The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) has released its chart-filled “State of the Climate Global Analysis” for June 2012:

The big stories are the heat and drought:

• The average temperature for the contiguous U.S. during June was 71.2°F, which is 2.0°F above the 20^th century average. Scorching temperatures during the second half of the month led to at least 170 all-time high temperature records broken or tied. The June temperatures contributed to a record-warm first half of the year and the warmest 12-month period the nation has experienced since recordkeeping began in 1895.
• According to the U.S. Drought Monitor, as of July 3, 56.0 percent of the contiguous U.S. experienced drought conditions, marking the largest percentage of the nation experiencing drought conditions in the 12-year record of the U.S. Drought Monitor.

How off-the-charts has the last year been? NOAA has done the math:

• During the June 2011-June 2012 period, each of the 13 consecutive months ranked among the warmest third of their historical distribution for the first time in the 1895-present record. The odds of this occurring randomly is 1 in 1,594,323.

As meteorologist Dr. Jeff Masters puts it, “Thus, we should only see one more 13-month period so warm between now and 124,652 AD–assuming the climate is staying the same as it did during the past 118 years. These are ridiculously long odds, and it is highly unlikely that the extremity of the heat during the past 13 months could have occurred without a warming climate.”

UPDATE: NOAA did the math inappropriately in multiple respects. Obviously, individual months in the US temperature record are correlated (weather persists, though not as much as you might think). So simply taking 1/3 (one third) to the 13th power as NOAA did is not the right way to do the calculation. Doing the calculation correctly isn’t easy, but Lucia of The Blackboard says “I am getting a probability less than 1 in 100,000.” That said, it is also wrong for NOAA to do the calculation assuming each of the last 13 months was merely in the top one third — when 6 of the last 13 months were in the top 4% warmest months (you can find all the rankings here by stepping through month by month). Most likely the probability of this particular heat wave in an alternative universe America where the climate that isn’t warming is less than 1 in 1.6 million, but it is a very tricky calculation to do. I have emailed Tom Karl, director of the National Climactic Data Center, and will post any change they make. Masters has added a correction here.

Like a baseball player on steroids, our atmosphere has been “juiced” with human emissions of greenhouse gases, which means we are going to be breaking heat records at an “unnatural” pace for a long, long time.  Climatologist Richard Alley offers a different analogy in a column today:

Humans have made some extreme weather events more likely, and they are happening.

Just as a back-street gambler might beat someone in an honest game but has a better chance with loaded dice, Nature might have caused this summer’s weather but we gave it a boost. More importantly, under business as usual, today’s children may one day think of this summer as cool.

How extreme has the weather been in 2012?

• The U.S. Climate Extremes Index (USCEI), an index that tracks the highest and lowest 10 percent of extremes in temperature, precipitation, drought and tropical cyclones across the contiguous U.S., was a record-large 44 percent during the January-June period, over twice the average value. Extremes in warm daytime temperatures (83 percent) and warm nighttime temperatures (70 percent) covered large areas of the nation, contributing to the record high value.

Here’s the chart:

Unfortunately, NOAA offers little near-term hope for alleviating the drought. Here’s their forecast through the end of September:

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by Jessica Goad

This past February, Mitt Romney told a Nevada newspaper that he doesn’t know “what the purpose is of” public lands.

But a new report released today by the U.S. Department of the Interior quantifies the economic impacts of public lands managed by the agency. The results are impressive:

The Department of the Interior plays a substantial role in the U.S. economy, supporting over two million jobs and approximately $385 billion in economic activity for 2011.

The study analyzes the total economic impacts of the agency’s activities on public lands and waters including mining, oil and gas drilling, timber, and outdoor recreation.

Mitt Romney will be campaigning in Colorado tomorrow, a state with a plethora of public lands — including Rocky Mountain National Park, which supported 2,641 jobs in 2010.  And as today’s report shows, Colorado saw 74,195 jobs and more than $14 billion created by Interior Department activities in 2011.

The Interior Department report shows once again that protecting places creates jobs. National parks, national monuments, and other places that are set off limits to development stimulate local economies and create jobs like local outfitters, hotel, and restaurant owners in gateways towns. As the report states:

Americans and foreign visitors made nearly 435 million visits to Interior managed lands. These visits supported over 403,000 jobs and contributed around $48.7 billion in economic activity. This economic output represents about 6.5% of the direct output of tourism related personal consumption expenditures for the United States for 2011 and about 7.6% of the direct tourism related employment.

Other recent studies have found that jobs in the outdoor recreation industry outnumber those in the oil and gas industry three to one, home values are higher near national wildlife refuges, and jobs in rural western counties that are a third or more protected public lands have more than tripled over last 40 years.

