RealClimate Commenter:  Methane alarmism will not be dissuaded by any reasonable means. But nice try David. ;)

Response [by geophysicist David Archer]: Well, to be honest, sometimes I do get spooked myself. There is a lot of carbon up there. David. PS: On further reflection, I don’t think I want to be fighting being alarmed about methane bubbles in the Arctic. I am alarmed too, but perhaps I’m alarmed for a longer time frame than some. David]

Whether or not you should be alarmed by Arctic methane depends on your definition of “alarmed.”  And it depends on how much you follow the other areas of climate science, many of which are, for me, considerably more “alarming” (see “An Illustrated Guide to the Science of Global Warming Impacts: How We Know Inaction Is the Gravest Threat Humanity Faces“):

Something truly alarming (via M.I.T.):  Inaction (our current “no policy” strategy) eliminates most of the uncertainty about whether or not future warming will be catastrophic.  Aggressive emissions reductions — fatally rejected by deniers, the breakthrough bunch, and the ignorati — dramatically improves humanity’s chances.

But I’m getting ahead of myself.   Concern about methane emissions has risen in recent years because methane levels have been risen in recent years after a decade of little growth and because there have been reports of massive methane plumes of the Arctic coast and because the carbon-rich permafrost is thawing.

Fortunately, the best NOAA analysis “suggests we have not yet activated strong climate feedbacks from permafrost and CH₄ hydrates,” a finding Climate Progress first reported 3 years ago.

But much more rapid ice loss in the Arctic than expected, accompanied by rapid permafrost warming, has convinced leading experts now say that frozen carbon is likely to start being released at a large-scale in the next few decades –  some of it in the form of methane, a far more potent greenhouse gas than CO2 — causing 2.5 times the warming of deforestation.  That would complicate any efforts by humanity to reduce emissions and avert multiple, simultaneous catastrophes (see below).  This largely unmodeled amplifying carbon-cycle feedback is, obviously, worrisome and even alarming.

As an aside, the word “alarm” literally meant “a call to arms” — as in, there is imminent danger folks, saddle up.  So we have “alarm” defined as “a sudden fear caused by the realization of danger” or “a warning of existing or approaching danger.”

An another aside, the do-little crowd and their enablers/stenographers — you know who they are — have two big tricks to poo-pooh “alarmists.”  First, they attack alarmists as predicting “certain doom,” pointing out that the models are filled with uncertainty and predict a large range of impacts.  But they don’t tell you that their preferred course of action — doing very little — cuts out most of the uncertainty, sharply narrows the impact range, and thus dramatically increases the probability of the catastrophe (see MIT’s wheel of misfortune above).

Second, the snooze button pushers attack alarmists for supposedly saying we are experiencing a real-time catastrophe, but they are really hiding behind the lags in the energy and climate system.  The climate realists are alarmed not because the doom hits in the next few years, but because if we don’t act aggressively in the next few years, the “doom” becomes exceedingly difficult to avoid.

In short, the do-little crowd and their enablers/stenographers have won the day politically, which means the alarmists have “won the day” scientifically.  Put another way, anyone who isn’t alarmed right now, simply doesn’t know what they are talking about.  As but one piece of proof:  The historically staid and conservative International Energy Agency has joined the ranks of the “alarmists” — see IEA’s Bombshell Warning: We’re Headed Toward 11°F Global Warming and “Delaying Action Is a False Economy.”

The notion it’s alarmist to say that where we are headed is catastrophic is, well, just laughable … or cryable.  As the chief economist for the IEA said in November about the fact that the world is on pace for 6°C (11 F) warming “Even School Children Know This Will Have Catastrophic Implications for All of Us.”

Darn you alarmist school children!

So we should retire the term “alarmist” and its variations.  We are climate realists — or climate hawks, if you prefer.  The snooze button pushers, well, they are still asleep at the wheel, which I wish were a mixed metaphor, but I guess those warning in the ads for Ambien are right — those pill-popping politicians and pundits driving the national and global SUV are sound asleep but don’t know it.  And that’s not even counting the disinformers, who I guess in this extended metaphor are working desperately to unplug the alarm clock or encase it in tar sands.  I digress.

