Tweet of the heat wave, from the National Weather Service:

It is friggin’ hot!

How hot is it? It’s so hot that all-time records are being set in June: “Nashville has reached its hottest temperature on record…109 degrees at 314 pm. The previous all time record was 107 from July 27th and 28th of 1952.”

UPDATE: Meteorologist Dr. Jeff Masters has more all-time heat records:

109° Columbia, SC (old record 107° on two previous occasions)
109° Cairo, IL (old record 106° on 8/9/1930)
108° Paducah, KY (ties same on 7/17/1942
106° Chattanooga, TN (ties same on 7/28/1952)
105° Raleigh, NC (ties same on 8/21/2007 and 8/18/1988)
105° Greenville, SC (old record 104° 8/10/2007 although 106° was recorded by the Signal Service in July 1887)
104° Charlotte, NC (ties same on 8/9 and 10/2007 and 9/6/1954)
102° Bristol, TN (ties same on 7/28/1952-this site now known as `Tri-State Airport’)
109° Athens, GA. This is just 1° shy of the Georgia state record for June of 110° set at Warrenton in 1959.

Here is a great graphic via Capital Climate:

The U.S. surface temperature map from Unisys at 4 pm, June 29,2012, shows 100° temperatures stretching almost continuously from California eastward to the Carolinas.

NBC Meteorologist Bill Karins said on Friday , “We’ve never really seen a heat wave like this in the month of June.” Sadly, in a few decades this will just be considered a normal June (see below).

How hot is it? It is so hot that NBC Washington’s Chief Meteorologist, Doug Kammerer, explained on air “If we did not have global warming, we wouldn’t see this.”

Like a baseball player on steroids, our climate system is breaking records at an unnatural pace (see “March Came In Like A Lamb, Went Out Like A Globally Warmed Lion On Steroids Who Smashed 15,000 Heat Records“).

As Climate Central explains in its post, “Scorching June Heat Wave Puts 50 Million in U.S. on Alert”:

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A penny for you cyberthoughts.

By Mike Luckovich
From the Cartoonist Group.

by Michael Conathan

Earlier this week, Cape Wind—a proposed wind farm off the coast of Massachusetts—quietly turned aside one of its few remaining challenges by coming to a landmark agreement with the Martha’s Vineyard/Dukes County Fishermen’s Association, which had filed a challenge to the project because fishermen feared they would be displaced from traditional fishing grounds. This compromise helps the project move forward, keeps fishermen in business, and shows how a new concept known as ocean-use planning will be fundamental to future management of our ocean space.

As a result of the settlement, Cape Wind agreed to work with the fishermen to ensure they retain access to the area where the wind farm has been permitted and help them set up a permit bank that will own fishing permits for use by Vineyard fishermen in perpetuity.

Think of permit banks like Zipcar for fishermen. A group—fishermen, nongovernmental organizations, or in some cases, states—acquires permits for a fishing area and then leases the affiliated access or quota to eligible participants. Here, participants will be Vineyard fishermen who might otherwise lose their access due to regulators reducing catch limits for certain species rebuilding to sustainable levels. Fewer fish to catch means fewer fishermen can make a living catching them.

Because of geographic and economic realities, the Vineyard’s small fishing fleets operate at a disadvantage compared to their larger counterparts in New Bedford, Gloucester, and other New England ports. So this potential for increased access can help level the playing field and may literally keep their businesses afloat.

In announcing the decision, Warren Doty, president of the Fishermen’s Association, said, “Instead of being on different ends of the fence, we’re going to work together to determine which areas are open to fishing, what areas will be successful for different kinds of fishing, and how to make that fishing safe and available to all fishermen.”

This kind of creative solution, born of committed negotiations between willing and motivated parties, is precisely the kind of outcome proponents of the Obama administration’s National Ocean Policy have in mind when they talk about one of the policy’s signature initiatives: ocean-use planning. The concept, also referred to as coastal and marine-spatial planning, is intended to reduce conflicts among an increasingly diverse and populous contingent of individuals and industries competing for use of ocean space.

The Center for American Progress released a report earlier this week, “The Foundations of a Blue Economy,” which makes the case for investment in and development of industries that generate strong economic return for coastal communities without compromising the environmental quality of our oceans and coasts. The report called out both sustainable fisheries and offshore renewable-energy development as pillars of this strategy, and for them both to succeed the kind of coordination Cape Wind and Vineyard fishermen have displayed must be a key component of the equation.

Cape Wind has run a gauntlet of challenges since its inception in 2001: from the lack of a federal permitting structure, to angry Cape Codders fearing tourism and property values would suffer, to multiple spurious legal challenges. Read more

by Max Frankel

In the last few years, we’ve seen an increase in extreme weather events and environmental disasters — costing us money, and far more importantly, human lives.

Some have been natural (or indirectly caused by humans due to climate change), and others, like BP’s Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, have been directly caused by us.

With scientists warning that the frequency of wildfires, floods, drought and other catastrophes will only increase as the planet warms, engineers are now focusing on how to use robots and other mechanical gadgets to aid in disaster response. Some of these bots vacuum up oil, some sort rubble and rescue earthquake survivors, and some help battle wildfires. Here’s a look at three of the coolest robotic defenders, both in use and on the horizon.

Illustration: John MacNeill

Firebug: Right now in Colorado, the Waldo Canyon Wildfire is burning out of control. As of Thursday, 30,000 people had been evacuated and firefighters had only 5% of the blaze contained.

Enter the firefighting robot army. Three groups — one at University of Magdeburg-Stendal in Germany, an American duo, and the makers of the Segway — are all working on a revolutionary and potentially life saving technology.