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

Related Posts:

• New Report: Outdoor Recreation Industry Jobs Outnumber Those In Oil And Gas Nearly Three to One
• Jobs In Rural Western Counties With More Than 30% Protected Public Lands Increased 300% Over Last 40 Years
• New Study Finds Home Values Are Higher Near National Wildlife Refuges
• Romney To Nevadans: I Don’t Know ‘What The Purpose Is’ Of Public Lands (Hint: They Pump $1 Billion Into the State Economy)
• Memo To Mitt Romney: Even Tea Partiers Know The ‘Purpose’ Of Public Lands In Colorado

by Tom Kenworthy

The vicious 2012 wildfire season now unfolding in the interior West is hardly a surprise. Much of the region has been in a drought for more than a decade. This winter’s snowpack was sparse, particularly in Colorado, and it melted and ran off early. Temperatures have been high, and humidity has been low—making fuels from grasses to trees very dry and flammable.

All of that means conditions ripe for fires, which have come with a vengeance. New Mexico has had its biggest fire ever, and Colorado has seen the most destructive fires in its history, with the Waldo Canyon Fire near Colorado Springs and the High Park Fire near Fort Collins destroying more than 600 homes combined. Even as firefighters have brought the big Colorado fires near containment, other large blazes have broken out in Wyoming, Utah, and Montana.

Yes, it’s looking like a big fire year. And yes, this is part of the new normal. It’s pretty much exactly what climate experts have been predicting and what the data have been telegraphing for some time. While there are various proposals on the table to deal with increasingly destructive wildfires, they are likely to continue and become worse unless we tackle climate change.

More severe wildfires, right on schedule

Numerous studies in recent years have predicted that higher temperatures and drought conditions brought on by climate change will accelerate wildland fire activity in the West.

In 2004 U.S. Forest Service researchers studying past fires in the West constructed a model that predicted as much as a fivefold increase in burned areas by the end of the century.

Two years later a Scripps Institute of Oceanography study looked at the relatively recent spike in wildfire activity and determined it was due to changes in climate rather than forest management practices:

Robust statistical associations between wildfire and hydroclimate in western forests indicate that increased wildfire activity over recent decades reflects sub-regional responses to changes in climate. Historical wildfire observations exhibit an abrupt transition in the mid-1980s from a regime of infrequent large wildfires of short (average of 1 week) duration to one with much more frequent and longer burning (5 weeks) fires. This transition was marked by a shift toward unusually warm springs, longer summer dry seasons, drier vegetation (which provoked more and longer burning large wildfires), and longer fire seasons. Reduced winter precipitation and an early spring snowmelt played a role in this shift.

Three years ago, in a thorough report on the impacts of climate change across the country, the U.S. Global Change Research Program said that earlier melting of snow and drier soils and plants had already increased fire activity in the West, and that the situation would grow worse:

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In the last ten years, as cases of black lung among American coal miners doubled — hitting “epidemic” scale — the coal industry and anti-regulatory politicians have fought to prevent federal agencies from creating new standards that would improve miner safety.

That’s according to an investigation from National Public Radio, The Center for Public Integrity, and the Charleston Gazette.

The reporters looked at health data and regulatory records, finding an alarming surge in cases of black lung in U.S. miners — even while opponents of regulation worked to stop any new laws designed to reduce the problem. NPR released part one of its investigation this morning:

Black lung experts and mine safety advocates have warned of the resurgence of the disease since 1995. New reporting by CPI and NPR reveals the extent to which federal regulators and the mining industry failed to protect coal miners in the intervening years.

An analysis of federal data by CPI and NPR also shows that the mining industry and federal regulators have known for more than two decades that coal miners were breathing excessive amounts of the coal mine dust that causes black lung. CPI and NPR also found that the system for controlling coal mine dust is plagued by weak regulations and inaccurate reporting that sometimes includes fraud.

“This is clearly a public health epidemic,” Laney says. “This is a rare disease that should not be occurring. It’s occurring at a high proportion of individuals who are being exposed.”

Rates of black lung have doubled nation-wide in the last decade. In Appalachia, cases of the most advanced form of black lung have increased four-fold since the 1980′s.

What is causing the rise in black lung? According to public health experts and industry experts, it’s a combination of outdated coal dust regulations and miners working longer hours.

The last time any major regulations were established was 1969. That year, Congress established the Federal Coal Mine Health and Safety Act, which created a new coal mining regulatory agency and significantly tightened standards for coal dust in the air. Cases of black lung fell by 90 percent after the law was passed.

But over the coming decades, as miners started working far longer hours, the problem came back in a big way:

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by Max Frankel

As intense heat and drought conditions continue across much of the Midwest, they are starting to take a toll on crop yields. According to a university plant biologist, operating in such conditions is “like farming in hell.”