Recently, geophysicist David Archer, an expert on the carbon cycle and methane hydrates, wrote three pieces on Arctic methane for the must-read website RealClimate.  The first is titled, “Much ado about methane,” though it would have been better titled “Much ado about methane hydrates.”  The second is “An Arctic methane worst-case scenario.” The third post discusses a model he created that you can play around with if you want an even worse case or a better one.

I am generally a fan of analyzing worst-case scenarios for two reasons.  First, in real life, individuals base a considerable amount of their planning and spending on worst-case scenarios (fire burning down your house,  catastrophic  healthcare problem) and so do governments:  Just think about how much money and material and manpower the U.S. has devoted since 1945 over the possibility of a Russian nuclear attack or tank invasion of West Europe or the need to fight two wars  simultaneously, and so on.  Second, many of those pesky worst-case scenarios somehow seem to keep happening where humans are involved — Fukushima being a classic example — which isn’t a big surprise given that ignoring warnings, which are sometimes called alarms, pretty much guarantees things are going to be worse than folks thought.

So here is what Archer finds in his worst-case scenario — if “the Arctic started to degas methane 100 times faster than it is today”:

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Five senators and 39 representatives received a perfect 100 percent score from the Koch brothers’ Astroturf group Americans For Prosperity for the first half of the 112th Congress. AFP judged Congress on their votes to protect the Koch brothers’ right-wing petrochemical empire on such issues as the repeal of President Obama’s new health care law, preempting EPA’s authority to regulate greenhouse gases, Chairman Paul Ryan’s budget to end Medicare, ending ethanol subsidies, several Congressional Review Act resolutions of disapproval to overturn new regulations and the fiscal year 2012 appropriations bills.

The Koch Five are Sens. Tom Coburn (R-OK), Mike Crapo (R-ID), Orrin Hatch (R-UT), Marco Rubio (R-FL), and Ron Johnson (R-WI), who have received a combined $187,400 in campaign contributions from the Koch empire:

THE KOCH FIVE
Senator	Koch Contributions
Coburn (R-OK)	$56300
Crapo (R-ID)	$42000
Hatch (R-UT)	$26500
Rubio (R-FL)	$34700
Johnson (R-WI)	$27900

The Kochs were the top contributors to Ron Johnson’s successful campaign to unseat Russ Feingold in 2010. Like first-termers Rubio and Johnson, Coburn has a perfect lifetime Koch score.

by Tom Kenworthy

Today marks the 125^th anniversary of the birth of writer and conservationist Aldo Leopold, and therefore an appropriate time to reflect on wilderness, bemoan the 112^th Congress’ lamentable record on land conservation, and to take a look at what the Congress may accomplish on wilderness in 2012.

Leopold, a writer (“A Sand County Almanac”), scientist, forester, and wildlife ecologist, was a huge influence on how we look at land and nature in the U.S. In the early 1920s, while employed by the U.S. Forest Service, Leopold convinced his agency to set aside by administrative action a half million acres in the Gila National Forest in New Mexico as “wilderness” –the highest form of land protection in our country.  It was the first time something like this had been done before.

His working definition of wilderness – “a continuous stretch of country preserved in its natural state, open to lawful hunting and fishing, big enough to absorb a two weeks’ pack trip, and kept devoid of roads, artificial trails, cottages, or other works of man” – was a model for the statutory and regulatory requirements for wilderness when Congress in 1964 enacted the Wilderness Act. The result of Leopold and his contemporaries’ efforts is the National Wilderness Preservation System, which today includes nearly 110 million acres in 44 states.

From the vantage point of 2012, when bitter partisanship infects nearly all the workings of Congress and the whole concept of wilderness is loathed by so many Republicans, it is hard to imagine the relative harmony that prevailed during consideration of the 1964 Wilderness Act. It passed the Senate 73-12 and received only one no vote in the House.

