Another week, another idiotic headline in the New York Times: “We’re All Climate-Change Idiots.”

Who is to blame for the nation’s inaction on climate?

Who is to blame for the fact that a climate bill that passed the House in 2009 — and that  would have put us on a path to take stronger action than any other country in the world — didn’t become law?

Could it be the anti-democratic, extra-constitutional, super-majority “requirement” that only bills that get 60 votes in the Senate can become law?

Nope.

Could it be the fact that the GOP strategy for dealing with Obama, as explained by Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell back in 2010, is to avoid giving  any legislation the patina of bipartisanship: ”The single most important thing we want to achieve is for President Obama to be a one-term president.”

Nope.

How about the anti-science, pro-pollution ideologues — many funded by fossil fuel companies — who have spread disinformation and poisoned the debate so much that it is unrecognizable — so much that John McCain, the GOP champion of climate action actually trashed a bill considerably weaker than the one he tried to pass twice?

Nope.

How about the media’s generally enabling and inadequate coverage – see “How the status quo media failed on climate change” and How the press bungles its coverage of climate economics: “The media’s decision to play the stenographer role helped opponents of climate action stifle progress”). See also “Silence of the Lambs 2: Media Herd’s Coverage of Climate Change Drops Sharply — Again.”

Of course not.

No, this piece ignores or dismisses the groups that deserve 90% of the blame and instead says in the next paragraph:

Yes, there are political and economic barriers, as well as some strong ideological opposition, to going green. But researchers in the burgeoning field of climate psychology have identified another obstacle, one rooted in the very ways our brains work. The mental habits that help us navigate the local, practical demands of day-to-day life, they say, make it difficult to engage with the more abstract, global dangers posed by climate change.

Seriously.

Yes, there is that oh-so-tiny “barrier” called the filibuster. And there is “some”  strong ideological opposition, just a bit, though, really none worth devoting even a full sentence to (see National Journal: “The GOP is stampeding toward an absolutist rejection of climate science that appears unmatched among major political parties around the globe, even conservative ones”).

And so we are subjected to a bunch of psychoanalysis and social science research about how we all have a mental block to solving the climate problem.

No doubt many do — but the piece never bothers to cite any polling analysis, probably because virtually every poll conducted in 2009 and 2010 and more recently shows that the American public wants strong climate action. Here are a few:

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By Heather Lammers, via NREL

The blips of a heart monitor, the hum of an MRI, the intense lights of a surgical room: all can bring both comfort and fear — and all require a lot of power. But new hospitals are being filled with natural, calming light and are leveraging energy from the sun and earth to power the machines, instruments, and tools medical professionals use to help patients recover.

Hospitals use a lot of energy to save lives. In fact, they use more than 836 trillion BTUs of energy every year and produce more than 2.5 times the carbon dioxide emissions of commercial office buildings.

The U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Commercial Buildings Program and DOE’s National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) are working with the American Society of Heating, Refrigerating, and Air Conditioning Engineers (ASHRAE) and the buildings industry (see sidebar) to find ways to reduce the energy intensity of large hospitals, schools, and retail buildings by 50%.

“The Advanced Energy Design Guidelines [AEDG] series represents the best practices in industry for energy efficiency in buildings,” NREL Senior Research Engineer and AEDG Project Chair Shanti Pless said. “Our job is to develop those best practices, along with the professionals in the industry, and put them together in an easy-to-implement guide. NREL created the modeling and optimization software used to determine that what is going into the guides achieves a 50% savings goal.”

The NREL commercial buildings team of Pless, Eric Bonnema, and Matt Leach led the development of the Large Hospital, Retail, and School 50% Savings AEDGs. Pless was chair of the project committees of industry experts, and Bonnema and Leach provided efficiency expertise and energy modeling optimization support.

U.S. hospitals spend more than $5 billion annually on energy, often equaling 1% to 3% of a typical hospital’s operating budget. “Healthcare is a big opportunity for energy savings,” Pless said. “We felt this industry needed resources, and there weren’t many out there helping them to achieve 50% savings in energy.”