The German group has plans for an insect-inspired bot called the OLE. The Saint-Bernard sized bugs are covered in fireproof armor and carry sensors that help them find fires. Once they get to the heat source, they can spray it with water or other fire extinguishing materials. The bots have legs instead of wheels, helping them to navigate over downed trees, rocks, and other forest impediments that rolling machines would have trouble with and lets them get to fires faster. (Interestingly, these OLE’s look kind of like Pine Beetles, the ferocious bugs wreaking havoc on western forests.)

Marching into battle alongside the OLE’s (and possibly a lot sooner) could be Segway’s design. Armed with a water cannon that can launch up to 10 gallons per second and Segway’s motors that let it travel up to 18mph, this robot is the heavy artillery of robo-wildfire fighting. Though it’s fast, it’s wheels make it less maneuverable than the OLE; however, this bot has the ability to haul injured or exhausted human firefighters out of harm’s way.

Behind the OLE and the Segway bot, a transformer-like robot could be clearing trees at a frenzied pace, creating the firebreaks that are so vital to containing a blaze. Though the robot looks like something out of science fiction, its creators have already built a prototype. The robot uses its four arms and massive cutting blades to completely deforest an area rapidly. Clearly, these bots could be dangerous for forests if used the wrong way. But in emergency scenarios they could help save thousands of lives and homes.

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Recent warming of the top 2300 feet of the ocean alone corresponds to an energy content of more than one Hiroshima atomic bomb detonation every second over the past 40 years. A new analysis of all the recent data makes clear that this remarkable warming can only be explained with man-made greenhouse gas emissions — JR.

by Dana Nuccitelli, via Skeptical Science

Although over 90% of overall global warming goes into heating the oceans, it is often overlooked, particularly by those who try to deny that global warming is still happening.  Nature Climate Change has a new paper by some big names in the field of oceanography, including Domingues, Church, Ishii, and also Santer (Gleckler et al. 2012).  The paper compares ocean heat content (OHC) simulations in climate models to some of the newest and best OHC observational data sets from Domingues (2008), Ishii (2009), and Levitus (2009) which contain important corrections for systematic instrumental biases in expendable bathythermograph (XBT) data.  The paper makes several important points.

• The 0-700 meter layer of the oceans warmed on average 0.022°C to 0.028°C per decade since 1960.

• Climate model simulations which include the most complete set of external forcings – natural (solar and volcanic) and anthropogenic (greenhouse gases and sulphate aerosols) – are consistent with the rate of warming observed over the past 40 years (see the 20th Century multimodel response including volcanic forcings [MMR VOL 20CEN] and multimodel response including volcanic forcings projected forward using the IPCC SRES Scenario A1B [MMR VOL SRESA1B] in Figure 1).

• The ocean warming observed over the past 40 years cannot be explained without anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions; it is a ‘fingerprint’ of human-caused global warming (Figure 3).

Figure 1: Recent observed ∆T estimates from Domingues et al. 2008 (blue), Ishii et al. 2009 (red) and Levitus et al. 2009 (green) compared with the 20th Century (20CEN) multimodel response (MMR) of phase 3 of the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project (CMIP3) for the subsets of models including volcanic (VOL, black) and no volcanic (NoV, gray) forcings. MMR results are also shown for the CMIP3 SRES A1B scenarios (dashed black and gray), constructed from the same VOL and NoV subsets defined by the 20CEN models. Figure 1c from Gleckler et al. 2012.

Gleckler et al. note that several previous studies have identified a human ‘fingerprint’ in ocean warming; they cite Barnett et al. 2001, Barnett et al. 2005, Pierce et al. 2006, and Palmer et al. 2009.  However, the Gleckler et al. results are more robust because it is the first (and by far the most) comprehensive study to provide an in-depth examination of data and modelling uncertainties, and to use three improved data sets with corrections for instrumental biases (e.g., XBTs) along with a large number of model runs made available by 13 leading modelling centres from around the world (CMIP3 model ensemble).

“Several studies have used well-established detection and attribution methods to demonstrate that the observed basin-scale temperature changes are consistent with model responses to anthropogenic forcing and inconsistent with model-based estimates of natural variability. These studies relied on a single observational data set and employed results from only one or two models.”

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By Brad Johnson, campaign manager of Forecast the Facts

The Obama administration’s Bureau of Land Management auctioned a major tract of Wyoming coal to Peabody Energy at a bargain-basement price of $1.10 per ton yesterday.

The North Porcupine coal tract in the Powder River Basin went to the single bidder, Peabody subsidiary BPU Western Resources, for $793,270,310.80 for 721 million tons, BLM representative Beverly Gorny stated in a telephone interview.

This sale, made under the provisions of the Mineral Leasing Act of 1920, represents a massive fossil-fuel subsidy based on the assumption that the use of coal benefits the American public. However, it is likely this coal is intended for the Asian market, where sub-bituminous coal fetches a much higher price. The non-competitive leasing program is under federal investigation.

Moreover, the costs of the carbon pollution from mining and burning this coal were not taken into consideration. The 721 million short tons of sub-bituminous coal in the lease sale will generate approximately 1.1 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide when burned. With a modest estimated social cost of carbon at $65 per ton of CO2, the global-warming impacts to society of this lease sale exceed $70 billion — 90 times the price paid for the lease. More than 27,000 people signed a Credo Action petition opposing the fire sale of Wyoming’s sub-prime carbon reserves.

The lease sale still has to be approved by the BLM post-sale panel, which recently rejected a low-ball bid for an adjoining tract.

By Christy Goldfuss

Stories about the recent House transportation bill will likely focus on what was not in the package: the Keystone XL pipeline and coal ash regulations.

