by Andrew Freedman, Alyson Kenward and Mike Lemonick, cross-posted from Climate Central

Texas, Alabama and Missouri topped the list of states hardest hit by the unrelenting assault of extreme weather in 2011.

Severe weather across much of the nation has raised the question of whether global warming has already begun to influence shorter-term weather patterns, and the specter of even more extreme years to come as global temperatures continue to rise.

According to climate studies, the short answer is yes: the new climate environment created by global warming is more conducive to some extreme events, particularly heat waves and heavy precipitation events: these are now more likely to occur and be more intense when they do take place. Climate models have more difficulty predicting how climate change may be influencing other types of extremes, such as severe thunderstorms and tornadoes, but a warming climate provides more fuel to these events in the form of increased water vapor and heat in the atmosphere.

And those extreme events — searing heat waves, parching drought, deadly tornadoes, blizzards and floods — cost billions of dollars in damage, affected millions of lives and tragically, killed more than a thousand people across the U.S.

By some measures, 2011 was the most extreme year for the U.S. since reliable record-keeping began in the 19^thcentury — and the costs have been enormous: according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), 2011 set a record for the most billion dollar disasters in a single year. There were 12, breaking the old record of nine set in 2009. The aggregate damage from these 12 events totals at least $52 billion, NOAA found.

While extreme weather knows no boundaries, and the impact of those events was felt coast to coast, Climate Central looked at the number of extreme events that affected each state to determine the 10 states that were clobbered the worst. According to Climate Central’s analysis, Texas tops that list of hardest hit, with a costly — and deadly — combination of intense drought, a punishing heat wave, the worst wildfires in state history, and plenty of tornadoes. Rounding out the top 10 was Alabama, Missouri, North Carolina, Oklahoma, Tennessee, Kansas, Connecticut, Vermont and New Jersey.

Climate Central’s analysis factored the death toll in each state, damage costs, the disruption caused to daily life, and how unusual the events were compared with what transpires in an average year.

But for these 10 states, little of what transpired was average as extreme weather rewrote the record books in 2011.

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The year 2011 brought the most billion-dollar climate disasters to the United States ever, piling history-making events on top of each other to catastrophic results. The litany of disaster included a scorching drought that rivaled the Dust Bowl summer of 1936, a tornado season twice as bad as the great 1974 tornado outbreak, and flooding worse than the the great 1927 flood on the Mississippi River. This year of disaster was the result of the unlimited burning of fossil fuels, which has trapped increasing amounts of heat in the atmosphere, disrupting our climate system.

In an interview with PBS News Hour, Weather Underground’s Jeff Masters described the effect of the hundreds of billions of tons of global warming pollution as being like “steroids for the atmosphere,” intensifying extreme weather to unprecedented results:

We look at heat waves, droughts, and flooding events. They all tend to get increased when you have this extra energy in the atmosphere. I call it being on steroids for the atmosphere. Normally, you have the everyday ups and downs of the weather, but if you pack a little bit of extra punch in there, it’s like a baseball hitter who’s on steroids. You expect to see a big home run total maybe from this slugger, but if you add a little bit of extra oomph to his swing by putting him on steroids, now we can have an unprecedented season, a 70 home run season. And that’s the way I look at this year. We had an unprecedented weather year that I don’t think would have happened unless we had had an extra bit of energy in the atmosphere due to climate change and global warming.

Watch the program:

Nationwide, more than 6,000 heat records were broken this year. On average, the U.S. has three or four events every year that are considered major natural disasters. But, this year, there were at least fourteen billion-dollar disasters. Damages are expected to exceed $53 billion.

The Debunking Handbook is a guide to debunking myths, by John Cook and Stephan Lewandowsky.

This is part five of a five-part series originally published at Skeptical Science.

Assuming you successfully negotiate the various backfire effects, what is the most effective way to debunk a myth? The challenge is that once misinformation gets into a person’s mind, it’s very difficult to remove. This is the case even when people remember and accept a correction.

This was demonstrated in an experiment in which people read a fictitious account of a warehouse fire.^1,2,3 Mention was made of paint and gas cans along with explosions. Later in the story, it was clarified that paint and cans were not present at the fire. Even when people remembered and accepted this correction, they still cited the paint or cans when asked questions about the fire. When asked, “Why do you think there was so much smoke?”, people routinely invoked the oil paint despite having just acknowledged it as not being present.

When people hear misinformation, they build a mental model, with the myth providing an explanation. When the myth is debunked, a gap is left in their mental model. To deal with this dilemma, people prefer an incorrect model over an incomplete model. In the absence of a better explanation, they opt for the wrong explanation.⁴

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by Brendan O’Donnell and Mathias Bell, cross-posted from the Rocky Mountain Institute

This is part three in a three-part series published at RMI on Turbocharging energy efficiency programs.

When you see the blue ENERGY STAR logo plastered on the side of your TV, you probably think of two things:

• This is an energy-efficient television.
• The federal government is providing me some assurance that the energy savings are real, the latter being more vague—I know the government is behind this somehow…

What you may not know is that some electric utilities are working hard to increase the number of ENERGY STAR appliances being bought.

Traditional utility energy-efficiency programs, especially those targeting mass-market residential customers, have enticed participation mostly through rebates. If a customer saves the receipt for an appliance and mails it in, the utility will cut a check. The ENERGY STAR product is made cheaper for the customer and the utility gets credit for the energy savings.

But for many customers, rebates are a hassle that require a lot of time and effort. As a result, participation rates fall short, even though buying the ENERGY STAR appliance is the smart choice.

To make things easier for customers, some utilities have wisely begun to work upstream with manufacturers, vendors and retailers. Instead of offering the customer rebates, the utilities are providing incentives to product suppliers to ensure that store shelves are stocked only with ENERGY STAR appliances. One upstream program that we think is particularly effective is the Northeast Energy Efficiency Partnership’s (NEEP) Retail Products Initiative.

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by Greg Hanscom, cross-posted from Grist

It’s that time of year again: When public schools everywhere cast about desperately for a holiday celebration that doesn’t involve Jesus or a dude in a red suit; when families gather from thither and yon to spend a few days remembering why they’ve scattered thither and yon in the first place; and yes, it’s time to take stock of the year past, and look ahead to the one coming up. As the guy charged with keeping an eye on all things urban around here, I curled up with my laptop on a winter’s night that was definitely not as cold as they used to be, dug through the archives, and now offer this, my most humble (and totally non-denominational) retrospective of 2011.

The promise of 2010: “bright flight”

Photo: Matthew Rutledge

The view from Seattle’s Capitol Hill. With Millennials and Baby Boomers both expressing interest in more urban living, it looked like 2011 would usher in the “triumph of the city,” to borrow the title from a book released this year by Harvard economist Edward Glaeser. Between-year Census numbers released last year suggested that, for the first time in a generation in many metropolitan areas, white people were shunning the suburbs in favor of city living. “A new image of urban America is in the making,” William Frey, a demographer with the Brookings Institution, told the Associated Press. “What used to be white flight to the suburbs is turning into ‘bright flight’ to cities that have become magnets for aspiring young adults who see access to knowledge-based jobs, public transportation, and a new city ambience as an attraction.” It was music to many city leaders’ ears, and great news for the planet, too, as tightly packed, car-free living is what a green future looks like for many of us. But wait, there’s more …

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