By Erin Gustafson

Today marks the beginning of hurricane season, a six-month period in which most of the United States’ hurricanes and tropical storms occur.  Of course, the east coast of Florida got the party started early this past Memorial Day weekend, hosting tropical storm Beryl with its 10 inches of rain and maximum sustained wind speed of 70 mph, just one in a series of extreme weather events that took place over the holiday weekend. Beryl is especially significant because it is the largest tropical storm to reach land before the official start of hurricane season on June 1^st.

“I hope this is not a sign of things to come,” commented U.S. Senator Bill Nelson, alluding to the nine to fifteen named storms, including four to eight hurricanes, NOAA’s forecasters predict will appear between now and the end of the season on November 30.  Unfortunately for all of us, the future doesn’t look terribly rosy.

As dramatic as NOAA’s hurricane predictions may sound, the agency is saying that they constitute a “near normal” hurricane season which will be less severe than recent years.  Still, it’s worth noting that any hurricane will bring strong winds, heavy rains, and flooding, and it only takes one massive storm to wreak major havoc.

More troubling still is that hurricane and tropical storm-related flooding this year and in the future will be exacerbated by the effects of rising seas.  In the past hundred and fifty years sea levels have risen 8 inches and scientists estimate that they will rise between one and seven feet by the end of the century.  With recent reports of melting ice sheets in Antarctica and rapidly disappearing glaciers due to climate change, and emerging concern about the role of increased use of water previously locked up in underground aquifers, predictions on the high end are becoming increasingly likely.

A four foot rise in sea level could endanger 5 million residents living in 2.6 million homes on $500 billion of residential real estate in the U.S., not to mention 300 energy-producing facilities, airports, thousands of miles of roads and numerous other types of infrastructure, making them increasingly vulnerable to increased storm surges and flooding.

At a Senate Hearing on the “Impacts of Rising Sea Levels on Domestic Infrastructures“ in April, Dr. Ben Strauss of Climate Central warned that rising seas would “raise the launch pad for coastal storm surges,” more than tripling the odds of what used to be “once in a century floods” within the next two decades.

Read more

JR: Has any piece of climate science been more vindicated than the Hockey Stick? This RealClimate piece adds three more independent studies to the ever-growing list (at the end).

Gergis et al. Figure 4, showing Australian mean temperatures over the last millennium, with 95% confidence levels.

By Eric Steig

In the Northern Hemisphere, the late 20th / early 21st century has been the hottest time period in the last 400 years at very high confidence, and likely in the last 1000 – 2000 years (or more). It has been unclear whether this is also true in the Southern Hemisphere. Three studies out this week shed considerable new light on this question. This post provides just brief summaries; we’ll have more to say about these studies in the coming weeks.

First, a study by Gergis et al., in the Journal of Climate uses a proxy network from the Australasian region to reconstruct temperature over the last millennium, and finds what can only be described as an Australian hockey stick. They use an ensemble of 3000 different reconstructions, using different methods and different subsets of the proxy network. Worth noting is that while some tree rings are used (which can’t be avoided, as there simply aren’t any other data for some time periods), the reconstruction relies equally on coral records, which are not subject to the same potential (though often-overstated) issues at low frequencies. The conclusion reached is that summer temperatures in the post-1950 period were warmer than anything else in the last 1000 years at high confidence, and in the last ~400 years at very high confidence.

Second, Orsi et al., writing in Geophysical Research Letters, use borehole temperature measurements from the WAIS Divide site in central West Antarctica, a region where the magnitude of recent temperature trends has been subject of considerable controversy. The results show that the mean warming of the last 50 years has been 0.23°C/decade. This result is in essentially perfect agreement with that of Steig et al. (2009) and reasonable agreement with Monaghan (whose reconstruction for nearby Byrd Station was used in Schneider et al., 2012). The result is totally incompatible (at >95%>80% confidence) with that of O’Donnell et al. (2010).

Read more

JR: Self-DustBowlification, Part I is our ongoing refusal to sharply curtail greenhouse gas emissions. That is likely to lead to catastrophic drought over large parts of America. Part II is our unsustainable use of groundwater, as this Climate Central piece makes clear.

Satellite image of fields that have been irrigated by central pivot systems, which use less water than many other irrigation methods. Credit: Wikipedia Commons.

By Andrew Freedman

Irrigated agriculture is rapidly depleting groundwater resources in parts of the High Plains and the Central Valley region of California, which are both critical regions for food production, according to a new study.  According to the study, if groundwater depletion were to continue at current rates, 35 percent of the southern High Plains will no longer be able to support irrigation within the next 30 years.

With climate change projections showing that more severe droughts in both the Southwest and High Plains are likely as the climate continues to warm, groundwater resources are going to be even more highly stressed in the coming decades, the study says.

The groundwater resources that sustain agricultural production in California’s Central Valley and the High Plains enabled farmers to produce $56 billion in agricultural products in 2007 alone, the study reported, and these two areas comprise the country’s most productive agricultural lands. The High Plains is commonly known as America’s “bread basket,” while the moniker of the country’s “fruit and vegetable basket” is sometimes applied to California’s Central Valley.