However, environmentalists, right-to-know advocates, and community organizers need to take a close look at the section that discusses “Accelerated Decision Making.”  For the first time, but likely not the last, conservative politicians in the House won a major victory in this small section of the bill by including their “streamlining” language, which simply means curtailing the public’s ability to comment on the impacts of transportation projects for communities — including on water, air, and public safety.

The legislation weakens one of our bedrock environmental laws, the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA), which guarantees public participation in reviewing government activities that affect the environment. It was signed into law by President Richard Nixon after passing the Senate by unanimous vote and the House by an overwhelming 372-15 vote.

First, the “Accelerated Decision Making” section of the transportation bill does what has never been done before — fining agencies up to 7% of their fiscal year budget if they do not meet established deadlines for environmental analyses. On the one hand, that means taking more money away from financially strapped agencies trying to accelerate their decision making process about the impacts of a project. On the other hand, it gives agencies an incentive to deny permits in order to avoid the fine.  Neither of these impacts will lead to getting more transportation projects on line faster.

Next, this section of the law expands the type of projects that do not have to go through a public comment and environmental review process at all.  These projects may get less than $5 million in federal funds, but they could still be large in scope.  Regardless of the overall size, the public will not be given an opportunity to comment and the public will not have an opportunity to see how the highway, bridge, or other transportation project will impact their community.

Lastly, this is just the beginning of efforts by House Republicans to “streamline” policies that protect the American public’s health and safety.  The House Committee on Natural Resources has been an incubator for such policy ideas, mostly around oil and gas development. For example, Rep. Doug Lamborn’s (R-CO), “Streamlining Permitting of American Energy Act” (H.R. 4383) purports to get more oil and gas drilling online by impeding  citizens’ ability to exercise their legal right to raise concerns about proposed oil and gas leases by charging $5,000 to do so.

The Transportation Surface Transportation Act is just the first time that House Republicans have been successful in getting this language over the finish line.

Christy Goldfuss is the Director of the Public Lands Project at the Center for American Progress Action Fund.

Photo: Tabitha Hawk, via Flickr

by Christina DiPasquale and Michael Conathan

As soon as today, Congress and the White House could issue decisions with massive and opposing ramifications for oceans in distant corners of our country.

The House and Senate are expected to pass a sweeping Transportation bill including a provision to send badly needed dollars to the Gulf Coast that will help communities and ecosystems recover from BP’s Deepwater Horizon spill. The money would comprise 80 percent of the civil fines BP and other responsible parties will have to pay as a result of the 2010 catastrophe, a measure recommended in the CAP-Oxfam report “Beyond Recovery.”

Meanwhile, the Department of Interior is on the cusp of issuing permits for Shell for drilling new oil wells in the Arctic Ocean’s Beaufort and Chukchi Seas off the north slope of Alaska. The administration’s justification? As Secretary Salazar stated earlier this week, “I believe there will not be an oil spill.”

The irony of these two actions occurring almost simultaneously proves we are still more inclined to mitigate future disasters than set up the rigorous safeguards that can help prevent them.

Giving Shell the permits needed to commence drilling in the Arctic—an area shown to have extremely limited infrastructure to respond to a potential spill, as detailed in the CAP report “Putting a Freeze on Arctic Ocean Drilling” — is a recipe for yet another disaster for local economies and the environment. The lack of response capabilities in the region becomes clearer when compared to the resources needed in the response to the Deepwater Horizon spill (view CAP’s map here).

So while we’re doling out billions to the Gulf to help mop up, we’re simultaneously setting ourselves up for the possibility of another failure in a region where we have virtually no resources for cleaning up a spill. Admiral Robert Papp, the commandant of the U.S. Coast Guard, explained the situation in a June 2011 Senate hearing:

“Our current Arctic capabilities are very limited…. Imagine if we had to mount a major pollution response—we would have to create our own infrastructure… Although private industry may assert they are adequately prepared for a response to a spill, we must determine what response capability our Coast Guard and Nation needs to have so we can mount an adequate response as exploration advances towards production.”

In addition to Admiral Papp’s warning, businesses have indicated their skittishness about investing in or insuring oil exploration in the region. German bank WestLB announced they would not provide financing to any offshore oil or gas drilling ventures in the area, declaring the “risks and costs are simply too high.” A week earlier, the insurance giant Lloyd’s of London concluded that offshore drilling in the Arctic would “constitute a unique and hard-to-manage risk” and advised companies to “think carefully about the consequences of action.”

With the nearest permanent Coast Guard facility over 1,000 miles away, no major roads, railroads, or ports along the North Slope, and extreme and unpredictable weather patterns, any coordinated response effort would be daunting.

Communities across Alabama, Florida, Louisiana, Mississippi and Texas — all too familiar with the economic and environmental price of insufficient response plans — are close to receiving badly needed funding to rebuild their economy and environment from fines paid by BP and other companies. The money, which could be as much as $16 billion, will then be invested in projects and activities that restore the long-term health of the Gulf Coast ecosystems and coastal economies.

Unfortunately, the transportation bill fails to address the strain put on government funds once the liability limit (or polluter’s ability to pay) has been reached. Though BP will not invoke the set $75 million liability cap for the Gulf disaster, Congress leaves the door open for other polluters to do so in the future, ignoring the Government Accountability Office’s 2007 and 2010 reports which both found “the liability limits for certain vessel types may be disproportionately low compared with their historic spill cost.”

At least now we know that there’s a precedent. If a spill wrecks the pristine Arctic and endangers the environment, culture, and very existence of the North Slope’s Alaska native communities, they may be first in line for a big payout to help clean up. Assuming we can ever figure out exactly how to do it.

Christina DiPasquale is an Associate Director for Press Relations at the Center for American Progress; Michael Conathan is Director of Ocean Policy at the Center for American Progress.

