Record Ice Loss and Tundra Melt Amplify Warming Feedbacks

by Nick Sundt, reposted from the World Wildlife Fund

Rising human carbon dioxide emissions may be affecting the brains and central nervous system of sea fishes with serious consequences for their survival, an international scientific team has found.

Carbon dioxide concentrations predicted to occur in the ocean by the end of this century will interfere with fishes’ ability to hear, smell, turn and evade predators, says Professor Philip Munday of the ARC Centre of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies and James Cook University.

“For several years our team have been testing the performance of baby coral fishes in sea water containing higher levels of dissolved CO2 – and it is now pretty clear that they sustain significant disruption to their central nervous system, which is likely to impair their chances of survival,” Prof. Munday says.

That’s from an ARC news release on a new Nature Climate Change study, “Near-future carbon dioxide levels alter fish behaviour by interfering with neurotransmitter function” (subs. req’d).

The authors “report world-first evidence that high CO2 levels in sea water disrupts a key brain receptor in fish, causing marked changes in their behaviour and sensory ability.”

We’ve known for quite some time about the threat global warming and human activity poses to marine life (see Nature Geoscience study concludes ocean dead zones “devoid of fish and seafood” are poised to expand and “remain for thousands of years“).  And we’ve known the threat ocean acidification poses to shell-forming mollusks and crustaceans (see The Great Oyster Crash and Why Ocean Acidification Is “A Ticking Time Bomb” for Both Marine Life and Humanity and links below).

Here’s more on this ground-breaking new paper:

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By 2020, California will face a shortfall of fresh water as great as the amount that all of its cities and towns together are consuming today

by Kevin Benfield, cross-posted from NRDC’s Switchboard

When you look at the official US drought monitor map, you immediately see that many American cities may be in the wrong places for long-term water sustainability.  In particullar, note the presence of “long-term,” severe-to-extreme drought conditions across most of Georgia, Texas, Oklahoma, New Mexico, and Arizona.

It’s a very sobering set of facts, especially when you consider that essentially every high-growth part of the US is experiencing significant dryness.  Now let’s look at a second map, this time world-wide:

This is not just a US Sun Belt problem but a major international problem.  Here are a few facts and projections extracted from a very good summary of the issues by Jay Kimball on his blog 8020 Vision:

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Right-wing weathermen who publicly reject climate science have responded with anger and vitriol to a campaign that exposes their influence on the American public. More than half of TV weather reporters don’t believe in human-induced climate change, even as our poisoned weather grows more extreme. Forecast The Facts challenges the American Meteorological Society to take a clear stand against these anti-science ideologues.

After ThinkProgress Green promoted the campaign, listing dozens of the prominent television weathermen who publicly heap scorn on scientific reality, the anti-science weatherguy community has lashed out:

Rush Limbaugh‘s “good guy” meteorologist Ryan Maue complained about the “left-wing sh*t website black-listing on-air meteorologists.”

Accuweather Senior Vice President Mike Smith agreed that the ThinkProgress article “amounts to blacklisting.”

San Diego’s KUSI-TV weatherman John Coleman said it was “very disturbing” that “the activists now feel the need to campaign to get us under control.”

Cleveland’s WJW-TV weatherman Andre Bernier said: “The day the AMS strong arms anyone to tow the AGW is the day I disown them.”

Retired TV weatherman John Ghiorse called the campaign “the ultimate in gestapo tactics.”

Strangely, they didn’t complain when Sen. Jim Inhofe (R-OK) compiled a list of science-denying weathermen in 2007.

Take a look at their comments from Twitter, Facebook and the web: Read more

President Obama has withdrawn his nomination of Rebecca Wodder to be the assistant Interior secretary for fish, wildlife, and parks, after Sen. Jim Inhofe (R-OK) and Sen. David Vitter (R-LA) blocked the pick. Wodder, the former CEO of American Rivers, was supported by environmentalists and even the Heartland Institute. Inhofe and Vitter blocked Wodder on behalf of the oil and gas industry. Inhofe explained he opposed Wodder over fracking, which she doesn’t even regulate:

They try to say it doesn’t directly affect the policy with hydraulic fracturing, and technically that’s right. But the fact that you come in as an activist with an extreme position is just more of the same in the administration, in every little corner of government.