The research, published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, integrates water observations from different sources, including NASA satellites, about 11,300 wells, and computer models to produce one of the most comprehensive looks yet of how irrigated agriculture is drawing down vital groundwater supplies.

The picture that emerges from the study is more complex than was previously thought, with groundwater depletion varying in different areas and at different times.

Read more

A round-up of the top climate and energy news. Please post other links below.

A greener economy could create between 15 million to 60 million jobs worldwide over the next two decades, according to a report from a United Nations panel. If nations pushed green energy, job creation would outnumber jobs lost in fossil fuel industries that do not adapt, with net gains of 0.5 percent to 2 percent in net total employment [Guardian]:

Achim Steiner, executive director of Unep [United Nations Environment Programme], said: “The findings underline that [the green economy] can include millions more people in terms of overcoming poverty and delivering improved livelihoods for this and future generations. It is a positive message of opportunity in a troubled world of challenges.”

As well as generating net new gains in the number of jobs, the switch to a green economy could help to lift millions of people out of poverty.

In the US, there are now about three million “green jobs”, in sectors such as wind power and energy efficiency, the study found. In the UK, the number is close to one million and has been one of the few areas of the economy that has been creating jobs. There are about 500,000 people working in green jobs in Spain. In the developing world, too, the number is growing rapidly – about 7% of people employed in Brazil, amounting to three million people, are now in the green economy.

Chinese officials promised Friday to play a positive role in this month’s U.N. environment summit but stressed the needs of their country’s poor, apparently trying to dampen hopes for major concessions. The comments added to signs that the June 20-22 meeting in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, might face political obstacles to any significant agreements. President Barack Obama, in the midst of a re-election campaign, and European leaders have withdrawn from the meeting. [AP]

Institutional investors and environmental advocates on Thursday urged companies to disclose their risks from the impact of climate change, two years after the Securities and Exchange Commission issued guidelines for firms to do just that. While the SEC guidelines do not force publicly traded corporations to assess such climate-related events as severe storms, droughts, floods and heat waves, some companies have done so anyway. But those disclosures have not been particularly useful, according to Maryland State Treasurer Nancy Kopp. [Reuters]

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency sent a letter late last year raising concerns that the southern leg of the Keystone XL pipeline might require more stringent permitting than planned by the Army Corp of Engineers, according to a report from the Associated Press. [NPR]

Mitt Romney’s Solyndra swipes may prove difficult to pull off cleanly. For one, Romney used to be a proponent of government funding of clean energy technologies. His 2008 energy policy platform called for a “dramatic increase” in “federal spending on research, development, and demonstration projects that hold promise for diversifying our energy supply.” Among those projects were “bringing clean energy technology to market through commercialization of large-scale renewables.” [Huffington Post]

The creators of Leafully, Nathan Jhaveri and Tim Edgar seem to think so, and so does the U.S. Department of Energy. The Seattle start up won the federal agency’s “Apps for Energy” contest this week with their app. The application monitors home energy use by accessing information from a user’s utility provider. [Discovery News]

by Justin Guay, via the Sierra Club’s Compass Blog

Something’s brewing in Bihar. After decades of being India’s most notoriously “backward” state, the Chief Minister Nitish Kumar has tempered corruption, built roads and spurred development.

Given the impressive achievements of his previous term, it’s no surprise he rode to overwhelming victory in recent elections. What is surprising is that his campaign platform consisted of more or less a single promise — to deliver electricity access to the 82% of the over 100 million inhabitants of Bihar who lack it. With little fossil fuel reserves to speak of, Bihar will need to write a blueprint for a clean energy revolution to deliver on that promise.

As Shaibal Gupta, Secretary, of the Asian Development Research Institute puts it, Bihar now requires an infusion of energy to further “lubricate” the wheels of development. That’s putting it lightly. Bihar faces a 30% peak power deficit (highest in the country) due to its paltry 546 megawatts of installed capacity — about the size of one average coal plant. Worse, Bihar loses roughly 38% of the meager amount of energy it produces through transmission and distribution. That’s like taking almost half of this capacity and pouring it down a drain – while you pay for it.

The states chief minister has tried to construct new coal plants to reverse the situation but to no avail. Worse, India’s coal crisis is raging, reducing the likelihood that any new coal plant Kumar is able to build will be able to secure coal at affordable rates. Add the lead time for a new coal plant (at least 5-7 years to complete) and it’s pretty clear turning to renewable energy is the only way to make good on his campaign pledge.

But these factors can be said to be true for any number of country’s still heeding conventional wisdom and dumping billions into failed grid extension efforts powered by heavily polluting coal plants. Which is why Greenpeace India has launched a campaign to push Bihar in the direction of the quickest most promising way to deliver energy access – decentralized clean energy (read their new report here). The campaign is creating the political momentum to catalyze a clean energy revolution building on the pioneering work of entrepreneurs like Husk Power and green light planet.

As a result of the campaign, coupled with the headache of securing coal, the states politicians are seriously considering committing their citizens’ future to clean energy.

Read more