Has the melt season started in the Barents and Kara Seas two months earlier than normal?

by Neven Acropolis

We are entering the final stage of the freezing season in the Arctic. Winter time is usually a boring time for watching the sea ice. Due to the polar night there are no direct satellite images, and it’s hard to tell what’s exactly going on up there because the ice is simply everywhere, filling up the entire Arctic ocean.

This winter was looking more or less like previous years, until about a month ago. A flip in atmospheric patterns that brought very late winter conditions to Europe, also had an effect on the fringes of the ice pack on the Atlantic side of the Arctic. Large swathes of sea water in the Barents and Kara Seas that ought to have been completely frozen over, opened up and total Arctic ice growth came to a practical standstill on various graphs, such as the Cryosphere Today sea ice area graph.

The regional effect can clearly be seen on this comparison of sea ice concentration maps for February 11th in the 2004-2012 period:

Image courtesy of the University of Bremen

Novaya Zemlya, the large Russian island that divides the Barents and Kara seas, is completely ice-free. The same almost goes for Svalbard, the archipelago in the top left. I think it’s safe to safe that this is unprecedented ever since satellites started monitoring Arctic sea ice in 1979. I have been looking at the Arctic sea ice from up close for about two years now, but this is definitely one of the most spectacular things I have seen so far. It’s almost as if the melting season has already started in the Barents and Kara Seas, more than two months earlier than normal.

What could be causing such an early retreat of sea ice cover?

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Our guest blogger is Alice Thomas, Climate Displacement Program Manager, Refugees International. In May, 2011, Alice wrote how the extreme floods of Colombia were devastating the nation. This post describes Colombia’s continued fight for survival in our poisoned climate.

As we approach the town of Manatí, in northern Colombia, I look eagerly out the window for signs of change. When I was here almost a year ago, makeshift shelters and tents lined the sides of the road. Random pieces of furniture were piled nearby: a refrigerator or a rocking chair – anything people could save from the floodwaters.

Today the tents are gone. But just outside of town, we turn off the road and into a lot, where temporary shelters made of fiberboard and corrugated metal have been constructed. I see Irida emerge from one of them. Smiling and laughing, we embrace each other.

Irida is one of approximately 225,000 people who were affected when unprecedented rains in the fall of 2010 caused the nearby Dique Canal to rupture. The break in the canal, which connects Colombia’s coastal city of Cartagena to the Magdalena River, submerged half of the northern state of Atlántico under 80 million cubic meters of water. When I first visited Manatí in March 2011, half of the town was still underwater, and Irida was living under plastic sheeting after being evicted from the local school. Irida’s house, which she showed me by canoe, had water up to the rooftop.

To some extent, Irida was lucky. Hers was one of the first families in the town able to move into these temporary shelters last April. In many of the nearby towns we have visited, they were not completed until three months ago.

But the shelter where Irida now lives was designed to last only three months. She has been there for almost a year. Worse than that, the floodwaters have still not dissipated, and her house is still flooded. According to the state governor’s office, 60 percent of the area that flooded when the Dique Canal burst in 2010 is still underwater today. Pumping has proven ineffective because much of this area was once wetland and is now returning to its natural state. So Irida and the roughly 600 other families in Manatí who’ve lost their homes are now being told they will have to relocate.

The day after our reunion with Irida, we join a town hall meeting where the governor tells a schoolyard full of flood-affected families that his priority is to find land and build homes for the thousands still displaced more than a year later. But Irida tells me that she doesn’t want to take the piece of land being offered. It is too far away from the center of town, she says. Before the floods, she ran a small grocery shop out of her house. If she relocates, she will be unable to restart her business and will be isolated from her community.