The U.S. corn crop, which is the largest in the world, is at a very vulnerable point in its development: the pollination phase. Although the harvest isn’t for two months, future yields will be determined in the next few weeks as crops pollinate. However, the unusually hot and dry conditions are complicating this phase.

Bloomberg Businessweek reported on how drought conditions are impacting corn farmers:

“This is a very narrow window for corn, and there’s little room for error,” said Brad Rippey, an agricultural meteorologist for the United States Department of Agriculture. “Whatever happens in that window, it is what it is — that cob is made or broken.”

“Corn yields were falling five bushels a day during the past week” in the driest parts of the Midwest, said Fred Below, a plant biologist at the University of Illinois in Urbana. “You couldn’t choreograph worse weather conditions for pollination. It’s like farming in hell.”

Despite earlier predictions of a record yield, revised forecasts are anticipating crop losses not seen since the drought of 1988.

The Midwestern drought now encompasses portions of five corn producing states, including almost all of Ohio. “‘It all quickly went from ideal to tragic,’ said Don Duvall, a farmer in Illinois who, in what was a virtually rainless June, has watched two of his cornfields dry up and die as others remain in some uncertain in-between.”

The drought, which has kept rainfall levels in Columbus, Ohio at half of their normal levels, has been exacerbated by an intense heat wave that set over 4,000 high-temperature records in the last 30 days. In corn country, temperatures in places like Jefferson County, Mississippi, reached as high as 111.

Coupled with the heat and lack of rainfall is low soil moisture levels. Measurements taken in Illinois, Indiana, Ohio, Missouri and Kentucky recorded soil moisture levels “in the 10th percentile among all other years since 1895.”

“The drought is much worse than last year and approaching the 1988 disaster,” said John Cory, the chief executive officer of Rochester, Indiana-based grain processor Prairie Mills Products LLC. “There are crops that won’t make it. The dairy and livestock industries are going to get hit very hard. People are just beginning to realize the depth of the problem.”

As this latest drought unfolds, researchers are looking at the impact of climate change on the intensity and likelihood of such an event. As Texas Climatologist Katherine Hayhoe recently told Climate Progress, extra energy in the atmosphere from greenhouse gases are creating new “background conditions”:

We often try to pigeonhole an event, such as a drought, storm, or heatwave into one category: either human or natural, but not both. What we have to realise is 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.

As our atmosphere becomes warmer, it can hold more water vapor. Atmospheric circulation patterns shift, bringing more rain to some places and less to others. For example, when a storm comes, in many cases there is more water available in the atmosphere and rainfall is heavier. When a drought comes, often temperatures are already higher than they would have been 50 years ago and so the effects of the drought are magnified by higher evaporation rates.

As Joe Romm pointed out on Sunday, the Earth has warmed only a bit more than 1 degree Fahrenheit since the catastrophic Dust Bowl — and the world is set to warm by between 9-11°F this century if we stay on a business-as-usual emissions path. That would make a lot more of America a true “hell” for farmers.

Max Frankel is a senior at Vassar College. Stephen Lacey contributed to this report.

Related Post:

• Hell And High Water Strikes, Media Miss The Forest For The Burning Trees

UpStart [uhp-stahrt] n. 1. A company or organization with innovative approaches to energy use, carbon pollution, resource consumption, and/or social equity, 2. A company or organization overcoming market barriers to build the new clean energy economy.

by Adam James

American cities are currently facing new demands on transportation infrastructure due to a rapidly growing population. There are two ways to address this problem. One way, of course, is to build more infrastructure. The other is to more efficiently utilize what’s already in place — thus saving energy, time, and money.

Information technologies offer the key to transportation optimization. Below are three ways digital technologies are revolutionizing the way we use cars, mass transit, and cycling.

1) Reinventing HOV: Efficiently Using Cars

A quick look out the window as you sit in gridlock traffic will reveal that very few folks have someone else in the car with them. Even zipping (or in DC, crawling) down HOV lanes you will rarely see more than two people in the car. Nationwide there are now 254,212,610 registered vehicles.

What if we could fill those seats? That is the basic premise of Sidecar, a new car sharing tool that matches individuals who are seeking rides with others who need them. The service vets potential rider-givers and ride-getters to alleviate any security concerns. Interestingly, the service cannot set up formal payment; it can just suggest a donation: so the ridesharing operates with a tip-culture. With the system running on credit cards, you don’t even have to worry about bringing cash.

Information makes this possible. By gathering and sharing information about individuals travel habits and needs, SideCar enables decreasing transportation sector emissions through greater cooperation — harnessing efficiencies in our existing infrastructure.