Traditionally, Republicans members of Congress have introduced, pushed, and supported wilderness legislation.  But today, not even influential Republicans in Congress can get much traction on even the most modest proposed wilderness bills, perhaps because House Natural Resources Committee Chairman Doc Hastings has held more than 20 oversight hearings on how to drill more while holding zero on wilderness.  Additionally, out of dozens of bills passed by the committee last year, not a single one was a wilderness bill.

But there are a handful of wilderness and conservation bills sponsored by Republicans that could move in the next year, if Republican leadership will allow them.  Among the wilderness bills introduced by Republicans currently languishing are

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by Stephen Lacey and Zachary Rybarczyk

The House of Representatives under the 112th Congress has been dubbed “the most anti-environmental House in history.” From a refusal to give up on styrofoam in the congressional cafeteria to the push for more uranium mining in the Grand Canyon, this House has an astonishingly deep resume of bad decisions on climate, energy and conservation issues.

Rounding out 2011 was a bill forcing President Obama to approve or deny the Keystone XL pipeline in 60 days — taking further federal environmental reviews off the table, even while a former Keystone pipeline inspector called the project a potential “disaster.”

A new analysis of two years of campaign contributions to House members conducted by the non-partisan research group MapLight shows a strong correlation between money flowing to Congress and House votes in favor of pushing a decision on Keystone XL.

In total, American oil and gas industry lobbyists have spent nearly $12 million in campaign contributions to both Republicans and Democrats since 2009, when the Keystone XL building permit was originally filed.

Of the 195 representatives who list oil and gas lobbyists in their top-20 campaign contributions, 185 voted for a bill in July that would have expedited the approval and construction of Keystone XL. That bill eventually died in the Senate. However, in December, the House passed an extension of the payroll tax cut that included a mandatory executive decision on the pipeline by February.

Here are the top 10:

Oil Change International highlighted a couple key pieces of information not outlined by the MapLight analysis:

• In total, Representatives who voted for the pipeline have received $10,922,161 from the oil and gas industry while those who voted against the pipeline have received only $717,552.  In other words, those that voted for the pipeline have received 15 times more money from the oil and gas industry.
• Maplight’s data also shows that the oil and gas industry has contributed more than ten times as much to members of Congress as environmental interests have. This is worth noting in particular because Maplight’s presentation referenced “high-contributing environmental groups” without this important piece of context.

So when American Petroleum Institute President Jack Gerard threatened “huge political consequences” if Keystone XL isn’t approved, he meant it.

Note:  If Obama avoids making a decision on Keystone XL in February, Republicans are now crafting legislation that would again force his hand in April. “Any and all legislative options are in play,” said Nebraska Republican Congressman Lee Terry to Reuters.

— Zachary Rybarczyk and Stephen Lacey

Related Post:

• Pipeline Inspector-Turned Whistleblower Calls Keystone XL a Potential “Disaster”

In a major advance for concerned citizens, the Obama administration has unveiled an interactive website that displays the thousands of major greenhouse gas polluters across the United States. The new site, at ghgdata.epa.gov, features a Google map and charts driven by the greenhouse gas reporting database of facilities that emit 25,000 metric tons or more of greenhouse pollution. The EPA established the rule requiring this reporting in 2009, in response to a law passed under George W. Bush at the end of 2007.

This comprehensive and well-designed site, developed by the government contractor SAIC, makes it easy to find out facts like:

The top carbon polluter in America is the Scherer mega-coal plant in Juliette, Georgia.

The ten most polluting coal plants produce a combined 188 million tons of greenhouse pollution a year.

Kansas has 103 reporting greenhouse polluters.

There are only two major emitters of highly dangerous HFC pollution in the United States, a Dupont plant in Louisville and a Honeywell plant in Baton Rouge.

People can also download the underlying data set for their own analysis.

The site does not display greenhouse pollution from the transportation or agribusiness sectors. The omission of the pollution from the millions of cars across America makes sense, but the exclusion of industrial agriculture pollution is a loophole inserted by Congress to protect the dangerous business model of Big Ag.