Like so many other Colombians we are meeting on this trip, Irida is quick to smile and laugh. But the pain and anxiety are nevertheless visible on her face. Beyond the relocation troubles, she has many more immediate worries. The toilets at her temporary shelter do not work, and two of the plastic water tanks have recently ruptured in the heat. The Colombian government discontinued food deliveries to the area in November. Her husband has been unable to find work. Without permanent homes or work, how can the process of recovery even begin?

I am at a loss for words as we say our goodbyes. I hope things will be better for Irida the next time we meet; I wish I could be more certain.

Although gas prices and profits hit record highs in 2011, Big Oil kept receiving tax breaks better used as investments in the middle class

by Daniel J. Weiss

President Barack Obama’s proposed budget for fiscal year 2013 sets a responsible course for rebuilding the economy so that it works for everyone, not just the privileged few. Our middle class is the engine of economic growth, but is threatened by dwindling public investments, a tax system increasingly rigged to benefit the wealthy, a fraying safety net, and assaults on what should be the bedrock guarantees of Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security.

The president’s budget protects those guarantees, boosts critical investments, and takes steps toward rebalancing the tax code so that all pay their fair share. And it does this in a fiscally responsible way, charting a path that nurtures the economic recovery while reducing the federal deficit, all without asking the middle class to shoulder a disproportionate share of the burden.

President Obama’s proposed fiscal year 2013 budget would make taxes fairer by, among other things, eliminating $40 billion in tax breaks over 10 years for oil and gas companies. About one-fourth of the savings would be invested in domestic manufacturing, which would create jobs.

Oil and gas companies are raking in record profits and clearly do not need these tax breaks. The big five oil companies—BP, Chevron, ConocoPhillips, ExxonMobil, and Shell—made a combined profit of $137 billion in 2011. This beats their previous 21st century record of $136 billion (2011$) in 2008, and ExxonMobil, Chevron, and ConocoPhillips were the first, fourth, and 15th most profitable companies on the Fortune 100 List in 2011.

Despite these humongous earnings, however, the American Petroleum Institute—Big Oil’s political arm—will likely trot out its tired excuses about why hugely profitable oil companies need $40 billion in tax breaks while middle-class Americans are paying higher gasoline prices.

Let’s review their arguments for keeping these unfair tax breaks:

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By Tom Kenworthy, Senior Fellow, Center for American Progress Action Fund.

Hundreds of thousands of people have stated their opposition to a proposed big expansion of a coal strip mine in Utah that would harm Bryce Canyon National Park and the recreation economy associated with the southern Utah attraction that has enjoyed federal protection for nearly 90 years.

Known for its slot canyons and ghostly red rock spires called hoodoos, Bryce is threatened by a plan to greatly expand the nearby existing Coal Hollow Mine from 635 acres to 3,576 acres, with a majority of the expansion taking place on public lands. If completed, the mine would then include areas just 10 miles from Bryce.

The National Park Service, Environmental Protection Agency and U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service have all weighed in with serious concerns about the mine proposal, as has the Hopi Tribe, which estimates up to 74 archaeological sites could be harmed or ruined. Park Service objections are particularly strong, and that agency has recommended the project not go forward, saying:

The park has determined that [the mine expansion would have] adverse effects on surrounding comunities, the tourism industry of southern Utah, air quality standards, dark skies conservation, and regional wildlife

In a letter last week, Rep. Edward J. Markey (D-Mass.), the ranking minority member of the House Committee on Natural Resources, urged Interior Secretary Ken Salazar to “consider the signal this decision sends regarding the future of our parks, forests, monuments, and wildlife areas and reject the call for expanding coal mining.”

Repeating concerns raised by other federal agencies about air quality, the park’s well-known night skies, natural quiet and wetlands and wildlife, Markey also reminded Salazar of the Obama administration’s commitment to clean energy development on public lands:

Proceeding with the expansion of coal mining in a sensitive area so close to a national park calls in question our dedication to promoting renewable energy development both on and off public lands

More than 210,000 comments have been been submitted to public land managers in opposition to the strip mine expansion.

