A new survey finds that by 2-to-1 Americans accurately understand global warming makes a number of extreme weather events worse.

This Yale survey matches a recent Brookings poll that found Americans’ understanding of climate change was increasing with more extreme weather and warmer temperatures. It also matches Yale’s earlier November survey finding.

This finding matches the results of September polling by ecoAmerica:

• 69% of Americans Know “Weather Conditions (Such as Heat Waves and Droughts) Are Made Worse by Climate Change”
  
• 57% of Americans understand “If we don’t do something about climate change now, we can end up having our farmland turned to desert.”

And the public’s understanding certainly matches the science (see “Has Global Warming Caused A Quantum Jump In Extreme Weather?” and links below).

You can find details on the poll at Yale’s website (and the NY Times, which was the source of the above figure). Here are some highlights:

• 82 percent of Americans report that they personally experienced one or more types of extreme weather or a natural disaster in the past year;
• 35 percent of all Americans report that they were personally harmed either a great deal or a moderate amount by one or more of these extreme weather events in the past year;
• Over the past several years, Americans say the weather in the U.S. has been getting worse – rather than better – by a margin of over 2 to 1 (52% vs. 22%);
• A large majority of Americans believe that global warming made several high profile extreme weather events worse….
• Only 36 percent of Americans have a disaster emergency plan that all members of their family know about or an emergency supply kit in their home (37%).

This is all the more remarkable because the media and key opinion-makers have all but stopped talking about climate change, so it would be hard for people to be convinced by those two sources.

On the other hand, the American public can’t miss the extreme weather because it is everywhere now and increasingly off the charts — see NOAA Chief: U.S. Record of a Dozen Billion-Dollar Weather Disasters in One Year Is “a Harbinger of Things to Come.” That was especially true last month (see “March Came In Like A Lamb, Went Out Like A Globally Warmed Lion On Steroids Who Smashed 15,000 Heat Records“).

The December 2011 Brookings poll found  all of this extreme weather was  measurably boosting  the number of people who understand the planet is warming:

Read more

by Kiley Kroh and Michael Conathan

Yesterday, former members of the National Commission on the BP Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill and Offshore Drilling released a report card evaluating the progress made by the federal government, Congress, and industry toward implementing the critical reforms recommended by the Commission in their 2011 report.

None of them make the honor roll. While the harshest rebukes were aimed at Congress, the report card finds that overall, “in every category, much more needs to be done.”

Big Oil, on the other hand, touted the reforms made by the oil and gas industry. Oil & Gas Journal reported “the industry has always demonstrated a strong commitment to operate safely and responsibly offshore, and has deepened that [sic] the commitment in the nearly 2 years since the Macondo well accident.”

Erik Milito, API’s upstream and industry operations group director, said “the bar continues to rise, the commitment is stronger, and the mechanisms are in place to support the strongest safety standards possible.”

Such assurances from API are dubious at best, considering the Commission’s 2011 report found a direct causal relationship between API’s role as the industry’s principal lobbyist and public policy advocate and “compromised” safety standards that were a direct contributor to the BP disaster:

API’s proffered safety and technical standards were a major casualty of this conflicted role … Because the Interior Department has in turn relied on API in developing its own regulatory safety standards, API’s shortfalls have undermined the entire federal regulatory system.

John Watson, CEO of oil giant Chevron, told USA Today that he’s confident production can occur safely, saying, “we’ve learned from the Macondo incident and others and have steadily improved our practices as an industry. We’re in a much better position as an industry today than we were a few years ago.”

That’s a questionable self-evaluation from a company recently slapped with an $11 billion lawsuit and criminal charges for a November 2011 spill off the coast Brazil and responsible for setting the ocean ablaze with a natural gas fire in Nigeria this year that burned for 46 days and took the lives of two workers.

While both the federal government and industry have taken steps to improve the serious shortfalls in safety and oversight that led to the Deepwater Horizon disaster, a great deal remains to be done – especially as the industry looks to move into frontier areas like the Arctic that are fraught with uncertainty and risk.

The Commission gave the administration an overall grade of B, industry a C+ and Congress a D. (The ocean conservation group Oceana released a similar report card yesterday comprised of nothing but D’s and F’s.)

Let’s take a look at the commission’s findings.

Read more

by Tom Kenworthy

The Environmental Protection Agency today took an important step toward reducing the harmful health effects of air pollution from oil and gas drilling operations.

The agency issued new rules that will require companies to capture emissions of toxic chemicals, compounds that contribute to smog, and methane, a potent global warming gas.

In a significant concession to the oil and gas industry, which has lobbied furiously to water down the requirements, the agency extended the time for full implementation to nearly three years, setting a limit of January 2015. By that final 2015 deadline, companies must have equipment in place to capture emissions through so-called “green completions.” Prior to the deadline companies will be able to flare or burn escaping gas and chemicals.

Gina McCarthy, assistant EPA administrator for air and radiation, said the change in the compliance deadline came when EPA determined it would take time for industry to get the technology in place for capturing emissions and to train personnel.

