Many of these species are endangered because of human activity. Sea turtles are vulnerable after years of getting caught in commercial fishing gear and getting their nesting area trampled or obstructed by development. More than half of hammer head sharks face extinction due to over-fishing and demand for shark fins. Indeed, “direct exploitation is the key driver of many of the species’ decline.” What’s more, they “are more threatened than the most threatened vertebrates on land.”

But not many of the species that are endangered and face extinction are listed as such. In fact, 40 percent of the birds, 50 percent of the mammals, and 80 to 95 percent of the other species like amphibians and insects that the IUCN recognize as endangered are not even listed on the official U.S. list of endangered species. This amounts to about 531 species that have not made the official protection list.

Researchers hope that the more people recognize the animals they see in movies like Finding Nemo, the more likely they are to care about human impact on them. These animals “got life histories that cause them to interact with people wherever they go,” said one researcher. “These are species that should be doing better because they are ones we care about.” Unless humans take notice, Nemo will be increasingly hard to find.

by Arne Jungjohann, excerpted from Grist.

Sweden, the U.K., and Germany: The European trio leads the world in fighting climate change.

That’s the finding of the most recent Climate Change Performance Index [PDF], which was released this week at COP 17 in Durban. But Swedes, Brits, and Germans shouldn’t cheer just yet; even their countries are not contributing their fair share.

In fact, that is the most worrying result of the index: No country is doing enough to seriously fight climate change. Consequently, the report — published by Germanwatch and Climate Action Network Europe — did not reward any country a ranking of 1-3. The countries ranked worst this year are Saudi Arabia, Iran, and Kazakhstan.

What about the United States? In comparison to 2010, the U.S. has climbed up two ranks, mainly due to emission reductions from the recession and increased renewable energy capacity. However, given still-high emissions and the lack of substantial national policies, the U.S. remains toward the bottom of the index, ranked No. 52. Among the large emitters around the world, only Canada, Russia, China, and Iran are worse.

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One of the world’s top climatologists talks climate science and climate science denial:

Related Posts:

• WashPost: “The Scientific Finding that Settles the Climate-Change Debate” and “Confirms” the Hockey Stick Graph
• Score Another Victory for Scientists, Michael Mann and the Freedom of Inquiry
• Much-vindicated Michael Mann and Hockey Stick get final exoneration

• Two more independent studies back the Hockey Stick: Recent global warming is unprecedented in magnitude and speed and cause

Over the past 10 years, the death of forest trees due to drought and increased temperatures has been documented on all continents except Antarctica. This can in turn drive global warming by reducing the amount of carbon dioxide removed from the atmosphere by trees and by releasing carbon locked up in their wood.

That’s from the news release for a new Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences study, “Roles of hydraulic and carbon stress in a widespread climate-induced forest die-off.”

A common myth is that higher levels of CO2 will be good for all vegetation.  Unfortunately, those higher levels of CO2 are accompanied by higher temperatures and, in many places, drought and bark beetle infestation, which are bad news for trees — as study after study has documented (see links below).

The new study spells this out for the trembling aspen (Populus tremuloides), which goes by many other names, including the white poplar, though, as it turns out, the aspens apparently now have reason to tremble — manmade global warming.  Fittingly, the aspen die-off is “called Sudden Aspen Decline or SAD.”

The study has a nice overview and notes with the key recent studies:

Forests are important carbon sinks, yet they are threatened by global change (1, 2). In the past decade, widespread forest mortality related to drought or temperature stress has been documented in multiple biomes and on all vegetated continents (3–6). In temperate North America, some of these events have been linked to “global change-type droughts,” defined as severe drought coupled with elevated summer temperatures (6–9). Such mortality events can radically transform regional land cover and effect biodiversity, fire risk, ecosystem function, land–atmosphere interactions, and ecosystem services (10–12). Furthermore, forest diebacks can lead to dramatic decreases in net primary production and carbon sequestration, driving these ecosystems to become CO2 sources and to have a positive feedback to climate warming (11, 13–17). Climate-mediated die-off of pine forests caused by insect outbreak in Canada led to estimated carbon emissions of 990 Mt CO2e (CO2 equivalent) over a 20-y period, equivalent to 5 y of Canada’s annual transportation sector emissions (200 Mt CO2e/y) (15)

There is every reason to think things will get much worse if we stay on our current emissions path (see Science: Second ’100-year’ Amazon drought in 5 years caused huge CO2 emissions. If this pattern continues, the forest would become a warming source).

This PNAS study explores the cause of the climate-induced forest die-off, and explains how droughts kill trees:

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Report on a ten-state initiative to reduce greenhouse gas emissions shows the program is a success after three years.