Vitter had vowed he would block her confirmation unless Interior issued a blanket extension of all Gulf of Mexico drilling leases, Greenwire reports. The extension was not issued.

Wodder will work as an adviser at the department.

“Based on her extensive experience and expertise, the Secretary has asked her to serve as a senior adviser, working primarily on conservation issues and the America’s Great Outdoors initiative,” said Interior spokesman Adam Fetcher.

The 23,000 citizens of Bainbridge Island in Washington State are showing how a combination of transparent price signals, online social networking and old fashioned community organizing can make a big difference in reducing energy consumption.

Located in Puget Sound, Bainbridge Island has been a major energy hog — with residents consuming 60% more electricity than the regional utility’s average customer due a large chunk of building stock not being up to modern energy codes.

Residents were offered a choice by the utility: pay for a new substation to support increasing energy demand, or reduce energy consumption. The island chose the latter — and in the process is helping train new workers, save residents money, and illustrate the power of collective action.

Helped by a grant from the Department of Energy’s Better Buildings Neighborhood Program — an initiative created through the stimulus package — island residents have created an online community network for monitoring energy use. In the first winter since the RePower Bainbridge project was rolled out, peak power consumption dropped by 10 megawatts. Over the next few years, the program will also facilitate efficiency upgrades for 4,000 houses and 150 businesses, while training around 65 people.

Watch the video below, produced by Climate Solutions, to see the local action that’s driving change in Bainbridge. You can also check out the Climate Solutions website for more great Solutions Stories.

 

RePower Bainbridge from Climate Solutions on Vimeo.

After two miners were killed at the Equality Boot Mine near Centertown, Kentucky in October, Kentucky Gov. Steve Beshear (D) issued a statement calling for a thorough investigation into the cause of the tragedy. “Mine safety is of paramount importance,” Beshear said. “Investigative teams will begin work immediately to determine the cause of this accident and whether there are any steps that can be taken to ensure such an accident does not occur again.”

Less than three months later, the “paramount importance” of mine safety seems to have disappeared. When Beshear unveiled his two-year budget proposal last week, the agency that oversees mine safety was slapped with a 4.2 percent budget cut, the Lexington Herald-Leader reported. Though the cut is smaller than those faced by other state agencies, the budget for the mine permitting agency, tasked with approving new mining sites (including those used for mountaintop removal), went untouched.

Mine safety, and the enforcement of mine safety regulations, has repeatedly taken a backseat to expanded mining under Beshear, despite repeated accidents in Kentucky mines that had been cited for safety violations. The Mine Safety and Health Administration (MSHA) cited Armstrong Coal, the operator of the Equality Boot Mine, with 15 safety violations between its 2010 opening and the October deaths. In 16 months preceding a deadly accident at the Dotiki Mine in Providence, Kentucky, MSHA issued 840 safety violations to its operator, Alliance Resource Partners.

Days after the Dotiki Mine disaster, Beshear appeared at the opening of another Alliance-owned mine and made no mention of mine safety. In 2011, Beshear appointed one of Alliance’s top safety officials to the Kentucky Mining Board, even though at least nine miners have died at Alliance-owned mines since 2005.

During his 2011 re-election campaign, Beshear took more than half a million dollars in campaign contributions from the coal industry, begging the question ThinkProgress has asked of his state’s elected officials before: Is Beshear putting the interests of his Big Coal campaign contributors ahead of actual human lives?

How to Help Hard-Hit Communities, the Environment, and Our Economy

by Alon Cohen, Jordan Eizenga, John Griffith, Bracken Hendricks, and Adam James

This piece is a primer for a Center for American report on Rehab to Rent, which can be found here.

Half a million houses, many of them vacant and deteriorating, are languishing in a bloated U.S. real estate market, threatening to turn some cities into ghost towns, undermining the stability of working families, and proving to be an anchor on a shaky economy. Many of these vacant homes, nearly a quarter-million, are controlled by the federal government.

If the situation wasn’t already bleak enough, there are also more than a million additional American homes saddled with delinquent mortgages that are in the process of foreclosure. Chances are many of these homes will also end up as the property of the federal government. The only way to lower the inventory of decaying homes is to find a use for the ones we have before new ones swell the pool. Without assistance, the current “overhang” of foreclosed homes is expected to take four years to work back into the market.

