Who’s connecting the dots on the extraordinary bout of extreme weather events hitting the U.S.? No, it’s not the “liberal” media. It’s Matt Drudge of the Drudge Report, the popular conservative news aggregation site.

Here’s the Drudge Report highlighting a fantastic story from the Associated Press today:

The U.S. is getting hit by a range of powerful extreme weather events this summer. Record droughts in the West and Midwest are fueling historic wildfires, putting pressure on farmers, and driving up crop prices. Extreme “hurricane-like” storms took eastern states by surprise over the weekend, knocking out power to millions of people and leaving them sweltering in an ongoing heat wave. Across the country in June, more than 3,000 heat records were broken. That was after an off-the-charts heat wave in March where heat records blew out cold records 12-1.

With all these events occurring simultaneously, climate scientists are being more blunt than ever — and journalists are finally connecting the dots in their stories. In the last few days, we’ve seen a number of excellent pieces making the connection between these events and climate change. The latest is from Associated Press science writer Seth Borenstein:

So far this year, more than 2.1 million acres have burned in wildfires, more than 113 million people in the U.S. were in areas under extreme heat advisories last Friday, two-thirds of the country is experiencing drought, and earlier in June, deluges flooded Minnesota and Florida.

“This is what global warming looks like at the regional or personal level,” said Jonathan Overpeck, professor of geosciences and atmospheric sciences at the University of Arizona. “The extra heat increases the odds of worse heat waves, droughts, storms and wildfire. This is certainly what I and many other climate scientists have been warning about.”

“What we’re seeing really is a window into what global warming really looks like,” said Princeton University geosciences and international affairs professor Michael Oppenheimer. “It looks like heat. It looks like fires. It looks like this kind of environmental disasters.”

Oppenheimer said that on Thursday. That was before the East Coast was hit with triple-digit temperatures and before a derecho — an unusually strong, long-lived and large straight-line wind storm — blew through Chicago to Washington. The storm and its aftermath killed more than 20 people and left millions without electricity. Experts say it had energy readings five times that of normal thunderstorms.

Greenhouse gases from man-made sources are putting a lot of extra energy into the atmosphere. In fact, the radiative forcing of all the CO2 humans have dumped into the air is equal to about 1 million Hiroshima nuclear bombs per day.

Scientists often compare that extra energy to a baseball slugger on steroids. While it’s difficult to look at a specific home run and say steroids were the only reason it happened, it’s much easier to show that the drugs increased the likelihood the ball made it over the fence. The same is true for climate steroids like CO2. All that extra energy in the atmosphere increases the probability and intensity of extreme weather events, making the droughts, storms and wildfires Americans are facing this summer far more likely and far more destructive.

As NBC Washington’s Chief Meteorologist, Doug Kammerer, explained on air “If we did not have global warming, we wouldn’t see this.”

Also helping connect the dots on these events, PBS recently featured a six-minute interview with Kevin Trenberth, a senior scientist with the National Center for Atmospheric Research. Trenberth does an excellent job explaining the combination of factors that make extreme weather events more likely, finishing the interview with a blunt warning: “This is a view of the future, so watch out.”

Here are some excerpts from the interview:

Read more

by Richard Caperton and Adam James

This past Friday night a devastating storm swept through the Mid-Atlantic and Midwest regions, knocking out power for millions of homes and businesses across 10 states and the District of Columbia. As of Monday more than 2 million consumers were still without electricity.

This disaster highlights how critical electricity is to our everyday lives, and it emphasizes the need for reliable power. Fortunately, there are steps that utilities, policymakers, and consumers can take to reduce the frequency and impact of outages.

We need to do three basic things to make our power more reliable: Reduce damages to the grid, make the grid more resilient in the face of inevitable damages, and speed the repair time for the damages that do happen. We also need to invest in energy resources that reduce the greenhouse gas pollution that’s causing more extreme weather.

What causes power outages?

Power outages have numerous causes, and no magic bullet will eliminate them. Outages can be caused by an overstressed electrical grid trying to deliver large amounts of power on hot days. Sometimes outages are manmade such as when market manipulation by Enron led to rolling blackouts in California. While the current outages are primarily due to downed distribution lines—the lines that carry power through neighborhoods and into houses—other large-scale blackouts were caused by problems with the transmission grid, which carries large amounts of electricity from power plants into communities.

The massive problem currently affecting the Mid-Atlantic and Midwest was caused primarily by trees and limbs falling on power lines. When this happens the local utility sends workers out to look for downed lines, but they generally rely on consumers to tell them about specific problems. After problems are identified, utility linemen have to physically repair every mile of damaged lines, a painstaking process that can take days, weeks, and, in some horrific cases, months.

There aren’t a whole lot of ways to speed up the repair process besides getting more workers and trucks in the field; that’s why there are line crews from across the United States working in the Mid-Atlantic today.

How we can make our power more reliable

While the United States has remarkably reliable power, there’s no way around the fact that other industrialized countries have fewer outages than we do. Americans lose power an average of 214 minutes per year, compared to 21 minutes in Germany and an extraordinary 6 minutes in Japan.