The 50% AEDG series is a new group of publications that builds on previous successes. Collaborators including DOE and NREL published a series of six 30% AEDGs covering structures ranging from small office buildings to highway lodging to self-storage buildings. Between the 30% and 50% AEDGs, there are roughly 450,000 copies currently in circulation. The full series of AEDGs is available as a free download at www.ashrae.org/aedg.

“ASHRAE, a professional organization consisting of 60,000 mechanical engineers who work on energy efficiency in buildings, is an excellent organization through which we disseminate the guides,” NREL Principal Lab Program Manager for Building Energy Technologies Ron Judkoff said. “ASHRAE also maintains commercial building standards for industry.” Read more

by Dana Nucitelli, via Skeptical Science

As we know, it is absolutely critical that we reduce greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions as much as possible, as soon as possible, to minimize the damage that climate change will do.

Thus the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA’s) endangerment finding – which concluded that GHGs are pollutants as defined by the Clean Air Act and must therefore be regulated – is a critical document.  Although there have been steps taken by individual states (i.e. RGGI and California) to regulate GHG emissions, we have had little success in implementing measures to reduce emissions on a national level, other than piecemeal steps like higher vehicle fuel efficiency standards which are often implemented for other non-climate reasons.  There are of course many individuals who oppose the EPA endangerment finding for two main reasons, (i) they oppose any steps to reduce our dependency on fossil fuels and (ii) they oppose any government regulations.

Unfortunately the American political party environmental policy positions have shifted.  In the 1980s, political liberals tended to favor government regulation as the solution to environmental problems, while political conservatives in the Reagan and Bush administrations came up with the concept of cap and trade systems to use the free market to solve them.  To the conservatives’ credit, cap and trade systems have worked remarkably well – the up-front costs were much lower than originally predicted, and they have saved Americans tens to hundreds of billions of dollars.   Now cap and trade is the favored solution to GHG emissions amongst political liberals in the USA, while the conservatives who originated the concept now generally oppose it, instead choosing to reject climate science and deny the problem exists at all.

Since these conservatives have successfully blocked attempts to implement a cap and trade or other carbon pricing system, we are left with government regulation (via the EPA and its endangerment finding) as the only alternative to reduce GHG emissions from large emitters.  Into this scene enter serial data deleter Patrick Michaels and his fossil fuel-funded Cato Institute political think tank, which have released a voluminous report attempting to undermine the endangerment finding, with their misguided efforts of course being promoted by the usual climate denial enablers.

In this post, we will examine some of the key findings in the Cato report and demonstrate how they are flawed, and that Michaels and Cato unwittingly acknowledge that the EPA is correct about the threat of human-caused climate change in the process.

Global Warming is Primarily Human-Caused

The EPA endangerment finding was based on several major climate science reports, such as the IPCC report and the U.S. Global Change Research Program (USGCRP) report Global Climate Change Impacts in the United States.  The USGCRP report listed 10 key findings which Michaels and Cato have ‘tweaked’ to reflect their own perception of the science.  The first key finding of each:

USGCRP: Global warming is unequivocal and primarily human-induced.

Cato: Climate change is unequivocal and human activity plays some part in it.

In other words, Michaels and Cato dispute that humans are the primary cause of the 20th Century global warming/climate change.  To support this position, they refer to page 16 of their report, which essentially just rehashes the myth that because the 1910-1945 rate of warming was similar to that since 1975, the latter warming may be natural.

“The first warming is not likely to be associated with greenhouse gas changes, and the lack of statistically significant warming since 1996, which is concurrent with the greatest increases in greenhouse gases, is of unknown importance at this time.”

As it so happens, there were significant human GHG emissions in the early 20th Century, which caused atmospheric CO2 levels to rise from 300 to 310 parts per million by volume (ppmv) from 1910 to 1945.  This CO2 rise alone would have caused approximately 0.1°C surface warming, which is approximately 20% of the total observed warming during that period.