A round-up of the top climate and energy news.

Britain is burning more now than at any time since 2006, despite official promises to move to greener fuels. [The Sun]

Imports are up 20 per cent to 18 million tons this year — with coal responsible for generating 42 per cent of all UK electricity, the Department of Energy says.

Gina Rinehart, the multi-billionaire iron ore magnate, is on the verge of becoming its newest media mogul. Ms Rinehart appears to want “to make the papers into a propaganda platform for mining companies and climate change deniers”, said David Marr, one of the Herald’s most respected writers. [The Independent]

An historic heat wave that has helped create tinderbox conditions in Colorado and other Western states is moving east, with record-breaking temperatures expected in at least 13 states Thursday, from Oklahoma to Ohio. [Climate Central]

A Colorado-based solar panel maker that received a $400 million loan guarantee from the Obama administration said Thursday it will file for bankruptcy, the latest setback for an industry battered by the recession and stiff competition from companies in China. [Associated Press]

If the climate were neither warming nor cooling, one would expect that on average, low-temperature records would be broken as often as high-temperature ones. In the last decade, high-temperature records have outnumbered low-temperature records by a ratio of 2 to 1. [New York Times]

The government needs to multiply investment in clean energy four-fold to avoid breaking laws on renewables and climate change, official advisers say. [BBC]

European cities are planning to adapt to climate change as the risks become more severe, a report by UK-based emissions measurement organization the Carbon Disclosure Project (CDP) and consultancy Accenture showed on Thursday. [Reuters]

Can we preserve a livable climate if we exploit any significant fraction of unconventional oil & gas resources?

The CEO of ExxonMobil, which has been a major funder of climate disinformers, says it will be “manageable” through adaptation.  Actual climate scientists disagree, as does the recent scientific literature.

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 catastrophic, simultaneous, irreversible warming impacts. Hitting 700 to 1,000+ ppm — which is our current emissions path and the inevitable outcome of aggressively exploiting unconventional fuels — means 7+°F global warming and the near-certain destruction of modern civilization as we know it.

Marty Hoffert — an energy expert and climate modeler — posted this blunt comment on a recent DotEarth piece about a report on potentially large unconventional oil resources:

However welcome the news may be to market economists — and I’m confident Exxon-Mobil and company are licking their chops over continuing our highly profitable to them fossil fuel energy infrastructure — it’s an unmitigated environmental disaster for climate change: “Game Over,” as Jim Hansen rightly says.

Shale gas, shale oil and tar sands don’t fundamentally change estimates of total fossil fuel resources; but these “unconventional” sources, now more cost-effective to extract as fuel for the bottomless pit of world energy demand, will make disastrous climate shifts from the CO2 greenhouse a near-certainly. Forget solar, wind and nuclear fission. They can’t compete costwise now with coal-fired electricity, and unconventional cheap hydrocarbons could become as cheap as coal on a dollars per Joule of energy basis.

The result will be a hothouse planetary climate as different from today’s as the middle Cretaceous a hundred million years ago was, when sea level was a hundred meters higher and both poles were de-glaciated; when dinosaurs roamed a verdant Antarctic continent. This will happen virtually instantaneously from a geological perspective as fossil fuel resources accumulated over hundreds of millions of years are burned in a hundred years or so and CO2 in the atmosphere rises as much as fourfold over pre-industrial values.

The best analogy I can think of is watching the rise of Hitler from an isolationist USA in the late thirties as the threshold for stopping him early enough to matter is passed and a holocaust of some as yet unknown horror becomes inevitable. Optimists might observe that Homo sapiens survived WWII and the subsequent cold war. But the coming inundation of coastal zones and cities along with massive species extinctions will likely be far worse. We will need to burn even more fossil fuel to “adapt” to this change by building seawalls and air conditioning, an option perhaps for rich countries, or mass migration inland and poleward for everyone else. Moreover, any attempts by our descendants to rebuild high tech civilization will be seriously hampered by the depleted state of both conventional and unconventional hydrocarbon fuels. Maybe they, unlike ourselves, will learn to go straight to solar and controlled fusion power, necessity being the mother of invention. More likely is a feudal agricultural economy in high latitude lands still fertile for crops and habitable in climate; or in the worst case scenario, hunter-gathering capable of supporting perhaps a million or so humans worldwide.

Many climate researchers breathed a sight of relief when Jim Lovelock backed off from nightmare scenarios with humans huddled in polar refugia against a greenhouse-induced waterworld. Too many accept the GOP denialist scam claiming human-induced global warming is a hoax to risk being perceived as alarmists, or worse. We didn’t sign on for this. We went into science and engineering, many of us, not only for the thrill of learning new by mastering objective nature, but to avoid the crazy subjectivity of human behavior. Give us labs and computers and some money and let us be geeks. We make mistakes, but we didn’t sign on for abuse. Thank you Ben Santer, Michael Mann, Jim Hansen, Ken Caldeira and all my other climate/energy colleagues for your courage to speak truth to crazy. The truth is that if we burn identified fossil fuel resources, particularly the so-called unconventional ones now making free marketeers dance with joy, it is only a matter of time before a transition to “hothouse Earth” occurs.

A technology optimist, I like to believe that some genetic evolution of the human genome can produce intelligent Homo superior better adapted to living in a high tech world wrought by scientific revolutions. I hope the spark of self-awareness survives, even if our particular experiment by nature doesn’t adapt and survive.