Interior’s Bureau of Land Management has issued a draft environmental analysis of the coal mine, with a proposed action that would allow the expansion to go forward.

As it has in regard to several new coal mining leases in Wyoming’s Powder River Basin, the BLM has closed its eyes to the Utah mine’s impact on climate change, contending that existing climate prediction models cannot estimate potential climate change impacts from one mine.

In November, two climate scientists called that dodge flawed and scientifically indefensible.

In honor of Valentine’s Day and the I Heart Climate Scientists campaign, a group of us at the Center for American Progress wanted to show some love for the climate scientists who have been harassed, threatened and dragged into the circus sideshow that is U.S politics.

We heart you. We highly value your important scientific work. And we know you’re not part of a vast conspiracy to control the world — because if you were, you’d be doing a lot better than the folks who do control the world!

Share your pics in the comments below, on Facebook, or on Twitter under the #iheartclimatescientists hash tag.

Over the last year, environmental groups have relied on old fashioned boots-on-the-ground protests to halt the Keystone XL tar sands pipeline. Now they’re turning to the web for a last-minute attempt to prevent Congress from resurrecting the project.

Starting today at noon, a coalition of environmental organizations including 350.org, Sierra Club, Natural Resources Defense Council, and CREDO Action, have rolled out a “signature bomb” in an attempt to get 500,000 citizens to tell Senators to stop trying to force a decision on Keystone XL.

No environmental organization has ever been able to raise that many signatures so quickly. But groups leading the effort are hoping they can use the momentum from last year’s protests to drum up the needed support.

“The environmental community is coming together in a way that it hasn’t in a long time,” said 350.org Founder Bill McKibben in a conference call today. “We’ve never tried anything like this before. But the environmental movement is well wired and well connected, so we’re going to see how this plays out.”

Keystone XL is a proposed 1,700 mile pipeline that would bring energy and water-intensive crude from Canada’s tar sands to refineries in Texas for sale in the global market. Sometimes called the “scar sands,” Alberta’s tar sands have been dubbed the “the most destructive project on earth” due to the immense amount of water, land, and fossil fuels needed to strip oil out of bituminous sand.

Last summer, most “insiders” in Washington believed the project would be easily approved. But after a series of successful demonstrations in front of the White House — combined with an arbitrary deadline for approval placed on the White House by Congress at the end of the year — the president rejected the permit last month.

But Congress won’t let it die. House Majority Leader John Boehner continues to tell reporters that supporters will “do everything we can” to make sure Keystone is approved. One way is to add an amendment in the transportation bill currently being considered in the House and Senate that would allow Congress to approve the pipeline.

That’s exactly what Republican leaders in the Senate plan to do this week. Senators Dick Lugar (R-IN), John Hoeven (R-ND), and David Vitter (R-LA) may add an amendment any day now that gives Congressional lawmakers authority to circumvent executive authority and green-light the controversial pipeline. Any legislation would still need to be signed by President Obama, however.

“This is the zombie pipeline that keeps coming back to life,” said McKibbnen. “We need the Senate to back up the President. These emails will be flooding into the Senate over the next 24 hours and hopefully they’ll make an impression.”

The environmental community already made an impression far bigger than expected a year ago. Will it be able to maintain its strength?

We must leave the overwhelming majority of unconventional fossil fuels in the ground to avoid catastrophic warming, but Nocera wants to open every spigot

CO2 emissions by fossil fuels [1 ppm CO2 ~ 2.12 GtC, where ppm is parts per million of CO2 in air and GtC is gigatons of carbon] via Hansen. Significantly exceeding 450 ppm risks several severe and irreversible warming impacts.  Hitting 800 to 1,000+ ppm — which is our current emissions path and the inevitable outcome of aggressively exploiting unconventional fuels like the tar sands as Nocera advocates — represents the near-certain destruction of modern civilization as we know it as the recent scientific literature makes chillingly clear. [Estimated reserves and potentially recoverable resources are from EIA (2011) and GAC (2011).]