2) Reinventing Mass Transit: Preserving Autonomy

But information technology doesn’t just enable better use of cars. A study by Latitude found:

“While users value the freedom and control a car provides, mobile information solutions could replicate this sense of autonomy without needing to own a car—primarily by helping users to make informed, in-the-moment decisions about what’s available near them and the best ways to get around.”

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Shell sets sail for Arctic seas without a clean-up vessel.

by Ben Bovarnick

In the event of an offshore oil spill in the Arctic, Shell has previously admitted it can only “encounter” most of the oil in the frigid, pristine waters — not clean it up. However, it may lack the resources to do even that.

As Shell’s fleet sails north to prepare offshore drilling in Arctic waters, Shell’s oil spill recovery barge, the Arctic Challenger, remains docked in northern Washington after failing to receive Coast Guard certification. The Los Angeles Times reports:

The delay in certification adds another notch of uncertainty to Shell’s narrow window for operations in the Arctic, which already is tight because drilling must halt by September in the Chukchi Sea and by October in the Beaufort Sea to avoid the dangerous advance of sea ice that comes with winter. Though drilling initially was scheduled to commence by mid-July, unusually heavy sea ice from the past winter has postponed that, probably until the first week of August.

The federal Bureau of Safety and Environmental Enforcement has said it will not issue final drilling permits until the Arctic Challenger receives final Coast Guard certification.

The Coast Guard raised concerns about the fire protection system, electrical wiring, and piping on the 37-year old vessel, as well as its ability to withstand a “100-year storm” — an event with a 1 percent likelihood of occurring over the course of a century.  Shell operators contend that the Coast Guard requirement for the barge to withstand a 100-year storm is unnecessary, believing the ability to withstand a 10-year storm is sufficient.

Just last year, Alaska was hit with “of the most severe Bering Sea storms on record,” only a week after the end of Shell’s proposed Beaufort drilling season.

The barge, languishing in northern Washington for the next three weeks, serves to transport oil containment equipment to any of the five exploration wells Shell intends to drill. The absence of this vessel as Shell’s fleet treks north is especially alarming given the lack of infrastructure in Northern Alaska available to respond to a spill, and Shell’s safety violations in while drilling in the North Sea.

At a congressional hearing in 2011, Commandant Robert Papp, head of the U.S. Coast Guard, expressed his skepticism in the Coast Guard’s ability to respond effectively to an oil spill in the Arctic Ocean, saying “if [a spill] were to happen off the North Slope of Alaska, we’d have nothing.  We’re starting from ground zero today.”

As detailed in a report from the Center for American Progress, the lack of infrastructure in Northern Alaska necessary to respond to a spill is staggering. The nearest major port is over 1,000 miles away from the drill sites and “there are no roads whatsoever connecting communities along the North Slope of Alaska.”

In an environment as pristine, yet unpredictable, as the Arctic, Shell must be prepared for all possibilities.  It is not enough to hope that containment is unnecessary, and if Shell rushes their processes, they may well find themselves unprepared for the consequences.

Ben Bovarnick is an intern on the energy policy team at the Center for American Progress.

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

More flooding could be on its way, after forecasters warned that the miserable weather – which has seen record amounts of rain fall in April and June, parts of the UK hit by freak storms, and flash flooding that has forced the evacuation of homes – is set to continue at least until the Olympics. [Guardian]

More than twice the average rainfall hit the UK in April. June was the wettest since records began, and the start of July has seen a month’s rain fall in 24 hours in some parts of the south-west.The bad weather has stuck and shows little sign of shifting, according to Helen Chivers at the Met Office. “The jet stream can get bends in it, it can get distorted, which can move us into a blocked pattern, like the dry weather we saw in winter … and the wet weather we are seeing now.”

… meteorologists are also studying how shifts in the Earth’s temperature, caused by global warming, affect weather conditions.

“A lot of work is being done into the decrease in Arctic sea ice,” said Chivers. “Essentially, if you warm up a sea, you change the temperature differential between the poles and the tropics and that in turn influences the jet stream. Research has already shown the influence on north-west Europe winters, making them drier and colder, but what happens in the summer is still relatively unknown”….

So can we expect to see more wet summers in the (dreary) future? Peter Stott, head of climate monitoring and attribution at the Met Office, said the recent bad weather could be ascribed to the natural variability of the weather. “But climate change could be making things worse, because the globally warmer atmosphere now carries 4% more moisture over the oceans than in the 1970s and this could be leading to increased rainfall in weather systems.”

See also Arctic Warming Favors Extreme, Prolonged Weather Events ‘Such As Drought, Flooding, Cold Spells And Heat Waves’.

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