If, as Carl Sagan speculated, technological civilizations are time bombs triggered by the inability of species evolved in technology-free environments to adapt to the technologies they themselves create, then we may be destined for self-destruction. Short lifetimes of technological civilizations is a reason for the absence of intelligent life in our Milky Way galaxy according to the Drake Equation for computing the number of contemporaneous technological civilizations in a galaxy. Too bad, if true, as we have now discovered that extrasolar planets sound other stars are a dime a dozen, and may discover potentially habitable “other Earths” soon with NASA’s Kepler Planet Finder.

Hear! Hear!

At least it would be an unconventional way for civilization to go, not with a bang or a whimper but the inevitable and widely predicted collapse of a self-destructive Ponzi scheme.

I tend to find the people who are most concerned about the climate situation are energy experts who understand a lot about climate science or climate scientists who have studied energy.

NASA’s James Hansen, who is in the second category, has made a similar point to Hoffert’s for a similar reason, though he believes 500 ppm is the cut-off for climaticide:

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by Brendan DeMelle, via DeSmogBlog

Documents obtained by the Environmental Working Group (EWG) show that bureaucrats within the New York Department of Environmental Conservation (NY DEC) granted the oil and gas industry premature access to highly controversial draft regulations for shale gas fracking in the state. New York placed a moratorium on hydraulic fracturing for gas in order to evaluate the science on the risks posed to drinking water, air quality and the health of New York’s citizens and the environment.

The documents, obtained by EWG through New York’s Freedom of Information Law, show that the fracking industry received an unfair advantage thanks to DEC officials who provided detailed summaries of their proposed rules exclusively to oil and gas industry representatives. This allowed industry a six-week head start to lobby state officials to weaken the proposed standards before the public was granted access to the plan.

Of particular concern, a lobbyist for scandal-ridden gas giant Chesapeake Energy used the exclusive access to the draft Supplemental Generic Environmental Impact Statement (SGEIS) to attempt to weaken the proposed rules restricting discharges of radioactive wastewater.

Thomas West, a prominent oil and gas industry lobbyist representing Chesapeake and other industry clients, made “one last pitch” — in an email to DEC Deputy Commissioner and General Counsel Steven Russo — to “reduce or eliminate radionuclide testing” of fluids that could migrate from drilling sites during storms, according to the documents.

NY DEC has previously found concentrations of cancer-causing radioactive pollution at shale gas drilling sites that exceeded safe drinking water standards by hundreds of times or more, according to EWG’s report “Inside Track: Cuomo Team Gives Drillers Jump Start to Influence Fracking Rules.”

“This is like giving the drilling industry three laps around the track while everyone else was left waiting on the starting block,” said Thomas Cluderay, EWG assistant general counsel. “The public needs to know whether New York regulators compromised the integrity of the state’s drilling plan months ago, despite promises of keeping the process fair and transparent.”

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The U.S. coal industry is so deeply unpopular, it has now turned to its imaginary friends for help.

That’s according to a linguistic analysis of a recent petition opposing new regulation of toxic coal ash. The petition, which was sent to the White House by the coal industry last year, featured more than two thousand Chinese names. That raised the curiosity of the Environmental Integrity Project (EIP). So the organization commissioned an analysis of the signatories.

EIP says the analysis shows that hundreds of the names are complete fakes. When translated, many of the Chinese “people” supporting the coal industry’s petition have names like “Steamed Bun Little Sister” and “Come to China Donkey.” The translator who examined the signatures determined that “most of the Chinese names in the petition are not authentic, and … appear to be generated by a piece of software or a group of individuals.”

The analysis of “Citizens for Recycling First” shows that the only recycling this organization is doing is recycling names:

• Generated by software/small group of individuals. Based on the consistent wording and style of many of these names, they appear to be generated by a piece of software or a small group of individuals. While many of the first names might be real, they appear frequently with either the last name or one character altered. An illustration of a similar randomly combined list of Western names might look something like this:  George Jones, William Jones, James Jones, Henry Jones, Peter Jones, William Smith, Frank Smith, Jim Smith, Larry Smith, etc.

• Use of non-names. At least 80 of the names identified in Chinese characters in the petition refer to objects or descriptions that are not used as surnames in the Chinese language. These include: Popular food items: Steamed Bun, Older Sister, Steamed Bun Little Sister, Small Steamed Bun and Big Steamed Bun, etc.  Dozens of the names are simply names of animals in Mandarin, including:  Big Bear, Big Grey Wolf, Little Duck, Little White Rabbit and Yellow Tiger.

• Invitations to travel. Some of the names included in the petition are in fact invitations to visit China, such as: Come to China Big, Come to China Cat, Come to China China, Come to China Donkey, Come to China Little Girl, and so on.

• Appearance-obsessed fake names.  Thirteen names appearing in the petition include the first name of “Handsome”, including Handsome Six, Handsome Eight, Handsome Good Looking, Handsome Dragon and the Most Handsome Guy.

• Famous historical/literary figures. Another 30 of the Chinese names in the petition actually identify famous characters in Chinese politics, history or literature. These include: Dasheng Sun: The monkey king in the Journey to the West (a famous Chinese novel) and Shanbo Liang, who is the protagonist in a very well-known legend.

This follows revelations in May that the coal industry paid people $50 to wear pro-coal t-shirts at an Environmental Protection Agency hearing.

With coal consumption dropping precipitously in the U.S., the industry is looking for some friends to help prop it up. But when buying them didn’t work, it appears that making them up was the next best option.

By Jessica Goad, Daniel J. Weiss, and Michael Conathan

The House Republican “oil above all” agenda has a new home in the fiscal year 2013 appropriations bill for the Department of the Interior and the Environmental Protection Agency.

Today the House Appropriations Committee passed a spending bill that would slash funds to enforce pollution laws and protect public lands, oceans, and wildlife. It also contains a number of policy provisions that have nothing to do with spending that would block enforcement of existing environmental laws, threaten our health, and harm our lands.