The good news is the Obama administration and independent federal regulators are formulating plans to sell government-controlled foreclosed properties to investors who would bring them onto the rental market. The aim is to reduce the number of vacant homes which depress housing prices and burden the economy while meeting an increasing demand for rental homes. If made affordable these new rentals can help meet the needs of approximately 100 million American households—about half of all renters—who are “rent impoverished” today, meaning they devote more than a third of their monthly income just to housing. This is a key indicator of pent-up demand for new rental housing.

The Federal Housing Administration, or FHA, and the two mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac—both currently in government conservatorship—collectively own about 230,000 foreclosed homes, mostly from mortgages insured or securitized before the housing bubble burst. Unfortunately, only a small subset of these foreclosed properties are in good enough shape and in strong enough markets to be sold directly to families looking for a place to call home. For the rest, low home prices and weak demand for owner-occupied homes mean that selling hundreds of thousands of them into that market will depress prices for a long time to come.

In this paper we lay out a set of priorities for removing a portion of these properties from the glutted for-sale market by converting them to affordable rental units, a process we call “Rehab-to-Rent” or “R2R.”

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The Energy Information Administration (EAI) projects that the United States will fall far short of its commitments to greenhouse pollution reductions, putting the future prosperity of human civilization at risk. To give humanity a chance of keeping climate change at levels compatible with modern industrial civilization, global emissions need to peak before 2020, with the developed world peaking well before.

In its 2012 Annual Energy Outlook, the EIA forecasts that natural gas consumption will surge as coal and oil use remains strong. Greenhouse gas emissions fell by 8 percent from 2005 levels in 2009, but that progress will reverse. The EIA projects that climate pollution will start rising again, leading to only a 7.5 percent reduction in 2020 and a 3.2 percent reduction in 2035:

The White House website, describing how President Obama’s leadership is allowing the United States to “meet the climate change challenge,” writes how President Obama negotiated the Copenhagen Accord in 2009 to limit greenhouse gas emissions. In that document, the United States committed to cutting its greenhouse pollution by 17 percent by 2020 from 2005 levels.

In 2011, climate negotiator Jonathan Pershing said the United States was still “committed” to the 17 percent target, but “cannot yet tell you how close we are to meeting the 17 percent reduction levels.”

“The United States takes seriously the commitments first made by our Leaders in Copenhagen and reaffirmed in Cancun,” US climate envoy Todd Stern declared at the international climate talks in Durban, South Africa last December. “We are making progress toward our target of reducing emissions in the range of 17 percent by 2020 through an array of domestic efforts.”

According to the EIA, the United States will lose ground already achieved when the pledge was made, and fall 56 percent short of its 2020 target. This year’s projection is more optimistic than the 2011 report, which estimated an 80 percent shortfall.

The United States is nowhere close to meeting even the insufficient target set by the administration. Without major, immediate changes in national policy, human civilization will be locked on a path of catastrophic global warming. The White House would do well to be honest about that reality.

It’s hard to rally around the term “sustainability” these days. When we consider the record amount of emissions we’re spewing into the atmosphere and the slow pace of change relative to our compounding environmental problems, the term “sustainable” has lost much of its meaning.

At the same time, however, businesses are getting focused on the problem. Many of the top companies in the world are investing trillions of dollars to change farming practices, reduce packaging, make operations more efficient, and deploy renewable energy. These are real, necessary, and positive steps. But they’re not nearly enough.

Last week, GreenBiz released its latest “State of Green Business” report. And it shows a very mixed picture for sustainability practices in the business community. In this post, we feature some of the best charts from the report on energy production, efficiency and corporate accounting.

1. U.S. carbon intensity is flat lining. In 2010, our economy increased emissions per dollar of GDP. That may decline slightly in 2011, but it still shows worrisome stagnation.

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Youth activists interrupted the State of the Energy Industry earlier this week to deliver the 99 percent’s message to polluters’ biggest lobbies, who were all gathered for a conference.

The annual event included addresses by American Petroleum Institute, American Gas Association, and the National Mining Association. During API President Jack Gerard’s speech, the activists yelled “mic check” and fact-checked the oil lobby. “Big Oil’s lies are hurting Americans, our economy, and our environment,” the group shouted. “API spends hundreds of millions of dollars corrupting our democracy. … Big Oil is raking in record profits at the expense of the American people.”

