It’s looking increasingly likely we’ll see an El Niño starting this summer. If so, next year will almost certainly be the hottest year on record.

The silver lining is that climatologist Kevin Trenberth says an El Niño would probably be a change “for the better” for the U.S. ”in the short term” since it might mean a weaker hurricane season and some relief for the devastating drought that is slamming the Southwest.

The latest U.S. Drought Monitor shows just how widespread the drought is:

So what’s coming? NOAA’s’s Climate Prediction Center says in its monthly “El Niño Southern Oscillation (ENSO) Diagnostic Discussion“:

ENSO Alert System Status: El Niño Watch

Synopsis: Chances increase for El Niño beginning in July-September 2012.

Let’s look at the global and national implications.

Globally, as I discussed last month, NASA said that the development of an El Niño this year would lead to “rapid warming.” That’s because the supposedly slow rate of recent global warming was actually due to the deepest solar minimum in a century combined with that the fact that “the cool La Niña phase of the cyclically variable Southern Oscillation of tropical temperatures has been dominant in the past three years.”

With global warming continuing unabated and the sun coming out of that atypical minimum, an El Niño would make a new global record all but inevitable. After all, we just had the warmest La Niña year on record:

Global average surface temperatures during El Niño and La Niña years.

As NASA wrote in its January analysis, “Global Temperature in 2011, Trends, and Prospects”:

We conclude that the slowdown of warming is likely to prove illusory, with more rapid warming appearing over the next few years.

At a national level, an El Niño this summer may be a good thing, at least for a while. Kevin E. Trenberth, senior scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research, explained what an El Niño would mean for us:

The developing El Nino is apt to change weather patterns across the United States and perhaps in the short term, for the better. The hot dry pattern that has prevailed has the potential to be changed as the North American monsoon kicks in in July to provide some relief in the Southwest.  It also acts to shift hurricane activity to the Pacific, making for a less active Atlantic hurricane season. The strongest effects are in the winter half year, however. Look for higher global mean temperatures over the next year.

Certainly we need relief from the drought — and a less active hurricane season is always a good thing.

El Niño and La Niña are typically defined as sustained sea surface temperature anomalies (positive and negative respectively) greater than 0.5°C across the central tropical Pacific Ocean (the so-called Nino3.4 region). You can read the basics about ENSO here.

Right now, the Australian government’s Bureau of Meteorology reports, the Nino3.4 sea surface temperature index just shot up to 0.7°C — a 0.3°C jump in the last two weeks:

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by RL Miller, via Daily Kos

Last week, the House held Attorney General Eric Holder in contempt for reasons arising from the House GOP-dominated probe into the “Fast and Furious” non-scandal, despite solid reporting, via CNN, that the vast architecture of a Congressional inquiry into a massive conspiracy was built on one disgruntled employee and a couple of lunatics with blogs. One good reporter exposed the lies at its heart, and it all came tumbling down.

Now, the same House Oversight Committee wants to bring in the chief of Abound Solar for a hearing. Abound filed bankruptcy after receiving $70 million in Department of Energy loan guarantees. In a nonpoliticized world, Abound was one of many solar manufacturers being hit hard by industry consolidation and Chinese competition; to Darrell Issa’s GOP, it’s another excuse to politicize clean energy.

I’m going to go out on a limb and predict that there is no vast architecture of conspiracy allowing Abound to get a loan, just as there was nothing beyond cheap GOP talking points at the heart of the Solyndra investigation.

Call it Sunny and Spurious.

Not to be outdone, Senator Scott Brown (R-CosMApolitan) seeks to manufacture a Wind and Worthless non-scandal by calling for an investigation into Cape Wind. Apparently one employee of the FAA, once, expressed concern about radar, so Scott Brown needs to sic a Senate committee on Cape Wind.

Meanwhile, the real waste of taxpayer money is being ignored. Darrell Issa’s Oversight Committee seems to have no interest in a Congressional Budget Office report noting the  waste of carbon capture & storage money (a kind of “clean coal”) – to date, $6.9 billion, or nearly 100 Abounds or 14 Solyndras. That kind of Cash and Curious is where the Oversight Committee should be spending its time. Instead, Issa’s committee is engaging in witch hunts manufactured by blogging zealots untethered to reality.

RL Miller is an attorney and environmental blogger. This piece was originally published at Daily Kos and was reprinted with permission.

by Ben Bovarnick

While many national governments struggle to take comprehensive action on climate change, major cities around the globe are acting on their own.