NY Times business columnist Joe Nocera responded to my post “Joe Nocera Joins the Climate Ignorati.”  He also interviewed Bill McKibben for his new column, “The Politics of Keystone, Take 2.”

But he is still very wrong, and he didn’t represent McKibben’s position well at all.  Nocera’s new arguments are more elaborate. Since you see them a lot from centrist economist types, I will respond  in some detail –  with the help of McKibben, who explains here what he was trying to explain to Nocera and why Nocera’s final paragraph is “very unfair.”

I’ll also show that Nocera holds the environmental costs of the pipeline up to a considerably different standard of analysis than he does his hand-waving assertions of the supposedly vastly larger non-environmental benefits of Keystone.  A leading expert on life-cycle greenhouse gas analyses of the tar sands responds to Nocera’s lowball estimate.

Nocera goes astray almost immediately:

Here’s the question on the table today: Can a person support the Keystone XL oil pipeline and still believe that global warming poses a serious threat?

To my mind, the answer is yes.

I know what you’re thinking.  Since when does Nocera “believe that global warming poses a serious threat”?

If Nocera really believes global warming poses a serious threat, you’d think he’d write about it regularly.  But his first Keystone article never mentioned warming and dismissed all environmental concerns.  Nocera wrote a long piece on the Chevy Volt last year and never mentioned warming or CO2 at all.

If you google his name and “global warming,” you’ll find 2008′s “At Exxon’s Can’t-Miss Meeting,” in which he touts the widely debunked nonsense peddled by physicist Freeman Dyson and dismisses knowledgeable people who express science-based views as trying to “push Exxon Mobil toward their belief system — their global warming religion.”

Needless to say, folks who “believe that global warming poses a serious threat” do not generally use the phrase “global warming religion.”  That was a key reason I called him a member of the climate ignorati.  The science says that global warming is an existential threat (see Lonnie Thompson on why climatologists are speaking out: “Virtually all of us are now convinced that global warming poses a clear and present danger to civilization” and literature review here).

Heck, the International Energy Agency, a staid and conservative group of economists and the like where Nocera should feel at home, says the world is on pace for 11°F warming and “Even School Children Know This Will Have Catastrophic Implications for All of Us”

So Nocera lacks any “street cred” to either pose or answer the “question on the table today,” as he has never shown any indication that he believes global warming poses a serious threat — and indeed he has written in the past as if he does not.  In his first Keystone piece last week he wrote:

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A broad coalition of the grassroots progressive movement is launching a 24-hour effort to mobilize 500,000 people opposing Republican efforts to approve the Keystone XL tar sands pipeline. GOP senators “plan to file an amendment mandating the project to the Senate transportation package Monday,” the Hill reports. In a Daily Kos diary, 350.org founder Bill McKibben — who led thousands of Americans who got arrested last summer in front of the White House in opposition to the pipeline — explains the “powerful, unified fight” to “keep this pipeline dead“:

We’re going to war at noon eastern today–non-violent war, but a powerful, unified fight against the heart of right-wing power, the fossil fuel industry. We’re out to collect half a million emails in 24 hours telling the Senate: back up the president and keep this pipeline dead. It’s going to be the most concentrated burst of environmental activism this millennium–and it needs you.

This effort includes a diverse coalition of the national environmental movement — including the Environmental Defense Fund, Rainforest Action Network, the Sierra Club and the League of Conservation Voters, the Natural Resources Defense Council, the National Wildlife Federation and Green For All. As McKibben said, it’s “everyone else who’s ever tried to save a whale, clean a lake, build a park, find a solar job.”

The 24-hour push isn’t just a “green” cause, but one of the American progressive movement. Other organizations participating in the petition drive include MoveOn, Credo, Democracy for America, Public Citizen, Change.org, the Labor Network for Sustainability, and businesses like Patagonia.