One of the protesters described her experience:

We all stood up. Our voices combined were deafening in that small room. I could see Gerard fuming under his smug grin. We were hurried out by Suits with nervous demeanor, but not before we were able to get a few powerful last words in. This was Big Oil’s crown-jewel forum – they’d been advertising this forum on NPR and even their top PR officials were talking it up online. It was clear they were embarrassed and totally caught off guard.

But this will not be the last one Big Oil hears from us. Oh no. We’ll be visiting them again and again, speaking truth to the lies, corruption, and corporate greed of dirty energy, and replacing it with a vision of transparent democracy and a just, clean energy future.

Watch it:

While the protesters promise to return, API is deploying an election-year “Vote 4 Energy” campaign to promote “drill, baby, drill” and deliver on its threat that rejecting the Keystone XL pipeline has “huge political consequences” for the president.

And yet, youth activists have spread the 99 percent’s environmental message across the world, recently. Thousands of protesters fought successfully against the Keystone XL pipeline, and youth voices grabbed attention at the Durban climate conference last month. Now, the 99 percent are taking that message directly to the doorstep of the oil industry.

Are Oceans Interior?  We Must Make Sure NOAA Stays Strong No Matter Where it Resides

The Oscar Dyson, a NOAA vessel, headed to summer feeding grounds off the Alaskan coast to study whales that have been teetering on extinction for decades. Even though our oceans aren’t exactly part of the “interior,” moving the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration out of the Department of Commerce isn’t a bad idea if it’s done right. SOURCE: AP/ NOAA

by Michael Conathan

On January 13, President Barack Obama announced his plan to implement a sweeping reorganization of the Department of Commerce by consolidating six agencies involved in trade and economic competitiveness. One unintended consequence of this reshuffling is that by redesigning the Commerce Department, we now must find a home for the agency that comprised more than 60 percent of its budget—the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, or NOAA, our nation’s primary ocean research agency.

In a December 2010 report, “A Focus on Competitiveness,” John Podesta, Sarah Rosen Wartell, and Jitinder Kohli detailed why President Obama’s proposed restructuring makes sense for America. But it’s worth taking a closer look at how such a move would affect NOAA and in turn affect how we manage our oceans.

The president’s plan would relocate NOAA to the Department of the Interior. In his remarks, President Obama went so far as to suggest that the Department of the Interior was a “more sensible place” for NOAA, and that it only ended up at Commerce at its inception in 1970 because then-President Richard Nixon was feuding with then-Secretary of the Interior Walter Hickle, who had publicly criticized President Nixon’s handling of the Vietnam War.

While this storied example of Beltway pettiness has circulated among ocean policy wonks for years, the reality is rather more complex. In fact, when NOAA was established in 1970, 80 percent of its budget and more than two-thirds of its employees came from the Environmental Science Services Administration—an agency that included the Weather Bureau, the Coast and Geodetic Survey, and Environmental Data Services—which was already housed at the Department of Commerce.

Since the announcement, many environmental groups have decried the move as potentially compromising NOAA’s scientific integrity by shifting the agency to a department that has developed a reputation for being industry friendly. Certainly, degradation of NOAA’s science-first attitude is to be avoided at all costs. Yet there is no reason the agency’s mission can’t be maintained under the auspices of Interior provided the agency retains its structural integrity and its budgetary clout.

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Other stories below: Keystone China connection is overblown; Climate scientists call for think tank to reveal funding

Oil Fields Gushing in the U.S

Federal forecasters are expected to confirm on Monday what the energy industry already knows: Oil production is surging in the U.S.

The U.S. Energy Information Administration is likely to raise by a substantial amount its existing estimate that U.S. oil production will grow by 550,000 barrels per day by 2020, to just over six million barrels daily.

The forecast will include new production data from developing oil fields, including the Bakken shale area in North Dakota, which could hold as much of 4.3 billion barrels of recoverable oil. North Dakota’s output of oil and related liquids topped 500,000 barrels per day in November, meaning that the state pumped more oil than Ecuador. In fact, U.S. oil production grew faster than in any other country over the last three years and will continue to surge as drillers move away from natural gas due to a growing gas glut, experts say. The glut has sent natural-gas prices to a 10-year low.

The three oil giants will post billions more in profits than they did in the fourth quarter of 2010, thanks to higher oil prices.

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