Much of the difference in reliability between the United States and other countries is due to these countries’ recent investments in more dependable electricity infrastructure. Germany, for example, now puts all of their new distribution lines underground, which is more expensive than putting them on poles above ground but also makes them impervious to falling trees.

We should follow Germany’s lead and put more of our new lines underground. But we can also make investments in a more resilient electric system, so that damages to power lines and other parts of the grid don’t cause people to go without power for days on end.

First, smart meters—devices in consumers’ homes that monitor their power use and communicate with the utility—can make it much easier for line crews to respond to outages without waiting for consumers to call the utility. This would be especially useful in times when telecommunications systems are damaged, and people can’t call the utility. Read more

by Max Frankel

Sixteen cities around the world have set a cumulative target to sell almost six million electric and plug in hybrid electric vehicles by 2020. If they reach this goal, EVs would account for about 6% of total vehicle sales and about 20 million cars on the road.

A new report called the EV City Casebook highlights how these leading cities are putting the right pieces into place to encourage the adoption of EVs:

“Cities are also leading by example. Many have already added electric vehicles to municipal fleets and incorporated hybrid buses into public transportation. They are placing charging spots at public buildings and, in some cases, offering discounted electricity rates for EV users from municipal-owned utilities. Just as important, cities are using their convening power to assemble multi-stakeholder groups that include city planners, automakers, utilities, infrastructure suppliers, academic and research institutions, and city and national officials. These groups work together to create a roadmap for EV readiness that considers all stakeholder perspectives and seeks to identify and address technical, economic and regulatory barriers to EV adoption and integration.”

The sixteen cities involved in the collaborative project are Amsterdam, Barcelona, Berlin, BrabantStad, the Goto Islands in Nagasaki, Hamburg, Helsinki, Kanagawa, Los Angeles, New York, North East England, Portland, Research Triangle in North Carolina, Rotterdam, Shanghai, and Stockholm.

Three cities, Amsterdam, Barcelona, and Los Angeles have taken the lead and are instituting innovative programs to reach their ambitious EV targets. Here’s a look at what they’re up to:

Read more

Arctic sea ice is melting at record rates. And rather than raise alarm bells, it’s only encouraged fossil fuel companies to drill for oil in the region as the ice opens up — prolonging our addiction to the resources that are helping warm the planet.

So what will happen if we continue down this path?

Greenpeace has envisioned that future in a striking new film released as part of its Save the Arctic campaign. The organization worked with the band Radiohead and actor Jude Law to put together this distopian story about the Arctic:

By Jessica Goad

Next week, the Center for American Progress and the Sierra Club will premiere a series of short documentaries called “Public Lands, Private Profits” that outlines threats to special places on public lands owned by the American people.

The videos profile three stories about the fights to protect certain areas from resource extraction:  uranium mining on the edges of the Grand Canyon; a proposed coal mine close to Bryce Canyon National Park; and natural gas drilling in the Bridger-Teton National Forest.

Watch a preview of the series above.

Some of our country’s best places have already been preserved for future generations to enjoy.  But these films show that even places already set aside for conservation can face challenges.

The videos will be released next Tuesday, July 10^th.  Also, tune in next Wednesday for the live stream of an event featuring the Sierra Club’s Michael Brune, and CAP’s John Podesta and Tom Perriello discussing “The Status of American Conservation in 2012.”

Jessica is the Manager of Research and Outreach for the Public Lands Project at the Center for American Progress Action Fund.

by Barbel Epp, via Renewable Energy World

Ask any six-year-old in a Chinese street, “What’s a solar water heater and what’s it for?” Without hesitation they will tell you: “A solar water heater is on the roof of a building to make hot water for the shower.”

This story is told by Hongzhi Cheng, vice secretary-general of the Beijing-based Chinese Solar Thermal Industry Federation (CSTIF) and head of The Sun’s Vision, a company based in the city of Dezhou in Shandong province.

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

Millions of people learned a new word over the weekend: “derecho.” It was not a happy lesson. [New York Times]

If you want a glimpse of some of the worst of global warming, scientists suggest taking a look at U.S. weather in recent weeks. [Washington Post]

After several years of relatively benign fire seasons, the West is headed into a hot, dry summer of potentially ferocious blazes like the ones that have scorched Colorado in recent weeks. [Los Angeles Times]

Hotter and drier beaches all but wipe out eastern Pacific populations of  leatherback sea turtles by the end of the century, according researchers from Drexel University. [Citizens Voice]

A new report from the Congressional Budget Office finds that Congress has authorized $6.9 billion for developing carbon capture since 2005 — but, so far, there’s little to show for it. [Washington Post]

Not long ago, grid operators only had to worry about coal, nuclear, natural gas and big hydro as sources of electricity generation. Except for the pollution, the threat of radioactive disaster, and blocking rivers, it was a simpler, more innocent time. [Greentech Media]

The new chief of the federal Energy Information Administration wants to add some spice to the agency known for detailed — if dry — reports and analyses. [The Hill]

Canada’s pristine image — and more importantly its environment — is not likely to recover from what critics across the political spectrum say is an unprecedented assault by the Conservative government of Prime Minister Stephen Harper on environmental regulation. [Guardian]