Remarkably, more than half of the country (58%) experienced either a top-ten driest or top-ten wettest year, a new record.

Percentage of the contiguous U.S. either in severe or greater drought (top 10% dryness) or extremely wet (top 10% wetness) during 2011, as computed using NOAA’s Climate Extremes Index. Image credit: NOAA/NCDC.

by Jeff Masters, cross-posted from the WunderBlog.

Rains unprecedented in 117 years of record keeping set new yearly precipitation totals in seven states during 2011, NOAA’s National Climatic Data Center revealed in its preliminary year-end report for 2011.

Precipitation rankings for U.S. states in 2011. Seven states had their wettest year on record, and an additional ten states had a top-ten wettest year. Texas had its driest year on record, and four other states had a top-ten driest year. Image credit: NOAA’s National Climatic Data Center.

An extraordinary twenty major U.S. cities had their wettest year on record during 2011. This smashes the previous record of ten cities with a wettest year, set in 1996, according to a comprehensive data base of 303 U.S. cities that have 90% of the U.S. population, maintained by Wunderground’s weather historian Christopher C. Burt. Despite the remarkable number of new wettest year records set, precipitation averaged across the contiguous U.S. during 2011 was near-average, ranking as the 45th driest year in the 117-year record. This occurred because of unprecedented dry conditions across much of the South, where Texas had its driest year on record.

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Many people, when trying to grapple with global warming are confused by the distinction between climate and weather. A great cartoon by Ole Christoffer Haga shows in simple terms how measurements of global temperatures record natural variability about a long-term trend. A dog meanders on a leash, held by his owner who is walking on a direct and slowly advancing path:

Importantly, this video shows the physical reality that climate isn’t just the average of random weather events. Like the owner of the dog, climate is a fixed system that limits the wanderings of weather. As we change the climate system with greenhouse gases, the owner moves in predictable ways, changing where the dog can wander.

by Zachary Rybarczyk

Developing countries (including China) are expected to account for more than 90% of global energy growth in the next 30 years.  The U.S Agency for International Development (USAID) is addressing the urgent need for sustainable, clean economic growth in these regions with the release of its Climate Change and Development Strategy for 2012.

Although USAID has incorporated climate change adaptation and mitigation into segments of its assistance programs over the past two decades, this new development strategy marks the first time climate change will play a central role throughout the entire agency’s development efforts.

This is a major development that illustrates how government agencies are making the link between climate change and humanitarian assistance, demonstrating an international policy commitment geared toward the mitigation and adaption to risks posed by both “slow-onset” (rising sea levels, changes in rainfall patterns) and  “rapid-onset” (severe storms, floods) climate impacts.  Strides taken to promote green, low-emission economies in emerging markets will not only protect global and regional environments, but will also improve the public health, food security, and livelihood of individuals living in these areas.

The Climate Change and Development Strategy, which will guide USAID projects from 2012 through 2016, aims to:

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by the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists

It is five minutes to midnight. Two years ago, it appeared that world leaders might address the truly global threats that we face. In many cases, that trend has not continued or been reversed. For that reason, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists is moving the clock hand one minute closer to midnight, back to its time in 2007.

Climate change

In fact, the global community may be near a point of no return in efforts to prevent catastrophe from changes in Earth’s atmosphere.  The International Energy Agency projects that, unless societies begin building alternatives to carbon-emitting energy technologies over the next five years, the world is doomed to a warmer climate, harsher weather, droughts, famine, water scarcity, rising sea levels, loss of island nations, and increasing ocean acidification.  Since fossil-fuel burning power plants and infrastructure built in 2012-2020 will produce energy — and emissions — for 40 to 50 years, the actions taken in the next few years will set us on a path that will be impossible to redirect.  Even if policy leaders decide in the future to reduce reliance on carbon-emitting technologies, it will be too late.

Among the existing alternatives for producing base-load electricity with low carbon dioxide emissions is nuclear power.  Russia, China, India, and South Korea will likely continue to construct plants, enrich fuel, and shape the global nuclear power industry.