“We took a look at the data. There does need to be time for equipment to be manufactured, for training to be conducted…. This is a reasonable step…. It wasn’t politically motivated.”

EPA rejected industry appeals to limit the rules only to wells emitting high levels of volatile organic compounds, or VOCs.

The proposed rules include the first federal standards for hydraulic fracturing operations. The rules will cover the estimated 13,000 U.S. wells that are hydraulically fractured or re-fractured each year, and apply to various parts of the oil and gas development process, from well completion to processing.

Read more

The Deepwater Horizon oil rig exploded nearly two years ago to the day, beginning an oil spill that lasted three months and released some two hundred million gallons of oil into the Gulf of Mexico. BP may have declared their mission accomplished, but the results of the spill are still trickling out.

The latest? Shrimp with no eyes, fish with lesions, and clawless crabs.

Scientists believe that shrimp, fish, and crabs in the gulf have been deformed by the chemical released to disperse oil during the spill. Fishers in the area say that they’ve been noticing deformities on their catches since. Al Jazeera reports:

“At the height of the last white shrimp season, in September, one of our friends caught 400 pounds of these,” [Louisiana commercial fisher Tracy] Kuhns told Al Jazeera while showing a sample of the eyeless shrimp.

According to Kuhns, at least 50 per cent of the shrimp caught in that period in Barataria Bay, a popular shrimping area that was heavily impacted by BP’s oil and dispersants, were eyeless. Kuhns added: “Disturbingly, not only do the shrimp lack eyes, they even lack eye sockets.”

“Some shrimpers are catching these out in the open Gulf [of Mexico],” she added, “They are also catching them in Alabama and Mississippi. We are also finding eyeless crabs, crabs with their shells soft instead of hard, full grown crabs that are one-fifth their normal size, clawless crabs, and crabs with shells that don’t have their usual spikes … they look like they’ve been burned off by chemicals.” [...]

The dispersants are known to be mutagenic, a disturbing fact that could be evidenced in the seafood deformities. Shrimp, for example, have a life-cycle short enough that two to three generations have existed since BP’s disaster began, giving the chemicals time to enter the genome.

BP claims to be investigating any toxicity and testing fish in the gulf, but they also claimed these marshes were clean. The company is clearly trying to distance itself from the spill, which was a public relations disaster. Indeed, just today, BP came to a settlement agreement with plaintiffs suing over health and economic issues related to the spill.

Tumors on a shrimp found in the gulf

At the same time, deep water drilling has started again. And though details are still only emerging on the full impact of the spill, some want the U.S. to move back into offshore drilling as aggressively as possible. Today, Sen. David Vitter (R-LA) went on the Senate floor to advocate for more drilling permits in the Gulf, arguing that “mother nature has proved amazingly resilient” in the wake of the spill.

Tell that to the fish without livers and the shrimp without eyes.

by Michael Werz, Laura Conley

Northwest Africa is crisscrossed with climate, migration, and security challenges. From Nigeria to Niger, Algeria, and Morocco, this region has long been marked by labor migration, bringing workers from sub-Saharan Africa north to the Mediterranean coastline and Europe. To make that land journey, migrants often cross through the Sahel and Sahel-Saharan region, an area facing increasing environmental threats from the effects of climate change. The rising coastal sea level, desertification, drought, and the numerous other potential effects of climate change have the potential to increase the numbers of migrants and make these routes more hazardous in the future. Added to these challenges are ongoing security risks in the region, such as Nigeria’s struggles with homegrown insurgents and the growing reach of Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb, which has expanded out of Algeria.

For the United States and the international community, this region is critical because of its potential for future instability. The proximity of Algeria and Morocco to Europe, Nigeria’s emerging role as one of Africa’s most strategically important states, and Niger’s ongoing struggles with governance and poverty all demand attention. Northwest Africa’s porous borders and limited resources, which allow Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb to flourish there, suggest that there is no time to waste in developing better and more effective policies for the region.

The climate, migration, and security nexus is a key test case because it is likely to exacerbate all of these existing risk factors. Climate change alone poses a daunting challenge. No matter what steps the global community takes to mitigate carbon emissions, a warmer climate is inevitable. The effects are already being felt today and are projected to intensify as climate change worsens. All of the world’s regions and nations will experience some of the effects of this transformational challenge.

Changing environmental conditions are likely to prompt human migration, adding another layer of complexity. In the 21st century the world could see substantial numbers of climate migrants—people displaced by the slow or sudden onset of climate change. While experts continue to debate the details of the causal relationship between climate change and human migration, climate change is expected to aggravate many existing migratory pressures around the world. Extreme weather events such as droughts and floods are projected to increase the number of sudden humanitarian crises in areas least able to cope, such as those already mired in poverty or prone to conflict.

Conflict and insecurity present the third layer of the nexus. This final layer is the most unpredictable, both within nations and transnationally, and will force the United States and the international community to confront climate and migration challenges within an increasingly unstructured security environment. The post-Cold War decades have seen a diffusion of national security interests and threats. U.S. security is increasingly focused on addressing nonstate actors and nontraditional sources of conflict and instability. The potential for the changing climate and associated migration to induce conflict or exacerbate existing instability is now recognized in national security circles.