Congressman Jim Moran (D-VA) raised grave concerns about the bill yesterday:

Literally, the quality of the air we breathe and the water we drink depends on programs funded by this bill. Millions of Americans make their vacation plans based on their ability to enjoy the natural, scenic, recreational, and cultural resources whose protection is funded by this bill…. The deep funding cuts necessitated … as well as the various special interest riders and funding limitations that were included in the subcommittee bill, would cause real harm to the environment and to efforts to preserve America’s natural and cultural heritage.

The biggest issues revolve around the levels of funding that various agencies will be facing under this bill.  For example, it would slash EPA’s budget by nearly 20 percent, including a 10 percent cut to clean air and climate programs. Additionally, EPA would see a 9 percent cut in enforcement under this bill, which is like taking 1 of every 10 cops off the beat when it comes to enforcing air, water, and toxics safeguards. And state enforcement of pollution reduction laws in the Clean Air Act and the Clean Water Act will be more difficult, because 28 percent of this funding compared to 2012 will be slashed – more than $1 billion.

Critical conservation programs managed by the Department of Interior also face severe funding reductions. Most surprisingly, the popular Land and Water Conservation Fund Program that enjoys bipartisan support was cut by nearly 80 percent compared to the current year to only $66 million — the lowest levels in its nearly 50-year history.  This program does not require any new federal spending; rather, it uses receipts from offshore oil and gas development to fund repairs and other projects in our national parks, wildlife refuges, and local parks.

In addition to these crippling funding cuts, the bill includes a number of harmful policy riders that would block implementation and enforcement of existing laws and programs.  The bill would:

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In a very surprising outcome, Chief Justice John Roberts cast the fifth vote to save Obama’s Affordable Care Act.

The key aspect of the decision that I think is relevant to climate policy is how the 5 justices decided to uphold the centerpiece of the ACA, the individual mandate requiring people to buy health insurance:

The court rejected Obama administration’s commerce-clause argument, but ruled 5-4 that Congress nevertheless “has the power to impose” the individual mandate under its taxing authority. The provision “need not be read to do more than impose a tax,” the opinion said. “This is sufficient to sustain it.”

In short, complicated justification for mandate fails, but tax wins. Note that this is in spite of the fact that most constitutional scholars always considered the mandate itself constitutional. Justice Kennedy (!) wrote in the dissent: “In our view, the entire Act before us is invalid in its entirety.”

My guess is that people who write climate legislation will take away from this that a lengthy bill designing a complex system to control CO2 and other greenhouse gases will be challenged in the court by conservatives and might conceivably lose. But Congress has taxing authority and that isn’t going anywhere. Yes, I’m aware that the U.S. Appeals Court upheld EPA’s greenhouse gas emission rules. But the climate bill that was considered by Congress to controls GHGs was considerably different and more complicated than those rules. Again, I don’t think the bill actually was unconstitutional, only that you never know what the Roberts Supreme Court (or a future one) might decide.

Back in February, Climate Progress reported that “Bipartisan Support Grows for Carbon Price as Part of Debt Deal.” As I write a year ago, the only plausible scenario now for seriously addressing US greenhouse gas emissions in a way that would enable a global deal and give us some chance of averting catastrophic multiple, simultaneous climate impacts is for a serious carbon price to be part of the post-2012-election budget deal.

It is still safe to say that this is not a high-probability outcome, but it is non-zero.

by Shuana Theel, via Media Matters

Carbon dioxide emissions are not just warming up our atmosphere, they’re also changing the chemistry of our oceans. This phenomenon is known as ocean acidification, or sometimes as global warming’s “evil twin” or the “osteoporosis of the sea.” Scientists have warned that it poses a serious threat to ocean life. Yet major American news outlets covered the Kardashians over 40 times more often than ocean acidification over the past year and a half.

Rising carbon dioxide emissions have caused the oceans to become around 30 percent more acidic since the Industrial Revolution, and if we do not lower the amount of CO₂ in the atmosphere, the ocean surface could be up to 150 percent more acidic by 2100. At that level, the shells of some plankton would dissolve, large parts of the ocean would become inhospitable to coral reef growth, and the rapidity of the change could threaten much of the marine food web. According to the National Research Council, the chemical changes are taking place “at an unprecedented rate and magnitude” and are “practically irreversible on a time scale of centuries.”

Despite a boom of recent scientific research documenting this threat, there has been a blackout on the topic at most media outlets. Since the end of 2010, ABC, NBC, and Fox News have completely ignored ocean acidification, and the Los Angeles Times, USA TODAY, Wall Street Journal, MSNBC, CNN, and CBS have barely mentioned it at all.

While most coverage described the basic scientific phenomenon or listed ocean acidification as a serious environmental challenge, the Wall Street Journal dismissed the problem. All three mentions of ocean acidification from the Journal were from columns that downplayed the threat — there was not a single straight news article interviewing scientists. One of those columns was a full article devoted to distorting and cherry-picking the science on ocean acidification. The Journal also published a letter to the editor (not counted in this study) from the Competitive Enterprise Institute’s Chris Horner who summarily dismissed ocean acidification as “the latest nominee to supplant troubled CO2-warming theory.” But the threat is nothing to shake off.

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Speaking in Dubuque, Iowa yesterday, Vice President Joe Biden lashed out at Mitt Romney for his willingness to kill a key tax credit for the wind industry — a sector that supports more than 7,000 jobs in the state.

With energy now a top issue in the presidential campaign, the Administration is starting to use Romney’s disdain for renewables against him in states like Iowa, where wind accounts for 20 percent of electricity and supports hundreds of businesses.

