NOTE:  NY Times readers who want to see an extended excerpt of my Nature article can go here: “Nature Publishes My Piece on Dust-Bowlification and the Grave Threat It Poses to Food Security.”

The NY Times reviews two new books on Dust-Bowlification — A Great Aridness: Climate Change and the Future of the American Southwest, and Lessons from the World’s Least Sustainable City:

Both authors cite the work of Jonathan Overpeck, a geologist and a director of the Institute of the Environment at the University of Arizona, whose tracking of simultaneously increasing temperatures and decreasing rainfall leads him to conclude that a new era of drought is dawning in many regions. He is not alone. The NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies had already predicted that extreme droughts would be an every-other-year phenomenon in the United States by the middle of this century.

And of course, the American Southwest is not the only region experiencing drought apparently tied to climate change. According to the journal Science, of the 12 driest winters the Mediterranean has experienced since 1902, 10 have occurred in the last 20 years. Researchers from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration say climate change can explain half of the added dryness.

See NOAA Bombshell: Human-Caused Climate Change Already a Major Factor in More Frequent Mediterranean Droughts

“The coming droughts ought to be a major driver — if not the major driver — of climate policies,” Joseph Romm wrote in a recent issue of the journal Nature. Dr. Romm, a physicist who edits the blog Climate Progress, added, “Raising public awareness of, and scientific focus on, the likelihood of severe effects of drought is the first step to prompting action.”

People who read these books will understand that message.

CP will run a full review of deBuys’ A Great Aridness shortly.

Dr. deBuys explains what we need to do and what we are likely to do:

Read more

by Matthias Bell, RMI, and Dylan Sullivan of NRDC, cross-posted from the Rocky Mountain Institute

This is part one in a three part series published at RMI on turbocharging energy efficiency programs.

The utilities in Ohio will tell you that they’re nothing like the energy efficiency leaders in California, Oregon, Vermont, or Massachusetts. Their systems are different and so are the regulations they must follow. But none of that has prevented them from investing in energy efficiency with their customers.

In 2008, recognizing that energy efficiency is the cheapest way to meet energy needs, Ohio’s Legislature passed a law that requires electric utilities to help their customers save energy. Since then, American Electric Power, Duke Energy, and Dayton Power and Light have stepped up those efforts and saved almost twice the amount of energy required by law (.3% and .5% of load in 2009 and 2010, respectively). AEP went from saving almost no energy in 2005 to saving a cumulative 554,000 MWh from its 2009 and 2010 energy efficiency programs, enough energy to power 55,000 Ohio homes for one year.

Utilities in Ohio aren’t the only ones making these changes. They’re part of a national trend. From 2007 to 2010, electric utility efficiency program budgets have gone from $2.7 billion to $5.4 billion. In other words, utilities have doubled the amount they are spending on efficiency in just the past three years. These numbers will only continue to rise. By 2020, program budgets are expected to reach $10.9 billion.

Read more

by Toby Webb, cross-posted from the Smarter Business blog

US environmental NGOs, along with other, more globally minded ‘green’ and conservation-minded NGOs, have been poorly led in recent years.

They’ve blown a series of chances to help businesses change using a nuanced approach. Their approach been too cut and dried, too ‘with you not against you’ in ideology. It was never as simple as that.

That’s fairly clear to most people I know. I’m condensing quite a few other opinions here.

Now a new generation of green group leaders is emerging.

This new set of leaders may have learned from Greenpeace’s brilliant ‘stick and carrot’ approach that has proven so effective with business.

That’s if this New York Times article is correct:

“Roger Ballentine, a climate adviser to the Clinton White House who now advises businesses on green strategies, suggests that the movement has grown impatient with coaxing incremental change by engaging with policy makers and corporations.

The old way was the Sierra Club putting its seal on “green” Clorox products; the new way is suggested by a Greenpeace Internet campaign that wrung a promise from Facebook last week to use less coal for its data centers.

“The failure to address climate is catastrophic, and young people are justifiably outraged,” Mr. Ballentine said, pointing to the next generation in the movement. “What we have now is an antagonized grass roots calling for a radicalized approach.”

This could mean that in 2012 the big, well-funded US green NGOs may begin to copy Greenpeace’s tactics.
Read more

The Debunking Handbook is a guide to debunking myths, by John Cook and Stephan Lewandowsky. It boils down the research on the psychological research on misinformation into a short, simple summary.

This is part two of a five-part series cross-posted from Skeptical Science.

To debunk a myth, you often have to mention it — otherwise, how will people know what you’re talking about? However, this makes people more familiar with the myth and hence more likely to accept it as true. Does this mean debunking a myth might actually reinforce it in people’s minds?

To test for this backfire effect, people were shown a flyer that debunked common myths about flu vaccines.¹ Afterwards, they were asked to separate the myths from the facts. When asked immediately after reading the flyer, people successfully identified the myths. However, when queried 30 minutes after reading the flyer, some people actually scored worse after reading the flyer. The debunking reinforced the myths.

Read more