The Carbon Disclosure Project (CDP) recently released a report tracking initiatives cities are taking to address their greenhouse gas emissions. Many of these municipal governments — plagued by heat waves and flooding — recognize the urgent need to mitigate and adapt to climate change.

Cities account for 70 percent of global emissions while occupying just 2 percent of dry land. The 53 cities that publicly disclose city wide emissions together produce more than 977 million tonnes of CO₂ — or the equivalent emissions of Germany.

While cities are a major source of carbon emissions, they’re also a hotbed of activity to reduce that global warming pollution.

Reacting to the dangers posed by climate change, 59 cities are taking a total of 630 city-wide actions to limit their emissions.  The most common measure is reducing the energy demand of buildings, with 133 efforts to do so in 48 cities. 47 cities have also initiated 129 actions to reduce transportation emissions.  In order to achieve this, cities are frequently using their general municipal funds, though there also exists “a wide variety of outside sources” like state grants, national funding, and UN programs to tap into.

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For months, the wind industry has warned Congressional leaders that failure to extend a key tax credit for wind producers would result in tens of thousands of job losses, particularly in manufacturing.

Led by a small band of ideologues determined to shut down bipartisan support for the burgeoning wind industry while maintaining tax credits for the oil and gas industry, Congress did the only thing it’s currently capable of: doing nothing.

And now, the layoffs have started.

Gamesa, a leading wind turbine manufacturer with multiple facilities in Pennsylvania, says that a slump in demand is forcing the company to furlough 165 workers at two plants starting this fall. According to a story in the Altoona Mirror, Gamesa officials cited the expiration of the Production Tax Credit (PTC) as the reason:

Current production at Gamesa’s facilities is still ongoing for 2012 orders. But the demand for new turbines beyond 2012 dropped significantly, pending the layoffs, Rosenberg said.

“We produce only to order,” Rosenberg said. “Everything that’s being produced is for projects that we have in-house that are scheduled for commissioning for 2012.”

With the pending tax credit expiration at the end of the year, the company has seen a significant drop in demand for new turbines.

The PTC provides wind project owners with a credit for 2.2 cents per kilowatt-hour of electricity produced. Since tax credits were introduced for the industry, the cost of wind electricity has fallen 90 percent, allowing the technology to compete with the heavily subsidized fossil fuel sector.

However, unlike permanent tax credits for the fossil fuel industry, the PTC is only extended on a short-term basis. The PTC is set to expire at the end of this year. Wind companies in the U.S. say the threat of expiration is killing plans for wind projects after 2012, thus causing a drop in orders and forcing them to consider laying off workers.

Vestas, the world’s largest wind manufacturer, says it could soon lay off 1,600 American workers if the credit expires. The company’s CEO recently predicted an 80 percent drop in the market in 2013 without Congressional action to extend the credit.

In April, a wind developer said it would scrap plans for a $20 million project in Ohio — House Speaker John Boehner’s home state — thus preventing the company from employing 200 construction workers.

And in March, Mitsubishi Heavy Industries said that national policy uncertainty was a major reason for halting plans to build a $100 million production facility in Arkansas that would have supported 330 manufacturing jobs.

Over the last five years, wind has brought $20 billion in annual private investment to the U.S. — helping support 75,000 jobs and making America one of the most competitive in the wind industry. But companies are now looking to expand operations into other markets like China, India, and Brazil that offer more policy stability.

A Gamesa spokesperson tried to sound optimistic, saying he hoped the layoffs in Pennsylvania would be “a temporary action.” However, with more companies stalling plans and announcing layoffs of American manufacturing workers, Congress is still unmoved.

How many more layoffs will it take?

Northwestern Glacier’s retreat has accelerated, and now it barely reaches the sea.

By Joe Smyth, via Grist

Our national parks have been called “America’s best idea,” and Americans are proud of the special places we have protected for the inspiration and enjoyment of current and future generations.

But protected areas from Florida to Alaska face new challenges on a warming planet, and melting sea ice means that a newly vulnerable area — the Arctic — is increasingly threatened by offshore oil drilling and industrial fishing. Protecting the Arctic is emerging as one of the great environmental challenges of our age — so what lessons can we learn from earlier generations who came together and won protection for the parks, sanctuaries, and wildlife refuges that we enjoy today?