More importantly, the Cato argument is intellectually lazy, because it fails to actually examine the causes of these warming periods.  A number of climate scientists have conducted attribution studies and universally find that while the 1910-1945 warming was predominantly caused by natural effects (i.e. increasing solar activity and an extended period of low volcanic activity), the warming over the past 50 years has been dominated by human GHG emissions (Figure 1).

Figure 1: Net human and natural percent contributions to the observed global surface warming over the past 50-65 years according to Tett et al. 2000 (T00, dark blue), Meehl et al. 2004 (M04, red), Stone et al. 2007 (S07, green), Lean and Rind 2008 (LR08, purple), Huber and Knutti 2011 (HK11, light blue), and Gillett et al. 2012 (G12, orange).

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by Michael Conathan

It’s a good time to be a tourist in Maine. While the rest of the country is being ravaged by wildfires, sweltering away setting record numbers of record-high temperatures, or withering in the grasp of a drought that rivals the 1930s Dust Bowl, northern New England’s temperate climes are a welcome relief. And the cherry on top of that cool, soothing sundae is that the state’s signature seafood, lobster, is selling at rock-bottom prices—as little as $3.99 per pound in Portland.

The downside, of course, is that while epicures can sample their favorite crustaceans for less than they typically pay for bologna, most lobstermen are struggling to just break even at per-pound prices as low as $2—about half what they typically receive for their catch. This level is far below the break-even point Maine’s 5,000 commercial lobstermen need to cover expenses of fuel, bait, and wages.

The cause? It’s somewhat hard to pin down, but a major contributor is global climate change. And the lobster fishery isn’t the only one feeling the heat.

Lobsters, like all crustaceans, molt as they grow. Dust the cobwebs off your ninth-grade biology textbook, and you may recall the term “exoskeleton”—the external shell possessed by lobsters, crabs, and most insects. Lobsters typically shed theirs in the late spring and early summer, and for a period of time they are effectively snails without shells—the limpest of which lobstermen refer to as “rags” because it best describes their consistency.

This year, rags started showing up early in traps, and many in the industry, including Bob Bayer who heads the Maine Lobster Institute, trace this to warming ocean temperatures. As Andrew Pershing of the University of Maine and the Gulf of Maine Research Institute asserted at a House Natural Resources Committee hearing yesterday, ocean temperatures in the Gulf of Maine in June were equivalent to average July temperatures. It’s no coincidence then that lobstermen are seeing rags a month early.

When it comes to the price crash, climate may not be the sole cause, but soft-shell lobsters contain less meat than their hard-shelled brethren and can’t be transported as far—you’ll never eat a rag in the Midwest—so their market is limited, and their value is lower.

Other factors that have driven lobster prices down include an unusually high volume of lobster caught in Canada this spring, which glutted Canadian processors’ market and reduced the need for Maine’s product—as much as 70 percent of Maine’s lobster goes to Canada for processing.

One silver lining, however, is that Maine’s lobster stock is healthy too. In 2011 Maine lobster landings set all-time records, surpassing the 100-million-pound mark for the first time ever and grossing lobstermen more than $330 million—more than 80 percent of the value of all fish landings in the state.

There’s still no denying that the marine effects of climate change are already being felt in many of the world’s fisheries. A study published earlier this month in the Canadian Journal of Fisheries and Aquatic Sciences found “rapid and consistent decreases” in the populations of sockeye salmon runs from Puget Sound, Washington, to the Yakutat Peninsula in southeast Alaska due to ocean warming. Warmer water provides more favorable conditions for less valuable species, including pink salmon, meaning they are more likely to out-compete sockeye in the ecosystem. And similar to lobster in Maine, salmon is big business in Alaska: In 2010 Alaskan fishermen landed $263 million worth of sockeye, a major component of a fishing industry that creates more than 80,000 jobs in the state. Read more