By Maria Gallucci, excerpted from InsideClimate News

The state of Massachusetts is quietly reaping the benefits of cap and trade, the much-maligned process for curbing greenhouse gas emissions that federal lawmakers and many state governments resoundingly rejected in recent years. According to a recent study, cap and trade has created 3,800 jobs and nearly $500 million in economic activity for Massachusetts since 2008.

Massachusetts belongs to theRegional Greenhouse Gas Initiative (RGGI), the first and only mandatory carbon emissions trading scheme in America. A report analyzing data from the first three years of the effort found that of the 10 participating Northeast and Mid-Atlantic states, Massachusetts benefited most economically, because it used the bulk of its money to help fund its aggressive energy efficiency agenda.

“Energy efficiency investments have a much bigger multiplier effect than any other category of spending,” said Paul Hibbard, vice president of the Analysis Group, the Boston-based consulting firm that prepared the report. When homeowners and businesses used RGGI dollars to retrofit and weatherize buildings, they not only ended up saving on energy costs and spending money elsewhere in the economy—they also put contractors and installers to work.

RGGI “is a very successful program … and we look forward to continue achieving those results,” Mark Sylvia, commissioner of Massachusetts’ Department of Energy Resources, told InsideClimate News.

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A Media Matters Repost

As many faith leaders have recognized, climate change presents a massive ethical challenge since those least responsible for global warming are among the most vulnerable to its consequences, including water scarcity, climate-sensitive diseases, and sea level rise. Yet in response to the recent international climate talks, conservative media outlets are mocking developing countries for seeking adaptation assistance, saying they just want to “cash in” on “climate gold.”

Spurred by a challenge from Ralph Nader, Sen. Jim Inhofe (R-OK) and Rep. Ed Markey (D-MA) plan to debate global warming. Tulsa World’s Jim Myers reports that Inhofe accepted Nader’s challenge to discuss the science of climate change with another member of Congress. Markey, the former chair of the House Select Committee on Global Warming, agreed to debate Inhofe, who continues to insist that global warming is an international “hoax,” even though his state has been wracked by record heat waves, storms, and drought. Inhofe “would welcome the opportunity to debate,” he said:

I would welcome the opportunity to debate the issue of global warming with Congressman Markey. In fact, I would enjoy the company: since the failure of global warming alarmism and the complete collapse of the Kyoto process, the only one talking about global warming in Washington these days has been me.

As is typical of Inhofe, little of what he said had any bearing on reality. Americans are increasingly concerned that global warming is driving extreme weather, climate negotiators successfully extended the Kyoto process at Durban, and thousands of people in Washington continue to fight for climate action against fossil-fuel interests. Inhofe ignored recent speeches on the Senate floor by Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) and Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-CA) on the urgency of the climate threat. Thousands of people in Washington are working every day to fight climate change, from Northrup Grumman scientists to FEMA officials.

”Congressman Markey would gladly discuss with Sen. Inhofe the over 100 years of science that proves carbon dioxide and other global warming pollutants are raising the temperature of the earth and changing the chemistry of the oceans,” said Markey spokesman Eben Burnham-Snyder.

by Richard W. Caperton

Conversations about building new renewable energy almost always come back to the electricity from these projects being more expensive than fossil fuel energy.  This may be the case (although it’s almost certainly overstated), but this shouldn’t lead to the conclusion that the way to minimize rate impacts is simply to use less renewable energy.  In fact, there are policy tools that can help lower the cost of renewable energy, letting us meet renewables goals at a lower price.

One of these policies is a feed-in tariff, also known as “CLEAN Contracts.”  Perhaps most famous for its successful implementation in Germany, a feed-in tariff is a policy tool that guarantees a fixed price at which renewable generators can sell the electricity they produce.  The tool works by requiring that utilities offer a standardized, long-term contract to clean energy developers, with a price determined by a public body or regulatory authority.  Feed-in tariffs provide the transparency, longevity, and certainty that banks need to finance projects, which leads to significant investment.  Indeed, feed-in tariffs are responsible for 75 percent of the solar photovoltaic power installed worldwide, as well as 45 percent of the wind energy.

The key element of a feed-in tariff is to set a price that reflects the cost of generating the energy, including a reasonable rate of return that is fair and equitable to both investors and ratepayers.  This is generally the same way that regulators set electricity rates, by looking at a utility’s costs – including investments in new generation – and setting rates at a level to recover those costs plus a reasonable rate of return to their investors.  The rate of return is critical, because there is evidence that the necessary rate of return under a feed-in tariff program can be lower than the typical rate of return that utilities require.  This means that renewable energy is cheaper with a feed-in tariff than without.

Publicly-available data on utility rates of return, feed-in tariff policies, and costs of renewable energy can give important insights into just how big this difference can be.

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