“We are importing less oil than [at] any time in the last 16 years,” Biden said. “But we think you got to bet on it all … You had our good friend Mitt Romney saying he dismissed wind and solar by saying they’re ‘two of the most ballyhooed forms of alternative energy.’ Tell that to the 7,000 workers manufacturing wind power here in Iowa.”

President Obama was in Iowa last month touting the economic impact of the wind industry and urging Congress to extend the production tax credit set to expire at the end of this year. According to a study from Navigant Consulting, around 37,000 American jobs could be at risk if the tax credit expires.

The Obama Administration is doing everything it can to counter attacks from Romney and other Republicans on energy — pushing offshore oil drilling in the Arctic, approving the southern leg of the Keystone XL pipeline, and using its climate and energy chief to “woo” the oil and gas lobby.

However, until recently, the Administration said very little about tax credits for renewable energy, leaving the issue in the halls of Congress. But with strong bi-partisan support for wind in the Midwest, a more aggressive messaging strategy on the economic consequences of allowing the tax credit to expire could give the Administration an advantage. It seems to be just now grasping this.

David Roberts of Grist recently explained the significance:

Despite support from Iowa Republicans for wind (and despite that turbine photo-op), Mitt Romney has expressed only contempt for the industry. He would end federal support for solar and wind alike, technologies that, he has said, “make little sense for the consuming public but great sense only for the companies reaping profits from taxpayer subsidies.” (Y’know, like Iowa’s own TPI Composites, the 700 people it employs, and the town it saved.)

The fact is, if Republicans win Congress and Romney becomes president, all federal support for clean energy will dry up and Newton, along with other Midwestern towns that have been revitalized by wind, will suffer yet another devastating blow. I wonder if Iowa voters — sitting in one of 2012′s most important swing states — were thinking about that when Romney came to the state recently to lecture about the deficit.

Federal incentives for the industry has broad support from the public too. A recent poll showed that 64 percent of Americans support an extension of the production tax credit for wind and other renewable energy technologies.

by Max Frankel

Yesterday morning, as high temperatures and drought in the Midwest intensified, the Farm Foundation held a forum to discuss the impact of long term drought on agriculture. Remarkably, until I asked a question about it, the topic of climate change did not come up.

The panel was made up of Matthew Rosencrans, a member of the drought monitoring staff at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration; David Anderson, a professor in the Agricultural Economics department at Texas A&M; Jay Armstrong, a farmer and seed salesmen from northern Kansas who sits on the boards of numerous agricultural organizations; and Kitty Smith, an economist and policy expert with the American Farmland Trust. The question and answer period was moderated by former Congressmen Charlie Stenholm (D-TX).

The participants went through their presentations about drought data collection, the effects of drought, and long-term drought planning without once mentioning climate change. When I asked about it, I was not received warmly.

“They call it weather,” said Mr. Armstrong.

Though he admitted to seeing some increased volatility in the weather, he accused the media of overstating the problem, talking “about what used to be a forest and is now a desert” and not putting enough emphasis on “what used to be a desert and is now a forest.” (Mr. Armstrong should talk to Dr. Craig Allen, who thinks that “rising temperature is going to drive our forests off the mountains.”)

Congressman Stenholm didn’t seem too pleased with my question, judging by his disapproving stare.

Mr. Anderson, the economist from Texas, described the devastating effects of last year’s Southwestern drought. Anderson estimated the economic losses in the agriculture sector from that drought to be in the billions; almost $4.5 billion in corn, wheat, hay, and cotton and more than $3 billion in livestock.

And as that drought unfolded, leading climate scientists warned about the influence of anthropogenic climate change on the intensifying crisis.

Texas A&M, climate scientist Andrew Dessler said last August that “there is absolutely no way you can conclude that climate change is not playing a role here. I’m quite surprised that anyone would even suggest that.”  Texas climatologist Katherine Hayhoe also recently explained that “our natural variability is now occurring on top of, and interacting with, background conditions that have already been altered by long-term climate change.”

In addition, NASA climatologists, including James Hansen, released peer-reviewed research concluding that the Texas heat wave was “a consequence of global warming because their likelihood was negligible prior to the recent rapid global warming.” The future is even more worrisome — see “James Hansen Is Correct About Catastrophic Projections For U.S. Drought If We Don’t Act Now.

Today, the Midwest and Great Plains region is entering a severe drought. As temperatures continue to rise and rainfall is nowhere on the horizon, the threat to crops intensifies:

“Yesterday, USDA released its weekly crop condition report and the areas of declining production predictably match the areas of drought.  In particular, Illinois and Indiana, two large Midwest grain producing states that were challenged by poor planting conditions in the early spring, now face increased lack of moisture.”

Ironically, the frequency of extreme rainstorms in the Midwest that damage crops and cause flash flooding have doubled in the last 50 years, according to a survey of rainfall data by the Rocky Mountain Climate Organization.

The increasingly dire influence of human-induced climate change on the agricultural sector has encouraged some to speak up. In April, the former president of the American Corn Grower’s Association said that farmers are “at the front lines of global warming — it’s a grave threat to rural livelihoods and quality of life. That’s why I support EPA policies to cut global warming pollution from automobiles and power plants.”

In spite of the mounting evidence and concern within the agricultural sector, it is astonishing that no one discussed climate change in a forum called “How Drought Reshapes Agriculture and Food Systems.”

Max Frankel is a senior at Vassar College and an intern at the Center For American Progress.

Related posts:

• With No End in Sight for Texas Drought, ABC News Explains: “Every Farmer in the World Will Be Affected by Climate Change”
• Warming-Enhanced Texas Drought Is Once in “500 or 1,000 Years … Basically Off the Charts,” Says State Climatologist

A round-up of the top climate and energy news.