As we were making final preparations for our Save the Arctic tour in Alaska, some of the crew from the Greenpeace ship Esperanza had a chance to visit Kenai Fjords National Park, a wild and protected area in southern Alaska where the coastline is punctuated by extraordinary glaciers that empty into a sea dominated by humpback whales, seabirds, orcas, and seals.

The effects of climate change are impossible to ignore here, as these enormous glaciers melt and retreat back to the coast. Researchers here in 1909 observed and photographed Northwestern Glacier extending 10 miles into the sea. A century later, we find this glacier has retreated back so far that today it barely reaches the sea. Alaska has warmed twice as quickly as the rest of the United States, and this melting has accelerated in recent years.

While the impacts of climate change are particularly dramatic here in Alaska, there’s trouble for national parks and other protected areas across the United States. In many Western parks like Rocky Mountain National Park, pine forests are being decimated by the mountain pine beetle that thrives in warmer winters. In Florida, coral reefs in Biscayne Bay and the Dry Tortugas are being destroyed by warming and acidifying oceans, while sea level rise threatens low-lying areas like the Everglades. Glacier National Park may not have any glaciers left at all by 2030. The list goes on — for more, see the National Parks Conservation Association’s report, “Unnatural Disaster: Global Warming and Our National Parks.”

Here at Kenai Fjords, tidewater glaciers play an important role in the ecosystem, and the accelerated retreat of these giant rivers of ice will have impacts beyond the melting ice. Just like other rivers, the areas where these glaciers meet the sea are extremely productive estuaries where freshwater and saltwater meet, and nutrients mix. As these frozen rivers retreat and in some cases no longer reach the sea, researchers are studying the impacts to the marine ecosystem and the wildlife that depend upon it.

Our expedition is headed now toward the Arctic, one of the last untouched and pristine places on our planet — and one uniquely threatened by climate change. It’s a place where melting sea ice doesn’t just impact habitats, it is the habitat for animals like polar bears and walruses. The quickly melting Arctic presents extraordinary challenges for the people and animals who call it home, and today it is also important for scientists studying what climate change means for all life in Earth. Like the special places we take pride in protecting for future generations, the Arctic needs protection from industrial exploitation.

Oil companies like Shell see the melting ice as an invitation to drill for oil, and there’s little doubt that industry would have destroyed places like Yosemite and the Grand Canyon as soon as it could if earlier generations hadn’t fought to protect those special places. This fight to save the Arctic will be different in some ways — the high Arctic region around the North Pole doesn’t belong to any nation, so the movement to protect the Arctic must be global. But like those earlier efforts, we’ll need the power of people to challenge some of the biggest corporations in the world.

by Sarah Woodhouse

Alberto, Beryl, Chris and Debby.

If you’re lucky enough not to have met them in person, these are the four tropical systems big enough to be named so far in the 2012 hurricane season. And we’re only in July. Though experts say it doesn’t necessarily signal a pattern for the season as a whole, it has been a busy and early start (the average date for the fourth named storm to occur is Sept. 1).

But as Florida residents mop up after two feet of drenching rains in some locations after tropical storm Debby, there is finally some good news from Washington on policy to lessen the destruction from flooding that these and other types of storms cause for people and property.

On Friday, both houses of Congress reached agreement and voted to pass a transportation bill, which is expected to be signed into law by President Barack Obama this week. Among the provisions included in the bill that will benefit America’s natural resources is a measure to reform the National Flood Insurance Program, which requires property owners in flood-risk areas to buy federal insurance.

The reforms passed last week will discourage and guide development away from freshwater and coastal floodplains, while better informing the public about the dangers to people and properties of flood risk. More specifically it will:

1) phase out subsidies that have undermined the financial stability of the program;

2) require the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) to ensure maps are updated and accurate so that people understand and can better prepare for their risks; and

3) streamline and strengthen mitigation programs to help decrease flood risks and better protect flood-exposed communities, homes and businesses.

Without this action, American taxpayers would have been asked to continue subsidizing public and private development in flood risk areas, doing nothing to fix the financial drain of this program  – which is $18 billion in debt.

In this case a perfect storm of aligned interests was a good thing in terms of tackling a federal program long in need of reform. Advocates for taxpayers and debt reduction, environmentalists, community planners and the insurance and real estate industries all formed an unexpected coalition to urge Congressional action on flood insurance reform.

Cost savings paired with prudent planning and mitigation designed to avoid damages before they occur, brought these groups together. The Nature Conservancy joined with allies such as the National Association of Mutual Insurance Companies, and a diverse group of organizations who pushed for changes.