Bill McKibben will be on the Colbert Report tonight to discuss the effort to prevent the destruction of our climate for the profit of foreign oil companies.

As climate science continues to be attacked and politicized, it’s time for us to shower some much-needed affection on the scientists who are helping us understand the changing world around us.

As a reader of this blog, we know you love climate scientists. And with Valentine’s day coming up tomorrow, now is your chance to show your appreciation for the necessary research that scientists are doing around the world.

Climate Nexus has rolled out a new social media campaign called “I Heart Climate Scientists,” that features pictures of people (and animals) expressing their love for the work that climate scientists do.

From the Climate Nexus campaign:

“Climate change deniers are sending hate mail and threats to dedicated climate scientists working to protect our families, finances and future. Show these hardworking experts some love — even digital hugs count this Valentine’s Day. Remind them their work is valuable, their opinions respected, and that they are not alone.”

The campaign has it’s own Facebook page and twitter hashtag #iheartclimatescientists, so be sure to take your pictures and send them in! (Paste a link in the comment section here too.)

Valentine’s Day is a good hook for the I Heart Climate Scientists campaign. But you can help extend it far beyond that. Help combat the bullying and the political threats by showing year-round how much you appreciate what climate scientists do through Facebook and Twitter.

What caused cod’s dramatic reversal of fortune in the Gulf of Maine?

Trawler crewmen work on rigging while fishing in the Gulf of Maine.  Source:  AP.

by Michael Conathan

When fishermen cast off their lines and leave the dock, they believe their skill, knowledge, and experience will lead them to the fish. They trust that weather and natural forces will not present more of an obstacle than their crafts can handle. And they hope when they return to port, the price they can get for their haul of fish will exceed the investment they have made in gear, crew, fuel, supplies, insurance, and the other countless costs of doing business.

At the heart of these costs and every economic decision fishermen have to make is one fundamental data point: the annual catch limit. In 2006 when Congress reauthorized the Magnuson-Stevens Fishery Conservation and Management Act—the law that provides the framework for U.S. fishery management—it included a requirement that the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association, or NOAA, must set a cap on the amount of each species that fishermen would be allowed to catch in a given year. This cap is referred to as an annual catch limit. This mandate was further strengthened by another provision of law stating that managers could not set a limit exceeding the level recommended by scientists.

Imposing annual catch limits certainly makes sense. In order to get the best economic return from our fisheries over time, we must catch what we can today while leaving enough in the water to ensure the resource remains solvent for the future. Still, as Eric Schwaab, then-administrator of NOAA’s National Marine Fisheries Service, announced at the time, doing so was an incredibly “heavy lift.”

Now, not even a month after NOAA’s announcement, there is reason to wonder whether our current approach to funding and executing the science that produces the fishery stock assessments that underpin the annual catch limits can support the weight of that responsibility.

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Other stories below: GOP transportation bill takes a few wrong turns; EU aviation industry warns of trade war over carbon price

Elaine Cullen, NIOSH

Drillers cut natural gas production as prices drop

As natural gas prices continue to drop, the recent nationwide boom in drilling is slowing. Drillers don’t make money if prices go too low — and drilling wells isn’t cheap.

“It is safe to say that there will be fewer natural gas wells drilled in 2012,” said Kathryn Klaber, president of the Marcellus Shale Coalition, an industry group based in Pennsylvania.

In recent weeks, several companies have announced plans to cut gas production around the nation, but experts say the low prices are also opening up new markets.

When the shale drilling boom was starting in 2008 the average price for a unit of gas was about $8. Two years ago it was down to $5.50, and now it’s dropped to about $2.50. Part of the reason is that the shale gas formations became productive more rapidly than expected, as thousands of new wells have been drilled nationwide.

Industry reports note that the national count of active new gas drilling rigs fell to 775 in early February, down from about 1,500 in 2008.

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