Countries that had earlier signaled interest in building nuclear power capacity, such as Vietnam, United Arab Emirates, Turkey, and others, are still intent on acquiring civilian nuclear reactors for electricity despite the Fukushima disaster.  However, a number of countries have renounced nuclear power, including Germany, Italy, and Switzerland.  In Japan, only eight of 54 power plants currently operate because prefecture governors, responding to people’s opposition to nuclear power, have not allowed reactors back online.  In the United States, increased costs of additional safety measures may make nuclear power too expensive to be a realistic alternative to natural gas and other fossil fuels.

The hopeful news is that alternatives to burning coal, oil, and uranium for energy continue to show promise.  Solar and photovoltaic technologies are seeing reductions in price, wind turbines are being adopted for commercial electricity, and energy conservation and efficiency are becoming accepted as sources for industrial production and residential use.  Many of these developments are taking place at municipal and local levels in countries around the world.  In Haiti, for example, a nonprofit group is distributing solar-powered light bulbs to the poor.  In Germany, a smart electrical grid is shifting solar-generated power to cloudy regions and wind power to becalmed areas.  And in California, government is placing caps on carbon emissions that industry will meet. While not perfect, these technologies and practices hold substantial promise.

Yet, we are very concerned that the pace of change may not be adequate and that the transformation that seems to be on its way will not take place in time to meet the hardships that large-scale disruption of the climate portends. As we see it, the major challenge at the heart of humanity’s survival in the 21st century is how to meet energy needs for economic growth in developing and industrial countries without further damaging the climate, without exposing people to loss of health and community, and without risking further spread of nuclear weapons.

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by Daniel J. Weiss

On Monday, President Obama surprisingly announced that Chief of Staff Bill Daley would depart the White House at the end of January. Office of Management and Budget Director Jack Lew would replace him as chief of staff – one of the most powerful positions in government.

Some environmentalists were jubilant over Daley’s parting.  He was chief of staff during a tumultuous year when the Administration finalized and proposed many critical public health and environmental protection measures that will benefit Americans for years to come.

The derision directed towards Daley is primarily due to President Obama’s decision to reject the Environmental Protection Agency’s proposal to follow scientists’ recommendation to modernize the ozone smog health standard.  Daley immersed himself in this decision, meeting with both industry opponents of a more protective standard as well as public health and environmental proponents.  Press reports indicate that he played a major role in blocking this vital safeguard. Relying on the existing standard instead would allow 12,000 deaths annually.

The day of the decision, I told the New York Times that:

“Today’s announcement from the White House that they will retreat from implementing the much-needed — and long-overdue — ozone pollution standard is deeply disappointing and grants an item on Big Oil’s wish list at the expense of the health of children, seniors and the infirm.”

There is, however, a lot more to the Administration’s public health and environmental record under Bill Daley than this bad decision.  In fact, the Administration finalized or proposed many critical safeguards over the past year.  This is just a partial of list of the public health and environmental protection accomplishments on his watch.

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Other stories below: Global CO2 market totals 96 billion euros in 2011; UK approves high-speed rail network

Global warming: Researchers document profound cascading ecological effects as Rocky Mountain snowpack diminishes

A steady decline in Rocky Mountain snowpack the past few decades has led to a classic cascading ecological effect, with “powerful” shifts in mountainous plant and bird communities, according to scientists with the U.S. Geological Survey and the University of Montana.

“This study illustrates that profound impacts of climate change on ecosystems arise over a time span of but two decades through unexplored feedbacks,” said USGS director Marcia McNutt. “The significance lies in the fact that humans and our economy are at the end of the same chain of cascading consequences.”

As the high-elevation snowpack dwindles, elk can stay at higher elevations during the winter and browse on plants that just a few short decades were inaccessible during the snow season, the researchers explained in their study, published Jan. 8 in the journal Nature Climate Change.

As a result, deciduous trees and  associated songbirds in mountainous Arizona have declined during the last 22 years. Increased winter browsing by elk results in trickle-down ecological effects such as lowering the quality of habitat for songbirds.

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