This paper tracks how the overlays and intersections of climate change, migration, and security create an arc of tension in Northwest Africa comprising Nigeria, Niger, Algeria, and Morocco. These four nations, separated by the Sahara Desert, are rarely analyzed as a contiguous geopolitical region. Yet they are linked by existing international migration routes, which thread up from sub-Saharan Africa to the Mediterranean coast, moving people and cargo into Morocco, Algeria, Libya, and onward to Europe. Within the region, seasonal labor migration is widespread, particularly in areas vulnerable to rainfall fluctuations.

We seek to examine what will happen when the effects of climate change interact with internal and transnational security challenges along these well-traveled routes, and connect those questions to the strategic interests of the United States, Europe, and the transatlantic community.

Read more

Photo courtesy of EarthFix by Amelia Templeton

More than 10,000 migrating birds have died this year in Oregon and California from an avian cholera outbreak caused by water shortages in the Lower Klamath National Wildlife Refuge.

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service estimates that the death toll could end up being as high as 20,000 birds in the coming months.

The Klamath Refuge is made up of 30,000 acres of shallow freshwater marshes, open water, and land for birds to feed and nest. However, the refuge — which has already lost 80% of its marshes because of development activity — only has enough water to cover about half its area, according to the American Bird Conservancy:

That has forced the 2 million birds that migrate through the area, which is a key part of the Pacific Flyway for migrating birds, to congregate in much smaller spaces, thereby creating a climate much more favorable to spreading, quickly fatal, avian cholera. In order to reduce the further spread of the disease, volunteers have been dispatched to pick up carcasses of the dead birds and incinerate them in FWS furnaces.

The problem is that it has been a dry year and the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation (BOR) hasn’t allowed water into the refuge since December. BOR parcels out water for users, and their first priority for water that might go to the refuge is for endangered fish, followed by various tribal responsibilities, and then farming needs. Some experts say that the refuge could go dry in three months if water is not provided.

These bird deaths are an extraordinarily small fraction of the millions of birds that die in the country every day. But the ongoing battle for water in the Klamath Refuge is a sign of things to come for wildlife management.

Currently, water availability is listed has an “issue of concern” on the Fish and Wildlife Service website. But a recent report on droughts published by the National Center for Atmospheric Research estimates that under a “moderate” emissions scenario, much of the U.S. will experience extreme drought conditions — potentially drying up valuable habitats like the Klamath Refuge.

A 2007 report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change warned that a 3.5 degree Celsius increase in global temperatures could cause “significant extinctions (40-70% of species assessed) around the globe.”

Our current emissions path puts us on target to raise global temperatures by more than 5 degrees Celsius (9 Fahrenheit). That global scenario would make drought-related bird deaths like we see in the Klamath an afterthought.

Related Posts:

• No wonder they’re angry: 13.7 million birds are dying every day in the U.S.
• Dust-Bowlification and the Grave Threat It Poses

Scientists Were Shut Out Of Climate Change Discussions On Sunday Shows

by Joceyln Fong and Jill Fitzsimmons, via Media Matters

A Media Matters analysis finds that news coverage of climate change on ABC, CBS, NBC and FOX has dropped significantly since 2009. In 2011, these networks spent more than twice as much time discussing Donald Trump as climate change.

Our round-up of the latest news in climate and clean energy. Please post other links below.

As prices have neared and in some cases topped $4 a gallon, drivers have cut their consumption of gasoline to its lowest levels in a decade, driving less and buying cars that are more fuel-efficient. [Washington Post]

President Barack Obama will receive endorsements Wednesday from the Sierra Club, League of Conservation Voters, Clean Water Action and Environment America, according to an environmental political operative and a House Democratic source. [Politico]

The White House on Tuesday said Obama would veto legislation before the U.S. House of Representatives that sought to force approval of the stalled Keystone XL oil pipeline as part of a new 90-day extension of federal transportation funding. [Reuters]

Members of the presidential panel that investigated the 2010 BP oil rig explosion and spill sharply criticized Congress on Tuesday for refusing to act on any of its recommendations and gave the Obama administration and the oil industry mixed marks. [New York Times]

To most consumers, the cloud is an abstract warehouse in the sky where we store our photos, documents and other key bits of information with a click of a button. But the technology that keeps the cloud running — data centers and mobile telecommunications networks, operating 24 hours a day — requires electricity, making it a target for environmentalists hoping to curb greenhouse gas emissions. [Washington Post]

One of the auto industry’s most closely guarded secrets—the enormous cost of batteries for electric cars—has spilled out. Speaking at a forum on green technology on Monday, Ford Motor Co. Chief Executive Alan Mulally indicated battery packs for the company’s Focus electric car costs between $12,000 and $15,000 apiece. [Wall Street Journal]

India’s enormous solar potential has until now been seen mostly through the lens of a PV module. But this week’s news that Areva Solar is planning a 250-megawatt project in the country’s Rajasthan region is noteworthy for its size and its technology. [Renewable Energy World]