Studies have found that for every $1 spent on flood mitigation efforts, $5 is saved. That’s an important statistic considering that federal funding spent on flood damages in the first decade of this century has increased to an annual average of over $10 Billion, a 2.5 fold increase from the 1950s.

Many provisions in the bill recognize the flood protection value of our nation’s floodplains and will help to preserve these important natural systems that also deliver additional public benefits such as improving water quality, providing spawning areas for fish and habitat for other plants and animals, and providing recreational opportunities. And for the first time, when mapping flood risk areas, the bill requires the consideration of our changing climate and the accompanying processes such as sea level rise and changing precipitation patterns which are affecting flooding around the country.

Results from scientific studies indicate that a changing climate has exacerbated and will continue to intensify extreme weather events including flooding and coastal storms. A report commissioned by FEMA indicates there will be a 40 to 45 percent increase in U.S. areas susceptible to flooding over the next century. And, newly published research (Holland and Bruyere 2012) finds that the percentage of category 4-5 hurricanes has doubled from about 20% to about 40% in only 35 years.

As we face the storms and floods of the future, at least many positive changes will now be made to the nation’s flood insurance, leaving the program on higher, more solid ground.

Sarah Woodhouse Murdock is Acting Director of Climate Change Adaptation Policy for The Nature Conservancy.

by Jill Fitzsimmons, Jocelyn Fong, and Shauna Theel, via Media Matters

While numerous factors determine the frequency, severity and cost of wildfires, scientific research indicates that human-induced climate change increases fire risks in parts of the Western U.S. by promoting warmer and drier conditions. Seven of nine fire experts contacted by Media Matters agreed journalists should explain the relationship between climate change and wildfires. But an analysis of recent coverage suggests mainstream media outlets are not up to the task — only 3 percent of news reports on wildfires in the West mentioned climate change.

News Outlets Avoid Topic Of Climate Change In Wildfire Stories

Only 3 Percent Of Wildfire Coverage Mentioned Long-Term Climate Change Or Global Warming. The major television and print outlets largely ignored climate change in their coverage of wildfires in Colorado, New Mexico and other Western states. All together, only 3 percent of the reports mentioned climate change, including 1.6 percent of television segments and 6 percent of text articles.

METHODOLOGY: We searched Nexis and Factiva databases for articles and segments on (wildfire or wild fire or forest fire) between April 1, 2012, and June 30, 2012. News outlets included in this study are ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN, The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Associated Press, The Los Angeles Times, CNN.com, USA Today and The Wall Street Journal. MSNBC and Fox News were not included in this analysis because transcripts of their daytime coverage are not available in the Nexis database.

Evidence Suggests Climate Change Worsens Fire Risk In Parts Of Western U.S.

Climate Central: “Wildfires Require Several Factors To Come Together.” A Climate Central article about the 2011 fire season noted that “major wildfires require several factors to come together,” and that wildfires are strongly influenced by regional climate conditions, which in turn are influenced by global warming driven by greenhouse gas emissions:

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

Across a wide stretch of the Midwest, sweltering temperatures and a lack of rain are threatening what had been expected to be the nation’s largest corn crop in generations. [New York Times]

Much of Ohio has slipped officially into drought, creating economic and wildfire concerns for emergency-management officials, as well as for agriculture and farmers statewide. [Columbus Dispatch]

Drought conditions are contributing to a Mississippi River level that may not be the lowest ever but still is cause for concern. [USA Today]

Cyanobacterial populations, primitive aquatic microorganisms, are frequently-encountered in water bodies especially in summer. Their numbers have increased in recent decades and scientists suspect that global warming may be behind the phenomenon.  [Environmental Protection]

Climate change, blamed on heavy environmental degradation on the slopes of Mount Kilimanjaro, has dealt a devastating blow on farmers as almost all cash and food crops have been affected by this year’s unreliable weather patterns, it has been revealed. [All Africa]

The nuclear accident at Fukushima was a preventable disaster rooted in government-industry collusion and the worst conformist conventions of Japanese culture, a parliamentary inquiry concluded on Thursday. [New York Times]

The final turbine of China’s massive Three Gorges dam has been connected to the power grid, marking the completion of a controversial hydropower project that cost the country more than £38bn and displaced at least 1.3 million people. [Guardian]

The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) subpoenaed JPMorgan twice in the past three months on allegations that the bank manipulated energy markets for financial gain, court filings show. [The Hill]