Sea ice in the Arctic has melted faster this year than ever recorded before, according to the US government’s National Snow and Ice Data Centre (NSIDC). [Guardian]

Satellite observations show the extent of the floating ice that melts and refreezes every year was 318,000 square miles less last week than the same day period in 2007, the year of record low extent, and the lowest observed at this time of year since records began in 1979. Separate observations by University of Washington researchers suggest that the volume of Arctic sea ice is also the smallest ever calculated for this time of year.

Scientists cautioned that it is still early in the “melt season”, but said that the latest observations suggest that the Arctic sea ice cover is continuing to shrink and thin and the pattern of record annual melts seen since 2000 is now well established. Last year saw the second greatest sea ice melt on record, 36% below the average minimum from 1979-2000.

Vice President Joe Biden on Wednesday lashed out at Mitt Romney in Iowa for the second straight day, this time taking issue with the Republican’s reluctance to embrace tax credits for wind and solar energy. [National Journal]

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Fueled by a warming climate, Colorado is experiencing its worst fire season in its history.

As researchers at Boulder’s National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) joined 32,000 other Coloradans in fleeing the fires, ExxonMobil CEO Rex Tillerson spoke to the Council on Foreign Relations about the “manageable” risks of climate change:

Rex Tillerson said at a meeting at the Council on Foreign Relations in New York that climate change was a “great challenge,” but it could be solved by adapting to risks such as higher sea levels and changing conditions for agriculture.

“As a species that’s why we’re all still here: we have spent our entire existence adapting. So we will adapt to this,” he said. “It’s an engineering problem, and it has engineering solutions.”

Tillerson’s flippant remarks about “adapting” to the “manageable” consequences of climate change come at a time that Exxon is making record profits. In 2011, the company made $41.1 billion in profits, and Tillerson pulled in $34.9 million total compensation — a 20 percent raise from 2010.

A 2011 study found that “9 out of 10 top climate change deniers [were] linked with Exxon Mobil.” So it’s no surprise that Exxon’s CEO would spread misinformation on global warming.

Climate Progress is unaware of any serious climate scientists who think that global warming is “manageable” simply through adaptation if we listen to the do-nothing Exxon crowd and stay anywhere near our current emissions path. We know a great many who have written that the reverse is true (see below).

It’s also worth nothing that by mid-century, wildfires in the West  our projected to be far, far worse. Here’s the grim projection from a presentation made by the President’s science adviser Dr. John Holdren in Oslo in 2010:

We can barely manage the wildfires we have today. How exactly would much of the West “manage” a 4-fold to 6-fold increase in wildfires? And that’s just from a 1°C increase in temperatures. We could see 5 times that this century.

Tillerson pushed standard denialist obfuscation talking points:

He added: “In the IPCC reports … when you predict things like sea-level rise, you get numbers all over the map. If you take what I would call a reasonable scientific approach to that, we believe those consequences are manageable. They do require us to begin to spend more policy effort on adaptation.”

While it’s true that the IPCC and other analyses have reported a range of sea level rise and other impacts, much of that is due to the fact that they consider some very low emissions scenarios that would require aggressive action of a kind that Exxon has spent millions to stop. And the IPCC report was based on science and observations that is 6 years old — it ignored virtually any contribution to sea level rise this century from the disintegration of the great ice sheets. Now there is a widespread convergence of scientific analysis that says on the do-nothing path, sea level rise by 2100 is likely to be 3 feet and could be double that.

The key point is that the Exxon strategy – taking no serious action to reduce emissions —  eliminates most of the uncertainty concerning future emissions and makes catastrophic impacts all but a sure thing.

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by Adam James and Bracken Hendricks

Americans have always prided themselves on thinking big. When it comes to energy, the National Renewable Energy Lab (NREL) has given big-thinkers everywhere a shot in the arm with a new study that concludes:

“Renewable energy sources, accessed with commercially available technologies, could adequately supply 80% of total U.S. electricity generation in 2050 while balancing supply and demand at the hourly level.”

This is a very big finding from one of the world’s most credible experts on advanced energy technologies. This detailed analysis makes clear that renewable energy is here, it is ready, and it can provide a very large share of the energy we need to run an advanced, prosperous and growing economy. The remaining question is whether we are ready to take the leadership to seize this opportunity.

Before we go into the high-level findings and some of the more impressive details, there are a few observations.

The first is on what the NREL study says about what we don’t need to hit 80 percent renewables.

We don’t need some crazy cool new technology or some groundbreaking invention. We aren’t waiting on the scientific community to make some breakthrough. Would revolutions in storage and batteries help us reach 100% renewable energy? Sure. But this 80 percent by 2050 target is possible with commercially available technology. That’s a big deal.

The second is about what this study shows we do need to make this renewable energy future a reality.

We need to transform our thinking about modernizing our electricity system — on everything from system planning and flexibility, to new business models and market rules. America needs to take the same approach it took with every other strategic infrastructure upgrade that unlocked economic growth in our past. From building railroads and highways to rural electrification, we focused our policies on capturing the scope and potential payoff of a major national project. That included providing the incentives to businesses and consumers through smart policy to lift all boats and increase economic productivity.

So before the dirty details: kudos to NREL for taking a look at what is possible and for laying out something visionary. The national debate on building a renewable energy future desperately needs to be re-focused and this report is a great step in that direction — making it clear that bold ambition is readily achievable.

Later this month, the Center for American Progress will also release a report on the convergence of renewable electricity, energy efficiency and smart grid technology, and how these technologies together represent a state change in our national energy infrastructure. Our piece on the Information and Communications Technology (ICT) revolution builds on NREL’s findings to lay out a framework for this national energy transformation.

High-Level Findings

The executive summary of the NREL report highlights a few key findings:

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